The day after Easter turns out to be lucky: I receive a straw hat from Jacqueline

Anticipating how exhausted I would be after the first weekend of Passover I came close to canceling our group for the Monday after Easter.  Luckily, I did not.

Echoing my mood, Jacqueline and Pablo, the first to arrive, complained that the services they attended for Easter were unusually long.  Jacqueline took me aside to give me a fine straw sun hat from her home in Madagascar.

Rather than ascending like a piece of straw, my next gambit fell like a lead blimp: the group was not interested in the Mueller report .  They found however much to ask and say about the upcoming DC International Film Festival.   Once they learned that documentaries used actual people rather than actors they could understand why I recommended “The Eagle Huntress,” a Mongolian documentary about a young girl falconer, as an easier way than traveling to another country to learn about a faraway place.

Asia remained a focus.  The first short article we read from theweek.com  about fortune-telling, took us to China and back again.  Hoon, it turned out, is so expert as a Chinese fortune-teller that her friends in Seoul advised her to quit dentistry in order to make a nice living as a soothsayer.  Hoon  explained that in order to tell a fortune she needs four pillars: hour (within two hours), day, month, and year of birth.  Fortune-telling has become modern: the book that used to be consulted has been replaced by an app.  She had not yet become a proficient prophet  when she met her future husband but still believes that destiny brought them together.  Politicians do not know as much as they think, as was demonstrated when Hoon got no response to the multiple emails she sent to Hillary’s campaign advising them that Hillary would lose the election to Trump.  While Aoi and Hoon regard Asian fortune telling as a science, participants from Latin America respectfully disagreed. Pablo labeled it as pseudo science.  Williams added that shamans in Venezuela are charlatans who take advantage of gullible people.  

Not letting go of the subject, Aoi mentioned that not all that long ago in Japan name analysis was frequently used to give babies lucky first names that also complemented their family names.  There is still some superstition about lucky and unlucky days in Japan.  A rokuyo calendar is followed so that “death” days, inhabited by evil spirits, may be avoided for weddings and funerals, which therefore tend to be less expensive because very few people want to be married or buried those days.   No one in Japan would buy a house whose address had the number 4, just as in the USA, participants were surprised to learn, many buildings do not have a 13th floor, possibly because that was the number of participants at the Last Supper. Amy’s mother went to a fortune teller in China, which provoked problems with her husband who is a non-believer.  We all agreed that fortune-tellers would go out of business if they did not give hope.  

We raced through very short articles from theweek.com about a SWAT team responding to a home-invasion call occasioned by a noisy Roomba imprisoned in a bathroom, dogs sharing expensive meals with their masters in a New York sidewalk cafe, a man’s beard containing more germs than a dog’s fur, a man who sued his parents to the tune of $86,822.16 for destroying his pornography collection, and the campus police chief of Smith and Mt Holyoke colleges being put on administrative leave for having posted positive tweets about Trump; all  these occasioned serious and humorous comments, the last being Pablo's objection that the action against the campus police chief was an infringement of free speech.  Finishing up, our lightly bearded participant Williams revealed how he washed his beard after eating.

Welcoming topics: a student's return and that perennial favorite, food

Before our meeting on Monday, April 15, I encountered Mabel as I was going to the second floor.  Although she seemed to have other business at the Library I convinced her to come to the conversation club from which she had been missing for about a year. 

What a joy! Mabel became our show-and-tell.  She was a compendium of information about her Harvard fellowship on medical simulation that  she will finish in May, thus qualifying to teach this skill to her fellow cardiologists, although the US law prevents her from practicing cardiology in the USA.  We were amazed by the lifelike simulators she showed us on her phone.  These simulations, we learned, are used not only for pre-operative exercises but also to teach parents and professionals how, for instance, to interact with children who have cranio-facial malformations.  It was satisfying to hear Mabel speaking perfect idiomatic English, and to be personally thanked her confidence.

Food is always a welcome topic.  This time the spin was how their favorite cuisines are adapted in foreign countries.  In Japan, for instance, as Aoi told us, MSG is placed on the table in Chinese restaurants, unlike here in the USA where MSG is regarded with suspicion.  From Jacqueline we learned that in Madagascar rice, their staple food eaten three times a day, comes in 150 colors.  Jacqueline however prefers French cuisine.  For Marcela the biggest change from Colombia is adapting here to light breakfasts and lunches.  Amy got close to the article we were about to discuss when she said that we should use regional names like Hunan, Cantonese or Szechuan rather than lumping these distinctive cuisines together as Chinese food. Similarly, Anna objected to American Italian restaurants that serve nothing like Italian food which in her homeland is pretty simple with splendid ingredients.  The fact that his homeland Peru is a gastro destination has stimulated Pablo’s curiosity about food. Here he has begun his exploration with Thai, fast food, deep dish pizza and New York pizza. Owing to their similar climates, Carmen Luz does not find much difference between the foods of Chile and the USA. In general, although many do not like spicy food, everyone was willing to try what is on offer here.

We broke into two groups, each with a teacher, to read and discuss an article about the furor created when a young white female Jewish health guru opened a Chinese restaurant in New York claiming to serve clean food.  Each group worked up an argument, pro or contra, about whether the use of the term clean Chinese food should be used.

Group 1’s claims were presented by Shinobu with help from Mabel.

• “Clean food” as a term of art is not yet understood.
• This misinformation is deliberately magnified on social media.  
• Those on social media want nothing but to destroy reputation based on misinformation, here making a false claim that clean food has something to do with cleanliness, when in fact it means avoiding MSG, processed food, and ingredients considered toxic.
• There is nothing wrong with changing recipes for the purpose of assimilation, as has been done by kosher Chinese restaurants for decades and decades.

Even though they were presenting opposing arguments, Group 2 largely agreed with Group 1.   Anna said that the proprietor of the clean food Chinese restaurant, Arielle Haspel, should not use the word clean to mean healthy but that nothing could be done to prevent Haspel from trying to make her restaurant stand out.  Pablo agreed that clean food was a marketing strategy.  Aoi from Group 1 added that it is too early to use “clean food” as a concept.  Jacqueline, also from Group 1, added that Michelle Obama had started the trend with her effort to introduce healthy school lunches.

Clichés color conversation

Another large group: can't quarrel with success!

I come to the sunny second floor of the Library several minutes late, during introductions, and propose that as the group of 26 continue to introduce themselves students divulge how they procrastinate.  The reason I am late is that I’d put off leaving for class by reading a friend's opinion piece  in response to a New York Times article about procrastination.  It takes a while before the students, from the Middle East, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, understand that procrastination means doing something to avoid what they should be doing.  After I mention that as a way of postponing his work the narrator of Italo Svevo's novel The Confessions of Zeno confesses that he kept track of any number of last cigarettes, my co-teacher Ela confesses that before attempting what she should be doing she brushes her cat.  Sharing Ela's humor, Jaume claims to have a Ph. D. In procrastination.  We split into three groups, the most advanced students without a teacher.  Each group discusses the longest article, about how useful clichés are, and two short articles, six in total, that they will present to the large group when we get back together.  

Clichés, everyone agrees, help with learning a language.  These shortcuts, they point out, are used by politicians and often, as in the case of “I have a dream,” can become slogans.  Their dream is to speak English well.  In my small group we talk about how to answer the question, How are you?  It all depends, they say, on who you’re talking with.  You might ask the question of a colleague and then walk away without an answer.  In the USA, one needs to be careful to avoid giving too much information (TMI), and it is best to say fine so there will be no further questions. Clichés are ridiculed for their mediocrity, although sometimes they display enough creativity to become mottos.  In the large group, after Irene summarizes the article, Elisabeth asks whether clichés are true; the answer, supplied by Anna Maria, is that like stereotypes such as that Italians speak with their hands (she is sitting on hers), clichés are too unspecific to be true.  Elime mentions that in some cases they are not true; she does not agree that what doesn’t kill you makes you strong.

Elime, a leader of the leaderless group, presents a short article about how the Texas Senate will decide whether lemonade stands run by minors should become legal.  The question is why they are outlawed: in the article the answer given is for reasons of health.

Dusan who quickly studied up easily summarizes a short article about how mushrooms have been shown to lower the risk of cognitive decline in a study among Chinese men and women in Singapore.  We wonder whether the weekly requirement of five ounces of mushrooms is measured before or after cooking. Natsu, who graduated from an aviation school in California, is not at all surprised by the mother-daughter pilot duo described in another short article as entertaining their passengers on a recent flight from Los Angeles to Atlanta.  Apparently there are now many female aviators in Japan, but not enough, and one of her friends, a petite and elegant woman, is always shoved into the seat of co-pilot rather than commander.  Teresita recently flew to Panama with a woman as pilot.  At first she was worried, but on reflection decided that women are (stereotypically) more careful.  Anna Maria volunteers that women have to try harder.  Elisabeth flew with an all-male flight crew, which she found weird.