China, last looks
I’m going home in eight days.
All of these things I wanted to get around to are suddenly urgent.
I just said farewells to my smaller class, the one that’s half shy geniuses and half boisterous slackers. They were a disciplinary nightmare but I’m still going to miss them anyway. The larger class, tomorrow, I will miss more. Fifty-six students (!!) and most of them conscientious or at least bright-eyed and knowledge-seeking; most of them came from less advantageous backgrounds than the students in the other class, and many of them made amazing progress, by their own effort, over the course of the year.
Chinese college is more like American high school and Chinese high school is more like American college — the effort to pass end-of-high-school exams is regarded by most as the pinnacle of achievement, and everything after that is gravy.
The Olympic torch is coming to Yangzhou today, and some of my students are going to be involved. The halls are full of young adults showing off their official torch-relay T-shirts. Downtown will be insane. I have been advised by one of my students (who I believe will actually carry the torch? but it isn’t clear at this point) to snag a window in a department store on the top floor and watch from there. I’ll try it and see if it works.
My writing has stalled a little: I’m in one of those phases where the desire to write a certain kind of thing has leaped ahead of my ability to handle the language and technique necessary to write it. That’s usually resolved with lots of books, so I’m guessing when I finally get back I can get up to speed by barricading myself in Powell’s for a while.