In the periodical room at Henan University of Technology’s new library, you can find English versions of Sports Illustrated, Vogue and Car and Driver along with such scintillating Chinese titles as World Nonferrous Metals, Diamond & Abrasives Engineering and the Journal of Pesticide Science.
What you’ll find in the rest of the library is a lot of barren bookshelves.
Thousands of books have yet to be transferred from the school’s old libraries to the new 10-story building, which opened in September and is still not finished. Many of the shelves are half-empty, giving them the appearance of a store during a closeout sale.
Lee, a woman who works in the reference department, told me that the library is currently stocked primarily with economics and science books, though I also saw sections on philosophy, psychology and politics. She said many more books from the university’s 2 million-volume collection should be moved to the new facility by the end of the year.
The top five floors are still under construction, as is a large lake and walkways behind the library. The front of the building, which is now a huge concrete plaza with a few trees and plants, will eventually be landscaped to make it look more like a park than a parking lot.
Lee, 47, has a library science degree from nearby Zhengzhou University and her daughter is studying economics at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She has traveled widely in the U.S., Europe and Asia, and speaks excellent English that she improved through online chats.
“You can learn a lot of English on the Internet,’’ she says.
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My ears are ringing from all the ringing on my campus.
A recording of an electronic chime can be heard dozens of times every day. It signals the five-minute warning before class begins, the start of class, the beginning of the mid-class break, the end of the mid-class break and the end of class.
With classes going on throughout the day, it’s a recording that’s played more often than “Auld Lang Syne’’ on New Year’s Eve. And I don’t even need to be on campus to name that tune. It’s played so loudly that I can hear it in my apartment across the street, a quarter mile from the closest classroom.
