Summer Wind

Last week I hit my students with poetry and song -- the fabulous "Summer Wind," a Frank Sinatra song written (according to http://www.thepeaches.com/music/frank/) by Johnny Mercer and Henry Mayer:

The summer wind, came blowin' in from across the sea
It lingered there to touch your hair and walk with me
All summer long we sang a song and then we strolled that golden sand
Two sweethearts and the summer wind

Like painted kites, those days and nights, they went flyin' by
The world was new beneath a blue umbrella sky
Then softer than a piper man one day it called to you
I lost you, I lost you to the summer wind

The autumn wind and the winter winds, they have come and gone
And still the days, those lonely days, they go on and on
And guess who sighs his lullabies through nights that never end
My fickle friend, the summer wind

The summer wind
Warm summer wind
Mmm, the summer wind

It's not Microsoft in Thailand, but the goal remains the same: 100% comprehension. I lob the questions at them: Who's "I," who's "you"? What are these "painted kites"? Two things are being compared, A and B. What's A, what's B? What about the piper man? Why was the world "new"? What does "still" suggest? What's the significance of autumn and winter winds having come and gone? How can a night never end, and why?

I find this song appropriate because it's got a fairly fixed, interpretable, unambiguous meaning. (Some kinds of literature are like this, others not.)

Can you believe, in discussions with two different classes of students on separate days, I had to pause a couple of times in mid-sentence lest the students perceive my voice cracking? (If you stay tuned, "Uriel in China" may yet turn into confessional notes.)

What's remarkable about our class discussion of this little poem is that the students understood nothing -- virtually nothing -- and could hardly produce any right answers to these questions. I know they're young, but really the lyrics do not seem all that complicated. Again, my unfamiliarity with the classroom situation in the West makes comparisons difficult, but I would think when you repeatedly press students as to the meaning of the world being "new," with the above context, they'd be able to explain it's because the speaker was in his youth. I'm wondering to what extent they've ever studied normal literature.

Is it conceivable I'm exhibiting cultural bias? Is there a wholly different Chinese literature where meaning is never conveyed like this? Please, list members! Castigate me for my ignorance if you must, but at least throw me some crumbs of edification. (My ill-humored detractor, quoted last time, an instructor at the other campus of this same college, has maintained a stony silence since my offer to meet for a drink.)

Let me climb a little further out on this frail limb and say I have often been led in the past month to question just how effectively the Chinese manage to communicate even amongst themselves. It is stupefying how the most mundane messages -- "Can I get my own copy of the key to the photocopy room?" -- do not seem readily transferable from one Chinese speaker to another. When I attempt to convey a simple question of this kind via one of my student translators, a prolonged barrage of Chinese give and take ensues. Then, after several minutes, a result is achieved: "No."

"Why. Not." -- is the obvious reply I transmit in return.

This question has not occurred to anyone. Another prolonged exchange follows -- and I never really find out the answer.

Another example: The other day; Beijing. I have the printed business card of a small club in central Beijing. It shows the street address, of course. Along the way, my taxi driver stops and gets out at least 4 times, I lost count, to ask pedestrians for directions. Each time he again borrows the card from me, then returns it with a smile on getting back in the car, confident he's got it this time. Our destination is finally reached after a succession of U-turns. This is an obscure little business, but for goodness sake he has the street address in Chinese on a printed card.

Another: a meal with some students who are particularly weak in English. I inquire of one of them, using another to assist in translation, whether he has climbed the mountain adjacent to our campus. The translator conveys the response impassively: it is not permitted because of Beijing's bid for the 2008 Olympics. There is no sign of any awareness of absurdity, of any knowing allusion to Monty Python.

A faint light does seem to flicker as I put it to him: "Does that make sense to you?" He indicates no, but that it's not his explanation, but the other fellow's. In response I make a palm-up gesture as if presenting the other, inviting him to pursue the inquiry. Another exchange in Chinese follows -- and I never remotely find out the answer.

These examples, which I could multiply, don't adequately illustrate the dense fog of confusion that seems to shroud communications here. It is more than just a matter of language. Possibly time would yield me better insight into this.

Friday, in a short class on the last day before the week-long National Day holidays (anniversary of the 1949 Communist victory and founding of the People's Republic of China), I thought I'd give them a fun send-off by having a "singing Olympics" in the classroom. I've got a karaoke CD with two "Summer Wind" tracks -- one with voice, one with the voice track absent (so the CD user can substitute his/her own voice). The plan was to get a few students to compete in singing to the class, then have a class vote for who'd get the gold.

I'd already played the song a couple of times after the discussion of the lyrics. We heard it once more to prep them.

With the first group, it proved impossible to get someone to volunteer to be a contestant. Admittedly it's hard to do this, even for native speakers (which they're far from being) and even with the words on paper, when the song is not very familiar. But it's probably because their mood had been soured by a stern but deserved talking-to they'd just gotten during a surprise visit to the class by the Dean. They are simply not working very hard.

The Dean offered the class a parable about a man riding a donkey. The man has a heavy bag which he is carrying on his shoulders, rather than placing before him on the donkey's back, in order to share in the donkey's burden. (I think I'm the donkey, but I admit the moral is not crystal clear to me.)

I'd told the Dean the day before what I'd lately come to realize; I'd also declared it in class: the obstacle dividing me from most of them is not language, but their attention spans.

There is a tendency for a newcomer to think attention spans could not possibly be an issue. These are Chinese people, after all. They should have no problem working rigorously throughout their waking hours -- maybe beyond. The Dean had also created the distinct impression that these students, dying to improve their English, would not be able to get enough of me, in and out of class.

Wrongo.

Although I can believe this caricature is close to reality at higher-standard institutions that serve the most accomplished students, it's not true here. The preconception persisted for a time, partly because there are so many individual students here to distract me and we genuinely seem to have fun together. But most students, actually, are happier socializing with each other in Chinese (or even watching TV!). Those "eager translators" of yore? They can occasionally be a bit scarce.

Cheating on tests, by the way, appears to be totally routine (not just my observation -- when the subject's arisen with other teachers, it seems taken as a given). Apparently their view is that they are helping each other, which is what friends are for. Along these lines the Oct. 4 China Daily has an article, "Education moves forward," mentioning somewhat enigmatically that "schools are enhancing the development of the students' ethics and ability in social practice."

Teachers with prior experience at this and some other institutions had warned me before my arrival that students here, as they put it bluntly, are "lazy." This has become more plausible as a characterization of the average student, though I do not at this point have a clear opinion.

A teacher in the south of China (Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province) echoes this experience in a recent email: "Their parents pay a great sum to have me here, and all they do is stare at me and make almost no effort to learn something.... But those students who do care about their education are just wonderful to talk to and to befriend."

I am not referring to the considerable proportion of students who speak virtually no English. For all too many, a query like "How are you?" is apt to leave them looking like deer caught in headlights. (And this after years, nominally, of prior English instruction.) Unless students are considerably beyond that level, simply attempting to follow a speaker in a foreign language must be quite taxing, as they continually struggle to recall the meanings of individual words.

It's really a waste to have foreign teachers, a scarce resource here, dealing with such students at all. But the blame for this situation does not lie with the students concerned.

Just to divert onto this tangent, this area of human endeavor -- learning English as a Second Language (ESL), at the totally elementary level -- seems still another example of an industry (like the computer software industry) where blind market forces seem only to encourage chaos and overwhelming inefficiency. Bookstores here have rows upon rows of texts for learning English; schools everywhere in China seem to be using more or less ad hoc approaches for teaching it. But how can individual consumers or harried administrators evaluate these alternatives? The economic winners in this market (just like software) are the best bullshitters.

ESL learning is -- should be -- a matter of science. There are right ways and wrong ways. It's analogous to medicine. (But since medicine involves life and death, the usual trite rhetoric about the wonders of capitalism and free markets dies away and the necessity of government involvement is taken for granted.) There are certainly teaching approaches, probably involving audio-visual equipment and materials (which would undoubtedly be cheaper than foreign teachers), which could be proven -- scientifically, by statistics -- to be relatively effective in achieving proficiency. I don't know what the best approaches might be -- I'm certainly no specialist in ESL. (I never had any intention of teaching it at the elementary level, and still don't.) But wouldn't it be sensible in a huge ESL market like China's if, somehow, the self-serving disciples of Mammon were reined in, and the right approaches were more widely in place?

From conversations with a few students it has finally dawned on me that some here see this school less as a place for learning than a way to get a visa for tourism abroad. (This school program's distinctive characteristic is that it includes time at a partner university in the West.) This, along with exposure to foreign teachers (which raises the school's expenses considerably), appears to be the drawing card that overcomes this school's unusually high fees. The Dean has announced that students who do not perform adequately will not be permitted to go, but possibly the students understand better than me how firm this resolution actually is.

With the other student group, by the way, I did manage to wring out three singing contestants, who performed not too badly. I realized my mistake as I was reading votes out to the student counter marking the tally at the board: one of the three got zero votes (the others 8 and 9 respectively). I should probably only have publicized the winner, especially since the vote seemed to be based on popularity. (I thought the guy who got 8 was better than the one who got 9. A minor lesson in the pitfalls of democracy.)

Some recalcitrance has surfaced recently among certain students. We were discussing the Microsoft/Thailand article again, following a comprehension test. No one cares about the Thai software market, I told them. Why was this published in the NY Times? What do we care about? Intended answer: corruption at Microsoft (in its role as purveyor of an encyclopedia), an important company.

But one student proffered that he doesn't care about that either; another concurred.

I knew this was mainly an expression of hostility (I'd told him and a couple of his buddies to stop talking and pay attention); on the spur I declared something about being at university to learn about and understand the world around one. But this is really a substantial topic in its own right: What is, or should be, the point of an undergraduate education? Of course this has been much discussed by a few academics, but I doubt students here or in North America are typically led to focus on this adequately in the course of their educations.

This college uses an American textbook, "Your College Experience: Strategies for Success" (1997), by John N. Gardner and A. Jerome Jewler, which considers this and other questions about university life for freshmen. The text, a compilation of writings by different authors, is laudable for addressing many relevant topics that should be addressed: academic honesty, a personal system of values, relationships, stress, homosexuality, decisions about sexual behavior, alcohol and other drugs. (I've read little of the text so far so I don't have an opinion on how it addresses most of these.) The chapter on the liberal arts by H. Thorne Compton of the University of South Carolina, however, seems to me to get it wrong, at least in some sections.

The chapter opens by explaining that the "liberal" in "liberal arts" means to set free -- which a liberal arts education should do -- "by helping us to understand ourselves, our culture, and our world." So far so good. But the essay follows this with examples of the practical benefits of a liberal arts education.

There is an illustration of the advantages of a liberal arts education in coping when stuck in a foreign airport. Further on, it is asserted that "[e]mployers ... seek professionals who are able to think analytically and independently." (I wonder how much time this academic has spent in corporations, where such predilections can be firing offenses.) Also mentioned is a corporate marketing miscalculation of the 1980s, which would have been avoidable had the folks but had a dash of liberal arts in their backgrounds:

A number of huge companies, with fantastic technology and extensive market research, sank billions of dollars into the home computer market.... [Y]et within two years, many of the companies were either out of the home computer market or out of business entirely.... Although the computer was a remarkable machine, it didn't do anything in the home that most people needed to be done or couldn't do more easily themselves.... The surviving companies were the ones that hired people (most often with liberal arts backgrounds) who figured out how to sell the product and to use it in new ways that appealed to the great majority of nontechnical humans.

Now that's just ridiculous.

It seems to me what has to be confronted is that a liberal arts education may typically not yield any practical benefits. Its value lies, as the chapter said initially, in "setting free" the mind -- setting it free, to be specific, of ignorance, prejudice, blind conformity, arbitrary perspectives. Exactly what we have all around us in the modern world.

The point is, truth is supposed to be a value in its own right. You may make less money; you may be more unhappy; less fulfilled; less content; less secure.

Examples: the earth turns out not, for goodness sake, to be flat, as any sane person would assume. And, bizarrely, it is not the center of the sun's orbit.

The country you happen to have been born in is possibly not the greatest nation on earth. The religious beliefs you happen to subscribe to, just because you were raised that way, may all be false. Certain routine practices of your society may be cruel and immoral. The powerful forces that control your environment may be manufacturing a false view you have of your world. Your nation's institutions may not be trustworthy. The news you keep up with may be written to mislead you.

I'm not asserting this is the way your world is -- but to some extent, it may be. If it is, who needs all this bad news? It's like the doctor/patient situation I described previously. If you have a terminal illness, do you want to know the truth?

One recent example of many individuals holding arbitrary beliefs determined purely by their social environment (I've already mentioned this to my students in class): the bombing last year by the U.S. of the Chinese embassy in the former Yugoslavia. The majority of Chinese think it was deliberate, whereas the majority of Americans think it was accidental.

Similar example: In the U.S. a few decades ago, overt racism was normal and not terribly stigmatized. Today it's taboo, regarded as deviant.

Seems to me the value of a liberal arts education is to elevate people to recognize the arbitrariness of beliefs and attitudes that are shaped by superstition or by their particular social and cultural milieu, and to achieve some level of enlightenment. The premise of such an education is that some things -- to begin with, logic -- are universal and not arbitrary. But given Western cultural regression, this attitude itself is on its way to becoming taboo.

People here don't just have misleading numbers to represent age, they also often have, or choose, curious English names: Toffee, Hamlet, Summer, Candy, Richer, Wing. I had to question one new student who presented himself the other day with the name "Describe." Surely this cannot be a name? But students insisted this is the meaning of his Chinese name.

At least give me a noun rather than a verb!

"Description" is too unwieldy. We agreed on Portrait.

I finally popped over to the Canadian embassy. Well, maybe not "popped." This school location, as I have come to better appreciate during this week of holidays, is not particularly central. Its strong suit is that it is remote from Beijing's air pollution. The downside is that getting into town is a 10-minute taxi ride followed by a 45-minute subway ride (then possibly another bus or taxi ride). And the crowds suggest that riding the subway is a favored activity during holiday week.

One thing I've now noticed several times on the subway is how parents usually get a seat for their children, even if it means having to stand themselves. The other day I saw a mother repeatedly pushing a 6-year-old girl back into her seat as the girl tried to get up. And while tiny children occupy partial seats, septuagenarians stand bleakly holding a rail.

The Embassy advises Canadians in China to "register" with them; it also has the "Canadian Club," which features squash courts! I was told by an embassy staffer that it's open to Canadians, but when I called in advance the day I was going to see if I could line up a partner, I learned this was false -- it's only for staff and guests.

The taxi announced we'd arrived. Was this another misunderstanding, or could the Embassy be the structure he was indicating? Wouldn't there be at least, like, a flag or something? On getting out of the cab and going up to the tiny plaque on the wall I could make out "Canadian Embassy." I guess they're getting as many inquiries as they care to handle right now.

Inside, after I'd gotten past the Chinese guards, I found two staffers alone in an office, behind thick plate glass. Could I get into the Club and look around, I asked. No, impossible. Could I talk on the phone to anyone there? There was no one there. Did he know any embassy squash players? No, he'd only been there two weeks; same with the other person in the office, they'd arrived together. I asked if they're given accommodations by the government. Nope. They're responsible for that themselves.

"Oh, so you speak Chinese?"

"No, not for this job. Just English and French."

Have I mentioned there is virtually zero English spoken in Beijing?

"Must be fun," I told him.

"Oh yes, it's been interesting." He had a bit of a shell-shocked look.

Incidentally, the Let's Go China guide, which so far I still think is quite good, says of this town: "Beijing is vast. Sprawling. Immense. Really, really big." This is true.

So, what's the point of this "registration" business, anyway, I asked. Evidently this was to be the only result of my visit.

It's for things like emergencies, I was told, so for example the Canadian government can evacuate me if there's a crisis.

Well. I'm always game for a free helicopter ride.

In other news, I was among the people lining the driveway to welcome gold medallist (in shooting) Tao Luna and her teacher, former gold medallist (I believe) Yang Lin, as they returned September 25 to the Shooting Range center. And I shook her hand.