Pen Breakage

A couple of people on this list have alluded to the possibility that the class discussions on my preferred themes might be serving my own needs more than the students'. But we all have to remember one thing: if we were to neglect my needs, my unhappiness might infect the students' "sunny" dispositions. So, in the words of Bill Murray in Ghostbusters: "Back off, man -- I'm a scientist."

A word about my orientation: computer software development, or programming, first got its hooks into me in high school, and has been my mainstay (income-wise) since I got my degree in computer science over 20 years ago. The experience of programming teaches an important lesson, which I've always thought everybody could use: what initially seems true is often totally false. A software program you are convinced is correct actually turns out to be rife with errors. This can be quite astonishing if you are willing to face it squarely. It means everyone should be skeptical of their intuition.

Of course, we all know this is the very reverse of normal Western thinking. "Gut instinct" is celebrated in business and politics. Why do people place so much importance on body language, non-verbal cues, facial expressions? Why was Clinton's sex life such an enduring story in the news? Why did people view this opportunity to peer into his personal life to be news at all? The simple answer is intellectual laziness, or intellectual incompetence. On such questions, people can have what they imagine to be informed opinions -- effortlessly. (Of course, once it's a major story, that fact alone makes it news.)

Laziness or incompetence like this (or any other significant ailment) are not natural conditions. If a large proportion of people in a society are thus afflicted, it signifies a problem in the environment.

In the long run, who benefits from this intellectual vacuum? The moneyed interests do, because what the people naively think of as "gut instinct" can be directly shaped through advertising, slanted news reporting, etc. Money wins in the competition for the people's "instincts." In a rational environment, by contrast, it's much harder to subvert nominal social goals like equality, fairness, and all the ideals associated with "democracy." This is how a communist country like China, whose billion people have (in the aggregate) been making impressive economic progress (8 to 10% annually) for a number of years, can in some important senses be more "democratic" than the U.S.

I'm not a believer in communism, but it seems to me one would have to be incredibly optimistic to believe that a U.S.-style political system would have been better for China's people overall than the government that has achieved this progress. (Again, I am talking about the current progressive period.)

Contrast China's overall progress with the many ways American government fails its people. It "guarantees" individual rights ("You have a right to an attorney ...."), but these are often meaningful only for the relatively resourceful. While such rights make for good TV drama, only statistics give a realistic picture of the condition of the people. These reflect a plethora of individual tragedies: the high proportion of the population experiencing the horrors of prison; the 20% of children growing up poor; underfunded schools, violence, poor diet and obesity (94% of all children in the U.S. aged 13 to 18 have diets rated as "needing improvement" or "poor" --http://urielw.com/culture.htm#fat), lack of access to health care. These things reflect poor marks on the most elementary measures of human well-being.

Many Americans rationalize such problems in terms of "individual responsibility." This is a kind of religious sentiment having to do with sin and the Fall of Man. I don't want to get too diverted in these nominally China remarks, but suffice it to say that's an extremely misguided way to evaluate government policy (or lack of it).

So why do all the Chinese want to go to the U.S., someone is bound to ask.

First, movies have created a fairly inaccurate perception of U.S. life. Kill the movies and I think you'd make a decent-sized dent in the numbers yearning to embrace America. Nonetheless, the urge would of course persist for many, and the obvious explanation is the far superior material wealth of the West.

Yes, capitalism undoubtedly had quite a bit to do with that (though the explanation is not so simple that it ends there), but the points above still stand. How well comparatively are these two governments serving their people -- today, given available resources?

I'm focussing on the deficiencies of the Western system because that's the point of view that's rarely adequately expressed in the shallow media commentary of the West. But the West, and I think possibly the U.S. in particular (I'm not sure), have led the world on important fronts, like the fight against discrimination (minorities, women, gays), and confronting sexual abuse of children (which exists in all cultures).

I offer all the above in a neutral vein, based on common sense, with the intent that anyone who reflects dispassionately should agree. If I'm mistaken I invite your corrections. What's so suffocatingly tedious about U.S. political speech (e.g. liberal vs. conservative carping) is that it's mostly ideological, aiming only to pump up the already converted, often ridiculing and stroking the audience's contempt for its ideological opponents. It's an idiotic way for a society to do politics. The right way would be to articulate principles and goals that both sides share, then determine intellectually what policies should follow.

I thought most of the first-year students I'm teaching here are 18, since that's what they told me. Turns out even this elementary item of information is subject to cross-cultural misunderstanding. Their counting is 1-based, ours zero-based. Here a child starts life with the age of 1, and turns 2 upon his first birthday. So most of my students are actually what we in the West would call 17.

I finally went into downtown Beijing on Saturday, escorted by a couple of students. Picked up a couple of maps which are now on my wall -- Beijing and China -- so I'm now somewhat oriented, spatially at least. The Beijing Shooting Range, right next to the Shooting Hotel campus I'm living/working at, can be seen just east of the Eight Sites Park, which is just north of the westernmost subway station. Beijing's subway system has 2 lines: one is a circle around the core, the other an east-west line running through it (with 2 transfer points). Inside the subway trains, the look and feel is more or less identical to that in Toronto's subways.

Off-campus, practically everyone in China speaks zero English. You ask some simple question -- "Which way is the subway?" -- and you get gobbledygook in reply. If you don't nod your assent they'll repeat the gibberish again, eyeing you avidly with the conviction that this time the plain meaning must penetrate to the alien. But this situation is not the inconvenience one might suppose when you're surrounded by eager translators. I rarely bother venturing even to the on-campus dining room without at least one student in tow. I've explained what I want -- steamed fish, no oil, no salt, no spices, just plain, clean and healthy, and some white rice -- and am now eating what I want. The restaurant staff are familiar with me; we exchange knowing smiles -- the concepts are universal; but we have a shared vocabulary of less than a dozen words (and frankly, most of those are English).

Indeed, with my ubiquitous helpers, total ignorance of the language has so far not been a serious impediment. It's tempting to forgo the incredible pain of attempting to learn this impossible language. Pretty lousy attitude for a language teacher, huh? But at least my students have my unreserved sympathy in their arduous task.

Living for a while among Chinese students as I have by now, a Westerner comes to perceive how wary and tense modern American females are vis-a-vis males, by comparison with Chinese females. Physical proximity while talking; brushing against one another while walking together: these normal things are irrelevant here, while in America, with sex! sex! sex! permeating the atmosphere, they are loaded with significance. (Similarly, same-sex friends can make contact here -- girls routinely hold hands -- without it being an overt sexual pronouncement.) In these and many other ways, it would be easy for a young Chinese woman visiting America to inadvertently communicate the kind of messages for which there is generally a highly receptive audience ... which could lead to unpleasantness or more serious difficulties.

Now, I am teaching at a Chinese co-ed college whose outstanding characteristic for the Chinese is that it sends them to the West to encounter foreigners. Sitting on a patio the other afternoon with a few (female) students, I informed them that almost exactly 50% of ICB's students are particularly at risk of troublesome cross-cultural misunderstandings, and I asked them to guess who the 50% were.

Some students are more fashion conscious, suggested one, and might be more tempted by Western lures, whereas others are hard workers.

Isn't this a demonstration of precisely the cultural difference I'm talking about? Who in the West could have missed the right answer? Or am I obtusely overlooking the fact that they withheld the answer because the topic is sensitive? I don't think so.

It is a somewhat sensitive topic, and there are few incentives to raise it, but I regard it as a responsibility. One needn't be particularly explicit, but I feel I should say a few words to these young people to convey, intellectually, some idea of the differences in this regard in the cultural environment that awaits them.

Of course, I'd offer no value judgments on these matters, neither to the class nor to this list -- my views are irrelevant to our topic -- except to venture the not terrifically bold observation that the Western media's obsession with sex is a bit much.

There is this nervous Asian tic that has been bugging me in class -- the clickety clack of pens being opened and shut. So, with my forthright nature, I have been freely confiscating them left and right. At times I've accumulated a dozen or so in the course of one lecture.

With such uniformly charming students, I can't be excessively strict -- and they know it -- so I do give the pens back after class, and the students are just as happy-go-lucky as always. It's actually a not impractical means of punctuating the lesson, since these are not the most industrious students on earth and they need their diversions.

The other day I warned that I would break the next pen in two, and I mimed the action to get the message across. Sure enough, within minutes I had a fresh culprit. I took the offender's pen in my hands and, assuming a mock-stern expression, made an abrupt motion as if to break it. At that instant, I saw an unforgettable look of anguished shock transfigure one of the girls in the class. Not the pen's owner, but someone sitting in another part of the room.

Again, that innocence! It was as if she'd never witnessed cruelty of any kind in her life.

My original intention in going to some country in Asia was simply to keep doing what I'd been doing lately in Toronto -- reading, writing, beefing up my website, doing some "virtual consulting" if some business presented itself (though hardly any did during the last year), and of course playing squash. Teaching was an afterthought, a way of integrating a bit better into local society. Initially the obvious thing to teach seemed to be computers, but the Philippines appeared to be rather unreceptive to foreign teachers. Then as I surfed the web for jobs in other Asian countries, I saw the deluge of English positions, and I realized English would really give me a much better excuse to teach about the most important issues in the world -- which are those that interest me and should interest everyone.

By the time I was talking to ICB, I'd accepted that the teaching would be full-time -- part-time jobs didn't appear to be available -- but I had a firm plan as to what I'd be teaching: the fundamental problems of capitalism and democracy, as exhibited by the USA, with the New York Times as one of the primary source materials.

On arrival two weeks ago, it was quickly apparent that the students' level of English was far below what I'd expected. They can hardly read Archie comic books, let alone a good quality newspaper. What to do? Teach Archie?

No. Stick to the plan, I decided. And we've plowed into selections I've saved from New York Times issues over the past couple of years.

My insistence on pretty much 100% comprehension has had implications for the speed with which we go through these materials. A couple of short paragraphs can take a couple of hours or more. But it can be done, and it is clearly teaching them many high-frequency words and phrases while at the same time showing them how educated Westerners conceptualize issues.

Re-reading these selections in the kind of enormous detail that's necessary in class has also benefitted me somewhat by giving me a second look at certain significant things.

The first selection we've done, for example, is "Microsoft Sees Big Growth in Thailand," an article from February 26, 2000 (available at http://search.nytimes.com/search/daily/ or Archives). I forget if I even particularly noticed this the first time, but it's really very striking that the Times would use such a headline, since it has nothing whatever to do with the meat of the story. As I told the class, nobody gives a damn about the tiny Thai software market. This is a story about money -- capitalism -- corrupting the truth. In a nutshell, it's about how Microsoft, to appease some Thai protestors disrupting its Windows 2000 launch in that country, altered the entry on Thailand in its Encarta Encyclopaedia to make it less objectionable (and less true).

It's curious that only the last 146 words in the 596-word article deal with the issue at all. The rest is just fluff about MS's growth projections in that country. My best guess as to what's going on is that the Times, fearful of offending MS, made a compromise: they didn't want to squelch the story altogether, but they stuck on the irrelevant headline and buried the point of the story at the bottom.

The article's conclusion reads:

A paragraph in the encyclopaedia on Bangkok had referred to the Thai capital's infamous commercial sex industry, one of the largest and most visible in the world.

The reference prompted complaints from women's groups who described it as an insult to the Thai people.

[MS wrote] to Thai Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai apologizing for any offence caused and said the company had amended its online Encarta update to delete the offending paragraph from the encyclopaedia.

"When you install it and ask for an update from the Web, it ...will remove the whole thing and put in something more about culture," [MS] said.

The new section on Bangkok did not mention the sex trade.

Of course, the identical corrupting tendency that exists at MS is also present in newspapers and TV news, all of which are corporate enterprises. Which leads to the question: if news is unreliable, then what fate for democracy?

But the language, the language. Very slow going. After one rather laborious class discussion, I told the class, sincerely, that we'd have to give up on this stuff and turn to a little collection of funny stories written in simple English. To my surprise, they all insisted they wanted to stick to the heavy stuff, and they promised to prepare readings more diligently for discussions in future.

Good. I've got plenty more articles.