Ni hao! Greetings from China, the Middle Kingdom of the world. The Queens University group of 22 juniors and seniors have had a smashing first three days in this land where the overpasses have flowerboxes on the guardrails, your dinner might swim in a tank next to the restaurant's kitchen, and the Ming Dynasty pottery is so thin you can see through it.
First stop: the Shanghai Museum where we viewed ancient Chinese currency, painting, wall screens, silk hangings of calligraphy, and furniture. Lunch at the Mongolian Barbecue Palace gave us the chance to enjoy a different style of cooking. Steel discs the size of truck tires served as the cook tops. The cooking technique, performed right in front of you, was intriguing. One of the four chefs placed the raw food you had selected — celery sprouts, scallions, a little ginger sauce, maybe some goat — on the round stove. Next, with the help of fat chopsticks about four feet long, they whipped the food across the blistering hot surface clockwise, passing it from one chef to the next. After less than a minute, they were done, and you had a delicious meal.
Everyone enjoyed the arts bazaar next door to the Mongolian Barbecue Palace and purchased some gifts for friends and relatives back home: pictures made from finely cut paper, shadow puppets, and small watercolors of birds and peach blossoms.
For an afternoon boat ride on the Huangpu River, we headed for the Bund, the famous Western area of Shanghai. Developed chiefly in the 1920s and 1930s, the Bund makes an impressive show along the riverfront, chiefly with its Art Deco and neoclassical facades. If you've ever seen The Last Emperor, you may remember the famous Jazz Age dance scene. It was shot in the famous Peace Hotel, one of the glories of this area that was once thought of as the Chinese Wall Street. We also viewed Shanghai's television tower, the Oriental Pearl Tower, the third highest manmade structure in the world.
At the Yu Gardens we saw a glory of the Ming Dynasty, the Yu Gardens. In the middle of the fourth largest city in the world is this green enclave of huge magnolias and ginkgos, structures designed for reflection, and a gazebo at the edge of the pond where poets used to gather over cups of wine to recite their work. We learned that the Chinese believe that evil likes to travel in straight lines. Accordingly, the owners designed their little paradise with zigzagging bridges across the goldfish-filled pond. The thoughtful design extended even to the roofs of several buildings. At the four corners of the roofs were massive dragon heads; their tails, the undulating line of the eaves.
The next day in Nanjing, an early capital for the Ming Dynasty, we toured the Center City and folks picked up some necessary supplies like bottled water and batteries, as well as some that have seemed somehow to become necessary, such as Louis Vuitton handbags, T-shirts with quirky sayings in English, and blueberry chewing gum.
After dinner, several students went out for a stroll and discovered English Corner. It takes place on Saturday nights in parks across Nanjing: people who want to practice their English get together in small groups to talk. Of course the members of our crew were the biggest hits of the night, disgorging all they knew about American culture, from NBA basketball playoffs to the influence of cowboys to President Bush.
Sunday we had the privilege and joy to spend with our new friends from Nanjing City No. 9 Middle School. We toured one of the more famous sites in Nanjing, the Sun Yat-sen Memorial. Sun Yat-sen is considered, oddly enough, both the patron saint of the People's Republic of China and of Taiwan. We also scaled the hilltop memorial to the revolutionary soldiers who helped bring about the end of China's last dynasty in the early 20th century.
Each student was paired with an eleventh grader to tour these sites and their attendant lush gardens. A few of our student hosts even bought incense for their new American friends at the Linggu Buddhist Temple. In the courtyard was an eight-foot high incense burner. Make a wish before you light it, the Chinese students said. At night, all 22 students stayed in a different Chinese home and were treated to wonderful local cuisine, the kind most tourists never taste. Chinese hospitality is justly famous worldwide, and the students have been lucky enough to see it firsthand.
Today we have the great chance to teach our new Chinese friends about American culture at No. 9 Middle School. Look for it in our next dispatch.
