Okay, so Ross was worried that I was going to be arrested for marking up a statue in the park with my felt pen. So here is another picture of the statue at Renmin Park to show that it is indeed a statue for lovers. It's covered with messages and also some padlocks, which apparently is a thing. So my little tag should be all right. 

Today I learned that I'll have a chance to do some corporate English training for the local subsidiary of a large multi-national firm, in addition to my classes at the institute. So I'm looking forward to getting some experience in the corporate training sphere. Also I'll be involved with a one-week summer camp for middle school kids, including a day trip to Confucius' birthplace, in early July. 

But best news of all -- Ross has told me that the mobile home has finally sold (fingers crossed, closing in two weeks) and he'll be able to join me in China soon!

There are a lot of public parks in Zibo. Once upon a time, pleasure grounds and parks were only for the nobility and royalty in China. I've visited Renmen (people's) park in Zibo several times now.

Any Chinese person who was alive during the Cultural Revolution will remember a time when children were ordered to pull up flowers and grass in the parks, because they were decadent and bourgeois.  Jung Chang, the author of the family memoir Wild Swans, wrote "most parks were brutalized wastelands" during this period. She says she went "mad with joy" when she first saw Hyde Park in London.

At the edge of People's park, along the canal, there are piled dozens of stone carvings which appear to me to be door frames. Someone suggested to me that decorative features like these were also removed from people's homes during the Cultural Revolution. I don't know for a fact if that's why these stone carvings ended up here but they certainly evoke a bygone age. 

Today, Zibo parks are well maintained and well used. My colleague Joanna and have walked together through the park several times and returned again last week to stroll around, sit in the shade under the trees and watch the paddle boats scoot around the lake. We paused at the lovely stone bridge which leads to a little island in the lake.

I haven't written very much about my work teaching at the vocational institute, and what it's like to start a second career when "60 years old" is looming on the horizon.  My classes at the vocational institute are oral English classes. My overriding task is to get the students talking, which means giving them subjects to talk about. Ideally, the topic or exercise should be interesting enough to them that they overcome their inhibitions about speaking English.

I don't achieve complete student engagement with every class, but I'm happy about the times I've succeeded, and I've learned a few things about motivating my students: they are competitive and they like classroom games where small teams compete against one another. They like role-plays. They like debate, although not every student has the command of English to meaningfully participate. Some students would not speak at all. One little innovation I started was to make every roll call into a poll on some question we were discussing in class. For example, today we acted out a short radio play about a mad scientist looking for the abominable snowman. The play was unfinished. So I asked the students as I was taking attendance, who won, the snowman or the scientist? Or, a tip I learned from my ESL teacher; stand at the doorway at the end of class. The students can't leave until they each answer a question (such as, "what are you going to bring to the picnic?" "My name is Paula and I'm bringing peaches, my name is Linda and I'm bringing lemonade," and so on.

As I walked around and viewed the intensity with which the kids went at it, I couldn't help thinking to myself, "and they tried to turn this nation into a nation of communists?"

By the way, 95% of my students are girls. So heck yeah, I'm playing to my audience; topics include the Titanic movie, fashion, wedding dresses, the Backstreet Boys, and so forth.

I was packing groceries up the three flights of stairs to my apartment and thought about  the running gag in the Big Bang Theory -- the characters in this comedy series have to use the stairs in their apartment because the elevator doesn't work. What is a gag in the show is daily life in China.

But had you heard that the "Big Bang Theory" has been banned in China?  It was very popular, especially with urban Chinese. Some of my adult English students, that I teach in on-line classes, really enjoy it, and one of my students chose the English name "Sheldon" in homage to the show's main character. My students watched the show via the internet, through one of China's video-streaming services. (And consider for a moment what it means to be a celebrity in China. Probably the Chinese audience is larger than the U.S. one.)

But the BBT, along with The Good Wife and several other popular American television programs, was suddenly banned last April for the vague reason that the content violated Chinese standards and norms.  

The e-magazine TeaLeafNation notes:  The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), the government organ responsible for censorship of all sorts in China, has given no reason for singling out the four shows for removal while leaving [other shows with risque and violent content] alone.  

Advertising Age magazine suggests that the state-owned television stations (CCTV), purveyors of domestic television fare, don't like competing with American shows that are highly popular with China's upwardly mobile, educated urban population. But it's also been suggested that CCTV will obtain broadcast rights for the show, after having forbidden the privately-owned companies to show them. As TeaLeafNation explains, the company that had the "exclusive rights to The Big Bang Theory.... now stands to take a large loss on licensing fees..." 

If BBT is broadcast in on state television it will be severely bowdlerized. I wonder how much money it would take to reach a licensing agreement with the show's producer, who openly dissed the Chinese government when the show was yanked off the internet.

This move appears to be a clumsy attempt at cultural pushback.