Dear Parents,
Yes! The wireless online card works! I am writing to you from a firm platform twin bed, in a room that is designedly simple— two twin beds with square dark brown headboards, a simple rectangle dark brown desk, a simple square tea table with two square stools, dark brown shelves, dark brown closet, simple walls sporadically decorated with black and white or faded color pictures of the simple past in square dark brown frames, black stone slab floor. Everything is in straight lines, simple yet sufficient and stylish. Even the curtains bear straight stripes, no tassels, no valences, no floral. You could call it either Spartan or post-modern. This is xin1xin1ke4zhan4 (known in English as Legacy Inn), a resort in Huairou. It is a nice, small, quiet, private, guarded community with its own restaurants, gym, and other facilities. After about one hour’s ride, we arrived here from Beijing city proper at about 10:30am today. We will be here this week except for Wednesday when we will go camping.
We were greeted by the Chinese children from China (for the sake of convenience and clarity, I will hereafter refer to our YiB children as American children and “Dongdong” Chinese children from China as Chinese children) who had arrived a couple of days earlier. Each American boy is assigned one Chinese roommate; each American girl was assigned two or three Chinese girls as roommates. (Dongdong has more girl than boy participation. The rooms at the Inn are very spacious and have no problem accommodating 3 or 4 girls in one room.) We are housed in two adjacent buildings called “The Stone Building” and “The Bamboo Building”. If you look at the room facilities and the outside landscaping, our move from si-zhong dorms to Legacy Inn is like a move from Motel 6 to Holiday Inn.
Everybody put together, we now have 58 children! They are divided into 4 teams—Team Turnip, Team Orange, Team Yam, and Team Tomato, all named after the college students who are team leaders and who use nicknames luo2bo2 Gege (older brother turnip), cheng2zi Gege (older brother orange), yu4tou jiejie (older sister yam), and fan1qie2 jiejie (older sister tomato). After everybody settled in their rooms and got acquainted with their roommates, we went to have lunch at a nearby hotpot restaurant. We now need two big buses for our transportation!
In the afternoon, from 2 to 5:30, all the children were gathered on the tennis court for a series of ice-breaking activities. It was another nice, cloudy day today so the outdoor activities were perfect. Cheng2zi Gege was in charge. He had all the children line up according to their teams, turn left, right and backward, and drilled them to follow directions the opposite way (e.g., if he says “turn right”, the children should turn left, and so on). Then he asked the roommates to get together and exchange personal information. Afterwards, the Chinese children were asked to introduce their American roommates in English, and the American children were asked to introduce their Chinese roommates in Chinese. The other activities were more competitive. In one activity, each team was asked to pose as statues for 20 seconds while the other teams would do anything (except for touching or saying/doing anything obscene) to make it impossible for that team to hold their posture. In another, each team was asked to make as many innovative gestures or movements as possible. The four college students led the activities; Bonnie and Saisai (Bonnie’s counterpart in “Dongdong”) were the referees. I helped out on and off.
At 6pm, we had dinner where we live. It was the fanciest dining hall we have used – vaulted ceiling, chandeliers, sconces, table lamps, fabric chairs, silk drapes and all. But the food was disappointing. Compared with what we had at si-zhong, we only got 4 or 5 choices for dinner (half of what we usually had at si-zhong) and what was available was not that palatable either. And there were no drinks, except for one soup.
After dinner, Saisai gave the children the following choices: swimming, ping-pong, basketball, or badminton in the gym, or resting in the room. I thought many children looked pretty tired. But most children still chose to go to the gym…
I hear the birds chirp. I wonder if they are the same birds that glided to my balcony earlier today. The trees where the birds rest can now only been seen in their silhouettes. It is twilight. We are finally away from the hum of the big city, one hour away but one world apart.
May our children seek and find a better self through getting to know their
Chinese partners in a parallel universe,
Agnes (aka He laoshi)