Nous sommes Canadiens!

Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!!!! I can't believe it it! Our permanent residency application was finally approved! YAY! Long live the Queen! Or wait, vive le roi? Oh my, I am already confused. And I haven't even "landed" as an immigrant yet, which I have to do before the end of the year, so I'll be home for Christmas... dumdidumdidum. This somewhat overthrows our plans, but thankfully no plane ticket was bought, no commitments made, so we can start plan B - that is me coming to Montreal for a couple of weeks (depending on my boss' good will) and then hopefully handing over the apartment to a subletter (if you know anyone who needs a furnished apartment in Montreal for half a year or so, please let me know). I am not looking forward to such a long flight again so soon, but could there be a more charming place for Christmas than Montreal? :) I had already resigned myself to not having any Christmas at all (they don't even have the tiniest break here, I would have to teach all the way till the end of January), now I might even get snow! And I have to say, upon getting the news I was so happy that all my doubts whether I really wanted to go back to Montreal after the year here evaporated.

Apart from that, life here is going on as usual. The week just flies by with teaching and Chinese class (I got the class' highest score on the midterm :P I know, I know, I'm a total teacher's pet. But you know what?! I don't f***ing care!) and on weekends I buy household appliances :P Ok, I'm exaggerating, but I did buy heaters and did not regret it for a second. I need to be able to warm up somewhere. My neighbor (the nosy one with the little daughter) could not believe I had already used my heating. She said I wasn't wearing enough clothes! I was actually wearing three layers of shirts/sweaters and two layers of pants at that moment - I had just come from Kung Fu and had just put my street clothes over my Kung Fu clothes when the little girl came storming out of their door, grabbed my leg and basically dragged me into her apartment. I swear she must have been waiting behind the door for the sound of my key in my door lock! As if I didn't get enough of 5year olds at Kung Fu.

Speaking of Kung Fu, I witnessed a rather bewildering scene there last weekend. The other instructor (i.e. one of the guys who shows up in sports clothes and stands around smoking most of the time) - he trains the bigger kinds whereas the old Master Xu trains the little ones and me :) - got very upset at one student, I think this guy might be 18 or so. I have no idea what he did to anger the teacher so much, but he made him come to the front of the class and started to slap this guy's face. Then he said something to him, slapped him again. He seemed to become more and more angry, he got louder and started to slap harder. But the student didn't run, he just stood there, tears streaming down his face and took it. The other parents either went away where they didn't have to see it (aka the women) or walked over and talked to the angry teacher (aka the men). They didn't actually try to stop him from hitting that guy, but they seemed to try to calm him down a little. After about 30 smacks the class resumed. The boy went to wash his face and then continued the training. Wow. That was something different. Meanwhile, master Xu had continued with the little kids and told them to do their exercises and not stare at the other group. Needless to say this was the most disciplined class ever. Whereas yesterday, when it was just me and three 6-7 year olds, there was a lot of screaming, uncontrolled giggling, rolling around on the floor and playing tag with Master Xu. He carries a big stick, but never really uses it :) I will be careful to keep my distance from the other teacher though...

Last Saturday was the beginning of winter - according to the lunar calendar anyways. I managed to take Xu Feng (another one of my boss' students) out for lunch and we ate lamb - incidentally the traditional start-of-the winter dish. It's very "yang" (not just because that's Chinese for lamb) but also considered "hot" food you should feed on in winter. And indeed it was this delicious, very fatty, stewed-for-hours dish, exactly what one needs on a cold day. Xu Feng was amazed when I said "oh, this is good, and so fat!" He asked "You like fat? 90% of Chinese girls are on a diet!" (from my limited statistic I would say that's true) He says it's not because of the Western beauty ideal that girls want to be anorexic thin, but goes back much farther, maybe 200 or 300 years, when the heroine of popular novels where these fragile and sickly girls (I guess that's also what we can blame the footbinding on). Xu Feng is an interesting source of Chinese history. I also asked him about his attitude towards Japan. Apparently, the Nanjing massacre is still the number one topic in history books. It's quite embarrassing how little the Sino-Japanese wars are covered in our treatment of WWII, I think. And kind of weird how China points to Germany as a good example of dealing with their past in a way the Japanese should have - according to China anyways. Now, I wonder how the dealing would have been if the allies had decided to "denazify" Japan instead of Germany.

I have also recently worked on improving my history knowledge. I had never heard of this guy named John Rabe before my Montreal Chinese teacher mentioned him to me. He is called the "good German of Nanking" because he was the head of the International Safety Zone that was established to protect the civilian population of Nanjing (there wasn't really anyone else left since the army had abandoned the city and left its inhabitants defenseless against the Japanese killing and raping about 300,000 people in six weeks in the winter of 1937/38). There is a memorial site in his former residence, which is on the Nanjing University campus. The people who run this place (they had a seminar a couple weeks ago which I went to) take it surprisingly personal that John Rabe never achieved the same fame and popularity as Oskar Schindler, although he saved so many more people. Well, he used the fact that he was a Nazi and Germany allied with Japan to stop the Japanese soldiers. But he wasn't alone. There were also quite a few Brits and Americans involved. And how do you count exactly whom he saved? He was ordered to come home by the Nazi government and obeyed, abandoning the people of Nanjing if you want. Supposedly by then the Japanese troops had moved on or just gotten tired of the killing and raping and he had "accomplished his task" as the people at the memorial site view it. But it so happens that there are movies out there that portray him as not quite so heroic. The only proof of events really seems to be his diary, and although that's certainly an important historical document, I doubt it's completely unbiased. So, everyone has to make up their own mind, I guess. The memorial site was sponsored by Siemens & Bosch (for whom John Rabe worked in Nanjing) and Johannes Rau (former German president in case you don't know - the German president is just not that important compared to the chancellor, he mainly "represents"... and establishes memorial sites, I suppose).

Ok, that's my story of the day. Next week the crazy Italian :P is coming to visit and in about a month I'm already on a plane. Wow, times really goes by fast. Sometimes I wonder if a year is enough to really get a feel of China.