Wednesday, 17 March 2010
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
Another temple
Last Saturday Jamie and I went outside the city to visit a temple that's quite different from the ones we saw in Beijing. It is only now being slowly restored; the pictures show something of the state of the project. We saw a few other visitors when we arrived, but they were leaving and we mostly had the place to ourselves. We talked briefly to one of the monks, who was very welcoming. Then we climbed down a slope outside the temple itself and looked into some abandoned cave homes.
I'm in the middle of packing (leaving Yulin tomorrow, unbelievably enough), so I won't elaborate right now. But here are some pictures.
I'm in the middle of packing (leaving Yulin tomorrow, unbelievably enough), so I won't elaborate right now. But here are some pictures.
Monday, 8 March 2010
A quick one
Once the semester started, the whirlwind began. I have been teaching with Jamie each day -- having fun meeting students, practicing English with them, getting a feel for how thing work here. Tonight I gave a talk to about 200 students using a quickly assembled Powerpoint slide show on "Maine Culture and Daily Life." Given how little time there was to prepare, I think it went okay. There were lots of good questions afterwards.
There's a lot I'd like to write about, including part II of "being a foreigner," but it will have to wait, perhaps for my night at a hotel in Beijing (Thursday), or the hours I'll be spending at the airport Friday.
Meanwhile, there are some pictures here.
There's a lot I'd like to write about, including part II of "being a foreigner," but it will have to wait, perhaps for my night at a hotel in Beijing (Thursday), or the hours I'll be spending at the airport Friday.
Meanwhile, there are some pictures here.
Wednesday, 3 March 2010
Foreigner I: Europe
The first time I went to Ireland, in 1979, I said to someone in a pub that I was “Italian.” That person laughed and said, “You’re not Italian, you’re American, anyone can see that a mile away.” (After a couple of weeks in the country, I too could tell an American a mile away.)
That casual comment changed my understanding of a lot of things as time passed. When I was growing up, in the context of Dad’s family, not to mention church and school, we had always called ourselves “Italian.” As far as I can remember there were no hyphenated Americans in those days. In America there were Italians, Irish, Finns, and Swedes, not Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, etc., never mind African Americans or Native Americans. No one ever gave much thought to how to distinguish Finn(ish-Americans) from the Finns in Finland; most of us had never been to Europe and never saw any Europeans, so it didn’t matter.
My first reaction to the guy in the pub in 1979 was that of course the perspective was different if you were in Europe; in Ireland, you were only a stone’s throw from the real Italy, which was full of real Italians, and in fact real Italians showed up in Ireland on vacation on a regular basis. It took me longer to realize how big a difference there must have between the lifestyles of Italian-Americans and those of Italians in Italy. Grandma Mat and her generation kept up the food traditions, they could still speak and understand Italian, and they associated mostly with each other and not with other kinds of Americans. Nevertheless, they weren’t really Italian any more; they were Italian-American.
Another thing that first trip to Ireland got me thinking about was foreignness -- in both directions. Ireland (and later England) felt both familiar and foreign to me. The architecture was different from home -- but not too different. (Never mind the question of what “home” means if you’re talking about the U.S. as a whole, from the desert southwest to northern Maine, from Florida to Seattle.) There was a lot of different vocabulary (“car park” for parking lot, “ring” for call on the phone, “call” for come by the house, etc.), but not too much different vocabulary. The lifestyle was different but not too different (no central heating in Ireland; rather, a turf fire, but in a recognizable fireplace). So while it was very clear that I wasn’t in America any more, there was enough that was familiar -- especially and above all the language -- to keep traveling from being very daunting.
From the other direction, I felt foreign. Going across the ocean to foreign countries made me think about the fact that not everyone shares my assumptions, my memories, or my history in a way that people from one country share those things even in a diverse country like the U.S. In another country, talking to people who see the U.S. from the outside, things just look different. The Dublin paper was always full of news about the United States in a way that American papers were never full of news about Ireland, and people actually had strong opinions about the U.S. in Ireland, because the U.S. affected them in a way that Ireland did not affect the U.S.
Those trips made me treasure the chance to go away and feel like a foreigner for a while. I would get some of my fixed ideas shaken up, see the world out of other people’s eyes for a while, see new places out of my own eyes, and come home not quite the same person I was before.
Brussels put a few cracks in that picture. Unlike in Amsterdam, where everyone on the street seems to speak beautiful English, in Brussels, outside my office, most people didn’t speak much if any English at all. It turned out that when I couldn’t have conversations with people, being a foreigner wasn’t quite so much fun. I had a great trip to Brussels (with my side visit to Amsterdam), but it taught me that being a foreigner is a little more complicated than I had thought.
China is another story altogether -- which I’ll try to tell next time.
That casual comment changed my understanding of a lot of things as time passed. When I was growing up, in the context of Dad’s family, not to mention church and school, we had always called ourselves “Italian.” As far as I can remember there were no hyphenated Americans in those days. In America there were Italians, Irish, Finns, and Swedes, not Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, etc., never mind African Americans or Native Americans. No one ever gave much thought to how to distinguish Finn(ish-Americans) from the Finns in Finland; most of us had never been to Europe and never saw any Europeans, so it didn’t matter.
My first reaction to the guy in the pub in 1979 was that of course the perspective was different if you were in Europe; in Ireland, you were only a stone’s throw from the real Italy, which was full of real Italians, and in fact real Italians showed up in Ireland on vacation on a regular basis. It took me longer to realize how big a difference there must have between the lifestyles of Italian-Americans and those of Italians in Italy. Grandma Mat and her generation kept up the food traditions, they could still speak and understand Italian, and they associated mostly with each other and not with other kinds of Americans. Nevertheless, they weren’t really Italian any more; they were Italian-American.
Another thing that first trip to Ireland got me thinking about was foreignness -- in both directions. Ireland (and later England) felt both familiar and foreign to me. The architecture was different from home -- but not too different. (Never mind the question of what “home” means if you’re talking about the U.S. as a whole, from the desert southwest to northern Maine, from Florida to Seattle.) There was a lot of different vocabulary (“car park” for parking lot, “ring” for call on the phone, “call” for come by the house, etc.), but not too much different vocabulary. The lifestyle was different but not too different (no central heating in Ireland; rather, a turf fire, but in a recognizable fireplace). So while it was very clear that I wasn’t in America any more, there was enough that was familiar -- especially and above all the language -- to keep traveling from being very daunting.
From the other direction, I felt foreign. Going across the ocean to foreign countries made me think about the fact that not everyone shares my assumptions, my memories, or my history in a way that people from one country share those things even in a diverse country like the U.S. In another country, talking to people who see the U.S. from the outside, things just look different. The Dublin paper was always full of news about the United States in a way that American papers were never full of news about Ireland, and people actually had strong opinions about the U.S. in Ireland, because the U.S. affected them in a way that Ireland did not affect the U.S.
Those trips made me treasure the chance to go away and feel like a foreigner for a while. I would get some of my fixed ideas shaken up, see the world out of other people’s eyes for a while, see new places out of my own eyes, and come home not quite the same person I was before.
Brussels put a few cracks in that picture. Unlike in Amsterdam, where everyone on the street seems to speak beautiful English, in Brussels, outside my office, most people didn’t speak much if any English at all. It turned out that when I couldn’t have conversations with people, being a foreigner wasn’t quite so much fun. I had a great trip to Brussels (with my side visit to Amsterdam), but it taught me that being a foreigner is a little more complicated than I had thought.
China is another story altogether -- which I’ll try to tell next time.
Monday, 1 March 2010
Travel plans
My visa extension finally came through. I will be flying home on March 12 rather than March 6. In the extra time I will teach with Jamie for the first week of classes, give a talk to English majors on daily life and culture in Maine (!!!), and be available to the English faculty to consult on usage and grammar.
I'll be leaving Yulin on the 11th.
I'll be leaving Yulin on the 11th.
Language
Unbelievable as it seems, I have been gone from home for almost four weeks. The past week or so has felt like a transition from being a tourist overwhelmed by unfamiliar impressions to being a temporary inhabitant of a place that feels ever more familiar, if no less mysterious and foreign.
Language has been a big part of my impressions from the start. Jamie is teaching English and learning Chinese, and we have talked about those endeavors quite a bit. Many people speak to us in English -- everything from “Hello” on the street to discussions with Jamie’s colleagues. A couple of them (especially Marien from Holland) speak such fluent English that those conversations go without a hitch.
On the other hand, I speak no Chinese at all apart from “ni hao” (hello) and “xie xie” (thank you), and very few people here can say more in English than I can say in Chinese. We hear “Hello - nice to meet you” on the streets a lot, but with most people it tends to end there. I can pick up a few words and phrases -- mostly stuff I listened to on CD’s before I came here -- but none of the meaning of what people are saying in Chinese.
As in Brussels, I wish I could have direct, in-depth conversations with local people. Jamie speaks what sounds to me like fluent Chinese (though he continues to deny that he’s very good!), and he does a lot of translating for me. Without him I would have lost my mind or fled home a long time ago. But it would take years of effort to be able to function here in terms of language, and both Jamie and his colleagues are evidence of that. All of them have been studying Chinese or English (respectively) for a long time, and I haven’t run into anyone who appears to have native fluency in English, nor does Jamie have native fluency in Chinese. Except for a very few language geniuses, only babies find this sort of thing easy!
Aside from the personal side of language issues, there’s also the politics. In China, every school child starts learning English in third grade and goes on with it through high school. The government not only supports English learning, it mandates it. (There is a national educational policy here; I don’t know what role the provincial and local governments play.) English majors at Yulin University must also learn Japanese, and I have met a number of people who also studied Russian or German.
Without going into a long rant, I will say that I wish the U.S. would place more emphasis on language learning. In that respect, coming here has only intensified a feeling I’ve had for a long time. The fact that many Chinese people know English, while very few Americans know Chinese (or any other foreign language) seems likely to play a subtle but important role -- not to our advantage -- in the coming years of economic competition between the two countries. This is not to mention the millions of bi- and multi-lingual Europeans and Africans who speak English with native or nearly native fluency, besides any number of other languages. My colleagues in Brussels switched back and forth among English, Dutch, and French without blinking, and I remember Edgard from the Ivory Coast, who taught French at Maranacook years ago, spoke beautiful English, and knew four other languages besides French and English.
Yes, English is a world language at this point, that’s why everyone else is learning it. But soon we’re going to be like kids who don’t know pig latin; a lot of the rest of the world is going to be able to talk behind our backs while we can’t talk behind theirs. ;)
Not only that, being a nation of immigrants means that we have an immense opportunity within our own borders to encourage multi-lingual citizens. Why should my Italian ancestors have had to abandon Italian when they learned English? Why don’t we encourage immigrants to maintain their native languages across the generations when they come here, so that we would have a nation in which not only English, but Spanish, Portuguese, Somali, Arabic, and any number of other languages are also spoken?
For those of you who are tempted to say that immigrants aren't learning English these days, I read about a study that said that in Southern California, later generations of immigrant families are learning English at about the same pace and rate as my Italian ancestors. It just seems different now because there is a long-term constant supply of new immigrants who don't know the language. But their' children and grandchildren are learning English just like Grandma, Grandpa, and Dad and his siblings did.
Well, that was something of a rant after all. 'Nuf said.
Language has been a big part of my impressions from the start. Jamie is teaching English and learning Chinese, and we have talked about those endeavors quite a bit. Many people speak to us in English -- everything from “Hello” on the street to discussions with Jamie’s colleagues. A couple of them (especially Marien from Holland) speak such fluent English that those conversations go without a hitch.
On the other hand, I speak no Chinese at all apart from “ni hao” (hello) and “xie xie” (thank you), and very few people here can say more in English than I can say in Chinese. We hear “Hello - nice to meet you” on the streets a lot, but with most people it tends to end there. I can pick up a few words and phrases -- mostly stuff I listened to on CD’s before I came here -- but none of the meaning of what people are saying in Chinese.
As in Brussels, I wish I could have direct, in-depth conversations with local people. Jamie speaks what sounds to me like fluent Chinese (though he continues to deny that he’s very good!), and he does a lot of translating for me. Without him I would have lost my mind or fled home a long time ago. But it would take years of effort to be able to function here in terms of language, and both Jamie and his colleagues are evidence of that. All of them have been studying Chinese or English (respectively) for a long time, and I haven’t run into anyone who appears to have native fluency in English, nor does Jamie have native fluency in Chinese. Except for a very few language geniuses, only babies find this sort of thing easy!
Aside from the personal side of language issues, there’s also the politics. In China, every school child starts learning English in third grade and goes on with it through high school. The government not only supports English learning, it mandates it. (There is a national educational policy here; I don’t know what role the provincial and local governments play.) English majors at Yulin University must also learn Japanese, and I have met a number of people who also studied Russian or German.
Without going into a long rant, I will say that I wish the U.S. would place more emphasis on language learning. In that respect, coming here has only intensified a feeling I’ve had for a long time. The fact that many Chinese people know English, while very few Americans know Chinese (or any other foreign language) seems likely to play a subtle but important role -- not to our advantage -- in the coming years of economic competition between the two countries. This is not to mention the millions of bi- and multi-lingual Europeans and Africans who speak English with native or nearly native fluency, besides any number of other languages. My colleagues in Brussels switched back and forth among English, Dutch, and French without blinking, and I remember Edgard from the Ivory Coast, who taught French at Maranacook years ago, spoke beautiful English, and knew four other languages besides French and English.
Yes, English is a world language at this point, that’s why everyone else is learning it. But soon we’re going to be like kids who don’t know pig latin; a lot of the rest of the world is going to be able to talk behind our backs while we can’t talk behind theirs. ;)
Not only that, being a nation of immigrants means that we have an immense opportunity within our own borders to encourage multi-lingual citizens. Why should my Italian ancestors have had to abandon Italian when they learned English? Why don’t we encourage immigrants to maintain their native languages across the generations when they come here, so that we would have a nation in which not only English, but Spanish, Portuguese, Somali, Arabic, and any number of other languages are also spoken?
For those of you who are tempted to say that immigrants aren't learning English these days, I read about a study that said that in Southern California, later generations of immigrant families are learning English at about the same pace and rate as my Italian ancestors. It just seems different now because there is a long-term constant supply of new immigrants who don't know the language. But their' children and grandchildren are learning English just like Grandma, Grandpa, and Dad and his siblings did.
Well, that was something of a rant after all. 'Nuf said.
Time passing
Here are a few recent pictures. I haven't taken many lately and the days have been passing fast and kind of randomly. I'll add another post soon, but meanwhile the pictures have some captions.
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