So today I did crawl to class- not feeling much better than yesterday but anyway. I felt dire during the first hour and contemplated retreat back to bed but made myself stay for the next hour, during which I perked up a wee bit. Then I heard we watching a film for the next two so I decided to stay for that and felt better by the end- although still very tired. My throat is still hoarse :(
In our reading lesson today we were giving presentations on our home towns. It was quite amusing to see the Koreans and Russians with pictures of the industrial sprawls they called home and then see Anthony's on Bexhill-on-Sea, complete with pictures of rows of houses with neat gardens.
The film we were shown was a surprise as I had seen clips of it before at a restaurant Becka and I had been to. And whenever I have been past that restaurant they appear to always be showing it too. It was nice to see the whole thing. It was called 人在炯图, (I think that's right) which means Men on a Journey, or something similar. It was about a post office manager journeying home who bumps into a cow hand travelling to the same destination. The cowhand is a bit of a village idiot and annoys the manager no end but because of various circumstances (first the plane breaks down, then the train, then the coach... ) they are lumped together. Comic situations ensue. Lessons are learnt. There came an intriguing part where the wife appeared to be consoling her husband when his girlfriend dumps him but perhaps I misunderstood the Chinese... All Chinese films/programmes are handily subtitled automatically. This is because all programmes are spoken in Standard Mandarin but a significant minority have different dialects which means that they cannot understand the language. Handily when written all the differences disappear so everyone can understand the subtitles. If you can read- which is not a given in China!.
This is one of the few redeeming features of Chinese characters- that they are universally understood!
Since coming here I swear I am growing more and more conservative. As a liberal the idea seems to be to question everything and, if it is found wanting, to discard it. But this implies we can fully comprehend everything's postive and negative effects- which of course we can't. Sometimes things which have happened a certain way for centuries that nowadays seem completely nonsensical have happened for a reason that we don't realise until we have changed things- accidentally for the worse. I am still completely for constantly questioning the way things are run but now reckon that "because we always have" might have some weight to it after all. For example Daisy, Becka and I were sat on the roof enjoying the sun today and we got to talking about careers and we talked about the traditional setup of the Man as a Provider with the Woman as the Home-maker and Child-rearer, and how this was a very unfashionable concept these days. And on the surface it doesn't make sense. Surely it is better to have two wage-earners in a family. A woman needs fulfilment as much as a man and home-making does not offer the same satisfaction as becoming the chief executive of a business. But what we realised was that in a couple one will always have to sacrifice their career for the other's. There will be very few situations where both partners can pursue their careers 100% i.e. the couple may have to move to be nearer to one partner's work that will mean the other will be further away/need to look for a new job. But why should it always be the wife's? Well it generally turns out that men are more driven and less willing to compromise whereas women will do so out of love. Plus there is the problem of kiddies...When children are involved, it becomes very difficult for the woman to be the main one pursuing a career and the man to childcare. Which inexorably leads back to the Wife set-up... Which is disheartening. All through school and university I and my female contemporaries have been planning for a future career that we intended to give 100% to and I wonder how many of us actually will end up in a position to do that. Is it possible to be happily married, with kids, and an unrestrained career? Or is it just a dream?
I had the worst sweet and sour pork today. Can't WAIT to get a flat- even with so rudimentary a kitchen as they tend to have here (Chinese cooking doesn't really involve ovens so they are rarely available in cheap flats). I'd kill for a jacket potato with salad. Salad. Green.Vegetables.
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