The difference between our China-Tokyo flight and our Tokyo-Chicago one was obvious immediately when we boarded in Tokyo. This plane (an American Airlines mega-jet) was obviously a little long in the tooth, the seats not nearly as modern and comfortable.
The flight attendants, while friendly enough, were far less attentive than the Japan Air Lines women had been. Ma Lei asked why they were so old and unattractive, whereas Asian-based airlines all have young, beautiful flight attendance. "Probably," she said, "the Americans don't pay enough to get pretty girls to apply."
My Chinese isn't really good enough to explain that it's illegal to discriminate against the fat and ugly in an American company, but I think she understood what I was trying to say. It took a couple of tries, though, because that concept is so foreign to a Chinese mind. In this particular instance, I'm with China!
Then the babies started crying, then shouting, then howling, as babies inevitably do on miserably long flights. Ma Lei was first annoyed that someone would bring a small baby onto a plane — Chinese people seldom do that — then wondered why those parents don't smack them for crying — the Chinese often do that. At one point there were three babies wailing a syncopated reggae beat with voices like fighting cats.
There was very little sleep had by poor Ma Lei. She's never before been on an international flight, and was not prepared for the rigors of 11+ hours in one plane. She perked up as soon as we landed, but she's due for a good long sleep now!
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Saturday, December 15, 2012
Ma Lei's American adventure begins
 |
| An image of a yangguizi — foreign devil |
I suppose I can add another country to my list of places I've set foot, though a stop at the airport doesn't really constitute much of a visit. It's Ma Lei's first time outside China, though, so setting foot even on the kind of universal no-man's-land which is the International Terminal of any major airport has a little more significance.
Ma Lei has been extremely nervous about every part of this trip, the planning for which began six weeks ago, in early November. Sure, she's excited about it, but she's also frightened, and nervous, and anxious about any of the myriad things that can go wrong when traveling. China has an especially long history of seeing itself as the only place where civilized people exist, where civilized people can be safe, and where anyone can be trusted. The outside world has only in the past 100 years or so (and inconsistently even then) been seen as anything other than tribute payments for China's emperor and tales of giant, hairy, foul-smelling, beak-nosed monsters known as yangguizi — foreign devils.
Of course, Ma Lei doesn't see me, my family, or Americans in general as devils, but we are foreign in the extreme, and thus venturing out into a world surrounded by us, created by us, operating by our rules and in our language, was bound to be anxiety-ridden. I don't think I would understand her feelings nearly as well — since Americans after all are blithely confident that our rules will apply anywhere in the world — except that my adventure in Shanhaiguan two months after I'd arrived in China proved very dramatically that this is not the case.
The fears were varied, and most passed quickly, as the momentary stand-in for a generalized anxiety is wont to do. Her visa would be denied. She would be turned away by the Customs official at the border. She would get sick in America. My family would hate her. She wouldn't be able to communicate with her family. She would starve to death because the food would be terrible. (This last one persisted, spurred by reports from not-too-adventurous Chinese people who swore that all food in America is terrible.) The ticket agent in Dalian as we checked in for our first connecting flight, to Tokyo, added yet another one by asking if Ma Lei had a Japanese visa.
The first anxiety attack I was able to sign on to came toward the end of that first flight, when there was a weather delay that forced us into a circling queue north of a nasty storm in Tokyo. At one point, the pilot told us that in case they couldn't get clearance to land within 20 minutes, they were going to have to put in at Tokyo's other airport, which would have done who-knows-what for our ability to get to Chicago.
About two minutes later we got our clearance, and as I write this we're sitting at the departure gate.
As soon as we landed, we had an instant role reversal: for the first time I was Ma Lei's translator and shepherd, rather than the other way around.
It's always such a shock when one gets out of China. The clothes are so much better (and more varied), the hair colors and styles are so different, the girls dress like adult (and sexy) women, not like schoolgirls clinging to childhood. And on the flip side, no one pays any attention to me.
Another thing — public bathrooms with toilets. and PAPER! and SOAP!!! And Western-style toilets, rather than a hole in the floor that you squat over.
Then there's that strange little button on the side of the toilet, with a graphic of a pair of buttocks and a spray of water, which does something too bizarre for words.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Cross-cultural communications
Once in a while I have students in the Support Center who want to talk about the differences between America and China. When dealing with students I try to be circumspect about those areas where I disapprove of Chinese culture, and to emphasize those areas which I love and respect. I don't think it's right for a foreign professor to come to China and dump anti-China propaganda on the students of this country. However, sometimes the cultural conflict becomes unavoidable, even if it's not exactly discussed overtly.
Yesterday, a student named Keren came in to talk about opportunities to study in America for her Ph.D. After we'd discussed the various options, how she needed to prepare, and so on, she wanted to discuss some of the cultural differences she would need to prepare for.
We talked about individualism versus collectivism in the education systems, and the broader range of choice available to American students. She lamented the fact that our university doesn't allow her to take liberal arts classes (though they've got plenty of "Marxist philosophy" thrown at them).
Chinese people, though, are steeped in the art of balancing, and the supposed benefits of collectivism are cemented in their minds, so she went on to say "I think Western individualism has some negative consequences."
Now I should note something about Chinese conversational dynamics. The Chinese are taught never to assert something without qualification. Rather, they raise "both sides" of the issue. Often they lead with what they don't believe, then follow with what they actually do.
Sometimes when dealing with foreigners, Chinese people who don't actually agree with the Party line will nonetheless present as established truths things that are shockingly offensive to the other side, but with that same "I see both sides" mentality. This might be a trap, or it might be an invitation from a student who wants to hear the official dogma debunked. It's often very hard to tell the difference until after you're in the fryer.
It's hard to know what to do in these cases, because I don't want to trash China, and I don't want to trash Chinese culture. Yet I also don't want to be neutral with regard to demonstrably false, propaganda-driven full-frontal assaults on Western culture. So I typically try to use a kind of intellectual judo.
Keren raised the usual arguments, though with a more thoughtful spin because she reads the BBC news. (That's very rare, for a Chinese student.)
First, she talked about violence in America. That's obviously a very real problem, though nowhere near as ubiquitous as the Chinese think it is. I pointed out to her that the US has a free press that loves to talk about every case of violence, whereas the Chinese press cannot do so. I told her that I have personally seen more violence in China than I ever did in America. I pointed out that certain whole categories of violence, such as domestic abuse, are accepted in China but punished in America. (I also mentioned that America is only 30-40 years ahead of China in this regard, since such things used to be tolerated in my country, too.) I told her she'll have to be careful in America, because there are dangerous places, but overall it's not an unsafe place. She nodded intently.
Then she raised the other big one I hear frequently: Americans don't care about their families as much as Chinese people do.
This is a classic case of what Ayn Rand termed a "frozen abstraction" — i.e., a concept or principle that is arbitrarily reduced to only certain of its proper referents, freezing out all other essentially similar instances. The Chinese (most of them) do, indeed, love their families, a love they express through Confucian obedience to their parents well into adulthood. While the extremes of parental rule are in the past, parents still exercise control or at least veto power over such crucial life decisions as a student's major in university, career, and choice of marital partner.
I find this line of discussion especially offensive, because I happen to come from a large and loving family. Of course I don't obey my parents — they wouldn't want me to — but I sure as heck love and respect them, and I consult with them on every important decision.
And if you want to see a family that loves each other, look to my uncle Charles's family, based in the Dallas area. His kids (four of them) and grandkids (six) do everything they can together, they squabble sometimes, and they take care of each other in times of need. Most of all, though, they love each other. At a holiday gathering, it's quite normal for 20-30 people from all reaches of the family to descend upon one house for an all-day party.
So there's a big part of me that bristles every time a Chinese person tells me that — just because we don't allow our parents to dictate every major decision of our lives — Americans don't love our families as much as Chinese people do. In fact, one could make a case that American parents love their children more than Chinese do, since they respect us to make our own decisions on crucial life issues.
One could make that case, but I don't, because I think that, too, would be a frozen abstraction. To love is to value, and valuing is conditioned by one's philosophical understanding of what values are. To the Chinese, with a collectivist and philosophically risk-averse view of values, it seems perfectly loving for parents to order their child not to major in philosophy, not to marry a man from a poor family, not to move overseas, etc.
At this point in my conversation with the student, I made a major pedagogical mistake. In making the point that Westerners see respecting their children's choices as a form of demonstrating love for them, I chose a horrible, horrible example.
A Chinese acquaintance of mine, I said, was in love with an English man who treated her very kindly, spoke fluent Mandarin, and planned to spend the rest of his life in China; but her parents insisted that she must not marry a foreigner, so they broke up. While this wasa perfect case in point, and it should be a great example for a young woman who (by definition, in China) is seeking storybook love (and who almost certainly adores Romeo and Juliet, which they've all read in Chinese), it led to a catastrophe ten minutes later in the conversation.
The signs of trouble should have been immediate. Rather than put herself in the young woman's shoes and bemoaning the parents' orders, as I had expected her to do, the student asserted that this girl's parents were right. "Foreigners and Chinese probably should not get married," she said. "They will not understand each other, and will fight too much. Chinese should only marry Chinese."
The student probably doesn't exactly believe this. Almost all ideas are provisional, in the minds of most Chinese students (with the possible exceptions of the hatred of Japan and the love of China and of money). Unlike America's young hotheads, Chinese youth are prone to put forward ideas they don't fully accept or endorse, then back away from them as warranted by experience or expediency.
Whereas American teens are like cable-news firebrands, Chinese youths are like centrist politicians. They have tendencies, they have interests, they have passions, but they don't have convictions. Whereas Western youths are prone to — as Plato said — nip and tear at arguments like puppies, Chinese youths are more likely to play chess with them. If one argument, like one chess piece, gets "taken," they'll modify their stance and continue playing the game.
With that in mind, I did not start a new argument on the subject of dating foreigners. I did not challenge her on the potentially soul-crushing consequences when parents make decisions that are inappropriate for their children. Instead, I made a friendly tactical retreat, granting her that parents often have better judgment than young people do, but "Americans think" that the final decision should belong with the person whose life is at stake.
If American parents hate the guy their daughter is dating, I told her, the last thing they'll do is to tell her so. Telling her not to date that guy would virtually guarantee that she'll run off to Vegas and marry the bastard. I made the shocking suggestion that, in this respect, American parents are more socially subtle than Chinese parents. That got her attention for a moment, and her eyes, which had been avoiding mine ever since the potentially divisive topics had started to come up, suddenly latched on mine for a second.
A few minutes later, I used my wife's family as an example for some point I was making. Then the student asked the fatal question: "Is your wife American?"
In all innocence I told her no, my wife is Chinese. It literally didn't occur to me that this was a problem until after I'd said it.
Suddenly, the student's face went blank. Her eyes got huge and round, and she quickly stammered something off-topic. She thanked me for the help, packed her bag, and fled the support center as quickly as she could.
It's sad, because I think this student felt terribly ashamed, but she had no need to. I wasn't personally offended at her comment, and indeed I agree that most cross-cultural marriages are highly problematic. Now, though, she likely will not return to the Support Center for the help she needs in order to prepare for study abroad. She may end up paying thousands of dollars to some agency that won't give her as good advice as I could give her for free, and she may end up feeling that talking with foreigners is fraught with social danger.
Later that evening, as we dined on wonton soup and lamb kebabs, I told Ma Lei about my encounter with the student. She nodded with a mock-serious face and told me "The student was right. Chinese women shouldn't marry yangguizi (foreign devils)." Then she punched me in the arm, and we caught a taxi to go home and walk the little dogs.
Yesterday, a student named Keren came in to talk about opportunities to study in America for her Ph.D. After we'd discussed the various options, how she needed to prepare, and so on, she wanted to discuss some of the cultural differences she would need to prepare for.
We talked about individualism versus collectivism in the education systems, and the broader range of choice available to American students. She lamented the fact that our university doesn't allow her to take liberal arts classes (though they've got plenty of "Marxist philosophy" thrown at them).
Chinese people, though, are steeped in the art of balancing, and the supposed benefits of collectivism are cemented in their minds, so she went on to say "I think Western individualism has some negative consequences."
Now I should note something about Chinese conversational dynamics. The Chinese are taught never to assert something without qualification. Rather, they raise "both sides" of the issue. Often they lead with what they don't believe, then follow with what they actually do.
Sometimes when dealing with foreigners, Chinese people who don't actually agree with the Party line will nonetheless present as established truths things that are shockingly offensive to the other side, but with that same "I see both sides" mentality. This might be a trap, or it might be an invitation from a student who wants to hear the official dogma debunked. It's often very hard to tell the difference until after you're in the fryer.
It's hard to know what to do in these cases, because I don't want to trash China, and I don't want to trash Chinese culture. Yet I also don't want to be neutral with regard to demonstrably false, propaganda-driven full-frontal assaults on Western culture. So I typically try to use a kind of intellectual judo.
Keren raised the usual arguments, though with a more thoughtful spin because she reads the BBC news. (That's very rare, for a Chinese student.)
First, she talked about violence in America. That's obviously a very real problem, though nowhere near as ubiquitous as the Chinese think it is. I pointed out to her that the US has a free press that loves to talk about every case of violence, whereas the Chinese press cannot do so. I told her that I have personally seen more violence in China than I ever did in America. I pointed out that certain whole categories of violence, such as domestic abuse, are accepted in China but punished in America. (I also mentioned that America is only 30-40 years ahead of China in this regard, since such things used to be tolerated in my country, too.) I told her she'll have to be careful in America, because there are dangerous places, but overall it's not an unsafe place. She nodded intently.
Then she raised the other big one I hear frequently: Americans don't care about their families as much as Chinese people do.
This is a classic case of what Ayn Rand termed a "frozen abstraction" — i.e., a concept or principle that is arbitrarily reduced to only certain of its proper referents, freezing out all other essentially similar instances. The Chinese (most of them) do, indeed, love their families, a love they express through Confucian obedience to their parents well into adulthood. While the extremes of parental rule are in the past, parents still exercise control or at least veto power over such crucial life decisions as a student's major in university, career, and choice of marital partner.
I find this line of discussion especially offensive, because I happen to come from a large and loving family. Of course I don't obey my parents — they wouldn't want me to — but I sure as heck love and respect them, and I consult with them on every important decision.
And if you want to see a family that loves each other, look to my uncle Charles's family, based in the Dallas area. His kids (four of them) and grandkids (six) do everything they can together, they squabble sometimes, and they take care of each other in times of need. Most of all, though, they love each other. At a holiday gathering, it's quite normal for 20-30 people from all reaches of the family to descend upon one house for an all-day party.
So there's a big part of me that bristles every time a Chinese person tells me that — just because we don't allow our parents to dictate every major decision of our lives — Americans don't love our families as much as Chinese people do. In fact, one could make a case that American parents love their children more than Chinese do, since they respect us to make our own decisions on crucial life issues.
One could make that case, but I don't, because I think that, too, would be a frozen abstraction. To love is to value, and valuing is conditioned by one's philosophical understanding of what values are. To the Chinese, with a collectivist and philosophically risk-averse view of values, it seems perfectly loving for parents to order their child not to major in philosophy, not to marry a man from a poor family, not to move overseas, etc.
At this point in my conversation with the student, I made a major pedagogical mistake. In making the point that Westerners see respecting their children's choices as a form of demonstrating love for them, I chose a horrible, horrible example.
A Chinese acquaintance of mine, I said, was in love with an English man who treated her very kindly, spoke fluent Mandarin, and planned to spend the rest of his life in China; but her parents insisted that she must not marry a foreigner, so they broke up. While this wasa perfect case in point, and it should be a great example for a young woman who (by definition, in China) is seeking storybook love (and who almost certainly adores Romeo and Juliet, which they've all read in Chinese), it led to a catastrophe ten minutes later in the conversation.
The signs of trouble should have been immediate. Rather than put herself in the young woman's shoes and bemoaning the parents' orders, as I had expected her to do, the student asserted that this girl's parents were right. "Foreigners and Chinese probably should not get married," she said. "They will not understand each other, and will fight too much. Chinese should only marry Chinese."
The student probably doesn't exactly believe this. Almost all ideas are provisional, in the minds of most Chinese students (with the possible exceptions of the hatred of Japan and the love of China and of money). Unlike America's young hotheads, Chinese youth are prone to put forward ideas they don't fully accept or endorse, then back away from them as warranted by experience or expediency.
Whereas American teens are like cable-news firebrands, Chinese youths are like centrist politicians. They have tendencies, they have interests, they have passions, but they don't have convictions. Whereas Western youths are prone to — as Plato said — nip and tear at arguments like puppies, Chinese youths are more likely to play chess with them. If one argument, like one chess piece, gets "taken," they'll modify their stance and continue playing the game.
With that in mind, I did not start a new argument on the subject of dating foreigners. I did not challenge her on the potentially soul-crushing consequences when parents make decisions that are inappropriate for their children. Instead, I made a friendly tactical retreat, granting her that parents often have better judgment than young people do, but "Americans think" that the final decision should belong with the person whose life is at stake.
If American parents hate the guy their daughter is dating, I told her, the last thing they'll do is to tell her so. Telling her not to date that guy would virtually guarantee that she'll run off to Vegas and marry the bastard. I made the shocking suggestion that, in this respect, American parents are more socially subtle than Chinese parents. That got her attention for a moment, and her eyes, which had been avoiding mine ever since the potentially divisive topics had started to come up, suddenly latched on mine for a second.
A few minutes later, I used my wife's family as an example for some point I was making. Then the student asked the fatal question: "Is your wife American?"
In all innocence I told her no, my wife is Chinese. It literally didn't occur to me that this was a problem until after I'd said it.
Suddenly, the student's face went blank. Her eyes got huge and round, and she quickly stammered something off-topic. She thanked me for the help, packed her bag, and fled the support center as quickly as she could.
It's sad, because I think this student felt terribly ashamed, but she had no need to. I wasn't personally offended at her comment, and indeed I agree that most cross-cultural marriages are highly problematic. Now, though, she likely will not return to the Support Center for the help she needs in order to prepare for study abroad. She may end up paying thousands of dollars to some agency that won't give her as good advice as I could give her for free, and she may end up feeling that talking with foreigners is fraught with social danger.
Later that evening, as we dined on wonton soup and lamb kebabs, I told Ma Lei about my encounter with the student. She nodded with a mock-serious face and told me "The student was right. Chinese women shouldn't marry yangguizi (foreign devils)." Then she punched me in the arm, and we caught a taxi to go home and walk the little dogs.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Oh-bu-okay
Three points of Chinese language, that will add up to an anecdote that I found funny. Dunno if the rest of you will think it's as humorous as I did.
1) In Chinese, you can ask a simple question in the form of a declarative sentence. For example, you can say "We'll go to dinner now, good/not good," and that means "Would you like to go to dinner now?"
2) Many expressions that in English would be a single word are, in Chinese, combinations of characters (usually two). So for example, "clear" or "understandable" is "ming bai," which literally means "bright white."
3) If you want to negate one of those two-syllable words, you often need to put the word "not" — "bu," in Chinese — in between the first and the second syllables. For example, "hao kan" means "good-looking." So if Ma Lei asks me if something or someone is "hao bu hao kan," that means "good looking, or not?"
Ma Lei has learned "Okay" as a word for "good," or "hao" in Chinese. So the other day, she and I were having a rather agitated mock-fight about what to do for dinner. As usual, I wanted to go somewhere more expensive, while she wanted to go for the cheapest possible alternative. "Let's go to the cheap restaurant," she said in Chinese, and then in defiant Chinglish: "Oh-bu-okay?"
I completely cracked up, and I have now adopted "oh-bu-okay" as my new favorite in-joke. I share it with you-all, in case any of you enjoy it as much as I did.
And by the way, we did end up going to the cheap restaurant after all.
1) In Chinese, you can ask a simple question in the form of a declarative sentence. For example, you can say "We'll go to dinner now, good/not good," and that means "Would you like to go to dinner now?"
2) Many expressions that in English would be a single word are, in Chinese, combinations of characters (usually two). So for example, "clear" or "understandable" is "ming bai," which literally means "bright white."
3) If you want to negate one of those two-syllable words, you often need to put the word "not" — "bu," in Chinese — in between the first and the second syllables. For example, "hao kan" means "good-looking." So if Ma Lei asks me if something or someone is "hao bu hao kan," that means "good looking, or not?"
Ma Lei has learned "Okay" as a word for "good," or "hao" in Chinese. So the other day, she and I were having a rather agitated mock-fight about what to do for dinner. As usual, I wanted to go somewhere more expensive, while she wanted to go for the cheapest possible alternative. "Let's go to the cheap restaurant," she said in Chinese, and then in defiant Chinglish: "Oh-bu-okay?"
I completely cracked up, and I have now adopted "oh-bu-okay" as my new favorite in-joke. I share it with you-all, in case any of you enjoy it as much as I did.
And by the way, we did end up going to the cheap restaurant after all.
Sunday, October 21, 2012
A Charming Mendicant
Hi all,
This year my classroom teaching responsibilities have been reduced to only two freshman-level reading courses. The bulk of my time is spent as Coordinator of the Foundation Year Support Center, helping freshman students understand the assignments for their classes in Reading, Speaking and Listening, Writing, and Business English. Working in the Support Center has given me a tremendous appreciation for the progress our students make over the course of a year in our program, because for the first time I see where they start.
It's been a first, eye-opening experience working this closely with freshmen. While a few of them start with impressive English ability, the majority are nowhere near ready to take university classes in English. They've typically studied English in the Chinese way: cramming their heads full of out-of-context vocabulary (by means of which to pass vocabulary exams), learning strategies to guess which parts of an essay to quote (by means of which to pass "reading comprehension" exams without actually comprehending anything), and perhaps memorizing a few sentence patterns (by means of which to pass essay-writing exams without actually knowing how to write an essay). Most have had 6+ years of mandatory English classes, yet never actually spoken an appreciable amount of English.
Yesterday I was visited by a charming girl with wide, mendicant eyes and the manner of a hopeful ascetic eagerly offering herself to the whip in pursuit of enlightenment. She came in silently and stood next to the chair, parts of her body physically pulsing with a war between fear and hope, until I invited her to sit. She quickly slipped into the chair, as if afraid to disturb the air too much. She filled-in the visitor's log wordlessly. She had a slight exotic but normal-sounding English name: Lia.
When I asked what she wanted to talk about, she spoke for the first time, pausing carefully between words: "My English is-a very pooh." Though this last word sounded exactly like "Pooh" in the Christopher Robins stories, her pronunciation was clear and deliberate, and she grinned proudly once she had gotten the words out. This may have been the first sentence she'd ever spoken to a foreigner.
But she didn't answer my question aloud, perhaps not wanting to tempt fate by attempting a second English sentence. Instead, she silently handed me her copy of Holes, the adolescent novel we're using as primary text for our reading class. It's fortunate that, although she is not one of my students, I am also teaching reading, so I am quite familiar with the book. I asked if she had any specific questions about the book.
I always ask students if they have any specific questions, but the ones whose English is "very Pooh" almost never do. It's hard for me not to take it personally, because surely anyone can come up with something specific — a particular word or expression the student doesn't understand, if nothing else — but I realize these students have been trained to answer questions and never, ever ask them.
Lia surprised me. Silently, almost solemnly, she opened her book. Her book was pristine — no markings, no underlinings, not even a fingerprint — yet she flipped instantly to page 23 and pointed immediately to the word "Armpit," the unlovely nickname of one of the characters in the book. The gesture was done so quickly, she had to have memorized the exact location on the page. I became slightly self-conscious: I wondered how much she had practiced for this meeting, and hoped I could live up to whatever fantasy study-session she'd envisioned.
She hadn't asked an actual question, so I asked her one: "Do you know what an armpit is?" She smiled again, nodded, and pointed to one of hers.
I explained that this is the nickname of one of the boys, then asked, "Do you know what a nickname is?" She was less sure of herself this time, perhaps because a nickname is something she couldn't point to, but she mumbled something that might have been the right answer. Just to be sure, I explained it to her a little bit, and she nodded.
"Why might the boys give their friend a nickname like Armpit?" I asked.
Lia got very serious, brow furrowed, eyes darting back and forth as if searching an invisible vocabulary list. Finally she smiled nervously and shook her head. "Sorry?" She asked.
I tried again: "If he has that nickname, what must he be like?" then clarified: "What is he like," because I figured "must… be" would confuse her. This time she smiled brightly yet briefly in understanding the question, but her brow furrowed again as she tried to come up with an answer, and again her eyes searched some invisible textbook for an explanation. She gave up and shook her head back and forth once, quick as a bunny, embarrassed but still smiling gamely.
I explained in Chinese that this boy must smell bad, then made a face and sniffed loudly at my own armpit. She nodded that she understood, but I could see in her face that she didn't, not really. The concept of giving a friend such an insulting nickname is too far from her Chinese context, in which children are given names like "Flower Bud" and "Shining Future." She clearly knew what I meant by saying Armpit must smell bad, but she couldn't process it.
She asked one more question about the book, which I was able to explain a bit more easily.
Then she sat and waited, straight-backed, not saying a word, perhaps not sure how to ask, as if waiting for me to explain something — anything — to her. She clearly wasn't done, but wasn't able to ask anything more.
Not knowing what else to do, I turned to the first page of the book and read her the first sentence: "There is no lake at Camp Green Lake." That's a classic writer's "hook," almost too mechanical a one, but perhaps effective. I would have loved to have talked about authorial intentions and the use of irony, but obviously it would have been of no use to my audience of one, so I tried to at least raise the concept in a less abstract way.
I read the sentence to Lia, then asked her, "Is there something strange about that sentence?" She didn't understand the question. I asked again: "Is that a normal thing to say?" She didn't understand "normal," so I tried "common."
She pondered for a while, her facial muscles going in all directions like hamsters chasing seeds, then she settled on the safest answer: she nodded "yes," and smiled sweetly.
That was wrong, so I tried again.
I sought for a good metaphor, and thought about Dalian, where it rains a lot and everything grows well. "If I called part of Dalian the Dalian desert, would that be a common thing to say?"
She started to nod yes, but I resorted to a Chinese teacher method and gave her the answer by shaking my head and frowning "no." Dalian is in no way a desert. She stopped nodding, stopped smiling, and asked timidly, "No?"
I smiled great-big and nodded, then pointed back at the first sentence. "So if someone says 'There is no lake at Camp Green Lake,' is that a normal or common thing to say?" Again she hesitated, but finally she reluctantly pushed forward the answer... "No?"
"Yes! Exactly!" I said, with exaggerated excitement. Her face instantly uncreased and brightened with surprise.
I asked her about the word "mystery," which she knew in the sense that she could tell me what it meant in words, but she had no real concept of what it really meant. I told her that this sentence is a mystery, and she isn't supposed to know what it means yet, but the author will tell her the information to understand it later.
She frowned again, and the hamsters ran around under her skin, and her shoulders rocked back and forth asymmetrically, but she finally got it. She repeated back to me, uncertainly, "I … don't… suppose to understand. It's Mystery!" I said yes, and her face lit up again. I made sure to say that she will understand the answer to the mystery later in the book, but for now the reader is expected to have unanswered questions. That's a tough concept for a Chinese student to understand.
I asked her what information the author was telling us in the first chapter (only a page long). Even as I asked the question, I realized it was unfair: too abstract a question.
She couldn't answer, so I asked her to take out her notebook and write down the basic questions "Who, what, when, where, and why."
Her notebook was pristine, as if she hadn't a clue how to take notes. That's not unusual: Chinese students are not taught to take notes. Taking notes is a conceptual skill. They are given lists of things to memorize, and that's what they do. So I wrote the first notes for her.
Across the top of the page, I wrote the five "wh" questions. Down the side of the page, I wrote Chapter 1, 2, 3, etc. Then I asked her to fill in what information about each of those questions she could glean from each of the first chapters. She immediately got that Chapter 1 was all about "Where," the setting of the novel, so we worked together to fill in some additional details. On the second page of her notebook I started a vocabulary list, which we turned to frequently as we filled in words and expressions she didn't know.
Chapter 2, only half a page long, contained information about both "Where" — the setting — and "Who" — the main character. This flummoxed her, so it took a long time and a lot of tooth-pulling. So when I asked her, amidst five paragraphs of information about Camp Green Lake, what she could understand about the main character, she couldn't answer me, despite my reading and re-reading the two sentences: "Stanley was from a poor family. He had never been to camp before." Neither she nor the hamsters could extract the information that Stanley was from a poor family, because it was embedded in other information about other topics.
It was agonizing, it was maddening, and it was frustrating. But with every new revelation, even as simple as "Stanley is poor," Lia glowed with excitement as if she were Helen Keller understanding the hand character for "water."
We pressed on for an hour, maybe an hour and a half, pushing through ten pages of the text. I don't think Lia would ever have stopped me, had I pressed her to keep going — not until her face plopped down on the desk in exhaustion — but fortunately my next appointment, a group of 13 students from a different reading class who wanted help understanding a different assignment, arrived before we could find out.
I apologized to Lia for having to end our lesson, though I could see she had absorbed quite as much as she was capable of. As I sent her out, she beamed with excitement over understanding Something New.
I know I will see that girl again, probably at the same time every week, probably with the same frustrating lack of comprehension, and probably with the same hamsters under her skin. I know, too, that she will fall behind in her Business Management class, because she is in no position to understand the text, the instructor's spoken English, or the open-inquiry method of instruction. I hope, though, and I expect based on her attitude, that she will catch up quickly. And maybe, after our program, she will be a fluent English-speaker and (to borrow a phrase) an enquiring mind.
RG
Monday, October 15, 2012
The Accidental Student
A colleague of mine encountered a second-year student — i.e., someone who'd passed through a year's worth of our classes, all of which are taught in English, and not flunked out. Nevertheless, the student seemed to have no English comprehension. On a reading comprehension test, he was stymied by "flower" and the verb "runs."
Asked what the problem was, he asked if he could use Chinese. My friend agreed.
In Chinese, the student explained that in high school, his English teacher was a vicious tyrant, and as a kind of curse on that teacher he'd sworn never to learn English.
When his college entrance exam results came back, with the attached list of schools he could attend, the majority specifically said English was required. Somehow, my Department — which teaches every single one of its classes in English — failed to say so on the brief description sent to potential students, so he chose us as an escape from English. Oops!
The student came from a remote town in far-southern Yunnan province, so he was an outsider even to the Chinese students, who didn't help him understand. It was only two weeks into his freshman year that he realized that he was in for four years of hell.
Can you imagine being at university for two weeks before suddenly discovering that you're supposed to be taking every single one of your courses in a language you not only don't know, but actively hate?
In an American university, such a student would quickly be directed into a program better suited to his interests and abilities. Here, though, there is no such thing as failing even a single class, so the student was processed forward into the second year, despite his having understood nothing whatsoever from any of his classes.
Yet the aspiration of my Department is to be a top-100 internationally-ranked business school. That's going to be a tall order.
Asked what the problem was, he asked if he could use Chinese. My friend agreed.
In Chinese, the student explained that in high school, his English teacher was a vicious tyrant, and as a kind of curse on that teacher he'd sworn never to learn English.
When his college entrance exam results came back, with the attached list of schools he could attend, the majority specifically said English was required. Somehow, my Department — which teaches every single one of its classes in English — failed to say so on the brief description sent to potential students, so he chose us as an escape from English. Oops!
The student came from a remote town in far-southern Yunnan province, so he was an outsider even to the Chinese students, who didn't help him understand. It was only two weeks into his freshman year that he realized that he was in for four years of hell.
Can you imagine being at university for two weeks before suddenly discovering that you're supposed to be taking every single one of your courses in a language you not only don't know, but actively hate?
In an American university, such a student would quickly be directed into a program better suited to his interests and abilities. Here, though, there is no such thing as failing even a single class, so the student was processed forward into the second year, despite his having understood nothing whatsoever from any of his classes.
Yet the aspiration of my Department is to be a top-100 internationally-ranked business school. That's going to be a tall order.
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