Tag: life in shanghai

I’m working on a new technique for my life updates, which I call “blog in progress.” It’s a journal where I write things down as they are happening throughout the week, and when it gets to a reasonable length, I’ll post it on the blog.

I’ve decided to skip these last two days of the May 1^st holiday and get back to work, which for me, means working on my masters’ assignments, studying Chinese, and working on my novel. I’m doing this for three main reasons. First, my wife’s company is German, and they follow a European work schedule, which means for these last two days of holiday, it’s just me by myself at home. Second, I feel guilty if a day passes, and I haven’t put in some work on my master’s assignments. Third, since I haven’t started up work yet, every day is pretty much a holiday still, so it’s not like I’m sacrificing that much by studying a few hours in the day.

For my assignments, my goal this month is to get all the back groundwork done so that I can do the teaching and data analyzing in June. For my views of learning, this means getting the needs analysis done and then creating the material for the class. It’s highly likely that I will kill two birds with one stone and use the materials I make for the Views on Learning class for my Views of Language assignment if they can coincide enough. The views of language assignment is really about the material itself, whereas the views of learning assignment is about how the class is addressing the needs of my learner. My third assignment, which is views on teaching, is more about my actions as a teacher in class so that one will have to wait till I gather the data from teaching the classes for the other assignments. I’ve finished the general referencing spreadsheets for all my assignments, by which I mean going through all my reference books and noting relevant quotes. However, I am still waiting for Rod Bolitho’s “Discover English” to arrive.

Healthwise, my weight has finally caught up with my sedentary lifestyle and my good cooking, so it’s back to no alcohol and dieting. I have a secret weight goal that I’m not telling anyone. It’s very ambitious and will probably take a while to get to it, but we’ll see.

I managed to do one writing session for my novel in the last week, but I only got down about 1200 words. My issue is that while I have the end of the story in mind and one of the storylines is more or less mapped out, I’m having issues with the other one, and as I’m alternating between them, my writing slows down whenever I’m working on that one. Still, progress is slowly being made.

I’ve also started up on my Chinese again, mostly doing online quizzes with HSK 3 vocabulary for an hour every day. After a few weeks, I’ll start practicing actual tests. I’m not sure if the HSK testing centers are open again or not, but if they are, I should probably get it done while I’m not working.

Last week, I taught myself how to use zoom for teaching, and this afternoon, I’ll have my first zoom class with a senior year kindergartner. It’s only a 30-minute class, so it won’t be that long. The kid is taking classes with VIPkids at the moment. Still, the parents are worried that it’s going to fast, and their kid doesn’t actually understand what is being taught, so the lesson will mostly be reviewing vocabulary and using it instead of learning something new.

I sent my draft questionnaire in to my tutor, and it came back with mostly positive feedback and a few suggestions. I’ve also given it to a few colleagues whose opinion I value, so I will get back to that on Monday. I’m also working on analyzing real writing samples from my student’s professional life. This weekend I’ll start general research on different task types and how they relate to Language Awareness. I won’t start making the tasks until my learner does the questionnaire and interview, but I’ll be looking at what kind of task types I think would be appropriate and references to back that up.

This next week I plan to finish up the questionnaire and give it to my learner as well as the follow-up interview, after which I’ll start working on the materials for the class. I’ve found that a lot of reference books give you examples of tasks but don’t explain how they’re supposed to work. I’ll be spending a few days researching that as well, otherwise I’ll have to come up with my explanations for them, which I will anyway but they like it when you have actual references to support your theories.

“Get that dog out of here!!!”

I looked up from my place in the line in my neighborhood vegetable shop to see who was shouting at whom. The local supermarket had previously had a fresh vegetable section but with the advent of the coronavirus they’d shut it down and now there was only one fresh vegetable shop in the neighborhood. I was the only foreigner in the store I’d been waiting in the check-out queue for about fifteen minutes. From the rate of progression and with at least twenty people ahead of me, I’d be waiting at least another thirty minutes before I got to the cashier. Everyone in the line was wearing a face mask and we were all maintaining as much distance as possible from each other as we could and still be considered to be in a line. The rain outside made this shopping trip even more dreary.

The object of the shout from another customer in the line was a Chinese middle-aged man, wearing what looked to me like nice designer type clothes, obviously well-to-do. He was holding a leash, at the end of which was a black and white border collie.

“I don’t have anyone at home to watch it,” the man pleaded, “and it’s raining outside.”

He’d probably stayed alone in Shanghai to watch the dog while the rest of his family went back to their hometown, I thought.

“We don’t care,” someone in the line said, followed by someone else chiming in with “you should have left it at home.”

The man backed away from the hostile line to the entrance of the shop. He came back in a few moments later, visibly upset at having to leave his dog outside in the rain. Social media had been circulating stories recently of how the coronavirus could spread from domestic animals like cats and dogs. It was utter nonsense. Nobody really knew what animal, if any, the coronavirus had come from. Bats and snakes were the current suspects from experts but they were a far cry from domestic pets who had never been to Wuhan. A lot of people didn’t seem to be making the distinction. There had also been some disturbing videos circulating on Wechat of cats and dogs being buried alive by their owners.

“There’s another one,” came the cry.

This time it was an older lady, in her fifties or sixties, carrying a small dog with curly fur. I didn’t recognize the breed but it was obviously a house dog that had never been to Wuhan.

“Get that dog out of here,” someone shouted angrily, “this is a food store.”

The old lady backed out of the store and left, choosing to not buy vegetables over leaving her dog out in the rain. I’m not a health expert so I don’t know if having a dog in a fresh vegetable store is dangerous in general, but the hostility from the other customers wasn’t about random diseases from dogs but about catching the coronavirus from them, which was ludicrous.

Half an hour later, I paid for my vegetables and headed home. Outside the store, I passed the black and white border collie, waiting patiently for its owner who was still stuck in the check-out queue. Fortunately, it had a slight overhang to protect it from the rain, but I was pretty sure that a lot of dogs in China would not have as caring an owner. I could only hope that all dog owners would remember why they had bought their four legged companions in the first place.

I feel bad about not writing any actual blog articles and will try to get some out this month. I had one ready to go for when I got back from vacation but the closure of schools made the topic a bit moot so I am saving it for the future. I have a few ideas for writing but I’m trying to focus on writing my novel so am avoiding any extraneous writing. I just wrote a whole paragraph on writing but deleted it as it’s now what this update is about. I’ll try to work in a blog post soon.

I have at least another month of enforced holiday. My colleague and I have been asked to go for Covid-19 testing on March 23^rd so hopefully our school is thinking of starting up again in April. I won’t say having lots of extra time to focus on my master’s and writing isn’t nice but I’m also not getting paid for the time I miss. There’s been a lot of talk on if foreign teachers are supposed to get paid or not during these “extra” holidays but the way my contract is set up, I’m not an actual employee of the school I work for so get paid on a “work done” basis. The end result is that if I’m not actually teaching, I don’t get paid.

Fortunately, other than lost salary, which is never nice, it hasn’t been that big an issue. As a proponent of personal finance, I save money whenever possible so we have a lot in the bank. Because of this I haven’t tried to get into online teaching, choosing to focus more on studying and writing for the moment. I’ll go through the list of areas and see how I’m progressing.  My wife has gone back to work already so I’m home alone during the week. As the days go by, I’ve changed my daily schedule slightly as well which I will share with you.

Education: Time stops for no student and that’s definitely the case for my masters. I continue to put in two to three hours every morning depending on what needs to get done. As before I’m usually done with the official course by day 3 of the week so the rest of the days I check the forums and try to comment on the other students’ contributions. The rest of the time I will either spend reading relevant reference books on the week’s topic or working on tools that will help me in my writing assignments. I spent a few days making a comparative spreadsheet of all the language teaching theories which has been useful for quick analysis of my teaching methods and classes. I’ve also done my first analysis of two of my writing assignments and will do my first analysis of my third one tomorrow. At the moment I am focusing on understanding them and coming up with questions that I would want to ask my tutors, as well as projecting what kind of references or classroom investigation I think will be needed. So far, the current quarantine mode of the city has not affected my studies too much. I’ve had to adapt a few of the tasks given but I’m hoping that classes will start up again before I have to actually start doing classroom investigations.

Writing: Once my studies are done for the day, I move on to my writing. My novel continues to progress. I finished the first eight chapters and sent it out to alpha readers. So far only one has gotten back to me but they “loved” it so hopefully that’s a good sign. Once I sent out the first eight chapters I took a week off from actual writing but spent the time outlining the next eight chapters on my trusty home whiteboard which I am already deviating from but I have decided on the last scene of the novel, unless there’s an epilogue, so I know what I am working towards now. Writing a novel in parallel to my masters course has been interesting. In my masters course, one of the “strands” is language awareness and that gives me more to think about how and why people say things as I write dialogues. I’m also creating a language, though to be fair it is based on an ancient language but I have to think about how the language might have changed over the thousands of years. My goal is to have a linguistically sound language that makes sense and that, if someone analyzes it, respects the rules set out for it. I’m also having to do the same thing for another language but that one is totally made up so that’s even harder. At the moment, I’m on chapter eleven of the novel and progressing at the steady rate of two thousand words a day. Starting tomorrow, I plan to increase that to three thousand words or a full viewpoint per day, at least on the days I don’t have to write for my masters’ exercises. Generally, one chapter is three alternating viewpoints, one from one character and two from another and it alternates by chapter. Each viewpoint is about three thousand words and can either be a scene or a succession of scenes. My goal is to have the first draft done by the end of April at the latest so that I can fully focus on writing my assignments after that. A youtuber I respect said in one of his videos on writing that a first novel should not be more than ninety thousand words. The first eight chapters of my current novel that I sent out amounted to sixty-six thousand words. Oops. Technically It’s not my first novel, which currently stands at its first rewrite of 110,000 words but I feel this one is going to go a lot longer. I’m not overly worried about that at the moment. I will probably do a blog article this month about my approach to writing that will go into more detail so I will leave this at that for the moment.

Language: Covid-19 has put off any chances of doing the HSK-3 test for a while so my Chinese has gone on the backburner for the moment. To apply what I’ve learned from my masters, my daily repetitive memory and cognitive strategies in January kind of burned me out for those strategies so in February I’ve been doing compensation and affective strategies which mostly consists of watching Chinese movies I enjoy without subtitles and trying to understand them. Naturally this consists mostly of action movies and I’m currently working through the Ip Man series. This month I plan to get back to some memorization strategies and add some cognitive strategies as well, probably by practicing online HSK 3 tests.

Health: My weight stays about the same but this week I have finally gotten going in my exercise regimen, doing HIIT exercises in the morning after I finish studying and before my writing and in the afternoon before dinner. I am generally sticking to OMAD but have now moved it to the afternoon. Generally, I cook a meal for me and next day’s lunch for my wife between 1 and 2 o’clock in the afternoon and will have a snack around six or seven. My goal is to limit my feeding time to between two and eight o’clock. I did break down at the end of the third week of February and get some beer but now I’m back on the nonalcoholic wagon. I’ve also started going back to my martial art roots and practicing “Sil Lim Tao”the beginner wing chun form. I’m thinking of signing up from some sort of martial art once the Covid-19 epidemic dies down.

Entertainment: Mostly gaming. I finished my first play through of “The Witcher 3” and am slowly going through it again. The internet and vpns have been crashing a lot so haven’t played Eve online too much other than keeping up my PI. Diablo 3’s 19^th season finished today and the 20^th starts on the thirteenth of March so I’ll have that to keep me occupied this month. I finally watched Joker and have mixed feelings on the story though it’s a great performance by Joaquim Phoenix. I’ve been keeping up with “Star Trek Picard” which continues to be a bit boring and a great disappointment. Let’s just say the Star Trek universe was always about meeting new cultures and now they are trying to turn it into some sort of space western universe which is not Star Trek. I’ve been watching Stargate SG-1 to get some good science fiction and it still holds up relatively well. Currently on season three. I’ve also been rereading a few of my favorite series. Read through John Ringo’s Black Tide series about a zombie apocalypse which seemed oddly appropriate and his spin-off series set in Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter universe which is always a fun read. Currently I’m reading through one of my all-time favorite fantasy trilogies “The Deed of Paksenarrion” by Elizabeth Moon.

So I’ve mostly kept up with my goals, other than Chinese but the motivation for that has fallen off a bit but I’ve still managed to hold on to it. Also made more of an effort to speak Chinese with my wife but daily language is pretty limited in its scope. I think next week will be my masters midterm break which will allow me time to start pre-production for my writing assignments and get a bit more reading in. Hopefully by April I will get back to work. Studying the masters gives me all kinds of ideas for teaching but I can’t use them yet since I have no classes.

We’ve been visiting my wife’s sister and brother-in-law in Beijing for the last four days. We had originally planned to go back to Shanghai on the 27^th but we decided to move our return up for a few reasons. We’d heard through the family grapevine (cousin’s uncle’s brother twice removed etc…) that there has been some consideration to locking down Shanghai in the same way Wuhan and its neighboring cities have been locked down and the thought of spending a few weeks in Beijing playing Mahjong all day long every day is more time than my wife and I want to spend in Beijing. There’s also the element of being on home ground when confronting a virus. If one has to deal with a flu epidemic, it’s much better to do it from the comforts of home and the neighborhood you know.

For all those reasons, we switched our train tickets. Thanks to the wonders of social harmony, the railway company is not making anyone pay for refunds and offering free date alterations on prepaid tickets so we switched over to January 26th. My wife wondered if we should get the earliest train possible but I told her that there was no way she was going to get up at five in the morning so no point. Also as a foreigner in China, I cannot use my passport to board trains in the same way that Chinese can use their national ID cards so I have to get an actual printout of the ticket. Since the ticket office doesn’t open before eight o’clock in the morning, there’s no way I can get a 7 a.m. train so we changed to the 12 pm train.

This morning, we woke up earlier than we had been this holiday. I checked my masters’ website for new contributions from my fellow students on the forums, made a few comments and then we finished packing up. While we were waiting, my wife’s sister informed her that they had heard that the building managers were going around checking the temperature of everyone in the buildings that form the residential compound where we were staying. Since we don’t officially live there and were staying at her sister’s extra apartment, this could have created some awkwardness. Fortunately, the building managers never appeared and our in-laws drove us to Beijing train station.  Everyone at the station was wearing masks and the boards showing train capacity informed us that many of the trains had hundreds of empty seats, a first during the Spring Festival I’m sure.

Despite everything we’ve heard about lockdowns and checking people’s temperatures, there was no health inspection on our way out of Beijing. I told my wife that it was possible they were only checking the people coming into the city, figuring that anyone leaving would be the destination city’s problem. As I type this, we are in the train heading to Shanghai so I will see what kind of set up they have for those entering the city.

 Well we’ve now arrived home and it’s a bit anticlimactic to say that we entered Shanghai without any hassle whatsoever. Despite the gossip on social media, I didn’t see anything remotely resembling health checkups. Also contrary to social media, the supermarkets are as stocked as they always are with food, although our local supermarket has removed its fresh vegetables section, which is a bit annoying as they don’t sell packaged vegetables so we’ll have to go shopping tomorrow. All public venues such as museums, cinemas and such are closed and we’ll probably be staying in for the most part which will give plenty of time to keep up my studying, writing and gaming. I may even work in some exercising. The city has announced that all middle schools, primary schools and kindergartens are not allowed to reopen until the 17^th of February so I have an extra two weeks of holiday, though probably unpaid.

I would like to assure everyone that my wife and I are healthy and glad to be home and I will post updates to life in a flue epidemic as they come. For some reason, I have an urge to write a storyline about a plague in the novel I’m working on at the moment. Don’t know where these ideas come from.