bezdomny ex patria

Ugh. This is what happens when you let little people run your country. I’m totally with the philospher quoted in this article. Far too few people realise this, but a humanities degree most certainly does impart skills that are immediately useful to life in the real world. It’s extremely frustrating that anybody should be forced to explain that statement. I understand that many fields of  university study do include some measure of vocational training – medicine, law and engineering spring most immediately to mind. But the idea that the humanities are somehow useless or impractical is utterly absurd and really should be banished from polite society, left to languish alone somewhere on a subantarctic island populated only by seabirds and seals.

But there’s more. Universities are not, and were never meant to be, institutes of vocational training or job factories. They are institutes of academic and scientific inquiry. Their purpose is to expand intellectual horizons and add to the sum of human knowledge and understanding. If it’s vocational training you want, go to a polytech or do an apprenticeship. If an expanded mind is what you want, university is and must always be the place for you.

What’s more (“what’s more”? My wife is affecting my English as well as my Chinese?), sending signals to high school students about which degrees are likely to be most welcomed when they graduate and start the Great Job Hunt won’t actually help anybody find a job. It’s not uncommon for the most popular majors – frequently chosen because of the perceived demand for them in the job market – to have surprisingly low employment rates. The reason is, everybody runs for those majors thinking they’ll step out of their last exam, and after a stop by the local student pub to celebrate, walk straight into some super-duper fancy job with a spectacularly high salary. The result is a major glut of graduates in those majors, driving down job prospects and starting salaries for those graduates. I guess the classic example would be: Just how many gazillion excess lawyers does America have? Enough to get a pretty respectable start in filling in the Marianas Trench?

No. I can understand tying a certain component of polytech funding to graduate employment rates, so long as it is only one on a long list of measures of polytech performance, as the whole point of polytechs is vocational training. But not universities. Universities must be protected as institutes of free and wide-ranging intellectual and scientific inquiry and exploration, and part of the reason is precisely to ensure the job prospects of graduates.

Rant完了.

Following a link, as one does on lazy mornings when the internet is a series of unrelated tangents and the occasional rabbit hole, I came across this interesting little article. At the bottom is a small note attributing the original text to Skykiwi, but with no obvious link, so give me a minute to see if I can find the original…. Ah, after struggling with their super-slow loading and not overly cooperative search function, here it is.

Two minor linguistic points:

It did take me a while to figure out “约翰基” was John Key, New Zealand’s prime minister. Yes, I feel silly.

The Chinese rendering of “New Zealand” as “纽西兰”, apparently common in Hong Kong and Taiwan, has always bugged me for some reason. Totally irrational, I know, and it is closer to the sound of “New Zealand” than is “新西兰”, but pet peeves are never rational. I suppose it’s because all my Chinese has been learned on the mainland, and so “新西兰” just sounds “correct”, while “纽西兰” just doesn’t.

Anyways, the article states John Key is encouraging young New Zealanders to learn Chinese. His reasoning is that it would make doing business in China easier. He’s right, of course, and I have heard complaints that New Zealand’s business community pays far too little attention to language and culture when they attempt to do business here, meaning they’re much less successful than they could or should be. I would add there are many other reasons to learn Chinese, but hey, John Key’s a businessman, and on this point he’s absolutely right. And on the subject of teaching Chinese, he points out one serious problem:

他说，纽西兰现有的 2500个学校中只有89个开设中文课程，这实在有些少了。

He said that of New Zealand’s 2500 schools, only 89 had opened Chinese classes, which is really far too few.

And on the subject of New Zealand’s traditional bad attitude to the study of foreign languages:

纽西兰商人已经在中国经商20多年。他一再强调，纽西兰人的确应该换换思路了。以前因语言相通，纽西兰人非常愿意和澳洲、英国人做生意，但现在必须明 白，纽西兰的未来在中国，在亚洲。

New Zealand’s business people have been doing business in China for 20 years. He continually emphasised that New Zealand really should change its thinking. Before, because of the common language, New Zealanders really wanted to do business with Australia, the UK and the USA, but now they must understand, New Zealand’s future is in China, in Asia.

I would say there’s a slight overstatement there in that I don’t think New Zealand’s entire future lies in China, or even in Asia. There’s plenty of possibility on the other side of the Pacific, in Latin America, too, and no reason why Africa should be ignored, and plenty of reasons to continue to trade with our traditional trading partners and the Pacific. But yes, New Zealand desperately needs a major change in its thinking, a thought transplant, perhaps, towards the study of foreign languages. We do need more people studying Chinese, and other Asian languages, and other global languages, and we do need our business leaders to start valuing linguistic and cultural skills much more highly than they traditionally have. Otherwise we might as well become Australia’s newest and weakest state, and give Tasmania somebody to look down on.

But it’s not all bad news: He goes on to point out that last year the number of people studying Chinese surpassed the number studying Latin for the first time. I should bloody well hope so! I see nothing wrong, and indeed much value in studying Latin, but I do think more people should be studying living languages than dead languages. We need a nation with good international communication skills, not a nation of linguists and classicists. I would also add that when I started my university studies, only two high schools in the entire country taught Russian. 89 schools teaching Chinese is far too few, but the trend seems to be heading in the right direction.

The article ends with EuroAsia director Kenneth Leong:

他认为，在中国早已经兴起了英语热，中国的商界精英很多都熟谙英文，但纽西兰人中懂中文的非常非常少，这明显会将Kiwi放在不 利的地位上。因此，无论从哪个角度出发，都是时候好好学学中文了。

He thinks the English craze broke out very early in China, and many of China’s business elite are good at English, but very, very few New Zealanders understand Chinese, which will clearly put Kiwis in a disadvantageous position. Therefore, regardless of which angle you start from, it’s time to start seriously studying Chinese.

Actually, in that last sentence, I’m not really sure how to work the “好好” or the repitition of the verb “学” into English. Any better suggestions than what I wrote? Anyways, many people will read that and say, “If they’re all learning English, why should we learn Chinese?” I guess the most obvious answer is that if you’re monolingual, you are completely at the mercy of your business partners and translators, you have no way of knowing what is being said or written in Chinese, you have no way of judging the quality or accuracy of the translations, you are totally denying yourself any chance to read all those little cultural subtleties you can read in your own people and therefore denying yourself a major chance for intelligence gathering (I mean, legitimate gathering of information for purposes of legitimate business, of course), you are opening yourself up to being cheated, exploited, and thoroughly ripped off. Whereas if you do learn Chinese, you are, as John Key stated, giving yourself a huge leg-up in understanding the market and the people you are doing business with, and also in safeguarding your own interests, and the more you learn, the bigger the advantage you give yourself.

I’ve certainly found that learning Chinese has made my job much easier, and the more I learn, the easier it gets.

There’s an interesting post at Luqiu Luwei’s blog that starts with a puzzling scene: She’s at a gathering of friends and relatives in Shanghai, they’re chatting, but something just feels odd:

…仔细一想,原来我们这些地地道道上海出生长大的人,在用普通话聊天…

…thinking it over, it was because these typical Shanghainese born and raised were using Mandarin to chat…

Pick all the holes in that translation you want, but I think the point is clear enough. And so why was this group of Shanghainese speaking Mandarin? There is nothing in the anecdote to suggest anybody from outside Shanghai was present. For the sake of the kids, it turns out, with whom they communicate in Mandarin.

Sidenote: Luqiu Luwei seems to use 普通话 and 国语 interchangeably.

So why are these Shanghainese parents only speaking to their kids in Mandarin? Ms Luqiu can’t seem to figure it out herself, but does offer two possible reasons. One is that the parents and teachers may be concerned that if they speak Shanghainese, the kids won’t get a solid enough grasp of Mandarin. Another is that it may somehow affect their ability to learn a foreign language. But this makes no sense, she says, when compared with the situation in Hong Kong, where the goal is for students to grasp two written and three spoken languages. Written Chinese and English, and spoken Cantonese, Mandarin and English, just in case anybody feels the need to ask.

She also points out the importance of language to culture, and local languages to local cultures, and ends her piece with this:

不敢想像,有一天,香港的所有电视台,电台,电影,还有所有的香港人,都开始不说粤语了,虽然我知道,我身边就有不少人希望有这样的一天,因为他们拒绝学 习粤语,甚至觉得,正是这种语言的隔阂,让他们觉得无法融入这个城市,做一个香港人.而他们把这些,归咎于这个城市透过语言来制造这样的疏离感.

I don’t dare imagine that one day all of Hong Kong’s TV stations, radio stations, films, and all the Hong Kong people, will all stop speaking Cantonese, although I know that there’s no shortage of people around me who hope for such a day, because they refuse to learn Cantonese, even feeling that this language is a barrier that makes them feel they have no way to integrate into the city and be a Hong Konger. And this they blame on the city for creating this sense of alienation through language.

我倒觉得,如果他们的思维能够掉转一下,先把自己当成香港人,把这个城市真正当成自己的家,那么,他们自然而然的会接受这种对他们来说陌生的语言,因为这 是这个城市的一部分,也是香港人这个身分的一部分.这样的道理,在其他的城市,甚至国家,都是一样.

Instead I think that if they can turn their thinking around, first think of themselves as Hong Kongers, truly think of Hong Kong as their home, they will naturally accept this language they find strange, because it’s a part of the city and a part of Hong Kongers’ identity. This principle is the same in other cities, even countries.

Y’know, I’m inclined to agree, especially with that last paragraph. I would add that it applies to expats, too. I’ve met too many here who simply refuse to learn even standard Mandarin. I’ve heard excuse after excuse after excuse. I’ve only met one expat in all this decade I’ve spent in China whose reason for not learning the language I respect (although I suspect there are others in similar positions)- his job meant he simply spent far too much time on the road at too irregular intervals for too irregular periods of time for him to sign up for lessons. But that’s a topic for another rant….

Like Ms Luqiu, I am puzzled as to why Shanghainese parents in Shanghai would not teach their kids Shanghainese. I can understand the two possible reasons she puts forward, considering just how much sheer ignorance about language there is out there – it’s one of the few resources to rival human stupidity in its abundance – but I agree that neither possible reason is valid. I like her comparison with Hong Kong, but I would say that it seems fair to me to assume that most people in this world grow up at least bilingual. I mean, look at the sheer number of countries around the world with multiple languages.

Which reminds me: When I was a student at Otago University, I had several friends from Singapore and Malaysia who expressed amazement that I was studying three foreign languages. I could not understand why they were so amazed, since they’d all been raised polyglots (English/Singlish/Mandarin/Hokkien seemed to be a common combination, although at the time I knew almost nothing about the Chinese language(s), so I can’t be certain).

I have also been known to point out to my students that many of them are at least trilingual, speaking their hometown’s dialect, Mandarin, and English.

I also totally agree with her points about the importance of language to culture and identity. New Zealand English has incorporated a lot of Maori words because many Maori cultural concepts have no possible English word to match them. Words like ‘mana’ and ‘tapu’ simply have too many implications to be translated neatly into one English word. New English words have been coined in New Zealand to fit concepts developing in New Zealand culture. Local cultural concepts need local words to express them. The same applies to every other dialect of every other language.

My wife speaks Yanqing dialect when talking to her family and standard Mandarin when talking to me and everybody else – well, English when talking to foreigners who don’t speak Chinese, and a mixture of standard Mandarin and English when talking to foreigners with a limited command of Chinese. I once had a colleague from New York who would speak with a mild New York accent most of the time. You could tell when she’d just been on the phone with her family, because her accent would suddenly be so strong you’d need a chainsaw to cut through it. Not long ago I met a Chinese man who lives in New Zealand who asked if we could please speak Chinese, as it felt too weird speaking English in his home country. Fair enough. Put any two people from the same place together and allow them to chat freely, and before long they’ll revert to their hometown’s dialect, regardless of what language the conversation began in. Why? Every aspect of language – accent, grammar, dialect, idiom, choice of writing system, even spelling – expresses something of the speaker’s (or writer’s) identity, both in relation to themselves and in relation to those they are communicating with.

What is a Shanghainese who can not speak Shanghainese? What is a Hong Konger who can not speak Cantonese? Or, in other words:

Why on earth would Shanghainese parents not teach their children Shanghainese?

and:

When you move to a new place, why would you not learn the local language?

Yeah, this one’s been brewing for a while….

Back during the May Day holiday, up at the farm, I watched Once Upon a Time in China/《黄飞鸿》 1, 2, and 3. I was reminded of a certain phenomenon I have noticed in the films of both Bruce Lee and Jet Li.

When we got back to Beijing, I noticed this short piece about Ip Man/《叶问》 2 (scroll down to 015: Ip Man and Chinese Nationalism).

And then I finally got around to watching Ip Man 2. And my wife remembered that good, old Scottish word “Sassenach” and used it to great effect.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s shaping up to be quite an interesting year. Fortunately, the situation that was proving to be very draining is now dealt with. With a bit of luck, the rest of the semester will be a lot easier.

So May Day, and a much-needed rest, came, and we headed out to Yanqing as usual. Peace and quiet. And excavators digging up the village roads. Apparently the water pipes are to be fixed up. But even with the excavators, it was nice and quiet. Warm, too.

And as is our habit, we came back on May 2, trying to beat the holiday rush. We get to the bus station and saw a huge, long line of people and no buses. Apparently holiday traffic meant the buses were stuck down at the Beijing end of the expressway and couldn’t get back to Yanqing fast enough. A “taxi” driver (not a regular, legal taxi) was offering rides to the train station at 5 kuai per person – it would normally be 5 kuai all up, but we weren’t in the best bargaining position – and so, figuring it was better to get a train than stand in the sun for hours only to get stuck in traffic on the expressway, we jumped in.

I absolutely do not recommend taking that train. Certainly not on a public holiday, anyway. The train itself is fine, a fairly standard CRH train, but it is considerably more expensive and less frequent than the bus, the new Yanqing station it stops at is not in the most convenient location (great for the “taxi” drivers, though), and if you’re taking the train from Yanqing, the station is a big, empty nothing. A large hall with an electronic screen showing the next couple of scheduled trains, a few seats, and toilets. That’s it. No concession stands, nowhere to get a drink or snack or newspaper, no entertainment of any kind, not even a TV. Nothing. So we walked outside. The neighbouring petrol station had a sign announcing a convenience store, but there was no convenience store. We crossed the road and found a petrol station that did sell more than just petrol, though, and got some drinks and snacks. We wandered around a bit to see if there was anywhere better to wait for the train, perhaps a restaurant – it was, after all, almost dinner time. There must’ve been something around, I mean, there was a housing estate behind the petrol station, but we couldn’t find anything. So back to the train station to wait.

Eventually we got on the train. There weren’t many people and it was comfortable. But then we get to the really big problem with taking the train: Badaling. Of the stations we stopped at where I could see the platform, only Badaling had barriers. Barriers and hordes of tourists. Opening the train doors was something akin to bursting a dam, and within seconds the train was grossly overcrowded and uncomfortable. Still, that is holiday travel.

Nice train, pity about the price, infrequent service, crappy station, and overcrowding. Still better than standing in the sun waiting for buses stuck in traffic, though.

While I’m ranting, I might as well get this one out of my system, too, although it is completely unrelated: I like Sogou’s Pinyin IME. I like that it updates automatically on a very regular basis, it’s easy to use, and it does a pretty good job of ‘guessing’ which words I want. What I do not like is that on its latest update, it also downloaded and installed Sogou’s browser and set that as my default browser. No, Sogou, no. I will be the one to decide which browser(s) I will use and which will be my default browser.

Oh well, now that I have the Sogou browser, I suppose I should at least try it and see how it compares to the competition. But I would have appreciated being offered some choice in the matter.

Might as well continue the string of unrelated rants: Kaixin001′s farm game is giving me far too much free 枸杞 (gǒuqǐ, Chinese wolfberry – only just learned what that is in English just now)!

Ah, I feel much better now.

And with the end of that rather draining situation and a good rest, I should be able to get stuck into the multitude of projects that have had to be put on hold for a lack of energy. That should mean, among other things, a resusscitation of this blog – or at least a little less neglect.

I seem to have misplaced my muse. If anybody has seen my muse, please let me know in the comments.

Actually, I have a few ideas for two or three things I want to be writing, but I am really struggling to convert ideas into pretty patterns of pixels. I have about a dozen projects sitting on back burners waiting for me to find the energy and inspiration to get stuck in. But…

One thing that has been really bugging me lately is work. Well, one aspect of work. A large part of my job is teaching Academic Writing. This means equipping young Chinese with the English writing skills they will need to succeed at a Western university. Yes, there are many problems with that statement, but they’re not the issue. What’s really bugging me, and this is a bugging that has been building up over a long, long time, is the textbooks I have to use.

Now, let me start by saying that all the Academic Writing textbooks – indeed, all the English writing textbooks – I have ever seen have been American in origin. And let me continue by saying that I’m really glad that I’ve known enough educated Americans over the years to not believe that what is contained in these textbooks is in anyway representative of what passes for academic writing in America. Y’see, these books never actually teach academic writing – and that is the least of the problems. What these textbooks invariably teach is a lot of sentimental, saccharine-laden nonsense with the occasional thrust of the lance at the op-ed pages of your local newspaper. What you find in these textbooks is certainly not the kind of writing that would actually earn you a degree. Let me emphasise: The Americans I know know what academic writing is. The Academic Writing textbooks I have to use teach something that is not academic writing.

And the second reason for the need to point out the American origins of these textbooks is that almost all of them I have used have been Chinese editions of the American books. That should be fine, except that the books were very clearly written for an American audience. The topics chosen for each chapter are topics relevant to American society. The model essays were clearly written for an American audience. If I were teaching one of these “freshman comp” courses that American universities seem to have, that would not be a problem. But I’m standing at the front of a classroom in China with 30-odd young Chinese people and an American textbook having to constantly take a step back, explain the topic, alter it to suit the audience I have in front of me, and move on. See, none of the publishers seems to make even the slightest attempt to adapt the books for a Chinese audience beyond slapping a Chinese cover over it and adding the necessary publishing details and perhaps, if you’re lucky, a Chinese-language “How to use this book” page.

To give you one example (because today in class we were doing Chapter 10: Examples), the book I am currently using, in Chapter 16: Argumentation, uses as a model essay one entitled Ban the Things. Ban Them All. by Molly Ivins. It reads like the kind of cheap, easily thrown-off op-ed piece one would find in any random newspaper of more-or-less “liberal” leanings. It argues in favour of stricter gun control. My first problem with using this essay is that it appears in the Chinese edition of the textbook I have to use to teach Chinese students here in China. Here in China where gun control is not an issue. Alright, I can, based on what I have seen of the American media and conversations with a wide variety of Americans I have met both here and back in New Zealand, fill in at least some of the background information necessary to understand what this essay is all about, where the author is coming from, and where she is trying to take us to, but:

To make matters worse, Chapter 16 sets out five strategies for argumentation that I am to teach my students, namely:

1. Use Tactful, Courteous Language
2. Point Out Common Ground
3. Acknowledge Differing Viewpoints
4. When Appropriate, Grant the Merits of Differing Viewpoints
5. Rebut Differing Viewpoints

That’s all good, and with a greater expansion on Strategy 5 and a lot of time spent on logically developing and presenting one’s own argument added in, is precisely what I’d teach. The problem is that Ivins’ essay is presented as a model of argumentation for the students to learn from and yet it starts with sarcasm and ends with ad hominem attack, makes no attempt to find common ground, only acknowledges differing viewpoints in so far as we can all acknowledge the incoherent babbling of people obviously in desperate need of psychiatric treatment (that ad hominem attack I was referring to) and therefore makes no attempt to find out whether any other viewpoint may have any merits, and therefore can’t even come close to rebutting anything. And with that, I have only just begun to critique that attempt at an argumentation essay. And I’m supposed to use this rubbish as a model to teach my students to write good academic essays?

And then there’s the structure of the books. My current textbook, for example, waits until chapters 21 and 22 to introduce such things as using the library and internet and writing a research paper. Such things as plagiarism, citations and bibliographies are buried in those chapters with far too little detail or development of the topics. My problem is that in my student days, the first thing one would do on receiving an assignment would be to pop into the Union to see who was hanging out there, or wander round to Governor’s for a coffee, or perhaps the Cook for a beer with your mates go to the library and start researching the topic. The point is, you can’t even begin to write a proper essay until you at least have the information you need to understand the topic. Shouldn’t the order be more like:

• Chapter 1: What is academic writing?
• Chapter 2: Decoding the assignment.
• Chapter 3: Get thee to the library, or at least online (but no playing on Facebook!)!
• Chapter 4: Now that you have some information, perhaps we can start brainstorming or planning this essay you have to write.

??

Sure, get a new book. But every writing textbook I have ever used has had problems of these kinds. It seems to be less a matter of finding a better book, more a matter choosing which mixture and arrangement of problems to deal with this time round.

We bowled up to Terminal 3 with plenty of time, dressed in our best compromise clothing – got to get into the terminal before hypothermia sets in, through the airports and flight in reasonable comfort, then from the terminal to the best place to change without spontaneously combusting, not an easy compromise to draw. Personally, I prefer summer to winter flights. But we got to the terminal without freezing and with plenty of time. We got through all the formalities easily and to our gate with time to wander round being underwhelmed by what T3 had to offer in the way of duty free. But whatever. I have only three complaints about the flight:

1. I got absolutely no sleep whatsoever. For that, I don’t blame Air New Zealand. I can’t. Somehow my brain went into hyperdrive for 13 straight hours.
2. The air was getting pretty skanky towards the end of the flight. I still don’t blame Air New Zealand, as there are probably many technicalities of keeping a pressurised aircraft cabin intact at high altitude and affects of these technicalities on the possibilities for providing ample amounts of clean, fresh air that I’m not aware of, but it would be nice if fresher air could be brought onboard as well.
3. The plane ran out of water. Still not blaming anybody, but you really gotta wonder when they get on the intercom and explain that nobody’s getting no tea or coffee with their breakfast as there’s no water left in the tanks.

Whatever, we made it to Auckland safe and sound. We touched down 15 minutes early, in fact. Stepping out of the skanky aircraft cabin air into humid Auckland air was expected. From that into the equally sticky, apparently unairconditioned air of the terminal building was not, and did not feel good. Whatever, we got through the formalities at that end without any hassle, out the other side and there were my parents waiting, standing, hurrying over to greet us. Then in the car and off to my uncle’s house where we could get ourselves cleaned up, get a change of clothes, a cup or ten of tea, and generally start feeling human again.

But there was a reason for us to stay in Auckland, and to have gone first to my uncle’s house, and that was my grandmother. She had been in poor and deteriorating health for some time. I hadn’t seen her for over ten years. About a week before our arrival she’d asked Mum when I’d be back. The plan had been for us to stay in Aucland and visit her before heading down to Hamilton, where my parents live. A few days before our arrival she’d had a massive stroke, and as we packed, then travelled, the family started to gather and prepare. But that’s a matter for another post I’m struggling to write.

I don’t really want to go into a travelogue. That’s been done. I do want to write about a few impressions, though. The first of them – at least, the first I want to write about – is the opposite of Arctosia’s. The thing is, I fully understand where he’s coming from, while I’m still trying to figure out my own reaction. I was struck by New Zealand’s prosperity. Not just prosperity, but possibility, too. I think that’s the first time I’ve felt that way about my own country, and I’m trying to understand why.

For example, I was surprised by Raglan. I had never been there before, and knew it only by its reputation as a surf beach. I was expecting only a few buildings – the requisite petrol station, pub, general store and maybe a church with a few houses and perhaps an area school, not much more. It’s much bigger than that, of course, but what I didn’t expect was an apparently quite thriving retail area full of boutiques, cafes, a few bars, and generally what you’d expect in a trendier part of Wellington or Auckland, but transported to the coast of the Waikato. Tirau was similar, in that the road was lined with some fancy stores selling lots of cool stuff and a few cafes and…. surprising prosperity for a tiny town not much wider than the highway that runs through it.

Oh, and  a giant corrugated iron sheep and a giant corrugated iron sheepdog. And a giant corrugated iron shepherd in the grounds of the church next door. In Tirau, that is.

Still, at half past four in the afternoon all the shops in Tirau shut, much to my wife’s disgust. How lazy! she said. How can they all shut?! If I had a shop here I’d stay open until much later in the evening! Then I pointed out how small the town is by pointing out just how far she’d have to walk up one of the sidestreets before she was in a paddock – not far at all.

Nationalism. For years my Mum has been sending me t-shirts with a New Zealand theme. Things like a map of New Zealand with the word ‘Home” next to it in big, bold letters. It’s almost as if she’s trying to tell me something. When we did get to Hamilton, she gave me more t-shirts of that nature. The day we left she gave me a hoodie with three colourful tikis on it. I think perhaps I sense a pattern developing here…. Anyway, so I’ve been aware for some time now that clothing with New Zealand patriotic/nationalist messages exists. What I wasn’t expecting to see so many blatant displays of national allegiance in New Zealand.

That first day there, in Auckland, had to be spent partly at the hospital with Grandma. But the situation meant that we were given time off, and Dad took us to do a couple of necessary things like change money (NEVER CHANGE MONEY AT AUCKLAND AIRPORT!), then we went across the Harbour Bridge and out to Devonport for a bit of a look-round. On the road (to get back to this nationalism thing) I couldn’t help but notice quite a few cars with a southern cross design, basically the same as the right-hand half of the New Zealand flag (four five-pointed red stars with white borders in the shape of the Southern Cross on a blue background – remember that and you’ll never confuse our flag with the Australian one again), to the left of their licence plates and a silver fern to the right.

Flags, too. I saw more New Zealand flags than I remember being used to seeing flying around. But with flags it gets a little more complex, especially when we were in Rotorua. I couldn’t help but notice more than a few Confederation of United Tribes and Tino Rangatiratanga flags flying, too – in one memorable case, a house in Rotorua had a torn-up United Tribes flag and a Tino Rangatiratanga flag flying from a flagpole in the yard and larger and more intact versions of both flags covering the front windows. Rotorua also sported graffiti along the lines of “Tangata whenua 4 eva”.

It seems I forgot to warn my wife what a maritime climate means: Summers are surprisingly cool. Overnight, when cloud covered the sun, when there was a breeze or rain, especially all of the above combined, she found it cold, and was even seen shivering. It seems lzh learnt the hard way that what I’d told her about the Pacific sun really is for real: As soon as the sun came out, she was complaining about the heat. I think the highest temperature we experienced in New Zealand was 27 degrees – in other words, daytimes were consistently a good 10 degrees cooler than midsummer Beijing.

My wife likes Hamilton. Actually, it is a nice enough town in its own right. My parents don’t like living there, because there’s nothing happening there (they say – I will refrain from commenting, having only ever visited, and never for the sake of visiting Hamilton). I can understand lzh’s point of view – it’s quiet, clean, green, full of trees, and generally pleasant. I’m sure that changes for the weekend of the V8s, but that’s one weekend. Mornings there were nice. I’d wake up, somehow instantly back on my summer schedule of absurdly early starts, brew a pot of coffee, and alternate between reading the paper and stepping out on the deck to observe the sunrise. Despite the fact I was awake at a time I have always felt should be illegal, I have to say it was quite a nice, almost civilised way to start the day.

She liked Taupo even better than Hamilton. The natural environment, the setting by the lake, she said. I can see why. I don’t have a bad memory of the place, and it’s natural setting goes a long way to explaining why.

She didn’t like Wellington. Dry and windy and densely packed. I think I saw for the first time just how tightly packed into the valleys and the few scraps of flat land central Wellington and the older suburbs are, and I think it was a combination of time away (seven years, as it happens) and lzh’s reaction as a first time visitor that opened my eyes to that. Windy, of course, and it is unfortunate that the few days we were there Wellington turned on its typical weather. For myself, it was just a little breezy, nothing unexpected or untoward. For lzh, it was windy. And yes, Wellington’s air is oddly dry.

That dry wind has been blamed for everything that’s been wrong with our skin since we left Wellington.

Books really are expensive. Still, I came back with 10 of them (and somehow our luggage wasn’t overweight): 2 were gifts, 9 were ‘New Zealand’ in some way, shape or form (history, poetry, fiction…). Necessities don’t seem to be quite so expensive. We needed shampoo. We were at a store in Tirau on our way home from Rotorua. lzh said, hey, this is only $5. I said, don’t buy it, it’s always more expensive in these small shops. She didn’t understand what I was on about, after all, it was cheap enough as it was. Next day in a real supermarket in Hamilton we got a bigger bottle of shampoo for even less.

We were in the souvenir shop at Rainbow Springs in Rotorua. The cashier rang up our purchases. She told me the price, but in Chinese…. I must’ve looked surprised and a bit confused. Oh, I’d heard you two speaking Chinese, she said. I hadn’t actually noticed the cashier before, being preoccupied with getting our already large pile of souvenirs onto the counter and stopping lzh from adding to the pile and getting her out of the shop and us on our way to lunch in time to catch the afternoon performance at Whakarewarewa, and the hour was growing late and I still hadn’t readjusted to being able to traverse twice the distance in half the time thanks to the very low population density. Turns out the cashier was from Guangdong – must’ve been a relatively recent immigrant, though, considering her Mandarin was slightly accented but basically flawless, most certainly not like that of a Hong Konger. We ate two lunches in Auckland. On both occasions, lzh ordered in Chinese. I noticed a Chinese-language (traditional characters) newspaper on sale in the Asian supermarket in Hamilton.

Chinese-language signs seemed to be about equally divided between Simplified and Traditional.

I was, however, surprised by how few Chinese, or East Asian people in general, were around. There must be plenty of them, especially if the Waikato now has its own Chinese-language media, but I guess they tend to hang out in areas other than the ones we visited.

lzh is still commenting on the distances that had to be travelled in order to do anything, even just buying a bottle of soy sauce or whatever the kitchen had suddenly run out of.

We were on the road to Rotorua, and my wife was glued to the car window, constantly commenting on how green everything was, how many sheep were in that field, how many cows over there, and so on. I spotted an odd-looking herd and said, hey, check out those animals. The look of mixed-up surprise, confused recognition, and a little shock was so priceless I should’ve had the camera ready. “就是那个草泥马吗?!” (Is that that grass mud horse?!) Yep, it was a herd of alpacas.

That’s about all for this long-overdue post. We’ve been back in Beijing two weeks now and the snow is falling thickly outside. Two weeks ago I was wandering around barefoot in a t-shirt.

Well, I was almost tempted to weigh in on the Great Google Melodrama, but Mr Bamboo saved me the trouble by writing pretty much what I wanted to write in this concise paragraph:

Another entry raises a question about Google censoring certain search terms and functioning within the law. If Google.cn ceases to censor search terms, then isn’t it breaking the law? Thus Google can’t negotiate because it can’t somehow be exempt from the same laws which apply to everyone else. Like any other government, the boys in Zhongnanhai aren’t about to concede anything.

Exactly.

And will everybody please just calm down? Google is not the internet. Baidu is not the only alternative. Any hypothetical shutdown of all Google services from inside the Mainland would be a pain in the arse, but is in no way equivalent to Mars colliding with Earth and the Sun exploding. This will all blow over and we’ll go on to have a 2010 with many more things to overreact to.

That said, I am a little concerned at the possible advent of the Great Chinese Intranet….

Or perhaps that should be Three Shots. I certainly think Three Shots would be a better English title than the official one. Still, I guess the official English title contains a reference to the films inspiration.

I was standing on the corner of that big, fancy mall on the northwest corner of the Shuangjing intersection waiting for my wife to finish sifting through overpriced clothes so we could go watch the film. I knew which of the buildings around me were old and which new- indeed, I remember when the spot I was standing on was a fancyarse lawn scarred with pathways leading into the sales office for the complex which was then little more than a hole in the ground. But somehow all the buildings looked the same age, as if the norwester had finally put the upstart new buildings in their place. It seems we have a habit of going to the cinema on blustery, dry, cold December days to see the latest blockbuster. Indeed, last time we’d gone to the cinema was almost exactly a year ago (indeed, we’re ony 3 days short), and the coldest December day in Beijing since 1951. That day we saw Feng Xiaogang’s 《非诚勿扰》. This time, when lzh emerged from the clothes shop, we wandered up to… oh, no “Wait, we’ve still got time, let’s go check out those discounted shoes first, you need new sandals for when we go to New Zealand”. grrrr. And it wasn’t any kind of shoes we bought, but a new pair of thick longjohns for me, me having discovered unfortunately late yesterday afternoon (when I really needed to be getting out of barbeque-reeking clothes and making myself respectable as presentable as possible) that the top half of my other set of thick longjohns was MIA. And then back to the cinema to see Zhang Yimou’s latest film, 《三枪拍案惊奇》/A Simple Noodle Story.

I have a love/hate/like/why can’t he get back to realising his full talent? relationship with Lao Zhang. I love his early work. I hate his martial arts epics. 《千里走单骑》/Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles was good, but not as good as his early films. 《三枪》 I don’t yet know how to rate.

I suppose I should note that the version we saw at UME Shuangjing was Mandarin soundtrack (obviously) with Chinese subtitles. Those whose Chinese is not up to following a film entirely in Chinese should either look for a cinema showing it with English subtitles or a DVD with more subtitling options than the cinema allows.

First impression was that the volume knobs on UME Shuangjing’s amplifiers must have a Number 11, because the three shots that bring the opening credits to a close really were one louder. Or to put it slightly more directly: If those three shots hit you with such force that you wonder if somebody hasn’t just put three bullets in your forehead, then perhaps somebody should turn the volume down just a tad. lzh spent most of the film with fingers firmly planted in ears, and yet didn’t miss a line.

Based on what I’d seen on TV, I went in expecting some form of comedy, probably of the rather silly kind, some Lao Zhang’ed cinematic errenzhuan [that is perhaps the worst wikipedia stub I've ever seen, but at least it gives you a brief description], perhaps. I also did not have high hopes from the film, having heard that it wasn’t all that good. Second impression was that the expectation the TV promotional stuff had given me was right, but the comedy was good. I certainly would never have expected to see 饼 (Chinese pancake type thing) given the same treatment as one of those errenzhuan kerchiefs and spun around till it became a pizza base so huge it’d have the Kro’s Nest pizza chef putting three shots into his own head for shame. It was a lot of fun to watch, but at the same time not a total surprise considering that 3 of the 4 actors playing the noodle restaurant staff (Xiao Shenyang, Mao Mao, Cheng Ye, with Yan Ni the only exception) came up through Zhao Benshan’s errenzhuan circle.

Third impression was that this was most certainly a Zhang Yimou film. Only Lao Zhang could possibly make a desert look so incredibly lush.

There’s also something incredibly discordant about this film. It’s set somewhere way out in Northwest China along the Silk Road, but most of the actors spend most of the film in costumes more appropriate for an errenzhuan stage in Liaoning. Was a time when Lao Zhang was making Northwestern films with distinctly Northwestern vibes, but if you closed your eyes and listened only to the dialogue, you’d think this one was set somewhere on the black earth of the Northeast. Anachronisms litter the script like drug dealers on the streets of Sanlitun of a weekend evening. And I couldn’t help but feel those anachronisms hid a lot of knitting needle jabs at modern Chinese society.

Before too long, a certain darkness crept into the film. It acquired an undertone and atmospherics so black you’d swear it was filmed by a Kiwi. Lao Zhang’s lusciously filmed desert turned all gothic, with ever-passing stormclouds looming, threatening. Sun Honglei’s soldier turned into a psychopath who did everything possible to empty the noodle restaurant boss’ safe. Yan Ni’s 老板娘/Boss’ Wife was so keen to buy the Persian Merchant’s gun because she had suffered ten years of horrific abuse at the hands of the Boss (Ni Dahong). And the Boss is quite a piece of work: Abusive, with a penchant for cutting the fat baby’s face out of New Year paintings and forcing his wife to put her face in the hole as he quietly, calmly tells her off, then slams burning tobacco into the small of her back. Self-centred, manipulative, and tighter than a Scotsman’s arse. While the errenzhuan actors seem to spend most of the film on the errenzhuan level of comedy, Yan Ni’s Boss’ Wife takes a wild, bipolar ride between brave face, slapstick comedy, and Greek tragedy, with Xiao Shenyang’s Li Si desperately trying to figure out what’s going on and how he’s supposed to respond to it all. But can this 娘们唧唧的/Big Girl’s Blouse man up and John Wayne their way out of this mess?

All three shots in the gun sold by the Persian Merchant are put to very good use, with the second being sidesplittingly, laundryman’s-going-to-be-busy hillarious. But I’ll say no more than that the Boss’ Wife gets what she needs, but at a cost of Shakespearian proportion.

Beware, within this beautifully-filmed, light-hearted comedy are hidden a myriad of ragged shards of glass. But it’s a great film. Watch it.

Oh, and for the “Some People Are Just Too Damn Talented For Their Own Good” file: Xiao Shenyang sings the song that animates the final credits (the first of his songs which is not a pisstake of other singers?), a song in which all the dead bodies come back to life and join in the dance. It isn’t just that Xiao Shenyang can act errenzhuan and more widespread forms of drama, and sing and dance (uh… errenzhuan), but Sun Honglei also turns out to be a pretty decent dancer.

“Tear down the multi-media classrooms!” a student cries at the start of this article by Xiong Bingqi on 思想国@21世纪评论. What could this be about? As Xiong states:

这让我很吃惊，因为那时全国各地的大学，正推行多媒体“先进现代教育技术”，鼓励教师上课用PPT，用多媒体技术，其好处据说很多——可以让教室很环保， 老师不用吃粉笔灰；可以图文并茂，图像、视频、音频并用，让讲课丰富多彩；可以点击链接，与网络连接，延伸学习，大大拓展上课空间；可以与异地学校课堂交 互，获得完全不同的上课感受……

This really surprised me because at that time universities throughout China were implementing multimedia “advanced modern educational technology”, encouraging teachers to use powerpoint in class. Apparently there are many advantages to using multimedia technology in class- it’s more environmentally friendly, the teacher doesn’t need to eat chalk dust; you can use pictures and text, images, video and audio can be used all at once, making the lesson rich and varied; you can click links, connect to the internet, extending learning, greatly expanding the class space; you can interact with classrooms in other places, getting a completely different experience of class…..

First a few translation notes:

1. I don’t know what the English usage is outside of my own immediate work environment, but ‘PPT’ seems to be the common Chinese way of referring to powerpoint presentations.
2. 图文并茂, according to the dictionary, is used to refer to books, magazines, etc, and means “both pictures and texts are excellent”. It’s Friday morning, and I’m not yet caffeinated enough to find a better way of rendering that into English than “you can use pictures and text”. Maybe I should use coffee rather than longjing tea to fuel my translations….
3. Chinese university classrooms still largely use blackboards and chalk, and believe me, environmental concerns aside, eating chalkdust is one of the bigger occupational hazards of teaching here. That chalkdust is incredibly efficient at drying out the skin on your face and hands and your throat- the throat’s the worst, though, as that, apart from shredding your voice, increases your susceptibility to colds and flus, and when you look at the students’ living conditions….. Teaching in China gives your immune system a good, solid workout.

Anyway, when I read this yesterday morning (I didn’t have time to post on it then, and had no energy after class yesterday afternoon), I was intrigued. See, I’m too lazy to use powerpoint much- for one thing, my first several years teaching I had a desk, blackboard and chalk. Heck, I had classrooms in Taiyuan that had no electricity and lights that went on and off according to the whim of somebody in some other room. Secondly, I find that powerpoint drastically increases the time spent preparing lessons. All that fiddling around with text, images, video, audio…. and despite the obvious advantages of multimedia, the actual benefit to the lesson outcomes is not always worth it. Yes, pictures, graphs, video, audio, maps, and all that can be extremely useful for boosting the students’ understanding of an issue, but I mostly teach academic writing. For that I find a good old-fashioned blackboard and chalk combined with working the classroom talking to students individually far more useful than fancy multimedia stuff, and word at least as good as powerpoint.

But the explanation comes: Apparently a lot of teachers have used the multimedia as an excuse to get lazy. Just borrow somebody else’s ppt, chuck it on the multimedia, and work off of that, no need to prepare. And if there’s a powercut…. you’re screwed. The result is students who, powerless to rage against their teachers and the system that allows them to continue “teaching”, vent their fury on the bloody multimedia classrooms. The machines can’t retaliate (yet), so they’re a safe target.

Xiong points out that, obviously, one cannot cure this “ppt dependency” (PPT依赖症) that lazy teachers have developed by simply ripping the multimedia technology out of the classrooms. The problem is in the system, so clearly the system needs to be fixed so that lazy teachers can’t use the technology as a crutch. He offers up a comparison that I find interesting:

America. In the American system, he says, universities have to compete for students and students have a lot more freedom to choose their university and then to transfer if they are not satisfied with their first choice. This keeps the universities on their toes, and although America, too, has its university staff who’d rather not see the inside of a classroom, the pressure is there to perform.

Fair enough, and it would be nice to see students here offered more choice as to what they study, where, and how they arrange their courses. But one can’t simply import some foreign system and expect it to work. Considering America’s own not small population, I can’t figure out how their university admissions departments work…. Surely they must find themselves buried under whole rainforests’ worth of paper? How do they process all of that? Vast armies of highly trained oompa-loompas?

In any case, I was intrigued by the article and found it provoking a thought or two. Firstly, it confirmed a suspicion I’ve long held that much of this new technology is little more than gimmickry. Let me explain: In the hands of good, dedicated, motivated teachers, the technology can be very useful for improving educational outcomes. But here’s the thing: Good teachers will get good results regardless of the technology used. The technology, be it a blackboard and chalk or a computer, projector and screen, is simply a tool. The tool itself is a mere object. The results depend on how the tool is used, not what the tool is.

Some people seem to think that “kids today” have somehow magically changed and we need to be using fancy electronic stuff to reach them. Nonsense. When I was a student the lazy students would skip class, read books or newspapers, or generally just not really listen much, maybe take a few token notes at best. Instead of reviewing or working on assignments, they’d go to cafes or pubs or watch TV or read books or…. My students now, if they’re lazy, play with cellphones, skip class, read books or newspapers, sleep, or generally just not really listen much. Instead of reviewing or working on assignments, they’ll play basketball or go to the internet bar or watch TV or download and watch pirated movies or…. Whether I use blackboard and chalk or computer and powerpoint, those who are motivated pay attention and study, those who are not, don’t. Using fancy technology doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to how many students pay attention or how attentive they are. The change is in the range of methods students can use to not study, not some magical difference in the students.

Secondly, I’ve been thinking a lot this semester, perhaps even deeply, about how my classroom works and what I can do to improve things. There are issues particular to my job that I won’t discuss and which I can’t do anything to change anyway, but I have been thinking a lot about what I can do to improve what happens in my academic writing classes in particular. I doubt there’s any way to make such a dry, technical subject interesting for the students, but as students of a Western as well as a Chinese university, they need these classes. I’ve finally gotten a chance to experiment with a whole new approach, something entirely different from how I’ve done things in the past. It’s really hard to change old habits. But I have seen improvements- some even quite dramatic- in how the students have handled various aspects of writing. Xiong’s article is a reminder that technology, in and of itself, will not make things any better. The key is not the tool, but how the tool is used. The big question for me is: How to apply the technology so as to improve outcomes in my writing class? I have yet to find an answer to that question- in fact, I find it puts more of a barrier between me and the students, as it keeps me behind a desk when I’d rather be moving around engaging directly with the students.

Food for weekend thought, at least.