Pick A Corner and Stay On It

Finished the last class of my Chinese history class today.  I would like to teach that class, every year until I expire.  The first year, surely is the toughest.  Develop a syllabus from scratch.  Cull from a lifetime’s worth of reading and decide upon just which texts to read.  Teaching a class you get the rhythm of what people can take and what is extraneous and what begins to grab them and stay with them and you cover what is, essentially the civilizational trajectory of Hatshepsut to Trump. 

A small group.  I liked them all.  So many countries represented in the room.  My own.  My adopted one, and about sixteen others.  Effete emperors like Huizong and Xuangzong, founding emperors like Taizu and Taizong.  Will I remember them all for much longer the way that I do now?  Do I now have a better understand that your average Beiing cab driver who’s watched a life of classical Chinese soap operas?  I hope so. 

I’m heading out to the Shanghai Convention center.  There are, I suppose, a half a dozen such places but ducking into a phone booth and switching from my role as a professor into my businessman’s cape, I am heading to the one built for the World Expo a few years back.  I have seen this iconic inverted red pyramid as everyone who knows this city and its civic propaganda does.  It’s over here in Pudong, somewhere.

Walking down Jiujang Road, my Di Di is supposed to be on this corner.  He is grumpy and tells me he’s on another corner.  I walk towards that corner but he’s already started to drive towards the corner I used to be on.  I call him, frustrated and tell him to pick a corner and stay on it.  He tells me the same.  We agree on a corner.  But now he goes way out our area to do what I suppose is the only way possible to do the U turn required to get himself here.  This is stupid.  It’s gonna take another ten minutes.  There are plenty of regular cabs going up and down the street.  What am I wafting for?  I cancel my Di Di and accept the penalty faire.  I need to get going.  Only later do I remember that I have no cash, which tends to be important in traditional cab.

Thursday 6/07/18