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Thinking With Your Flagpole

Are you sure that you’re thinking? How do you know?

Bride and Boy and I are back in the academic saddle as of last week, and I saw my freshman writing classes for the first time. Like many Chinese university students, they were often bored during their seven weeks back home, during the huge annual migration that is the Spring Festival period. However, don’t be afraid, for I helped them by giving reading and writing assignments to do. (Attaboy, teach!) So, then I had 324 pages of journal writing to read. (Doofus!) I learn a lot about China and my students that way, though, and not only about which ones are most inclined to plagiarism, and which kids actually try to read in English instead of watching a movie. (You read The Godfather? Puzo’s thick, complex, racy novel? Really?)

Their first new assignment of the term is the argumentative essay. So what do you really feel strongly about? This is often a tough question for kids here, as they are not trained to think critically, and Chinese life requires acceptance, waiting and there-is-no-why (mei you wei shenme) in quantities that North American students can’t imagine. I gave examples and prompts. I asked, for example, Who is the proper owner of the Diaoyu islands? and quickly answered China, of course! and they all smiled at the obviousness of the answer. But when I mentioned that every Japanese student would “think” otherwise, oh, and by the way, that Taiwan is closer than either China or Japan and, yes, Taiwan does not think of itself as being part of the mainland — well, the brows furrowed a little. They started to get where I was going with this: opinion, argument, mind-sharpening, “to learn to write is to learn to have ideas”, as Robert Frost once said.

It put a crease or three in my forehead, too. How do we know when we are really THINKING?

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Pride and Xenophobia: Hitting the Wall

Another James, an American Philosophy grad with a jones for football and a twinkly-eyed swagger, learned who his friends aren’t this week. He lives in the foreign teachers’ residence at our university, along with other Yanks, Aussies, Canucks and, not incidentally, several Japanese professors and students. Jim was rather indignant to find that women in the main-floor administrative office were posting patriotic – that is to say, anti-Japanese – stickers on the office door and in the lobby of the residence. (I wrote about the growing Chinese resentment over the Diaoyu Islands here.) He’s no newbie in China, our jock Socrates, and he saw no point in ‘opening a dialogue’. He took direct and impolitic action, indignantly removing posters that he found distasteful and presumably hurtful to visiting Japanese at our allegedly international university.

Welcome

By the time I met raging James, he was hurt by the lies apparently told to his Chinese colleagues by the office girls he’d always been friendly with, sputtering darkly about threats of dismissal, and incredulous at how quickly he’d been offered the fond  f— you :  This is China. If you don’t like it, leave. Everywhere on our campus float the balloons, the proud red and yellow banners, and the insistent welcome of ubiquitous volun-told student smilers honouring big anniversaries for our school and our college. I don’t believe Jim went for the faculty photo (“an important historical document”) and the following festival of executive self-congratulation. I didn’t, either.

NINE-EIGHTEEN: Face to (Losing) Face in Asia

This morning in Dalian, there were no all-city sirens and alarm bells at 9:18. Yesterday, though, the Chinese loudly remembered what they consider perhaps their greatest national humiliation, an injury that they just won’t let go: the invasion of northeastern China by Japanese forces in 1931. They just call it “9-18”. It’s eighty-one years now, but if anything the memories are recently growing more bitter, as the obscure islands in the East China Sea — now, does Japan call it that? — that are claimed by both countries become a renewed source of hostility.

Diaoyu! Senkaku! Let’s call the whole thing off…

The People’s Republic of China says the Diaoyu Islands are theirs. (Actually, it says these islands belong to Taiwan, but that Taiwan belongs to mainland China, the PRC.) The Republic of China agrees, though it prefers the spelling Tiaoyu Islands. (It, however, also insists that it is a sovereign nation, so that’s a bit of a disagreement.) And although these tiny islands are quite close to Taiwan, Japan calls them the Senkaku Islands and says they are in charge,

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