Chinese Find Stay-at-Home Joy in Challenging Times

SHENYANG, Feb. 14 (Xinhua) — Zhang Tongyu, a 7-year-old who lives in Xingcheng of northeast China's Liaoning Province, turned her living room into a Latin dance studio during this year's extended Spring Festival holiday.

By waving her hands and watching carefully as her mother danced to Latin music during one of their "dance classes," Zhang corrected her mother's moves from time to time to better play her role as a dance teacher.

After just one year of learning Latin dance, the little girl has already mastered all the basic dance steps and shown great passion in teaching her mom.

"We stay indoors most of the time due to the epidemic outbreak," said Zhang's mother. "But I can still get a lot of physical exercise from my daughter's dancing lessons, while she gets to review what she has learned."

Like Zhang, many people across the country stayed at home during the holiday to better help contain the spread of the virus, racking their wits and making full use of social media to have fun and entertain themselves.

In a video that has gone viral on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, a young man gives his cat a lecture on mathematical functions.

The young man, surnamed Li, was a doctoral degree candidate at the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University who couldn't go back to his hometown due to the epidemic. He came up with the idea out of boredom, and his cat, with its cute face of helplessness, quickly grew in popularity.

People in many places around the country also enjoyed various online resources provided by museums to enrich their lives and enjoy festival fun.

In southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, many museums have provided digital exhibitions amid the country's fight against the novel coronavirus.

The Chongqing China Three Gorges Museum (CCTGM) and the Chongqing Natural History Museum were among those bringing exhibitions online. Visitors could find audio guides to more than 30 exhibitions and videos on 10 others through CCTGM's official account on WeChat during their virtual tours in online exhibition halls.

East China's Jiangxi Province also rolled out a series of online exhibitions for people to enjoy a cultural feast via the Internet since local museums and memorial halls were closed.

People can acquire travel tips for other countries and authoritative tourism information during the epidemic prevention and control period through the online tourism services launched by China's Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

Both services can be attained on the country's e-government service platform, the official website of the ministry, or via an official app developed by the ministry.

However, work has to be done even in challenging times, especially for those high school students who are getting ready for the national college entrance examination.

"We have been utilizing tools like WeChat and QQ to help students keep up with their studies while staying at home," said Gao Hui, a teacher at the No. 9 Middle School in Shenyang, capital of Liaoning.

According to Gao, the teachers recorded their lectures and posted the homemade videos in the classes' online chat groups, where students could also post their own questions and finish daily assignments.

"To some extent, studying at home helps to cultivate the students' habit of self-learning, which will be beneficial for them in the future," Gao said.

(Source: Xinhua)