Sunday 7th April, 2013               2030

With not having to get until 0830 this morning I didn’t go to bed until after midnight. Stupid boy. The animals decided five o’clock was enough, with Pooh doing his party trick of leaping up on the bathroom door handle and opening it. Not only did the noise wake me but of course I had to get up to close it again for fear that the cats would run amok and break things in there.

Still, just one class today and then we rode to town for lunch in KBW, put money on Joanna’s card to order my cat biscuits (methinks I will buy the dog stuff online too from now on if it is cheaper) and then pop to Lottemart. Tomorrow I am going to introduce Qing to a sort of British roast chicken (skinny partridge more like) dinner. She loves mashed spuds and although I would love to have done roasties it is not possible to do the bird and them in a mini oven simultaneously. Anyway mash is my favourite too. Carrots and peas and it will be as reasonable a facsimile as I can create but more importantly she will have gravy for the first time as well.

With her exam taking place in Hefei on Saturday she will leave here on Friday but she says she will return “soon” - whatever that means when it comes from a Chinese woman! She has though promised to be here for the weekend my Hilton friend visits. I like having her here, even if it means I am in fact working every waking minute on correcting her diction or grammar.

After we got back this afternoon she had to bus to town again because her dad, uncle and aunt were coming to give her the money to book a second exam in May should it be necessary.

Unbeknown to either of us and I have just found out, while we were shopping in Lottemart one of Kevin’s female sophomores, at around two o’clock this afternoon leapt from her 6th floor dormitory in a successful suicide bid. The reason I have so far heard? Boyfriend trouble. Unbelievable. No graduation, no more boyfriends, no husband, child, no nothing. Apparently a photo taken on a mobile phone of the body on campus covered in a sheet and surrounded by police is now on QQ (their Facebook equivalent) which I find most distasteful if true.

Monday 8th         1940

Further on the deceased girl. Nothing to do with a boyfriend. She had a history of depression. Obviously Kevin knew her, her name was Hebe, but I knew her too. Last year she would often talk to me when I was drinking near the shops. Both Kevin and I knew something was wrong with her - one day she was like a Jack in the box, the next as miserable as sin. We don’t know if she was bipolar or manic depressive but last year she disappeared for maybe 6 weeks when she was probably committed but then returned. It was almost as if she had been given a lobotomy but the fact was she was on medication. Whatever else it did (aside from obviously not working in the end) it seemed to knock all the stuffing out of her personality. Although Kevin told me (he is very cut up, understandably) she was doing very well in class lately, I noticed she was either morose all the time or in a trance and on many occasions she simply walked by me instead of as before stopping for a chat.

I am incredibly sad and of course all three classes today brought the subject up during my intro to the lessons where I invite any interesting stories. When I saw Kevin at lunchtime I mentioned we had discussed it and when I mentioned this he seemed amazed. When I asked “why?” his perfectly valid comment was that he wasn’t qualified to talk about it. Neither am I, but then who on earth really is? Shrinks? Counsellors? It’s all guesswork and had I shut the students up then in my view that would have been worse than talking about it. Far better they are open, which they appear to be with foreigners far more than native teachers, possibly because they feel (and possibly justifiably in my opinion) the Chinese teachers on the whole don’t care once they leave the classroom.

The one big question I have though, and I know if someone is determined to die then they will find a way, is why, when she had such a history, was she still billeted on the 6th floor instead of having been moved to the ground floor? My thoughts at present go out to her family, friends, classmates and roommates. This has been a sad 24 hours indeed.