Blurt 23: Not much is more irritating than boomerang criticism. I nag my son on his indolence one morning when I circle and circle and still can’t find my writing desk. I natter about the chronic sleep shortage of Chinese students, while shackled by my own fatigue.
Momo, a nickname for her that I overuse shamelessly and mispronounce incorrigibly, is one of my favourite students. She’ll volunteer her paper if it contains an example of a writing fault I’ve been discussing with the class. She has one of those shining, intently learning faces that every teacher is nourished by, and she writes an English journal with ferocious interest and effort. Ms. Zhu also reads enough English that she can insert a bit of tasty slang in her writing. I was beyond delighted to find, as I checked her Journal progress, a few paragraphs about a significant disappointment that she had experienced. Looking back on it, she wrote, “I bummered at that time!”
It helps that Momo is such a great kid, but this is one of my recent favourite bits of Chinglish.
“This isn’t a book about China,” claims author Peter Hessler about the first of his three books set far from his American upbringing. “It’s about a certain small part of China at a certain brief period in time.” And Rivertown: Two Years on the Yangtze is certainly that, though his disclaimer is among the first evidences of the clear-minded humility that is one of the book’s greatest recommendations. It is a first-person account of a young man’s two-year immersion in the life of western China, and it is many things: a wide-open window into a place and a time, a travelogue, a coming-of-age tale, and a teacher’s diary.
BLURT 21: Fear and self-loathing in Hong Kong, Guangdong, Yunnan, over an insignificant promise that terrifies me so that I’m writing THIS instead of THAT.
I’m looking out the 9th floor window of the Salisbury Street (downtown) YMCA in Hong Kong. Actually, I’m in Kowloon, all part of the territory so proudly reclaimed by mainland China in 1997 from the British, but Kowloon is the part attached to the mainland. The black and silver, soaring, hugely titled buildings — Panasonic, Olympus, Epson — across the harbour are on Hong Kong Island, along with Kowloon the densely populated, high-rising part of the “New Territories” of HK. (By the way, in Mandarin the newly returned “Special Administrative Region (SAR)” is known as Qiang Kang, “Fragrant Harbour”. It looks reasonably fragrant on this bright afternoon.)
It’s a city that works, that is remarkably clean, one that genuinely enacts the concept of “mass transit”, moving incredible numbers of people efficiently and, at least in the district where we are, making walking a useful and do-able way of getting around. They’ve maintained, through the decades, a lovely downtown park with massive old trees and lots of water.
Amid the pampered comings and leavings in the lobby of a Chiang Mai hotel, and here on a sunny balcony overlooking the baking tourists by the pool in Krabi, I try to pretend I am not one of them. When I can’t simply enjoy warmth and leisure and good food, I am guiltily soured by this tourist business, and am too (self) conscious of the real “tourist trap”: the detachment from the serving class, the presumption that the too-visible disparity between their fortune and mine is at it should be. At its worst, it becomes a bland but bitter-edged condescension at the quaintness/ignorance/pathos/inconvenience of “these people”. These people. What a simple and toxic phrase – surely better than “these brutes”, “these savages”, but not so much different. These thoughts gain traction in a slippery tourist mind that is still digesting a jet-set reading of The Help.
Now, gentlemen! Don’t turn away, I’m talking to you,
Here’s the Educated, Middle-Aged Concerned Citizen, seeing another country and its troubled, yet pleasant people. What is he thinking as he walks along the crowded streets? How does he correlate what he sees with his experience of the so-called “developed world”, and the perspective gained through his study of education, human psychology, literature and yet more sacred texts? What’s on his mind? Let’s listen in!
Early in the mornin’, come along!
Listen to the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes song!
Catch a bowl of sunshine, here’s how you do it,
Whistle up an appetite and hop right to it!
BLURT 20: First night in Chiangmai, ancient capital of Siam: warm breezes, friendly smiles, mango fruitshakes, drivers using brakes not horns. Thailand 4, China 0.
Sorting myself out on a Monday morning here in Dalian, China, I was surprised to notice how December loomed. Good Canadian lad that I am, ancestral memories rang a High Holy Day alarm: wait, the 28th? That must mean the Grey Cup was yesterday! I hadn’t a clue, though, that my electronic clicks and misses would send me towards a septuagenarian brawl and some old, old questions.
I didn’t know who was in the Grey Cup, the Canadian Football League’s championship game, though I’d read in the Globe and Mail on-line that my (nearly) hometown Hamilton Tiger-Cats had won a playoff game. Since we’re 13 hours ahead of EST, I was able to follow the blurts and textual mutterings of various G&M Sports Guys in the press box as the B.C. Lions clawed the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.
There is a university in my city that offers what I’m coming to think of as a classically “new China” approach to education – at least for the rich.
As you may have heard, China is racing. Athletically, especially as the 2008 Olympics loomed, the sporting cadres sprinted to pressure-treat their selected young warriors to shine, precious-metallically, before the world. Economically, China charges headlong toward international influence and prestige as the world’s largest producer of wealth. (Some say it’s only a matter of time.) Educationally, it seems that the notoriously manic, mobile concentration camp endured by China’s aspiring youth – with their profoundly anxious parents sounding the drumbeats of this single-minded march toward something or other – shows little sign of slowing down to see where it’s going. (To be fair, there is always the mantra: we must work hard so we can have a comfortable life. Even the most English-impaired students know this line, and the majority seem to find it satisfactory.)
A certain school here in Dalian, I’ve come to know, has among its main attractions a series of programs that allow students to travel for study in different disciplines