Today, Hilda and I took advantage of a free afternoon to visit a local residential high school. Loren, an English teacher from the U.S., invited us and then generously escorted us to observe one of his classes in action. I was amazed to find out that Loren has learned almost no Mandarin during the 2 1/2 years he has spent here. Considering the difficulty we have had doing the simplest of things, I find this mind boggling. Perhaps his English-speaking, Chinese wife runs some interference for him. But, we couldn't hold back our curiosity as to how he handled the day-to-day activities of eating, buying, and getting around on his own. Loren responded by pointing to his cell phone. When he gets stuck, he calls a bilingual friend. For example, if he's at the store, he has a friend speak to the store clerk over the phone. Then his friend relays the answer to him in English. He also collects business cards from the establishments he frequents to use with taxi drivers. And a prerequisite for choosing a restaurant is that they have food you can point to or an English menu. So now you know.
The students at Loren's school attend class, until 4:30 each day and leave the classroom weighted down with five hours of homework on average! This leaves no time for after-school activities and creates a sleep-deprived student body. There are no competitive school sports. No one has time for it! Upon arrival in the classroom, some students lay their heads down on their desks, perhaps still groggy from the required rest period immediately before the class. It was a pleasure to watch each student get up before their peers to modestly present a short speech based upon several questions about an English song.
Afterwards, we toured the campus with May, a Chinese teacher of English. When we visited the gym, we saw teachers warming up for a badminton tournament. Badminton and ping pong are big here. The highlight of the tour was the "Garden of Natural Sciences" (that's my name for it, and remember, this is a school). There were a series of large rocks along a nicely landscaped path. Each rock showcased a theme, from bugs to volcanoes to maps. Quite unique.
Our delightful guide, May, watches U.S. television to keep her excellent English in top-notch condition. We discussed "Grey's Anatomy" and "Desperate Housewives". The world is getting smaller and smaller.
We returned to the island of Xiamen via the school's scheduled bus for teachers and staff. This is one of the perqs the school offers, since it is set plop in the middle of new, mostly unfinished, residential,\high-rise, developments. The bus was plush and punctual. The bus driver tried to leave one minute early at 4:59pm, but several teachers came running on board at 5:00pm.
Calliope and I had dinner with Loren and some friends he gathered together -
- Apple, a Chinese woman who runs Apple Travel,
- her husband Choy (sp?) who is half Chinese and half Australian and who maintains the "What's On Xiamen" website,
- Choy's long-time friend and housemate, who was born and raised in Germany, but is now Australian,
- a Chinese man, who used to teach English at the same school with Loren, but is now helping develop markets for an export business
...I loved the sculptures/statues at the school. The worm and starfish looked real, monsterous, but real. Next time you're there, paint a 4-square court. Call it a cultural exchange.
ReplyDelete...
-Mike
This is the 10-12 (or 9-12) campus of Xiamen's K-12 Foreign Language School, which I will be visiting during my stay in Xiamen June 21 - July 2. At that time I will be looking to explore possible communication/exchange possibilities between this school and Riverview High (which has an International Baccalaureate program), and Pineview (a gifted/talented high school), which is currently teaching Mandarin.
ReplyDeleteI also expect to mneet Loren, with whom I have had some e-mail correspondence over the past year and a half. I myself was and remain quite concerned about Loren's cavalier attitude toward learning Chinese -- most particularly when I learned that he was marrying a Chinese woman with limited Englih skill.
As a cultural anthropologist researching in China for 20 years, I am exquisitely aware of the critical role of language in communication. Language expresses cultural ways of thinking. Grammar and syntax are like circuit boards designed to channel thought processes in particular ways, and vocabularies are the ways in which cultures classify experience and phenomena. Chinese language, in particular, being a high-context language, is a communication process that is very different from English (a low-context language). It's not a simple matter of word to word translation.
When two people from different language cultures marry, the extent to which they do not know their partner's language is the extent to which they are unable to share their partner's life experience and processing modalities. I have witnessed this over and over in "mixed" marriages. Typically a woman marries an English-speaking man who does not bother to learn Chinese. The couple ends up living in the US where the dominant language is English, which produces a very unequal situation. "You learn my language, but I'm not going to learn yours." The result is that there are whole parts of the Chinese speaker's psyche and logic that can be neither expressed nor shared, which produces a sense of isolation.
This is one reason why the Gulfcoast Chinese American Association in Sarasota is so important -- it becomes an arena where Chinese speakers can use languge in the sharing of common experience without at the same time excluding their spouses.
I am particularly interested in meeting Choy, who maintains the What's On Xiamen website, so I hope that will work out.
We are also hoping to connect with any Xiamen jazz groups.
Carolyn Bloomer
City Director for Sarasota relations with Xiamen
Sarasota Sister Cities Association