I sincerely hope that my long silence can be compensated by this post. I have a great set of excuses anyway: they include being out of town AND being sick. Let’s start by being out of town part.
We paid a short visit to Shaoxing. It’s located some two hundred kilometers West from Ningbo and a journey there takes one hour by train.
It’s famous by the Shaoxing wine, used in China for cooking (or by some tourists, no names mentioned, to be drunk by a bridge) and by Lu Xun.
Lu Xun was the first writer to create in modern Mandarin. This is the link to the English translation of the first story to be even written in this language, “The Madman’s Diary”:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1918/04/x01.htm
The main protagonist is convinced that his family are trying to fatten him up in order to eat him. This cheerful tale is beautiful in itself, but everybody tells me is must be viewed in its social context, here probably China being consumed by the feudal system. As much as I find social contexts unimportant in interpretation, the free interpretation of Lu Xun’s text doesn’t exist in China. The pupils learn his stories by heart and recite them. Exams on his work look more or less like this:
Task one: Here is a text of Lu Xun with some words or entire paragraphs missing. Fill in the gaps from memory.
Task two: What did Lu Xun mean when he wrote: xxxxxxxx.
The students are previously informed what Lu Xun thought by their teacher. I’m not sure if the teacher has found it out from Lu Xun.
I can mock it as much as I like, but what do I know? The fact, expressed by the writer himself, is that he desired to write in order to improve, or even mend, the Chinese society. He decided to become a writer when he saw an execution on a Chinese man accused by the Japanese of being a spy. What shocked the young author was that Chinese people came to see the execution for fun and were indifferent to the suffering of their compatriot. Lu Xun immediately gave up his studies of medicine and returned from Japan to China to become a writer who will make a difference.
He started as a translator of foreign literature. He translated, among others, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Polish nineteenth-century Nobel Prize winner. Having read most of this guy’s work, I congratulate Lu Xun on his persistence. His major inspiration was, however, Gogol and his short stories, which became his favourite genre.
He was the beloved writer of Mao. However, he never joined the Communist Party. After writing in service of the new country most of his life, he died of tuberculosis.
But he was born in Shaoxing, where you can still see the house where he was born, converted into a museum. In fact, the whole old town of Shaoxing is a living museum. It’s the first city in China I’ve seen with the preserved old part. Now you cannot change anything there, but the locals are allowed to live there. They live in the old way: do laundry in the river, hang it on the street, cook outside, leave their doors open and sit in front of their houses until it gets dark. The time seems to have stopped there until you see them use mobile phones or go online.
Unfortunately, the happiness cannot last forever and after returning to Ningbo I got sick. As I suffered from fever of almost 39 degrees, I called the university officer to take me to the hospital.
Let me explain to you how it’s done in China.
First of all, the doctor will give you neither diagnosis nor medicine until you take the blood test. They need to be hundred percent sure what’s wrong with you. When last year I’ve heard that I needed a blood test I completely panicked thinking that I was seriously ill. Nothing of the sort. You catch a cold, you take a blood test.
A sophomore student of English Major was accompanying me. She had no idea what a food poisoning is, not even after I explained: “you eat something bad, then you feel bad.” How is that a difficult sentence? I almost cried. Yet she was very sweet, holding my hand, stroking me and trying to comfort me. She even tried to feed me candy and insisted that I should eat something.
We waited for the blood test results for one hour. With the results in hand, we returned to the doctor.
This time there was a queue. It is not any type of a queue that you’ve ever seen in Europe. Here, the doctor’s office is open, people stand around him and push one another, trying to make him take their health book or results first. If you’re too weak to push others you probably just die. Fortunately, the students were pushing, I was standing by. The doctor takes the results, asks whose they are, reads them, asks some questions and gives prescriptions.
Rule number two of Chinese medical practice (rule number one was blood test) is that being sick is unhealthy, so if you are too sick to get better immediately, they need to give you the amount of medicine they would normally give to a horse in Europe. It’s a bit hard to swallow, so you get a drip.
Just imagine a room the size of a lecture hall full of people taking drips. Really cheerful.
After the drip I felt better at once. The next day the temperature dropped, the day after that I was perfectly healthy and working.
The miracle of Chinese medicine.
We paid a short visit to Shaoxing. It’s located some two hundred kilometers West from Ningbo and a journey there takes one hour by train.
It’s famous by the Shaoxing wine, used in China for cooking (or by some tourists, no names mentioned, to be drunk by a bridge) and by Lu Xun.
Lu Xun was the first writer to create in modern Mandarin. This is the link to the English translation of the first story to be even written in this language, “The Madman’s Diary”:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1918/04/x01.htm
The main protagonist is convinced that his family are trying to fatten him up in order to eat him. This cheerful tale is beautiful in itself, but everybody tells me is must be viewed in its social context, here probably China being consumed by the feudal system. As much as I find social contexts unimportant in interpretation, the free interpretation of Lu Xun’s text doesn’t exist in China. The pupils learn his stories by heart and recite them. Exams on his work look more or less like this:
Task one: Here is a text of Lu Xun with some words or entire paragraphs missing. Fill in the gaps from memory.
Task two: What did Lu Xun mean when he wrote: xxxxxxxx.
The students are previously informed what Lu Xun thought by their teacher. I’m not sure if the teacher has found it out from Lu Xun.
I can mock it as much as I like, but what do I know? The fact, expressed by the writer himself, is that he desired to write in order to improve, or even mend, the Chinese society. He decided to become a writer when he saw an execution on a Chinese man accused by the Japanese of being a spy. What shocked the young author was that Chinese people came to see the execution for fun and were indifferent to the suffering of their compatriot. Lu Xun immediately gave up his studies of medicine and returned from Japan to China to become a writer who will make a difference.
He started as a translator of foreign literature. He translated, among others, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Polish nineteenth-century Nobel Prize winner. Having read most of this guy’s work, I congratulate Lu Xun on his persistence. His major inspiration was, however, Gogol and his short stories, which became his favourite genre.
He was the beloved writer of Mao. However, he never joined the Communist Party. After writing in service of the new country most of his life, he died of tuberculosis.
But he was born in Shaoxing, where you can still see the house where he was born, converted into a museum. In fact, the whole old town of Shaoxing is a living museum. It’s the first city in China I’ve seen with the preserved old part. Now you cannot change anything there, but the locals are allowed to live there. They live in the old way: do laundry in the river, hang it on the street, cook outside, leave their doors open and sit in front of their houses until it gets dark. The time seems to have stopped there until you see them use mobile phones or go online.
Unfortunately, the happiness cannot last forever and after returning to Ningbo I got sick. As I suffered from fever of almost 39 degrees, I called the university officer to take me to the hospital.
Let me explain to you how it’s done in China.
First of all, the doctor will give you neither diagnosis nor medicine until you take the blood test. They need to be hundred percent sure what’s wrong with you. When last year I’ve heard that I needed a blood test I completely panicked thinking that I was seriously ill. Nothing of the sort. You catch a cold, you take a blood test.
A sophomore student of English Major was accompanying me. She had no idea what a food poisoning is, not even after I explained: “you eat something bad, then you feel bad.” How is that a difficult sentence? I almost cried. Yet she was very sweet, holding my hand, stroking me and trying to comfort me. She even tried to feed me candy and insisted that I should eat something.
We waited for the blood test results for one hour. With the results in hand, we returned to the doctor.
This time there was a queue. It is not any type of a queue that you’ve ever seen in Europe. Here, the doctor’s office is open, people stand around him and push one another, trying to make him take their health book or results first. If you’re too weak to push others you probably just die. Fortunately, the students were pushing, I was standing by. The doctor takes the results, asks whose they are, reads them, asks some questions and gives prescriptions.
Rule number two of Chinese medical practice (rule number one was blood test) is that being sick is unhealthy, so if you are too sick to get better immediately, they need to give you the amount of medicine they would normally give to a horse in Europe. It’s a bit hard to swallow, so you get a drip.
Just imagine a room the size of a lecture hall full of people taking drips. Really cheerful.
After the drip I felt better at once. The next day the temperature dropped, the day after that I was perfectly healthy and working.
The miracle of Chinese medicine.
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