Read my latest story, "A Tale of Two Birthdays", at 52|250.

The waves from the earthquake in Sichuan were felt here in Longhu, but not by me. At the time, I was ascending the stairs of Foreign Language Building 2. When I reached the fourth floor, I found that the few students from my film class who were still around were outside of the classroom and talking rapidly. They explained what had happened (that the motion of climbing stairs was enough to mask the shaking shows how weak it was here) and that most of the students had run out of the building when the earthquake began.

I gathered up the students who were still around and, after a futile effort to yell down to the students and teachers in the plaza below to explain that such a small temblor was no cause for alarm, I began class– though I added a small speech on earthquake safety to the lesson plan.

We made it most of the way through the lesson before one of the building supervisors came to let us know that the building was being evacuated. She also said that this was because there was going to be another tremor in half an hour. The students’ peals of panic only quieted somewhat after I explained that the ability to predict earthquakes like that had not yet been developed.

After that, I spent a half hour chatting with some of my students on the soccer field and telling them about some of my previous earthquake experiences; none of them had felt one before. When I left, they were still not being allowed back into their dormitories.

Yesterday, a group of teachers, along with our department’s dean and her daughter visited the greenest space for miles around: the cherry orchard tucked in an artificial valley that lies about a five-minute drive from campus (longer when an auto-rickshaw driver decides to block the road while he eats breakfast).

The trees still showed evidence of the dramatic downpour that struck the day before, but the ground had absorbed most of the moisture that fell upon it, which allowed for a pleasant picking after our assigned trees had been stripped of ripe and nearly ripe cherries. The shade kept the air cool and smelling less of coal and gasoline than of mulch and soil, which only reconfirmed my determination to plant fruit-bearing trees around my house (should I ever own one).

On the way to the orchard, we passed a stage set up for a funeral. On the way back, we walked up the rather optimistically named Small Taishan, though the very top was marked as an off-limits military area.

I’ve just returned from a futile trip to Longhu’s newly opened CAAC window where I attempted to obtain tickets for a weekend trip since next week I won’t have class on Thursday morning thanks to the college sports festival. After asking me when and where I wanted to go, the woman behind the counter told me that they were not available; I didn’t understand her explanation, but given that she didn’t check her computer system, I’m assuming the problem wasn’t that they were sold out. Of course, I really shouldn’t have expected much from anything in Longhu. Despite the recently opened upscale hotel and the housing development that this new office is near, Dragon Lake (as the name translates to) is still a rural area where food peddlers on stand next to sewage grates that sometimes overflow. In other words, a lot of the people in this town (not to mention people in far-off territories controlled by the people’s empire of China) have much bigger things to worry about.

Normally, I wouldn’t let this sort of thing get to me. Besides the fact that it’s simply not a major problem relatively speaking, I can go into Zhengzhou on Saturday and try to buy (train or plane) tickets at offices that are usually much more useful. If that doesn’t work, there are still nearby towns of interest I can get to by bus and so take advantage of the long weekend. (Or maybe I’ll just save the money so I can do more this summer.)

I was, however, in a bad mood already. In my class this morning, I once again had students debate whether the character of Leslie in Bridge to Terabithia is brave or foolish. The group arguing for foolish (all but one of them female, which reflects the demographics of the English department) claimed that her joining a footrace for boys was foolish because it “hurt their esteem” when she won which made it more difficult for her to make friends with them. When I asked them if they thought that, in general, girls and women should avoid beating boys and men in competition in order to avoid injuring their pride, they answered in the affirmative without any hesitation. I don’t even know how to begin to address that.

I wish I could understand what it is that makes these young women different from those in my group from the ones who did so well with the gender-based analysis. If I could figure that out, it would be the first step towards helping them see how much they can be and have a basic human right to be.

With the official date of St. Patrick’s Day (unless you want to accept the Catholic church’s authority on a matter such as the correct date for a saint’s feast) falling on Monday, the opportunity for celebration fell over the weekend and stretched across the weekend. On Friday, the school sponsored a ‘welcome’ dinner for foreign teachers (even though almost all of us are returning from the previous semester) at the absurdly posh hotel down the street from the campus of Shengda College. Just blocks away from a wide public street where vendors sometimes set up grills right beside overflowing sewers is a hotel where tables feature motorized lazy susans with goldfish swimming in large central bowls and private rooms contain leather couches and TVs in addition.

Saturday, a smaller group of foreign teachers headed into Zhengzhou. After finding a restaurant that featured a rather high quality curry, we headed over to the Target bar, a place popular with foreigners where a Che Guevara flag was joined by an Irish one hanging from the lantern-lit second floor. We remained on the bottom floor (closer to the bar), next to a white brick wall covered with pictures from around China (with people’s face disturbingly annotated to include horns and missing teeth, suggestive of a contempt for the native people of the country made more nauseating by the prevalence of older and poor people in the photographs) and various scrawled names and phrases. I contributed a four-line poem in ball-point which I like to imagine was completely at odds with the spirit of most of the graffiti, but perhaps I am not as rebellious as I like to think.

We returned late, after a trip to McDonald’s (where all I could order was orange juice), having confirmed once again that it’s much more difficult to get drunk when you’re paying for your own alcohol. We also had a brief run-in with a security guard when we walked through the construction zone on the site of what used to be the main gate (rather than walk an extra ten minutes to use the southern one), though this was resolved when we continued on our way towards the foreign teachers’ residences. At least, unlike on New Year’s, the cab didn’t drive us all the way to the wrong college on the other side of town.