My first two English classes went very well last week! The biggest challenge for me is that their English ability ranges from knowing very little to being pretty conversant in English (example: a 40+ year-old Phys. Ed. major that hasn't spoken English in 20 years versus a 25 year-old English major. You can imagine). As a result, adjusting my speaking speed is the biggest challenge. On the first day, I started out speaking relatively slowly, and several students asked me to speed up. After speeding up, however, I had a number of students asking me to slow down. Finding that middle ground is going to be difficult. For my first class, we did introductions, and as expected considering that I am for many of them the first white person that has taught them English, they were very curious about me and asked me a lot of questions. They are very sweet and several of them have already invited me over to their homes to eat dinner and one of my students got me free tickets to a soccer match.
For the second class we discussed "Meeting Guests and Saying Goodbye." Each class is three hours long and at the end we have one hour to discuss certain topics. So I introduced it with the basic idea that language and culture are always fundamentally intertwined. You cannot separate the two or else you will never truly learn the language. I think the topic was a little bit too difficult for them, but I hope in the end that they enjoyed the challenge. So I opened it up with the idea that although the Chinese word for "foreigner" is used quite frequently, in English the word "foreigner" is usually quite inappropriate. And that got me thinking...
For those of you who do not know, Chinese people refer to any person from any country outside of Asia as a 外国人 waiguoren or "foreigner." This is directly linked to the race difference, as they refer to Koreans, Japanese and other Asians by their nationality. I explained to them that it is appropriate to use this word in Chinese, for example: when my American friends and I are speaking with one another in English, we actually say "waiguoren" when we are talking about someone who is not Chinese. Why? Because the word foreigner in English is not normally used so the word "waiguoren" is quite difficult to translate. The word 外国人 "foreigner" literally means "a person from outside the country." On the other hand, 中国人 "Chinese" literally means "a person from the middle country." If you look at the word itself 外 "wai" means outside and quite literally is the opposite of 中 zhong, or "middle" which is the word for a Chinese person.
You know how China used to be referred to as the Middle Kingdom, right? Well actually, it still is. The word for China is 中国 zhongguo, which literally means the "middle country." Note how the character 中, the word for middle, is quite literally a rectangle with a line down the middle to symbolize the meaning for "middle." As a result, when Chinese people are talking about anyone who is not Chinese, they say foreigner, which for them is the antonym of the word for Chinese. This is the root of the translation problem.
So we talked about some appropriate translations for foreigner. Namely that we use the person's nationality to describe them, and if we don't know their nationality, we use their continent, ie "European." Other appropriate translations are "not Chinese," "international," and "westerner." We talked about how this reflects the fact that the US is a very diverse county so if you say foreigner it is really not clear what you are talking about. An African? A Chinese American? An Australian? It could be anyone, really. In addition, if a foreigner is walking down the street in the US, you can't actually tell they are a foreigner by looking at them, whereas in China, you know immediately if someone is foreign or not. I explained to them that we have the same thinking that they have towards other Asian ethnicities (in that they would never call a Japanese person or a Korean a foreigner), but that our thinking doesn't just refer to people of Caucasian race, on the contrary, for us that idea refers to everybody. As a result, the word foreigner is rarely used.
If you live in the United States for a certain amount of time, not only do other people and yourself slowly start to consider you American, but also you can gain citizenship. Whereas I could live in China for the rest of my life and not only never be able to hold citizenship (citizenship is restricted to people of the Han Chinese ethnicity and the 56 designated Chinese ethnic minorities only) but also that I will always and forever be called a foreigner, or in some interpretations, an outsider. As a result of these cultural differences, connotations and interpretations, the word foreigner is not always appropriate.
We also discussed how the different ways that we address people reflect cultural differences. China actually has a very complicated system of addressing people, depending on if you know them, if you're friends, if you're family, if you're co-workers, ect ect. For example, if you don't know someone and they are at least 20 years older than you, then you call them "aunt" or "uncle." If they are less than 20 years older than you, you call them "older brother" or "older sister."
If it is a boy that is only a few years older than you, you can't call them older brother or else people with think you are dating. Instead you can call them 帅哥 shuaige, which literally means "handsome brother" but more colloquially is translated as "hot boy." I know, weird right? If you call someone brother people think you two are dating, but if you call them "hot boy" then people don't have a second thought about it or blink an eye.
On the other hand, if you are friends with them it is a little different. If they are a girl and older than you, then you call them by their name and add "older sister" to the end of it. For example, my friend Tingting is 婷婷姐 or tingtingjie, with means "Tingting sister." With boys, you can call them by their name or just 帅哥 "hot boy."
As you can see, this all clearly reflects the way the language and culture can never be separated under any circumstance. This all reflects China's complicated filial system, as well as filial piety and the fact in China the whole family used to live under one roof. Today, they still consider themselves "one family" under their socialist system of government, and as such still refer to strangers and friends as family members.
Anyway, enough of my rambling. This weekend was nice, I went out to dinner with my friends Pingping and Fangfang on Thursday, and a group of us took some of our friends out to eat Sichuan food (Read: SPICY but delicious) on Friday. Also on Friday CIEE took us to a Chinese cooking school to learn how to cook Chinese food and I learned how to make 麻婆豆腐 which is basically really spicy Tofu. My friend 小虎 Xiaohu (his name means "Little Tiger") took some really cool pictures and I will try to post them soon.
Things are still going great here in China, but I suffered two setbacks recently. In February, I applied for an internship for the Fall 2010 semester with the Department of State Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and after a phone interview with the North Korea Desk, I found out that I was rejected from the position. Secondly, I took the HSK test this morning (Chinese version of the TOEFL) and I'm pretty sure that I basically failed it. I have been looking into going to grad school for International Relations at the Johns Hopkins University branch at Nanjing University, but I need a really high score on the HSK to get in. It was disappointing because I've been feeling relatively good about my Chinese language ability, and then I went into an Intermediate level test (it wasn't even the highest level of the test) and I probably knew less than half the questions.
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