Rebecca A. Foster

Yesterday while texting with a buddy from China I made a tiny obscure joke I wasn't sure he'd remember and pick up on, but he got the joke and I was *tickled pink* he still remembered, appreciated and understood with no explanation needed. Our shorthand is so very short. I adore this guy in a way different from guys I've met in America and I think it has everything to do with the crap and inconvenience and hardships we battled and two years later I wonder: how long will it be until I don't feel this attachment? I feel similar special attachments to other friends I knew there and sometimes it's like I'm trapped in this tension that will never be assuaged because we'll never live that life again. And if I always feel it, is that okay? To just live with that? I get attached to people, but as a human being I don't think that's anything to apologize for. Aren't we supposed to? (However, when someone dogs me or is constantly "too busy"...

I haven't spoken much about the health issues I've had from getting dysentery and giardia while in China. The Peace Corps doctor told me giardia can be recurring and there is nothing you can do about it, and I heard this from other sources too, so I've lived with the flare-ups, discomfort and bloating since then. (I hide my stomach as much as possible and joked I brought home parasites as a special souvenir.) My awesome nurse practitioner told me that didn't sound right based on her work with refugees when she was in Brooklyn and sent me to a referral-only, awesome Infectious Diseases specialist. There aren't a lot of these specialists in my area due to the low demand so I had to wait over 2 months to see her but she gave me the great news that yes, it can be treated and after one or more rounds of treatment I can expect to be protozoan free! (She told me they are referred to as protozoans, not parasites. Protozoans sounds so much nicer, I think.) She also told ...

I loved the little dish of pickled radish we ate with meals in Chongqing, so I made some. I got the recipe from Fuschia Dunlop's Sichuan cook book. (I think these would be more accurately called salted, fermented vegetables, not pickled vegetables, but they translate as pickled.) In China they use large ceramic pickling jars but the ones I could find are super expensive here (over $100 on Amazon) so I went with this clear glass jar I got for $6 at Target and sterilized with boiling water. (It needs to have a tight lid.) The recipe is salted water (I used kosher salt), Sichuan peppercorns, fresh ginger, a small piece of cinnamon stick, rice wine, a little bit of brown sugar (those last two are for fermentation), dried chilis and a little bit of star anise. I couldn't find whole star anise so I use liquid drops, just 2 or 3. I put in western radishes, Chinese radish (daikon), cabbage and lotus. (Lotus root is one of my favorite new veggies I learned about in China. I can...

A former student has asked for my help in filling an ESL position at his school in Changde and my former university in Chongqing is accepting applications until July 31st. If you are interested in being an ESL teacher in China, please click the 'Contact' button above to shoot me an email and I'll hook you up with their info. T. told me this week his school district in San Diego laid off 1,500 teachers; it's the same story I have heard from friends across the country who want to be teachers but their districts aren't hiring. I taught the ESL class in public school for two years (several years ago) and even then because I wasn't tenured my position was knocked back to $600 a year in the budget. Well, that wasn't going to work, so I took a job in business and I've never been back in the public school system. (I volunteer ESL and taught in a Chinese university through Peace Corps.) S., my best friend from Texas, teaches high school in Brooklyn and is an aw...

(Note: oh gosh! This post is why I should only post in the daytime. I'm not a night person, I say silly things after 10:00 PM, even on this blog. But I'm leaving it up. The real me, or something.) Sometimes a guy whose opinion matters to you thinks you're desirable and it's awesome! Evolution in action. Sometimes they stop (or stop showing it) and you might think, "What did I do to stop being desirable?"  But someone else's actions (or lack of them) shouldn't change the inherent desirability you believe about yourself*. Of course, if he stops showing or saying it, move on and find someone who does . It's nice to believe you're desirable. It's nice to not have to rely solely on that, either. 1. As I like to say, "I have enough male friends now. If you don't want to put your tongue in my mouth, you're useless to me." 2. I have also said, to a guy I liked but who would come over at night and just talk talk talk, ...

A couple of people have asked me privately what I think about the current news in Chonqing, specifically the downfall of Bo XiLai and the investigation into the British citizen's death last November. I'm going to answer here. 1. Chongqing isn't just a place I served as a Peace Corps volunteer; it became my home, a place I remember fondly, and I still have close friends there, so I can't be completely objective. 2. My Chinese friends in Chongqing spoke highly of what Bo XiLai did for the city, specifically allowing people with rural hukou access to medical care at the better hospitals and the chance to change their hukou from rural to city. Also, they spoke highly of the crackdown of the Chongqing mafia and attempts to weed out corruption in the police force. 3. My opinion is that Bo XiLai made the Party lose face when his underling tried to get asylum at the U.S. Consulate and for that reason was removed. In my experience in China, the real reasons for things ar...

Today I walked around a puddle of pee on the sidewalk and wrinkled my nose in disgust. Then my internal dialogue kicked in: "Oh wait, that's probably dog pee."

You know those dainty little thrower-uppers, who just sort of tilt their head down, put their hand to their mouth and spit up? It's like they had throw-up classes at finishing school, or were the most well-behaved babies ever and never grew out of it. Yeah, that is so not me . I am a throw-up drama queen, all moans and groans and heavy breathing. It's like the end of the world, or my liver, when I puke. I was reminded of that this week when I woke up Thursday morning at 4:30 AM and rushed to the bathroom before emptying my stomach several times over, to be repeated with water, Sprite and dry heaves for the next few days. Stomach flu is the worst! But, as always, it reminded me of something funny. (I consider my ability to find the humor and funny aspects of life to be one of my more humane qualities. You're welcome, humanity.) Picture it: China, spring time, T.'s apartment, 1 AM. I'm slowly turning green and it's apparent I'm going to start tossing my cook...

If you have ever met someone for the first time and been asked, "What are you?", I think we could be friends. It's a perfectly logical question, really. What I hear: "You look different than what I expect and I need to have a category to place you in, so I want to know: what are you?" I usually explain that my father is (was) American, my mother is Chilean, and yes I look like my American father but with the coloring of my Chilean mother, no I don't speak Spanish as my first language, yes I can speak some Spanish but it is Chilean Spanish, yes I prefer wearing dresses not pants, no I don't go anywhere without lipstick on, yes I dress a little formally, no I'm not Catholic, yes I have been to Chile and can make manjar and pebre and empanadas, no I am not expected to date or marry a Chilean. These are some of the common questions I am asked and I'm not offended by them.(Okay, it is a little embarrassing when I meet someone and they begin spea...

The chopsticks I brought home from China are all stainless steel or melamine (melamine: okay for chopsticks! Not okay for milk!), but I have a few sets of wooden ones I brought home from Thailand several years ago. I put all the chopsticks in my dishwasher to sterilize them but most ended up in the bottom near the drain, and one of the wooden ones was snapped in half. Oops. Preface: I have this big, passion-from-across-the-room crush on our apt.'s head maintenance guy, V.  He's Chilean, looks like a Spanish soccer player and has gorgeous hazel/green eyes. I met him the day I moved in and I've only run into him twice since them but both times he remembered me and we chatted and he's charming and did I mention, super hot? This guy + light eyes = V.  Thus far, I have avoided purposefully breaking things in my apartment so he has to come fix them. I know, right? I'm so adult and stuff. But ever since the chopstick incident, my dishwasher doesn't drain properly...

I'd never heard of Magnum bars before I went to China, but they quickly became my favorite treat. One of my favorite ways to spend an weeknight evening was meeting up with R., J. and V. for dinner in R.'s neighborhood, then walking off dinner before crashing at a beer garden for some late night laughs. I spent more than one night searching for Magnums at every little ice cream seller we came across; more often than not, no Magnums, so when we DID find them, that made the evening all the better. I "mmmm"-ed all over the place. So of course when I saw Magnums in my local grocery several weeks ago, I excitedly took a phone pic to send to R: Magnums! In the U.S.! Worlds collide! In my humble ice cream opinion, they are better than Haagen Daz bars. I recommend the coffee ones, if you can find them.

Ma La girls like hot pot. I had a hot pot dinner party at my house this past week, with spices I brought home from Chongqing. (I saved the wrappers and I'll be taking them to the Asian market to see if they can order more for me.) Here is the food table, next to the eating table. In China the plates of food for hot pot come out on a multi-tiered cart, but because I don't have one of those, I used a card table. There are meatballs, little smokies, lotus, rice sticks, quail's eggs, noodles, squids, and two kinds of tofu. (We also had golden mushrooms and chicken pieces but those were already on the table.) Here is a shot of the table set up. I bought an induction cooker to use in my apartment, because that's the kind of cooker I had in China and I found I prefer it to the convection cooking more popular here in America. I used it that night for the hot pot; not only is it portable to the table, but inductions don't get hot like convections so no one was going to ...

(A topic from the book.) My 4-inch platform sandals were cute and somewhat practical in America, with our cleanly paved sidewalks and parking lots and car transportation culture. But in China, with its broken tiles, ripped up sidewalks and walking culture? Still cute, but wildly impractical. (Below, a typical sidewalk in my part of the Chinese woods.) I wore them anyway. 'Cultural integration' is one of the phrases you hear often in the Peace Corps; a large part of our pre-arrival weekend meeting involved telling us if we didn't successfully culturally integrate into our country of service, we were going to be a failure as a volunteer at best, and at worst, dead in the street. (No, not kidding. Now you know why I was so stressed out that weekend .) V. and I were making our way home from an evening downtown, he in his appropriate footwear and me in my platform sandals. I hadn't walked in shoes like these for several months and about every 50 feet, I weeble-wobb...

While in China, I put this mix list together for a friend. I have vague memories of dancing to it one night at his apartment; I have even vaguer memories of dancing to all of these songs back in the day. The 90's were fun. (I've included hyperlinks to every song on YouTube.) 1. Wild Thing - Tone Loc 2. I Wish - Skee Lo 3. Return of the Mack - Mark Morrison 4. Dazzey Duks - 69 Boyz 5. Ain't Too Proud To Beg - TLC 6. Get It On Tonite - Montell Jordan 7. 1,2,3,4 - Coolio 8. Doin' It - LL Cool J 9. You're Making Me High - Toni Braxton 10. The Humpty Dance - Digital Underground 11. Hypnotize - Notorious B.I.G. 12. Rumpshaker - Wreckx N Effect 13. Sweat - Inner Circle 14. Wiggle It - 2 In A Room 15. Move This - Technotronic 16. Temptations - 2Pac 17. Do Me! - Bel Biv Devoe 18. O.P.P - Naughty by Nature 19. Pony - Genuwine 20. Baby Got Back - Sir Mix-A-Lot 21. Tootsee Roll - 69 Boyz 22. Ditty - Paperboy 23. Whoot! There It Is ...

You might have heard that China doesn't allow people to express their opinions about the government publicly and doesn't allow freedom of speech. This is all true. One of my great disappointments in learning Mandarin was realizing no one was saying anything really worth overhearing. People won't express a contrary opinion publicly, so they don't say anything opinionated at all. Casual conversations flow about food, fashion and money and not much else. Which is why it was so shocking when I was judging a Shanghai Education Press-sponsored, city-wide high school English speech competition, and one of the girls opened her speech in the crowded auditorium by saying, "Our hands built the buildings that fell during the earthquake; our hands made the milk that killed the babies." (Referring to the tens of thousands killed by shoddy building construction and the tainted milk scandal hushed up because of the Olympics.) I was floored, and shocked, and nervous fo...

(Note: I really dislike Facebook in theory and practice and I've given up for the second time trying to use it. It's not you, it's me, Facebook. Well, maybe it *is* you.) China and I have a complicated relationship these days. So many things I miss: my sense of community, my fruit lady, my veggie lady, my shaokao guy, my baozi girl, the stairs and hills and daily walks, the easy-going nights, the fun days of teaching, my friends and students and public transport and feeling like every day was something new. And of course that includes R. and T. and V. and J. and my other close friends there. Some days I feel like I'm never really going to fit in in America again, or be content here. It would be weird, right, if I spent all that time in China and didn't change? How can I come back and live an ordinary American life again? How can I want to date an American who is going to expect me settle down in a suburb with an SUV? (Short answer: I refuse to do that.) But th...

1. The Guggenheim building is far more interesting than the Guggenheim collection. 2. I thought St. Pat's Day in Boston would be cra-zay. Maybe for New England, it is. I would like to invite all Bostonians to San Antonio for Fiesta . Cra-zay! I really liked Boston, but I am far too spirited and not nearly preppy enough to ever live there. 3. We went back to a friend-of-a-friend's apartment, where I accidentally left behind my McSorley's mug when leaving to go home for the night. The friend-of-a-friend had to walk me back to his pad to get it. Pretty sure he (and his doorman) thought this was as ploy for me to stay the night. Nope, I just really am that absent-minded. On the way to the subway (again), he asked me "You're not going to tweet about this, are you?" (Meaning everything that went down that night. He's an actor.) I was caught off guard by his question; is that really a thing people say now??? No. No I'm not. 4. NYC, please get a mag-lev ...

A big part of Chinese culture is sitting at night at a beer garden; this activity starts after dinner and often goes until the early morning hours. The beer gardens are located outside restaurants or sprung up on sidewalks next to food tables and carts. It is common for the sidewalks in my city to be lined with beer gardens. Beer gardens aren't a weekend thing, they're an everyday activity. As I have mentioned here before, it takes so long to do anything in my part of China, there isn't an expectation to do more than 1 or 2 things per day. For the Chinese in my city, sitting at night at a beer garden with family or friends is a really important part of daily life. Chinese culture is structured around relationships; this is part of building them. Most volunteers took to this custom quickly and easily. The video below is not only a good example of the atmosphere of these places (notice the blue stools we're sitting on), but also of the amount of free time we had on ou...

I'm taking advantage of the MacBook Pro I use for work and putting together some movies of my pictures and videos from China. Between that and the book, it's one reason I haven't been around here much. I keep finding treasures in the crevices of my picture files, like this picture of a 'ma la' skirt. In Mandarin, 'ma' 麻 means 'numbing' and 'la' 辣 means 'spicy', and 'ma la' is a phrase commonly used as slang to describe Chongqing girls; the weather and the food are numbingly hot and spicy, and so therefore are the women. This is an adult woman's skirt. As you can see, it's about half my size. I can't imagine getting even my butt in this thing, let alone my legs. Chongqing style is very ma la: short, tiny, tight, bright, covered in sequins and embellishments. Chongqing is sort of the Rio of China, I guess. I had a girl once tell me, while dressed in tiny panty shorts and a see-through shirt: "I am a tradit...

New York City makes me miss Chongqing dreadfully. It's a relief to not have to travel by car, to walk everywhere, to be able to pop into the corner bodega for shampoo and little cookies. I brought my iPad so I could work here and there on a work project while I'm gone because of a tight deadline. I activated the hot spot on my phone, uploaded docs to mobileme and downloaded them into Pages on my iPad. I'll use my phone to wifi power the iPad to send the docs back to the office. Technology continues to amaze me. Conversation T. and I had last weekend: Me: "I just want to live in an incense palace with houseboys, is that so wrong?" T.: "There is nothing wrong with wanting to live in an incense palace with houseboys!" I knew there was a reason I love him. And I would like that incense palace to be in New York City. Thank you.