life of a rat
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May 2004
CCTV9 and Amnesty International
The People's Republic of China is a country full of little ironies. For the second time in a week CCTV9 referred to Amnesty International to back a story they were showing. Once again it was a criticism by the organization of the US and its warring behaviour. Big deal maybe, but it's funny that the state run media, which functions as the mouthpiece of the Communist Party should thereby implictly admit that Amnesty is a credible organization, whose reports can be trusted to the extent that they can be referred to in news stories, which are, due to the nature of Chinese media, highly propagandistic in content. Funny because should you try to download Amensty's website you will have no luck in this country as the website is banned due to Amnesty's continuous criticisms of the Chinese government. Which is basically like saying, Amnesty is credible and trustworthy when it comes to certain countries, such as the U.S., but when it comes to, say, China, Amnesty is not only incredible and untrustworthy, but poses a threat to the social order to the extent that its publications must suffer a blanket ban. Or, Amnesty's reports are only credible after they have been interpreted by the Party. It's my guess that what's going on is an attempt by CCTV9 to make itself more credible to its international viewers by referring to organizations like Amnesty in its news reports. I think the idea is for viewers to go: "Oh, they're citing Amnesty. China must be very open and progressive if they're doing that." Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. CCTV9 only shows up its own selectiveness when it comes to news by citing Amnesty because should you go and look up the report on the net, you'll get a "page not found" message.
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Warning: Whiny, Self-indulgent Post
I think I've got China Fatigue Syndrome. Or maybe I'm just tired. Interestingly, the foreignness of China is starting to impact on me again. I find myself thinking of home - Melbourne - many times a day, and if things are not necessarily better there than they're certainly easier to do. Everything makes me tired, my classes make me tired (but maybe that's also because I've taken on 27 of them, get more money ho hum), public transport makes me tired, walking down the street ignoring Hello's makes me tired, attempting to order food from restaurants makes me tired, making sure taxi drivers aren't ripping me off in this or that or the other way makes me tired, going out makes me tired, and so on.
A feeling of listlessness and disinterest has overtaken me. I have one month left to go and then I have annual leave, but the idea of organizing travel plans, well, it makes me feel tired.The result is that I'm spending a lot of time in my so-called "apartment" (boarding house room would be much more accurate) watching Sex and the City and the Sopranos. If I go out it's always to the same, tired old clubs. Overwhelmingly I'm tired of attempting to negotiate things in a language I'm too unfumailiar with. I just wanna go into a shop and say: "Hi, how's it going, I'll have the paper and a packet of Marlboro Lights, thanks a lot."
The rules here are a mystery to me, I really don't know anything about how this society functions. Everyday I find out that something or other is nothing like I had perceived it to be. I never know when I'm being too discreet or crassly indiscreet.
This isn't a whinge about China - it has nothing to do with China, it's about me. I don't want sympathy though, I just wanna go back home.
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Tones
Chinese, like some other languages, Vietnamese for example, is a tonal language. The linguistic logic for this is that because words are built out of closed syllable morphemes following a strict pattern that goes initial sound, often a consonant; final sound, often a vowel, diphthong or nasal, which results in a limited number of possible combinations of sounds to build words with. You always know when a word is foreign, because, for example, no Chinese word ends in 't', and no word starts with 'v'. Actually I don't think Chinese even has 'v' in its phonetic suitcase. To "compensate" (bad explanation I think) for this, languages like Chinese use tones, which are fixed upon morphemes and change the meaning of morphemes which, in terms of their phonetic value, stay the same. We use tones in English as well, in every sentence we speak, but tones in English indicate mood, and can be changed without altering the meaning of a word. In tonal languages, tones are an integral and indispensible part of the lexicon. Mandarin, or, as the dialect is called in Chinese, pu tong hua, has five tones (or four - many people don't see the level tone as a real tone). The level tone is mostly used for unstressed syllables. There's a rising tone which sounds like the tone we use to indicate we're asking a question, a falling tone, which sounds like the tone when you adamantly say "No!" There's a dipping tone, which sounds like the tone you use when you irritatedly say "So?" Finally there's a high tone which sounds like you're singing "la".
I never really thought it could that much of an issue, but people are right when they say the hardest thing to get around when you learn this language is tones. For one thing, it's really difficult to constantly remember and change tones on every syllable of every sentence you utter. In English, we gradually change tone as the sentence progresses. But the biggest problem is a psychological barrier. I especially have trouble with the high tone, because it sounds like you're singing a note. I can never get my voice high enough to pronounce the high tone properly. I just feel dumb singing it for some reason. And it just feels "wrong" to end a sentence on a rising tone when you're making a statement, because it sounds like you're asking a question. It took me forever to realize that the falling tone is not a gradual fall like like the "so" in "So, when are you coming over?" but a sharp, quick sound. The dipping and level tones are maybe the easiest to use. Tones are fascinating. It's also hard to remember that syllables are not stressed or accented as in English. For a long time I went around saying Ao DA li ya (Australia), because we put the accent on the second syllable in English, and no one understood me. Then I realized that I shouldn't stress any syllable in the Chinese rendering, and people heard what I said.
Chinese students are often warned to watch their intonation when speaking English. Often they use none or little (for obvious reasons), and tend to sound like computerized voice simulators. I wonder though just how we sound to the Chinese?
I've also figured out how to retain vocabulary. If German is easy to learn because so many items are related to English (book - Buch, beer - Bier, winter - Winter, etc.), then it's easy to learn because you associate new words with known signs or concepts having similar signifiers. So, you have to do the same thing in Chinese where possible - find signifiers you already know, even though the concepts will be unrelated. If an array of sounds doesn't become a signifier, it just remains an array of sounds and you will forget it within ten seconds. For example, I retained the word for tomorrow - ming tian - because it's also the name of a coffee bar I often went to in Nanchong. I remembered the word for cigarrete - xiang yan - because yan is the family name of my best Chinese friend, and so on. I cannot remember the word for bread, because 1) I have nothing to relate it to and 2) I never use the word, I just pick up a loaf in the supermarket and take it to the check out.
Chao mian, however, that's a whole other story. I ordered chao mian ("chow mien" in Australian) once and got something completely different, because I used the wrong tones. When I pointed this out, the waiter had a fit. He was running around, babbling to colleagues and patrons who were all laughing, saying I don't know what, but he must have used the word chao mian fifteen times in one minute. I will never forget that word nor its tones which I know perfectly now, although I never did go back to that restaurant. As you pick up more and more, the associations get easier to place, but there's still a long, long way to go. The next issue will be syntax.
Maybe the best thing is to find a Chinese partner with limited English. A good friend of mine here has a Chinese boyfriend who doesn't speak English and, as a result her Chinese has gone through the roof.
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Teaching in China (the tale continues)
Another thing that's weird about being an English speaking English teacher in China is how you're just given classes and let go. I guess I expected it more or less from Nanchong which is in the sticks anyway - but I didn't expect it quite so bluntly here in more progressive Shanghai.
What I mean is, as far as what the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs calls Foreign Experts is concerned (and this is no mere title), there is no such thing as a curriculum, nor an assessment module, nor performance standards, nor accountability of any sort in any way. You, suddenly elevated from whatever you were in your home country - a university graduate on the dole in my case - to the status of Foreign Expert, are on your own, in most every respect. The attitude seems to be: as a recognized Expert in your field, and no less a Foreign one, people feel uncomfortable about critiquing your methods in any way. As the native speaker of English, people are not readily going to criticize you.
This has its positives: you can do whatever you want, hell you could incite an overthrow of the Chinese Communist Party in your class and no one would give a fuck, because no one ever comes to see what happens in your class; no one will ever chastize you, even if you have been out until 4AM last night and your class has just sunk like the Titanic because you've been attacked by the hangover from hell; if they say teach "this", and you don't like it, you can just walk off and teach "that", and what are they gonna do - fire the "Foreign Expert" whom they've possibly been waiting months for? I don't think so.
It also has its negatives: Being on your own means there is often no one to talk to, no one in your school to liaise with (apart from the Foreign Teacher Liaison, but that relationship tends to be rather formal). Even when there is another foreign teacher on campus, it doesn't mean that you're gonna become best mates or anything. For example, on my campus there's another Australian teacher, but we don't talk that much: he's got two little kids, his wife and his mother-in-law to keep him company in any case. We get on fine, we just don't get to talk a lot is all. As for the Chinese English teachers, they are either busy, or asking you questions about the more obscure intricacies of Chinese written English exams (see my post on Chinese English Exams). In any case, they are not going to discuss the finer aspects of their curriculum and assessment with you, because most of them have a growing suspicion that their own curriculum is, well, not quite what it could be.
Some of the classes I have are pretty good. I mean, they have really good knowledge of English. In a recent post I lamented how it was hard to get young people here thinking critically. Last Sunday, I did a class on song lyrics. I mean, it's a lot more interesting than present perfect vs. past perfect grammar type stuff, and I want them to see English something by which you communicate, rather than a mark on an exam in any case.
Maybe I'm paranoid, but in my contract it explicitly and clearly says that I am not to discuss 1) socialism 2) religion and 3) Taiwan in my classes.
It's pretty similar in Vietnam, and there you could tell it could have been enforced quite strongly. For example, the police visiting my apartment at midnight to "check up" on the teacher and issue arbitrary $10 fines. I like Vietnam, but it's no wonder that country is lagging way, way behind. The state there is also as yet much too orthodox to let any such possibly subversive person as a foreign teacher into its public/state schools. There is no protection and it's very easy to get ripped off. If you thought it was easy in China, try Vietnam. One big reason people go there anyway to teach in private schools is because the pay is much better than in China. When I was there in 2002 it was $20 an hour. Here in China, on average, it's about $8 an hour (excluding benefits). However, there you have to look after yourself. Here we tend to be coddled: free accommodation, medical benefits and so on.
In my IELTS class we did "Another Brick In The Wall" by Pink Floyd; you know, "We don't need no education/We don't need no thought control/No dark sarcasm in the classroom/Teacher leave them kids alone/All in all you're just another brick in the wall". It led to an interesting discussion about 'socialism' in China: is socialism about building community and people helping each other (bricks in the wall as a metaphor for a collectively supportive structure), or is it just about something called propaganda? Thought control: Bricks in the wall as a metaphor for conforming, being wedged into the terms of the current ideology? In the same way the song lyrics talk about education? I'm pretty sure if someone didn't like me, they could get me into a spot of trouble for letting questions like that into my classroom, but hey, what are they gonna do, fire me? We'll see.
After all, behind the super-shiny veneer of Shanghai is a place where I can't even call emergency numbers from my apartment, let alone any other number or get online, because it's just too much of a hassle to organize an outside phone line. Where my neighbour has to use another apartment to take showers because the hot water tank is in its death throes, bleeding badly, because it's just too much of a hassle to fix it...
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Mao Ming Lu
5 May 2004
I love irony. Irony is one of those experiences that inject an unintended mischief into the banality of life, particularly as irony tends to effortlessly undermine the carefully structured fantasy of an ordered and compartmentalized consciousness, and generally acts so subversively and behaves so badly.
Maybe some don't, but I find it very ironic that one of Shanghai's prime nightclub and bar districts should be located in Maoming Lu, just down the road of the former residence of none other than the great chairman Mao Zedong himself. Yep, just down the road from the residence of the architect of the much maligned Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution is a strip of what can only be described in Marxist terms as a cesspit of bourgeois decadence, where the notion of class consciousness just about smashes you in the face, no matter what class you're descended from, where beggars and prostitutes swarm around foreigners and the wealthy (what working class Shanghainese in his right mind would pay 50 kuai for a stubbie of Foster's for God's sake?), and where the wealth gap glares you in the eyes.
It kind of says volumes about the political unconscious operating here. Unfortunately I haven't got the time to write volumes about Shanghai's political unconscious as I have to get down to Maoming Lu to celebrate a friend's birthday. Looks like I'm finally a full convert to bourgeois decadence.
Clubbers getting it on at the Buddha Bar, Mao Ming Lu
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