my cousin A Yu and I went to soak hot springs today. Fuzhou is famous for its natural hot springs. What a luxury it was! We also got Chinese foot massages that lasted an hour long. Half an hour on each foot. Actually, a lot of it was pretty painful, especially when they would push sharply right into a spot between bones. I had to try really hard to relax and learn to enjoy it. I understand the logic -- it's like that chinese proverb, loosely translated to mean that whatever's good for you is sure to be bitter to take in. A Yu yelled at the girl who was doing my foot because she couldn't tell me which blood points/chi points on the foot were supposed to correspond to which parts of the body.

It's 3 AM and there's a rooster crowing somewhere off in the distance. Which is strange, for such a big city like Fu Zhou. I'm still overwhelmed by the traffic here. When I cross the road, I follow other people and cross right next to them, for fear of getting run over by a taxi, bus, people, bicycle, and motorcycles all at once, if I tried to navigate myself.

It seems like I've been getting stares from people here and there, and I couldn't figure out why exactly. My cousins have assured me that I don't look like a foreigner at all. I blend in perfectly. This guy told me the other day that I actually have a really strong Pu Xian accent when I speak Mandarin (the accent from speaking the local dialect of my hometown, Xian You). So my relatives finally told me today why they think people stare at me. A Yu said, sure, first people will notice me and take a second look to figure out whether i'm a boy or a girl, but that's just out of curiosity; what those people in the restaurant were discussing had to be about one thing: the fact that I'm not wearing a bra. The hilarious thing is that A Yu thought that instead of just me, it was all Americans who didn't wear bras... I worried so much before coming to China about whether I would stand out as an American somehow, but I was so far off. When I went back to my 老家，the original village where my dad grew up, people kept commenting on how modest/earthy/simple I dressed. I guess they were expecting cosmopolitanism. My cousin's wife even offered me some of her cloths to change into that she thought was more appropriately pretty and fancy. But, no way I was gonna put on something with flowers and lace!

It's getting a bit annoying, every new person I come across, the first they say is, oh, I thought she was a boy. This used to make me quite secretly satisfied, but now it's getting tiring. With almost no exception, that's always the first comment. But the good thing is, as soon as it's brought up, it's also casually dropped. Nobody links it to sexuality, or anything dangerous. People simple don't understand why. At the wedding banquet I went to with my little sister, who's 13, someone who sat at our table asked her halfway through the banquet about her 弟弟 (younger brother). That gave my sister quite an ego boost.

My grandfather came to Fuzhou also today for a check-up. The first one since he finished chemotherapy 2 months ago. The results were fantastic, almost all gone. A Yu managed to get a hold of a doctor she knows, who's the #1 doctor in the whole Fu Jian province for this kind of cancer. The whole gang of us (A Yu, me, my aunt and uncle who's accompanying my grandfather) grabbed my grandpa and rushed to the visa office where this esteemed doctor was getting some paperwork done, so that he could take a look before he leaves the country in a couple of days. It's quite something, this Chinese system of getting things done through connections and personal relations. I have to admit it's pretty damn nice of the doctor to voluntarily see a patient in his own time, in a random public place somewhere, for free, just because my cousin knows him and we're from the same hometown. Then it's a whole charade of continuing to keep the cancer hidden from my grandpa. He believes that it's some kind of esophagus infection or something like that. It's a good thing that he's partially deaf and his hearing aid was out of battery. It's a continuous struggle for my aunt and uncle to arrange things for him, take care of his hospital visits, get the diagnosis w/out letting him detect anything, while my grandpa is trying to stay in the middle of it all, hear what's going on, and direct what should be done. He doesn't know what's going on at all, and he can't hear, so he writes down a huge list of questions beforehand to show to the doctor, and we all half cater to him and explain details patiently, and half lie to get it over with. The doctor writes down the answers for him, and because the CT scans today came out so well, he wrote at the end, "can live for another 80 years!" (He's totally in on the whole cover-up thing. Apparently it's a pretty common thing for family members to do). My grandfather was really happy. Suddenly, I feel so unusually 孝顺 (the complex, deathly important idea of children caring for/respecting/obeying their elder genearation). Like I'm willing to do a whole lot to make him happy or well. It's strange, what your physical space do to you -- in the U.S., I've lived for the past many years as the most heartless/kinless/familyless/obligationless person for miles around, because I resent these things so much; but here, standing on this yellow/ancestral soil and breathing this yellow/polluted air, I feel like I can almost, almost understand why my relatives would unanimously decide to keep his own cancer a secret from him, out of concern for him!

My grandfather is so proud of the Harvard insignia stuff I gave him (t-shirt, pen, and umbrella). But today, he gifted the pen to the doctor. That's a heavy gift for him, seeing that he's been carrying it in his shirt pocket everywhere he goes lately. He was even ready to give the umbrella to the doctor too. He read this article about the --fuck, can't think of the English word-- mission of colleges to educate their students. The article called Harvard the #1 ranked school in the U.S., right above Yale, and thus #1 in the world, and called each and every one of Harvard's students "a kernel of gold" waiting to be polished to shine. Something like that... I didn't finish reading it. My grandfather liked that idea so much, he photocopied the article for all the grandchildren to read, and quoted it to everyone, calling me "gold," and repeated the story to that doctor too! Each time I hear it, I fear being seen as the obnoxious cousin, the enemy. But it makes him really proud.