China Diary # 6 - " Glass Casting Series"

I woke up at seven o’clock. After a nice hot shower I cleaned up the kitchen. I looked for tea, which I could not find. I walked down the street to try to get some tea from Lennart. He was up but after waiting for 10 minutes outside his unit I decided that he was not coming out and went back to my unit to do this diary and checked my office e-mails. Li Gang was supposed to come over at 8:30 so we could have some breakfast together and we could go to Jenny Lu’s for groceries. He showed up at about 10:00 and made arrangements for local taxi to take me to and from Jenny Lu’s for 15 RMB. I was able to stock up on groceries but the driver complained that I took too long and wanted another 20 RMB. It was not worth a fight and I wanted to focus on cleaning up the glass casts that were done for me by the students at Tsing Hua University last year, which Li Gang had delivered to me that morning. They came out different than I expected.

It is painstaking detail work and must be done carefully because glass is very fragile. My model had many undercuts. Eventually I found that a brush used to clean dishes with water, along with some thin but strong wire for the very hard to get to places, which seemed to work the best. Li Gang and his assistant invited me to join them for a lunch made at his studio of Chinese noodles, with a soy and lamb paste, along with some tomatoes and eggs. I then went back to work on the glass castings. I began to tire, started to make mistakes and was getting cut in the process. So I took a nap. (…)

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