Christmas & The Garden of Eden

Our Christmas party was pleasant enough. There was singing; dancing; Mr. Li is the acknowledged dance king of ICB, taking obvious delight in elegantly spinning the young ladies on the dance floor. My own prowess turned out to be in something slightly less refined, a game where you try to stomp out balloons attached to your opponent's foot before he/she does it to you. Regrettably it was necessary to humiliate my opponent, an attractive young lady who'd shaken her booty in a dance performance a bit earlier, by bursting her last balloon with a bang when three of mine were still intact. Mr. Meng was very impressed and congratulated me heartily -- at last.

Later he pulled me away from the party to hand me a thick wad of cash -- one of my salary installments -- which he helped me count.

A new issue has surfaced in this regard. Seems he simply had no idea that I might want to convert some of this stuff to a hard currency before leaving the country. He will try to help me, but no promises.

Remember my visa quandary? And how the problem just went away one day as a work visa fell out of the sky? Turns out, now that I want to convert cash, that it wasn't that simple. What Meng got for me was an F visa. My Chinese job intermediary in New York explains via email:

F-visa is not a regular employment visa, but it allows you to work. It is called short-term visitor's visa, but it is not issued to tourists. It is issued to professors, scholars, and other experts who come to China to give short-term lectures, conduct research under the auspices of an institution. The procedure that an institution needs to go through to obtain an F-visa is exactly the same as that for obtaining a Z-visa, but an F-visa is usually good for three months. It may be extended. In any case, if you intend to teach as a regular teacher for one-semester or longer, you need to have your F-visa adjusted to a Z-visa....

I don't know why ICB got you an F-visa. It shouldn't. But if your visa is valid, you are legal. You asked why the currency exchange rules are different for F and Z visa holders. I don't have an answer to that....

Besides balloon contests, I've been playing squash somewhat regularly but infrequently. It's a 45-minute taxi ride to the Kempinski Hotel's health club, the only place in Beijing where I can find competition. My regular squash partner there (though he speaks no English) is Ren Zeng Li, reputedly the best Chinese player in China outside Hong Kong. I'm pretty even with him and we have very nice games. There are also three Western players at about our level who play there more or less occasionally (David, Jens, & Keith), plus one -- only one -- who is significantly better: Scott McEwan (spelling?), a former member of Scotland's international junior team. (Apparently he was #2 on that team when the current world champ, Peter Nicol, was #1, and they used to play together.) I played a few games against Scott once, in October -- he killed me with little effort.

Exam day for my two groups of freshmen. You missed the lecture, but if you saw Matrix you might want to take a shot at a couple of questions:

"Morpheus: The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you're inside, you look around. What do you see. Business men, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it."

Q: Some American viewers of The Matrix believe that U.S. democracy is an illusion and that American society is controlled by a small number of wealthy and powerful people. The above passage would suggest to these people that "business men, teachers, lawyers, carpenters" ... A) are really the force controlling society; B) do not believe in democracy and do not want it; C) do believe in democracy but are still its enemies.

"Agent Smith: Have you ever stood and stared at it, marveled at its beauty, its genius? Billions of people just living out their lives, oblivious. Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world. Where none suffered. Where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization."

Q: This is an allusion to the biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The similarity is that A) in both stories, man seems unable to live happily in a world without problems; B) both stories involve an illusion about the real world; C) in one story, God is good, while in the other, the controlling force is evil; D) in both stories, the controlling force is angry with men.