Limbo

Jeremy has a good life. He spends his evenings roaming his ample spaced apartment sitting with friends and scrounging for food. Nobody bothers him; the dimly lit rooms protect his sensitive eyes and hide him from intruders.

But now Jeremy is dead, his remains long since removed from this place. Why might you ask? I will gladly share: because Jeremy is a roach, and because I really hate roaches. In the two months since my new apartment has been inhabited the place has become a haven for them, and I have spent considerable time and effort over the past week waging war against their kind, even going so far as to go on hands and knees to jab them with my chopsticks. As a result my efforts seem to have paid off, the apartment finally appears clean and I am starting to feel settled in.

However, having all this cleaning and unpacking completed has left me with a great deal of time. Classes will not begin until the thirteenth of the month and much of my time now is spent reading on my balcony. It is a great relief after an intensive two months of summer training in Chengdu, but it is also a time of relative sadness as I am no longer busy with classroom chores or in visiting Chengdu sites with friends.

Instead I wander the campus and observe some of the habits of Chinese students in Yibin. There are plenty of student activities to keep my attention as many of them have also arrived early, the freshman for military training and the older students to prepare for classes. In the early hours of the week freshman students line the sports fields and basketball courts in droves, literally thousands of them in military formation and uniform. They sing, march, exercise and learn drills from the local military officials who have come to train them. It is the third routine of this kind that they will perform in their early lives: the first being before middle school and the second before high school. Older students have no such obligations and wander the campus holding hands with their girlfriends/boyfriends and getting together again with old friends. Earlier in the week these students had sat in tents welcoming the newer students to their respective majors. The sponsors of the event, a local phone company, had matching tents and performance stages set up around the entire college. In those first few days the campus had sprung to life in a way neither Chris nor I could have imagined just days before. It didn't last long though, by mid-week these ceremonies had begun to die down and students are beginning to settle in.

Now the campus grounds are filled with students still dressed in military uniform or their own unique styles of college clothing. For women this style can mean a traditional summer dress as we often find in the U.S., but non-traditional outfits cannot be in any way compared to our own. Keeping in mind that I am in no way knowledgeable about clothing styles or fashion, styles for girls can range from overalls with shorts in place of pants to a form of jeans/Barby skirt and dress shirt all rolled into one, with many variations in between, especially in color. For guys the style is far more simple-jeans and shirt or some sort of sportswear, though of course the guys have also been known to find styles which may seem strange to the western eye. Walking amongst these fashionable youths I try to pinpoint other differences in this campus from those in the U.S.: dogs wandering the campus with no identifiable owner, children and old retirees of various ages relaxing on the campus benches (colleges in China are much more community oriented than the U.S. and are sometimes interchangeable with parks), large rocks with Chinese poems carved into them, ping pong tables, large red banners with encouraging slogans. But for all its differences it has many similar features to universities back home as well: basketball courts, huge track fields, dorms, campus shops and green areas for the students to study. The layout is well planned and from the front gate it is a beautiful campus to look upon. At the opposite side of the gate I can see a large clock extending from the top of the main education building. At noon it will chime twelve times with a preceding jingle that might sound familiar in the U.S.

The stroll from one gate of campus to the other is not easy. Most of the university rests upon the side of a small mountain. The Fine Arts buildings and library rest at the peak and in the far back of the campus (not encouraging to my studies), and from there the university slopes steeply down, stopping at one other main platform before finally reaching the ground level closer to the front gate. In fact, the steps leading down from my own office are so steep that my estimate put the steps at at least five hundred. My own apartment rests at ground level along with most of the campus supermarkets and tea shops. Fortunately for me and my Irish skin, the campus is also lined with many long trunked tree’s which protect the school’s trails and narrow roads from the hot sun. The campus walls also protect its inhabitants from the berserk traffic noises, a factor for which I am deeply grateful.

Outside of campus Chris and I were able to find several new interesting sites. On the weekends the center city area is filled with shops, both inside and out, and most necessary things can be found there. Outside shops can take up entire streets and since vendors will bargain with you it is a significantly better place to shop. Our host families were also kind enough to guide us to a nearby mountain where townspeople often go for a walk or run. At the pinnacle you can see all of Yibin from a small tea house. There, old retirees sit together laughing about old times while playing mahjong and breathing in the fine mountain air. The respite in this place from noise and air pollution has made this perhaps one of my favorite places in Yibin.

My own apartment also offers its own sites: from the balcony ledge I can observe elderly men and women doing Tai Qi (Chinese martial arts) and cicadas humming in the trees. Men work to bring bricks from one pile to another for an undisclosed reason. Campus’s such as these often seem like a sanctuary to foreigners, a place where we can get away from the rush of the city and the stares from passersby. I will spend this last week before classes sitting on the balcony and letting the sounds drift up to my apartment. It feels a bit like limbo with all this time on my hands, though it has proved useful in settling in. Things are clean now, and Jeremy is dead. Good riddance.

For those of you interested I now have a mailing address. Please continue to leave your mailing addresses to help me stay in touch!

MAILING ADDRESS
Leo C. Dorsey
Foreign Affairs Department
Yibin University, Jiu Sheng Road 8
Wu Liangye Ave, Yibin, Sichuan Province
644007

四川省宜宾市五粮液大道酒圣路8号宜宾学院外事处。644007