Guess what! Just yesterday, I declared all five of my classes this semester to be pass/fail. 🙂 Yay for a relaxing last semester!! Here at Wellesley, we can take an unlimited number of classes pass/fail, which I think is awesome. 🙂 I mean, most people take their classes for a grade, which makes sense–and which I did too for most of my Wellesley career–except this is my last semester and I want to relax as much as possible! 😀 The only caveat is that I no longer qualify for Latin Honors at graduation (but I think I would have only qualified for cum laude anyway, and not magna or summa).
Anyway! Wow, can’t believe the semester is already almost halfway through. Fall Break starts at the end of this week! I’m going to go visit my friend at her house on Cape Cod. 🙂 Her name is Judy and she’s a retired elementary school teacher and she’s kind of like my adopted grandmother! ^_^ (In addition to Jean and Richard, my other adopted grandparents, which you would have read a lot about if you’d been following my blog in previous years!)
I also just had an awesome Office Hours with my Chinese Cinema professor. I love the concept of Office Hours and how much of a campus culture they are here at Wellesley! It’s a great way to just sit and talk one on one with your professor(s) and get to know them better on a personal level. Professor Song and I talked about Chinese culture, language preservation (since I’m second generation; my parents were first generation immigrants) and Chinese vs. Western culture. He also gave me 3 books!! They’re about Chinese culture, history, and geography, respectively, and are in both Chinese and English! 😀 So happy I’ll be able to practice my Chinese! I also really love his class–we’ve been watching wonderful Chinese films that simultaneously take us through Chinese film history and–to a similar degree–Chinese history itself. Films we’ve watched so far include: Center Stage (Stanley Kwan), The Goddess (Wu Yonggang), A Touch of Zen (King Hu), Rouge (Stanley Kwan again), and The Story of Qiu Ju (Zhang Yimou). And so many more to come! I love that once a week, I get to just get together with a bunch of other students and my professor and watch a feature length film in our on-campus cinema! It’s such a great, cathartic experience.
It’s also cool because up until now, we’ve been learning about the Hong Kong film industry in class, and hand in hand with that comes Hong Kong history in general, too. And what an interesting history it has! I can’t believe I didn’t know more about it before, especially since Hong Kong was very much in the news in recent years. Also–I’m moving there next year for work! So I better get to know that place a bit better. 🙂
Actually, I think it’s great that I get to learn about a place in class and in my mind, know that I am headed to that place soon. 😀 It is so exhilarating!
Also! In my Chinese Painting art history class–we did calligraphy! It was so much fun. It’s also so hard! A lot harder than you think to make the brush go in the direction you want it to, and to make sure the ink is not too dark or too light–depending on how hard you press on the brush. Man! I really want to practice my calligraphy and get better though. I find it very therapeutic. It’s basically like painting!
Anyway, gotta go and run to my next class–but I’ll tell you all about Fall Break next time!
~Emily