Ex Media Scientia

This was going to be a pretty image-heavy entry, but then I thought, if I'm going to take the time to put up all the images, I'll never get around to writing the actual entry. So it will be text-heavy instead. One month and one day after my arrival at Shantou, here is something of a summary of My New Life in China.

1. The welcome at Shantou University was lovely. STU is, at large, a lovely place. Not very large, but very green, vivid and spirited. The atmosphere is positive - busy but not frantic, communal somehow. At at forty minutes' bus drive from the city proper, the university is really its own little world. I've heard differing opinions on whether this is a good or bad thing, but so far I'm enjoying it. It feels protective, which makes the first month much easier on the hapless laowai!

2. I was given an apartment on campus, which I will eventually post pictures of. Possibly many pictures, because it is huge - two bedrooms, one of them about the size of my old apartment's living room/kitchen, a large living room, a kitchen, and two balconies - one small, but one reasonably spacious. It would be suitable for the growing of potatoes and tomatoes in bags, except for the absolutely constant rain. I don't know what to do with half the space in this place. I could keep ten cats.

3. For now, though, I am only keeping two guinea pigs, Xingxing and Lingling, which I bought downtown. They are adorable and reasonably satisfying in terms of making the house into a home. They like watermelon and carrot and dislike cabbage. They are still young and shaped like wriggly bullet tubes, but I have great hopes for their transformations into proper sized bundles of fur and fat.

4. But I am not growing anything on the balcony because it rains all the time. All the time. And when it doesn't rain it's foggy, or misty, or damp, or something else involving a conspicuous amount of water where it does not belong. It's also surprisingly cold for what I thought Southern China in winter ought to be. Although the fog is a bother to live in, it does paint some beautiful pictures especially with the low mountains - they really are taller than mere hills - around the university. When the fog is especially heavy, we appear to be living inside a strange patch of reality and modernity within one of those Chinese landscape paintings that is the suggestion of mountains against white.

5. Teaching-wise, everything is very satisfying. I have a delightful amount of freedom in deciding the content and form of my classes, which is enjoyable, but also quite demanding. I have nothing but good things to say about the students. For the second week of my Popular Culture module, the poor sods had to read Adorno and Horkheimer on the culture industry, a paper that is still challenging even to me. They all struggled through it. For the next week they had to read Barthes' Myth Today, and they struggled through that with equal courage! Let me tell you, few things are as heart-warming as a class full of students who have all done the reading. We've done Bourdieu for Week 4, so things got a little easier, except we're doing postmodernism next.

6. My other two modules are Studying Media Audiences - this and the pop culture module are both based strongly around introduction, theory, and doing academic research - and Reporting on Israel and the Middle East, which I'm tackling as mostly a history/culture module with some political communication attached as my own limited training allows. It's a fascinating module to teach, though, because so much of what is to me everyday information is new to them, and some of their reactions are just so... well, I have to say "sane", really. We've recently talked about the Sykes-Picot agreement and the drawing of borders by the great powers post-WWI. They found it hilarious and disturbing - really, just sitting in class and laughing uncomfortably at the idea that countries could just be invented in this fashion. And that is honestly the only sane response.

7. It is astonishing how stereotypes, or rather images, travel and prevail, though. These guys are kids from small-town China (where five million people, as in Shantou, is a small town), but as soon as we sat down to make a mind map of associations for the Middle East it was oil, war, Daesh, arms merchants, the friggin Crusades. Even for a media scholar who knows how these things work, it's mind-blowing.

8. I love my students, is what I'm trying to say. I especially love this one girl in my Audiences module who always reads the additional reading and comes to class glowing with love for Hall, Radway, and Fiske, and the exact beautiful realisation I remember having at her age, that people talking about TV matters.

9. There is a small and fun local community of foreign teachers. We've had a St. Patrick's Day celebration at the Treehouse, which is the local pub and named that for having an actual tree growing through it. It's a weird place. It brews its own local beer. I have not tried the beer but I am told it is good. It's named after someone called Old Ben, who may have been the teacher that first brewed the beer, or may have been that teacher's dog. The highlight of the foreign teachers community's week is the Saturday bus to Walmart, where you can buy frozen burgers and microwave pizza. Tomorrow is Saturday. My excitement knows no bounds, no joke.

10. The food. It's possible that I, a hapless laowai, have no concept of what is actual good Chinese food, but the food is so good. Which is not to say that the mircowave pizza and burgers are not a delight, because I have found that - probably by lack of habituation - I sometimes find the flavours of Chinese food hard to distinguish, there seems to be an underlying flavour that, to me, is common to everything, and sometimes I become tired of it. Not often, though, because it is a wonderful flavour. Umami? I don't know. "Fragrant" is the word that comes to mind for me, this kind of intensity that you can feel in the back of your throat tickling into your nose. The food in the canteens is... not awful, but I try not to have too much of it because it is dripping with oil. In the little street just outside the uni called East Gate, though, you can find all sorts of delights, like "ants climbing trees", which is a dish of noodles with little black sesame seeds that me and my TA tried out of sheer curiosity for its name before realising it is in fact a Sichuan dish, and then we cried. There is also a place that does wonderful, wonderful dumplings (jiaozi, the sickle-shaped kind), where you can see the filling and dough being made and put together before being popped into a pot to boil. I could eat them forever I really could. There is a Chinese barbecue place that I have not yet tried, two stands of bubble tea which I have tried for the first time and was strongly weirded out by, a Korean rice rolls place, and a stand that sells the kind of hot dog on a stick that I remember having in the Shanghai Expo. The ones that were inexplicably sweet.

11. And there is an Israeli restaurant, which hopes to cater to the hordes of my countryfolk who will be pouring into Shantou come September when the Technion opens its local branch. It's going to have to work pretty hard on catering to them, though, because while it has the merit of offering flatbread that actually tastes like flatbread (the quest to find bread that does not taste unpleasantly powdery, spongy and sweet is eternal), any other connection to actual Israeli food is... dubious, at best. I'll have to devote an entry especially to this problem.



This has gone on for a while, so I think I'll stop here for now. I'll try to chronicle more specific adventures as they come my way. Next entry there will be pictures. Some of them will be of things that may be fruit or may be alien invader eggs.