Pipa fruit and a little culture shock

First..the Pipa: Helen demonstrates the essential eating goodness of the pipa fruit, which has appeared suddenly in the markets. One of the vendors I frequent convinced me to buy some.

The flesh has a mild almost nutty flavor, very firm and sweet, and the inside contains four pits (which Helen is planning to plant back in Buffalo..I didn't have the heart to tell her that anyplace where they get 20 inches of snow during pipa season is not going to work out)...


The pipa season is brief and much celebrated - everyone is eating them, and in just a week or two, they'll be gone, apparently. I guess they don't travel well, because I have not seen them before.


Now for the culture shock ..scenes from a classroom in a Chinese university. Imagine you have submitted a composition in your Chinese class, called "Wo de gong yu" (My apartment) which uses lots of recent vocabulary words to describe your home. It is your first ever composition in Chinese. The teacher corrects mistakes on each paper and assigns it a grade..OK, so far this feels familiar.
Does she quietly hand back the graded compositions....oh no, she does not. She holds each one up, acknowledges the author, and shows the class the grade and why it was received, pointing out the common errors.....we are on new cultural ground here. There was an audible gasp from one of the other Americans in the class -- it wasn't just me. Anyway, I did OK, so it was not too traumatic, but it made a very big impression on me -- glad I had taken the entire morning to do a careful job! Michael says that when he is subtle about handing back work..the students will walk up to each others' desks at the break and see what other people got on their papers. According to a young woman we know, the public review of grades is very common, especially in middle and high school. Quite a different approach to peer pressure I guess.