Merry Christmas!

Hi America! I miss you! I am in Taizhong right now. It's like seventy degrees here and sunny, in other words perfect. Also did I mention I'm on VACATION! Let me recount how I got here, to vacation:

Last week (the last week of school) on Monday was our final presentation, Cat and I were Chairman Mao and Chaing Kai-shek respectively. Our performance was pretty funny (I think) but we actually did some real historical (read: wikipedia) research to write the speech, which started out as a real debate about history and politics and ended with the two of us insulting each others mothers. (It didn't get too juicy - the network figured out they needed to bleep pretty early on and then pulled the plug on us). In the process of researching, we discovered lots of cool, bizarre and sometimes scary information that we worked into the speech.

Maybe I'll post the speech later, but short preview: Both Mao and Chiang had four wives. Some of them looked quite unfortunately like the Blob. Mao's mom was the seventh girl in the family so they didn't even give her a name. Both Mao and Chiang fought in the Xinhai revolution (our teachers made us delete this part because they didn't believe it but we looked it up again and it is true). Chiang considered himself a revolutionary and hated being called a warlord so much that being called a warlord made him go for his revolver and also cry. Chaing's son was educated in the Soviet Union and was big on Communism, to the point that at one point he disowned daddy. Both Mao and Chiang got around, not just with the four wives. Mao even refused to get treated for his STD's, but it was all good because the girls that got them considered it a real honor. Neither really spoke regular old Mandarin, instead speaking local impossible to understand dialects.

So we discovered a lot of facts and weird parallels between Mao and Chiang that we were able to use in our speech. The craziest stuff, of course, came from Mao's ideology and its implementation. It is really weird to think how recent all of that was. At one point, we wanted to use a few sentence structures so we had Mao say something about how it wouldn't matter if half of China starved to death, as long as the rest of China survived to implement Communism. Then we tried looking up what he had said about it in Chinese, and it was basically the same as the sentence we had invented - including wondering of the death of half the population: "有什麼大不了的呢?" or basically, "What's the big deal?".

Anyway, although our historical research was cursory at best (please don't use the above info in your dissertation), it was pretty interesting and still illuminating. For most of the semester, I was definitely not looking forward to the end of the year performance, but it was actually fun. I'm really glad I got to work with Cat, I think the best group projects are when both people can be on the same wavelength and like spending time together. We ended up taking it fairly seriously but not to the degree that it was stressful, and we ended up pretty well prepared. Now I have a lot of Chiang Kai-Shek phrases memorized, so I can criticize the Great Leap Forward at the drop of a hat (forcing people to make steel out of pots and pans in their backyard furnaces? please.) and also say "No, your mom is a slut!" pretty smoothly too.

After school, Alex took us to Yeliu, which has tons of weird rock formations! Weird doesn't begin to describe it, I felt like we had been transported to the moon. (Pictures later since finding pictures is really time consuming.) Then we went to Jilong night market, like 30 minutes away, 20 since our bus drive drove CRAZILY, and we ate really really delicious food. Both are port towns so they smelled a bit fishy but the delicious food and cool rocks made it worth it. It was a really awesome trip, Alex's planning was great and we got really lucky with the buses!

Tuesday to celebrate final presentations being over, we had a fruit party in my core class! Everyone brought fruit and we ate ourselves into a sugar coma. Taiwanese fruit is truly amazing. I discovered/re-remembered that I like eating Buddha heads, which are really ugly bumpy looking but yummy fruit also called a custard apples. Then our news teacher ordered milk tea for us! What a great, coma-inducing sugary day of school. Tuesday night I ate with Cat and her friend Bonny who was visiting and Nick at TOASTERIA, an unfortunately named but really really yummy grilled cheese place. It had like every kind of yummy grilled sandwich and REAL CHEESE. My sandwich was gouda and salami and onions. For the second time in two days, I felt like I had left Taipei, this time for Italy instead of the moon. OMG so delicious

Wednesday was a day of no school where instead everyone else did their final presentations. I was planning to go because I wanted to see Tracy talk seriously about economics and Kevin rap and people better than me at Chinese give amazing speeches, but instead I ended up sleeping until 4:30 PM. I guess I definitely have not shaken my end of semester bad habits. It was getting dark when I woke up. Yes I know, impressive. So instead I just went to the gym and then to dinner with my aunt (who is Taiwanese but lives in LA and had turned up without warning) and her 8 year old son and my cousin.

Dinner was in the Xinyi business district which is currently beautiful! It is decorated with Christmas trees and lights and was also freezing at the time with kind of misty rain, which had it dropped 25 degrees and turned into snow would have been the perfect Xmas weather! There are also huge snow globes everywhere that you can get your picture taken standing in...wheee! And I remember that I have barely spent any time in the ritzy bits of Taipei, mostly cause I am killing my consumerist side and have no desire to become a mall rat or eat frequently in hotels. It's good around Christmas time though.

Thursday basically no one came to school except me. It was quite uneventful. In the afternoon I took my aunt and nephew to see my grandma after eating a huge hotel holiday buffet. Then I went to Cat's house and then ate with Cat Drey Tracicle Brian and Justin at my secret xiaolongbao place which I discovered was also Drey's secret xiaolongbao place and we had donuts and said goodbye since they were all going to America for Christmas.

Friday my other cousin took me to dinner with her old friends from high school to celebrate her birthday. The restaurant had infinite cake and I really liked her friends :) It was briefly exciting to everyone that I'm American and also (even more briefly) that I have a friend who knows someone in Super Junior (a really popular Korean boy band). The big question on everyone's minds though: Does America have good parties? Is it like Gossip Girls? So, the boys are good looking like the ones in Gossip Girls? What do people do in America at night if there's no night market? I mean, how do you buy food? But what do you do for fun at night IF THERE'S NO NIGHT MARKETS???

Anyway so that was the end of the quarter! For some reason in the last few weeks my one-on-one teacher realized that I had a grasp of the material already and that it did not scare me (as it seemed to scare her) to leave the textbook. So I actually started learning a lot of things in class and she gave me lots of real work. Yeah, in the week that I was sleeping until 4 PM and had relatives turning up out of nowhere and friends to say bye to, I started having real work that I was really interested in doing.

We talked about Western and Chinese literature and especially Dream of the Red Chamber and a collection of short stories I had read called A Taste of Apples. I started reading the short stories after we saw them at the AWESOME literature museum in Tainan over Thanksgiving break and Alex said he had read them. (The TaiDa library has been so great for getting books, I never leave without way more than I can carry/read). The stories are pretty good and give you a good feel for rural Taiwan. It is also cool to be reading about places that you know, every other page I get to think to myself "I'VE BEEN THERE!", just like reading David Foster Wallace about Champaign.

The last day my teacher gave me a story called 看海的日子 ("days watching the sea", I guess) which I really liked! This assignment basically solved the majority of my complaints about textbook learning. If only just some (or any) of my textbooks were in narrative form and then I could learn to say things I want to learn. Obviously there's always reading on my own, but it would be much more effective if I didn't have to look up all of the vocabulary on my own and had some guidance on the parts written in dialect (still have no idea what a 草螟猴 is? from looking up individual characters in dictionary: grass snout moth's larva monkey ???) and if I were able to talk to a teacher about it the next day and employ some of the things I'd learned in writing my own narratives.

I just wish I could have been doing this all semester instead of doing it on my own with no support from one-on-one. I don't understand why I have such a big mouth in most situations but when it came to being repeatedly but gently shut-down by my teacher in a kind of passive Japanese manner I just gave up and let her figure out too late what we should have been doing all along. Oh well, new quarter, new danbanke teacher

I am actually at the moment feeling pretty terrible about my Chinese. Reading is way improved in that I can now handle most necessary and non-necessary things I'm interested in doing in Chinese, like train tickets, the library system, etc. and some fun unnecessary things, of course. For speaking though, I feel like I've half-learned so many words and on so many occasions cannot say what I want to say though I know if I heard it I would understand it. Think I've plateaued pretty badly. Additionally, I am becoming overly self-conscious about my mistakes such that I end up halting in weird places. (The only time I feel that I really clearly and fluently speak my mind is when I'm enraged, like on the phone with Apple, but keeping myself in constant rant-mode would probably be bad for my blood pressure.

Break will be good for shaking my self-consciousness, I hope. I am not really sure what is going wrong. I remember that the summer I was here there was some point where things seemed to 'click' and I felt that I could really think in Chinese pretty smoothly. Right now I just feel like I can't think in either Chinese or English. When I speak in Chinese I halt to think of the equivalent of English words, when I write in English I have to backwards look up words from Chinese in the dictionary. I hope that I just need to rest my brain, otherwise I don't know what's wrong.

Also, I plan to take school a bit more seriously next quarter since the classes will be harder. I am going to try to convince ICLP that I can learn the vocabulary on my own so that I can use my one-on-one class more effectively. I now also have a good reason: the American Institute in Taipei offered me an internship in the consular division, which means that if all goes well (and it would also be nice if I can find a way to fund it - suggestions?), I'll be staying here this summer. And it would be really good if my Chinese was sufficient to read all kinds of official documents and things, but also express things in the office, you know, so I would like to start working on that with the support of a teacher instead of just on my own.

And there is my completely factual account of how I got to vacation. So yes I am clearly not feeling very analytical or creative at the moment, just happy to be freeee. Christmas is coming up! It's so weird not being home with my family! I had lots of invitations but none of them felt super suitable I guess cause none of them were home. It was a good reminder that a lot of the freedom I have here is negative freedom, and I hope I can build up to the point that the freedom I have here is the kind where you feel completely at home. Taizhong has been really amazing though, and the plan now is to go visit my Grandpa and one of my cousins in Taidong for the weekend, so I'll let you know how that goes.

<3 Katie