Life on Sabbatical

I’m in Honolulu now, staying with a friend, who is a professor here and lives in an apartment for faculty in the U. of Hawaii education system. I'm on sabbatical this semester, spending two months as a visiting scholar at the East-West Center, U. of Hawaii. I'm working on Chinese nationalism and Sino-Japanese relations, and how memories of WWII atrocities in China still shape Chinese perceptions of Japan. In March, we (N & E and I) will be heading off to Nanjing for 3 months, where I will be interviewing school teachers and looking at the school curriculum on how the Nanjing massacre is taught and received in middle and high schools. I'll also be looking at representations in popular culture (films etc.), and public monuments (especially the Nanjing Massacre Memorial), elite speeches and party documents etc. on these issues. It is wonderful to be able to read and think without having to prepare for classes every day!

E is going to finish her spring semester classes via correspondence with her teachers, although I'm not sure what she will do for industrial arts or music or p.e. or social life. Anyway, she has mixed feelings about missing most of the spring semester, but I'm hoping she will learn a lot that will be more useful to her in the long run than what she gets from going to school five days a week in the Slippery Rock Area Middle School.

My reading these days is dominated by books and articles on nationalism, Sino-Japanese relations etc., but for fun, I'm reading science fiction. I found some Philip K Dick books in a second-hand bookshop here, and have been going through them. He is wildly imaginative and in his best work succeeds in creating (usually paranoid) alternative realities, although his work is also uneven. I've also read in the past three weeks some books by Orson Scott Card (Ender series), which are sort of interesting, or even very good for the genre. Much of his series involves the difficulties of encountering alien intelligent species in a sympathetic way and in ways that are certainly outside of the cosmological framework of what I would think of as the usual "earthnocentric" Judeo-Christian worldview.

I've also been checking out lots of movies from the Wong film library here at UH, and watch almost one per evening. Some have been a bust, but some have been very interesting. I just watched one by a Taiwanese director (Hou Hsiao-hsien or Hou Xiaoxian depending on how you romanize it) called "three times" that I liked quite a bit. No dialog for the first 10 minutes. Anyway, watching these movies is a good way to bring Chinese back into the active part of my brain, and I'm finding that my listening comprehension is improving and that I can understand most of what goes on in the films, assuming that they are speaking mandarin of course. The Cantonese and Taiwanese dialog films might as well be German or Japanese, for all the good it does me, but I still enjoy them.

I've also been to the beach a couple of times (OK, quite a few more than that), and bought an old bike and have been using that to get out and about here. It is beautiful here, but I wish someone would get rid of the Waikiki abomination and just leave the beach to people who really appreciate it. It has been great having the bike to get around, except that there are too many cars and not enough bike lanes. But it has been great to get out on the bicycle and enjoy the sunshine.

Here are some sunset pictures taken at Ala Moana Beach. It is a great place to wind up an afternoon, relaxing on the sand and watching the sun sink into the ocean...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/24194207@N05/sets/72157604099059528/show/