Life Adventures

I’ve realized something about myself: I tell stories in my head. As I look around at everything, I often see stories unfolding and often store them away to tell later. Yesterday, a small story unfolded before me . . .
Yesterday was our first big snow. As we stood outside waiting for our school van to pick us up, we marvelled at how nice the snow makes winter look. Instead of the dull browns of the grass and trees, we had a bright white landscape. In China, snow shoveling is a community effort–or maybe I should say task. After a good snow at our college, students will be assigned to shovel the campus roads and sidewalks during their lunch break. There are no snow plows in China. I walked out of the building after teaching my oral class and saw the shoveling had begun and chuckled to myself as I noticed that most of the boys were doing the shoveling while the girls just stood idly by “participating.” I got into the van and headed home–another campus–and noticed that in front of my dorm the same community effort was transpiring. As I walked toward my dorm, I noticed that here girls were actually participating in the shoveling effort. I watched two girls scrape their snow shovels across the road and toss the accumulating snow into the grass. They both moved back to start another shovel run, and as one of the girls put her shovel to the ground to do her duty, her shovel just fell apart, broke in two, the shovel snapped from the handle. She stopped with that look of incredulity. I could see the thoughts in her head, “This did not just happen!” She turned to her friend with the defective handle raised in demonstration of its utter inadequacy for the task. Her friend laughed and then caught my eye to see that I was laughing wholeheartedly as well. I continued giggling as I went into the warmth of the dorm grateful for stories that are always unfolding around me.

In China, I’ve affectionately been given the monicre of “The Crazy One.”  Over the years, I’ve come to realize that this means different things to different people.  In China, crazy is often viewed as a negative word, so when I went up to my student, commented that I liked her earrings since they were a little crazy, she was slightly disturbed.  Having now clarified to most of my students that being crazy doesn’t mean clinically insane but, in fact, just out of the ordinary, most of them are perfectly happy to call me crazy.

Last night we had an adventure in craziness as my friend invited several of our students to join us in a night of craziness.  Here were some of the results: