Is progressing nicely. I spend 4 hours a day in class and about 4 hours studying, with 4.5 hours of tutoring a week. It is very clear to me that my brain has been molded differently than my peers, because I possess almost no ability to listen and comprehend anything I haven’t already seen. Most of my peers can hear a word they don’t know, say it once, and recall it later that day. I can have a word repeated to me multiple times, I can say it multiple times, and I won’t remember it unless I write it down. When I’m saying a word, I see how it is spelled in my head, and when I’m listening to someone speak, I’m seeing their words written down as if I’m reading from paper. The more familiar I am with a sound, like virtually all of English, the less aware I am this process may be taking place. For instance, if you tell me you live in Corvallis, I notice nothing. If you tell me I am “cantankerous” I will try to picture the word in my head. I suspect the same process operates in everyone to a degree, but in my case everything in Chinese sounds like “cantankerous,” while other students seem internalize the sounds much faster.
On the flip side, I seem to have a badass sense of direction and effortless visual memory. Over the weeks I’ve routinely placed my location in Beijing correctly whereas my programmates continue to demonstrate no clue of their own whereabouts until we drive directly in front of our dorm. One time we tried to find a big bookstore at the edge of our district. After finding it we tried to catch a bus back, but couldn’t find any that went to a location near our school, so we set off walking in a random direction. As we went down this street people gradually got tired of exploring and started talking about getting taxis. I recognized that if we walked two blocks farther we’d be on the same street as our school, and that virtually every bus on that road would take us straight to its doorstep. Having no comprehension of how I could know this, people argued with me for several minutes about how that was impossible and so forth.
While this was happening we all walked into a pit construction workers leave unnatended on the streets and mark with a flag 6 feet away.
To me, this isn’t very impressive. It’s easy to recognize certain billboards and skyscrapers in the city. When I really began to think maybe my brain was responsible was when we were staying in a Tibetian village a couple weeks ago. We were stationed in a house on the outskirts of the town, and so any time we went out to explore or participate in the village activities we had to walk through the whole thing. Tibetian villages are often as vertical as they are wide, and wind up the mountain with no attention to straight or logical road layouts. Often a street will end in the wall of someone’s home, and continue as a 30degree narrow ramp up to the next “street” 10 feet above your head. I never paid particular attention to how things were connected, but sure enough, whenever we had to navigate at night, everyone around me, including our Tibetian guides, was horribly lost. As in, “I don’t know if my home is left, right, up, or down.” I may not know where I am exactly, but I always have some sense of the direction and the approximate distance I want to head so the whole phenomenon astounds me. Anyway, by flashlight I led my group back to our house every time, even when they insisted “no, it can’t be that way, I don’t remember this at all.” Though my difficulties listening plague me on a daily basis, I guess I’d rather have the ability to find where I live since I seem to be the only one capable of doing so in my group.
My class only has 13 people: two Americans, five Mongolians, four Kazaks, a Russian, a Hungarian, and one who I think is Kyrgyzistani (I know in Chinese he’s from “jurgistan”). Most of us went out for lunch one time: I’ll let you guess who is who (its later in the post).
At this point my two teachers are trying to teach solely in Chinese and they are succeeding except when my programmate yells at them “in English!” It’s really ignorant and rude so here is an unflattering picture of her.
Previously there was a lot of English being thrown around in the classroom because here it’s the international language. Everyone from every country I’ve met has had some sort of English education. For Kazaks and Chinese it’s in school, and for everyone else its movies and music. In fact, there is one Kazak here who claims to have learned his fluent English from rap music videos.
This is not to say everyone speaks English, but for social interactions between international students it’s often the best language to use. Many students speak Russian too. The program here is probably 50% central Asian, 25% East Asian, and a 25% western [civilization].
But back in the classroom, a lot of students don’t know English well enough to learn Chinese through it. So throughout class the students who speak Russian are translating to each other and the students who speak Mongolian are translating to each other, and I guess at the end of the day learning some Chinese. Thankfully for us Americans we are proficient at English and that’s really helpful, even for the Russian-speakers and Mongolians who turn to me to translate our teacher’s broken English into something intelligible.
I never thought that we Americans would be the most disciplined students in the Chinese language program, but we definitely are. What would be a flagrant violation of classroom conduct in the States is routine in our classes. Cell phones go off regularly, including the teacher’s. The ring does not initiate a frantic scramble to locate and deactivate the ring either, it initiates a casual answering which sometimes continues into a conversation or, when the student/teacher deems it worthy, stepping outside to take the call. Even the teacher is beginning to take calls during class. People are constantly talking out of turn, both in their own languages to tell jokes, and in Chinese when it’s not their turn to speak. The girls in front of me hold a photoshoot weekly where they lean together and take cell phone pictures in fact. At first, the lack of discipline is very distracting, but at this point it’s all very normal. Usually when people are goofing off is when the teachers are going around to each individual in the room and asking them questions or making them repeat. One of our two teachers is less experienced and has a much less successful time keeping everyone’s attention while doing this, and for me it’s a good time to study the text on my own. Here’s a movie I made one day when I brought a camera to document the classroom scene. Notice the direction people’s heads are facing as an indication of where their attention lies. Listen to the myriad of voices popping up at will. Feel the lack of direction as you try to guess who the teacher is talking to.
During the 4.5 hours of optional tutoring we have each week is when I feel I make the most progress speaking, because I and sometimes one or two other students are the only ones that show up. That gets us lots of personal attention, and since the tutor teachers are fellow Chinese university students in foreign language education and lack any experience (18-21 years old), it basically consists of us reading/speaking and them repeatedly correcting us on every mistake. It sounds harsh but is a way to lay a good foundation for pronunciation.
The overly critical method is also how Chinese students are usually taught. Don’t mistake my Chinese language classes as indicative of all Chinese education. From what I know most classes are much larger, harsher, and disciplined. I think the Chinese language program is designed to be very lax and accommodating to students which come from less rigorous backgrounds. I didn’t expect to find that American classroom conduct is much closer to Chinese classroom conduct than what is going on in other countries, particularly Kazakhstan which has the rowdiest students by far.
As an aside, the Kazaks have a reputation on campus, which I will briefly recount so that you may know nothing about Kazakhstan other than what Borat and I tell you. Kazaks disrupt class. This is fact, and I think everyone has come to grips with it, or even enjoy the classclownery. However, though I saw none of this with my own eyes, they also evidently piss in the elevator, set dorm furniture on fire, and frequent the happy-ending massage parlor around the block. What I have seen with my own eyes were the fifteen year olds lighting firecrackers off on the 14th floor of the dorm in the stairwell, which echoes the ear-shattering sound most effectively. At current, there is little evidence their reputation is unwarranted. To cope, me and my American friends have begun to theorize about school and childhood back in Kazakhstan, and we figure it generally to be like this, though with a few more tire fires:
During the 10 minute breaks half the students filter out into the hallway to talk to their friends. This breaks down along nationality. In the following picture you see the Americans hanging out on one end, Kazaks at the other. In the case of Americans I know they’re not super motivated to seek out international friendships. I figure it’s the same for the Kazaks. But while people are grouped up, it doesn’t feel cold or clique-y. People just fall into the place their most comfortable, and with pretty challenging language barriers to overcome, most exchanges are pretty brief.
While these people go out into the halls about half the students stay in their classrooms or visit friends in other classrooms. While I don’t visit any of the classrooms other than my own since my (non-American) friends come to it, my impression from walking by their doorways is that there is more international getting-together inside. This is a long way of saying not to read too much into this one picture. Here’s a video of why my classroom often attracts visitors.
I’m not sure why the school computers have at least a gig of pop in Russian and Chinese, including music videos, but they do. And the teachers go along with it when students jump on and start blaring music through the speakers, so the classroom transforms into a club 40 minutes every morning. In fact, the Kazak and Russian girls that sit in front of me love it so much they often insist we keep listening/watching after the break is over, and since our younger teacher is a pushover, we usually do. Again, this is all bad from one standpoint, but it’s fun from another, and if you’re like me and in the classroom to learn it’s not hard just to study on your own while this is going on.
What do you know about Mongolians? That Ghengis Khan and his family conquered the world in the 13h and 14th centuries? Well, now you can add the fact that they eat virtually nothing other than meat and fat (and claim this is why they are strong and conquered the world). For a Westerner used to cutting fat off a steak and using utensils, grabbing a rib with your hand and tearing the meat off the bone with your mouth is kind of embarrassing. But it’s also very satisfying and tasty. I have to say, I was almost a vegetarian when I came here to China but after repeatedly having this experience with meat, I think I’m going to have huge cravings to bite hunks of meat and fat off of bones in the States. Cravings that I won’t be able to fufill without looking like an animal. Check out the table. Those discs are filled with meat, and what appears like a vegetable platter is really radishes and onion to be eaten with the meat. What appears to be liquid in our bowls is salted milk tea. Hah, I’m awesome.
I’ve also been hanging out with a Turkman from, you guessed it, Turkmenistan. We usually talk in Chinese since we’re at the same level, but when we want to say more than what colors our clothes are or ask for things at a restaurant we switch to English because his is awesome. He asked for an English book so I gave him a copy of Skeptic magazine. That should keep him busy for quite a while. There’s even an Uzbeck girl who knows more about American emo music than I do because she’s 15. I’ve yet to make any Chinese friends though. The major factor is my horrendous Chinese and the fact that I study every moment I’m not asleep, buying food, or typing this email. All and all, I’m pretty satisfied with my social life, because in comparison to my programmates, I do something other than hang out with Americans all day talking about minutia.
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Why is it, out of all the ideals we hold to be true, we are most troubled when our sense of justice is violated? Justice, or our sense of it, is the amalgamation of ideals like equality and righteousness. Justice is the universe functioning according to it’s own rules. Bad things happening to good people is a violation of the golden rule of justice, yet here we have “good” defined internally by the universe and yet they are still punished by the means of the universe. That’s a philosophical contradiction. It moots the point.
I had my first school exam in China today and was shocked by the level of cheating. Cheating goes on in American classrooms but where I’m from it usually does not go farther than the opportunistic gazing of a student in thought. I witnessed deliberate and unashamed attempts: leaning left and right to peek around shoulders, whispering in Kazak or Russian, and even the ol’ pull-out-my-*uking-textbook. It was extremely aggravating, so aggravating in fact, I spent half of the time deciding whether it was a moral imperative that I do something about it. I weighed the costs to their academic lives against my personal life under the unpredictable element of my teacher’s reaction: be righteous and loathed? Been there. Say nothing and allow evil to persist in this world? The current paradigm. Pass the buck to a teacher who probably wouldn’t have an entirely successful response because she’s kind of soft yet would care very much that students were cheating? Bad news. You’ve gotta ask, “how much personal loss am I willing to incur for the chance to believe I’m a moral person?” I believe the boundary between adult and child is set partially by this measure.
So on and so forth while my test was not being completed or considered. I might have remained in this state of dilemma if one of my programmates hadn’t begun asking the teacher for help, in English, and received an answer, in English, to which she replied “how the fuck am I supposed to know what a preposition is?” Also she nights before had been talking about heading to graduate school. Ah, what sudden levity.
Look for a current update sometime soon. Naturally it will be brain-numbing drivel, but proof that enough of my organs are still intact to post something.
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