Oh, oh. This is the beginning of the blog I was supposed to start in 2012 when we were teaching in China. Yes, I am a little late. Now we are home and busy being retired. Sew busy. Right now I just finished the first of four wedding quilts I am taking back to China this fall for three weddings of former students. The fourth quilt will be for a student whom we assume will be getting married. We do not know when or if we will ever return to China.
The first time we went to China in 2010 we went on a two week tour. It was magnificent. And tiring! Hot, too! We landed in Beijing and toured there for a few days, flew on to Xian to walk all agape at the Warriors, and then flew next to Guilin. At that time I was convinced there was no more beautiful place in the world than Guilin. We did go there again while we taught in China, thank goodness! Our last big city to visit was Shanghai, pronounced correctly with the a as in father. We did the usual visits and then spent a day at the World Expo where we almost melted. Laws in China forbid workers from being required to work beyond 103 Fahrenheit so the government doesn't ever report the weather higher than 102. I will say, though, that the knee brace I was wearing that day had metal stabilizing bars built in the fabric. They left burns on the sides of my leg. That had never happened anywhere in the US.
What I want to emphasize is that you can remove your body from China but you really cannot totally remove your heart. Once you have been there and interacted with Chinese people, you leave part of yourself always in China. Thus, I am making these quilts for presents. I cannot make quilts for the 400 students I taught and the 400 students my husband taught, but these students are the ones who came here to the US and stayed with us so we are still in correspondence with them.
No comments:
Post a Comment