hmmm, the house still looks normal but storage is filling up fast.

I hope it all fits!

Camp Patwin

My class did skits and there was a lot of them and we had a lot of fun. Our parents came. I played in “What Kind of Tracks?” and “Sleepwalker.” After the performance we got our sleeping bags ready and after a while we went to sleep in the MPR. My friend and I didn’t sleep well because it was too noisy (we were annoyed) but we whispered most of the night. In the morning we ate muffins and drank juice.

See if you can find me here, I look surprised when I see my mom with the camera, then I smile...

posted by Merlin

people - lenses - people

I worked in darkroom when I was in college. It was always a magical place to me staring at the timer and waiting for the images to reveal themselves in the tubs. Then I had little knowledge about different lenses. I thought Nikon and Canon made the best lenses and therefore pictures. Not until we moved to Davis, CA, starting over my graduate work, I began to play with Rolleiflex, Mamiya, Leica, Horseman. There're lenses that can make my heart sing for the life I have and for the life of others. I often find the subjectivity of the social sciences loves to slice up a culture for analyses. As a trained anthropologist of religion, I feel torn between the professional indoctrination and my own sense of how I connect with peoples who do not speak my languages. We are taught to mark boundaries with others, but on the individual level I rather see the opposite of what we are taught - we desire to be connecting and connected, we long for wholeness rather than partiality and divisiveness. Anthropologists love to relativize everything and anything universal is questionable to them(us). I'm a marginal anthropologist as I told my doctoral committee members when I was having the oral defense session. I read everything and am only willing to conform to those ideas that best articulate my research results...

I have to pack for my trip to Yunnan tomorrow. I'll be leading my students for a field research trip in Lijiang and Tengchong. Our research project is "Tourism: Modern consumption of ethnic landscapes." So, we'll speak to local peoples, hike on the mountains and listen to what the landscapes there are going to tell us:)!

Homing

I've lived in Beijing for nearly a year now. I began to like it. I feel more creative, and love to work with my students and other scholars. Being the Resident Director of the Language & Ethnic Studies Program gives me opportunities to teach and to make new friends in the fields of higher education, cinematography, and arts. When I began my job last June, I was given an office with stained white walls. I felt I was in a local hospital except there was no smell of sanitizer. I was wondering how long I or my incoming North American students would last here. I secured a small budget and called in my Tibetan artist friend, Dorji Tsering. This was when I realized that I also have much creativity inside me. We worked together for two weeks painting the walls and directing contracted workers to put in a wood floor. We want my students to feel welcomed and stimulated when they enter my office. When the school started, our idea was proved right. Students loved it. The point is that we are all away from home. I just wanted to do enough homing things so that we can all feel this place is a home away from home. The genre does not have to be American but shows enough creative, vibrant, inviting, empathetic tones. Nowhere else on campus has an office like mine. This exception does not make our host institution feel uneasy; instead, this office has become its showcase for its success in attracting international students. Deans of different colleges here frequently come here and I took the momentum, asking for two classrooms adjacent to my office and a wide, long hallway, to literally build a Study Center. Creativity does not mind additional space. Now, the long hallway became a public gallery. Currently we are displaying artworks by two artists from Yunnan. This coming May I'll invite a thangka artist for his art show. Stay tuned:)

things you find

I was packing up photos and came across some pictures we took the last time we lived in China (Hangzhou). This was 2002-2003, when Devin was 7 and Merlin was almost 3.

We lived down this alley, turning left here, at the new wall that was built while we were there. I often joked that the national pasttime in China was demolition and reconstruction. It was no accident that one of Merlin's favorite things to say was "backhoe," accompanied by much pointing and general merriment. I'm sure our neighborhood has changed completely since the time we were there. So many buildings were marked as "condemned" or rather "knock-down." Unfortunately it was often the buildings with great character that were due to be removed to make way for tall, impersonal apartment buildings.

From here (left) we'd continue about 25 yards to a courtyard on the right - we lived on the first floor of a 5 or 6 story building. A building had been constructed just south of our building so we only got a strip of sunlight in the kitchen for a few minutes a day. In the winter instead of staying in the house to warm up, it was better to go outside to stand in the sun.

The picture on the right is the gateway leading to an old house down the alley from us, also seen below. The character on the right gatepost is "chai" indicating that the compound and surrounding buildings will be torn down.

Below are the early stages of neighbor-hood "im-provement."

I won't really have a frame of reference for Beijing (having only been there once, 14 years ago), pictures I see of it now look very modern and "rebuilt." It's a pity because there's a very colloquial character to the old neighborhoods, a sense of something unique and a feeling that interesting secrets will be revealed around the next corner....

Finally

I am finally getting around to mailing out the photo collage we like to send sometime around Chinese New Year. Just a month late... Better late than never, though, right?

I've started packing up books and papers and putting them in storage. It's amazing how I suddenly feel there's so little preparation time. Everything was mosey-ing along and then spring hit and now there's a million things to do and packing on top of it all. No sweat, I'll accomplish everything!

don't mind me

while I talk to myself and try to figure out some of the interesting things I can do on this blog...

I'm thinking of pulling some of the things from my old one (Davis Permaculture Users' Group), including some other things that've been floating around, and posting them here, so I can keep some of the info in one place. I know, it won't thrill the family members who just want to see pictures of the kids, but I'm kind of liking the idea of posting a whole variety of things here - and honestly I'll have a lot more fun if I can post about foraging and plants and the odds-n-ends of creative projects we do around here.

how to be a blogger...

or maybe I mean that with a question mark as I'm thinking this up as I type - I kind of played with blogging last year, but it was a quiet little deal that pretty much only I read. I look at it as though it was a practice run for this one.

Anybody who wants can join us in our soon-to-occur dive into China. Along the way it'll be proven just how crazy we are (not just in moving us all to China, but in general, we're kind of ....different).

It's strange to have a brand new unused blog open to any representation of ourselves that we want to offer - there are so many different levels at which one's life can be approached to make it understandable to others. For me, I probably need to ignore the "threat" of an audience in the early stage so I can become comfortable posting...

You'll notice there's a huge gap - exactly a year - between my last 2007 post and the newer ones. What happened was that Dan couldn't access the blog from Beijing. This was probably because I'd started it out as a "private" blog while it was being set up and somehow he couldn't get in even though he's a contributor. There's also the issue of China's censorship of blogger sites - though this week, when I removed the permission aspect Dan was able to view it just fine. I'd shelved the blog idea but now it looks like we'll have a workaround for the firewall (aka The Great Firewall of China) that allows the PRC to effectively block controversial and untested sites- so I should have access to everything I do here, thanks to someone I won't name since he's actually giving me server space at his work...