Solid Joys

The Zhou family graciously welcomed me to join them on their annual rice-planting day this spring. My student Snow, who is their second daughter, took me and her classmate Mary home to the countryside, where we slept on the kang (traditional, fire-heated platform bed), ate her mama’s cooking including my favorite salty duck eggs, and helped plant rice in the family’s paddies.

I’ve taught English to Snow and her class for almost two years; now, it was time for her to teach me something–how to “zhong shui dao”: plant rice. Wade into the swampy field, wearing tall rubber boots if available. Take a clump of rice seedlings, which look like grass about six inches tall. Pull off three or four stalks, with their attached mud. The water you are standing in rises about five or six inches above the surface of the mud, so reach down through the water till you touch that surface, and press the clump into it, but not too deep. That’s it. Then you and your fellow planters repeat this process several thousand times till the whole paddy is decorated with a neat, even beautiful, grid of green stalks.

Pictures are on my Facebook.

Since before I came to China–that is, more than two years ago–the foreign teachers at my college have been told that they would be moving, and soon, to big, new apartments. These anticipated dwellings would be twice as big as the studio apartments being rented for us at a neighboring college, would be brand-new, and would be a little closer to our own college. I had the impression that the move was imminent; in fact, when I arrived in July 2007, I hesitated to really settle into my room, because I was told that I might move as soon as October.

October came and went, and March 2008 became the promised moving date. So I settled in. March didn’t bring a move; better make that May. Except the apartments aren’t ready yet. Um, how about August? Nope. The apartments are built but not yet “decorated” (i.e., they are not finished inside–they are just concrete shells). Surely, our foreign affairs liaison said, they will be ready by January 2009. Er, March–after you return from winter break. That didn’t happen, either. OK, we really mean it this time: you will certainly move before May 1, 2009. Accustomed to hope deferred, the eight of us said amongst ourselves, we’ll believe it when it happens.

And then it did. The call came on Tuesday, April 21: this Saturday, we will take you on a tour of your new place! Then on Monday, you will move! This time, it was for real. As I anticipated it, I had to surrender to this being His perfect plan. I would miss the friends in my building who, because they teach at another college, would not be moving. I would miss the area I’d lived in for almost two years, and the familiar restaurants and shops.

Tour day came, and we packed into the van to see our new homes, excited but uncertain. We were moving, like it or not! Housing is a provision of our contract, but the details of that housing are  up to our foreign affairs office. We were all comfortable enough in our old places. What would the new ones be like?

We arrived and scattered to see our apartments. When I walked into 305, I could hardly believe that all this space was mine alone: five rooms, fully furnished, with stacks of brand-new household goods still in the boxes–everything needed for the kitchen, plus generous extras for other parts of the house. In the living room, a huge couch; in the bedroom, a gigantic bed; in the study, an attractive bookcase and desk, bearing a brand-new computer.

The promised land of Cai Yuan Jia Yuan Xiao Qu runs with milk and honey. After almost three weeks here, I continue to rejoice in His exceedingly abundant provision. Not just the IKEA-esque furnishings, but the location has perks: a daily farmers’ market on our street offers dirt-cheap (and dirt-y–fresh from the farm!) organic produce. Juicy tomatoes, leafy cilantro, shiny eggplant, fat strawberries, ripe nectarines, and much more–three minutes’ walk and I can get veggies for dinner or fruit for breakfast. And the size of my apartment–10 can comfortably sit on my living room furniture–makes it all the easier to have students and friends over.

The desire accomplished is sweet to the soul.

Because the nature of my location limits what I can write on this blog, I also send out regular e-mail updates to friends back home. These e-mail updates tell more specifically about my work here, equipping friends in their Remembrance of me. I am deeply grateful for and dependent on such intercessory support.

If you would like to receive these e-mails, just send me an e-mail (susinchina@gmail.com) to ask me to add you to my list. Thanks!

To him who has ears to hear, let him hear.

The Sun shone brightly on me as I filled my watering can this morning. Fill me up, to the brim, with clean, clear, life-giving water! I want to give it out today: to pour a little on that fast-growing plant and more on this scraggly one. I need enough to sprinkle a few dribbles on each of the scores of seeds I’ll come across today that have not yet been quickened.
Some seeds are soaking up water as fast as we gardeners can pour it, but the Sun has not yet brought them to life. Seed A1 (female), for example, loves having gardeners’ attention every chance she gets and is constantly learning more about our water and our Sun. She’s not yet alive, though.

Some seeds, once they begin living, grow faster than others, within hours or days shooting up to the surface and bursting with joy. An especially verdant one, L1(f), called to me this week to bring her some water and to drink it along with her. She recognizes that gardeners need lots of water, too. We’re going to start having regular water breaks together, drinking from this cup.

Some seeds that appeared to have been granted life are now withering. Weeds of career and unquickened fellow seeds seem to be choking the life out of E(f). Some sort of predator has attacked A2(m), causing him to shrink from gardeners, watering cans, other live seeds, and most devastatingly, the Sun Itself.
Some plants that have been around a little longer have recently demonstrated their increasing strength. L2(m), refused to be transplanted to a dark part of the garden that has few living seeds and little access to water, choosing the Sun over other comforts. A3(f), since becoming a live seed a few months ago, cares now only about the Sun and about seeing nearby seeds come to life. She’s a radiant blossom.
Gardening means hours, weeks, years of walking around with a watering can, getting dirt under your fingernails, and waiting for the Sun to do Its work. Working with seeds tries a gardener’s patience. Not knowing which seeds will come to life tests a gardener’s faith. I’m a fortunate gardener, though; not everyone gets assigned to such a fertile plot, where the Sun is quickening many seeds these days. Plenty of solid joys here.
The garden stretches out and out, and in the dirt are millions of dead seeds. Not mostly dead; all dead. But because I believe in a Sun with miraculous powers, all dead is not a problem.

On the 13-hour Continental flight 89 from Newark to Beijing, I read Red Scarf Girl: A Memoir of the Cultural Revolution. Author Ji-Li Jiang tells the story of being a 12-year-old victim of the fervor of socialist revolutionaries, whose principles condemn her family for its wealth and social position. Red scarves, worn by schoolchildren, represented loyalty to the revolution.

I sat by the window on the plane, the middle seat was empty, and on the aisle sat a friendly Chinese man. I showed him the book, and his happy face turned solemn as soon as I uttered the words “Cultural Revolution.” He was once a red scarf boy.

“I was in sixth grade when the Cultural Revolution began,” he said. There was a long pause, as I waited for him to tell me about it. “My father was a landlord,” he said finally.

That’s something like admitting you were a Jew in Germany in 1940. In China in the mid-1960s, landlords represented exploitation of the working classes, oppression, and corrupt family money; they were the enemies of the class struggle surging through the country. Consequently, they were universally reviled and terrorized by the masses.

Another long pause, with no eye contact. Then, quietly, “It was a terrible time.”

Jian Chao is exactly the same age as Ji-Li Jiang, but far less willing to discuss his experiences. I want to ask him questions, but he seems so sad that I hesitate to open the old wounds.

Finally, he speaks again. “After elementary school, I couldn’t go to junior high. The Communist Party secretary said, ‘This boy, a landlord’s son, cannot go.’”

I ask, what happened? “A few packs of cigarettes.” He smiles sheepishly, palms up in a gesture of surrender and offering. That’s what it took to get into junior high. A similar bribe got him into high school. After that, he worked as a farmer for four years while Mao’s rule continued.

“I kept reading, though,” he said. “Not novels. I read books about math and physics. I hoped that I would not always be a farmer.” Then, as abruptly as the Cultural Revolution began, it ended. With Deng Xiaoping installed as the new leader, a college entrance exam gave students more equal opportunity for further education.

Jian Chao studied geophysics in Changchun for six years, then worked in Beijing before receiving a life-changing invitation: to engage in research in Denver. Now, he works for an oil corporation in Houston and has lived in America for 18 years. He and his wife, who is an accountant, have a daughter studying finance at New York University, a 14-year-old consumed with internet games, and a little boy who misbehaves in kindergarten. This is his first trip back to visit his parents in China in two years.

I looked over and saw that he was taking advantage of the in-flight entertainment options by watching Clifford. Yes, the cartoon about a Big Red Dog. Maybe his younger son likes it. Or maybe this is what farmers-turned-geophysicists do to relax.

I ran into Will, a junior computer major, at the bookstore one December day, when we both attended my friend Abi’s talk about coffee. He e-mailed me the next day:

“I learnt a lot from the lecture about coffee culture~So I think a lot of American pretty like coffee and coffee brings people energy! Maybe that is the mystery why American are more energetic than others. I love my life and I like myself to be the guy who are optimistic and active to life. So maybe coffee will help.

Today I also want to talk with you about life. I always think about what is the goal of whole my life or what really deserves me to put whole my life on it? I’m thinking about these questions since when I was a young child. When I was little I always think why I come to the world and who am I? Once I thought I was a director of a movie called “my life” and when I’m die the movie will come to end. Because I thought I can only sense things happened around me and only know what I was thinking but not others. After I came to school and met a lot of pupils of the same age and then I found out there were so many kinds of people who I had never known.But now I’m a college student and my sense changes again.I find out I just an ordinary man but not the director and I’m not the core of the world but my own world. And I think the world has no core and human are just a part of it.
But another question comes to me that is what I’m living for? For getting more money? I don’t think so. I’m not a person who are always seeking for creature comfort. And I don’t have a great desire for money. When I was young I always wanted to become a scientist because I read a lot of books about nature and physical science and I had a great interested in it. What’s more from these books I knew a lot of great scientists like Copernicus, Galileo and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and so on. They all fighted against current governments for the truth. I admired them and their spirit of fighting for the truth really impressed me. And I think these people change the world and even sacrifice for the science to put our civilization forward.
So my dream was always to do something which can affect people’s life. But when I grow up I find myself is not the great man but just an ordinary man and do ordinary things because I’m not as intelligent as scientist and even far behind. So in university I do a lot of work and study hard to make me know more knowledge but it still makes a little sense or even it is far behind my dream. So what can I do? One of my purpose to go to American to study as a graduate student is also to learn more knowledge because America has the best education and now I still have a superficial knowledge about computer science.
But am I really fit for scientfic research?I still don’t have a clear answer in my mind because I’m extroverion and sometime I don’t have enough patience for working out a hard problem.
Maybe it is a hard question to give a clear answer but I really love to tell these with you and share with you because at the first sense I find you are a friendly person and you are very kind.What’s more now we are good friends and I trust you.”

 We got together. We talked about life. He attended a Christmas Eve concert. The next e-mail:

“Thank you Susannah! Thank you for your inviting me to the concert, and also I bring some friends with me~Today’s concert is really good and the choir sing really beautiful. And it let me know an old story about J-sus and told me what is the life is like in Chr-st-an. I find they are very happy and very friendly when G with them.
This week I was really tired of my preparing for my final examination and always feel a lot of pressure which I didn’t know how to deal with my emotion, but on the way after the concert I feel very happy and my pressure gone away.
I hope today’s concert will make a change in my life and I hope someone will introduce me to know more about J-sus.”

We got together again, along with a Chinese brother. We talked. We learned that Will was our brother already; he’d just not ever gotten connected with other body members.

The third e-mail:

“Thanks very much Susannah! And I really want to come closer to my Father. After our last talk I want to spend more time reading B. and let my Father teach me how to deal with my life. These days before I go to sleep I arrange about half an hour reading B. And it really gives me a lot of things that I want to find about life and future. Though there are a lot of things which I have to face but now I’m brave enough to work hard and get over them and I have learn a important skill: never give up what is important to me and always ask my Father if I have problems and learn to encourage myself to deal with them.

Hope I will have a good time in my future Haerbin journey and also hope you will have a great time spending with your family and friends in America! G bless us!”

We’ve had stunning fall color in Changchun this year. It was a welcome surprise for me compared to last year, when the leaves didn’t turn color–they just turned loose, as winter swooped down upon us at the end of October.

Joyce Kilmer’s poem “Trees” has come to mind.

“I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.”

The early morning air by Hangzhou’s famed West Lake is warm and wet, a layer of white fog hiding the blue-gray mountains that border the water. It’s not the murky green waters that fascinate me; it’s the culture of health and wellness buzzing on the wide walking promenade that rims the lake.

Few of these Chinese have extra fat to burn. Consequently, few jog by or sweat to the beat of loud aerobics music. The exercises engaging them–tai chi, dances with fans or aluminum swords, slow-paced martial arts, gentle stretching with feet or hands propped against ancient trees–promote flexibility, muscle toning, deep breathing, and harmony of mind and body. Even the two happy gray-haired men on inline skates sweep by at a leisurely pace.

Children learn martial arts from old men; rows of middle-aged women wave their arms in synchrony, their silk sleeves rustling. These morning routines are not about elevating the heart rate, but about mildly maintaining the body in a context of traditional community.

Our two-week English Olympics Summer Camp ended August 9, as the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics began. The English camp, attended by more than 200 Chinese college students and coordinated by more than 30 foreign teachers (from America, Singapore, the Philippines and Russia), promoted English learning and fostered relationship building. Many of the students will treasure the memory of this camp for the rest of their lives, and several will adore the One they met during camp for all eternity.

A winning combination, no matter what country you are in! A new bookstore/cafe opened last week, to which all are invited to come learn through conversation, English corners, and special events about the things that matter most, in life and eternity. We had a dedication ceremony with music and words from those behind the project, and words of praise for the One behind it all.