English writing practice for Wednesday 16th April Today, a friend has published an article on a website, talking about his day-to-day life under the threat of the pandemic and racism in New Zealand. He shared the personal experiences in the article that suggested racism has already existed in society for a long time, and as a social issue, the pandemic made the situation even worse for the disadvantaged minority groups. In the beginning, the spread of the virus seemed to be labelled about Chinese, and many media and the local authorities used Chinese flu as the name of the virus reminding people to raise concerns about the development of the novel deadly bug. But soon the name of the virus has led to massive racist attacks on Chinese people.

English writing practice for Tuesday 14th April I broke a tooth tonight. Initially, today was a wonderful day. At the daytime, I finished all the work on my to-do list, it was the first time since I have started to work from home. Then I went to the dance studio. After the intensive training last week, I felt my body was full of energy, and I am ready to move into the next level. After that, I had a fascinating supper with friends in a good bar. We planned a lot of things, such as taking a holiday in Thailand while the pandemic finished. When I backed to home, it was roughly 9:00 PM, I wanted to end up the day by taking a bath and curl up on my bed. But at that moment, I fell over in my bathroom. After I got up, I saw a tooth on the floor. It was my tooth. The first idea came to my mind was, God, I just made a nice couple of tea, and I couldn’t drink it anymore. Also, I probably need to re-arrange my schedule tomorrow, postpone several meetings, make an appointment with my dentist, and push mountains of work close to the edge of their deadline. A lot of things are driving me crazy.

Daily writing practice for Monday 14th April Have you ever been treated unfairly by others? Did someone look down on you just because of your gender, age or even your accent? Many people have the bad experience that they are discriminated against, and they might consider it difficult to fight back or shrug off it. As an enduring human behaviour, discrimination comes from several reasons. First of all, discrimination is often considered involving misleading information on mass media. Most media are region-centred, and their understanding of specific areas or cultures is limited by certain facts. As a result, they provide single-sided stories to their audiences. For instance, you rarely can see the foreign news as a headline that appears on the newspaper in XX

fleabag My favourite TV series in 2019 is Fleabag. I have watched the award-winning series for a couple of times, but every time I was like it is still new to me, and I always can find out some stunning points through the lines. Fleabag is a two-season British TV comedy, which was acted and produced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. The story is about a woman who lives in London alone, and how she rides out her difficulties by rebuilding the relationship with her family and friends. Fleabag looks like far away from some traditional comedies which make people laugh by setting up a lot of punchlines. Actually, many people say they weep out a lot when they are watching it, because the story makes them recall their personal life. At the first season, the story focuses on what happen to the ‘Fleabag’ and how her life was messed up. In this season, she seems to lose the ability to cope with people and lack the ability to be very honest with herself. Because she doesn’t want to be responsible for the failure of her relationship, so her ex-partner left her. Also because she had an affair with her best friend’s boyfriend, and that caused the death of her best friend. The accident hurts her very much ,yet she is running away from the reality. In the second season, the atmosphere of the story became warmer and lighter. In this season, she fall in love with a priest, and this relationship helps her get out of her life troubles and makes her become braver. Love rescued her. At the end, even though the relationship finished ,but this time, she was taught how to love and take responsibility.

English diary for Wednesday 8th April As a multicultural country, China has a diverse language system and contains hundreds of languages and dialects in different areas and regions. Mandarin is the official language, but actually many Chinese don’t really speak it at home or only use it as a working language . My native language is mandarin, and my grandparents come from north China, so I speak Mandarin with a little bit north accent. People in my birth town speak mandarin too. Many of them are migrants, they have moved to the city during the 1980s-1990s . Even though they have quite different cultural backgrounds and religious backgrounds, most people go for speaking mandarin for communication conveniently . I moved to Canton in 2015, and since that, I have been starting to learning a new language :Cantonese. At the beginning, I didn’t intend to take up a new language. I am not a successful language learnerI, and I lack the essential confidence of language learning,. It would take years to know how to chat with locals by using Cantonese .

English diary for Tuesday 4th April I went to the dance studio tonight. After the lunar Chinese new year, it was the first time that I took a dance class. Before the class began, we had a little bit of catching up. We swapped our thoughts that during the quarantine period, we both felt quite frustrated and overwhelmed.Moreover,We have got the same feeling that the world we knew has changed, but we don’t know what will happen in the future. We have done some warming up at the beginning. Due to many of us haven’t done any exercise in the past 3 months, so a slow but specially-designed stretch practice would help us to unlock our body. After that, we have done some strength training--mainly focusing on our weak legs. I have to say that I was quite exhausted at the middle of the class, but I still persevered. After a break, we started a short improvised practice. We were asked to roll over on the floor and push a ball moving at the same time. It was so difficult for me, because the ball is so tiny and we only have a small contact area with the ball. The class ended up with a relaxation practice, we all thought that was a wonderful night.

English diary for Monday 23rd March Do you fancy getting a pet? Even though you don’t have a pet, but you are familiar with the cute, fluffy creatures. Millions of people live with pets, food and goods of pets contribute a massive amount of money to global economy, and the lovely funny thing creates thousands of hundreds of job opportunities for human beings. It is difficult to say we feed pets, or maybe they feed us. Having a pet is a reasonable choice for people. First of all, pets help us communicate better with people. Asking the name of a pet seems ta perfect opening if you don’t know how to start a talk with a person.   Moreover, many pet owners said that they meet new friends through walking the dog outside. Indeed, pets shorten the distance between you and other people.

English diary for 18th March finally, I went to see my dentist today. So excited to see he is still alive and looks full of hopes. I was the first patient of him since the virus outbreak in 2020. As a two-kids father, he joked that he was considering to shift his career to the gigolo business if the pandemic won't finish in May. As a kind response, I said I still want to be his first customer.

English diary for Monday 16th March I just finished jogging back to my apartment. I’m totally zoned, and I want to go to bed immediately.  Since March, the weather is warmer in Canton, and everything seems hopeful and charming. The city seems to be recovering from the hit of Covid-19, for people are starting to go down to streets and most shops are reopening. After a long winter, spring is not too late for everyone. Meanwhile, I am raising concern about the pandemic around the world. It is a hard time for everyone to get through. When you see the people are suffering from the deadly bug and you can do nothing, it is quite powerless fo me and I feel like it’s going to traumatise me a lot.