Alone in the sprawl

With Sheena out of town for the weekend, the logical thing for me to do was go out and talk to the locals, and in Cupertino this means a middle-aged Chinese lady. But it's not as strange as it sounds. This Chinese lady is Sheena's--and now my own--Chinese tutor.

So when Sheena and Keyvan were giggling (or maybe just smiling dispassionately) over past MTV crushes, I was being presented with a Soviet-planning-style overview of payment, teaching supply, and scheduling logistics. It didn't take long for me to realize that my Chinese is pretty rusty, but I was able to walk away with some salient learnings from the session:

1) The Chinese flag is red not because red stands for communism, but because it represents the blood of all the people who died supporting Mao during the civil war. Think about this the next time you're in Shanghai walking down East Nanjing Road (photo 16).

2) Qinghua is the best university in China, partly because it's one of the best science and technology universities in China, but mostly because my tutor's husband got his PhD there.

3) The Chinese government has a propaganda department because without such a department, the rural masses would have no idea what to think about major national and international issues. In other words, it's not an effort to get everyone behind their points of view, so much as an educational initiative. However, the most interesting part of this argument was her claim that, without the propaganda people writing articles about how China should approach Japan, Chinese people would have run Japanese people and businesses out of the country during the protests of 2005 (and others). Also, I think she might have suggested that Tiananmen was probably the right thing to do at the time, but that's another topic for another lesson.

Until then, onward and upward.