Interviews and a little frustration

Our interviews have been going well. Some better than others, but overall very good. I'm fascinated by the places we're going and what these people have to say. We interviewed a retired 30-year PLA soldier who talked about his country's leaders (past and present) a lot; he reminded me of a couple of people I've met in the U.S. He also had the nicest apartment that we've been to so far--about 600 sq. meters on 2 floors for himself and his wife. The same day we visited him we met an 81 year old man who likes to surf the internet and climbs a ridiculously steep staircase to get to his apartment. We've also met a couple of people that were 'sent down' during the Cultural Revolution to be 're-educated' by working in the countryside. This isn't the focus of our research, but I am really glad that a couple of the people we've talked to were willing to talk about it. A couple of us went to a neighborhood park one morning to watch people's morning exercises and see if anyone would talk to us; at first they just talked about us, but someone went and found an elderly man who had studied English before 1949 (what the Chinese call "jiefang"--liberation), and then a whole group of people came over to see what we were about. They all complimented Dr. Wilson on his Chinese. I think our whole group is loving these interviews.

I have been a little frustrated lately by difficulties with Chinese. I know that I've only been studying it for 2 years, but I feel like I should be a lot better at it than I am. I hate not being able to read (or if I can read, I'm not able to understand) even dumb things like the error messages on the computer. I hate having to order in a restaurant by pointing to the menu--each time this is necessary it's like surrendering in defeat. I hate knowing a word but not catching it in conversation, and I hate knowing all of the words for a sentence I want to say but not being able to string them together in the right order. I have competent 'survival' Chinese skills, but I would really like to move beyond that. Every once in a while I'll catch a whole answer in one of our interviews, or be able to read and understand an entire storefront advertisement, and these instances are very exciting. But they almost make me more frustrated the other times, when I can't understand someone with a slightly different accent. Ah well. That much more motivation to keep at it.