Yesterday I've yet again cooked hot pot in the kitchen - it surely wasn't the best hot pot I've cooked here - there's no thinly sliced lamb or beef in it, and the lack of green onion made it look less than pleasurable from the beginning. I was reluctant to let Husain or Alin join us because I thought I have got really nothing decent to offer. I called them eventually of course, and the smell of boiling soup itself would already suffice for Husain. I also, notably, cut down the cost of making a single hot pot to less than 6 euro cash, with 3.50 euro the soup ingredient and 1.99 a can of mashed beef. The rest, of course, were celeries, tomato slices, cabbages and broccoli purchased with a meal-plan subsidized campus card. Learning from my previous mistake of mixing grape juice, orange juice, apple juice and multi-saft juice altogether, I also created a new formula combining only orange and apple juice - that drastically improves the taste and also brings me a huge sense of being closer to nature. The four of us engaged in some routine conversation before Alin went to the tedious Undergraduate Student Government meeting made more tedious by our current president's attempt to reform it into a systematic bureaucracy. During, our floor representative came in and invited us for a meeting at 10 PM taking place in the same kitchen we were at. Our of etiquette of being concerned with our floor's affairs, I enquired her if it would be advisable for me to bring hot pot to the competition, since it's delicious, easy to make and the College Nordmetall would reimburse all the money we have spent for the competition, and she said no - it looks darkish, colorless and therefore unfit for the theme "Colorful Dish". She went on to say that everybody would just make cupcakes since they're usually the right balance between easy to make and multichromaticity, and the floor is planning for a movie night out afterwards in case we have won the championship and the extra 50 euro. We were baffled for a while regarding which movie to watch and we agreed that for a certain time period, in Germany, if one wants to watched un-dubbed English movie with popcorns, one has little choice. At 10 PM, she posted on Facebook telling everybody to come to the kitchen. No one showed up and she went back to her room after chatting up my roommate in the corridor.
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Me and my girlfriend have had an ongoing confrontation since last night. Because I have long been disturbed by the length of my hair and the fact that it always itches me in the neck, I decided to cut my hair with a scissor. And then I cut her hair with a scissor.
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My brother, Wang Yao, is getting married. He and his wife whose name I still don't know got their certificate from the Civil Affairs Bureau 2 days ago. I got this news while I was replying to my sister's message, and I saw an interesting avatar showing my brother holding a fried chicken wing in a low-tier fried chicken shop with a big red banner that reads "Welcome! Please stay in line!". From the avatar he doesn't look much different from how I remembered him before I came to study in Germany, except that in terms of appearance he is slightly tilting towards his parents. His papa suffers from stroke and is semi-paralyzed and his mom an hourly laborer, subsisting sometimes on washing dishes, doing cleaning job, and occasionally recycling bottles for money. The notion that my brother is getting married discomforts me, because I have long perpetrated the idea of how difficult it is to get married in China while being financially challenged. It turns out just that I have vastly underestimated the willpower of the so-called poor people to lead a normal, decent life. They are willing to accept mortgages taking a lifetime's hard work to repay, and still regularly visiting a restaurant for a nice meal. My brother included - they hardly think of the future because there's really nothing they can think of. Getting a promotion at Bosch Wuxi to advance to management level sounds similar to winning five million dollar from the small lottery stands down the street corner.
I later tried to engage in a cordial conversation with my brother. But it felt awkward at the beginning because he has never replied to the photos of Lisbon I sent him. Those are lovely lovely photos, but they did quite the opposite of what they look like to my brother. The dialogue began to flow once my brother noticed my brand new iPhone 6 Plus. He was curious about the price, and I told him it 799 euro, 200 euro less than the actual price. He doesn't have a phone now, the white Sony LT26i I gave to him because it was the phone that I would never use again and would not even bother to sell has broken down, like his laptop he bought at the age of 20 and still used till several months ago - one night the screen stopped working, and everything stopped working. I told him I have organized a national food week here at the university where friends from different countries cook their national dish for us. But I have to shift the topic when I told him that there are Tibetans, those under the Tibetan Government in Exile and it has obviously disgruntled him. I carried on to tell him my plan of starting a business, and those attempts I already made, like the Apple iTunes Gift Card arbitraging and selling my roommate's father's sculpture. He was interested in the fact that my roommate, Afghan, has a father who's a top-notch sculpturist in Iran. He nodded to every single statement, however absurd, from me, as if I'm one of those people he should learn from. I ended the conversation by telling him that if I ever become successful in starting a business, I would ask for his help. I was dumbfounded by how thin the line has become between the us two, with a conversation full of compliments not because he really wanted to appraise me, but simply because he didn't have anything to say and tried to sound friendly, or rather, un-hostile.
My brother was an abusive figure when I was at a younger age, as a pupil. He went to the Affiliated School of Wuxi Education College. It's a school that doesn't have a search-engine-indexed website and an official English name. At that time the rest of my family had despised him and used him as a bad example. And indeed, he seems very keen in taking away my gadgets and becoming furious when told to return them. He started to change as he goes into high school, the same high school I later went but at a different address, Wuxi No.3 Senior High School. It was from him as a high school student that I learned the hardship of having to take College Entrance Exam. That was a time when his table was filled with large, double-side printed booklets full of practice questions, and I was sternly instructed not to go into his room because he has to study in there. I turned into a cynic partially because I thought it was not human for anyone to need to go through this. Eventually he got into a second-rate college in Nantong in northern Jiangsu Province, a city far less privileged than his own. But he didn't not go there for the first year because he was diagnosed with Hepatitis B, and had to take one year off for observation to be deemed safe for school. It was then I finally felt a dull inkling of respect for him. I wasn't truly concerned with his condition of course. I just thought it was unfair for people, especially his family, to alienate him just because he got something only mildly infectious. I was too young to comprehend why I felt that way, I just sat with him while he was playing StarCraft on his new laptop - interestingly, more than five years later I sat on the same chair in the same room in his house, watching him playing the four games of Dota 2 on my brand new laptop. It might be the last time I get to innocently watch him playing because he doesn't love playing games anymore - he doesn't have time or equipment to do that - he had started as a factory worker on the assembly line for Bosch Wuxi, waking up very early every day to be picked up by the transit bus, and coming home equally late on the same bus he went. And I, as a college student abroad, will have another life to steer as well.
He once triumphantly declared he is a genius and I am stupid. And I used to reply to him in the exact same sentence. We would brag about how well we play basketball. In fact, it was me bragging about it and he was simply stating the truth. And then we would go to the basketball court at the Taihu Square to watch other people playing. At first we walked because it was fun to chat along the way - I was still preparing for my SAT test and he liked to know about my adventure. Later I would sit on the backseat of his electronic bike, expediting there because he was 29 and had found a girlfriend, and I was 18 and had found a college. That's how things play out for us.
His marriage, however, is not official in a filial sense. He is still living in his room, sitting on the same chair I used to sit on. But the chair must feel more like a residue to him, the end of a journey instead of a point along. His, and also my, paralyzed grandmother has moved to my apartment so my mom and aunt can take care of her, and he is about to move in to his apartment, not particularly far away from where he is now, but far nevertheless, with his wife of the future and faith of the past, to become "once and future husband" in his respective life.
And his wedding, truly official, is at June 27, 2015, 12:00 PM UTC+08:00. This time I will not be with him. I will be sleeping in Germany, possibly greeting him in dream, likely not.
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Dota 2 for the first time made me feel entertained - in an easy co-op bot match, I made double-digit kills and died only 2 times. In retrospect, I might call this the pinnacle of my Dota 2 gameplay skill - for I certainly would not enjoy another mindless 40 minutes. However, I still found the mechanism set in this game appealing. It always takes the last bit of patience from you for a reward to keep you going, so the benefit of force quitting never outweighs the delight or rather, obligation of keep going.
My girlfriend went to the Stats tutorial which she thinks is utterly incomprehensible and then to a presentation meeting she has on Friday for Introduction to Chinese Civilization - she took the course because of the amount of credits it offers and somehow began to have real interest in the ancient Chinese history. I postulate, the trigger is the TV show The Empress of China she once so feverishly watched for 2 months. I never had her kind of zeal to go to a tutorial I know I won't understand because I'm not interested or to watch any TV show after I read somewhere that watching TV shows deprives one's agility in thinking. Even my sense of being obliged to show up has been dulled by a rejection letter that begins with "We regret to inform you" from a job I applied at the Nordmetall College Office. It's a job involving only mundane tasks of setting up printers, replacing chalks at the pool table and sitting in the office after dinner, and I still failed to get it because there are too many overqualified people for the position . For a brief moment I actually gave up inside and deemed it no longer necessary for me to condescend myself to cater to the society's deficiency. But now, I'm still striving to tell myself not to give in, which seems like the right kind of spirit to me at this moment.
