A Short Letter Home

Do you wanna dance?

Man, I'm falling behind on my posting. I guess the "gosh-wow!" of being in a new place has truly become the same-old, same-old of everyday life. So I suppose the time has come to wax philosophical.

It's been a relatively busy week. The curriculum for Siu Wan's schooling called for a few crafts which ate into the time. I've also been working to try and make a class list for Yau Neih. (When she starts a class I photograph all of the students, download the pix to the laptop and throw together a page of faces and names for her to use in class.)(I've got to keep up those desktop publishing skills, you know.) Anyway, come Thursday night I was ready to print things out. Yau Neih and Siu Wan went off to watch the locals dancing in the street and I headed over to the English department office. (We don't have a printer so I make a pdf of the file, e-mail it to myself, and then download it to the English office computer and print it out.) My plan was thwarted however, as there was somebody already using the machine. In America, I would have asked when they might be finished. In China, however, they tend to treat us lao wai like guests, and I was afraid that if I said anything, the person using the machine would drop what they were doing and get out of my way. That much politeness I didn't want, so I just quietly walked past the office and headed back to the flat. But then I changed my mind and went to join Yau Neih.

I think I've described "the dancers" before. Every night, weather permitting, a bunch of people gather on a nearby street corner and do circle dances to recorded music. Some of the students say that it's the "retired people" that do it, but there are middle aged and younger folk in the mix as well. It was kind of funny, watching the action the other night. The older folks were definitely better dancers than the young'uns. Probably came from years of practice. So anyway, we watched them for at least a half hour, if not longer.

Then on Friday night, we did our musical English corner and came home. It was about eight o'clock, nobody was tired and we were all bored. So when Yau Neih said she was going to watch one of her students give dance lessons, we all decided to go along. The student has the unusual English name of Journey, and definitely comes across as an artist. Now, you might expect that we were going to watch him teach some ethnic dance, but actually he teaches hip-hop dancing. (Note, he says it's hip-hop but there's no way an old, unhip geezer such as myself could know whether he is telling the truth or not.) We found the classroom he was using and watched as he tried to teach four or five girls how to dance. It was really quite enjoyable. I could tell that Journey was a good dancer because it was more interesting to watch him dance than to watch the girls.

Later when I thought about the two nights' entertainments, I realized that I've come to this place at just the right time. Throughout the process of coming here, I've thought that it might have been better had I done this when I was a young man. Like someone doing a stint in the army, it would have been easier to put my life on hold for two years while I did my tour of duty. No house to manage, no kids to wrangle. But looking at my experiences here, I have to realize that I never had the maturity in my younger days to appreciate what's here. While I might have appreciated a good hike at 23 or so, I would never had been content to sit and watch some "old fogeys" dance. Also back then I had a very narrow taste in music. I doubt if I would have deigned to sit still for anything that didn't fit my criteria. And that same lack of maturity would similarly got in the way of my eating and most of the other experiences I've been having here. So while I still may wish I didn't have to worry about how my house is holding up or paying the storage fees, I think that I have to say that the Guy pulling my strings knows what He's doing.

posted by John @ 6:34 AM