Rebecca A. Foster

There needs to be new words for our new social construct needs, such as the people you would block from reading what you write. If 'schadenfreude' gets to be a word, surely we could come up with something? (I recently learned 'sauter' is free.) Also, how about the technology to go along with it? Whatever that word is, I need to use it so many times. I'm tongue-tied. For now.

What I learned about physics: sometimes, when you rearrange a whole lot of books and don't pay attention to putting the heavier ones on the top, this happens in your bedroom**: BEFORE AFTER AFTER AFTER My dad's personalized Army beer stein from when he was stationed in Germany, complete with his Battalion and Unit motto and insignia, that I left sitting on top of the bookcase, and which hit the wall when it fell. My dad left it to me when he died and throwing it out is not an option, so I called a pottery shop and got a recommendation for a glue called Bond 527 that I HIGHLY recommend if you are gluing glass or ceramic; it's thin and sets very fast. A friend is going to solder*** the little man back onto the lid for me. I've been piecing it back together and I'm finally down to the bottom part, which used to have the silhouette of a naked lady blown into the glass and when you held the stein up to the light, you could see the naked lady. I g...

Before this past weekend I never knew the phrases 'tapas bar' and 'topless bar' sound so alike.* Go ahead and say them to yourself out loud real quick. See? Who knew! Not me, until we had this conversation about where to eat: Him: "How about a tapas bar?" Me: "Topless bar? The food won't be any good and it'll be expensive. Plus I don't want to go to a topless bar. You want topless, I'll take my shirt off while we eat real food." (Note: we were in Vegas, so this conversation is not as far-fetched as it sounds.) Him, laughing: "Tapas, tapas, not 'topless!' T-a-p-a-s.' Me: Laughing so hard I cry a little. Him: "But since you've promised to eat topless,** I don't care where we go!" *Pronouced as 'tahpahs', not 'taypahs.' I think people argue about this. I'm not sure which one  is right.  *I didn't eat topless, even though we went to a restaurant, and I am not making this ...

R. had the great idea yesterday that we should write a book together about our daily life experiences in China. I said this sentence to R. while we were video chatting: "It was when you were in Tibet, the night we had all the gin and tonics and got sprayed down in the street by the paint truck..." and I wasn't even telling all of that as the story, it was just the setup to the story. And she stopped me with a "Do you hear yourself? Our lives are never going to be like that again. When will you ever get the experiences to say a sentence like that again?" And she's right. Our remarkable lives became common place and ordinary to us. So we watch to recapture our now-remarkable-again experiences for posterity. She's the editor; we'll both contribute. I'm really excited to start this project. I picked up a new sketchpad tonight to start collecting things I'll include as inspiration and illustration. Even if we only publish it for two people, i...

My Chinese name is Libeisha, which is three words combined: li (丽pretty) bei (蓓 flower bud) sha (莎 no real meaning, just used for the sound). But the word 'sha' with the character 杀  means 'murder.'  I sent an email to a student and was typing too fast and when I hit the keys for 'libeisha' the character string that came up first was the murder-sha 杀, not the sound-name-sha 莎. I chose the murder character, didn't notice, and sent off the email. Hoo boy, did my student find that amusing! He wrote back immediately, "Are you okay? You have been murdered? Oh no!" And told me he had gathered up his classmates to his dorm room so they could see and laugh at my mistake, too. They love that I study Mandarin, but they got quite a kick out of their teacher calling herself  "murdered." Oops. Sometimes, your language skills are only as good as your typing skills. I use Google Mandarin for my keyboard conversion program, btw. Google owns so many p...

Guys, I can't think of anything to write about for 'X'. I've been delaying and delaying and...nothing. X marks none of my spots. Sorry, X. In lieu of X, here's a picture of me when I was a toddler. I found this picture because V. and I were walking down the street one day and he asked me what my natural hair color is. I told him, "It's pretty close to the color it is now." "But your hair is like three different colors." I remember feeling flattered he'd noticed my hair at all. So when I got home I dug this out of my electronic files to show him my natural hair color is pretty close to his: black. And also to show him I'd mastered jazz hands at an early age. (Well, my left hand did.) My favorite part of this picture, though, is my red tights. My mom was always dressed us very fashionably. Pretty sure I was also wearing matching red Buster Brown shoes. I don't think there was a time between ages 1 and 10 I didn't own a ...

Chinese students almost uniformly make the mistake of pluralizing 'clothes' into 'clothes-es' and we are the kind of teachers that mimicked our students most common mistakes when talking to each other, so now I say 'clothes-es' all the time in my head. Other things we said: Deeleeciours (delicious) Advices I wish you happy every day! I miss speaking Chinglish on a daily basis. Luckily I still talk to folks in China so when they say things like this, I write them down. You think you won't forget, but you do! Did you know in Chinese culture it is normal to wear the same clothes for several days in a row? (Not underwear, that I know of!) You wear them until they are dirty, then change into new clothes and wash the ones you've been wearing. It was really hard to get used to at first, but then I loved it. It's much easier than having to choose new outfits every day. My students thought it was really strange Americans change our clothes every day. ...

Last Spring V. and I were meeting up at the train station to travel together to our end-of-service conference in Chengdu; I got to the train station first and it was an uncharacteristically sort-of sunny day (one of our five days of sunshine a year, whoot!) so I sat outside to wait for him. A couple of Chinese grandmas and grandpas came over to find out A: "What are you doing in China?" and B: "Where is your umbrella, young lady, that sun is going to turn you brown!" One of the grandmas clucked her displeasure at my insistence that I liked the sunshine and didn't mind if I got a little darker. She stood next to me holding an umbrella over my head anyway, like I was an Egyptian queen on a barge (but there were no be-loincloth-ed men around, darn it). Chinese grandmas do what they want. Just as she was giving me another speech about my poor sun judgment and how it was going to make me too dark, V. walked up; his complexion is a little darker than mine, and grand...

An article from this week about how younger people hate email. I wrote about it weeks ago! Get with the program, NYT. You are so 2000. Link to the article.  My goal to not email didn't go so well. I think I lasted about 6 hours. Oh well. ______________ I was reminded this week of a conversation T. and I had when I was in China. I told him that something good had happened (I can't remember now what it was) because he was such a decent guy. His response? T.: "Ugggghh, decent? That's a bad word to a guy. It's like me saying, "You have a great personality." Me: "I DO have a great personality!" T.: "Ok, yes you do, but still no guy wants to be called decent! It means they're not exciting or sexy or something." Me: "Okay. I won't say it again." T.: "Well, I probably am decent. I just have to live with it. Damn it!" Before this I had no idea 'decent' was such a loaded word. So now instead of...

I know many of you are bilingual; so cool! I wish I spoke another language fluently/native-like. I don't. But I do like adopting the words I love in other languages into English, without translating them. I've talked here before about a few words I wish we had equivalents for in English. Here are a couple more: 1. Sancha Origin: Spanish. Means: 'The girl on the side.' We don't have a great translation for it into English. Concubine? Mistress? Illicit Lover? None of those really capture how I heard sancha used in everyday conversation, which in San Antonio, was frequently. (What this says about San Antonians, I'm not sure.) Anyway, I always heard it used as a girl on the side you flirt with and have feelings for, but not necessarily doing anything about. Although you might be. It covers a wide range of doing-ness or not. But if you are in a monogamous relationship, you probably don't want your SO to have a sancha. 2. Ganbei Origin: Mandarin. Means: Em...

I have many declarations. My long-term favorite is "He/She/It is dead to me." I can hold a grudge like a hiker holding onto a ledge. It's a real talent. But last night R. and I were gchat video chatting (I love R.; she is, quite simply, awesome) and she said, "You know what sucks about being home? I can no longer excuse things by saying, 'Ain't no shame in China.'" She's right. "Ain't no shame in China" is a declaration I made about a year in, when I stopped being polite and started being real. (Ha! Old-school, in the house!) It became our rallying cry: Get hooked on Gossip Girl and actually discuss it with friends? Ain't no shame in China. Drink 120 proof Chinese liquor too quickly and puke all over your hotel room like a college kid? Ain't no shame in China. Kiss a guy in a bar (twice! In two different bars!) you'd never have kissed in America? Ain't no shame in China. Wear mismatched clothing and lots of c...

I found some pictures from Shanghai I never posted, thought some of you might enjoy seeing them. They are all cell phone pics, though, so not super high quality. A hot water dispenser, very common in China. The Chinese characters say 'caution scalding', meaning scalding water, but the English 'care bear!'?? I can't even call this Chinglish or a mistranslation, this is just a joke someone played, right? British style telephone booth, a cultural relic of the British occupation of Shanghai I assume. I was amazed how clean and empty the sidewalks of Shanghai were, compared to Chongqing: An apartment courtyard; this picture makes me so homesick: Little places to grab a cup of afternoon tea or coffee. An aquarium in the pedestrian tunnel. I remember thinking how fancy Shanghai is compared to Chongqing, based on the underground tunnels alone. Wouldn't it be cool if your job was to take care of pedestrian tunnel aquariums? In contrast, this is what I sa...

I caught the flu, so I've had lots of time to sleep/rest/read. What I hate most about being sick is how boring it is! And how I lack the motivation to do anything about that! (I'm actually a little relieved it's the flu, because initially I thought it was food poisoning, and I was sad that my Chinese-germ immunization to food illness was over. But yay, it's just the flu!) Another weird consequence of reverse culture shock I didn't anticipate: being in a crowd of people where everyone speaks a language I recognize freaks me out. In China, because I lived in a city where most people spoke the local dialect instead of Mandarin, I still didn't understand most of what was going on around me. (This is not true of all volunteers; many of them are much, much smarter than I am.) I got very used to tuning out what I could not understand. So even though I was surrounded at close range by literally millions of people, I existed in this little mind bubble where I didn'...

My last day in China, I was flying out of the Chengdu International Airport, the first flight of the day to Shanghai. It was delayed (I'm pretty sure the pilot was still eating breakfast or something), so I was caught in a big cattle call of a waiting area. Every so often an employee would get up and yell into a megaphone about one of the 10 or so departing (late!) flights from that gate. Chaos in China? I know, shocker! So I pushed my way to the front of the crowd, and after about five minutes went by, I realized I was resting tmy arm and hand holding my boarding pass on the back of the guy standing in front of me. Like, my forearm and hand were full-on laying all over him. And it took me five minutes to notice I was doing this. And he never even turned around. And today this guy at the gas station was standing a full 8 feet behind the person in front of him in line, and it just annoyed me to no end. WHO NEEDS 8 FEET? It took all of my restraint not to cut in front of him in l...

From Robert Frost: "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." In a few hours I leave Chongqing for good. (I'm not leaving alone; I have an understanding shoulder to cry on as we pull away from the city, should the need arise.) I'm embracing Robert Frost's words today. To all of you who have been faithful supporters of me the last two years: THANK YOU! I could not, and I mean this literally, could not have done it without you. I can't express adequately the love and admiration I have in my heart for you. And one word for me: love. In the last few years, I've learned that in the end, it really, truly is only love that matters. Most of all, I take home with me a lot of love, and for that, I am grateful. This blog is not over! I have so many more things to share about my experience in China, things I am too overwhelmed now to write about with any sense of eloquence. But as soon I am settled at home and more or l...

A few random pictures I took last week: Seaweed Pringles: Eating 4th of July 'American Potato Salad with Chinese Characteristics' with chopsticks: The NBA is super popular here; this is a kid's team practicing on my campus, outfitted in Lakers jerseys. Licensed by the Lakers? I have no idea...but I'm guessing no: Guy sitting across from me on the subway; his t-shirt says "Cnly Cod Can Judge Me":

A few recent adventures in my Mother Tongue: 1. My friend G. said, “I demanistrated him. Wait, what’s that word I mean? You know, make him less of a man?” It took us about five minutes to pull it out of the deep recesses of our English brains: emasculate. But ‘demanistrate’ is so poetic, is it not? And I think if you can defenestrate, you should also be able to demanistrate. (Okay, I know fenestrate and defenestrate are not actually opposites. But still. It sounds nice.) 2. T.’s parents were here from California this past week to visit him, and it was really fun to meet them! His dad and I were talking and he asked me, “How much longer have you been here than T.?” And my subconscious brain said “Say wha’? That’s a much more complicated grammar structure than I’m used to hearing!” And my tongue said, “A year ago.” Which is, of course, not the right answer. His dad had a brief, ‘Oh, so you’re a little bit slow, aren’t you?’ moment I’m sure. At least I recognized my mistake right away...

The Sichuan* accent of Mandarin is famous for dropping the ‘h’ in the consonant combos ‘sh’, ‘zh’ and ‘ch.’ They become ‘s’, ‘z’ and ‘ts’ respectively. When I started learning Mandarin, I swore I would never drop my h’s! Never! Last winter, I noticed I was dropping my h’s. I was yi ping sui (yi ping shui - a bottle of water) and sang zoumo (shang zhoumo - last weekend) and haotsi (haochi - delicious) –ing all over the place. Oh well, so much for my pure Mandarin. But then…last weekend at dinner…I said, “I really love sellfish.” SHELLFISH, I MEAN. I got a good laugh out of it, but it’s a little scary that I’m now pronouncing English with a Sichuan accent, as well as Mandarin. Maybe it’s a good thing I’m leaving China soon. My English is crap. I’ve also noticed there are some things I like to say in English, other things in Spanish, and some things in Chinese. For example, I sent T. a text that said, “Tu quieras 吃饭吗?”(“Do you want to eat?”) I’ve also told him in a text, “中人 be loco!” (“C...

I was asked to do a lecture this week on the English language for the Foreign Language students at my university. Part of my lecture focused on the ways in which new words are added to English. Two ways are*: 1. New meanings for existing words 2. Making up new words For #1, I used the example of the word ‘text,’ which used to mean only written works and/or speeches, but now also means SMS messages. And from this new usage of the noun, we also made the verb ‘to text’ and added the words texting, texted, etc. For #2, I gave the example of the words ‘sexting’ and ‘sext,’ which from what I read online are pretty popular words these days in American culture. I didn’t say much about the meaning of the words themselves, only that they were made up, derived from ‘texting,’ and meant that the text had a sexual topic. I explained that we went from ‘text’ to ‘texting’ to ‘sexting’ back to ‘sext’ in new word formation; that’s awesome from a linguistic etymological process point of view, and...

A few weeks ago, we joked that we should have a Chongqing PCV Writer’s Club, in which we’d write bad/cheesy romance pieces, then read them out loud to each other a la open mic beat poetry night. Did I mention it has been raining FOREVER in Chongqing? It’s making us all a little crazy. So last week in our downtown Starbucks, the Writer’s Club* had their first meeting. (I should mention, Starbucks here are almost like libraries, with sectioned-off rooms, long tables with study lamps for laptops, super comfy couches and lounge chairs, and all the free wi-fi you can handle. You can basically hang out there all day and no one blinks an eye. Also, they make all their specialty coffee drinks in non-coffee versions, which is great. I wish they did this in the U.S. They do this because many Chinese don’t like the taste of coffee. So, a caramel frappuccino will have whole milk instead of coffee, along with the caramel flavorings etc. They also have more teas on the menu here.) We each spent abou...