Rains in Asia

So, I'm still catching up from my week off of blogging here. As this post will demonstrate, that week off wasn't exactly due to a plethora of exciting adventures -- more like the reality of classes settling in. Over the weekend, it rained BUCKETS, and Tom and I tested our skill at amusing ourselves indoors in our tiny apartment.

HK has a very advanced weather warning system to keep its residents apprised of impending typhoons and/or flooding. The HK Observatory issues a rain warning at three levels: Amber, Red, and Black. Generally, when there is a "Black Rain Warning," everything is cancelled. For typhoons, the Observatory "hoists" signals of either 1, 3, 8, 9 or 10. A signal 10 means a direct hit, and HK is pretty much going to be a disaster (if I remember correctly, only one or two signal 10s have been issued here in the 20th century).

Luckily, we weren't facing typhoon warnings over the weekend, only rain. We were at Amber alert, which is the lowest one, but darned if it wasn't more rain than I've seen in the States (except that one freak morning thunderstorm in D.C. this summer). Since we'd stocked up on granola bars, frozen dumplings and beer at the grocery store, we were quite content to stay inside whenever we peeked out the windows in contemplation of leaving.

The question was what to DO inside. Certainly not schoolwork (sorry Mom!). In an interesting change from the casebook culture of law schools Stateside, neither of our programs really assign set books for reading -- more like a selection of pieces in a range of different books, none of which can be posted online or photocopied by the professor because of HK's strong copyright rules. So, schoolwork has to be done at the library with the books on reserve.

Tom is in the middle of "War and Peace" and was all set for indoor activities, so I grabbed my less hefty book and settled in as well. The book I read was called "Oracle Bones" by Peter Hessler, and what started as a rainy day distraction quickly became one of my favorite reads in a long time. Peter Hessler writes narrative nonfiction in the John McPhee style (and studied under McPhee at Princeton). He came to China in the mid-1990's with the Peace Corps to teach English in the Sichuan province (the region where they had the horrible earthquake in 2008). He stayed in the country after his stint, moving to Beijing as a clipper for the WSJ and eventually becoming a correspondent for the Globe (and more recently the New Yorker). He's written three books over the past 6 or 7 years about his time in China, and his writing really made this moment in time for the country come alive for me. China is in a pretty darn exciting spot of its history right now, and the United States' relationship with China is inevitably in some kind of flux. Reading Hessler's narrative, which intertwined the stories of some of his former students with information about the country's preparation for the Olympics, the experience of scholars during the Cultural Revolution, and the journey of a Uigher middleman named Polat made me very excited for the trip to the capital that Tom and I are making in October.