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Guest Post: A Chinese Student Speaks Up

Posted by :James Howden On : June 29, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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Through a P2C2E — a “process too complicated to explain,” as Salman Rushdie called it in his wonderful youth novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories — I got to meet Ms. Z. Like many Chinese university students, perhaps most, she studies in a major chosen by her family, not by her. Unlike many, she is a writer, even in her second language. In a spasm of bravery, she wrote an English essay about something honest and true-hearted and even a bit angry, and it found its way to me. It is a declaration of independence. It is her youthful emancipation proclamation.

I was moved by her courage and her plain-spoken message, and asked her permission to share it with my readers. (I did a quick edit of some rough second-language edges, but this is all Ms. Z.) She is not a “typical” Chinese student, if you assume such a thing exists, but neither is she alone. Perhaps you will enjoy a small taste of life in a Chinese university — but this time, from an eagle-eyed student perspective. She calls her piece “Marionette Generation”.

The ties that bind.

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Jacob Riis (on perseverance and “pounding the rock”)

Posted by :James Howden On : June 29, 2013
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

I had never heard of Jacob Riis (1849-1914) before my attention to all things San Antonio Spurs reached new heights during their NBA Finals series with the Miami Heat. (Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, tired of the “typical, trite silly crap you see in locker rooms at all levels”, has long had Riis’s stonecutter quote displayed in the Spurs’ dressing room. I was puzzled when a microphone picked up “Coach Pop” imploring his team during a timeout to “keep pounding the rock!” This could have been basketball jargon for “keep dribbling the ball”, which was a strange thing for such a team-oriented coach to say. Now, suddenly millions of NBA fans know of Jacob Riis and his love for basketball  tireless dedication to social justice.)

Riis was a journalist, a muck-raker, an activist and a noted practitioner of the brand-new art of photography. Born in Denmark, he was a relentless advocate for immigrant rights and decent living conditions in New York. It was in the context of his activism on behalf of the “poor, huddled masses” that he made the above statement. The Spurs use it because they believe in the process of team-building, slowly and steadily. I think of it when trying to teach English, build community, educate for justice, find my mislaid abdominals and write and write. (What’s your rock?)

T&F in China (Pt. 2): Running Hard, Who Knows Why?

Posted by :James Howden On : June 25, 2013
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Category: All About Sports

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Part 1 of this piece, a rundown of a track and field meet in a Chinese university, can be read here. It ended with the writer noticing more people out for a run at his campus’s outdoor stadium:

…I liked the athletic company, though there were nearly always as many walkers as runners, and some of the runners looked pretty grim about the whole thing. On the day of the meet, I saw why their training looked so dour. They weren’t exactly staring death in the face, but perhaps they couldn’t help but notice his pimply younger brother.

My feelings careened all over the emotional map during the women’s 3000-metre race. It was glorious, pathetic, dramatic, and a complete mess. (So was I, by the end.) Contrary to all the rules of track competition, many of the schools had conscripted a young man to run alongside their female entrant, while others had a relay team taking one or two hundred-metre turns urging the runners on and charging pell-mell across the infield. Some of the go-go girls carried water bottles, and would fling handfuls at the faces of their favourite athlete on this warm day. Some competitors plodded drearily, hands on exhausted hips. There were two heats of this spectacular struggle session, so as the lead runner was heading for the home stretch, she lengthened her stride trying to achieve a winning time. A dozen young men ran with her, just inside the infield, occasionally barrelling over a race marshal or spectator. Her desperate effort across the last hundred metres had me choked with admiring emotion. The glory of sport! Even here! What a noble effort! But as I moved closer to the finish line, I saw a growing collection of young women, dazed and prone, or in a couple of photogenic cases (but sorry, no photo!) a limp body being carried in the arms of a young Galahad towards a patch of shade. Anxious teams of friends and first-aid volunteers (with no training) fanned and flung water in a flurry of urgent and useless ministrations to fallen warriors. That’s when I started to get angry.

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Sports Day 1: Track & Field With Chinese Characteristics

Posted by :James Howden On : June 23, 2013
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Category: All About Sports

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JamesHowden.com is always concerned about the reading pleasure of its visitors. Because the report on my university’s June athletic competition is full of dudgeon and joy, it has been split into two parts. (Well, okay, my bride also said, “It’s too darned long!”) This is Part 1, while Part 2 is here.

I wrote earlier about the (nearly) annual Sports Day at my university (though that story only covered the day’s first 90 minutes). It is a mark of how deeply North America-centric I was (and likely still am) that I was mildly shocked, on arriving in China four years ago, to find that universities had no sports teams. The alliance between higher education and elevated levels of sporting competition is mainly an American thing, so I should’ve known; non-academic sports clubs and academies are the rule in Europe, Asia, and South America.1 There are glorified intramural basketball or volleyball games involving different faculties, which sometimes draw hundreds of drumming, shouting supporters. Yes, and there is (usually) a track and field meet, bumped off the schedule last year for the 60th anniversary commemorations of my university.2 In my earlier piece, I didn’t get past the pageantry, so here, by popular request3, is the sporting part of the story.

1 I may have been fooled by watching Kung Fu Dunk, starring Taiwanese singing sensation Jay Chou, known here as Zhou Jielun, on my first flight to China in 2009. A disgraced Shaolin monk (Chou, whom you might have seen as Kato in the movie version of The Green Hornet), is recruited by a semi-criminal sleazeball to transfer his other-worldly martial skills into stardom in the C.U.B.A. (Chinese University Basketball Association). It was spectacularly and delightfully bad. Anyway, only a few prestigious universities participate in the CUBA, which it turns out is mainly a place to enroll unqualified students – those who came up through State basketball academies, but have no future as pros – for the glory it will cast on school administrators. Hmm. Maybe it’s not completely different from American schools…

2 That day had pageantry and enforced student enthusiasm by the bucketful, so apparently there was no need for running and jumping that year. This reinforces my suspicions about what this “athletic meeting” is for, and for whom.

3 Well, my buddy JP has been bugging me about it. And my wife. That’s popularity!

A view of the finish line area from across the infield: officials, marshals, timers, medical volunteers, team spirit leaders, and a bunch of random people milling about. Photo: J.P. Mayer

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John Wooden (on failure)

Posted by :James Howden On : June 21, 2013
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“Success is never final; failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.”

John Wooden (191o-2010) was not only the greatest basketball coach of all time, but a wise teacher for 20th and 21st century America. I quoted his wisdom in a recent article here. He was my hero, perhaps even Number 2 among the greatest men I can imagine, and I can’t believe he’s been gone three years already. He was a writer and an educator, though, and his words live on, as does his example. His advice runs through my mind nearly as often as that of ‘Abdu’l-Baha. In the immediate calm-down after an incredible NBA finals, where I loved the Spurs and admired the heck out of LeBron and the Heatles, I miss basketball and coaching. I miss John Wooden.

A Hall of Fame player, tough and fiery, with a degree in English literature and teaching as a day job.

Humble victor, though he won again and again and again and again. A great man with feet of granite.

Learning Danny Green

Posted by :James Howden On : June 19, 2013
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Category: All About Sports

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Although my teaching schedule has blissfully allowed me to watch every minute of the NBA Finals — the games are on at 9 am here in Dalian, and my classes are mainly in the afternoons — it’s also June: time to make up for past marking sins, time for administrivia and visas and social obligations, time to prepare for a Canadian summer. I haven’t written a thing about the Spurs versus the Heat, and Game 6 is already upon us. Xiaoqiang is here, and the TV is warming up. I’m thinking about Danny Green.

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John Ralston Saul (on corporatism and individualism)

Posted by :James Howden On : June 17, 2013
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Category: He Said/She Said

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In The Unconscious Civilization (1995), Saul traces the rise of individualism in the West, but complains that the term has been “hijacked” in modern times:

“Nowhere…was the individual seen as a single ambulatory centre of selfishness. That idea of individualism, dominant today, represents a narrow and superficial deformation of the Western idea….[We are] a society addicted to ideologies – a civilization tightly held at this moment in the embrace of a dominant ideology: corporatism…[It] causes us to deny and undermine the legitimacy of the individual as a citizen,…which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of the public good….The overall effects on the individual are passivity and conformity in those areas which matter and non-conformism in those which don’t.”

John Ralston Saul is a Canadian thinker, writer and activist for the public good. I was lucky enough to watch from close range, in the mid-2000s, as he continued to develop the ideas he put forth in The Unconscious Civilization (1995) and to poke and provoke conversation about ideas that matter, from the neighbourhood to the globe. He’s an intellectual fireball. In the midst of watching too much basketball and reading too many student papers, I’m stealing the chance to re-read Saul.

Peter Khan (on idealism vs. lethargy)

Posted by :James Howden On : June 12, 2013
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“We, today, face…the test of overcoming apathy and lethargy, the test that those around us increasingly lack zeal and idealism and a passion for changing the world. Society around us has lost its vision….Heroes and heroines…have become discredited….They have been found to have feet of clay. There are no heroes. There are no heroines….It is a matter of making it through day by day, being concerned only for one’s self because no one else is interested in us. You survive or not. It is a hard, cruel world out there.

“That is not the Bahá’í way. We are people committed to the creation of a new society. We are summoned to heroism…to sacrifice…to idealism and to altruism….We are people who love and are concerned about generations yet unborn and we are prepared to dedicate our lives that those generations to come…may have a better life; may have a life of peace and unity and harmony and the possibility for the full development of their potential.

“This is the idealism to which we are summoned as Bahá’ís. We need to overcome the apathy and lethargy of society and stand apart as people dedicated to the creation of a new world.”

Peter Khan (1936-2011) was a professor of electrical engineering who became best known for his service to several sorts of Bahá’í community institutions in the U.S.A. and Australia, as well as membership on the worldwide community’s elected international council. This is an excerpt from a talk he gave in 1995 in Chicago. What a mind! His spoken delivery was very deliberate and dry, not dazzling at all unless you listened to what he was saying.

The Party, the Bread, the Track, and the Circus

Posted by :James Howden On : June 10, 2013
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Category: At First Glance

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God knows that I love bread. (Bread and I, however, are in the midst of a relatively amicable separation, and my waistline has noticed.) The student body at my university, and especially at the rich-kid college within it where I teach, is of a particularly well-fed demographic, and they see their grindstone bachelor’s degree exclusively as job training, nothing more. (The majority work in majors chosen for them, often with no real interest or aptitude in the subject but only faith in the promise of the “comfortable life” that most Chinese — understandably — seek.) Though privileged within Chinese society, they do endure acres of boredom and megatons of rote learning, so the circus does come to town. And though I am not above the occasional superior sneer at the circus entertainments chosen by others, I’m still a sucker for the Olympic march of the athletes, small-town parades, the communal experience of fireworks. Even loners like me love a good show, some high-wire performance, but I was recently put in mind of the ancient Roman poet Juvenal’s scorn of the use of “bread and circuses” to pacify a population.

It was Sports Day at my university in northeastern China, a day common to most schools here. It is a more of a show than a track and field meet, and actually two days of class are

The March of the One-Time Athletes. A beautiful day for a show. (Photo: JP Mayer)

sacrificed for it. Many students are required to miss class sessions in the days before in order to prepare, but not for their events. In a country where precious little importance is given to physical education – except, that is, for the tiny minority selected in their youth or childhood to attend State sports schools and bring sporting honour to their province or their Olympically-ambitious country – this once-yearly festival of geng kuai, geng gao, geng qiang (“faster, higher, stronger”) sees astonishingly little athletic preparation, or even the possibility of it. It drives my Canadian friend JP, a masters decathlete and long-time high-school coach, just slightly bonkers.

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Juvenal (on “bread and circuses”)

Posted by :James Howden On : June 7, 2013
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Category: He Said/She Said

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“… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses…“

(Juvenal, Satire 10.77–81. “Juvenal” is the English name of a Roman poet, who lived in the 1st and 2nd centuries of the Christian Era. This famous critique of the degraded mentality of the Roman masses has been widely and often used to disparage the ways in which governments try to keep their citizens tranquillized, and which the public often and willingly accepts. In Spain, they’ve called it “bread and bullfights”, for example.)

And, to increase the linguistic richness of JH.com, and thanks to dear young
Wikipedia, here is the original Latin of Juvenal’s statement:

[…] iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli / uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim / imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se / continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, / panem et circenses. […]