Thoughts while far away
Leo has a few words to say
Our son now understands more Chinese than he does English. We feel like delinquent parents.
His Chinese words that he can speak include: light, no, it fell, thanks, nanny, carry me, food, yes, not okay, grandma(!), and of course, mama and dada.
We’ve been delinquent in keeping up our blog! This hasn’t been intentional, but is the result of our new load of school and work keeping us busy. Each of us has taken on some English teaching, which brings a whole new level of cultural exposure through our students’ conversation and writing. When a student writes openly about the effects of pollution on daily life (the stench of factories, toxicity of the water, and lung cancer), it reminds us that this isn’t the same picture of the Chinese people that comes through the American press. People here know that their country is far from perfect, and needs some real progress towards a better standard of life for all. But, it can be hard to push for some advancements like melamine-free milk, especially when the historical perspective is something like: “50 years ago millions of citizens died from starvation. Now you want every item on the food shelf to be certifiably sanitized?”
Life in a country with 1.3 billion residents brings some distinct challenges, and calls for a good measure of perspective and patience. In their defense, the Chinese like to point to America’s own period of development during the 19th century, where there were similar problems of disease, quality control, and living standards. In fact, we saw an article detailing the ‘Swill Milk’ scandal in New York that caused many infant deaths about a hundred years ago. The death toll then was even higher than the one here from the melamine. At least China has the benefit of modern medicine to ameliorate many problems that would have been life threatening just fifty years ago. Progress continues, but it will be awhile before it reaches every corner of this vast country.
Our Chinese speaking teacher continues to amuse. Her latest quip was about how female Chinese doctoral students don’t have a good chance of finding a husband. First, they are too old, nearly thirty. Second, they are not very pretty, because all they like to do is study. Third, women tend to marry up in status here, and it’s hard to find other men more accomplished than their own Ph.D’s. Not impossible, but definitely a challenge. This class has fast become our favorite since we get to discuss these issues and bring perspectives from the ten or so different countries represented in our class. It’s a mini world forum at times, and always promises some surprising perspectives on the ways of life we take for granted!
We’ll try to keep up the posts. Don’t abandon us!
As I sat through Chinese class yesterday, I noticed how our teacher refused to write words like Nanjing, Zhongguo(China), and Wo(I) with capital letters in their non-character transcriptions. I found myself wondering, ‘Doesn’t she know those are proper names?’ It struck me then that this had been the norm all semester. How strange, I thought, that Chinese people don’t think of words in terms of capitalized versus non-capitalized ones.
This got me wondering about the English usage of capitals, and how this device adds a whole extra layer of thinking that is absent in a language like Chinese:
imagine a life where sally and spot visit washington d.c. to see the national mall.
I feel as though I’m in egregious error typing a sentence like this. But in a language like Chinese, how can you capitalize pictures that stand for words?
马丽住在北京。mali zhu zai beijing. (Mary lives in Beijing.)
I will have to fight my resistance to this new norm, trying to convince myself that life is still okay without having the comfort of capitals to mark all the ‘proper’ objects I think about. Who invented capitals anyway? And isn’t life easier with one less convention to follow? China has seemed to do fine without them for the past few millenia, so why start now?
