Xi'An!

Tomorrow I'll be heading out to Xi'an with several of my classmates to see the Terracotta Soldiers as well as some other neighboring archaeological sites. I am currently in a Chinese archeology class and my professor is taking us as a group. Truth be told, all of us took the class because we knew there would be a field trip component, so we're pretty excited.

Other than that, things have been going well. School is as busy as always, and I never feel like I have enough time to complete what I want to get done. I'm really good at wasting time doing things like eating, reading cookbooks, devising ways to kill mosquitoes (this would be a great research project), and eating. As you can see, my issues with time management are entirely my fault.

My research is going okay. I turned my original set of interview questions into a questionnaire which I then sent to some friends of friends. I got them all back during winter break, and spent a bit of time roughly translating them back to English. Most of them weren't very helpful, with people giving me very short or one-word answers. Actually- the questionnaires were a big flop... Going through the questions helped me see where there were problems with the original translation from English to Chinese. Some of the questions morphed during the process ("What's your name?" somehow changed to "What's you name and how old are you?"). The majority of questions I still feel are fine, although there are a few that need to be changed. As far as everything goes, I feel as though I'm back at square one, but this time with a better picture of what I'm stepping into. If I had to, I could come up with a paper, but it would be ninety-percent literature review and very little original thought.

I still think my interview questions, although they need some tweaking, aren't too far off the mark. I'm pretty sure that people will answer the questions, but they need to be presented in a different way. Hence, I'm now actively looking for an interpreter who can do CSL and Chinese. I'm willing to pay, feed, and help with transportation, I just need someone for a few hours, a few times. What I'd like to do is sit down with several people and ask them about their experiences as deaf people in China. Even if I come up nothing with nothing new or interesting, I feel that their experiences as a group cut off from most of society by a language barrier (like me!), make their lives unique and worth recording. Hopefully I'll find that interpreter soon!