What Happened This Week
Based off playing tennis for half an hour yesterday (mind you I was first doubles JV), I got a job offer to coach tennis to teenagers for a few hours a week. I learned that Chinese female college students use bikeshares way less than male ones because they don’t want to get tan. I talked a girl who was going to the UK for grad school this fall out of using Evangeline as her English name (we settled on Elena). It’s still unclear where she came up with it.
Had dinner with a Chinese family (two 13-year-old boys, mom, dad) and the dad when I said I didn’t want to drink hard liquor (it was a Tuesday) insisted I go shot for shot of beer with him for an hour and a half. The kids were pissed that Tencent had just banned them from playing China’s most popular cell phone game for more than two hours a day and any time past 9 pm.
I was driving in a Smart Car with some girl and the only American artist she could name was Katy Perry. I went with Ultralight Beam and A-Punk as the first two songs.
My Tutor on Trump
For the past few weeks, I’ve slowly been explaining the Trump news to my most chatty tutor, a woman in her late twenties with a four-year-old boy. When we started out, she knew next to nothing about him. Her first impression of him was that Trump was a 人上赢家 or a “life winner” because he had an awesome daughter and a beautiful younger wife.
When the news broke of the Trump Jr. saga, we walked through the initial meeting and how the Times first reported the story. In a question I have kept hearing throughout discussions about American politics, she kept asking me “how do you know that?”
We translated the whole back and forth between Goldstone and Trump Jr, which if you remember features some pretty poor English grammar. After we looked at a professional Chinese news translation to compare how well we did, which apparently read awkwardly as well. Said my tutor, “I don’t know if the Chinese translator was a bad writer or just trying to represent him very accurately.”
It didn’t make sense to her that Trump Jr. would run his own twitter, since because he’s the son of someone super famous he’s basically a wanghong (internet celebrity) and they never run their own social media. Then I told her that Trump himself still does his own tweets…
This week I went back and explained the whole Flynn-Comey-Mueller saga. We translated chunks of Comey’s memo, watched a bit of his testimony (“oh so everyone watched it like that guy who killed his wife!”) and then read Trump’s Times interview. When I started explaining, her first reaction to him reaching out to Comey to squash the investigation was “可怜！” or “how pitiful!”
Other reactions included, “he should come to China and learn from Chinese rich people how to keep a low profile because if they draw too much attention here, they get in trouble.”
“How can Trump say he’s never read Donald Jr.’s email. We’re sitting here in China, and we’re reading the email!”
“He is very moody. Maybe he has a mental diagnosis and is paranoid, so his memory changes a lot, and he really thinks he’s telling the truth.”
“He’s going to be seriously ill. He wants to control too much and is under great pressure. It sounds like he doesn’t want to be president. He’s very nervous and very tired, he may have a physical problem soon.”
“The Times was smart to send a female reporter to interview him because they know Trump wants to talk to her.”
She closed our class by teaching me a chengyu. 月亏则盈,水满则溢, or “The moon waxes only to wane; the water surges only to overflow.”