Epic update?

3/25/10 5:52 PM

 

I realized that I can't really write about really interesting things, right after they've happened. I have so many things I want to say that are just sparking around in my head… I want to capture all of it, at the same time. And I can't, because I'm not David Foster Wallace (some of you are rolling your eyes in your head). So when I sit down to write, I freeze up a bit.

 

Also, I did a bunch of chop-sticking today, right after some major ping-pong sessions, with someone us American students affectionately dubbed "Ping-Pong Girl," though apparently her English name (like in Mandarin class, they give us Mandarin names, to get us in the mindset), is Encore. That's right. Encore. They have crazy names, here. Someone is named Feeling, and someone else is named Cherry. I mean, my name translates pretty crappily, too, because while Chinese names are literally just random words strung together, there is an art and history behind this, so apparently my name, AiDe, (Love Virtue), makes no sense. So people call me Addy or Andy, whichever they pronounce first. Ms. Gao calls me Add, and she says it so perfectly, I just can't bear to correct her. Naiyi's name is Ace, (which a good number of people constantly mispronounce, perhaps intentionally, as "ass," which Naiyi thinks is "a kind of disease," [another one of those I-don't-have-the-heart-to-correct-him situations]) which is why I refer to him as Naiyi.

 

Which is me saying that I'm tired and sort of distracted and my right hand is hurting a little, but that I'll do my best to write down some of the things I've been exposed to and thinking about, which are mostly in the abstract, so forgive me as I flounder.

 

 

Creative energies are snuffed. It's tremendously sad. So many kids I've talked with have these wonderful creative minds, and tell me all these things that, if I were in their position, I would never come up with. (Not that that was well phrased, or anything, but you know what I mean.) I was talking about movies with this kid (who I think was called Yuan Yuan or something? Which seems to be the cultural equivalent of "girly man," because everyone thought he talked a lot, which is true, but the girly man label was generally unwarranted) the other night, in Nanjing, and he brought up Quentin Tarantino. Yuan (which is what I guess I'll call him, even though that is the name of the currency [though the official name is Ren Min Bi, it's referred to as the Yuan or Kuai , like our US Dollar is referred to as a dollar or buck or cheddar or something {I totally wrote this independently of The Briggs', I just didn't publish it until after they talked about it...}]) knew what Tarantino stood for, and the sort of things he does with movies, but Yuan knew that he wouldn't be able to see any for a long time. He had this wonderful way of thinking about things, and the way he expressed them (in his second language, no less!) was great to listen to (even though I had to tune out Adam Sandler's masterpiece, "Click," on the telly.) Everyone sort of knows they're being defeated, in some way, by their government and their situation.

 

Google.com just started redirecting me to Google.com.hk, yesterday or so. But I just use Google.co.uk, so it's all good.

 

We went to a mass grave the other day, where a bunch of CCP guys got killed by CCP resistors, way back in the twenties. It was sad and scary and propaganda-drenched, and came hot on the heels of a bunch of overworked high-schoolers getting drunk on the school trip to Nanjing, so people were generally having none of it. So I was sort of there, in the middle of all that, not knowing what to think for a couple of hours. 

 

Exhausting and enlightening.

 

3/26/10 9:29 PM

 

At this point, I forget what prompted this. But it's valid nonetheless.

 

I should be asking myself, what do I want to get from learning this language? How will I change, what will I gain, what will I lose? Is it rewarding in its own right?

 

The answers are mostly positive. I'm convinced that really only good can come of this. But I know there will be limitations. I will never be a native speaker. I will never be able to truly capture what I mean to capture, when I speak. I'm barely able to say what I mean half the time, when I speak my native language. I feel like I'm going to constantly miscommunicate, ever so slightly, whenever I speak Mandarin.

 

And, as I write about this, I realize what prompted this.

 

There is this really awesome kid in our P.E. class, who is always palling (I like how that's considered an actual word) around with everyone. We'd been casual ping-pong buddies, but recently he went up to me and talked with me, in English. But his personality changed completely. His body language completely flipped on his head. The guy who I'd know to jump around, shove other kids away (good naturedly, of course), so he could play ping-pong, and crack loud and (apparently) hilarious jokes across the room, was suddenly squirming in front of me, with his hand over his mouth and words dribbling, ever so softly, from his seemingly shy self.

Will the person I have been and will be honing my whole life disappear as soon as I start speak another language? 

 

3/27/10 10:56 PM

 

Apparently I'm awesome at paper folding while mildly inebriated. Go figure.

 

Today we went to Happy Valley, which is known as the "Six Flags of China." (I say this as a foreshadow-joke to Zhou Zhuang being known as the "Venice of China," but I'm pretty sure no one would ever get that if I didn't totally point it out. So here it is.) We hit that place hard. Tamara, a snazzy German girl, really likes all the rides, so I actually wound up riding basically everything worth riding, unlike back in stupid old Mei Guo (literally "beautiful country," actually "America"), when I shy away from the Superman and the like. (Yes mom, I know, all the crap that does to your spine and brain cavity. I can't justify my riding these things all that well, but I know about all the reasons why I shouldn't be going. I'm not sure if that's a point for or against me.) Naiyi's ex-girlfriend (who is really cute and they have this awesome flirty thing going on, and neither can realize that they both want to date again, has this sort of hard to pronounce name, and everyone mispronounces it to tease her, so it makes it extra hard to remember her actual name, so we English-speakers tend to refer to her as "Naiyi's Ex") went along with us, and we made her go on some of the rides. At first she really didn't (and I mean reaaally didn't) want to go, but we built up her courage and we had a blast and she had a great time.

 

3/28/10 6:17 PM

 

Oh but I forgot to tell about Friday. Which was also rather awesome. Jason, the aforementioned amazingness, wanted to hang and take us out for dinner after school. But the German students and some of their host kids planned a bowling night already, so we couldn't do that. So Jason said he'd meet up with us. So we went bowling (not the candlepin wimpiness we have back in Needham. This was real, Big Lebowski, bowling. Which I've never done before. Pretty cool stuff. I spent most of my time figuring out which sized ball I wanted to use, and by the time I did figure it all out, we had switched over to chilling at the pool tables. And then Jason showed up. And it turns out that he is semi-pro at pool. Like, really actually. So we were all there sort of flailing about for the hell of it, and Jason shows up and rocks the tables, and we all sort of felt silly. And then (personal information about Jason, redacted, but I assure you, it really sucked), so he was sort of a mess. So we went out to eat and drink and give him a good time, which we did (but of course, not to excess.) (I think the point of all this is that I'm hanging out with people and having a blast. This interpretation is further bolstered by the fact that I, just now, got a call from someone being like, "dude! Let's hang out!" but with a lot more translation issues and things.) So that was fun, and I got a really good text from him, basically saying "thanks I feel a bunch better."

 

Also, I just bought some awesome Little Red Books, a modern one with English on one page and Chinese on the other, and an old one, published December 1967 (for publishing history, check this out, though note the bias [especially visible at the end, before the acknowledgements] http://www.bibsocamer.org/BibSite/Han/index.html), which is crazy legit. It seems to be a really early printing of the third edition, which became the accepted edition, which is used for every subsequent printing. The previous owner checked off a passage in the chapter called "the people's army," which is only mildly unsettling. All of the books I had seen were the English-Chinese ones, and they were really sort of chunky and big. But now I see the actual size of the original thing, which is about a third of the size, and you can totally see how people would just carry them around. It's just a bunch of paragraph-long quotations from Mao's writings, and is just such a hard hitting collection of fallacy-laden propaganda. It's really frightening. All of the men in the propaganda poster I got were holding them, and it's easy to see how the book functioned in the culture, at one point (and even easier to read this potentially skewed Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotations_From_Chairman_Mao_Tse-Tung).

 

Karaoke bars are ridiculous? Naiyi likes Backstreet Boys a lot. Those videos are the stuff of legend. I'd totally forgotten about them.

 

The songs in Mandarin are actually really excellent practice for reading the characters. They scroll along at the bottom of the screen, and so I read the words to myself, as best as I could, but there's only a second or two before you hear the words from your Chinese-singer-in-residence, so it's a continuous, immediate-feedback sort of quiz. And learning is, almost by definition, helped a ton by music. (Musicophilia citation pending, but there's that chapter about stroke patients learning how to speak through singing along to music). (Maybe this is me just finding a semi-legitimate excuse to hang around Karaoke bars and watch random dudes sing songs I don't know?)

 

3/29/10 11:27 PM

 

We just hit the town to wish some of the cooler German kids goodbye. I feel like one of the gang now.

 

Again I find myself apologizing for gearing up to write what is an essentially content-less assortment of thoughts. A lot of people can say they've been to Zhou Zhuang, (where we went yesterday,) and I'm very lucky to count myself among them. But this isn't where I feel the content is, right now.

 

I'm just hanging out with these guys. We're all the same. I can make the same jokes here that I can make back home, to the same reactions. We have the same thoughts and insecurities and emotions. We are just 10 kids from 3 vastly different cultures, all finding our way around a sprawling city. Even with the help of our host kids, we kept getting lost and being disorganized, and encountering all of the little hiccups that come with the territory. Teaching each other swears in our native tongues. The pleasures of lolling about in a new country that we're starting to get a handle on. Or, for some of the Chinese kids, just sitting back and watching as their cross-cultural peers unwittingly eat fried pig skin for the first time. ("I'll tell you what it is after you eat it. Otherwise you won't want to." – Thank you, Jason.)

 

Jason is always surprised by all the vocab he knows. He said "jaywalk" today. And "sixpack." And then said, "why do I know that? That's crazy." And so I gave him my "critical period" talk, which is summed up well by these Wikipedia article introductions:

 

In general, a critical period is a limited time in which an event can occur, usually to result in some kind of transformation. A "critical period" in developmental psychology and developmental biology is a time in the early stages of an organism's life during which it displays a heightened sensitivity to certain environmental stimuli, and develops in particular ways due to experiences at this time. If the organism does not receive the appropriate stimulus during this "critical period", it may be difficult, ultimately less successful, or even impossible, to develop some functions later in life.[1]

For example, the critical period for the development of a human child's binocular vision is thought to be between one and three years,[1] and further critical periods have been identified for the development of hearing and the vestibular system.[2] There are critical periods in childhood in which imprinting can occur, such as when a greylag goose becomes attached to a parent figure within the first 36 hours after hatching. A young chaffinch must hear an adult singing before it sexually matures, or it will never properly learn the highly intricate song.[3] These observations have led some to hypothesise a critical period for certain areas of human learning, particularly language acquisition.

Experimental research into critical periods has involved depriving animals of stimuli at different stages of development. Other studies have looked at children deprived of certain experiences due to illness (such as temporary blindness), or social isolation (such as feral children). Many of the studies investigating a critical period for language acquisition have focused on deaf children of hearing parents.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period)

 

And

 

The critical period hypothesis is the subject of a long-standing debate in linguistics and language acquisition over the extent to which the ability to acquire language is biologically linked to age. The hypothesis claims that there is an ideal 'window' of time to acquire language in a linguistically rich environment, after which this is no longer possible.

The critical period hypothesis states that the first few years of life is the crucial time in which an individual can acquire a first language if presented with adequate stimuli. If language input doesn't occur until after this time, the individual will never achieve a full command of language — especially grammatical systems.

The evidence for such a period is limited, and support stems largely from theoretical arguments and analogies to other critical periods in biology such as visual development, but nonetheless is widely accepted. The nature of this phenomenon, however, has been one of the most fiercely debated issues in psycholinguistics and cognitive science in general for decades. Some writers have suggested a "sensitive" or "optimal" period rather than a critical one; others dispute the causes (physical maturation, cognitive factors). The duration of the period also varies greatly in different accounts. In second language acquisition, the strongest evidence for the critical period hypothesis is in the study of accent, where most older learners do not reach a native-like level. However, under certain conditions, native-like accent has been observed, suggesting that accent is affected by multiple factors, such as identity and motivation, rather than a critical period biological constraint.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Period_Hypothesis)

 

 

I can now understand a lot of what people are saying. It's really odd. If I concentrate a bunch, (and get a good bit lucky), I can make out a solid third of the meaning out there, I think. There's this one girl who likes saying "go die," to her friend, and it's my little secret that I know what she's saying. She might pick up on all the giggling, though.

 

I sort of want to do a seminar or lecture or something on Chinese culture observed through kung-fu movies. I just have this odd cultural sense, as a result of growing up on Jackie Chan and his kin. As if there were a cultural critical period. I mean, none of the movies I watched took place in modern day China. But many of them were made very recently, so they present their stories in a modern Chinese way, and the actual subject matter they deal with – from many hundreds, even thousands of years ago – is still tremendously relevant.

 

New favorite word: "an" (pronounced like "unh," like a grunt). It means "yes," essentially, and is crazy useful because there is no set word for "yes" for every situation. (Quick explanation: verbs are very important in mandarin, and are used over and over in slightly different ways, instead of having to conjugate. [Sorry, all you linguists out there. This may be just all-together wrong, but I'm pretty sure this is how it works.] So if you say "you want some?" some just [prepare for over-literal translation] says "want" in response, [see?], instead of saying "yes." This holds basically true for any question. Q: "Are you?" A; "[to be verb]" Q: "you have?" A: "[to have]," etc.) But there is a word, "dui," which means "to be right," that is sort of used as a substitute for this structure, and I'd been using that. But I only sort of built in my reflex for saying it, and it was hard to remember all the time, and I found myself nodding pretty often. And someone said, "we say 'an' instead." So now I basically rely on my already well-trained grunt reflex. "Ungh" = "yup." And no one bats an eyelash.