Missing Books, Left and Right

Last week, my textbook 老外在中国 (Laowai zai Zhongguo--Foreigner in China) disappeared. I'd had it with me when I went into a restaurant to play Chinese chess--my new distraction--with some local cabbies. The games were interesting enough that I forgot to take my book with me when I headed home.

Last year, this wouldn't have been a problem, since forgotten personal possessions were generally treated with more than their due respect out in the untamed boondocks of Bao'an. I once left a copy of "Zorba the Greek" at a restaurant, only to return the next day and find it set upon its own little table, perfectly centered on the table cloth. Here in civilized Nanshan, though, it's a different story. I returned to the restaurant the next day and inquired after the book. Though the waiter seemed unable to understand my question, one of the cooks spoke up quickly, "老外在中国!" I affirmed this, and the waiter went off to find the manager while the cook babbled the title over and over again.

The manager showed up just to tell me, "没有; 没见 (meiyou, meijian--don't have, didn't see)," with a shifty sort of look in his eyes. I suspect he just decided to take it home, since he has been making some half-hearted attempt to learn English. Now that Jia has managed to order the same book online and the loss doesn't irritate quite as much, I can finally find hilarity in the situation; that someone out there is probably using my Chinese textbook to learn English--and learn miserably bad English at that, since the book's author is no whiz in the language, forming conversations like the following (set in a doctor's office):
D: What's wrong with you?
P: I feel uncomfortable.
D: Where do you feel not good?
P: My body has the ache.
D: It should be caused by the cold.

Elsewhere, more books have disappeared. Having met "a nice girl, I thought" at a party, Baolou later invited her over to his apartment, from which she promptly lifted his teaching materials. At least this second person (however not nice she may be) is pretty sharp and will be studying well-constructed English in the future.

Just a Little Favor

One of our adult students recently wrangled me into an uncomfortable corner. After complimenting me on the way I ran classes ("Best in the school!") and telling me he'd be honored if he could take me out to dinner sometime (I accepted, but pointed out that I rarely to never speak English outside of school), he asked me whether I could do him "just a little favor"--review his resume. He said he'd send both the English and Chinese writing so that I could check whether the grammar in his translations were right. Though I'm not too fond of the endless exchanges of favors that run most of life here in China, I figured looking over a resume couldn't be that much work.

Yesterday, he sent me his full resume: all four pages of it, including descriptions of companies and long lists of poorly proofread gobbledygook. He hadn't even bothered running spell-check on the document. I worked through a bit of it, just identifying which portions were suitable for a resume and which parts would need to be condensed. I printed off a sample resume for him and a list with a few resume-writing pointers, then said I'd be happy to look at his resume again once he'd taken some time to condense his four pages of information into a standard format of one page. I figured this was a fair enough effort.

"But how about you correct it first, and then I'll make it smaller, okay?" he asked once I'd given my advice. I pointed out that what he'd given me was a lot of information to go through at one time. "But I just need you to show me my mistakes." I pointed out that in many places I wasn't sure what he was trying to say. "I give you the Chinese." I pointed out that the Chinese I was studying was on a bit simpler level than that (leaving out that almost none of my hanzi have much to do with the corporate world)--things like asking for and giving directions, talking to service staff, 等等. "Then it can be good practice for you."

"Well," I finally said, tired of the needling, "I reckon this will take me about a month, maybe a month and a half to proofread as it is now. I'll have to look up a lot of phrases and words, and I'm going to have to enlist a lot of people for help. On the other hand, if you can make it smaller, just a page or so, then I can go through it in maybe a day and just ask you questions for things I don't understand." I didn't point out that I have absolutely no intention of learning a bunch of corporate terminology, at least not until I'm well done reading a children's comic book.

He finally said he saw what I meant, or at least he didn't try to hand the print-off back to me again. It will be interesting to see how this one plays out. As for the sort of high-brow material I actually am studying, I'll give some of the little mantras I've been working on below:

大头，大头，下雨不愁。人家有伞。我有大头。
Da tou, da tou, xia yu bu chou. Ren jia you san. Wo you da tou.
Big head, big head, when it rains, I don't worry. Other people have umbrellas. I've got my big head.

谁高？我高。满地都是草包。
Shei gao? Wo gao. Man di dou shi cao bao.
Very loosely, this translates, "Who's tall? I'm tall. Everyone else around is useless." More literally, the last sentence is something like, "The full ground, all are grass bags."

电灯泡。砸核桃。谁放屁？我知道。不是他，就是他。
Dian deng pao. Za he tao. Shei fang pi? Wo zhi dao. Bu shi ta, jiu shi ta.
"Light bulb bubbles. Smash walnuts. Who farted? I know. If not him, it must be him." [This is sort of an eeny-meeny-miny-moe chant, one whose English translation I've begun using in classes to pick students.]

These are little nursery rhymes Jia has taught me (and which I'm sure she'll correct if I've messed up any of the hanzi). For some reason these seem to stick better in my head than more useful expressions, and since they have really simple sentences, I usually only have to hunt for one or two hanzi to finish them.

Li Yang Reconsidered

I'm no big fan of Li Yang's "Crazy English," and I don't go out of my way to keep this dislike a secret. Generally, the only effect I see from Yang's teaching in my class is loud shouting during class activities and a heightened tendency to repeat (usually poorly) one or two nearly meaningless phrases.

Recently, I've run into a few adult enthusiasts of Li's in classes, and have adjusted my original opinion of his message slightly. (My overall opinion of him, that he's just a motivational speaker who's making money with a ridiculous gimmick, hasn't changed at all.) Li's central message, which sadly gets drowned out by all the shouting, is that in order to learn English, you have to be "crazy"--have to pursue something with all your heart. I realized recently, talking with Whitetooth about some of his experiences, that we've both gone through periods of studying so intently that others might think we were losing our minds: both of us have caught ourselves tracing hanzi on the bathroom wall while taking showers just to keep awake, and my morning routine of making forty sentences from the flashcards taped all over my apartment before letting myself use the bathroom in the morning might look at least masochistic if not perfectly insane.

A few of my adult students seem to have gotten this part of the message: that learning means work, and that you have to be inwardly motivated to keep up that work. Unfortunately, the distractions in Li's message make the central idea muddy for them. One student says he spends all his time outside of work and class studying: "Li Yang said he had to listen to the 'I Have a Dream' speech a hundred times before he understood. Last night, I listened to it fifty times, and I still don't understand. Tonight I'll have to listen to it another 50 times." (This student has since missed a week of classes at the school.) Another student has expressed unhappiness with the classes, because she's expected to think of her own sentences to speak during class sessions, which should be the instructors' jobs; she thought she'd be fluent by now, because she quit her job in order to attend classes all day, every day at the school.

So they've got the act like a crazy person part of the equation down; they just can't seem to make the connection that the craziness ought to be born out of the fatigue and frustration that studying according to a normal and sensible schedule creates. And they still can't tell the difference between realistic goals and "crazy" promises. Maybe after they see the absolute failure of "Crazy Chinese," which promises to teach children 1,000 more hanzi in half an hour's studying per day than they currently learn in six years of schooling--maybe after that they'll be able to see that a silver tongue is often attached to a big bag of grass. (大草包 or big grass bag is a common slang term for someone worthless.)

Shenzhen Goes Crazy
Originally Posted--06:14, 2007-11-05

And in the upcoming weeks it's likely to try and drive me that way as well. The reason? "Crazy English" has hit Shenzhen. "Crazy English" is already popular with a few of my more annoying students, who insist on listening and REPEATING everything I say as loudly as possible, and even my Chinese manager has apparently told Whitetooth that "it's good because you speak English loudly." Despite Li Yang's claims that there's more to "Crazy English" than just screaming English at the top of your lungs, none of his adherents seem to have gained anymore from him than shouting every English phrase they know.

I like Li's attempt to explain the "crazy" element of his program by saying that it's not to be questionably lunatic but "to dive into the thing one sets out to do." He's translating the Chinese term gongzuokuang, which we would translate as workaholic, and neglecting to note that the "crazy" part of the phrase just means crazy (as in kuangre--fanatic; kuangwang--deluded).

The cleaned up Answers.com article has this to say, and whoever wrote it made a good decision by not going to far into Li's biography (such as, for instance, mentioning that he almost flunked college). Of course, no one seems to notice (or admit) that Li is just a pep-talk performer, not a teacher. In the States, most would probably immediately think of Christopher Farley's motivational speaker from SNL. ("You're gonna end up living in a van down by the river!")

Though there are a few character-assasination sites on the web, Li doesn't really deserve them; he's not a cult leader, just a motivational speaker, which is exactly why he chooses to perform in front of crowds of 30,000 people. He hasn't done anything innovative, just capitalized on the Chinese ability to mimic sounds like automatons. (It's not getting students to repeat anything I say that's a problem; it's getting them to know what they're saying or to actually say it correctly--not say "shpeak," for example--or to use English in sentences on their own that's the rub.) He isn't shaking Chinese tradition in the least, just capitalized on the Chinese desire to do things as groups; every morning, Chinese work to do calisthenics in synchronicity, most of their performances devote at least half the time to choreographed dance, classes (English and otherwise) are conducted through endless repetition or rote phrases, and really the only new thing Li has brought to the table is yelling. (If you think yelling goes against Chinese tradition, sit at the next table over when a waitress delivers the wrong dish to a group of Chinese, when shouting is necessary to indicate displeasure.) And, of course, when folks shout in any language, pronunciation suffers.*

No, there's really nothing wrong with what Li is doing, unless you happen to be a waiguoren living in China. The enthusiasm at Shenzhen University (which has a bus stop on my way home) must already be spreading like wildfire, for I've already had my first college student step up to me and scream, "HELLO," inches away from my ear. My first response was to say nothing, after which the student shouted again, louder and closer. I slowly and loudly replied, "Wo ting bu dong," ("I hear but don't understand.") and honestly I can't understand--can't understand why he'd think I'd take the time to talk to him after such a rude greeting.

*I wonder if any native speaker can understand what he's saying at the end of the clip, say, about 3:34 on. The one part almost sounds like "Elvis Presley" to me; it's worth noting that his English is apparently quite good when he's just talking.

祝我生日快乐: Happy Birthday to Me (Sort of)

Well, my birthday is right around the corner, which turns out to be sort of a weird thing. I hadn't expected it to seem that important a day, really, so I was a bit surprised this afternoon to find myself suddenly meditative about the whole aging process. I guess in part this is because I effectively skipped turning thirty last year: since many Chinese add at least one year to their age*, it was easy to get into the idea that, though I was by stateside standards hitting the big three-oh, I'd already passed it on the mainland, so nothing was really changing--a peculiar little bit of reasoning that kept me from experiencing any major crisis.

This year is only a little different: Since I'm now already thirty-two by Chinese standards, turning thirty-one tomorrow doesn't seem like such a huge deal, but the encroaching birthday, no matter how far away (in geographic if not temporal terms) it may feel right now, provides an explanation for the way I've been feeling the last week. Over the past two or three weeks, my ability to pick up new hanzi has been slowing down a lot, to the point where I'm only able to remember one or two new hanzi per day, and in the last week I've been obsessing over the idea that I'm not getting anywhere with my studying. Part of me knows, of course, that plateaus are a natural part of learning anything, and another part of me knows that I was due for one--you can only make big improvements for so long before the slow-down sets in for a while. But in the last week or so, this little plateau has seemed a bigger deal than it should.

Today it hit me suddenly that this temporary slow-down in my progress seems like a bigger deal than it actually is just because of when it's happening; another year is passing on my internal calender, and since I got a pass last year on the "round number" milestone, this year seems a little bigger than it should. Realizing this, I drew the conclusion that I've been a silly ass for the past week and that it's about time I moved on from there. So today, I spent a good chunk of time cleaning, then I reviewed my hanzi lists from a few chapters in my textbook (reminding myself that I've learned over 600 new hanzi since December--not too shabby a number), then I made a single resolution for the new year (after all, it's really Spring now, and I'm living in a country where the first day of Spring marks the beginning of a new year): "Try not to be too much of a silly ass." It's probably the best resolution I've made in my life.

As for birthday plans, tomorrow I'll likely be having dinner with Nersey and Jia, since Nersey has an oven and has started making pizzas with nan from the Xinjiang restaurant. Then I'll probably go to bed early, since I have to work early the next morning. Since my birthday gives me occasion to mention it, below is the ridiculously simple Chinese "Happy Birthday" song (sung to the tune of "Happy Birthday" to you, though often as not sung for many reasons besides a birthday**).

祝你生日快乐。祝你生日快乐。祝你生日，祝你生日，祝你生日快乐。
Zhu ni shengri kuaile. Zhu ni shengri kuaile. Zhu ni shengri, zhu ni shengri, zhu ni shengri kua le.
(Literal English translation: Wish you birthday happy. Wish you birthday happy. Wish you birthday, wish you birthday, wish you birthday happy.)

*The reasons for these extra years have been explained to me in two ways: Either a child is considered one-year-old at birth, thus adding a year to the overall age, or age is tracked according to the lunar rather than solar calendar, leading to the extremely inflated ages you hear about for seniors in China. If you want to feel older, visit this calculator site and find out your Chinese age.

**Last year at Lao Chongqing (my favorite Sichuanese restaurant in the neighborhood), I sat outside during a particularly riotous celebration. About eighty women from one of the nearby factories had the night off and, crammed into the relatively small restaurant, went through a good amount of food, beer and baijiu. When they weren't busy dancing without music or running in and out of the front door, they spent most of their time singing 祝你生日快乐. The next day, I mentioned the party to a friend, and he asked the head waiter whose birthday party it had been. The head waiter's response (as it was translated for me) was "It was no one's birthday. They were just happy with drinking, so they sang some. People like to sing that song when they're drinking, because everyone knows the words."

Walls, Walls, Walls

China still thinks in walls. You'd think maybe a country that went ahead and built the world's largest wall to (unsuccessfully) keep out intruders would have sort of gotten tired of the whole idea of walls, but the idea of the wall is alive and well in China.

This realization first came to me last year on my second day, after I got locked in--yes, locked in--my own neighborhood. From my apartment last year, I had to pass through one (usually) locked gate to get into the space between my buildings and the other buildings in my area of the neighborhood; all the buildings on the perimeter of this area are linked by fences, turning them essentially into part of one great wall. The gated community is the basic community of China, neighborhood after neighborhood surrounded by walls, and the walls seem more important than anything else; streets often meander aimlessly, dodging around one community after another. To walk to school along the main road--in a straight line along restaurants and shops--takes me about half an hour. To walk home along a separate road, this one winding between neighborhoods, takes me well over an hour.

But divisions seem too to run deeper here than simple stonework. India may have its caste system, but China has something just as clearly divisive--the idea of outsiders. Many of the adult students at our school, having seen a few of the foreign teachers talking to each other in Chinese or about Chinese, have decided they need to find people to study with. In one of my classes, all six students talked about this desire to find a study partner. I pointed out that all six of them were studying English, that they all knew each other, and that it should be easy enough for them to make plans to meet and study. No, that wouldn't work: two of the men live in different districts, one in the Nantou area of Nanshan and the other in Bao'an, near the Nantou checkpoint (ten minutes apart by bus); the woman who lives in the Nantou area--this is no good because this would be "blended company" (a man and a woman); two students live across the street from one another, but in different neighborhoods, so this is also no good. Ideally, they all want to find someone who works at their company to study with. "Are there any people in your company also studying English?" I asked them. No, no there aren't. "Then maybe trying to find someone from outside your company would be a good idea?" No, not really; eventually someone in the company will maybe study English.

The word "danwei" (government office work units) doesn't get used much around here, and any time I use it just to mean a clique of co-workers, I'm almost immediately corrected. ("Danwei" seems to be a relic of earlier days--a word from before Opening and Reform.) But the feelings behind the danwei is alive and well. If I look at my Chinese friends, I realize I'm nearly their only friend who isn't a co-worker, and they're generally reluctant to talk to other groups of Chinese. I rarely hear my Chinese co-workers talk about meeting their friends, but they do go out together quite a lot (this despite a rapid turnover rate). It seems a desperately lonely way to live; I wonder, since they're always out with co-workers when they're out at all, whether they ever get a chance to blow off steam about work. (In the US, loose lips sink ships, but here they more likely get you fired.)

So our school now has a "social committee"--another co-worker and I--who are responsible for arranging social events for our adult students. We're looking into bowling and maybe some salsa dancing lessons nearby, trying to find something we can take people out to do at least once a month. It's a curious job to find myself now responsible for helping adults have a night out.

Kibitzing

I had perhaps my most interesting class yet last night. At school they've begun a new sort of course offering--adults classes that meet at least twice every day and for which students can more or less show up whenever they want to. Different teachers handle the classes on different days or at different times, which means that continuity breaks down a bit, and most of the time (to judge by the class notes most teachers leave) teachers do whatever they want, sticking only loosely to the course curriculum. It means that I'm freed up to do just about anything I think is interesting (and that students are prepared for this), which makes it a bit more interesting to teach.

After Monday and Tuesday's class both got hijacked by questions like "Is it true that most people in the US don't marry or have children?," "As an American, do you think you're better than black people, or is that an inappropriate question?," "How do you say, ' [insert food name for which there is no Western equivalent],' in English?" I decided I couldn't take another class without extra materials. Since students are always asking me about food in America (which they assume is all hamburgers and hot dogs), I started hunting for some American menus and soon ran into the menu from Chicago's Eleven City Diner. I figured this would be a good way to show what food in America is like and maybe break down the idea of a McDonald's and KFC nation.

I knew the menu would be a hard read; Nersey had mentioned that Jia struggled to read menus while stateside, and her English is better by several degrees than most of the students in the level I'm teaching. I also knew it would be worthwhile if the students would only put the effort into it. I put together a glossary of about forty or so words I knew wouldn't show up in the Chinese-English dictionaries--things like "shmear" and "mayo" and "side car." I also geared myself up for the class to be an absolute flop. Despite my concerns, the class went over extremely well.

In total, I had four students show up, and all of them seemed to think that this was an incredibly valuable lesson, even if it was miserably difficult. We only managed to get through the first page of the menu and into a few of the words from the glossary. It didn't occur to me while looking at it, but Rubin's short dedication uses a good number of abstract expressions; it took a long while to explain how a restaurant can be a "cornerstone" when a cornerstone is part of a building or how you could "rekindle" feelings without understanding the idea of feeling being like a fire inside a person's chest. With the exception of "diner" and "delicatessen,"* my students knew nearly all the words they were reading; they just didn't understand what it said or why there'd be such a thing in a menu. It took about an hour and a half to get through Rubin's writing, but once we'd worked our way through it, two students concluded that it was "beautiful," like "poetry." My students may be light-years away from remarking, "Oy, this mentsh is a real dikhter," but somehow they manage to get a lot more emotion out of two short paragraphs than most people back home probably would. I imagine getting a chance to peek into part of another culture (and especially into part of it that is maybe just behind the surface and not often seen) and understand it makes such a little thing a larger experience than it could ever be for a native.

* These two new words led to a good bit of pilpl. One student's dictionary defined "diner" as "a restaurant that serves exotic, foreign foods" and "delicatessen" as "meat from foreign countries." It wasn't easy to convince them that diners mostly serve familiar homestyle food and that most delicatessens are neighborhood shops that serve a lot of local foods. I think it's a fair bet those definitions were written by Chinese rather than waiguoren; after all, what's more exotic a foreign food to the average Chinese than a double-decker pastrami sandwich?

Odd Man In

Nersey and Jia recently found a good Xinjiang restaurant within walking distance of our apartments, and we've been a couple of times just for the random lamb kebab or tudou pian (grilled potato slices). Late Monday night, hungry from having had nothing more than a bowl of oatmeal all day, I went in for an entire dinner, adding nan (flatbread), grilled sausages, qiezi (eggplant), some vegetable skewers, and a plate of fried noodles to my normal order. The food was great; I filled up to bursting for under twenty kuai, and this morning I didn't have any of the digestive problems that normally accompanies eating too much at a Chinese restaurant.

Xinjiang food has become my favorite in China, since it's the closest to Western food you can find while still eating Chinese (and cheap). Nan is more or less the same as pita bread; Xinjiang-style kebabs are similar to Greek- or Turkish-style foods--loaded with cumin and pepper; tudou pian are like potato chips, only better; even their fried noodles have a distinctly Mediterranean flavor to them (quite odd, since most of Xinjiang is basically desert). Perhaps more importantly, the Xinjiang restaurants are usually Muslim, therefore safer, and the food seems healthier, cooked with less oil and cooked more thoroughly as well.

The greater attraction of Xinjiang restaurants, though, is that 意想不到, I often feel an odd sense of identity with the workers. Because many Xinjiangren are both ethnic minorities and Muslim, they don't seem to fit in as well with Han Chinese. The ethnic majority (i.e., Han) customers tend to talk down to them and be even ruder than they usually are. (Keep in mind that shouting, "服务员"--“Waitress"--at the top of your voice, snapping your fingers, arguing loudly, etc., are all normal manners in most restaurants.)

Monday, I got to listen to a table of four young Chinese men--all equipped with bad haircuts, "Western" clothes, and big leather money bags--alternatively mock one of the waiters and me. Their comments on him mostly consisted of lines like, "You are stupid; we didn't order this" and "Little wonder--he's a Xinjiang person," such quips followed by loud laughter. The item they chose to mock me about was that I was practicing my hanzi while eating; they all were of the opinion that I must 看不懂 (kan bu dong--not understand) what I was writing. I didn't bother responding, because I've learned it just isn't worth the effort. There are stupid people, and there are stupid people.

During the night, I got sympathetic smiles and nods from the staff throughout the night, and the waiter receiving the most abuse from the Chinese talked to me for a bit, mostly to compliment my writing. Together we got to enjoy the spectacle of watching the brain trust at the next table attempt to decipher the "English" sign on the wall: most of their attention was focused on the top of the poster (which advertising an electronic Quran/camera/MP4 player), where the writing is in Arabic. They proudly concluded that the capitals USB meant 美国 (meiguo--America). Little wonder, then, I don't feel bad about feeling like an outcast sometimes in China, or about identifying more with the minority than with the majority.