hughmacdougall.com

Thanks to poor health and cold weather I have had to make a very difficult decision, I’m leaving China. Some of you will know I had a serious health incident this time last year and took two months to recover reasonable daily fitness. While thankfully not so bad as last year it has happened again and after two weeks of gradually worsening breathlessness I had to face up to it and decide to go home where the excellent Queensland medical system can take care of me and get me back on the road again. I fly home next week.

I am very sad to be leaving a lot of nice people, including the students who won my heart during the last semester.

Most of all I will miss my BMW, who gave me the gift of love. We have something special for ever though it didn’t work out fully. Why were you crazy enough to try to love someone so much older anyway? I am full of wonder that you tried and you will always be my treasure.

To my Australian friends, it will be great to see you all again and share how our journeys have changed us. One by one, I intend to renew the friendship with each of you. I am a poor correspondent while travelling, but I don’t forget those I love.

And of course my children, maybe I can do some things to make up for my neglect. Thanks for staying close by e-mail, chat and phone so there is not a big gap to bridge. I love you.

Other family, what can I say. I love you too.

Christmas in China must be split into my experience and the experience of Chinese people. My experience was a little sad. I rang my family thanks to the wonder of VoipCheap, an internet phone service which I feel certain is cheaper than Skype and does the job really well. For a very low fee I was able to spend time talking to the people I love thousands of kilometers away in Australia. First I got up early and rang my children, and their mother who I love dearly in a different way from before. Then I went back to bed. Later, when I got up again, it was time to call my sister’s place and talk to her and my brother-in-law and nephew and my mother. Later, I called my other sister and spoke with her and my brother-in-law. After all that I was sad because that is the time when I remember to miss them.

In the meantime millions of Chinese city people were shopping. Christmas here is a shopping festival and the streets are awesomely full of people queuing to get inside the shops to take advantage of the great bargains available. As most people know, many Chinese are happy to barge in front of people who politely queue so there is an element of danger and the possibility of being crushed. Needless to say I went nowhere near these places, but just stayed at home with BMW.

There is almost no understanding of the reasons why Christmas exists and even of what the difference is between Santa Claus and Jesus Christ. How they have both contributed separately to the meaning of Christmas in the Western mind is inaccessible to most Chinese. I proved the difficulty of the concepts involved inadvertently when I later set a couple of exam questions around the topic. Despite having gone over the cultural idea of Christmas and its origins quite thoroughly I found myself gasping at the wild nature of some of the responses. So, as I said, Christmas in China is a shopping festival and nothing more.

Here is the latest outrage I have heard about in Wuhan. It is the experience of a friend of a friend and the source is reliable. On one campus, not the one I have been teaching at, the dormitories provided for Master’s Degree students have many windows missing or broken. In summer this made it impossible for the students to get comfortable at night. Now it has been snowing for several days and some students are getting frostbitten while they sleep. Colds and flus are rampant in those dormitories. What do you think the reason is, for this outrage? Complaints by the students have met with the reply, ‘The students broke the windows and if we replace them they will break them again’. How is that for an attitude of bloody minded neglect! And the windows are only part of the story. Another example of the callous disregard of the students’ welfare shown by this administration is the fact that my friend’s friend brought a pack of milk cartons home one night and by morning they had all been ruined by mice. These students pay 600 RMB a year for this place. There are several hundred in a four or five storey building. It is a substantial income for the administration (in the reality of Chinese finance) which in it’s cold-heartedness and greed would rather impose serious risk on students’ health and safety than spend it on their well-being. Or maybe the money goes to keep the magnificent frontage of the institution from revealing the festering corruption within. How do they get away with it! This tells of the desperation of Chinese students to gain a Masters’ qualification, thought to be a ticket to high paid jobs (NOT!) and of the scant regard Chinese authorities at any level pay to the welfare of their people. If there is an official who’s job it is to prevent such problems and protect the welfare of these vulnerable tenants he/she has either been bought off or hasn’t come round to look.

Hey! Don’t get angry at me for criticising China and causing it to lose face. Do your job and your country can be a little prouder. Get out there and look for the students residences with the broken windows. No, don’t ask them to show you those ones. You and I both know that you have to find them yourself and the ones they showed you are only showpieces. Stop lying and fix it. How can these students expect to study well and help bring your country a good reputation in the world if you allow them to be treated this way. Just lock up the ones who are guilty of this neglect and do your job properly. 

A couple of months ago BMW and I went to a scenic spot in Wuhan that we had not been to before. What a pity! It is the nicest part of Wuhan I have seen. The area makes a feature of commemorating the Shu kingdom, an early kingdom that was centred on this area. There are wonderful sculptures and bas reliefs cut into the sandstone of the hills, depicting arts crafts and technological achievements attributed to the Shu.

At Moshan also there are beautiful gardens of various sorts, which I will deal with elsewhere. There is a street of tourist shops, no worse than elsewhere in Wuhan and better than many. Moshan is on Dong Hu, the biggest lake within any Chinese city, East Lake in English. The lake has various moods and can look dreary under heavy pollution or approaching beautiful in good Autumn light with a wind dispersing the smog. Sorry Wuhanese, I had the disadvantage to be born near Loch Lomond in Scotland so most of the world’s lakes are not so beautiful in comparison.

To our delight, when we went into a small cafe at the end of the tourist arcade, BMW and I were befriended by the proprietor, an artist. This man is a photographer specializing in the photography of plants. He also sculpts in wood, creating beautiful creatures in the traditional Chinese manner from roots of bamboo and other trees.

Sun Yao took to us and offered to make me an official Dong Hu artist. I was pretty reluctant at first because I don’t think of myself as an artist, only as having an artist nature, but I accepted the honour and am determined to make a photographic study of Moshan so as to be worthy of the title. I will also write some poems to fit.

Our new friend took us to the top of one of the hills where a lovely pagoda sits. As the sun is setting, a concert begins. The instruments are of ancient design and the performers are costumed in kind. They produce lovely sounds and a young woman dances a graceful dance enhanced by the long flowing sleeves of her costume.

After the concert Sun Yao cooked us a meal of a fish he had caught in the lake that morning and we talked about art and life, BMW interpreting.

So there you are, doors opening.

These wheels in the snow are a piece of exercise equipment on the estate where I live. I might have mentioned my admiration for the Chinese commitment to exercise before. In schools as small children right up to senior citizens doing tai ji quan (tai chi) in the parks or in any suitable area of flat ground the Chinese twist and bend and step out for fitness. Hey! Who am I to be admiring such a thing?