More work
Prospects have really been picking up for me teaching English lately. I have another student starting Tuesday, and last week an extremely nice teacher from Norway who is a friend of a friend of Sister #1 let me sit in on his classes and gave me a crash course in English teaching. That was quite a bit of fun, actually. I learned quite a bit about teaching in general as well, which should come in handy.
Ya-ping's grandmother is back in the hospital, and according to all medical science should already have passed on, but is here by sheer force of will. There is family infighting over what they should do with her as in "do not resuscitate" that type of thing, which I think is absolutely riduculous, but one of the uncles claims he is a minor god and therefore whatever he says is god's will, and he says to use all means necessary to keep her alive. It's nuts.
On a related but much less depressing note, Preston now knows two Taiwanese words from being around his great-grandmother, "Great-Grandma" and "It hurts!" (which is basically the only thing his great-grandma can say at this point) He can also say 'milk' in Chinese.
Ya-ping's grandmother is back in the hospital, and according to all medical science should already have passed on, but is here by sheer force of will. There is family infighting over what they should do with her as in "do not resuscitate" that type of thing, which I think is absolutely riduculous, but one of the uncles claims he is a minor god and therefore whatever he says is god's will, and he says to use all means necessary to keep her alive. It's nuts.
On a related but much less depressing note, Preston now knows two Taiwanese words from being around his great-grandmother, "Great-Grandma" and "It hurts!" (which is basically the only thing his great-grandma can say at this point) He can also say 'milk' in Chinese.
posted by Ya-ping, David, and Preston at 6:01 PM
2 Comments:
I am glad that you are getting some more work. Teaching skills are pretty handy, even in teaching your own children.
I hope things work out for the family as far as grandma goes. It is hard when things like that divide the family.
Forgive my ignorance, is there a separate Taiwanese language? Or is it the same as Chinese? I thought they were the same.
That's actually a good question, they are reasonably similar. Taiwanese is the traditional language of the island, and most people can speak it, but Mandarin has taken over as the more common language (pretty much everyplace in china has an ancestral language, there are over 600 dialects in all, but Mandarin is now the universal language). The problem is that some older people (like Ya-ping's parents), only speak Taiwanese. I only speak mandarin. So I can't really talk with them.
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