Clarks: pictures

We've not posted any photos in a while, so since I'm dealing with the digital camera this morning [I'm getting together the presentation for "Mish" Day at CC], I thought I'd put a few shots on here for you to see ahead of time.

This is a local church building. We've never been, but it was sort of encouraging to see.

This is Gao Da Ren (Josh) and Gao Yan towering nearly as high as the landmark HZ tower.

My birthday cake, from Free Mori bakery. It's covered in fruit and almonds, as you can see, and on the inside is a layer of pudding between the top two cake layers.


This is a handmade lantern displaying the character "Fu" ("good luck" / "blessings") as seen on the night of Lantern Festival -- the 15th and final day of Chinese New Year.

Always the entertainer, me on the mandolin playing some songs for Shen Li and Margaret's daughters [L-R, respectively] after a morning meeting at our house. Shen Li's little girl is eleven-years-old and has an exceptionally keen interest in "reading" with us.

I could've included more, but these took a while to upload, so I better go ahead and just get to work now on the presentation. We love y'all and are thankful to be here. Zai'jian! [See ya later!]

Clarks: Housing News

Guess what... we just opened an email from Julia, the Vice-Dean of the Foreign Language and Literature [i.e., English] Department, who is, effectively, our main boss at the school.

The letter is not completely clear -- nor was the follow-up phone call completely clear either -- but it seems that the school authorities have decided to "make an exception" to the off-campus rental policy.

You'll recall that our university was planning to cut funding for foreign teachers to live outside campus, so we were going to have to come up with about 4000 RMB a month extra in order to pay rent and utilities on the place we're living. That meant either doing extra work, asking for extra support, or maybe just having to change jobs and/or relocate -- none of which we were thrilled about.

Anyway, like I said, it isn't 100% clear or certain, and the details are yet to be decided... BUT... it seems that because we are an employed couple and a teaching couple is hard to find and they like us and we do a good job and blah, blah, blah... they are going to create a loophole that will allow us to stay at our current job and apartment!

Jason: I'm sad. I'm also thankful.

I'm sad because it is raining -- or at least I assume it still is -- as it has been pretty much constantly for... well, literally countless days now. The obvious remark: imagine how Noah must have felt. And certainly, our school campus is nearing flood stage. The road out-front has already -- twice or three times now -- flooded to the point of needing a bridge to get across! I'm not exaggerating; they really made a bridge. At first it was just some hop-stones pulled up from the sidewalk tiles, that and a few bamboo pallets at another spot, but then someone actually installed a bridge -- if you want to call it that -- so more than one person at a time could get to the other side of the street. I haven't got a picture, but I'd be surprised if the Hardins don't have.
Anyway, that's not the only reason I feel sad.
I'm also discouraged because our "seeker" thing we had planned for this week only had three people in attendance -- only one of whom is in the "seeking" category.
But I know to be thankful.
Like, on the up-side, one of the people who came over hadn't been around in a while -- although she's been family for a few years now -- and we could tell that being involved was actually very good for her. And the other sister, too, was encouraged and probably learned some things -- or at least saw a new way of sharing what she already knew. And then there's that "one lost soul" whom I should be thankful to have met, rather than "counting her as loss" for the sake of so few coming.
But still, it was disheartening at the time. Because, by the way, they were about an hour late, so it was like we're sitting there going "is anyone going to show up for this?"
So I guess, while I'm thinking of it, I should ask that your "keep us in mind," if you will, with regard to meetings and that sort of thing. And with regard to our feelings overall, as this rainy season promises to drag on into this next month.
Something else I am thankful for: having the blog, having Skype, having facebook... having e-mail [which sounds strangely old-fashioned nowadays; I mean, e-mail... that's so '90s]... being able to receive packages from home; being able to gather information, resources, and news from the Internet.
Also, for Bonnie Ray. She and I were skyping just as I began to write this entry. What she said really cheered me up. Actually, she's made it rather difficult to write about how sad I am. [Gee, thanks, Bonnie.] She reminds us that whatever we do, whatever efforts we make, they are in the hands of a more skilled teacher whose words are never in vain.
In fact, you know what? I'm just going to go ahead and stop writing.
I'm going to read or even listen to some NPR, do our daily reading, get some rest...
I think I'm going to just be thankful and not worry about the outcome right now.
Goodnight.

Caleb Birthday

Caleb turned 2 years old last Sunday February 8. My sister and my parents came for his birthday. A friend bought Caleb a birthday cake with a big lotus flower candle. Supposedly you light up the candle, it burns to the bottom of the wick, then the lotus flower opens up playing the Happy Birthday song. However, the huge flame started melting the lotus flower. Melted plastic dripped on the cake. Caleb yelled “fire”. It was the biggest candle and the strongest fire I have ever seen on a birthday cake. The lotus flower finally opened with several pedals still flaming and dripping plastic and played the Happy Birthday song again and again. Finally we had to take the candle outside of the house because Happy Birthday was driving us crazy. We had a great time though.

Clarks: The Bearded Man

I'm kind of tired, so I'm going to try to keep this short. But let me tell you a little bit about our tea time with The Bearded Man from here in our community:
First, he has a name. It's 施王伟.
Or, you can just call him "The Bearded Man" -- whichever works better for you.
Also (I already knew this, but maybe I haven't told you yet) he's a music teacher. In fact, he's a music composer. He brought us a book of his choral and operatic compositions.
When he first came in he was immediately taken by the Chinese paintings in our house. It turns out he's a rather traditional man who appreciates Chinese art, music, culture, and history.
He finds the homogenous cityscapes of the world rather dry and uninteresting, preferring to visit culturally unique and historically significant sights. Ex: He's travelled all over China -- including many far-flung regions -- but has never been to Hong Kong. "It's just skyscrapers."
He has a sister in America, but he's never gone to the States to visit her.
He has a daughter in graduate college -- or who teaches at a college -- I'm not really sure. Anyway, she also studies/teaches something to do with music.
Basically, he's a nice guy, middle-aged, and very interesting to talk to.
And he's either very polite, doesn't like tea, or just maybe doesn't like our tea. Or perhaps he was too involved in our discussion to bother drinking. At any rate, not much tea was consumed.
BTW: The topics that evening ranged from music to travel to culture to politics...
Anyway, that's the basic story.
One last detail: He stayed for three hours. We talked to The Bearded Man for three hours. For three grueling but enjoyable hours, we spoke with a middle-aged, well-educated, bearded man who works as a music professor and composer. And we spoke in Chinese. Only. In fact, he doesn't (apparently) speak English -- except the word "compose" -- and oh, I taught him the word "banjo" too. But other than those two words, we all spoke exclusively [Cec eventually brought in the dictionaries so we could fill in the blanks as needed -- us, not him] in Chinese for three solid hours.
Three. Straight. Solid. Hours.
We were both exhilerated and exhausted when he left.
We're humbled and thankful to live here.
Thank you for your prayers and support.
And please pray for 施王伟, The Bearded Man.

Clarks: 3-Day Valentine [part one]

Today is the 12th of February. Valentine's Day has not officially arrived yet, but in the Clark household celebrations are already well under way.

China has really taken to celebrating V-Day in the past several years, always packing out every nice restaurant in town, buying flowers and candy galore, really "romancing the stone" -- whatever that means. So we knew already that if we were going to have what we would consider a romantic holiday we better do so on some other day besides the 14th (which is a Saturday this year, which only makes things worse).

The romance bloomed early for us this year, the 10th was the first day of our (so far?) three days of sweetness: Having been intrigued by the historic charm of Liu Xia Village on the night of Lantern Festival, we decided to return the next day and look around. Liu Xia turns out to be quite an interesting little place. It's just beyond the edge of anything you'd really call "Hangzhou, proper," about half-way between our house and the Hardins. We go past there every time on our way to school, but from the street it just looks like a dull and dusty out-skirts town, so we'd certainly never thought to go poking around and exploring there. But when we did, we found a number of interesting sights. First thing you notice is the old bridges over the canal. Stone-engraved signs indicate that some of these are hundreds of years old. Each one is different, having been built one-by-one down through the years as more people demanded more convenient crossings. Also in town are some old (and some renovated) buildings with typical Chinese-style wooden railings, pitched-edge tile roofs, and small quarter-framed windows. One building we found was even made of rice and mud! It's not unusual for the Chinese to have built houses and walls of mud and pounded glutenous rice flour, with bits of straw and broken pottery mashed into the mix; it is surprising, though, to actually get to see that sort of thing in 2009, since most of those old buildings have been / are continually being knocked down. When the locals saw us wondering at and admiring the old-style architecture, they came up to us and explained the history, construction techniques, and enduring strength of the place, obviously glad to see someone taking interest. Finally, from there we went down the street and eventually into a grocery store to get a drink. It's a rather old-fashioned (that is, 80's-era) Chinese store, with all these cheap-looking little side stalls on your way in and out, each displaying either tacky or useless cheap goods in glass cases. But lo and behold, as we strolled past one of these relics from the past, something caught our eyes: a counter full of jade jewelry. Cecely was immediately drawn in; I was a bit more skeptical, but went ahead and looked at what they had. And there I saw this cute little red cord bracelet with a green jade rabbit and two orange "jade" (?) carrots. Cecely's Chinese zodiac sign is the rabbit, in case you're wondering, so it seemed like the perfect gift. "It can be for Valentine's," she said, and with that we made official what we hadn't yet realized -- "today is our Valentine date."

And now, it's about time to start our third day... I know I haven't even mentioned the 2nd one yet. I guess it will have to wait for another post. And of course, I also haven't told you about our evening with the egg lady's niece and and sister, or about last night's three-hour conversation all in Chinese with the bearded man, who turns out to be a composer, by the way.
Oh well, romance awaits us!

Clarks: Ask and you shall be runneth over!

Well, I can't say we weren't warned.
After all, Malachi made it plain enough two-and-a-half millennia ago:
"Test me in this," says the LORD Almighty, "and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it."
In other words, "Watch out what you pray for, because it might come true!"

Things had been slow here for a while. We've been on vacation for seven weeks. [Don't tell Jake; he thinks we're staying busy.] School still doesn't start back until next Tuesday for the two of us, and even then we'll be having our weekly four-day weekends. Yes, there've been the W3 meetings; we've met with the RJ ladies; we've devoted extra time to Chinese study. But really, compared to the schedule that a lot of you are probably keeping -- work every day, church three times a week, grocery shopping, soccer practice, ballet lessons, digging out of the snow and ice -- life does seem pretty simple here. So in our relative boredom, as it were, we sought out something to do, you know, something to keep us busy and make good use of our time. We started praying, Lord give us more opportunities. Like with the neighbors.

God listened. And it didn't take Him long, apparently, to decide to say Yeah sure, How's this for opportunities?!

I don't guess we've even told you about the thing the other day with Margaret and ShenLi: They wanted to come over (since Margaret has extended family staying at her place) and have a little Sunday get-together at our place. We gladly obliged, of course. So here they came -- them and their two daughters! [Wow. Those girls are real live-wires, let me tell you.] The short version is that we spent probably three hours or so together studying, managing the kids, praying, managing the kids, discussing life issues, sharing The Meal, managing the kids, and talking to Elaine in Searcy, Arkansas, via Skype. Oh, and we arranged to host a dinner at our place--with us cooking Chinese--for ShenLi, her daughter [did I mention she's a little wild? *see footnote], and her husband, this upcoming Friday. So that's how we kicked-off the week.

The evening before we'd been coming home from the Long Jing Tea Village -- it's a great tourist spot and well worth the visit, and if I weren't so swamped with other stories, I'd tell you all about it and even post a picture or two -- when we saw "The Bearded Man": He's this guy who lives in our old building, right below where we were actually, in 501, whom we'd seen the very first week we lived here and had talked to a few other times since then, and whom we thought seemed peculiarly interested in us, but whom we hadn't done much yet to really get to know. So, the bearded guy is outside our building when we get back home. Weird, huh? But we were pretty tired and everything, so we came on in after just a "hi, how are ya" and a pat of his sweet little collie's head. And we both said later how that was strange to see him over here near our new place and how we wonder if he was over here looking for us on purpose and how we felt drawn to go back out and talk to him but how we didn't know what we would've said. So we didn't go back out. But we did pray about him quite a lot. And so, the next day -- after the three-hour marathon child-circus worship meeting -- there he was: Outside. Of our building. Waiting. With the dog.

We were famished and were rushing to McDonald's in between our "morning service" at home and our "afternoon service" out at the Hardin House. But how could we ignore this sign? So we stopped and talked, and talked, and motioned, and stuttered, and sounded stupid, and then talked some more... and after a half-hour or so of standing hungry out on the lawn in the not-so-warm noon air, yet somehow feeling quite warm and well-fed, Cec was inspired (literally, I suppose) to ask him over this Wednesday for tea.

Then today -- after me and Josh had gone to make songbooks, which took like a couple of hours, I guess; and after Cec had met us for coffee, and then we'd gone on from there to have lunch; and after we had come back toward home and stopped and bought a bus card and put money on Cecely's cell phone and gotten back in the house and fed the cat and taken a nap -- well, we were still in the bed half-napping... we got our third surprise opportunity: The doorbell rang, I hopped up, in only my long-johns, and ran to see who it was. My glasses were still on the bedside, so I couldn't quite see to the bottom of the stairs, but I recognized the voice and said for whoever it was to come on in. At the door I excused myself to go put on my glasses and some pants. And about that time I realized who was here: the Egg Lady [not her real name].

Now, unfortunately, I'm going to have to cut this story short because the egg lady's niece is going to be here any minute, but again, the short version: She's been so nice to us since the first day we got here, and she's always asked me every now and then if I could please, please, please help her niece to improve her English. And I've always hedged. I've said, Well maybe; I'll think about it; blah, blah, blah... but never yes, until today. I mean, the lady has seen me in my underwear; I might as well meet the girl at least; we're practically like family now! So, really, any minute now, she's coming over -- the egg lady, the girl, the girl's mom -- they're all coming over. [I'm already dressed this time.] And then...

Well, I've gotta go. More later.
Anyway, we're thankful for this flood of opportunity. Just pray for us to have stamina.

[The daughter, by the way, is actually very manageable, if you actually make her sit still. (More on typical Chinese parenting techniques another time, perhaps.) She's the one who is interested in prayer, and this time was even wanting to read the Book with us.]

Jason: Thinks Aloud

I've got a lot on my mind lately. Sometimes it helps me to think through things aloud, so if you don't mind listening, I'm just going to start blabbing and see if it helps me to straighten anything out. I don't know where to start, and I don't where this is going, but anyway...

The cat is in my lap. I'm really glad we have a cat. But you may recall, our cat has been a sickly creature. He's doing OK right now, and maybe (just maybe) we think we've got his condition [severe allergies] under control enough that we won't have to hospitalize him again. We really care for him and, I guess I might as well say, love him, but it has been tempting--more than once--to somehow get rid of him so that we could just start over with a healthy animal. I mean, who spends this kind of time and money caring for a sick cat? But, we keep him. We always keep him, and we probably always will. We used to fight it--the sickness, the despair--and think that "we have to fix this" or we couldn't be happy or at peace. But then, sometime within the last month maybe, it occurred to us that "this is our cat; this is our reality; and this is OK." We can keep him, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, 'til... until he's "gone on to be with the Lord." Because, after all, that's what life and love are all about. We have a lot of freedom, a lot of choices, a lot of control even; but there are some things over which we have little or no control, some choices that we have to make, some freedoms that are taken away. When it comes to those hard times, those tough situations, what we have to do is just make the most of it, let God "work all things together" and move on day by day. Which is a valuable lesson. A lesson perhaps worth the countless RMB we've spent keeping this cat alive. Because...

Well, another thing on my mind is family. As in, our family. Not our parents, though. What I mean is, Cec and I, and the ever-present question: to have or not to have a child. It's something we think about more lately than we have in the past. We don't know if we can or cannot have children; we've always done our best to prevent it, so it's never happened so far. We have, in fact, usually said quite clearly and strongly that we have no intention of having children--"we don't want to mess with it" is a phrase I've used more than once. But... and this is kind of where the cat story comes in... we've reconsidered our position. There have been different reasons at different times--personal, financial, health, etc.--but one of the reasons that was always there, in the back (and often in the front) of my mind, was "what if something goes wrong?" as in, "what if something is wrong with the child?" as in, "can I handle having a child with autism, with a physical disability, or some kind of debilitating or life-threatening disease?" And for me, for years and years, the answer has always been NO, NO WAY, it isn't worth the risk.

I know that for any of you who might have children or grandchildren (or nieces or nephews or...) who have such issues, this might sound incredibly immature; and admittedly, it is. This has been a huge fear of mine, though. It really has. But--and again, I know that the reason behind my change of mind probably sounds just as ridiculous as the reason for my fear--I think I have learned, through having this silly, sick cat--that it would be OK. I could handle it. I would do my best. I would love and care for my child, whatever it takes, and life would go on.

So that's where I am right now. Also, there're a few other pieces to the puzzle: some sermons on prayer (that talked a lot about fatherhood) that a friend of ours here in China indirectly directed me to; taking care of Caleb for most of the other day; a reading I did (at random) from one of the OT prophets... plus time, plus maturity, plus who knows what else... all of which have led us to becoming open to the idea of--possibly, if it is God's will; although we're not gonna go out of our way or try to control it; just whatever happens happens--becoming parents.

And besides that, we've got Chinese language, a new semester about to start, ministry opportunities as far as the eye can see... There's plenty to think about.

So if you've made it this far, here's what I'd like you to do: Say a prayer before you close this browser window, asking that we'd be guided rightly, that we'd be blessed as God sees fit, that our life and work goes well, and that... well, you might as well pray for our cat, too, that he'll continue to be healthy and able to breathe, like he is right now, sitting on my lap. Thank you.

The George Method

God showed us this great way to shift a dinner party into a spiritual conversation. George is a believer who recently moved from Hairbin, northern China. I asked George if he could be my Chinese tutor. George and I went next door in a restaurant to study. Meanwhile GaoYan had planned a small dinner at our house with Angel, the realtor, and YangZhenZhen, the foot massage friend. It turned out to be a big dinner party because Angel brought her boyfriend and his sister. So GaoYan wanted to have a spiritual conversation, but the friends are not very spiritual. Angel has studied the Bible a little bit, but still the conversation would not go very far. After my Chinese lesson I invited George to come see our apartment and meet Caleb. George was excited to talk with everyone at our house. They are all young people searching for a better job and trying to find their place in the big city of Hangzhou. Very quickly GaoYan and George were able to talk back and forth about the hope they had with God leading their life, and how reading the Bible is so important for peace, joy, and happiness. Having another Christian present, shifted the topic of conversation. At the end of the evening we were praising God for arranging such a positive spiritual discussion in our home.