Today, day 4, is my last “vacation” day before classes start. I’ve earned those quotation marks, because I spent a good part of my time so far here in Beijing getting my homework done for the classes that start tomorrow. Service Marketing is an extremely interesting topic, and I’m definitely looking forward to the class.
Laura and I began the day in Ritan Park, which is very near to where she and Bruce live. We spent a good deal of time walking around and seeing all of the morning exercisers. The health culture is a very interesting element of Chinese culture that I think would be a good idea to import to the US. Granted it doesn’t produce the beefcake that is the standard American gym bunny, but even very elderly people are pretty mobile here.
After some more homework I headed to the Forbidden City to take a tour of where the Ming and Qing emperors had called home. This is a space many Americans may be familiar with from the movie “The Last Emperor.” The size of the complex is extremely impressive, and it alternates between open spaces and relatively small yet ornate buildings. Clearly the concept of comfort differed from Western royalty, because there is no real equivalent of Buckingham Palace or Versailles in terms of an overwhelming single structure. The enormity of the complex, though, definitely makes a strong impression as to the grandeur of the imperial household.
I left the Forbidden City by the back exit and walked around some of the local neighborhoods. I ended up in an art gallery and bought a silk screen of bamboo and a small painting of one of the Confucian fables.
The silk screen image of the bamboo appealed to me because the artist was showing it to me referred to bamboo as “this gentleman.” I was thrilled because it recalled an ancient Japanese text about a joke played in the imperial court there, which imitated the Chinese imperial court. The punch-line of the joke is a poetic allusion to bamboo as being “a gentleman.” I had read this text in my undergraduate years (though the name escapes me for some reason), and the multi-level allusion appealed to me greatly.
The Confucian fable painting was three men and quotes the master’s comments that a person can learn a lot from any three people trying to work on a given task (I may be missing the nuances of this story). The moral of the fable is basically that no one person is good at everything and we can all learn something from the people around us. The message of humility is a very appealing one.
Tomorrow and the following four days are going to be in class, so the pictures and reportage from China may slow for a while. Here are my pictures from today: Ritan Park & Forbidden City.
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