What a Difference a Day Makes!

August 23

What a difference a day makes! Well, first of all, I woke up my heart gung ho for more adventure, but my body feeling horrid: a splitting headache, a fever, and a feeling of dizziness and nausea every time I stood up. I rallied my roommate to join me for an outing to buy some bubble tea for breakfast, but just before going opted to cop out. All I felt like doing was laying down. No bubble tea for me this morning, and please no morning full of important introductions to the students with which I’ll be spending the semester. My sophomore English teacher spent the first day of class stressing, with supporting evidence from scientific studies, how crucial first impressions are and, ever since, I’ve been convinced. But lacking even the energy to remove my shoes, I sprawled out across the pristine white bedcover and laid there in a stupor until just about the last minute before I needed to be downstairs for our very first program orientation.

The sweet, cool jasmine tea I stopped for on the way did the trick, and, once I was awake and in the midst of the action, I was able to forget about the heading and nausea that lingered but lessened during the day. Living in Nanjing 101, from the point of view of Ping Ping (the program assistant close to us in age) and Tang Laoshi (the program director, a sweet woman and more of a motherly figure) was the topic at hand: how to get around, stay safe, withdraw money, make phone calls, and the like. Navigating this world definitely draws upon a different set of skills and habits. But for me, that’s part of the adventure.

When lunchtime rolled around, we walked over to a fancy 5-star hotel (close to the Blue Sky Sports Bar we went to the previous night) for a big buffet lunch. From there, we split up into groups to tour the city with the guidance of some NJU students. Since I purchased a cell phone the previous day but still had no SIM card to make it work, I joined the group heading out to buy cell phones and SIM cards. After I joined that group, Lu Guan, a Chinese student who seemed to take a liking to me, decided to join us too. We had roughly 9 American and 2 Chinese students, all crammed inside this tiny cell phone store, and it seemed to take far to long: every transaction required a separate negotiation. But now I’ve got my SIM card and my phone’s in business. Lu Guan was the first to give me his phone number.

When you’re getting a SIM card and choosing a cell phone number in China, I discovered, there are certain cultural considerations to keep in mind: above all, you want to secure an auspicious number. What makes a number auspicious or otherwise? Well, Chinese is a tonal language with 4 tones and pretty much every possible syllable has at least one manifestation for each tone. Meaning that lots of words with very different meanings have the same or similar pronunciation. This can make things very confusing, but has also given rise to a rich tradition of puns and plays on words. Take the number 4 for example: 四 (pronounced “si” meaning 4) sounds similar to 死 (also pronounced “si” but in 3rd instead of 4th tone, meaning “to die”), which has given rise to 4’s unlucky reputation. Eight (八, pronounced “ba”), on the other hand, supposedly sounds enough like 發 (“fa,” one of whose many meanings is “to get rich”), giving 8 a lucky connotation. I kept this in mind and chose a number with no 4’s but a respectable amount of 8’s.

An exasperating 2 hours, 7 cell phones and 9 SIM card purchases later, several students were ready to return to the dorms for some rest. As usual, that was about the last thing I wanted to do. So I rounded up a group of like-minded classmates for an excursion to Fuzi Miao, the Confucius Temple. Though this was only my 3rd day in Nanjing, I already found myself leading a tour of sorts. Later on in the evening, after my guidance proved successful, my friend Mickey joked I should start my own touring company. “Really now,” I replied. “What should I call it? How ‘bout something like ‘Blind Leading Blind’?”

Blind, perhaps, but with the help of a map, I led the way to the closest Metro station. There, I bought tickets for everyone to San Shan Jie (3 Mountain Street) and navigated our not un-conspicuous group from that station to Fuzi Miao, stopping along the way at the familiar Nai Cha (Bubble Tea) stand at the hostel I stayed at just days before. As we approached the temple, it was easier to tell we were heading in the right direction: the closer to the temple you get, the higher the concentration of people and shops and sights and smells and street vendors.

Before entering the temple, we decided to split up to find food and agreed on a time and place to meet afterwards. The Fuzi Miao market was supposedly famous for its street food, so that’s what I opted for, choosing between what appeared to be seaweed on a stick, roasted nuts, banana goo in a bamboo box, and other less appetizing options and eventually buying a cup of tofu chunks smothered in soy and hot pepper sauce. We reconvened, the people who had set finding a bathroom as their top priority still hungry, and got tickets to enter the temple.

The stairs leading up to the main entrance were saturated with Chinese tourists taking pictures of family members posing in front with smiles and peace signs. We snaked our way through them, through the imposing temple doors, and into a courtyard saturated with the smell of incense. Lining the path leading up to the main temple were larger-than-life statues of stately men and stylized lions. Into the temple and there’s Confucius himself, depicted to be about 20 ft. tall in a painting hanging behind the altar covered with offerings for him: clay figures of animal heads and other foods (yes: here, animal heads certainly can be considered foods) as well as actual musical instruments.

I got the impression that Fuzi Miao is more like a tourist attraction than a place that people actually come to worship. A family of Chinese tourists entered the temple on our tails and their tour guide explained to them the proper way of worship: kneeling before the altar and bowing (kaotao-ing) three times. Surrounding the altar in the center, covering the walls were large and incredibly elaborate and exquisite sculptures fashioned from colored stones, depicting what I gathered to be stories from Chinese mythology.

The sound of a powerful gong greeted us as we exited the main temple and stepped into a courtyard: this courtyard contained a giant gong and an equally massive drum which visitors could strike and beat to their heart’s content… for a fee. One corner was also reserved for paying customers to practice archery. From there, our path through the temple complex led us into a room with a stage set with a collection of Chinese traditional instruments. Unlike in the main temple, however, these instruments were for playing and not just offerings before Confucius. Visitors could select a song and—again for a fee—the temple’s performance group would perform it for you. I was tempted to try it out (the fee wasn’t that dear) but once I figured out the system and worked up the courage to ask, a difference performance group entered and started to dismantle the instruments. In their place, they set up a stage with lots of multi-colored curtains, which we soon figured out was for an upcoming shadow puppet performance, scheduled to start in a half hour.

While we were waiting, all of a sudden, I heard the exquisite sound of a flute. I looked towards the source of the sound and saw something I wouldn’t have expected: one of the students in the group, an awesome guy nicknamed Mickey from Japan, wandered over to a nearby table at which a few smaller sorts of traditional instruments were for sale. He had picked up the flute and started serenading us with some hauntingly beautiful Japanese songs, and now the sound of these songs echoed around the temple, keeping us entertained while we waited for the shadow puppet show to start.

One flute purchase negotiation and a few false starts, the show started for good, with an over-the-top woman with a microphone announcing the acts. First was a simple (so simple that even us “Lao Wai,” literally “Old Outside,” meaning Foreigners) yet charming slapstick act about some squabbles between a stork and a turtle. As in an American folktale it called to mind, the turtle won the race, so to speak, by evading the stork’s aggressions and waddling away unscathed—with a mouthful of the stork’s feathers.

Next was a more moralistic tale about a young lumberjack who loses his precious axe in a raging river and a Shen or God who flies down on a cloud to help. This helpful deity dives into the river to retrieve the axe… but comes back with the wrong one. “This gold axe isn’t mine!” the lumberjack exclaimed in disappointment. So he tossed it back in the water and the deity dove in to help again. And again, “This silver axe isn’t mine! My precious axe is just made of iron.” Once more, the wrong axe is tossed away and the deity dives back in. Third time’s the charm: the right axe is retrieved and the lumberjack is ecstatic and grateful. His good deed done, the Shen flew away on his cloud.

But then along comes a rich and greedy merchant who hears the young lumberjack’s tale and decides to try his luck. Though he lost no axes to the raging river, he starts lamenting as if he had, and as if that axe were his most valuable possession. So the Shen swoops down again to help. First he pulls out of the depths of the river another iron axe: “No this iron axe isn’t mine! Mine is much more valuable. Next the Shen pulls out a silver axe. “I think this one’s mine…” The deity dives in again and retrieves the sparkling gold axe. “Come to think of it, both of these are mine. Yes, I’m so happy to have back my precious gold and silver axes.” While ogling over his new possessions, the golden axe falls off the bridge and into the raging river. The merchant falls in after it, to his death. I guess you could say the moral is something like, “Don’t get to greedy and claim what’s not yours.” Some might say this is a lesson the Chinese government should learn when it comes to territory…

But to end on a more positive note, like the sweet sound that lingered at the end of Mickey’s songs: I started the day feeling sick and disheartened. At the end of the day, I returned (reluctantly: after all, we all had a Chinese placement test early the following morning) from Fuzi Miao and went to bed feeling full of energy, health and hope restored.