Substance and theory

There are few places I feel more comfortable than the classroom, in the front that is. And despite a job with lots of potential to stay in the office and do a lot of cerebral stuff, to save another department's bacon, I've found myself deep in the classroom again for half of my working time teaching a course that should never. It swung into being just two weeks ago and will go on for another 13 weeks. Since it wasn't to be, it's almost impossible to give it to anyone else as it was only a framework. It's not all a sacrifice on my part. It being a course overseen by the qualifications authority, I've learned a lot about what is entailed in official courses that grant stamped certificates. That was one of my objectives.

The course itself has the not-so-simple goal that a passing graduate should be able to go into a tertiary level classroom with the English language capacity to succeed. Moving students to this level is something that conceptually is a big part of my company's reason for being. (Or shall I say "reason for buying" because it was an acquisition?) Moving students to this level is a big challenge if you think the difference between the usual requirement for university study and what university study comprises. IELTS, the main tool for testing academic English readiness, students should be able to write a 250 word structured essay, not 1000 words as in a normal course assignment; listen for particular words but not for whole meaning; listen to native speakers and not, say, south Asian intoned English; to read three articles in an hour rather than 10 pages as expected reading in a night. I'm a proponent of IELTS as a test but I knew this course wasn't going to be like preparing students for that.

It was almost accidentally that I stumbled though on some interesting ideas. While finding interesting listening on education, I let the class listen to a TEDtalk by Angela Lee Duckworth called "The key to success? Grit". Students, though reasonably smart, found it hard going. It didn't help that over half thought that the key to success was "great". To summarise Lee Duckworth's message: Neither IQ, nor social intelligence, nor health, nor good looks really predict success; only another characteristic, grit, predicted it. What is this non-technical sounding "grit"? It's the passion, perseverance and stamina to continue at a task, not just for an hour, not just for a day but for years and years. It's a nice sentiment and listening task to do at the start of a challenging course. It'd be great for everyone to have a little grit to get to this big goal.

While I was pacing around watching them listen to the recording, I was thinking about grit. Prior to teaching this course, I was teaching another group of students wanting to pass an in-house proficiency test analogous to IELTS that would allow them into our sister company's mainstream courses. However, most of them lack the foundation to make any impact on the test. They are a mixed bunch with some very smart young people, all Chinese, almost all between the ages of 17-23. There are two or three who in my estimation could learn and pass the test in the short time but they almost all lack exactly what Lee Duckworth mentions: grit. Even though the all would rather study mainstream courses, none of them takes the opportunities to learn, or to address the weaknesses that prevents them passing the proficiency test.

For a formative test two days ago for the new course, I randomly chose another talk this time on youtube, Carol Dweck's "Developing a growth mindset". (What I didn't notice at the time even with multiple relistening is that Lee Duckworth cites Dweck.) A growth mindset is another concept to explain the same issue of why intelligent, capable people don't succeed in learning things well. Simply put, a growth mindset is the belief that you can become a better learner with effort and challenge. That doesn't sound like brain science but there is a lot of implicit suggestion in the way that we teach and the way we praise that gives people the subconscious understanding that challenges measure us rather than grow us. Difficulty embarrasses us rather than enhances us. Of course, in another field like exercise no one would question that increasing difficulty would increase the gain (to a point).

In the group I have a namesake who is my best example of a lack of grit and negligible growth mindset. He is smart enough to learn how to pass tests; give him a grammar test and he can get it mostly right, and more accurately than anyone else. Give him a list of words and he'll look them all up in Chinese and remember them. But give him something he's not familiar with and he has no patience. In probably the most obvious situations, an Argentine didn't know what a "wedding" was so I asked my namesake to explain it. He thought for a moment and smiled embarrassed. And I asked him again, and he said he knew the meaning but couldn't say it. I told him that the Argentine needs his help and I need to know he knows it. But he didn't say a word. This is someone with conversational fluency, knows the words "get married" "special" "day" "church" "kiss" but maybe not "bride" and "groom" but he couldn't even start, or take the risk with others watching of doing the wrong thing.

But while these nice terms "grit" and "growth mindset" assume their way into my lens of the world, I remind myself of some of the base intellectual values I have. Do these really correspond to the substance of the world or are they just part of an interface of theories that could be an illusion for the workings underneath? Regardless two of the more gritty students in the newly started course enjoyed both listening tasks despite the difficulty and it rounded off a good start.

In another case of theory becoming substance, my final hurdle for something grand to hang on the wall was overcome with the acceptance by Trinity College of my diploma portfolio. The grades were hardly anything to show off but as a body of knowledge and experience, I'm utterly proud. Many courses might rubber stamp a capable practitioner's experience but I can say that I learned a lot from the process of the course and even through the trials of the portfolio that lasted for over three years. The rubber stamp is a nice addition and one that gives me credibility to be what I am in the teaching world. Perhaps what all good teachers need is a growth mindset, that all of the classes improves us all, that all of the gritless students pushes us to be more engaging and inspiring. And that we seek further knowledge about the theory and substance of how the mind works, how the mind might fail to apprehend and how success in learning finally prevails.

The Street

I've completed my first three weeks of work in my new workplace. The first felt easy; the second, despite being four days long, felt interminable; and the last week flew by rather effortlessly, despite also being the same length as the second. Comfort, familiarity and the gained confidence in a new workscape are important. The lay of the land in the office is one thing but one of my first thoughts before each day is the physical area where the company is situated.

The Central Business District of Auckland is very familiar to me. It was the place where I had my first full-time job in 2001. Just like those childhood years where one year counts as ten years of memories, that time feels long despite only being three years at most. I can tell you all the shops that were not there 15 years ago and all those that lasted. Sometimes it's surprising.

Walking down it though always elicits two distinctly different sighs, one of joy and one of disappointment. The disappointment is that there is so much obvious poverty in Auckland, more than in the past. I pass as many as five people in the early morning rush on Queen Street, looking miserable, with hat before them to collect money, some with that clear, unfakeable smell of not having bathed. I blogged previously about the Beggars of Jiangnan Xi but it is sad that the same is true in the heart of the city. 

There were beggars and street performer in different guises 15 years ago, some with a lot of character. There was the Tin Man who rhythmically beat his tin, evenly timed but without a touch of melody; there were the Sound System Dudes who, though possessing even less talent than the Tin Man, would have a hat out for their provision of played music. There was the One Armed Statue, one dollar a move; two dollars a smile. There have always been the Ride Money beggars, those that ask you for change around the bus stops, but there are plenty of those up Dominion Road these days as well. (In one cute moment last time we came back to New Zealand, we were asked for money by a passerby; I said I didn't have any changed and he bid us farewell politely; a curious shock for my wife who'd never had that kind of walk-by begging nor that politeness in refusal.) These days there's a lot less character. It's sad of course that people cannot make their way financially in life. I presume the difference in character might come from a different kind of poverty, that which comes from psychological issues or from substances, a resigned kind of begging. 

The joy is being back in my cultural element walking on the street and the hallways of buildings. Strangers don't mind making eye contact and smiling. Walking on the street, people notice cars wanting to turn in or out and spontaneously slow down en masse and stop to let them proceed. People allow other people to flow the other way. In New Zealand it sounds like simple common sense but it hasn't been the common sense that I've known for the last six years.

The Seven Sisters, Pleiades, Subaru, 昴宿星團 and Matariki

There are many constellations that take pride of place in the sky. Scorpio and Orion get full marks for likeness. In the South, Crux potently points at the axis of the night sky. My favourite is far from unique and you know it because you've heard its name before: it's a car brand (Subaru) and gives its name to Maori new year (Matariki). I knew it mostly by its Greek appelation, Pleiades, a name I've butchered for far too long. (Try /ˈplaɪədiːz/ or /ˈpliːədiːz/ as indicated by Wikipedia.) They've appeared lucidly in my dreams and sent me out of dreams on early morning hikes to Maungawhau Mount Eden for Matariki observances. The appearance of this constellation before the morning sun rises marks the Maori new year and crowds of people brave the winter cold to spot it before the dawning sun outgleams it. The Matariki observance in 2016 begins 6 June but I didn't wait and went out to see it tonight. It has the most enchanting twinkle.     

How do you find it? Find Orion in the North, move your eyes along the plane of his belt through the "V" of Taurus and keep going and.... STOP. You are now in Pleiades. Admire and repeat another night.

Luminating

I have had writer pretenses of the most amateur kind ever since I learned how to grip a pen. I remember writing an unintelligible space drama and being publicly destroyed by Mrs Butterworth in front of the class when I was 8; there was the Entombed-inspired rambling story (Entombed was a computer game that I was crazy about) in Form 1 or 2; there were poems and religious rants in my teens; preachy, obvious philosophical stories in my early twenties; occasional fiction and short stories in my later 20s; in my pre-China phase I was trying to stick a novel together but never completed it. (The plot of which I still ponder about.) Oh and there was this blog. All pretenses went when I really start to read in larger quantities.

It took me a long time to mature as a reader. Despite my ability to focus in chess and language learning, I found it hard to focus and read fiction on a regular basis as I grew up. This really did change in my mid-20s. Perhaps it was the surplus time I had when I was self-employed, or just that other things weren't as interesting at the time. I've since made up for lost time even though there are still huge gaping chasms of books that I would like to have read but probably will never read. There have been some great books in there, as well as Chinese books in the last 6 years. Some books came like cold water. It was Lolita in particular that broke my heart. English was Nabokov's third language and he wrote something so well conceived and written; it disabused me of all those silly little fantasies of being an author. Reading Jin Yong, a Chinese novelist, also had a similar effect on me. Not that I ever though that I was going to be a Nobel Prize winning literary master. Or perhaps I did. I've always been a fabulist.

When I got Dan Carter's biography for Christmas I was lucky in that the giver mentioned it could be exchanged. And I knew exactly what I was going to swap it for: Luminaries by Eleanor Catton. I'm not even an inch into this 800 page novel and I get the same sort of sense as I did with Lolita. Just like Nabokov, it's not just about the ability to write but those awarenesses and knowledges that go into preparing the ideas and imagery: Catton knows the geography, the history, the terminology of mining, social norms and language of the time. She might have researched some of it for all I know but the seamlessness of the background shows that most of it was probably known before as the story formed in her mind. This is just one of many things that come to mind as I read and think.

Naturally, if I ever finish that one novel, I wouldn't be writing in that style. (I meditated on the topic of style more than I wrote.) Writing doesn't need to have the wow of knowledge to construct a potent, meaningful story. It doesn't need complexity and moving parts. Just pitch it to the heart, yeah?

I'm starting "proper" work again soon but writing has been an interesting side project recently, too. I've had the luck to work on a friend's friend's content writing project. It was child's play to someone who likes to write and provided some extra cash during this quiet time. And then there was my on-going tussle with my diploma essay writing. Due to circumstances beyond my control I've had very little supervision of my project work and support for the writing requirements; throw in the fact that my essay writing has never been my strongest suit and you get an interminable saga. I hope I get some signs that my last submission is good enough to scrape over the line.

Words and scribblings, they're all for something or someone. If not they're just hot air. So many times I'm just writing for me, even when they're submitted with a word count, or put into a blog frame. Luminaries was written and stands to be read. And it's a book that I can't want till I have a moment to read more of.

Welfare and the Leviathan

"If there is no God, everything is permitted." - Fyodor Dostoevsky

During our first long road trip we visited three friends who we knew in Guangzhou. Two were students and one was a staff member who decided to emigrate with his wife. Each meeting brought different responses into that question of how it is to live in New Zealand and what discoveries had been made. The youngest, whom I'll call Vinni, was the most interesting to speak to, although for all the wrong reasons. He was in his last weeks of his three week stint in New Zealand to study:

"Are you sad to leave?" I asked in English.

"It's hard to say," he replied in Cantonese, in a tone which was obviously meaning he was happy to leave. New Zealand is not his cup of pu'erh tea. And the fact that a student of English answers in a Chinese way is analogous to how he handles the questions posed by life abroad. 

Vinni had been a popular student among teachers. He was apparently approachable, chatty but scratch the surface and you'll find many interesting views. When asked what he wanted to do once he finished his studies he'd replied: "I want to be a landlord." I had only met him once or twice before he headed to New Zealand, and then he came to our reception in Auckland, flying up from New Zealand. He gave us ornate Dragon Phoenix cups as a gift, which was very kind. He had a lot of expensive antiques in his family home in Guangzhou.

It was once he was in New Zealand that I started to frown a little more when I heard his words.

"New Zealand is very corrupt," he mentioned in a text exchange. He went on to explain that there was a student who failed a course and went to the lecturer to cry about her grade and was subsequently allowed to pass. In another incident which irked him, a fellow international student did his own translation of a prerequisite document, explaining that there were no notary offices in his small home country. Vinni railed that this country and society was fit for cheating, that any sensible person would take the chance. And Vinni was sensible.

We contacted him before we returned: "I'm in your industry, too, now," he messaged. He'd set up a business to do the homework that other international students were too lazy or merely unable to do. It was a lucrative loop-niche. He was a very smart person. Later when we finally met him in Wellington, he mentioned that he was invited to a dinner at the Beehive (which he pronounced "behave"). A Green party MP was the main host, but he couldn't remember the name. 

In English the word smart is partially synonymous with shrewd and cunning. Chinese has a word that covers all these:  精明. Some of the 精明 behaviours are sometimes unethical or even illegal in western eyes, though. As we chatted over brunch, he listed more things: No one forces businesses to pay GST, so many don't. In fact, one one guy earned a lot of GST free money and kept it in cash on his roof, only for it to be stolen. All $200,000 of it. But the theft wasn't reported because of the questions that might lead the victim into a legal corner. He showed a picture of a set of charity Christmas gifts given to some well-off recent immigrants. Apparently they didn't have jobs and noted a way to get access to Christmas welfare gifts. The way he said it was the key, though: He didn't look down on these 精明 people in these cases. He looked down on the system and society that allowed it.

I said my views on this: We live in a society where there is trust - it's a beautiful thing. This kind of behaviour will slowly destroy it and ruin the image of Chinese (most of the examples he raised were done by Chinese). I mentioned the case from several years ago of a tour group being scheduled into a Christmas charity lunch for the needy, and the impact that it had. You have to fight through paperwork, bureaucracy, rolled eyes, queues, expense to do simple things in China because of that lack of social and bureaucratic trust. Would anyone want that really? 

"New Zealand will be like that in ten or twenty years, just like China," he commented later echoing my sentiment. I tried to bite my lip because he wasn't my friend and it was the wrong place. (I only speak English to students, whether they be current or former, and we were in a public place where if I got excited I might say things to implicate others.) I suddenly wanted to release my inner racist mockery, channelling an old white conservative like my father, and tell him and his kind to go back to China, but of course he already was.

He elaborated back on the story about going to the "Behave". Anyone could go in. The security was light. There was no awe to be had in its simple democratic openness. A single Xinjiang/Urewera separatist or ISIS freedom blighter could take out the leadership. The same could never happen in China, where even symbols have the highest security, and the leadership is barely seen. (Everyone dropped their chopsticks when Xi Jinping had his baozi moment.) 

The quote in the beginning comes from a Dostoevsky book, The Brothers Karamazov:

"Rakitin now—he doesn't like God, doesn't like Him at all. To people like him, God is a sore spot. But they hide it, they lie, they pretend. 'Will you,' I asked him, 'try to develop these ideas in your literary criticism?' 'They won't let me do it too openly,' he said, and laughed. 'But tell me,' I asked him, 'what will happen to men? If there's no God and no life beyond the grave, doesn't that mean that men will be allowed to do whatever they want?' 'Didn't you know that already?' he said and laughed again. 'An intelligent man can do anything he likes as long as he's clever enough to get away with it. But you, you got caught after you killed, so today you have to rot in prison.' He's real swine to say that to my face; a few months ago I used to throw people like that out of the window. But now I just sit and listen to him."

I think that about him and a lot of people: they somewhere lost their God (which I'll say is their conscience toward any kind of idealised good), they need or worship Leviathanesque power to keep them in check because they themselves cannot. Without scrutiny you are free to take. The welfare they exploit is paid with, not by "the country" but by the taxes they're avoiding. I was glad when that conversation was over so I could get some free air. He was also a 富二代, second generation rich, the son of a highly placed civil servant and expectations of life are quite different.

The other two Chinese friends we saw were adapting well and enjoying the new environment and thriving, paying tax and embracing the difference. 

On a slightly different story, I saw a comment on Facebook from some childhood friends that I couldn't help cringe at. They'd bemoaned the fact that they need to pay a holiday service charge "even" on their fruit smoothie from TANK. There has been a failure somewhere in education, eastern or western, to know that it isn't all take-take-take, whether by them or us. Take your time and a half and pay your holiday service fees.

In the air

Road-trips are a great way to re-acquaint yourself with your own country: the beauty, tastes and convenience through fresh eyes and tastebuds; the subtle changes to roads; places in different seasons; and those clouds and that weather. We recently went on a short day trip to the west of Auckland and then a seven day trip to Wellington, the Hawkes Bay and back, to see family, friends, sights and generally just to get a feel back.

New Zealand has advanced and modernised its roading network slowly but surely since I'd been away. There are new expressways (even one or two not recognised on Apple Maps), the tunnel to the North Western motorway is almost connected and other projects are nearing completion and generally things are quicker and smoother. You can avoid bottlenecks like Cambridge and some others like Huntly are in the process. (There could be discussions about the effect this has on small towns, but let's just keep it from the point of view of road users, shall we?)

But the drivers were modernised, too. This was the first time I'd fully utilised GPS as a driver, airbnb, virtual traffic information and smartphones in general. I am rather slow on the uptake of new technology. Probably the most interesting part was our experience of airbnb. It was on a whim that we gave it a try, downloading and setting it up the morning of departure, then booking a place for two nights in Hamilton, and that's when the surprises began.

I guess I'd expected to be in a disused room of a now-abroad child, with the feeling that you were invading someone's privacy by living in their house. This was dispelled pretty quickly. All three places that we stayed in were rooms specially made for the purpose of accommodating airbnb guests, two hosts, despite social and family arrangements, made us feel like friends visiting rather than outsiders; the other one was a bit more aloof and formal (mentioning "it's stated in the listing" whenever we queried things) but even her place you felt at home because that was a big part of her living.

The two that made us feel most at home had something in common: they are retired or semi-retired couples with the children abroad, certainly a large demographic in New Zealand; they love visitors, we chatted with one couple for about an hour one night, during and after they had guests; and it was clear that airbnb wasn't a personal project of one, both were into it. Both of them provided breakfast, one of them being a luxurious breakfast with homemade muesli, greek yoghurt, milk, strawberries and blackberries, half a banana each and a mandarin. I was served a cup of brewed coffee to go with it. And this was for NZD65 per night. I could also add that they introduced and offered our bookshelf to read from, stupendous views and their vegie patch to take from to cook our evening meal!

We had lots of fun with cats on our journey meeting a total of eight in five homes we visited or stayed in, too. Mr P., in the photo apparently didn't warm to many but we had our moments that floored the hosts.

Could this count as a cat tour? A cloud tour? A real estate tour? A road survey? Well, that's the beauty of road trips. I enjoyed picking blueberries for the first time as well as revisiting places like Puhaha Mt Bruce nature sanctuary, Mt Victoria, Karangahake gorge and Te Aroha spas. I have another two in mind if employment doesn't occupation over my time soon.

“Returning to the source is stillness.”

It has been two weeks since our arrival back and life has been relatively simple. Of course, not having jobs helps with that simplicity, with the only inclusion of some job searching and applications each day, you get nine hours of leisure. Excellent!

What having I been doing, beside Christmas?

• Re-connecting with family and friends
• Eating
• Doing my portfolio for my Diploma (which I thought I was done with but one of my essays in it was considered done for in preliminary marking and was sent back to me to be re-done).
• Content writing for a friend’s enterprise.
• Tossing and interpreting coins in the I Ching.
•  Doing the gardening
• Reading the Art of War
• Not exercising

I had intended to have a period of daily exercise upon coming back. However, inflammation has literally found my Achilles Heel, which three months on has not Healed. Post New Year, I’ll get an expert in to advise me. Twice it has seemed to come right only to relapse completely after modest exertion.   

Life is simple, which after twelve of the busiest in my life is a joy. Soon I’ll be pining for the hustle and bustle.

Tongue

"New Zealand accent, aside from the short "i" sound, to outsiders is more or less the same," I said. "Although some Australians pronounce "plant" with a sharp "a" like in "ant"."

"Oh, they must have been influenced by America," my friend Colin said.

"Nah, probably influenced by somewhere in England," I remarked and perhaps is a consolidation of my whole insight into dialects and accents.

I'm not a linguistics professor, nor a historian. But slow learning languages and accents themselves, noticing patterns and looking at history have provided me with my own conclusions which I'd like to elaborate here. I'd like to raise a book read aaaagees ago which is worth a read, not for facts but the kind of thinking that can really blow you out of established facts about language evolution. It is The Secret History of the English Language by M J Harper. One of it's simple posits, recalled because I don't have it as a reference right now, is that language is because that's how it was. Evolution, whether biological or linguistic, isn't fast. Even if someone in an ivory tower evolves language, like a Shakespeare or a Bacon, it won't cause the majority of the population to develop a different way of speaking. There is huge buffering against change. That's why, as I'd agree, Middle English didn't evolve out of Old English (as the book stridently puts forward). A language basically like Middle English (think Chaucer) probably came to the British Isles. It probably wasn't the language of the ruling class early on, that must have belonged to another tribe that would be relegated to history. No-one would say the people who wrote in Latin spoke like the early Romans, just as no known region spoke in Classical Chinese, which existed right up to the twentieth century as a means for communication. 

And so it was from my experience with Cantonese. It might seem a mystery that there are different accents in different towns just kilometres down the road, but simple when you look at language not as a monolith but as a mass of diverging, interacting units. They're not unlike biological evolutionary units. We're not surprised to see two birds, a kakapo and a kiwi, living on the stretch of land (let alone a sparrow if it should hop by). And it would be a mistake to think that these two derived from an ancestor that once existed on the same strip of land. Such is it with Guangzhou Cantonese and Qingyuan Cantonese. Qingyuan is probably not a Guangzhou colony, but a place settled during the same period of migration by a bunch of different clans. Chinese clans are patrilineal, so I'm currently in a patch of at least two settling families, both called Zhong. Our Zhong family isn't actually Cantonese but naturalised Hakka. The other Zhong family is local Cantonese. By proximity, they speak a similar brand of Cantonese. Women have been married into other towns for millenia but a single woman here and there won't make much difference to the linguistic core and development trend. So probably not in the distant past different families brought their tongue as is to this strip of land in the Pearl River Delta. The fact that they're somewhat similar, mutually understandable, indicates they were part of a similar region from their originating area (the central plains of China). Biologically they can still interbreed. 

Hakka dialect can't interbreed in terms of pronunciation or grammar because it's too different. You would learn both separately and choose one to use. They're mutually exclusive for communication purposes. Hakka was a much later mass migration to Guangzhou. The logic is the same but much clearer for Hakka because they're more widely spread: it's hard to imagine them as a single clan. They were another snapshot of central plain Chinese language and culture that spread south in a wave. The wave is important because isolated families that move are unlikely to retain their language. They'd need to assimilate to marry their women out and make alliances. Where there is a wave of migration, there'll be enough other families to support the continuation of the culture and language without the need to rely on others, who won't necessarily give up their own dialect or culture for the sake of others.

And if that weren't incomprehensible enough, I'd like to return to our Ozzie friends and their "plant". My friend was quite rational in his guesses of American influence, but it can't be right. The fact that Americans, almost all Americans, use this pronunciation, indicates that some of the colonisers undoubtedly said it that way. The United Kingdom has all sorts of accents there. Immigrant countries have a lingual lottery from the proportion of peoples from various regions. If the population is small enough, they average themselves out to make a core identifiable accent that is a mean of all the parts, more or less.  Australia, in some regions, probably have people from the same areas as the American forefathers who brought the same sound over. 

This could be all claptrap, but it's the kind of claptrap I'm glad I have a working theory for. Such things are some of those dirty secrets of the way the world works.

An ode to Qingyuan

It's my third home, the place of my comfort, where I can sleep and wake without need or want. A place when I'm so secure I can drink beyond my limits. A place where I can walk among the paddy fields. I can talk snakes with the elders as well as spot half-squashed snakes on the roadside. It's a place of geese and chickens. Of tables and tables spilling over everywhere on festive occasions. Of uncles and aunties, all of which I forget to call correctly. Of tea and wine. Of seeing the young'uns grow and grow. 

Qingyuan represents a lot to me. One day, if I were to retire in China, it'd probably be here in a school living in a small place I could walk from and to. It's simple and complicated, it's sweet and it's bitter. It has all the flavours, sights and smells. It represents bridges: I bridged the relationship with my wife's family. But they moreso bridged the gap to me. I tried to pave the way with language even if my language is still a work in progress. 

Where I paved too poorly, there was Second Grandmother. She is a direct neighbor but a distant relative two generations higher. She's had a roughish time of life but doesn't show it a bit. She can take the bitter. She's always smiley to me but has never figured out how to talk to me. She usually greets me in the exact same way as she would another, a rapid, high pitched, loud exuberant connected stream of words, usually a question, that I have no way of answering. Anything beside this I might have had a chance to deal with but she gets discouraged. Usually in her discouragement she speaks slower and I can understand a bit more but she's lost interest.

There are the ones who've made it across the paved road I've made through a greater effort and openness on their part. Those are definitely my parents-in-law, who've probably dealt with a fair but just because I'm a foreigner but who care for me dearly as I do them and will try tirelessly to communicate. My grandfather-in-law has more to overcome being partially deaf, but still has embraced me and tried to bridge the gap. Others are Aban-go, who is my age and puts the effort in to talk. He doesn't grade down his language, probably because he can't but his desire to communicate means I learned a lot from him (compared to the more helpful but distant, Hou-go, who usually resorts to Mandarin but can't understand my culture or personality nor support me really to understand his); Fourth Kaufu, who's always smiled and tried to communicate (I've blogged about him in the past); Third Uncle the Chef, who I've barely understood anything of in five years but still communicates from the heart.

This has been my final exam of exams for my Qingyuan dialect. Speaking, I still can't freely communicate. It's really disappointing, but my listening is surprisingly good. In all the "reunion" farewells I've followed quite detailed and sophisticated conversations in accented Qingyuan dialect. I can always fall back on good listening and a command of Mandarin in my daily life if I choose so I'm at least happy that I have the tools to deal receptively and actively in rural China. But Mandarin always feels a cop-out here.

Qingyuan, oh Qingyuan, this is my final sleep here for some time. May your charms and hearts remain.

One of a million: Old bean, Changyu brandy and the cursed Japanese.

It comes with countdowns that the seconds seem more precious. I haven't blogged much in the last few years but there have been a million blogs that were unwritten because living abroad is not only a special time with so many insights and thoughts but is also a time where there isn't as much leisure to write, especially when you're censored off from the world. (I remind you that blogspot is actually blocked from China. I send my blogs by e-mails, which has a nice similarity to the foreign correspondents of old who telegrammed their stories in. If there is repetition in my content, it's because it's quite difficult to check past writing.)

I may have talked about Old Bean, which is the literal translation of how I call my father-in-law, 老豆. It's a casual name of "father" in Cantonese. My wife calls her father this and her mother "婶"（aunt) which is quite strange to a western ear. Old Bean, even by countryside standards, is a simple man. He's been told recently to cut back on alcohol, but previous to this I'd drunk a lot of alcohol with him, most of which was Changyu three-star brandy. It sells for less than five New Zealand dollars (at the current exchange rate) for a 40% alcohol in a 700 mL bottle. Unfortunately for all other wines, this is the value standard that everything is compared against. We bought Maotai, China's most famous baijiu, so famous that it's a metonym for foreigners for all baijiu, for his 66th birthday and he could not even fathom appreciating it because no matter how good it was, the price was almost certainly beyond that of Changyu that he appreciated on a daily basis. Simply put, price affects his sense of taste. Without it being at the right price, there is no appreciation.

But that's the way he is. Having drunk with him for over 5 years, I know his habits at the table. In my Qingyuan world at dinner you rarely drink from your glass without chinking it with everyone. But picking your time to chink, or detecting when someone else wants to chink, becomes the skill. Even when increasingly inebriated, you should have your wits about you because someone's hand might go onto the table and rest aside their glass indicating that thirst has arrived and that quenching is required. Pouring is another thing. The younger the person, the more incumbent pouring is and to judge how much to pour in relation to the responses of the pouree. And once we stop drinking brandy, switching onto tea. (Hydration is important!) It's the kind of ritual I'll miss.

Old Bean's family has been impacted by Chinese modern history, and history is frequently a topic at the dinner table - more history than any western family could recite and discuss casually with little notice. Yesterday at our kaufu's house (our maternal uncle), the topic of both the starting emperor for the Han Dynasty (Liu Bang) and the War of Resistance against Japan in WWII came up. The latter came up again over lunch today. Of course it was much less abrupt here: there was a Chinese wartime drama on TV, Changsha Defense Force. Chinese wartime drama is not a fine artform: they often rely on exaggerating Japanese wartime atrocities (as if it were required), disregarding history and overemphasising the amazing abilities of the Chinese soldiers who slaughter the Japanese with cathartic glee. (Have a look at either of these if you need to see for  yourself: http://www.chinasmack.com/2013/videos/chinese-heroine-gang-raped-by-japanese-soldiers-uses-super-move.html http://www.chinasmack.com/2014/pictures/tourist-attraction-based-on-anti-japanese-propaganda-movie.html.) I've had two moments to look at these dramas in the last week. The first was The Pretender, a popular series usually beyond the ridiculousness of the ones mentioned in those links, but still had the childish cowboyesque moments where there enemy is shooting and hitting nothing while the hero pokes out behind a small rock and nails five in between the eyes in short time. Soon as I see this my sense of appreciation, just like Old Bean's, switches off. No matter how good it is, I can't stomach it.

The one on TV for lunch was a little different: It represented the KMT (国民党) positively. Saying that is simple but it was the kind of theme that floors even a casual viewer like me. Historical interlude: KMT, the Nationalist party of China, was the power after the Qing Dynasty was overturned and the Republic of China began. But then the Communist Party rose and then the Japanese invaded. Part of the reason for the Japanese success in invasion was no doubt because the two forces, the established KMT and the Communist Army had mutual distrust. After the bombs fell in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end Japan's imperial aspirations, the KMT and the Communists fought it out with the Communist Party and Mao prevailing in 1 October 1949. The KMT wasn't vanquished though. They headed off to Taiwan where their successors still are, happily ruling in what eventually was a successful democracy with fisticuffs on the parliament floor.

In a censored, controlled media like China, KMT though are corrupt, foolish, doomed and evil, only marginally better than the Japanese, but only in that they were not inhuman and inhumane. And then suddenly, out of the blue, there is a TV show that shows them dutifully defending the Hunan provincial capital of Changsha. We all dropped our chopsticks at the thought. And then had a drink.    

Endings

Before you start again, you've got to leave. And I've been leaving now for about 6 weeks. I had my first farewell on 1 November with teachers then with students from my old centre, then a surprise farewell at my second centre 7 November, then another surprise farewell on 11 November, and dotted all around then and ever since are the small personal farewells. Even after being sent on my way, I crashed at least two other leaving parties. And embarrassingly had to go into a couple of the centres later to do some scanning and printing only to confronted by students of the belief that I'd already landed in New Zealand. (I'd been always clear that I was returning home in December but they'd assumed that my farewell was going to be the absolutely last time they saw me.)

Part of the problem was that we'd planned to go travelling after the end of my contract and it didn't happen because I lost my passport. My bag thief ironically saved us a lot of time, money and stress. Only through his intervention did we save on travel, but allowed me to finish my diploma work on time, plentiful time to pack, gave us time to make a little money and prepare for the time ahead. And now, pretty much, we have a couple of busy yet leisurely days of doing things we want to do, like reading, writing, walking and talking.

Winter has come to Guangdong though which has been keeping us inside. I hope tomorrow brings sun to my last three days in China. 

Shaking with the times

I have had no lack of reading in China during these six years. But it’s been a long time since I’ve read a heavy academic general-interest book like Antifragile. And boy was it a shock to the system when I started it a few weeks ago! The language is deeper, ideas for potent and, if you’re not 100% focused on it, it doesn’t go in. Reading Chinese kungfu novels are easier to follow than Antifragile. But perhaps it’s because of a lack of that kind of reading. I read the same authors books Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness before I came to China and, at least at the time, felt they were very consumable.

The book seems to come from my family of thought so it didn’t have too much challenge to my base assumptions. The person who lent it to me apparently struggled with some of the left field propositions delivered with bombast, self-righteousness and more than a dash of smugness. In a word, it’s not a book that seeks to win over people. It is a book to smack people of a different feather over the head, if they dared to venture in.

It is part of a trilogy of his other books, linked and mutually supporting. While this book introduces his idea of antifragilily, this book also summarises and elaborates the concepts from his previous books, of randomness, black swans and the metaphorical concepts he creates to explain them all. He has a whole glossary of metaphors and self-made terminology that frame the phenomenon or approach: Black swans, Extremistan, the Procrustean bed, Green timber problems, iatrogenics and others. If I were to write a book of my thoughts, a glossary of my takes on each word would be indispensable – and would drive readers equally mad.

Black Swans weren’t his original metaphor, Karl Popper used it to illustrate the idea of falsification rather than proof. He extended it to talk about unexpected event with big ramifications, which could potentially change everything. Before 9/11, not many people would have thought to prepare for it. Before the GFC in 2007, no one thought so many large companies could come to an end. These are two black swans. We don’t plan for plain sailing; we should have our approach ready for the storm.

I’d read Black Swan before arriving in China and was amused in my first year in China that one of the most interrogative students I’ve known (nicknamed Question Kevin for his penchant of assailing teachers mid-hallway with inane, hair-splitting questions) had read it as well but he couldn’t chew through the main point. I sat him down to share some thoughts but he didn’t want to talk about it. Perhaps he had too many questions.

Randomness was a key principle in his first book, but there is an extension of it his latest book, in regards to randomness, that applies to my life now in a timely way. First to talk of the principle: almost everything in life has a background randomness to it whether it be your heart rate, your productivity, the China - New Zealand exchange rate and a wise approach to life is to not be mentally oversensitised to fluctuations but also see the benefits in fluctuations and randomness to things. Being able to deal with and benefit from these is quintessentially what antifragility is about. Denial of randomness or artificially stabilising things makes them fragile.

An analogy he usefully brings up in this book is that of the employee versus the contractor: An employee has a very stable income, and if we extrapolated it to retirement would be a quite a nest egg. A contractor’s income is quite random and he knows it. He has to make or take his opportunities, make the best of the income droughts and take full advantage when it rains. It is plausible that he’ll have the same nest egg at the end of it as the employee but it’s a rollercoaster getting there. But if an employee loses their job, they’ve lost their income until they can find a new one. The apparent stability is not true if a career black swan arises. A strictly employment mindset is fragile. (Incidentally, I was watching the mini-series Mildred Pierce at the same time as reading part of it, which made me think of people’s approaches to that other historical Black Swan, the Great Depression.) The contractor by contrast might thrive or even get stronger, which is the key thesis for the book: The contractor may be more antifragile.

This taps into my future ahead because I’m again at the same kind of crossroad I was at 11 years ago (almost to the day). I’d finished my Diploma in Primary Education coursework and was sending out CVs and going to interviews at primary schools and getting nothing. It took a series of events that led me to become self-employed and having a very different kind of working life (which, incidentally was ended by a black swan, but the experience definitely made me stronger; my entreprise, however, was fragile.).

Currently I’m investigating all sorts of side projects and contemplating a large one, all the while still applying for jobs to be an employee. Of course, full-time employment doesn’t preclude side projects small nor big (unless the contract says so). Before there are any houses or babies on the way it might be good to experience being moderately cashed-up and experimental with the coming year. Maybe it’s time where an antifragile approach would be better.

Back to the book, he was big on adding fragility to all sorts of systems from decision making, health, medicine, nutrition – all very random. He could quite possibly need a sedative. In terms of adding Randomness to systems, my recent interest in the I Ching had a nice resonance with one of his passing comments: “Finally the ancients perfected a method of random draw in more or less difficult situations and integrated it into divinations. These draws were really meant to pick a random exit without having to make a decision, so one would not have to live with the burden of the consequences later.”

Randomness is only retained when intervention is seen as a last resort, and it’s only tolerance and adaptation to randomness that gets us to be antifragile. It has a ring of the Daode Jing, “Practice inaction and everything will be done.” Another tie in.

In less philosophical life: We left our apartment almost a week ago now, staying in the family home in Qingyuan. Tomorrow we’ll head back to Guangzhou for the last time before we go to NZ. And in 10 days I’ll be waking up to New Zealand time. Bring on the next step!

Red glass, green glass

Life is full of choices. Red pill, green pill. When we say no or yes. When we choose to accept the world or seek to change the world. When we break from our habits and compulsions or break from them. When we say what we feel or know that it's not the right time. And what to drink?

There have been plenty of choices, recently. One case was the successor who didn't succeed. He was weak when he arrived. I knew it. I tried to make it clear that it wasn't enough. Probation time came. Both my manager and I made the call to pass him based on hope and the stated desire to improve. Without me there I'd hoped he'd find the space and the need to step up. Without me, two weeks later he was fired. 

In another completely different encounter, I chatted quite deeply with someone like me who was leaving the company apparently on his own terms, but as the tone of the conversation immediately implied, he felt forced to leave. The policies were unreasonable and prevented him doing what he wanted to do and stay with the company. There was heat; there was wine. I felt some affinity but I'm glad I don't feel oppressed by the world like that any more.

New Zealand will bring me a new tone of life. I would like to be a pragmatic vegetarian and cut back significantly on drinking alcohol and coffee. The latter two are kinds of perversions: compulsions. I feel defiled when I think of anything aside from basic bodily reactions as compulsions (i.e. besides sleep, hunger and thirst etc.). Choices and optionality are the way.

Another case of choice was that of my wife biting her lip, rather than speak. Did I tell you I have a friend who owns a baijiu factory? (Baijiu 白酒 a grain alcohol spirit). I'd met him on a language exchange app. I was helping him with English at first (he gave up soon after) and I made some crucial breakthroughs with my Cantonese while I was laid out with my broken knee. Then he mentioned his family's baijiu factory and I mentioned my love of baijiu. It was agreed: a year and a half ago that I'd be going to his factory; and only in the last week did we actually get around to it. The factory was started by his father on his own initiative. You could tell he adored his father, describing him as a very cultured man, who is a gourmet, calligrapher, master chef, entrepreneur and founder of a baijiu factory. I'd looked forward to meeting him and then it came. He made civet and snake hotpot (good!) and poured snake blood into wine and snake gall into another. (Ironically some vegetarian friends of ours had been interested in coming originally but I'm glad that they didn't.) But his conversation was mostly over my head. His humour was too abstract and ironic for me. Unfortunately it wasn't that way for my wife who stayed slightly aloof, but not because the rest of us had snake blood breath. It took the trip back to realise why:

"I wonder what his mother's like. He must take after her more." 

"Why?"

"His father said some really crass things."

From demeaning all people from Qingyuan (which I thought was jokey and I'd defended by saying Qingyuan Cantonese was more pure than Guangzhou Cantonese), to him asking which one of us had the "problem" for us not having a baby, to using a slightly derogative term for a half-Chinese/half-European baby (半唐番) and many other points, too. Apparently the comments were before the wine started flowing, from a cultured man, not that that means much between hobbies and proclivities. Perhaps it was probably good for me not to have understood quite at the time.

Great meal, though, and I was pleasantly drunk by the end.

Anyway, back to choices: Red glass or green glass?

Consulting the I Ching

The itching of mosquito bites on my ankles. Her next to me ripping out the staples holding embroidery to its backing. My finger's bled blood coagulating. The Qing dynasty period drama playing on the iPad. The medicinal cupping marks on my back pressing into the sofa. The honks from down on Jiangnan Xi road. The last crumbs of a colleagues biscuits melting from between my teeth. And the lingering tipsiness of the Four Specials in my blood.

There are moments and then there are moments. Today has been the most testing of days since I bid working life farewell temporarily. There have been 101 little processes to jump through since my passport and bank card were stolen. I still don't have my hands on my own money. I could get that within 7 days provided I had my passport in my hands at that time. I won't. In 7 days my passport will be sitting on a visa officer's desk for 7 working days. It's a mystery how these things can't be done faster than seven days. My money is in the bank but for procedural reasons my bank card can't be issued within 7 days. And the visa, I've had many, can't be done within 7 working days because that's how long they say it takes. Bureaucrats don't exceed the expectation here - they're paid to meet them and only that. 7 days is an interesting number because that is how long it took for me to get a new New Zealand passport, including postage to and from New Zealand and processing time at the end. The contrast is stark.

Someone just died in the period drama on the iPad (甄嬛传, if you must ask). You can't have missed it - dying people have blood dribbling out of their mouth. Someone poisoned the emperor's daughter-in-law. All poisonings and serious kungfu blows require blood to come out of the mouth to indicate that something has happened. It's a convention of TV dramas and the kungfu novels I read. I feel like I haven't felt much through and after this instance of thievery but I know the sheer frustration of bureaucracy isn't just felt by me. Blood is being spat.

Before she had a sherry and I had some Four Specials, I grabbed some coins and consulted the I Ching (易经). That doesn't sound like me, does it? I Ching is usually classified as divination - foretelling the future - but perhaps it's deeper and more realistic than that. I'd heard of the I Ching long ago and turned my nose up at it more often than I turned it down. A friend and colleague gave an I Ching book to me at my farewell and said that the next we meet we could talk about it. Well, we've already met incidentally - perhaps that wasn't divined at the time of giving - and we're yet to talk about it.  But it's worth talking about.

You toss some coins, or some yarrow stalks if you have them around, you form a hexagram (6 lines, either complete or broken) and from that you read one of 64 possible permutations. But if you expect the future spelled out for you you're in for disappointment: each prognostication is deeper and more arcane than Nostradamus's quatrains. But then again that's perhaps the truth of it all: Life is textured and arcane.

The voice of doubt above is very much of my life and views before. I can't say I've read it much now with any doubt, only interest and introspection. There is not such thing as a lucky hexagram. All have risk and promise; there is no one approach in life, our approach should change with circumstance (challenging us to change and not be fixed); and sometimes it requires some direction to take action confidently. 

She drew a "Biting Through"; I drew a "Ding" (a traditional three-footed pot). I could relate hers to her more than perhaps she could. And I'm the stable three-footed pot, which even when tipped, tips out the worst and keeps the best. 

She's taken out the embroidery. Apparently no-one died in the drama and the sherry has been finished. If there is one thing that can be foretold is that waves ease, winds pass and the drunk sober up.  

Antifragile

"Do you want it or not? If you don't, well that's fine. If you do, I'll need a little something. Give me 5000 yuan and I'll send it over. How does that sound?"

I lent against the desk of the police station, contemplating this text message and if and how to reply. He'd already called me once before sending me a text - he was heavy accented and had his script tight and mechanical. I suggested he message me to buy me some time.  

"I received this," I said giving my phone to the uniformed person behind the desk to show the text. 

She laughed, "He's trying to trick you! Ignore him." My phone, almost out of batteries, displayed another in-coming call from the same man. I ignored it.

"You're a bad man," I texted back, "You've taken my money. Even if I wanted to pay I can't. You took my charger, too, I'm almost out of power."

"Do you want it or not," he texted. "If you say nothing, I'll assume you don't." I left him to assume.

Later on, I was giving my statement to another officer: "And I received a call from the guy who stole it." 

His eyes lit up, "You should meet with him. Bring a friend and call the police."

"In my country that's what we expect the police to do. Besides, he only wants me to put money in his bank account."

"Oh, then just ignore him."

"Do you want me to get his bank account number because I can ask for it."

"No, he'd have used fake documentation to open it." He wasn't interested in following it up and finished my statement. My phone ran out of power with the need to help him find the address of the restaurant where it was stolen.

Objectively, it wasn't a great day. I had put my bag on a seemingly safe restaurant chair for lunch with my colleague sitting opposite me and had still managed to get my bag stolen: my passport, travel document (with my phone number and address), keys, wallet, bank card, a copy of Fight Club and a memory stick all taken. Later from a neighboring hotel's office I got to see CCTV footage of the thief leaving the restaurant (also not required by the police) to confirm that it had been taken. Before that it'd been one or more of theft, David Lynch, insanity or magic.

 But I was pleasantly surprised that I wasn't angry or upset. I had a little bit of anxiety when communicating with my tormentor. It's probably the kind of equanimity that I had had before for a time. Perhaps my impending end to work had relaxed some of the nerves that tighten through work. The previous day I'd given out a written warning and two strong action plans without sweating either.

And then another leaving colleague lent me the book Antifragile today by one of my favourite writers, Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I haven't read it but the name made sense when I sat down to write this. His definition of this word is something that isn't just resilient in the face of the unexpected but actually gets stronger. That in a world where security and stability is valued we make things increasingly vulnerable to the unanticipated changes and developments. But the world has endured despite sudden and spectacular changes. We should embrace a little chaos. I'm sure Tyler Durden would agree with that. Or at least be indifferent to it, as Laozi might prefer. And the police might like the latter rather than the former.

It was a tiring weekend. The theft, the police, work, a late night game of football to watch, four hours' sleep, an early morning meeting work, a farewell dinner with teachers and great whiskey, then a farewell party with students and staff with more whiskey and not much sleep and then a trip to the Public Security Bureau and consulate for my passport issues before more work again. Tuesday was the promised land. It was smooth. 

I'm not sure which page of the I Ching (Yijing in Pinyin, the Book of Changes, by some translations). I shook some coins and came up as Force/Persisting, total Yang. I wouldn't have made head nor tail of it but it was in a book I'd received among my farewell gifts. I hadn't given a toss about the I Ching because I could just write it off as silly divination. But just a few pages in and I'm keen to get more of an understanding. Coins are all I have now, anyway.

And then there was Francis. We have no lack of weird students, to be clear, and Francis seems weirdly, obsessively lucid. The kind of person if I weren't a teacher, if I weren't so up to my neck in leaving and tying up lose ends, I might indulge. I've only met him twice:

First time: Two months ago I went down to the Lounge Area of my centre and helped release a teacher for a newspaper interview. I was there for 20 minutes to entertain them while he was gone. I left and did a few other things and then when leaving he pulled me over to his computer. "You're lawful good," he said. (Actually, it took me a while to realise it was these two words because of his pronunciation and even when I knew it was that, I still didn't know what it meant. He drew me a diagram and got images from the internet. "Lawful Good are rare, just 4% of people," he said. He couldn't explain how he could observe I was a Lawful Good. I left with an interesting, abstract way of looking a personalities, and left.

Second time: At my farewell party I was taking photos with students from the past as he walked past the glass window next to us. He looked vaguely familiar and even looked at me putting his hand against the glass with a grin on he face. He came in, thrust a bag of durian and egg mooncakes into my hands and then left for the bar. After another thirty minutes, I sat down where he was to thank him and he jogged my memory who he was and where we'd met. He then wanted to talk about enneagrams, another thing I didn't know about and suddenly went to his bag to get a scrap of paper and started scribbling furiously, covering both sides linking vital organs, personality types, sexuality and handedness. "You're a reformer," he said, "Homo, left-handed reformers are geniuses. I only know one other reformer, Fernando Redondo." I didn't know Fernando and I mentioned I wasn't left-handed either, without wanting to touch on the topic of my sexuality. I thanked him for his interpretation and he stayed doing his own thing until he left. 

Tuesday is drawing to an end. I have sleep to have. Books to read when I rise. Life is good.