Ancient bronze disc with traditional ornaments In 1955, Romanian government decided to enlarge student exchange program with three new economic domains: rice, silk, and ceramics. I was proposed to study ceramics and was asked to request parents’ permission. My [...]
In the fall of 1955, a group of eight Romanian students, me included, departed Bucharest for Beijing. Flying Chinese carriage It took us three full days to reach Beijing because the flights were infrequent, and plane speed was low. We stopped [...]
Student Lucia Neagu, Lu Jie When we landed at Beijing airport, I expected everything to be different, another world. Instead, my first revelation, proving my childish ignorance, was that the sky was still blue, the grass green, like in Romania, [...]
My new Chinese friends (1957) We were housed at Beijing University (Beida), a strikingly beautiful western style campus with colorful traditional Chinese architecture. Learning together in dormitory (1957) All buildings belonging to university departments looked to me like [...]
Beijing Summer Palace, 1955 One day we were invited to visit The Summer Palace, an architectural treasure of the last, Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). Beijing Summer Palace, 1955 Walking through long, colorful, painted galleries alongside the lake, I was [...]
Bronze traditional ornaments, 1957 We started learning Chinese through Russian, familiar to all foreign students who came from Eastern European democratic countries and spoke basic Russian learned in school. Since Chinese was difficult to speak, we spoke broken Russian between [...]
Listening to the way we spoke Chinese, demanded a lot of focus from our Chinese friends, guessing to understand what we wanted to say. It was hard to avoid smiles, or outright laughter due to linguistic confusion. Bronze ornament, 1957 [...]
Chinese tea pot I was surprised to find that the only water available to drink was boiled water, strange, less tasty compared with Romanian fresh spring or well water. Tea was offered everywhere in many varieties. I became addicted to [...]
My name Lu Jie I had a strange, uncomfortable feeling after realizing my visual confusion in recognizing Chinese faces around me. Even more bizarre, their name, difficult for me to pronounce, would not stick in my memory. It took [...]
To paint in traditional, Chinese guo hua (国画) style on rice paper, we spent time learning the basics: how to hold the brush, how to prepare the ink and how to control the ink flow. To get the feeling of how Chinese [...]
