This morning, while sipping my coffee and looking at my Twitter feed, I saw a much re-tweeted blog post that contained misinformation about health care in China. The writer was arguing that medical innovation does not arise out of a single-payer hospital system. Medicine and medical breakthroughs only come about in the robust environment of capitalism.
   I could quibble, but I'm not going to argue about that. What I took exception to was the blog writer's portrayal of a Chinese hospital and Chinese medical care as squalid and dirty. Overall, that's a misleading picture.
   First, China has prosperous provinces (the ones on the coast, the ones filled with factories and trade) and it has poorer provinces. Better health care is available in the more prosperous areas and in the bigger cities. That applies to us as well -- if you live in a dinky little small town, there is no giant gleaming hospital down the road, is there? ​

My Aunt Shirley used to say of some essential household tool: "I can't keep house without it!" And I sometimes feel that way in China.

One aspect of living abroad is that some very basic activities and routines are conducted differently, including housecleaning.
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Take the simple act of sweeping the floor, for example. In the west, we use a long-handled broom and hold it with both hands. The disadvantage is that you need someone to hold the dustpan for you, or you awkwardly try to handle both broom and dustpan.
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 But sweeping evolved differently in China. Here, the brooms are shorter and are used with one hand and the motion feels different...

   Jane Austen's nephew Henry wrote of his aunt,  that "her complexion [was] of the finest texture, it might with truth be said that her eloquent blood spoke through her modest cheek.”  He is referencing a poem by the Elizabethan poet John Donne: 

    Other contemporaries of Austen have spoken of the high colour in her cheeks. In those days when no respectable woman wore makeup, she was lucky enough to have naturally rosy cheeks well into adulthood. And the reference to "eloquent blood" means that her colour rose when she was animated; in other words, she blushed easily.
   On the topic of blushing I have finally found a theme in which I can combine my time in China with Jane Austen and the English literature of the past. One of the charming things about my female students in China (ages 18 to 20) is that they still blush, readily, if you raise the topic of boyfriends. It's like travelling to a bygone age.
Do any Western young ladies still blush? Oh yes, we all can blush, or flush, from embarrassment in social situations, but what about the blush of modesty?

Maidenly purity was a central pre-occupation in English literature prior to modern times. The blush on a maiden's cheek was seen as a mark of innocence and purity. Inevitably, the heroines of Georgian, Regency and Victorian novels are described as blushing frequently.
   Henry Fielding describes a girl whose "face and neck overspread with one blush," Samuel Richardson's Pamela is "all covered in blushes," Fanny Burney's Evelina is praised for her "downcast eye, and blushing cheek, timid air, and beauteous face," Hannah More's heroine, Lucila, in Coelebs in Search of a Wife can't get through any conversation without blushing: "She stopped and blushed, as fearing she had said too much." In Anne Radcliffe The Mysteries of Udolpho , "A blush overspread" her heroine Emily's cheek. Mary Brunton's Laura in Self-Controul charms a rogue: "for every voluptuary can tell what allurements blushes add to beauty." Sir Walter Scott's Rowena, on removing her veil in front of Rebecca: "partly from the consciousness of beauty, partly from bashfulness.... blushed so intensely that cheek, brow, neck, and bosom were suffused with crimson."
   It is clear that for any self-respecting heroine, frequent blushing is de rigeur. Juliet has to excuse herself to Romeo: "Thou know'st the mask of night is on my face,. Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek. For that which thou hast heard me speak tonight."
   Young ladies were frequently described as blushing "celestial rosy red," a phrase taken from Milton's Paradise Lost, however Milton was not referring to a maiden's cheek but to the angel Raphael's reaction when he was asked by the newly-married Adam if there is sex in Paradise.
   The fluctuation of color in the face when a lady blushed was certain proof that her color was natural and not applied with rouge. In Elizabeth Gaskell's Cousin Phillis' the heroine's "colour came and went" as the artist Holdsworth gazed upon her and drew her portrait. “Paint must never hope to reproduce the faint half-flush that dies along her throat," the artist says to the Duchess in Robert Browning's poem.

   Fanny Price is the blushingest heroine, blushing from embarrassment, fright, indignation, guilt (over her secret love for Edmund) and of course, blushing out of modesty whenever anyone says something kind to her or about her. Henry Crawford speaks approvingly of how Fanny's colour is beautifully heightened as she bends over her writing desk.
   Even men blush in these novels, from chagrin, self-awareness, or anger, but seldom from modesty. "I blush for you, Tom," Sir Thomas Bertram says to his son when confronting him about his debts.
​    The Victorian era was the hey-day of the blushing maiden. Victorian heroines were inevitably sweet and demure and portrayed as having heart-shaped faces with high foreheads, very large eyes, sweet little rosebud mouths, tiny feet and hands and of course, naturally rosy cheeks. These heroines are guileless and always astonished if somebody notices them.
   In David Copperfield, little "Em'ly was confused by our all observing her, and hung down her head, and her face was covered with blushes."
   Some writers, however, found this cliche of the blushing maiden cloying.  Gilbert & Sullivan satirized the blushing maiden in their 1884 operetta The Mikado, when the bridesmaids advise Yum-Yum how to behave on her wedding day:

Sit with downcast eye --/ Let it brim with dew --/
Try if you can cry --/ We will do so, too.
When you're summoned, start/ Like a frightened roe --
​/ Flutter, little heart,/ Colour, come and go!

  And in Vanity Fair, W.M. Thackeray makes fun of the typical Victorian blushing maiden, whom he openly derides: "But as we are to see a great deal of Amelia, there is no harm in saying, at the outset of our acquaintance, that she was a dear little creature; ....her face blushed with rosy health, and her lips with the freshest of smiles, and she had a pair of eyes which sparkled with the brightest and honestest good-humour, except indeed when they filled with tears, and that was a great deal too often; for the silly thing would cry over a dead canary-bird;... or over the end of a novel, were it ever so stupid..."  And he contrasts her with the calculating Becky Sharp: "Amelia, hanging down her head, blushed as only young ladies of seventeen know how to blush, and as Miss Rebecca Sharp never blushed in her life—at least not since she was eight years old, and when she was caught stealing jam out of a cupboard by her godmother."

​   In the West, at any rate, the blushing maiden in literature has gone the way of the DoDo, and yet I feel a certain nostalgia for the idea of having something to blush about.

 More on blushing:
Katie Halsey, Jane Austen and her Readers 1786-1945 discusses blushing in Jane Austen's novels.

Why Do People Blush? Mental floss

The Powers That Be in China have decided to enforce the regulation that they will not grant a work visa to persons over 60 years of age. So it appears -- unless there is some province where the authorities are still bending the rules a bit -- that my China adventure will come to an end in about six weeks. My current work visa will expire and I won't be able to get a new one because I turned 60 last November. I hope that there are still some exceptions to this rule --  I hope to find some university in the hinterlands that is willing and able to take a chance on hiring a decrepit old foreigner. 

Around the campus here, I see dozens of janitorial and landscaping staff, hard at work all day, who appear to be older than 60. And I see hundreds of seniors working on other public landscaping projects around town. Mandatory retirement appears to apply only to government and white collar workers, who also enjoy better pension benefits. For Chinese nationals, the current retirement age is 60 years for men, and 55 for women. 
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There is a strong social expectation that the retired women will look after their grandchild, while their daughters and daughters-in-law go to work. The grandfathers pitch in with the babies, as well. That said, the Chinese government is planning to raise the retirement age, for obvious economic (as in economic realities) and demographic reasons. 

At any rate, I predict that this no-foreigners-over-60 rule will be revised or withdrawn before long, the demand for native English teachers being what it is, but probably not in time to change things for me, or many others in the same boat.

The reality of this hasn't really hit -- will I have to say goodbye to my students, colleagues and friends, and return to Canada and a very different lifestyle? Ross and I were planning to explore more of Asia -- we love the six weeks' winter vacation that comes working as a teacher at an institute of higher learning in China, and the low cost of roaming and flying wherever we pleased. 
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I'm not feeling particularly worried about not knowing where I will be come this September. September will come anyway. And meanwhile I want to cherish these last few weeks in Zibo, because the world that surrounds me here, which was once so alien and remarkable, is now familiar and routine and frankly, has become a second home.