My People Page

My People page:

You'll see most of the people in my Shanghai life as you go through the blog. (I'm way behind, but now I have a router that's a little faster than the .59 mps wireless that's in the room)

Yes, here is ZHAO XIAOHONG and her husband TONG HUA.   Last year they took me to a restaurant in Pudong after Xiaohong and I spent the afternoon sightseeing in the drizzle that was the weather of the day.    This was the time I was up in the famous Shanghai Oriental Pearl TV tower.

Since then we've been to a concert with her sister colleagues at SJTU.

Xiaohong was the exchange faculty member at Highline during the 2001-2002 academic year.   She worked closely with Larry Blades on a course.

Everyone uses WeChat, the phone based social media.   And I laugh these days because I think of the religious in America always saying grace before eating to honor the food and praise their creator; in China, however, before each meal we pull out our smart phones and snap away, again, a way to honor and remember the food before it is eaten, and to share the meal with all those who could not be with us. (Well, it's a good rationalization.)

Here are DING YAPING and HE YAN, who took us to the Golden Bull, a Vietnamese restaurant in the Grand Gateway Mall.   I'll try to get a food post up some time in the future.

DING YAPING is the person people from Highline have known best over the years.   I know Laura, Shannon, Susan, Larry, Bryan, have all had long and beneficial relationships with Ding Yaping, who goes out of her way to be sure we learn our way around the city and the campus.  She has saved my life many times already.

Yaping flies to Atlanta twice a year, where her husband works on the Emory University campus.
She was at Highline during the 2000-2001 school year.
Some day, she needs to come back to Highline to work full-time.













HE YAN came to Highlinie as the SJTU faculty exchange  during the 2002 - 2003 academic year.
Among other things, she teaches an introduction to English and American Poetry. Last year I visited her classes.  And I will again this year.

                                                                          

My worst memory of HE YAN was the night she disappeared in Texas.   A group of us went to a conference in Austin.  The group was walking through the night life section of town one evening, when we realized that He Yan was no longer with us.   We searched and searched,  and couldn't find her.  Happily, she was safe.   Her love of music had drawn her to a bar down the road.

On this night He Yan was taking us to a Karen Carpenter concert (a British group was playing Carpenter songs) and we were to have dinner with together with her husband Wen Tao, who unfortunately was called to work, so three of the four sisters and I went to the concert.  Yaping met us after dinner and we rode the subway to Pudong, where we met up with Xiaohong.



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Here they are after the Carpenter Concert.

YU JIYING stopped by when I was in the Reading Room in the School of Foreign Languages.   Last year, she was a member in my faculty class. She has flawless written English and speaks with a touch of British in her voice.   Last year she was working on a project investigating the effect of explicitly teaching critical thinking (based on Richard Paul's work on critical thinking) on improving composition.  She is planning on writing a paper for publication in English.  Jiying wants to come to America for an overseas teaching assignment and had an invitation from the Language School in Monterrey, but unfortunately, her government funding fell through.  I hope she will apply and make it Highline soon.  She took me to lunch on the Minhang campus, tried to get together another time, but didn't get it together, unfortunately.

WU FANGLIN was a Highline exchange just a year and a half ago, Fall 2013.   She said she had a difficult time adjusting, her blood pressure was up and she couldn't sleep at night.   The planes bothered her, and she never adjusted.   She likes to be alone or one-on-one, with crowds no bigger than 3 or 4 people. You'd never know it talking with her; she's upbeat, energetic, and outgoing. She has resisted her mother's pressures to marry and feels being able to live with oneself is most important.   The day I was meeting her after both of our classes, my blood pressure had been up, so she took me to the campus medical unit, where she got me a medical card and had my blood pressure checked.   It was high normal and not bad.   I had also run out of some pills, which my friend Suni had mailed two weeks before--but has yet to arrive--and she was able to get me a bottle just by asking.  What a friend!  We went off campus for a snack that afternoon, and later back on campus, she showed my the 50 meter pool, (Oh, my!) and where she is being tutored at ping pong by ancompetitive expert, who is a student she is tutoring in English.

This is WANG DANLI, known to me by her English name, one she created for herself, DARING, because, she says, this is the way she wants to live her life.   Daring is a post graduate student who is interning with Porsche at the moment.   She was my guide last year to several places in Shanghai.   This year she wants to work on her English (that's my job), and I need help communicating when I need to buy something or to find new places to eat or visit (that's her job).    We went to the Shanghai Botanical Gardens recently.  There's a blogful of photos coming.
Now in July, she is an intern for Dell Computers in Shanghai, and hopes for a full-time position.

Daring's boy friend is going to school in Hefei, Anhui Province.   She's in conflict because her mother wants her to drop the boyfriend in favor of a boy from their home town in Zhejiang Province because her mother wants her to return and settle in their home town where the family is.   Daring, however, has a dream of living in Shanghai with her boyfriend. And she feels she can't try this life without being married, in spite of the fact that many young people in cities such as Xi'an and Beijing (and Shanghai)  live together as they do in America.   She's caught between generations, while others have moved on or not.  

Michael, my Beijing guide, told me he was living with his girlfriend when he was attending university about 15 years ago, and wanted to marry her, but she left him to go back home where her parents lived.  He said that was the fate of many university relationships.  Michael is same generation as many of the students I had this year, and if you read their essays, you'll see how strongly the cultural value of  filial piety rests on them.  

And my Xi'an guide, who is Daring's age, said many of his friends who have girl friends live together, and he would too, if he had a girl friend.  Only one of his friends has married.  The world in China is changing, especially in the cities, but Daring is caught in the middle, left to make a decision she does not want to make.

                                

Michael Xu, Beijing                                                       Lucas Han, Xi'an

ZOU FUTAI is something of a miracle worker.  His area of study is computer networking, and he wants to come America to continue his research.  Unfortunately, I hear this is one area about which our government is very sensitive.   Well, right now, he's decided having a baby is more important, so he has decided not to leave even if he opportunity should arrive.
I called Zou Futai when my new router wasn't working.   Daring helped me buy and set it up,and my phone would work on the router but the computers would not.  I asked Futai if he had a student who could help, but he came himself.  And it seemed to me the moment he stepped in the door, both of my computers were connected.    We spent the next few hours having a delightful lunch at the SJTU Restaurant.   He had a club sandwich (yes!) and I had something that was labeled Mexican and was sort of wrapped.   But we had a good time catching up.   Zou Futai was also in my faculty class last year. he was working on a paper that had to do with security and DNS servers?   (I punctuate this with a question mark for the obvious reason:  I don't know what I'm writing about..)



AND LOOK WHO SHOWED UP IN SHANGHAI!

Front row left:  MEG RYAN, Director of Center of Excellence for Global Trade and Supply Train Management, Highline College; SHELLEY YANG, the incoming Faculty Exchange person from SJTU; JACK BERMINGHAM, President, Highline College; TAO QING, Assistant Dean for the School of Foreign Languages, SJTU; back row from the left:   HONZA (Yupeng) JIANG, my contact person with the school (the administrative assistant), and me.
Professor Tao had dinner for Jack at the Shanghai Min restaurant in the Grand Gateway Mall.

Here is Happy Annie, Annie Yao, who organized the trips I took to Beijing and Xi'an.  On this evening she recounted her day trying to get a visa for her daughter for their upcoming trip to Italy.   She said the paperwork was impossible to complete in a day.   Her problem? She needed to prove her daughter was her biological daughter.

 Above is Xiao Gan, the maid who worked my room for all of May and the beginning of June, until she found a new job selling air conditioning and water purifying equipment.  She taught me how WeChat could translate Chinese to English and English to Chinese, so I could communicate my  needs to her.

Because we can't drink tap water in China, we depend on boiled or bottle water. Each day, Xiao Gan left me extra bottles beyond the standard two.

The two current maids; the one on the right is Xiao Liu

And this lady does the laundry.   Here she is either flashing the V sign for victory, which everyone flashes when you take a picture in China, or she is telling me what time the laundry will be washed, dried, and ready for pick up.