(no subject)
Hi guys. I swear I keep meaning to post, but I never actually sit down and do it. News in brief!!
1) classes are finished and as of now I have about 48 hours left in this place I - for some reason - chose to live for a year. We had a party last night and said goodbye to some friends, we'll say goodbye to others soon. It all - this whole year - kind of seems unreal. who the Hell goes to China? I spend a lot of time lately thinking about this year, trying to make sense of it in retrospect. What did I get from all this? My students asked me a lot if I like Yibin or not. I tell them the truth, generally. I say Yibin was a tough year in my life. But in all I probably learned more about China from being here. Being in Chengdu or Hong Kong would have been much more fun, I would have had a lot more friends, would speak a lot better Chinese. But from Yibin I know more about this place that is so absolutely China. Yibin's culture is a culture that's disappearing as China modernizes. The sort of backwards completely unaware of anything outside their town mindset that is rural China is becoming the modernized forward thinking culture that is urban China. It's good that I understand the roots so next time I live in this country I'll be able to put where they are now in more context. So Yibin wasn't fun. It wasn't an exotic vacation. It was hard, and it was bullshit, but I think I got much more out of it than a fun year would have given me.
2) I'm trying to mail my Guzheng home. Apparently they cost a ton in America, but in perfectly Chinese fashion, there's absolutely no way to mail it home. We went to the post office, asked them what to do. They said we needed a receipt. The store would only give us an informal receipt, because if they gave us a formal gov't approved receipt, they'd actually have to, y'know, pay taxes on their sale. So after an hour of arguing they gave us the receipt. We went to the post ofice, and they took one look at it and said "Too long." Why didn't they say that earlier? You know. because. So apparently to mail something wood internationally you need a special box. Right, of course. They don't make boxes big enough for guzhengs. They won't let me use two boxes together. WTF. So Maybe I might be able tos end it via UPS or something similar, but it's gonna cost more than the damn thing did in the first place. HA HA. GREAT. Too bad I don't have enough money for that. What the Hell.
3) Did you know that Chinese history books teach that noone died at Tiananmen? Some people were injured, but noone died. It's illegal in china to protest - you'll be arrested. We think a lot about control - Chinese people don't think the government has any control, but our knowledge of history is so completely different. The only thing I can say that carries any weight is - all your media and your text books and your everything is written by the government, and is all pro-China. None of our books are written by the government as far as I know, and lots of them are really down on the US. Everyone is really intensely nationalistic. Like, way more than Americans, even after 9/11. There's this incredible pride in CHINA, and it's history and culture (though what's left of their culture!!? They got rid of all that!) that just amazes me.
4) the weirdest thing to me is that the Chinese seem to be incapable of answering "why." In Chinese or English. There seems to be no critical thinking ability, a trait which is decidedly not helped by an education system based around memorizing the answers. It's strange to me because it's, like, the foundation around which Western thought and philosophy is based. WHY. So lots of our lessons this year, especially with higher level students, were based around trying to make them think about Why. Why do culures all over the world have holidays about death in the fall, and birth/fertility in the spring? Why should we have no guns? What is wrong about homosexuality? How much free speech should we be allowed, and why?
They regard English as a way to encode Chinese. They don't really understand that there's a completely different way of thinking that goes along with this. That was the goal of these "Why" lessons. Try and show them we think differently.
Man am I becoming inable to lucidly express anything. So long eloquence!
I'll talk to you later! Off to chengdu in 48 hours.
PS Right now there's a program on TV celebrating the three gorges dam and they got a bunch of kids to draw pictures of how beautiful the dam is. HILARITY. Also, they've written Chinese words to a medely of classical tunes (I.E. the nutcracker suite, that piece from Carmen, etc.) about how great the dam is.
1) classes are finished and as of now I have about 48 hours left in this place I - for some reason - chose to live for a year. We had a party last night and said goodbye to some friends, we'll say goodbye to others soon. It all - this whole year - kind of seems unreal. who the Hell goes to China? I spend a lot of time lately thinking about this year, trying to make sense of it in retrospect. What did I get from all this? My students asked me a lot if I like Yibin or not. I tell them the truth, generally. I say Yibin was a tough year in my life. But in all I probably learned more about China from being here. Being in Chengdu or Hong Kong would have been much more fun, I would have had a lot more friends, would speak a lot better Chinese. But from Yibin I know more about this place that is so absolutely China. Yibin's culture is a culture that's disappearing as China modernizes. The sort of backwards completely unaware of anything outside their town mindset that is rural China is becoming the modernized forward thinking culture that is urban China. It's good that I understand the roots so next time I live in this country I'll be able to put where they are now in more context. So Yibin wasn't fun. It wasn't an exotic vacation. It was hard, and it was bullshit, but I think I got much more out of it than a fun year would have given me.
2) I'm trying to mail my Guzheng home. Apparently they cost a ton in America, but in perfectly Chinese fashion, there's absolutely no way to mail it home. We went to the post office, asked them what to do. They said we needed a receipt. The store would only give us an informal receipt, because if they gave us a formal gov't approved receipt, they'd actually have to, y'know, pay taxes on their sale. So after an hour of arguing they gave us the receipt. We went to the post ofice, and they took one look at it and said "Too long." Why didn't they say that earlier? You know. because. So apparently to mail something wood internationally you need a special box. Right, of course. They don't make boxes big enough for guzhengs. They won't let me use two boxes together. WTF. So Maybe I might be able tos end it via UPS or something similar, but it's gonna cost more than the damn thing did in the first place. HA HA. GREAT. Too bad I don't have enough money for that. What the Hell.
3) Did you know that Chinese history books teach that noone died at Tiananmen? Some people were injured, but noone died. It's illegal in china to protest - you'll be arrested. We think a lot about control - Chinese people don't think the government has any control, but our knowledge of history is so completely different. The only thing I can say that carries any weight is - all your media and your text books and your everything is written by the government, and is all pro-China. None of our books are written by the government as far as I know, and lots of them are really down on the US. Everyone is really intensely nationalistic. Like, way more than Americans, even after 9/11. There's this incredible pride in CHINA, and it's history and culture (though what's left of their culture!!? They got rid of all that!) that just amazes me.
4) the weirdest thing to me is that the Chinese seem to be incapable of answering "why." In Chinese or English. There seems to be no critical thinking ability, a trait which is decidedly not helped by an education system based around memorizing the answers. It's strange to me because it's, like, the foundation around which Western thought and philosophy is based. WHY. So lots of our lessons this year, especially with higher level students, were based around trying to make them think about Why. Why do culures all over the world have holidays about death in the fall, and birth/fertility in the spring? Why should we have no guns? What is wrong about homosexuality? How much free speech should we be allowed, and why?
They regard English as a way to encode Chinese. They don't really understand that there's a completely different way of thinking that goes along with this. That was the goal of these "Why" lessons. Try and show them we think differently.
Man am I becoming inable to lucidly express anything. So long eloquence!
I'll talk to you later! Off to chengdu in 48 hours.
PS Right now there's a program on TV celebrating the three gorges dam and they got a bunch of kids to draw pictures of how beautiful the dam is. HILARITY. Also, they've written Chinese words to a medely of classical tunes (I.E. the nutcracker suite, that piece from Carmen, etc.) about how great the dam is.