China: first impressions

After a cancelled flight and a long delay, we arrived in Shantou on Monday and were met at the airport by a wonderful student who has just spent a month at McGill who brought us to the campus. 
 

We’re staying at the University’s Academic Conference Centre, which is in a quiet spot at the far end of campus, overlooking mountains and a reservoir. Here's our little villa – we have an apartment upstairs. 

 

I barely had time to shower and eat but I made it to my first commitment – drama class auditions for a production of Romeo and Juliet to be staged at the end of the semester (with a contemporary English text). After hearing about 25 students read, either alone or in groups, we went back to class for some discussion of the play. I was really impressed with how outgoing the students were, which was not at all what I had expected. They were willing to express their own opinions about the play and were eager to know what their professor and I thought about various aspects of it.

Day two was spent settling in. We made it to East Gate, a small area of shops and restaurants just off the campus, to buy some provisions. 

E is going to be pretty disappointed – it was hard to find much dairy. But we did acquire some UHT milk and processed cheese slices so he will survive. Luckily he also really likes fried rice – plenty of that here.

On day three I spent some time working in the library in the morning. It’s a truly beautiful building with some lovely space to read and study. 

It also has a lot of literary quotations peppered around (some of them a little bizarre!). 

While there is a huge section on “Marxism, Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory” there are really very few books here and a tiny number of foreign volumes. This appears to be the Shakespeare section:

I also found this!

 

In the afternoon I met with the professor of the drama course and another American professor who is helping with the production to cast the parts, which proved to be relatively straightforward. Today was also the day of laundry. I flummoxed everyone at the ACC by asking if there was a washing machine I could use. They have a laundry service but it’s not cheap (hotel prices) and would really add up. In the end, one of my colleagues here kindly let me go over to his place and use his machine. Now we have clothes festooned throughout our small apartment. Things take ages to dry because it’s so humid here. In the evening we went to the art school and saw a beautiful art exhibition – landscapes by Xu Qinsong.

Today I had lunch with the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, the Vice Dean, the Head of the English Department and the professor I am working with in the drama class. This led to me agreeing to give a public lecture next week. However, my compensation will be a tour for the whole family to a nearby historic city. So I’m going to call that a win. Lunch was at the ACC, where we’ve already eaten several times. It looks like I will get to know the menu pretty well. It's mostly Chinese, including local Chaoshan specialities, but with a handful of Western dishes, described as follows:

I also visited the British Literature class. Watching the students grapple with religion in Chaucer’s England was pretty amazing. Later on we went for a walk around the reservoir. It has been drained for construction work so you can cross to the other side, where there are a few trails.

Random thoughts:

The campus has quite a community feel as all the students live here. There’s always tons of laundry hanging out of the windows of the residential towers. 

People tootle around on bikes or motor scooters. It is not unusual to see an entire family, including babies and small children, on a moped. There are enough foreign professors here for us not to feel too unusual. Because basketball is a big deal at this university, there are even enough tall people here for A not to stick out too much. There are several impressive buildings that seem totally empty (usually apart from a random person sweeping the floor). Wood panelling on the exterior of buildings seems to be the architectural style du jour. 

The campus is very pleasant with a lot of trees; there are people employed perpetually to rake up the leaves. 

There’s also a lot of construction going on and design is taken very seriously – the new medical centre was designed by Herzog de Meuron who did the Beijing Olympic Stadium and there's a huge sports complex with a hotel going up. 

But once built, these new structures don’t seem to be particularly well maintained. 

It’s quite refreshing to have people address you in Chinese (I couldn’t tell you if they are speaking Mandarin, Cantonese or the local dialect) and expect you to understand. I feel completely incapacitated only being able to say about two words and not being able to read anything at all beyond the odd character that is similar to the Japanese.