December 2008
19 posts
Xu Peikai is German?
I’ve been doing an experiment. Just for laughs, whenever a person ask what country I’m from, I make them guess. I used to do the same thing in Japan, but it wasn’t really entertaining, because basically everyone guessed that I was American. However, in Taiwan most people (and I really mean most) guess that I hail from England or Germany, with the majority of people guessing the...
crossing cold winter
Third Sister wrote me a message:
This coming Sunday is dong zhi (midwinter in lunar calendar). In Taiwan’s custom, you have to eat something warm, like ma you ji (sesame oil chicken), yang rou lu (mutton stewed in soup)… everything that make you warm to cross cold winter….
Remenber to eat warm food!!
Daphne Lin and I are strolling through the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, looking at a collection of paintings by contemporary Asian artists. For some reason, all the pictures by Chinese artists say they are made with “paper,” while Korean paintings are done on “Korean paper,” and all Japanese paintings are drawn on “Japanese paper.” Each country claims to have...
Common Sense
Monday mornings we attend Teacher Lin’s Listening class. Teacher Lin is easily my craziest teacher. One week, she and I will be using Chinese to discuss something really sophisticated like conditions during the period of martial law, or the quality of Taiwanese language education. Then the next week, she’ll start class, saying, “Classmates! Classmates! Let’s begin...
Teacher Du
Teacher Du is my Modern Chinese Reading class teacher. She is a friendly lady in her late-30s, who lived in the United States for ten years, and started teaching at Shida’s Department of Chinese Language and Culture this year. Modern Chinese Reading is my most important class. It meets three times a week, so we spend plenty of time together.
My feelings for Teacher Du are mixed at best. She...
