F2F Class Notes (Sonia)[W/R]

Make sentences with all the new vocabulary

Dear Philip,

Please kindly find Freada Sun’s resume as an attachment for the Marketing Manager Position forof the Cos-Derm division. She will be available for an interview next Friday morning.

Let me know feel free if you are available for this timeing or not.

Best Regards

Ruby

corrections:

an attachment/ attached

*Please let me know if this time suits you.

Please kindly find Freada Sun’s resume attached. She is applying for the…

Vocabulary

miracle(n):  an unusual and mysterious event that is thought to have been caused by a god because it does not follow the usual laws of nature

secluded: private hard to find, hidden

canal: small river

draconian(adj): laws that are extremely severe, or go further than what is right or necessary.

poverty(n): the condition of being extremely poor

moor: (a boat parked)

eloquent(adj): clear strong message

evocative: making you remember

mythical(adj): not necessarily real, only exists in a story

magpie(n): black bird

maiden(n): a young woman, unmarried

http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/2122313/chinese-girl-adopted-american-family-miraculously

Twenty-two years ago, a heavily pregnant Qian Fenxiang hid herself and her three-year-old daughter on a houseboat on a secluded Suzhou canal, 120km away from her home in Hangzhou, and waited.

Six weeks later, she gave birth on the boat to a second daughter, a child who should have been aborted under China’s draconian one-child policy, introduced in 1979 as a means to reduce poverty.

Xu Lida, her husband, had cut the cord with a pair of scissors he had sterilised with boiling water and, for a do-it-yourself delivery, all seemed to be going well – until the placenta wouldn’t drop. It was a dangerous complication, but hospital care was out of the question. Fortunately for the couple, there was a small clinic near where they were moored, and a doctor who agreed to help without alerting the authorities.

Five days later, the then 24-year-old Xu got up at dawn and took the baby to a covered vegetable market in Suzhou. There, he left the girl with a note written in brush and ink: “Our daughter, Jingzhi, was born at 10am on the 24th day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar, 1995. We have been forced by poverty and affairs of the world to abandon her. Oh, pity the hearts of fathers and mothers far and near! Thank you for saving our little daughter and taking her into your care. If the heavens have feelings, if we are brought together by fate, then let us meet again on the Broken Bridge in Hangzhou on the morning of the Qixi Festival in 10 or 20 years from now.”

Dubbed Chinese Valentine’s Day, the Qixi Festival falls on the seventh day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar and marks the day when the mythical cowherd and his lover, the weaving maiden, are allowed to see each other on a bridge formed by magpies in flight.

The Broken Bridge – which is not actually broken – is no less evocative. The short span between the shore of Hangzhou’s West Lake and the scenic Bai Causeway was mentioned in an eighth-century Tang dynasty poem. In the traditional story White Snake, it is here that the White Lady and her lover, Xu Xian, first meet.

It wasn’t exactly 10 or 20 years later, but on the eve of the Qixi Festival this year, Qian and Xu finally laid eyes on Jingzhi – their healthy, intelligent college student daughter who is known as Catherine Su Pohler by her American adoptive parents.