Best of Chinglish

One of the things that makes me chuckle from time to time here is the Chinglish ranging from incomprehensible gibberish on a t-shirt to accidentally insightful poetry plastered over a city wall.  Here of some of the highlights...

"START KILLINGWHALE"

                  A wonderful t-shirt.

"Minutemen meatpuppets descendents angst."

                  Another great t-shirt.

"IF"

                  My favorite Chinglish t-shirt.

"When you come with burning lamp of pain in your hand I can see your face and know you as biss."

                   This gem was written all over my bedsheets when I first got to Kaili.

"Distinctive feature mutton the minority did eat."

                  This was a text from a Chinese friend who couldn't really speak English and just tried to googletranslate his text.

"Fuitable for men, women and childrenchoiceness raw material produced meticulous pleasant to the palate give first choose treasure."

                  This was on a box of cookies.

"Collect myriad dotes on the infinitely superior to one body."

                  This was the motto of the construction company building the shopping mall by my house.  The other motto was more grammatically correct, but meaningless all the same...

"Because the only, so the first."

Three Years in the Waiting

I didn’t want to jinx anything by discussing it publically before it was a sure thing, but now the results are in, and I’m excited to announce that I’ll be attending Florida State University next year as an MFA student in film production. 

This has been my dream for about three years now, and when I was wait-listed two years ago, I selected Peace Corps China as a solid stepping-stone from which I could reapply in 2013. In January, after going through the process again, revising my statement of purpose and fully creating a new screenplay for my writing sample, I was selected for a March interview. Unfortunately, it made no sense to fly to Florida for an interview, so, despite their strong insinuation that coming in-person was preferable, I decided to interview by Skype. The interview was a 20-minute sprint through the last two years of my life, and afterwards I felt both exhausted and hopeful… hopeful that the great firewall of China didn’t render too many of my responses incomprehensible, hopeful that they remembered my group interview from last time, and hopeful that the other applicants had seriously choked.

The wait was pretty unbearable, with all of the things I should have said rattling around in my head and my mind constantly waking my body up in the middle of the night to check my email during normal EST business hours.  Finally, a week and a half later, I got the email I’d been waiting for, my acceptance to FSU. It feels great knowing that I have a future doing what I want and knowing that it was my time here in the Peace Corps that made it possible.