I don’t know about you, but I always get a little bit anxious whenever I have to renew an official document, be it a contract or a visa, both of which I’m going through right now.
It’s the end of October and I’m about to start my second contract with my current company. The life of an ESL industry worker is one of annual contracts, dependent on any number of criteria and, in some cases, geopolitical forces. Furthermore, since we’re only contract workers and require visas to work and reside in China, we every year we need to renew our visas, which means going to the PSB (which I think stands for Public Safety Bureau, but may mean any number of things) and get this wonderful piece of yellow paper:
And if you think your passport is fragile, this piece of paper is also water soluble! Not only that, it doesn’t guarantee unhindered passage since many of the airport staff don’t deal with these things on a regular basis so they often have to ask their managers WTF this thing actually is. And the last pinch of salt in the punch bowl is that I can’t travel outside of China with this thing. Not even to Hong Kong… where I’m planning to go for a week in November.
Anyway, it makes me amazed that for the last ten years I’ve literally gone from job to job knowing that I’ll be changing it up soon enough. My current average is 2.5 years per job maximum. Some may be amazed at that regularity, others may be amazed at how long that can seem, but that’s just what I’ve noticed in my own job life. Current expectation? The same.
Despite the job expectation of another job turnaround, I continue with my Chinese studies. I don’t have an exact number, but I am on character 867 of William McNaughton’s Reading and Writing Chinese, but that doesn’t say much because I’m only working on List A right now, which has about 800 characters itself (but they’re all mixed in with List B and C). I currently do ten characters per work day but I’m thinking I might take that back down to eight or nine characters, just to give me some time to work on them. Right now I spend about 20-25 minutes writing and write each character 15-20 times. It’s helped a little, but I am focused on content-consumption rather than complete memorization and perfection of the characters.
Taken from William McNaughton’s Reading and Writing Chinese. Rev. by JiaGeng Fan.
I did finish my first book in Chinese, a graded reader. I’ve mentioned it before and it took me about three months to finish. But I only read on work days, not days off simply because I have other things I need to attend to. I’ve now moved on to book one of the 三体 (san ti) triology, “The Three Body Problem” by Cixin Liu. This one doesn’t have any pinyin and is just the Chinese characters. I’m told it’s not a hard book to read but still presents a challenge. Oh, and I’m not actually reading this one myself, I’m audio-booking this one, by that I mean, the e-reader I’m using offers a voice over feature that will read the characters on the screen. The ebook is some 2773 “pages” long (cell phone-sized pages) and I only ever have about 30 minutes to read each work day. I can get through about 15-20 pages, which means this is my project for the next three months or so. I can’t say I understand it all but again, I’m going for content-consumption and exposure to the characters in a controlled environment.
Below is a look and listen to the computerized reading of San Ti. See if you can follow along:
That’s all for now!