This quarter has been by far the most challenging and interesting class-wise.
1st quarter was about getting back the comfort with Chinese that disappeared after one school year of 5-hours a week of Chinese classes and a summer in England. I consolidated core vocabulary in TOCC and started to figure out how Chinese essays, news, and colloquial speech worked. I also had time to adjust to Taipei (how to get places, buying daily necessities), developed good habits (exercising, eating, laundry), and had lots and lots of opportunities to explore, from travelling and hiking to cultural events and television.
2nd quarter I had about as much fun as you can have with Chinese classes and still learn. Exploring was a little limited by a longer class schedule and rainy cold weather, but I still made a number of excursions, especially now that I had a group of friends to go on trips with. As opposed to just random explorations and constant children's television, I also started to engage with the language more regularly outside of class: Cat and I found language exchange partners, we started watching 2 different TV series, and I started following the news in Chinese.
This quarter is the first time I am rid of the awful (but necessary) concept of the "core" class (which you are supposed to spend most of your time on), and this means I get to take way more interesting and diverse classes and feel like the language is actually helping me understand things rather than just "learning" it with no end in sight.
Here are my current classes: Taiwanese short stories, television news, documentaries, and independent reader (a collection of essays gathered from Chinese language sources on various topics, from education to politics and society).
The first difference is that all of these things have been actually published or broadcast rather than being specially prepared or modified language materials, so they are mostly language that actual people use.
The second is that they are challenging. Like, I have lots of work I should be doing now.
The third is that they are content heavy. As in, real things and events are actually discussed in them. I feel like I'm engaging with actually significant issues. Part of this is that the content is more recent (within the last few decades for short stories, within the last few years for documentaries, within the last few days for news). But even reading outdated essays about the L.A. race riots still feels in a way like discussing relevant and pressing issues, because they are things people can and do have real opinions on with implications that matter today.
Also good for me in that dealing with concrete issues is something I tend to avoid. Theoretical facets of issues come easily to me and facts are just so much messier and frustrating. Chinese is now helping me engage with real, current issues. For example, my news teacher is a former reporter for 聯合報道 and she cares that I know things, like about ECFA and NATO and specific Chinese activists. Things which, otherwise, my brain would filter out in favor of gleaning and retaining purely general information which would later help me bs my way through situations requiring that knowledge.
From the beginning, Chinese is presented as a way to immerse yourself in another culture. And it is, in that intro language books are full of words for night market snacks, essays about Chinese history, or comparisons of Chinese versus American education systems. Besides providing a kind of shallow framework for understanding what you, as an American, are doing in a different culture, it also gives you the tools to have some "oh!" moments. ("Oh, so that's why diarrhea is something you totally don't talk about in English but is a favorite topic in Chinese" "Oh, so that's why the waitress won't let me order a cold drink in the winter" "Oh, so that's why I feel infantilized every time i come to Taiwan!")
But examining authentic Chinese literature, documentaries, essays, and news is such a difference in kind, and just at the time that I was kind of reaching a crisis of meaning in my language study career. And doing so as the main class activity rather than just what I try to squeeze in between the gym and homework is a much better feeling.
To give some concrete examples: The beginning of fall was election season, which meant having loud trucks with banners and megaphones blasting unintelligible and crackly slogans. This seemed super stupid to me. If the point was to win votes, this was the worst way to go about it, since it quite clearly was annoying to everyone (rich neighborhoods banned these processions from entering - they did so anyway). Then late first quarter I started reading Taste of Apples, a short story collection which gives you a really good feel for rural Taiwan. One is about a town crier, whose job it is to spread news by walking around town beating his gong. The disappearance of his job signals modernity's unstoppable encroachment on traditional village life. So after reading this story I felt slightly less hostile to the megaphone trucks, and a little more understanding of their existence.
In documentary class, besides watching our assigned documentary, we're also supposed to find outside materials to reference and provide background to the content of the documentaries. The first week we unraveled the difference between 外省人 and 本省人. There's really no good way to deal with these terms in English, and they are overly politicized terms anyway. But essentially, in order to understand Taiwan, you need to understand that it's population is mainly composed of aboriginal peoples, KMT descendants (waishengren) who came over after the civil war with the Chinese Communist Party, and "Taiwanese" (benshengren) who originally came over from the mainland so were there after the aboriginal peoples but way before the waishengren influx.
This is something I've always understood fuzzily but never discussed or learned about concretely. It also opened up so many more avenues of discussion with Taiwanese people here, and especially of understanding the KMT, like hearing my teacher's story of her political coming of age in college, when she realized her strongly KMT upbringing hadn't given her all the facts. Or like hearing about how my language exchange partners studied Chinese history, not Taiwanese history, in high school, and had tests on the location of Chinese railroads, because the whole idea was always to attack and take back China from the communists. Why study Taiwan when it was just a temporary base for taking back the homeland?
Or right now, doing my work for news class. Instead of using the prepared "TV news" materials that everyone uses for that class, my teacher wants me to not just be learning the language skills but also to be dealing with actual news. So all of our clips concern the current week's news, and right now I am working on the State Department's 2010 Human Rights Report and how it is being received in Taiwanese and Chinese media, as well as the Chinese government's response (the 2010 report on America's human rights record).
It's been way interesting to see the commentary in Chinese newspapers, both the language that is used and the factual stretches that need to be made. Like this People's Daily article which tells us that America has been "kidnapped" by human rights. The article makes "discrimination again homosexuals" one of Clinton's three talking points, rather than oppression of minority groups (including homosexuals, but also China's equally or even more obvious oppression of racial minorities like Uighurs or Tibetans). For the obvious reason that in China this is less political sensitive than talking about racial minorities - no one there is worried that a united community of homosexuals will want to secede, and public consciousness about sexuality-related freedoms is non-existent.
Despite understanding every word in the article, at first it was hard to understand some of the points being made, because the worldview is extremely alien from my own: one in which a mainstream and convincing argument can be made that as each country deals with their own laws, peoples, society, culture, and religions in their own way, this implies it is the way it should be -- ok, this is just the culturally relativist argument so far...and to provide support for this claim based on the fact that in some African countries you can be imprisoned for being gay. Back off, West, and stop "encouraging homosexuals to resist the government" (quoted text is directly from the article. added words are in the spirit of the article).
Without Chinese, I would have a vague understanding that for all its failings, America's human rights problems are not comparable to, say, North Korea's. Hearing the Chinese accusations in the news, I would have some understanding of why I saw a few points worth considering and mostly a twisted and untrue position. A liberal arts education helped me get there, but there's always the nagging doubt that you are too culturally centric to really know. Chinese has, first of all, given me the impetus to gain more knowledge with which to evaluate this. But it's also helping me engage with arguments made in other cultural frameworks on the level of that culture and language.
At first language study is a totally formal and negative project, where all values begin to seem relative and you can't really convince your teacher that it is okay to drink cold things or be 100% confident that your culturally informed opinions on cold drinks are correct. Now it's also a positive project, where I don't have to fall back on English to find something that rings true, in other words, the truth or close to it, like that in no case do I think a government should imprison a person for being homosexual. And specifically in this case I can tell you that while some things are the West being a big bully towards developing nations and/or China, what parts are not and what is wrong with the Chinese response, from whatever culture you look at things.
In other words, now that language learning is giving me a chance to also learn more things about the world, I have more chances to authentically evaluate and form my own opinions and understand my values, which should be an aim of education whether abroad or not. As many things as I am finding are "relative", as much as things get more complicated the more deeply you understand them, I'm also tentatively building meaning that I hope I can honestly say is not a pure product of either English or Chinese and their respective cultures.
At first, language study abroad really tears down a lot of who you are, in that it takes away both your ability to express who you are and actually who you are in relation to what's around you. At the intro level of language learning, it provides in their place only some artificial phrases about the foods and activities and kind of education you like ("American!" "creative!" "independent!") and boy do you ever start to feel the nihilism weighing down on you. It's not until now that I feel like I am, more often than not, engaging with real ideas and issues in Chinese, and that doing so in Chinese makes this a significantly more intellectually honest project than it would otherwise be.
I hate reading my own writing and my blog entries are particularly poorly written (both an issue of time and priorities and what is discussed above, the tearing down of a language and cultural framework that I was used to using to communicate). Otherwise, it would be interesting to read back and see what things were like back then, because I really feel like how I'm learning now is so different and feels so much more constructive. The first five "levels" of Chinese were absolutely necessary, fun and new at the time, and did much to teach me about cultural differences -- but now I am actually reading real real real things!!! And I can see, actually, how this is fitting into everything I've been studying and want to learn and do, not just on the theoretical level of some future achievements but actually what I am already doing right now.
In class last week I argued that a feeling of alienation isn't just from encountering something Other, it also only arises when you don't understand yourself. The alienation that I've felt from living here is slowly, but concretely and authentically, being resolved through language learning. Most basically by making another culture more accessible, but also by engaging and affirming something outside of relativism and nihilism, values that I identify with and think are worth believing in.
