This morning in Chinese class we learned the song "Beijing Huanying Ni" (Beijing Welcomes You), which was the promotional video for the 100 day countdown to the 2008 Olympics. It is so catchy, and we realized that we had learned the majority (da bufen 大部分) of the characters in the song. It also has an epic moment of Jackie Chan, and I highly recommend watching it. I've actually downloaded it for my iTunes library; it's that awesome.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxgaH3bZwuE&list=FLNrXv5UceKnZWvmRXWxv7tQ&index=1&feature=plpp_video
Instead of a Public Health lecture, as you can tell from the title of this post, we had a field trip today to a community health clinic. It is a smaller facility, one of two hundred in Beijing alone, that does only primary care. We started in the public health area of the building which had a consultation center for nutrition, exercise, screenings for chronic illness, and general health and behavioral advising. The initiatives there were good, but there were few people in the space. They attribute that to the lateness of the day, and I hope they are correct and that many more people had been served by the facility.
In the main outpatient center, the most utilized clinic was for traditional Chinese medicine. There were many people mid-therapy as we walked through, including a man who was casually sitting in the room with acupuncture needles in his face. We were all extremely interested in these therapies and how patients choose those over the biomedical therapies, so the next academic session when we have our TCM class is much anticipated by all.
We finished the site visit with a bit of a conference/Q&A session with the director of the center, a doctor from PKU, two representatives from the Beijing CDC, and one from the Haidian District CDC. We live in Haidian District. It was interesting, but there was a large language barrier today, so that made communicating more difficult. I've found that because we are talking about such a specialized topic, these professionals who have fantastic everyday English do not know all the words that we use to describe various bits of anatomy or the name of a disease or therapy. It's the specificity of the field that makes English/Chinese challenging for people to communicate, but it's all part of the experience.
Compared to the hospital we visited last week, this clinic was small, less crowded, and less modern. We have been discussing disparities in China pertaining to health and socioeconomic status, but this visit really reminded me that China is still a developing country. To have facilities at such different levels within one city is extremely demonstrative of the struggles this nation faces in striving for equity. It was as if we had jumped into a photo from Africa or Haiti and then suddenly we were back in a big modern city, and it made me sad that there are such gaps within miles of one another.
In the evening, we had our 4th of July Celebration with our language partners. We were supposed to be celebrating in real time with the US, but the holiday ended 6 hours earlier in eastern time, which is 3 hours pacific time, so it was just ironic. Gu Laoshi ordered food for us, and we began the evening with a singing of the American and Chinese national anthems. It was fun to sing with Helen because both of us like to sing and we taught each other our respective country's songs.
There were a lot of dishes at dinner. There was cold tofu in a heart-shaped mold that had a very light, clean flavor that I very much enjoyed. Also with the cold dishes that I did not like as much but still tasted good were mushrooms, Sichuan spicy beef, cucumbers in soy sauce, and cooked lettuce. Our hot dishes were tomato, egg, and spinach; sweet and sour shrimp (very American/mei guo, but so tasty because it was familiar); a scallop served in its shell with rice noodles on top; a vegetable dish of sliced mushrooms, celery, and red pepper; a whole fish that I was too full to try; steamed buns with duck that was stir-fried with peanuts and peppers in a kung pao reminiscent way; a fried meat dish that I think was chicken; fried rice; taro eggroll-so delicious! the filling was creamy and purple, so of course I liked it; a meat soup; the most delicious corn soup I have ever had-the corn flavor was very intense, the broth was light, and there were egg drops in it; and sliced watermelon and cantaloupe for dessert.
While the food was good, I really enjoyed talking with Helen. We compared notes on how our lessons were going and I tried a Chinese sentence of my own with her today. She said it was very good, and I always feel so triumphant when I can communicate in this language that is so new to me. She has been preparing for her TOFL which is a week from Saturday, and I think she's going to be fine because her spoken English is so good. I love spending time with my Chinese friend!
We left dinner at 8, I stopped to buy a lu cha 绿茶 green tea, then I tackled the dorm issue of getting hot water. Andrea has done it the last few times, so I took a turn getting our hot water recharged. Our room has a card, and I took it, my phrasebook/dictionary, and my small vocabulary that includes the words re shui 热水 hot water and the ability to tell them my room number (er ling liu ling jiu 二零六零九 20609). My attempt was successful!!! It was truly a triumph to come back with the card ready to recharge our water supply so I could take a nice shower.
I am now preparing for tomorrow's oral exam in Chinese class. We have 14 questions and will be asked 6. One of the six is to give an introduction, and I've got that down, so I just have to finish prepping the remaining questions. They're pretty basic: introduce your roommate, do you have a Chinese friend, introduce your teacher, things like that. We only have a few verbs, so there's only so much we can say. I feel good about it though because I'm preparing by writing, which means I have to process what the question means so I can answer it. It'll be okay, it's just the first time, and our teacher's philosophy is that we test to learn rather than learn for the test. I really like her and I'm going to miss her during the second session when we have a new teacher!
Today is awesome because I successfully spoke Chinese.
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