I spend about 16 hours a week with Chinese college students, mostly discussing America and American views of China. I’ve learned a lot from them, but the main things I’ve learned are that (1) Chinese people are interested in American culture and that (2) they don’t know much about how America really is.

In the interest of helping increase global understanding of America, and in the interest of improving my crap Chinese, I present: 千里迢迢, a Chinese-language blog I’ll be running about American culture/music/politics/etc. If you can read some Chinese, check it out, If you’re decent at Chinese and want to be a contributor, shoot me an email, and if you’re neither of those things you can still help me out by leaving comments telling me what you think Chinese people should know about America.

Typically, I’m not one to be amused by Chinglish. I’ve seen tons of it, and as someone trying to learn Chinese I’m not really inclined to mock other language-learners just because their English is full of mistakes. Occasionally, though, I do come across something worth posting for other reasons.

It’s gotten cold here recently, cold enough that I’ve invested in some long underwear to keep the chill at bay. Yesterday, I bought a set by a brand called Septwolves. Like many Chinese companies, they have decorated their box with some English. Above a clearly photoshopped picture of some wolves in a forest is the following text:

The wit of the wolves coexists with their action. Against the atrocious nature, the Wolf is as staunch as human beings. The never-altered objective presents a perfect face of the teamwork of wolves.

Below the photo, it continues:

The viability of wolves has far surpassed the consciousness of human beings. What the wolves most care for is “what benefits the Group the most”. Humans are inferior. The losses never change the desire of the Wolves for success. The true feeling makes the Wolf understandable and reliable.

Odd grammar and capitalization aside, this is a bizarre marketing strategy. I know it’s in English, so most of their customers will never read it, but convincing people they’re inferior to wolves seems like an odd way to sell underwear. And their Chinese marketing approach seems to be similar (if more direct); printed on the picture in large, stylized characters is the brand’s apparent motto: “我喜欢狼.” (”I like wolves”). No kidding!

I like wolves too, though, and it turns out their underwear is very comfortable, I just bought another pair today.

Sorry for the lack of recent updates. In addition to work, I’m currently trying to apply for several different jobs as well as graduate school, and I’m also sick, so my time has been limited. There are at least two video features in the works, though.

I’m also thinking about doing a survey of some of my English classes. I teach almost all college students at this point, and I probably see about 500 different students every week. It struck me I’m in a pretty good position to survey them (in English), which is a language practice opportunity for them and a learning opportunity for us.

My question to YOU, dear reader(s?) is: what questions would you like to see on the survey? Feel free to list as few or as many as you would like.

I woke up today and found various news sources telling me this:

A sharply divided Connecticut Supreme Court struck down the state’s civil union law on Friday and ruled that same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry. Connecticut thus joins Massachusetts and California as the only states to have legalized gay marriages.

The ruling, which cannot be appealed and is to take effect on Oct. 28, held that a state law limiting marriage to heterosexual couples, and a civil union law intended to provide all the rights and privileges of marriage to same-sex couples, violated the constitutional guarantees of equal protection under the law.
The New York Times

Well done, Connecticut. I grew up there, and while I’ve often been pretty critical of the state (and its government), I have to say I’m pretty proud about this.

Today (October 1) is National Day here in the P.R.C. It celebrates the founding of the nation on Oct 1, 1949 in Tiananmen Square. It’s the reason everyone has a week of vacation, and its the reason that the city is draped in Chinese flags all of a sudden (of course, no country in the world goes as all out with flags as America, though).

Since it is a political (and recently created, relatively speaking) holiday, it doesn’t have a ton of tradition the way some other holidays like the Mid-Autumn Festival, Chinese New Year, the Dragon Boat Festival, etc. do, but with any luck we’ll at least get a decent fireworks display and I imagine there are ceremonies being broadcast on TV for those who are into that kind of thing. I haven’t watched Chinese TV since the Olympics ended.

There should be some new video stuff up soon, including a pretty interesting interview a friend and I did with a Taiwanese tourist we ran into. The raw footage is about twenty minutes long, and entirely in Chinese, but I’ll have it up as soon as I can cut it down to size and translate everything. There’s some other video too.

Oh also, the old roommate showed up at my door this afternoon, which was quite a shock. I greeted him with a pretty cold, incredulous “What are you doing here?” and he looked shocked I wasn’t happy to see him. Turns out he was just in town for the day and wanted someone’s phone number, which I gave him. I was pretty curt, and I didn’t let him come into the apartment, so he asked me what my problem was. I told him that somewhere between insulting my entire family and intentionally trying to embarrass me in front of coworkers, I had lost all desire to ever see or speak with him again. He said OK and left, so with any luck, that’s that.

This morning I was woken up by the dulcet tones of an air raid siren. It didn’t look like anyone was panicking outside, so I wasn’t super concerned, but still, given that this isn’t 1940s London, I was a bit disconcerted.

If I’d been a bit more awake, I might have realized that today is September 18, the day the Mukden Incident occurred in 1931, giving Japan a flimsy pretext to invade China. I wonder how many people living here now were alive then. Not many, probably, but surely a few. Anyway, it was an interesting reminder for me of just how powerful an influence history sometimes has, especially in this country.

Also, if you’re reading this post, please comment if there’s anything particular you’d like me to talk about/look into/ask Chinese people about. I’m looking for more topics for video features, and I’d obviously like to cover topics people are interested in.

I am a teacher. My parents are both teachers; I was raised on the campus of a school. My grandparents–on both sides–were teachers. Perhaps, then, it stands to reason that I spend a fair amount of time thinking about education.

Working in China, of course, exposes you to a variety of different educational philosophies. Students–and school–are different here, as I’ve touched on in previous posts. The ways are myriad, but today I’d like to get into two specific examples from my own experience here.

The first comes from my experience teaching college students at H.U.S.T. (哈尔滨理工大学). Although I am now teaching some regular courses there, many of the first classes I taught were one-time “speaking” classes. Essentially, I was given nothing but a classroom of students–as many as 60 students–and two hours to do whatever I could to help them practice their speaking. The students, for their part, seemed to be required to attend, but certainly hadn’t been encouraged to care much. One student walked into one of my classes and pulled out headphones and a PSP before I had even started talking.

I understand that with “resources” (i.e., foreigners) as limited as there are here in Harbin, large class sizes are probably unavoidable, but why are they paying me to teach students who don’t want to learn English? This is a waste of my time and the students’ time, not to mention the school’s money. At best, these students simply sleep; at worst, they are disruptive and make it even more difficult for other students to learn than it already is.

I didn’t know this, but apparently admission into a Chinese college virtually guarantees graduation. Parents want their money’s worth for tuition, so students who foreign teachers “fail” rarely actually receive Fs on their transcripts. Somewhere in the whole “red tape” process, the grades get cleaned up to make sure everyone passes. Not everyone passes with good grades, but apparently it’s pretty damn difficult, perhaps impossible, to fail out of college here. This makes sense from a financial standpoint, but not really from an educational one.

At the private school I do most of my teaching at–which I’m not going to name–similar rules apply. Because the school is a business, part of my salary (really just whether or not I receive a bonus) is decided by how my students review my class. This applies in all of my classes; thus, part of my salary is determined by how popular I am with a bunch of five year olds.

On the one hand, if the students don’t like the class, they stop coming and the school loses money. On the other hand, though, this system doesn’t take into account at all whether nor not the students have actually learned anything. A teacher who lets the kids run around and do what they like could theoretically get better reviews than a teacher who’s relatively strict so that the kids’ language skills actually progress. I’m not sure how common an occurrence that is, but I do think that generally, when evaluating teachers, how well they teach should be factored into the equation, whether they are popular should not.

Then again, it’s thanks to this sort of policy that I live in a giant apartment and collected a surprisingly significant paycheck today, so how much can I really complain? Teachers need to get paid. It’s just sad that the sacrifice educators make for economics is so often education itself.

First off, please forgive me for the long delay in posts. We’ve just switched from the “training” period of work into the “full workload” portion, so we’ve all been a bit floored recently. It’ll even out, though.

Anyway, during the training period we heard a lot about the differences between Chinese college students and American college students, especially with regards to romantic relationships and sexual knowledge. Like most people, I take anything I hear about “Chinese people” with a grain of salt, but today I had my first university class, and there’s definitely at least some truth to it.

Out of a class of forty people–these are college students, mind you–only one of them had ever dated someone. I asked them to plan out their “dream date”–the date they’d take someone on if they only had one shot at wooing them–as part of an exercise, and a disturbing number of them said they’d take him/her to the library to study together.

I ended up having to improvise a new lesson plan on the fly because I couldn’t get them to talk about dating or anything relating to it. Friendship worked better, that’s what I’ll be doing tomorrow.

Anyway, I know not all Chinese students are like this–Chinese textbooks are full of lessons about the “new ideas” of young people, which include things like living together with one’s significant other before marriage. Everyone tells me they exist, but I’ve yet to really meet anyone here who’s done that, especially not at college age. (The few people I do know in China who’ve done that are all now married to whoever they were living with, too).

So what’s the real truth? I don’t know, but I’ll look into it further.

Also, I have a student in one of my classes whose English name is “Dragon Soldier”. Other notable names included “Delinsa” and “Dvid”. Also a girl who is named “Scarlett” after the Gone with the Wind character.

The saga of my obnoxious roommate reached a new level today. During the break in one of the classes, I was in the teachers’ office talking to a colleague, and my roommate was sitting in the corner on the computer. My colleague and I were having a tongue-in-cheek conversation about how frustrating student apathy can be, when he suddenly blurted in with his opinion: if we have “that attitude” about our students, then we “aren’t cut out to be teachers.”

Even though this was mainly addressed at me, my colleague tried to point out that we were joking around, and that venting our frustrations outside of class helps keep us from taking them out on the students when we are in class. Not good enough, apparently if you ever have a negative thought about your students; if you’re ever frustrated they haven’t prepared properly or annoyed when they don’t care, then “you aren’t cut out to be a teacher.”

I told him that both my parents were teachers, that I had grown up around teachers, and that I was pretty sure that kind of lighthearted complaining was a perfectly normal part of being a teacher. His response? If the teachers I knew talked or thought negatively about their students, ever, then “they were probably shit teachers.”

Think about that for a second. Think about the extreme level of arrogance it takes to, as a teacher with less than a month of experience (much of which has been spent training rather than teaching), assume that you know better than the lifetime’s worth of teachers I grew up with, including my parents who, between the two of them, have something like thirty years of teaching experience (in fact, it may be closer to forty).

Then there’s the fact that he, the man who killed someone’s pet and then lectured the owner about how his culture was wrong, has the gall to lecture me about my attitude towards anything.

I didn’t really respond to him (because what’s the point?), just went back to class, had lunch and came home. I’m still pretty angry about it, but my day was improved somewhat by stopping and chatting with some of my neighbors on the way home. These are the guys who work at a restaurant downstairs; I interviewed one of them about the olympics so a bunch of them are in the video in the post below this.

Yesterday, they shared some watermelon with me after one of them accidentally hit me in the chest with a large piece. (It was unintentional; still, one never expects to be hit by watermelon.) Today I just stopped on my way home because I was frustrated and wanted to talk about the roommate thing with someone. They asked me to sit down, so I sat for a while and chatted with them about that, my work, and then a bit about the Olympics.

Since they’re all male (all my Chinese teachers have been women)–and since my Chinese isn’t actually that good–I have a hard time keeping up with them sometimes. It’s good practice, but it makes me feel very stupid sometimes. They ask me a question, and then have to explain their meaning five different ways before I answer…maybe by the time I’m done here I’ll have it down to four or three.

First of all, the good folks over at Veggie Co Records have finally had a go at my Myspace page, which was long in need of an overhaul. I’m still not going to update it much because I hate Myspace, but at least it looks less boring.

I have finished a draft of the first song of American Expatriate, “Arriving”. It’s got a skeleton instrumental and complete lyrics, although I haven’t revised them yet. It describes the narrator’s first moments arriving in China, first while he’s looking out the plane and then later when he’s lugging his luggage up the eight flights of stairs to his apartment. It’s got a chorus that is meant to be sung, so prepare yourselves now: I’ll be singing again on this album. (Don’t worry though, I’ll be getting some knowledgeable help before I record it).

I’ve decided on a writing style for the album that’s heavily influenced by my recent experience writing some short fiction (and reading it). Although the overarching plot of the album isn’t exactly crystallized yet, don’t expect there to be a lot of dialogue. This song, and those that follow it, get the point across largely through a description of the environment, filtered (of course) through the narrator’s somewhat distorted perspective.

Why am I choosing to write it this way? For one, I find it much more interesting than conveying feelings with dialogue. A song already is dialogue in a sense; I can use tone and emotion in the delivery and convey information without having to have the character talk to people. Secondly, it fits one of the overarching themes of the album, which is isolation. This is not to say that the narrator won’t interact with other people–quite the contrary–but my concern is primarily what’s going on inside his head. What happens outside is really only important in that it affects his mind state. Finally, it allows me to paint a visual picture and convey information about the narrator at the same time. Since urban China is an interesting setting, and one that many listeners won’t be familiar with, the more detail I can cram into the songs, the clearer a picture of the setting they are going to get. At the same time, by filtering that detail through the narrator’s language, the listener learns something about him, too. It’s the proverbial two birds-one stone thing.

I’ve also been wanting to bring magical realism into some of my music for a while now, being a fan of authors like Borges, so expect a good bit of that, too. Nothing too crazy, though. I think you’ll like it.

Musically, I’ve got around 40 skeleton instrumentals, of which 3 or 4 might end up on the album, if that. I’m still learning my way around the new Reason, and developing my composition skills. It’s really too early to say anything for sure, but expect real-life drums and stripped-down piano chord melodies mixed with some distortion and occasional electronic intrusions.