Living in exile

Seeing how people communicate ideas and suggestions (in the English language) to deal with the academic disruptions that the coronavirus has unleashed is quite refreshing and quite a departure from my experience here in China. Perhaps the language is also an issue because Mandarin Chinese is really just a second language for me, and probably a fourth language in academic and institutional settings. I may surprise some with my command of the language but this is my brain filling in the blanks. Of course, filling in the blanks requires models and ways of thinking.

Earlier I learned two new things in Chinese which arose from me filling in the blanks. Apparently, I always thought that 矛盾 is 茅盾. A friend pointed out that the latter is a writer. The reason why I thought it was the latter was because of Moutai (a Chinese spirit that you drink, of course). I was introduced by another friend to the word 社畜. At first, I thought it was 社会的畜生 and thought it was a bit too much (I would prefer the direct 杂种, or the more flavorful Minnan way of saying it zap-zing. For the latter, use the German hard z and use sparingly in Southern China.). But it was really 会社的畜生, something related probably to the work situation of the Netflix red panda character Aggretsuko.

Yesterday, I streamed a webinar by the European Respiratory Society which featured Zhong Nanshan, one of the key people on the frontlines of the outbreak. Funnily enough, tonight it was covered in the local Chinese news (one of the sources I look at is 澎湃新闻). It is nice to be in front of the mainstream and a small part of me (or, if you wish, the small part of me) wonders if I contributed to it being more known within China.

There was a part about this webinar delivery that I felt was not entirely kosher. I did not exactly ask for permission from the European Respiratory Society to stream this webinar. Furthermore, a news article was written as “promotional material” by the school and it featured some screenshots of chats during the webinar. To the school's credit, the names including the @ handles were blurred out. I felt those screenshots were on the border of kosher and non-kosher. But I did not ask to override it and in fact, I even shared the news article. This will be a reminder for me for the next time.

Midterm exam week is coming and I have yet to hear guidance from the university about how best to proceed. I am glad that I decided against giving midterms. In fact, I went one step further and not give homework anymore. Instead, I use an ongoing assessment instead (this solution does not scale very well). There are deliverables, prep material, practice problems, tidbits of things to do here and there that I have built in for the course. I have deadlines but these deadlines are extremely soft. At the end of the day, students do things at their own pace and online classes are in general built for students wanting to do things at their own pace. This created a big burden on me to track student outcomes but it allowed me to get a real sense of what the class is learning (or at least those that choose to be candid about their progress). I am able to adjust my pace for teaching (it became much slower, more technical in the simpler places). I am also able to see where students have misundertsandings and believe me these misunderstandings pile up asymptotically. We cannot take a willful blind eye on what students really know. So far, I have some students handing in homework voluntarily (even if incomplete for feedback purposes). I hope this trend will continue.

As the semester has not officially started for us, I wonder if we should prepare to make think of the upcoming Fall Semester starting on September as the original Spring Semester? I hope my colleagues at the top will take a stand as to how to proceed. Stanford University is the finest example I have seen with respect to their responsiveness to the coronavirus disruptions. The link given is quite comprehensive and covers almost every aspect from the beginning of the school term to its end. The bandwidth problems that I raised almost a month ago are going to be a pressing issue. The call-in option for audio in Zoom is something that I have yet to try.

I think the university should also start giving everyone a complete day off so that everyone could do other things that suddenly require more attention than before. A big example is food preparation, going to the market, etc without relying too much on deliveries. And I hope that this would transition to everyone having four-day work weeks in China. To me, this is good business. I am also hoping that the isolation procedures wille extend to common ailments. I hope that the university will give its staff, its students, and its workers some latitude when they get sick. I think we should worry less about people shirking. And if people shirk, we should just fucking call them out. If you are a believer of positive energy, then nothing sucks positive energy more than a piece of shit shirker.

Ok enough of the blather. Tomorrow, I am going to start buying stuff from the market again. Not so bad, we have had 17-18 days worth of food brought about by meal planning. So for now, the meal plan for the next 3 weeks (I hope) is to have the following meals: vegetable curry, pickled cauliflower, pickled carrots, fish marinated in vinegar (a local Filipino favorite called daing), beef stewed in tomato sauce (another Filipino favorite called kaldereta), beef with broccoli, Wuhan hot dry noodles, puttanesca (which Nigella Lawson once called whore's spaghetti or was it slutty spaghetti?), pickled ginger, pickled radish, Asian style pot roast, beef brisket with radish, eggplant puree, eggplant with tomatoes and chickpeas (seems to be the Lebanese version of moussaka; and everyone should get pomegranate molasses or even make it from scratch), potatoes La Rioja style, French onion soup, and more potato and eggplant based dishes. I think these may even last us 4 weeks. The only constraint is the refrigerator space.

That's it. If the entry left you with a set of emotions and with a bit of hunger, then I was successful. Thank you for reading.