Today I walked from my apartment to my school. What usually takes a 15-minute ride by bus took an hour on foot. I'm not sure why I did it, other than the fact that I've been feeling a bit low lately and I was tired of staying holed up in my room studying for yet another Chinese test (I'm now in my third quarter of Chinese classes, and we have a test pretty much every other day).
I've been terrible about updating this blog, as well as keeping in touch with people back home in general. Half-written letters sit unsent in my desk, and there's the stack of Christmas cards that I meant to write but never got to. I'm not sure why I've been so averse to delivering snail mail and answering e-mail lately, but there it is.
All anyone's been talking about these past few days are the student demonstrations against the trade pact with China that Taiwan's president is trying to pass. They only recently got violent, with some students getting hurt and handcuffed. My current teacher is not only very interested in politics but in this issue in particular, so we've been discussing it pretty much in every single class last week and this week. I can now talk about politics in Chinese, which is pretty mind-blowing when I realize that I can't even really talk about politics in English. But I now have the vocabulary at least to deliver some sort of opinion.
It is also ironic that these demonstrations are taking place during the same week that we're learning about Taiwan's history in our textbook. I must admit that I don't know much about the whole Taiwan-China situation at all, and now that I have all these names and dates floating about in my head, I feel even more mixed up than before. For one of our homework assignments, we had to watch a two-hour movie (in Mandarin, with no English subtitles) about how the two parties in China separated during the wars and how one of them eventually migrated to Taiwan and transformed into the democratic system that governs the country today.
Honestly after watching the movie I just felt really depressed. The movie centers on the three sisters (real people) who married the three most powerful men in China at the time. However, after Chiang Kai-Shek's party started killing off members of the opposing Communist party, two of the sisters found themselves against each other and didn't speak for 10 years. The movie ends with both of them dying alone. I don't know how accurately the historic events and figures are portrayed in this movie, but I was so surprised to discover that I had never heard of the three Soong sisters before in my life. I really am ignorant about the role that women have played in history throughout the world, and no wonder. How often are we taught women's lives in history classes?
My current Chinese class is the hardest one I've had yet. The tests are particularly difficult, not just because of the amount of vocabulary that we're required to know, but because the listening part, which I am normally best at, requires us to write at lightning speed what we hear the teacher say. This has always been the most difficult part of learning Chinese for me (learning traditional characters is no piece of cake, especially since I never had to learn so many in such a short time), and I was shocked to discover that my listening skills (on these tests, at least) have progressed from being my strongest point in class to my weakest. On the bright side, we have presentations every week, and I've been successfully breezing my way through those. We're allowed to look at our notes, but we have to write our own speeches, of course. I think I am one of the stronger speakers in class, mainly because my previous teacher really emphasized learning grammar structures and I've always been good at constructing sentences, which has carried over from English. Also, I enjoy saying whatever I feel like saying; being afraid of making a mistake is no longer an issue.
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