One's English Fluency Is an Attraction

There are definitely more (extensively more) expats in Beijing than Taian. Out of the 4 million in Taian, we were told there were only 300 expats. But people still like to sit and talk with foreigners here. It is part of the reason for being in China.  Here are the reflections on being overwhelmed a year ago, though.  Post from a year ago in Taian: However, there were 10 kids in our apartment for English corner, which is remarkable on a holiday weekend (May Day: Labor Day) One of the new students had been added to my WeChat account earlier this week. (WeChat is the absolute MUST for social media communication in China.) He 'chatted' with me every day since then: what did I teach, why did I come to China, worries about taking his English exam, worries about his English inadequacies, excitement about meeting native English speakers and using English in a group, etc. etc. etc. At times I felt a little overwhelmed about being able to keep up with his barrage. I wa...

Resolution of a Scam without Loss of “Face”….Maybe

A few weeks ago I posted about a scam that involved taking off moles/warts/tags. We were overwhelmed at the time with the price tag attached. Admittedly it was several hours of work, involving many small removals. We were also upset with ourselves for even beginning the process. We have lived in Asia for 8 years now and know that this would be a case where business/scam would have a wavy line. We paid about 2/3 of the amount, (all the money that we had) , but said we had to wait until our pay check at the end of the month to finish. As the time approached we were told by other expat friends here that they had also been involved in the same situation in the same massage spa. Their bill was much less and involved much less work, and they just flatly refused to pay it and threatened to call the police. Nothing more was said. We have agonized over this, because we were angry with ourselves, felt betrayed by a place with whom we have been engaged once a week for months and months, a...

Do My Students Love Their Parents? Do My Students Have Siblings?

I am reposting a fb post from a year ago. We were in Taian at the time. This is a much smaller city (only 4 million) about 300 miles SE of Beijing. I was teaching undergraduate students at Taishan Medical College. My current Ph.D. students at Peking University are different in the number of siblings that they have. Many of them are only children, but still many do have a sibling, and many, many of them spent part of their childhood with their grandparents in rural locations (which they remember very fondly). Only one or two are from one parent families though, and some of these are because of the death of a parent rather than divorce. Quite a difference from what the statistics would be for US college students. I was struck again by the reverence with which they view their families.  From Taishan Medical College undergraduates, April, 2017: "The last few days I have listened to about 125 freshmen one minute presentations on their "families". Boy do I have a shockingly ...

Beautiful Things about Living in Beijing

“ To celebrate the May Day, the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs has invited the China Philharmonic Orchestra to hold the SAFEA May Day Concert at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 25th, 2018 at the Forbidden City Concert Hall.” This is the invitation that we received in our email yesterday. How fun! We have not been to the Forbidden City yet. (I know this is a terrible admission, but those of you that know us realize that we are the world’s worst tourists and don’t go to the usual places….we do need to make it to the Great Wall soon here though.) Anyway, we will go to hear a concert tonight with a group of very nice people. There are so many, many wonderful things about living here: Top-notch cultural events Adequate salary to do what we want A very nice apartment (one of the best we have ever lived in) Convenient subways Easy, pervasive biking situations Good health care Nice massage options Availability of most any food we want Oft...

South American Indians in Asia

While we waited in the very nice lobby of the hotel in Weifang Friday night, there was a group of people who arrived. I was with an ERRC team mate who back in the 70’s had driven an RV with her husband from the US through South America, and through Africa.(!)   When we saw the new arrivals in the lobby, she looked at me and said, “They look like Otavalan Indians!” Otavalo is a very specific group of Quichua Indians in Ecuador. They have a world famous market in the town of Otavalo, well known for wall hangings and woven materials. They have a very distinctive look. It was always fun to go there when we lived in Ecuador from 1976-1980. I totally agreed with her. The facial features, the color of the skin, even the clothes were very reminiscent of Otavalo. We openly stared at them….just as we are often so openly stared at here. (Shame on us.) I tried to speak Chinese to them, but no response. A few mumbled out, “hello” in English. I should have tried Spanish, but didn’t. Finall...

WeiFang: Kite Capital of the World and Blog Difficulties

Peking University and Shandong University invited the foreign “expert” teachers to an overnight field trip. It is the 35 th anniversary of the Weifang Kite Festival, the biggest kite manufacturing city in the world. Interesting. The site for the festival was about an hour outside of , reachedWiefang, through acre and acres of salt flats, and fields and vistas of a bay of the Pacific Ocean. Out in the middle of a field we also stopped at a restored temple to the dragon and salt gods. It had huge statutes in 3 different temples. Pretty, but very empty. However, there were tv cameras there taking our pictures, and officials giving some background to the temples. When we got back in the bus, I asked the translator why we stopped. She said, “Propaganda.” I said that maybe she should say “advertising” rather than propaganda. Language difference. The kite festival had untold numbers of kites in the air. Many of them too big for people to control and they were anchored to cars, etc. Eve...

The Answer: Poor in Spirit, book excerpt

The Answer But then Paul gives us the answer: “Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:25) We are not struggling alone, and cannot struggle alone. Yes, our job is to “struggle”, to stand against these propensities, but maybe our job is also to “accept” our inabilities: to be “poor in spirit”.   And Jesus stands with us through it. Sometimes He delivers us out of the difficulty, but just as often He stands with us as we go right through the middle of it. This beatitude deals with giving up. It’s the picture of a beggar reaching out his hands for help. The difference in making this beatitude work is not do we give up but how we give up. There is the wrong way, leading to more dysfunctional behavior such as working harder, alcohol, drugs, or just shifting focus to a different but just as addictive activity. This ultimately is just another illusion of a meaningful lifestyle that keeps you going until you once again feel that hollowness deep w...

Highlighting Hair….Again

About a year ago this time, I had my hair highlighted at a salon in Taian. It went fine. I had my own highlighting hair products brought from the States with me. I remember the young assistant gentleman tasked with pulling my hair through the cap, was mostly excited about the light plastic gloves included in the box. I had to stop him from putting them on while he was prepping my hair with the cap and save them until they were using the highlighting products. Anyway, it went well and was a reasonable price. A fellow team member here in Beijing wanted to try a new hair salon opened a few blocks from our apartments. I went along to help translate. It went well, and in the conversation about her $3 haircut, I asked if he could highlight my hair. I didn’t know the words and pointed to someone who was having her hair dyed. He said, “Sure, $9.” I rushed home to get my over-the-counter highlighting kit. I brought it back and showed him the cap but also the tinfoil that I brought, beca...

Mashed Potatoes with Chopsticks

This showed up on my Face Book feed this morning. Easter was on this date a year ago. It is a good reminder about the differences for Easter this year. Now we are part of a church fellowship that is many, many hundred’s strong, rather than 8 of us meeting to worship, etc. I do miss our friendships there. Last year on this date in Taian, China: “Fireworks for Easter...well why not? Was up at 5:30 and could have watched the Easter sunrise, but (1) I am in a third floor apartment surrounded by 4 and 5 story buildings, and (2) I don't know which way is East. Had a nice fellowship time with 8 expats for Easter service. And then a potluck meal. It was to be sandwiches and salads. Well any of you who know Rick know this is not going to cut it, so he brought a can of spam to share. Someone else had said they were going to bring mashed potatoes. I woke in the night with the thought that you can't eat mashed potatoes with chopsticks, which is pretty much what all of us have for ...

Scammed and Robbed

It has been a relatively rough week, and I have not written about it because I didn’t know how to share some of it. Scammed One of the biggest pleasures we have is a weekly massage. We really don’t have the money for this, but we budget because of the enjoyment it brings. The spa we use said that they had a specialist coming in who could excise our skin tags, moles, warts for about $3 per small blemish and $10 bigger issue.(We have been consistently to dermatologists who assure us that nothing is cancerous.) So, this sounded good to us and we said, “Go ahead.” Well, by the time they had removed every microscopic and every larger issue, the price that was announced was many thousands of dollars.   We were just stunned. No idea that it would end up here.   Of course, being foreigners, they assumed we had many assets, no matter how often we said that we did not have money. When we told them how much more money this is compared to our monthly salary, they understood ...

Poor in Spirit, continued. Excerpt from Blessed

Continuing the chapter on “the poor in spirit”, excerpted from BLESSED Eight Steps to Emotional, Relational, Spiritual Wholeness: The Healing Power of the Beatitudes Struggle Romans 7:19-25New International Version (NIV) 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. 21 So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me.24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? 25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave ...

Opportunities

ERRC Office  <errc@errchina.com> To: ramarklund@yahoo.com Apr 11 at 5:45 PM URGENT NEED FOR MIDDLE SCHOOL TEACHING INTERNS Partner with a middle school in China this summer! If you've been looking for an opportunity to grow and expand your cultural horizons, consider getting your feet wet by teaching at an international school. Apply now to be a middle school intern this coming July! 3 OPENINGS Location:  Beijing (Shunyi District) Grade:  Middle School Students (ages 13-15) Start Date:  July 11th, 2018 End of Program:  August 2, 2018 Responsibilities:  Conversational partners, 3-4 hours a day Qualifications:   No degree or teaching experience required; interns will be matched with teachers Program Fees:  $1800 including orientation materials, support services, administrative costs plus (estimated) Visa:  $170 Insuran...

Chinese Fast Food.....Yum.

Gentle easy day. This week I don’t have 100 essays to grade from my writing classes so spent the day I usually am ensconced with my red pen and instead worked on power points for the next few weeks while Rick went to teach his extra hours. Since he has oral English and no homework to grade he has 12 hours per week to teach. I just have 8 hours to teach….and then 90-120 essays to grade. It is warmer. A week ago today it was sleet and snow, and the government turned off the heat 3 weeks ago! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3XjvykyVRE Look at this Youtube site if you want to see what a friend described trying to walk on the wall in the snow last week.)Today is 70 and the flowering trees are bursting.   But the wind is whipping the bushes to the ground and the dust off the Gobi is blowing. We biked around the pretty lake on campus, with ancient walkways and pagodas and ducks and weeping willows and bright pink and white blossoms. We also went to one of the little fast food ...

Viewing Our Shadow: The Poor in Spirit, Book excerpt

Dysfunction The Chinese word for “bad” is “broken”: hwai - le. It is the same word used for a broken toy. We are not so much “bad” as “broken”. We need to be restored, healed, put b ack together. “Sin” is dysfunction. We are surrounded by dysfunction particularly in our relationships. We don’t just have relationships with those people around us. Instead there are 4 basic relationships: to ourselves, to God, to others, to the world of nature/technology. Any and all of these relationships are “hwai le”. Much of  Eight Steps to Emotional, Relational, Spiritual Wholeness: The Healing Power of the Beatitude  deals with bringing restoration, healing to these relationships. Relationship to Ourselves Perhaps one of the most devious relationships that need restoration is relating to ourselves. We are dysfunctional: emotionally, relationally, physically, socially, spiritually, eternally. One of my students years ago at a children’s home illustrates this concept. I...

Important Thoughts

There are some disturbing things happening here right now in our beautiful country. I am going to write rather obscurely so that none of my post triggers a response from further up. Read between the lines. s We just received an article through our organization which says that the online sales here of Our Father’s Book has been stopped. The local language editions have been pulled from the sites as of the end of March. You can imagine how upsetting this is. We don’t quite know what to do or how to respond. We were in the process of buying several for our weekly meeting. I guess that is not an option now. We also had a conversation this evening with a local believer who attends one of the small indigenous meetings who said that the powers had stepped in and broken up her group in to smaller meetings. She said Easter service had been a video. She was not happy. She was the only one who came to our once a month English Corner this evening. The attendance is never very high for t...