I’ve learned a lot from all the corrections to my last three posts. Thank you so much. And thanks for DeepSeek recommending this website; otherwise I would never have found it. Some teachers recommended a tool similar to Grammarly to check grammar. Apparently, compared to so many kinds of AI today, what that software could do was not intelligent or flexible enough. But I think this process—writing in foreign languages, posting the article, and then accepting the revisions—is not only about how to write but also how to think in different ways. Therefore, the essence of this process is to interact with people from different cultural backgrounds.

Speaking of which, once I saw something unbelievable while wandering with my roommate.

Before entering one of the city gates, we saw two foreign girls with a tube of incense sticks and some fruit in their plastic bags. We were both amazed. We didn’t know young people who seemed to come from Western countries would buy incense sticks that were clearly used in temples.

We were heading for one of the gates where I’d been with another roommate before she left for a one-year exchange program in Japan. Suddenly, those two girls appeared again, still carrying two bags of things. They noticed some elderly people walking barefoot on the cobblestones and decided to do the same. There was a theory that walking barefoot on cobblestones stimulates acupoints. They might have heard of this or just done it for fun.

Anyway, we kept going ahead. You could always find some interesting scenes in parks, like people hugging the trees silently. I remembered there was an elderly man practicing the xun—an ancient Chinese clay flute-like instrument—facing the city wall. I plan to do this someday because some sorrowful melodies played by the xun sound like a ghost weeping, full of ancient poetic charm, though the instrument can also convey a sense of joy.

Not far from the elderly man practicing the xun, there was another elderly man playing the saxophone, also facing the city wall. You can imagine the sound of the saxophone completely drowned out the sound of the xun since it’s a louder instrument. So, the two melodies mixed together, and the ascoutic effect was odd. We were surprised by this and wondered why they didn’t practice farther apart from each other.

On the way to a restaurant, we saw those two girls again. Maybe they were heading to a temple, judging by what they were carrying and the direction they were walking toward (there are several famous temples inside the city wall in this area). It’s always surprising how we sometimes run into the same people over and over again at different places while wandering. Last month, I had the same experience while sightseeing with a friend in Xizha, Wuzhen, a Jiangnan-style water town scenic area.

Back to the topic: we may find people from other cultures doing exactly the same things we do, or acting in completely different ways—and both are reasonable; it all depends on how we view and understand the world. (I have so many thoughts about languages that I’d like to write about, but I’ll split them into several posts for easier reading.)