Tuesday, June 28, 2011

A visit to Tunghai from former Shansi rep Tom Gold

I finally got to meet another of my dissertation interviewees in person last Thursday (6/23). Dr. Thomas B. Gold, who was an Oberlin rep to Tunghai in the early 1970s, came back to visit the campus before he participated in an international conference in Taipei. Tom was very helpful when I was working on my dissertation, providing me with lots of background and helping me with my analysis of the texts I was working with.

Linda and I had a nice time with him, walking around Tunghai's campus and chatting about what has changed and what hasn't since he taught here.

After a hearty lunch at a Hakka restaurant near Tunghai

Walking around Tunghai's campus

Looking for Tom's old room in the men's dorm

Found it!

The shower room had changed somewhat; most noticeably, a natural gas fueled water heater has replaced the one Tom remembered (for the old heater, he recalled, you literally had to gather sticks and light a fire to heat the water)*

Enjoying the view
Enjoying some Tunghai ice cream (I'm holding Linda's "Tunghai-sicle" as well as my own)
*David Decker, who was acting chair of the Foreign Languages Department in 1980, told us about how he informed incoming teachers of the need to gather sticks to heat their water and (exaggerating a bit) that the Department would equip each teacher with a bow and arrow so that they could hunt for their food.

Monday, June 27, 2011

Who's a pig?

This won't make any sense if you don't know that in Chinese, "pork" is called "pig meat" (豬肉)...

I won't mention where this happened (I don't want to go to jail), but for lunch today we went to a restaurant where one of us ordered a pork dish and the other ordered beef. When the clerk came over to our table with our food, she wasn't sure who had ordered what, so she asked (for some strange reason), "你們兩個,誰是豬?" (Basically, "Which one of you two is a pig?")

Well, I was chewing my cud when she asked, so obviously it wasn't me...