Not a Concept
There are a lot of things you can’t get in Fuzhou, China but what’s much more interesting are the things that don’t even exist as concepts. I remember reading a great science fiction story about a portal between two universes where the civilizations on each side realized that they couldn’t exchange physical items but they could exchange ideas. Like the idea of paint. When you think about it, it’s pretty ingenious. Without the idea of a coating that you can spread over a surface to protect it and make it fuchsia, there would be no quest to figure out how to make it.
Here in China, I was desperate to find a way to learn the new vocabulary being taught in our classes. I couldn’t seem to use a simple list, and I remember how powerful flashcards were for learning. Of course, to make flashcards you have to have to scribble on little blank cards. The concept of the notecard… doesn’t exist in China. Trust me, I’ve looked and asked everywhere. Of course, when I think about it, why would they? Notecards are something that was very useful in America when people had piles of addresses or recipes. While Americans filed piles of neat little paper cards the Chinese people were all still farming. By the time everyone here in China was building offices, they had computers to keep track of their addresses. The only reason notecards still exist in America is because people found thousands of completely different uses for them. Like making flashcards. Eventually I found an art shop with thick water color paper and a rusty paper cutter in a back room of my school. The other students marveled at my bizarre way of learning and, as they laughed, they picked them up and used them.
There are a lot of other things that don’t exist as concepts. My friend Fay Lee could not be convinced that the thing I described, something called, “paper towels” could possibly have any use. Toilet paper was clearly just as good. “Look, I know it seems strange and wasteful and, well, just plain doesn’t make sense but… they’re thicker. And sometimes when you clean certain things you don’t want to use the same towel again.” She wasn’t buying it.
There is one concept, though, that brings foreigners to hysterics almost as fast as the Daoist driving. When I arrived this semester, just in time to start classes, I heard through word of mouth that classes were starting a week later. There was no reason given, and I would have sat in a room by myself if I hadn’t bumped into another student to hear about it. I heard a rumor that it was because some admin through that not enough students had arrived in town yet. My friend Martina Zucker scheduled travel after having a school administrator, after a lot of pushing, give her a date for final exams. When the time came, the exams were randomly pushed back and Martina had to either miss them or tell her parents to stay home in Germany and cancel all of her plane tickets.
Then, suddenly, after many complaints and a huge increase in foreign student enrollment, something completely unprecedented happened. An otherwise normal day of classes ended with the teacher suddenly passing out neatly printed calendars, with nice photos, on cardstock. We couldn’t believe it. We… didn’t believe it. There were dates marked for vacation time and the start of classes. (Nothing about exams.) After some wonder and cautious delight I quickly asked, “wait, so are these really the dates these things will happen?” “Well,” my teacher replied, “of course they are likely to change. They are already talking about pushing back the start of classes next semester.” So in response to our desire for a schedule, they gave us, well, something resembling a notecard.
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