A Matthew Original: I Love my Family

This is a song I wrote last night, because I needed a simple family song to teach my class on Saturday. It's a side project to my full-time business English gig - teaching songs to young children at a start up Saturday school every weekend. It's only two hours, and it's a disproportionate amount of work to write a new song every week, but it gets me writing, even if it's not the most moving songcraft you've ever x-perienced. Enjoy, or don't. Also: love your family. I'm kind of getting into filial piety now that I'm living in China (just kidding mom, I still can't come home for Christmas).

My Chengdu Apartment episode 1: Laundry Night

Yes, it's Friday night and given a lack of VIP invites to fancy clubs coupled with a dearth of clean socks, it's laundry night. Pictured is my bathroom /laundry room. Although the laundry system really just consists of those two buckets, so I suppose could do laundry in bed if I felt like it. Luxurious, I know. For those of you wondering, yes, this is one of those bathrooms that has a squat toilet and a shower head all in the same tiled room. I like it like that. It's easy to clean. And I can splash around when I do laundry. I took this picture myself, by the way. I do have some friends here in Chengdu, but none of them are close enough that they'd be washing laundry with me on a Friday night, so I'm being domestic on my own.

Also, did I say the next post would be about Islam? Well, it got pre-empted by laundry night. Islam comes next.

The Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture

So 6 days in Gansu were fascinating and trying. Communication was difficult with Rehsalati as my "in" to the family we stayed with, since they had a habit of speaking only to her (in Gansu dialect, no less) and she had a habit of not translating. Not that she could be expected to all the time, but I prefer to jump communication hurdles on my own, especially when the only person able to help is feeling disobliging.
My best times were when I was alone with members of the family, since that's when I could actually learn things, speak and be spoken to. The family lived in Linxia (临夏) capital of the Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture, and a major centre of Islamic culture in China. It's populated primarily by Hui people, although there were also Dongxian, some Tibetans, and of course, the ever-present Han.
We visited the newly-opened Islamic boarding kindergarten, which Reshalati's little friend Abdullah attends. It's a trilingual school, run in Chinese, Arabic and English in that order. I got to sit in a little while on the kids' Arabic conversation and Qu'ran recitation classes. Rather a lot of people in Linxia speak Arabic as a second language, and a lot of the schools focus on it, for obvious reasons. The same day we visited the Linxia Institute of Islamic Studies, in the centre of town. We were brought around by a friend of the family (also Hui) who was staying with them as he was back on holiday from his job as an Arabic-Chinese translator for a Chinese company in Kuwait. I have to imagine that that's really a pretty good gig, espescially if you're from Gansu, which is by all accounts one of the poorest and least developed provinces in the country.

Our host's family (some personal friends of Reshalati's) consisted of a husband and wife in their 50s, their two daughters and their husbands, and one cute grandson, named Nouhar (you'll notice his name is Arabic, not Chinese). There was also a girl of maybe 12, who was some distant and less fortunate relation of the family, who they had taken in and promised to do what they could to marry her off, in exchange for her... well, she was a servant, there's no other way to put it. Even after dinner, when the rest of the family had taken off their shoes and were sitting and lounging up on the carpeted platform that served as dining room, living room and communal bed, she would return after having washed all the dishes and still be confined to stand over by the door, in case anyone wanted her to fetch anything. So, a young Cinderella, seemingly, although, I suspect that all parties concerned consider her lot happy if it ends up getting her "married off" to a respectable Muslim there in town. I was probably the least comfortable of everyone with the seeming inequity of the arrangement, although, as is often the case, maybe I should just get over myself. I don't mind people working hard for their keep, I just didn't like how no one seemed to look at her much. Thoughts? Bleeding heart liberal?

Next post will be specifically about Islam. I have a lot to say about these 6 days, it seems. Today's song, though, is unrelated to the Hui people, Islam, or China. It's another song by current favourite Harry and the Potters. The sound isn't the greatest, but if I worried about that too much, I'd never get any songs up on here at all. So, "Save Ginny Weasly":



Save Ginny Weasley - on ODEO

Quick update from Gansu

Reshalati is pacing angrily as I write this, insisting a little too vehemently that there's nothing wrong and I can take as long as I want. Sooo, since she is my escort, if not technically my host, I'd better just throw some photos at you and give you the full story when I get back to Chengdu on Saturday.

Love,
Matthew