Hi all, I'm starting up another blog at:

www.dorothycheng.blogspot.com

It'll be much less emo, I promise.

  

So fucking emotional these past few days.  I got myself to France finally and will be staying for the next two or three months.  Sobbed with gutwrenching fear when I realized (this French keyboard is fucking annoying...) what exactly I was getting myself into when I arrived at the host family's house after hell on the RER and metro and understood almost no French.  I have always been very disdainful of people who are paralyzed by homesickness, but in the first two days, I had slight panic attacks everytime I went out or someone spoke to me.  I finally screwed up enough courage to go out to St. Germain des Pres (gorgeous gorgeous) the second day and sobbed with relief in the middle of a cobblestoned alleyway, because it was just as lovely and atmospheric as I imagined and I knew that I'd grow to love Paris. 

Doing much better now.  It's the fourth day and last night I had a long conversation with my host sister in French over dinner. 

My mother sent me a package today filled with foodstuffs.  FIVE (5) Mason jars of homemade noodle sauce with fried tofu and beans, zong zi (which is sweet rice wrapped in big ass leaves), an assortment of Chinese cookies, crackers and sundry snacks.  If I were still living at home, this would be nothing.  But as it is, I am enjoying the munchies immensely as I sit here wasting time while my fridge hums dejectedly because it is empty, empty, empty.  Except for the stuff mommy dear sent me, of course.

This reminds me of a ancient Chinese fable.  One of the emperors used to be a beggar.  One winter, he and his elderly father were walking the cold snowy streets with no shoes, getting their wooden bowls filled layer by layer with leftovers from each house they stopped at.  When finally, they had completely topped off their bowls, they sat in an alcove shielded from the wind and gobbled up their food.  Later, he became the emperor and became dissatisfied with everything he ate.  He ordered his master chefs to recreate that bowl of layered porridge/stew/slops he once ate as a starving young man.  They presented him with it, he tasted it, spat it out and ordered the deaths of his chefs.  Then Confucius flew down fom heaven and said to the emperor, shaking a finger, "Stupid lout, it doesn't taste as good as before because you're a useless, fat, spoiled tyrant.  And tyrants always get their food spat in."

After that, Confucius leapt away, leaving a trail of rainbows and delicious cakes that turned to spitting, headless mice when the emperor tried to eat them.

I love that yarn.  We Chinese are very creative in our moralistic tales.  And we like to spit.