Elves

December 24th, in case you didn't know, was a work day, a cold one--it least it was for me, as was December 25th. So this work day had its ups and downs. A frightening pile of thesis proposals was mounting on the corner of my desk. Someone was going to have to grade all of those. There was a short conversation with my dean that proved to be exhilarating, productive. More on that later. But, while all this was in the front of my mind, in the back I was wondering just who was coming to dinner. Anyone?

Several students had informed me last week that they were making me a Christmas Eve dinner--at my apartment--but I hadn't heard any more about it. They had been adamant--I was to buy nothing, prepare nothing. Still. Complicating things, a tutor had asked me to see an exhibit featuring her mother's paper-cutting, an exhibit that would be up for exactly five more hours and hung up on a clothesline in front of a building a mile away. It was not a convenient time to go see her mother's papercuts, but I did. I found out her mother is good.

So it was much later than I had hoped when I returned to my apartment, a few miles away, and found a washing machine in the middle of the living room. It was, in fact, the old one, a very small machine that worked just fine. Why was it in the living room? Well, a Chinese worker, under the supervision of the landlady, Mrs. Niu, was trying to cram another one into the old space, and it wasn't going to fit. He was also trying to tell me something with great spirit and gusto, and I had no clue what he was saying. There was water all over the kitchen floor, which meant that there were muddy footprints tracked all over the little apartment with white tiles on the floor. It was freezing--or close enough. Five degrees Celcius. I had planned to bake some Christmas cookies and clean things up before my students came--but I couldn't get within five feet of the sink and the water was turned off anyway.

I was spared having to decide what to do next because two male students banged on my door and  unloaded two big shopping bags on my couch. My cell phone rang and the class monitor welcomed the three of us to come join the rest of the gang in Yong Hui supermarket so I could help them pick out some vegetables. The guys and I half ran there and, thanks to cell phones, finally found the others milling around.

Before long, there were thirty-five of us back in my kitchen--well, thirty-five in my apartment and as many as could fit in the kitchen. I'll let the photos below tell the rest of the story. Let me say this, though, these "only children" function like a big family in ways that vaguely remind me of my own big family. They get stuff done. They work together for the good of the whole. They pitch in, they're fun, and they're utterly amazing.

Before they morphed

. . . into elves

Five degrees Celcius

Before they put up a Christmas tree

Elves decorating

Each elf making his or her own famous hometown dish

Elves under their bow

Elves making lots of paper flowers

Voila!

Elves preparing mushrooms

Elves paper cutting (amazing things put in surprising places)

Hungry elves

Only the beginning of the feast--the wok was hot until 10:00 pm

Elves eating

The last elf left after every dish was washed, every leftover bagged up, every inch of floor mopped. Then, at 10:20, Co and Fasty (older students, different class) banged on the door, with gift in hand and a huge bouquet of flowers. Yes, sure, they would have some tea. They stayed and talked until 11:15, when they had to sca-daddle to get back before their dormitory doors were locked.

Not in China

I remember wincing at the sound of a cane cracking on the back of a  student in an adjoining New Zealand classroom. It was biology class, and I remember Stuart, perched on the stool next to me, whispering, “Yes, we have corporal punishment—but at least we don’t have capital punishment.” I was young, but I’d never thought about it that way before.

I’m older now and sit here shelling peanuts at my kitchen table, laptop nearby. I’m high up in an old Chinese apartment building and there are no bars on my windows, but there are bars on the windows of lower floors. Backpacks, when they’re worn, are often swung around to the front, and people in train stations clutch their bags closely. I wonder about the figures not only for larceny, but also for domestic violence. Sometimes late at night I can hear a fight in one of the nearby buildings—a man shouting and a woman wailing, beseeching him to do something. I’m not even sure that it’s domestic violence because I can’t understand what they’re saying, but inevitably her beseeching turns and simply becomes prolonged screaming. I have never personally witnessed such sounds before. I have, though, witnessed a breathtaking mountain scene that happens to be, a student tells me, where she would go to escape her father’s beatings.

So China’s not perfect. It has both corporal and capital punishment—and it’s not free of school violence.  Just days ago in Henan Province a disturbed 36 year old man allegedly entered a school and tried to attack some children. 

But here’s the thing: The man in China had a kitchen knife, not a gun—certainly not a .223 Bushmaster semiautomatic rifle or either a .10 mm Glock or a .9 mm Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol. The man in China allegedly attacked the Chinese school children within hours of when Adam Lanza made his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in the US. Without assuming that the Sandy Hook tragedy can be accounted for simply by a single factor, legal access to deadly guns, that one factor is precisely the one about which we have some choice and control.

The U.S. has the highest gun ownership rate in the world. Although it isn’t top of the list for the number of people killed by guns, it is near the top of the list, following only Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela, four countries suffering from very different kinds of problems than those confronting the US (UNODC & Small Arms Survey of 2010, as quoted by Voice Of America 2012-12-18). None of the Western European countries with which the US sometimes compares itself has figures like these—nor do any of them have capital punishment.

But back to China:  Again, according to the VOA, “The United Nations estimates that China's overall homicide rate is less than a quarter of that of the United States. Gun control advocates argue this is because China, which has over a billion more people than the U.S., has only a fraction of the number of the U.S.' guns.”

I can’t pretend that my college- mountain-city is typical in China. I just don’t know enough. It’s certainly not Beijing or Shanghai, that I do know. But I can tell you that I marvel constantly at how safe I feel, bodily safe, walking from early morning until late at night, walking everywhere. The lanes winding through the campus are dimly lit, and yet I never feel alone and never have felt so safe at night. The lanes are full of students at all hours—women walking arm in arm, holding hands, or simply walking alone, men bee-lining their way to the next class or moving along in small noisy groups.  The athletic fields have none of the bright garish lights you find on many such fields elsewhere—they’re simply dark, and students run around the tracks in the dark or sit on the fields, huddled in little groups, talking, laughing, reminiscent of summer camp. Okay, that’s campus, which is also gated with guards patrolling everywhere, but it’s the same way on both the main streets and the back alleys of the city. The open-air stairwells in my apartment have lights that should come on if you stamp your foot—but often don’t. Even in the near dark, I feel relatively safe. People live in the city and they’re out; it’s not just riffraff out late on the streets.

It’s not perfectly safe, of course, and tragedies can strike anywhere. But there is a difference. There are no guns in China—not many, that is.

Dragons and other words

Words are complicated little devils. Anyone who has struggled to paraphrase anything, let alone translate from one language to another, knows how much baggage a few little letters can carry--connotations, allusions, historical associations, and all that. Cultural and ideological associations. On the back of a few little sticks--say the letter "A"--is so much else. The word "red"--what it carries on its back in the West might be quite different from what it carries in the East. "Moon." "Dragons." The Western baggage is so different from the weight on those Eastern words. Even simple, everyday things aren't so simple--what's a "cup" or a "plate"? Ha! You thought you knew! Come to China and I'll show you!

So just what does it mean to teach English words to Chinese students in the age of globalization? What IS English in a world of Englishes?

I was mulling over these things as I trudged along through campus shadows to an evening performance sponsored by the School of Foreign Languages. It's nearing the end of the semester, and I'm doing my mental end of term post mortem--wondering just what am I doing here--what larger forces am I wittingly and unwittingly contributing to, and what do words have to do with them? These big thoughts were on my mind as I wove past students still milling round outside the auditorium.  I sat down, having been ushered to a seat near the front, where I shortly witnessed the Party Secretary belt out "The Sound of Music" with as much force as Julie Andrews. It was a stunning performance. It didn't matter that it was in English, not German, because a crew of Chinese students shortly put on a German skit, which happened to feature I-phones and some of the most amazing American hip-hop dancing I've ever seen. I don't think there's a French department, but there must be a French class, for along came twenty black headed Chinese students, who sang a lovely French tune. Russian, Japanese, and, most of all, English words filled the evening air. But throughout the evening were dances--stunningly well done, for Chinese students know how to practice and practice and practice--and most of them were hot and sexy and Western. But the students outdid the West: they wore costumes that might make New York street walkers look prudish. Their dance moves were subtle and bold, edgy and amazing. I wondered how different tonight's performances were from what might have been put on a decade ago. And I wondered how much English words and English movies and English youtubes and English ads and the English-heavy-internet and, yes, English classes have to do with it. It's not just dictionary definitions that are absorbed when people are exposed over and over to English words.

So, as I walked home with my down jacket under my coat--the jacket I sometimes sleep in, too--I was still thinking about these things. It's not so simple to wonder what English is. A thousand years ago, it was basically German, and it eventually got Frenchified a bit and it kept on changing. The Great Vowel Shift came along, and we eventually got something that we might recognize as "modern," and that became increasingly codified and normalized with dictionaries and books of usage. But meanwhile, English was absorbing vocabulary from all sorts of other languages--and was being spoken by people in far flung countries. So, today what is English?

Well, with millions of Chinese speakers and more non-native speakers of English than native speakers, it's a fair question. Chinglish might not be English--as the Broadway musical suggests. But what about China English? Just as English is no longer JUST what's spoken in the UK--it's what's spoken in New Zealand and Australia and Canada and the US, too--maybe it's no longer JUST what's spoken in what Braj Kachru calls "inner circle" countries, but is also what's spoken in "outer circle" and "expanding circle countries." But other linguists have other ways of categorizing emerging world Englishes, and many of those maps re-orient what is the "center" or the "norm." Maybe China English isn't an inferior variety, but is a variety that holds its own ground, with its own cultural weight thrown on the backs of words. China English, different from a nonstandard Chinglish, might be considered as legitimate a variety as North American English. (Curiously, although many of my quite nationalistic students believe in the legitimacy of China English, they generally privilege British over North American English. Interesting.)

My head hurts, and I'm reminded of Darwin mulling over mockingbirds--were they separate species or different varieties?

I haven't personally witnessed Chinese students talking about the "hegemony" of English, and yet I have witnessed lots of opinions and attitudes that suggest students know in effect what "hegemony" is and resent it. When people talk about the hegemony of English it's a tricky thing. I wouldn't be thrilled to be called a colonizer or master, and, yet, as an English teacher, what am I doing? I'm not apologizing for what I'm doing, and yet I'm becoming more aware of how thoughtful I need to be about the texts I choose.  You can thank the setters of the Chinese national examination standards for the fact that most of my students have already read more canonical British and American novels than some M.A. candidates in U.S. graduate departments. Now, my Chinese students happen to be in an English department, but even biology students and food science students and textile students must pass some English examinations in order to get their degrees. Not all of them are happy about that, as you can imagine. Should their science books be in English? Should those brilliant mathematicians who detest languages of any kind really have to pass English examinations? That's a complicated issue.

The internet, the language of business, and the language of science are all dominated by English--and all of the baggage carried by every little English word. So where will all this go?

Will we get an ever-more centralized English-related language? Will the sheer number of Chinese speakers of English reverse the forces of hegemony in decades to come? Or will English eventually morph into several other new languages, maybe new species, so to speak?

It's colder in my apartment than it is outside--that is, I'M colder in my apartment than I was outside because I'm not moving and generating heat--and it may be time to don my hooded down jacket over my other jacket and try sleeping on these questions. Maybe I'll dream about dragons, which are very special in China.

Later: Friend Ann responds with this:

They warned us

They warned us back in the days of Peace Corps training. They warned us that we shouldn't be surprised if we were issued invitations with only two hours' warning to do almost anything, including attending ceremonies where we would be the featured attraction. We should have a song or spare lecture in our back pockets or be ready to dance or perform or do some other amazing thing on short notice. So it was with utter relief that I discovered I was assigned to teach in a big research university that happens to be one of China's top 100--i.e, a Project 211 university--because my colleagues would all be much too busy to be bothered with the painfully amateurish theatrics of someone from Missouri.

If it had been otherwise, if I had been sent to teach in a more rural area of western China, I  might have been the greatest novelty of all time (gigantic woman with strange hair) and begged to sing at every school function and give lectures on the fly. So, not only was I spared the trauma that any nearly pathologically shy person feels when confronting a podium, but also all of those innocent residents of western China were spared hearing my rendition of the national anthem or some traditional English folk song or Christmas carol. This is not false modesty--I'm not that Chinese yet. Miss Smith, the music teacher at Anderson Elementary School preferred that none of us Davises sing  out loud at school assemblies. Mr. Schramm, the choir director at Trenton First Methodist made Sally Lutz sit next to me because she could drown me out when I was in fifth grade. And, if memory serves me right, my New Zealand host sister Eleanor and I were kicked out of a bath house in Rotorura for blubbering our national anthems under water some years ago. (A few. . .) And when it comes to speeches, I never successfully learned to spit words out. As fourth of six very verbal children, I never really learned how to wedge may way into lively dinner table debates. You might wonder how on earth I survived a teaching career and the answer is by not lecturing. Dancing? I'm no better. Yoga, yes--running, yes--hiking at high altitudes, yes. But dancing no. Contra dancing is about as forgiving a dance community as you can find in the US, and I've been known to lose my partner and end up down the line in the wrong set.

So, as you can imagine, it was with some dismay that I heard that the School of Foreign Languages really is going to have an event in a week or so and the foreign teachers usually perform. There are no fewer than six hundred majors, and I've heard rumors that a thousand people typically pack the house the night of such performances. Not only am I a bad singer, my sense is that China is full of wonderful singers. I wonder if learning to speak a tonal language at a young age makes the ear more discriminating, more carefully attuned to getting the notes right. So the standards, the expectations are high.

I'm still not one hundred percent that I'll have to perform, but, an idea popped into my head as I was crossing a dimly lit bridge on the way home from campus the other night. What if I donned a shaggy white mustache, some shaggy white eyebrows, made my hair wild, and borrowed some baggy men's clothes from some of the male foreign teachers--and pretended to be one of most beloved Missourian's, Mark Twain? Or what if I went a step wilder, and went on the stage barefoot and assumed the role of Huck? A colleague in Missouri, Tom Quirk, happens to be a Twain scholar and suggested the following passages. . .neither of which any woman donned in men's clothing has read  recently in Beibei. If you've read enough, read no more--but if you'd like some of Huck's delightful musings from chapter twenty of HF, read on--or, if you want to see how Twain fashions an "Encounter with an Interview," read on some more. . .

    TWO or three days and nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. Here is the way we put in the time. It was a monstrous big river down there -- sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up -- nearly always in the dead water under a towhead; and then cut young cottonwoods and willows, and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres -- perfectly still -- just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line -- that was the woods on t'other side; you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn't black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away -- trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks -- rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and

sounds come so far; and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they've left dead fish laying around, gars and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!

   A little smoke couldn't be noticed now, so we would take some fish off of the lines and cook up a hot breakfast. And afterwards we would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along, and by and by lazy off to sleep. Wake up by and by, and look to see what done it, and maybe see a steamboat coughing along up-stream, so far off towards the other side you couldn't tell nothing about her only whether she was a stern-wheel or side-wheel; then for about an hour there wouldn't be nothing to hear nor nothing to see -- just solid lonesomeness. Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping, because they're most always doing it on a raft; you'd see the axe flash and come down -- you don't hear nothing; you see that axe go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the k'chunk! -- it had took all that time to come over the water. So we would put in the day, lazying around, listening to the stillness. Once there was a thick fog, and the rafts and things that went by was beating tin pans so the steamboats wouldn't run over them. A scow or a raft went by so close we could hear them talking and cussing and laughing -- heard them plain; but we couldn't see no sign of them; it made you feel crawly; it was like spirits carrying on that way in the air. Jim said he believed it was spirits; but I says:

   "No; spirits wouldn't say, 'Dern the dern fog.'"

   Soon as it was night out we shoved; when we got her out to about the middle we let her alone, and let her float wherever the current wanted her to; then we lit the pipes, and dangled our legs in the water, and talked about all kinds of things -- we was always naked, day and night, whenever the mosquitoes would let us -- the new clothes Buck's folks made for me was too good to be comfortable, and besides I didn't go much on clothes, nohow.

   Sometimes we'd have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark -- which was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two -- on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn't say nothing against it, because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they'd got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.

   Once or twice of a night we would see a steamboat slipping along in the dark, and now and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out of her chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and look awful pretty; then she would turn a corner and her lights would wink out and her powwow shut off and leave the river still again; and by and by her waves would get to us, a long time after she was gone, and joggle the raft a bit, and after that you wouldn't hear nothing for you couldn't tell how long, except maybe frogs or something.

   After midnight the people on shore went to bed, and then for two or three hours the shores was black -- no more sparks in the cabin windows. These sparks was our clock -- the first one that showed again meant morning was coming, so we hunted a place to hide and tie up right away.

An Encounter with an Interviewer

     The nervous, dapper, "peart" young man took the chair I offered him, and said he was connected with the Daily Thunderstorm, and added, --

     "Hoping it's no harm, I've come to interview you."

     "Come to what?"

     "Interview you."

     "Ah! I see. Yes, -- yes. Um! Yes, -- yes."

     I was not feeling bright that morning. Indeed, my powers seemed a bit under a cloud. However, I went to the bookcase, and when I had been looking six or seven minutes, I found I was obliged to refer to the young man. I said, --

     "How do you spell it?"

     "Spell what?"

     "Interview."

     "O my goodness! What do you want to spell it for?"

     "I don't want to spell it; I want to see what it means."

     "Well, this is astonishing, I must say. I can tell you what it means, if you -- if you -- "

     "O, all right! That will answer, and much obliged to you, too."

     "I n, in, t e r, ter, inter -- "

     "Then you spell it with an I?"

     "Why, certainly!"

     "O, that is what took me so long."

     "Why, my dear sir, what did you propose to spell it with?"

     "Well, I -- I -- I hardly know. I had the Unabridged, and I was ciphering around in the back end, hoping I might tree her among the pictures. But it's a very old edition."

     "Why, my friend, they wouldn't have a picture of it in even the latest e -- My dear sir, I beg your pardon, I mean no harm in the world, but you do not look as -- as -- intelligent as I had expected you would. No harm, -- I mean no harm at all."

     "O, don't mention it! It has often been said, and by people who would not flatter and who could have no inducement to flatter, that I am quite remarkable in that way. Yes, -- yes; they always speak of it with rapture."

     "I can easily imagine it. But about this interview. You know it is the custom, now, to interview any man who has become notorious."

     "Indeed! I had not heard of it before. It must be very interesting. What do you do it with?"

     "Ah, well, -- well, -- well, -- this is disheartening. It ought to be done with a club in some cases; but customarily it consists in the interviewer asking questions and the interviewed answering them. It is all the rage now. Will you let me ask you certain questions calculated to bring out the salient points of your public and private history?"

     "O, with pleasure, -- with pleasure. I have a very bad memory, but I hope you will not mind that. That is to say, it is an irregular memory, -- singularly irregular. Sometimes it goes in a gallop, and then again it will be as much as a fortnight passing a given point. This is a great grief to me."

     "O, it is no matter, so you will try to do the best you can."

     "I will. I will put my whole mind on it."

     "Thanks. Are you ready to begin?"

     "Ready."

     Q. How old are you?

     A. Nineteen, in June.

     Q. Indeed! I would have taken you to be thirty-five or six. Where were you born?

     A. In Missouri.

     Q. When did you begin to write?

     A. In 1836.

     Q. Why, how could that be, if you are only nineteen now?

     A. I don't know. It does seem curious somehow.

     Q. It does, indeed. Who do you consider the most remarkable man you ever met?

     A. Aaron Burr.

     Q. But you never could have met Aaron Burr, if you are only nineteen years --

     A. Now, if you know more about me than I do, what do you ask me for?

     Q. Well, it was only a suggestion; nothing more. How did you happen to meet Burr?

     A. Well, I happened to be at his funeral one day, and he asked me to make less noise, and --

     Q. But, good heavens! If you were at his funeral, he must have been dead; and if he was dead, how could he care whether you made a noise or not?

     A. I don't know. He was always a particular kind of a man that way.

     Q. Still, I don't understand it at all. You say he spoke to you and that he was dead.

     A. I didn't say he was dead.

     Q. But wasn't he dead?

     A. Well, some said he was, some said he wasn't.

     Q. What do you think?

     A. O, it was none of my business! It wasn't any of my funeral.

     Q. Did you -- However, we can never get this matter straight. Let me ask about something else. What was the date of your birth?

     A. Monday, October 31, 1693.

     Q. What! Impossible! That would make you a hundred and eighty years old. How do you account for that?

     A. I don't account for it at all.

     Q. But you said at first you were only nineteen, and now you make yourself out to be one hundred and eighty. It is an awful discrepancy.

     A. Why, have you noticed that? (Shaking hands.) Many a time it has seemed to me like a discrepancy, but somehow I couldn't make up my mind. How quick you notice a thing!

     Q. Thank you for the compliment, as far as it goes. Had you, or have you, any brothers or sisters?

     A. Eh! I -- I -- I think so, -- yes, -- but I don't remember.

     Q. Well, that is the most extraordinary statement I ever heard!

     A. Why, what makes you think that?

     Q. How could I think otherwise? Why, look here! who is this a picture of on the wall? Isn't that a brother of yours?

     A. Oh! yes, yes, yes! Now you remind me of it, that was a brother of mine. That's William, -- Bill we called him. Poor old Bill!

     Q. Why? Is he dead, then?

     A. Ah, well, I suppose so. We never could tell. There was a great mystery about it.

     Q. That is sad, very sad. He disappeared, then?

     A. Well, yes, in a sort of general way. We buried him.

     Q. Buried him! Buried him without knowing whether he was dead or not?

     A. O no! Not that. He was dead enough.

     Q. Well, I confess that I can't understand this. If you buried him and you knew he was dead --

     A. No! no! we only thought he was.

     Q. O, I see! He came to life again?

     A. I bet he didn't.

     Q. Well, I never heard anything like this. Somebody was dead. Somebody was buried. Now, where was the mystery?

     A. Ah, that's just it! That's it exactly. You see we were twins, -- defunct and I, -- and we got mixed in the bath-tub when we were only two weeks old, and one of us was drowned. But we didn't know which. Some think it was Bill, some think it was me.

     Q. Well, that is remarkable. What do you think?

     A. Goodness knows! I would give whole worlds to know. This solemn, this awful mystery has cast a gloom over my whole life. But I will tell you a secret now, which I never have revealed to any creature before. One of us had a peculiar mark, a large mole on the back of the left hand, -- that was me. That child was the one that was drowned.

     Q. Very well, then, I don't see that there is any mystery about it, after all.

     A. You don't? Well, I do. Anyway I don't see how they could ever have been such a blundering lot as to go and bury the wrong child. But, 'sh! -- don't mention it where the family can hear of it. Heaven knows they have heart-breaking troubles enough without adding this.

     Q. Well, I believe I have got material enough for the present, and I am very much obliged to you for the pains you have taken. But I was a good deal interested in that account of Aaron Burr's funeral. Would you mind telling me what particular circumstance it was that made you think Burr was such a remarkable man?

     A. O, it was a mere trifle! Not one man in fifty would have noticed it at all. When the sermon was over, and the procession all ready to start for the cemetery, and the body all arranged nice in the hearse, he said he wanted to take a last look at the scenery, and so he got up and rode with the driver.

     Then the young man reverently withdrew. He was very pleasant company, and I was sorry to see him go.

The Mystery of Translation

Groping for words and phrases and coming up short has been a way of life for me for several months as I struggle with my very rudimentary Putonghua. But even if I were fluent in both Chinese and English, I'd still be struggling to explain, to translate so many things. It's a marvel, I suppose, that we can translate at all.

Some things may simply be untranslatable, as one of my seniors writes in her paper about A Dream of Red Mansions, one of the four Chinese "classics." A given Hanzi character (the written symbol, not character in the novel) might compress so many historical and cultural allusions into it, each of which are tethered to other values, assumptions, ways of knowing. Several students who are majoring in English but minoring in business write about the complexities of translating brand names and advertisements to preserve the humor, puns, parallelisms or whatever that made the original brand work and still be effective in the target language. As my language teacher told me last summer, Coco Cola means something like "tasty and rejoice!" But, according to http://www.troutmansanders.com/11-19-2008/ , Coco Cola had been translated literally when it first hit the market in the 1930s with something close to “bite the wax tadpole” or “female horse fastened with wax." Coco Cola had to work fast to come up with an an alternative translation for something whose characters happen to sound about right. . .Ke Kou Ke Le. I'm no expert, so don't quote me, but I heard that Pepsi's advertisement "brings you back to life" was first translated as "brings your ancestors back from the grave" years ago.

And so it was with mild awareness of these challenges that a Belgian, a (U.S.) American, and two Chinese friends and I sat down with our cups of green tea or red wine to watch the second half of a Chinese film set during the Japanese occupation, The Spring River Flows East. The film had subtitles--two sets, in fact--a yellow English set right on top of the black and white set of Chinese characters. The visual complexity of those yellow words that could barely be distinguished from the characters beneath them may actually say a lot about the challenges of cross-cultural communication.

I'm no film scholar, but Clay and my two Chinese friends happen to be, and I heard about Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell for the first time and their study of script writing manuals, among other things. Amazing to me was to discover that in the early days of Hollywood, script writers quite self-consciously fashioned their scripts so that scripts would appeal to foreign audiences--they wrote so that films could be exported. So, again, I was given pause to think about the relationships between and among language and culture and now BUSINESS. One of the alleged principles of writing-to-export films was developing distinctly individualized characters. That principle might seem obvious to Western fiction writers, but it's a principle that hasn't been widely shared by all cultures. Still, some of my students have commented that it's easier to identify with American film heroes because they are personalized, individualized, unlike the more abstract and symbolic hero of some Chinese films.  While my student's comments don't surprise me, what does surprise me is that Hollywood has been self-consciously revising film scripts to reach distant audiences since back in the nineteen-teens. But what made any of the authors of those old script-writing manuals so sure that they knew what the principles are that would reach far across big oceans?

Much of our discussion rambled the way any Friday night discussion might, but it occasionally came back to film studies and this film with all its pointed use of moon imagery and references to a famous poem about having as much sorrow to bear as a spring river flowing east (you didn't have to be a scholar to make that connection--the film made it for us). Clay commented that so much of what he had read previously in Western film journals about this Chinese classic bears little resemblance to the articles he is finding now written by Chinese scholars.

All this led to a long discussion of critical theory--and just how controversial it is in China. Doesn't it get away from talking about the film (or the text)? And, besides, commented the younger Chinese scholar, Chinese priorities are different. Their film industry is just burgeoning now. Scholars not only of film but of everything else have a different kind of relationship and obligation to serve the whole society.  So what gets said? All very interesting. From acts prior to translation--writing and performing the film--to translating it with subtitles--to reflecting on the film, there are so many times a person has to stop and choose, this word or that word, knowing that different words have different consequences. It makes my head spin.

And now I must go try to buy some fruit and vegetables. I'm still not sure if that thing that looks like a grapefruit but is ten times as big really is a grapefruit. And I know which cabbage is "Chinese cabbage," but there are so many, many greens. Which ones are spinach--and just what is spinach?

I'll Show You

There are some things I don't like. I didn't particularly like it last night when the cook's assistant snickered and stared at me the whole time I ate three mantou (little steamed buns), a fried dough stick, and a fried egg, the unfortunate result of my attempt to order a vegetable dish from a cook who speaks only Chongqinghua. Mind you, what unifies "Chinese" for a billion plus people is Hanzi, the single system of written characters, not Putongua, king of the many spoken dialects. I can't read menus written in Hanzi, I can't speak Chongqinghua, and my Putonghua (Mandarin, the language of government and business) is still poor. I'm not alone. Even some of my students at the very selective Xi Nan Daxue fret that they might fail their exams in Putonghua--that is, if they grew up speaking any of a dozen other dialects.  Sometimes a husband and a wife speak to each other in Putonghua, rather than the dialects of their native provinces because their dialects are mutually unintelligible. But I ramble. The cook's assistant really didn't have to laugh at me because I cannot read Hanzi or understand Chongqinghua.

I didn't like it today when the crowd in the train station pressed so hard on all sides of me that I would have been carried forward without losing my place if I had found a way to lift my feet off the ground.

I don't like standing in line. There is no sense of turn-taking whatsover, not in that train station, not in Yong Hui, not in any of the other grocery stores where I have to wait in line to have my vegetables, tofu, and peanuts weighed. I might wait patiently, but if I actually appear to be patient, arms will be thrust ahead of me and the shop girl will accept whatever the most aggressive housewife thrusts under her nose. There is no standard of fair play when standing in line.

But lest you think Chinese people are unfriendly, think again. It's true that you're more likely to be greeted by blank stares than smiles on the street. The public can seem distant, unfriendly. But what does a smile from a stranger mean? If a Chinese person means to be friendly, it will be expressed with more than a smile.

Just today--just in the last twenty-four hours--I encountered over a half dozen people who went out of their way to help me. There was the student on Bus 558, the doctor in the cavernous waiting room of the train station, the eighteen-year old who admittedly opened his conversation by asking how old I was, the translator who joined me at a little table for jiaozi (dumplings) and the graduate student who offered her library card who was sitting at the next table, the girls at the north gate who went looking for a wifi cafe on my behalf, and girls by the east gate who actually found one--and then thundered down the street to get me when they thought they had given me the wrong directions. These are just today's encounters, but I've had scores of others. For instance, within the past week I stopped in front of the optician at the local market and handed him not one, but two pair of glasses, one with a broken bow, the other with wobbly bows needing tightening. He told me he'd need ten minutes but, when I returned to pick up and pay for my glasses, he refused even the most nominal payment. Instead, he just wanted to hear about Meiguo and to wish me well.

Although I'm not ignorant of "guanxi"--networking and working the old boys' club for mutual benefit--I'm stunned by the degree to which people go out of their way for me, sometimes leaving no trace of who they are and no way for me to reciprocate if I want to and no way for them to seek favors, even if that had been their hidden motive.  All of these encounters occurred today, but I encounter similar acts of kindness regularly.  If a Chinese person means to be friendly, it seems to me,  it will be expressed with much more than a smile.

Big-Something-Oh

(Apologies for missing my Friday post--have had computer problems.)

The virtue of being condemned to a seven-year old's vocabulary is that big-something-oh birthdays are a laugh--seem somehow anachronistic, surreal, nothing to take too seriously. And so I didn't. Between my language lessons (where I'm the student studying Putonghua) and more language lessons (where I'm the teacher teaching Yingyu), I enjoyed hanging out with both friends and students. Fellow foreigners (waiguoren) Olga, Inge, and Clay treated me to Sichuan cai, chocolate, and red wine (they know my weak spots). 

The landlady, Mrs. Niu, brought me a cake, still boxed (above) on my back-porch kitchen counter. Looking the other direction in my very narrow kitchen, you can see not only the cake, but also my fifteen foot high walls and windows.

And here are some photos (below) snatched from a Powerpoint my students made me after a  four-person lunch exploded into a twenty-some-person awesome feast.  Meanwhile, thanks to Chris, Ben, Nick and other well-wishers form other points on the planet!

Jiggling My Foot on Election Day

I could have been seven years old, plotting a sneak preview of my Christmas stocking, so excited was I when I threw off my quilt around five am on Wednesday. Were the first election results in yet? The adult in me whispered that the polls weren’t even closed yet in California, but the child in me impatiently jiggled my foot while my laptop growled into action—a show of bravado for a machine so ridiculously slow that I can usually take naps while waiting for pages to load.

Around me thousands of people seemed to be dead to the world—in a world still dark except for the wet leaves reflecting some light far below.  Most of these thousands of neighbors slept, as I had, with balcony and kitchen windows still flung open, even though temperatures were dropping down to single digits Celsius.  South of the Yellow River, there’s little central heat, but people in Sichuan and Chongqing tend to like the cold fresh air. This sometimes creates tension in the dormitories, where students from the north want to close the windows and “turn up the heat” (whatever that might be), and roommates from the south are invigorated by chilly temps. In my case, the window latches don’t really work and I have plenty of long underwear from my hiking days. But the little wheels were still spinning on the computer, slowly loading something.

No matter what the results would be, I was grateful for the help I had had on both sides of the Pacific getting my absentee ballot safely delivered to the Boone County clerk. Although my waiban and his assistant had helped me with some computer glitches, my biggest help came from the shorter of two graduate students rummaging through a pile of burlap bags and packages that had been dumped in a corner of the post office. While the taller one kept trying to find her bag, the shorter one realized that I needed to know if my letter would be delivered by November 6^th.  Even though it was still early October at the time, there was no stamp I could buy that would guarantee delivery by election day. The sympathetic graduate student thought my best option would be to mail it via a private delivery, ZTO. She would take me there. Meanwhile, the taller student found not one, but two colossal bags, each of which weighed nearly fifty pounds. I offered to carry one bag, and the graduate students carried the other bag between them. The shorter student and I loaded the taller student and her bags onto the first campus shuttle we passed, and then the two of us proceeded to wend our way through a maze of sky-scraper like dormitories to a complex that had a fed-express-like ZTO. She “mei guanxi’d” me though all my protests and stayed with me to inquire about costs and to negotiate in Chinese with the clerk who was about to close the shop, and she waited to translate the Boone County clerk’s address into Hanzi (Chinese characters), which were required for the ZTO forms but not for the Chinese postal service. She tried to escort me back to the main gate, although I finally convinced her that I knew my way around campus reasonably well.  In the end, she had given me well over an hour of her time and would take nothing in return.

Now, mind you, this was the most expensive letter I have ever mailed—180 kuai—so dear in every sense that one of my beloveds, who knew how much this vote meant to me, decided not to cast a vote that surely would have canceled out mine. My family is huge and of all political persuasions, but we love each other above all else.

Before I got any election results, I had an email pop up from Siren, Catherine, Gina, and Cathy who had planned to bring groceries to my house on Saturday and make jiaozi (dumplings) with me. The email was informing me that now I should expect twenty people. I shouldn’t worry—they were bringing all the food. But! Even if I seat every one on my cold tile floor, I don’t have forty chopsticks! Before I finished that thought, another email popped up saying that they had decided to rent a flat for the day and that they would meet me at Gate Two and then they would take me there. Well, my fellow Peace Corps volunteers and I had been warned throughout our summer training—we wouldn’t make it in China if we weren’t flexible and “prepared” for all sorts of last minute changes. I tried to digest that thought as I noticed that CNN, the NYT, the Guardian and other elections sites were still refraining from making any projections. I’d have to forget about the elections for now.

Thanks to texts and emails from home, as well as reports from some students who rushed to my office as soon as they heard the election results, I eventually learned who won.

But, of course, the US election is not the only change of leadership afoot. My Putonghua and Hanzi are both so bad that it’s hard for me to get a good reading of the Chinese coverage of their own leadership change during the 18^th Party Congress. The only thing I can really read is pictures, and from them I can tell that everyone must dye their hair—men, women, young, old. They all have pitch black hair, even if they’re 86 years old. From pictures, I can tell that the Chinese media coverage of natural and manmade disasters here and abroad is amazing. Beyond that, I have no clue what else is covered and how well or what my students know about their government. I do know that any of my seniors who anticipate becoming party members must compose some special essay right now, and I believe that once a party member, always a party member—no exit. I have no idea what the implications are. I don't know much. I’m still a seven year old in this respect, too.

So, back to the jiaozi party that is mushrooming into something else. . . tomorrow. Before I go to bed, I should study my students’ names and faces. I have 180 of them, and I can name most of them in class, but I’m often at a loss when I suddenly bump into them on the street. The students I remember best have names that depart from the usual “Cathy," "Sally," and "Sam” and are either nature names like “Iris," "Rainbow," "Apple," "Rose," "Daisy," and "Snow” or—crazy names like “Pain," "Potato," "Guess," "Gallop," "Snail," "Soon," "Echo," "and Monk.” Somehow, maybe not surprisingly, the students with the most unusual names are also some of my most intellectually distinctive students.