Time to Read
Smoke rose up from the west several times during our recent stay in Grand Marais. Resulting from the Cavity Lake fire in the Boundary Waters, it was oddly reminiscent of my first few days in Beijing. Our North Shore trips are occasions for hiking, shopping, drinking morning coffee on the pebbled beaches of the harbor and reading.
I carried two books with me to China and made virtually no progress on either while there - too busy writing blog entries! Companion books of a sort, they are River Town and Oracle Bones, both by Peter Hessler. Readers of this blog who are interested in learning more about contemporary China will find these two books highly readable and informative.
I know this now because the North Shore provided the time to finally encounter them both. River Town traces the author's experiences during two years as a Peace Corp volunteer teaching English in the town of Fuling. Oracle Bones picks up the story as Hessler becomes a more established journalist, seeking out and publishing stories in, among others, National Geographic, the Wall Street Journal and finally as the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker.
Having learned another language while living and working abroad for seven years, I found River Town to convey accurately the sense of a second personality that emerges when living through a new language.
From the book jacket of Oracle Bones: "In a narrative that gracefully moves between the ancient and the present, the East and the West, Hessler captures the soul of a country that is undergoing a momentous change before our eyes." Especially interesting to me in the context of MPA's Mandarin initiative is his exploration of the earliest writing, preserved on the Oracle Bones of the title and the implications for the development of language in China.
Back from the cooling breezes of Lake superior to the tropical climate of the Twin Cities, I open my email to find a note from Wang Tian announcing that she has an appointment, through HANBAN, with the US consulate for a visa interview on August 8th. Training for all the NAIS/HANBAN teachers will be conducted in China from August 10-15 after which all teachers will board commercial jets for their posts in the US.
Watch this space for details!