Qingyuan dialect: Comparative phonology

The last post about the predictive power of Japanese to guess the differences between Japanese and Qingyuan Cantonese might give one the wrong idea. The Japanese sound of the words might still be less similar than the sounds of Mandarin or any other Chinese dialect to the sounds that were being predicted. Guangzhou Cantonese (QC) sounds are most similar to GC but when there is a difference between the two one wonders where it comes from. Perhaps to understand why I would spend time poring over other Asian languages it might be helpful to explain my previous discarded assumptions.   Despite some familiarity with GC, when I arrived in Qingyuan I was not comprehensible to them nor they to me. It was like a student who'd only learnt basic NZ English arriving in Glasgow. Qingyuan was one of the Guangdong cities with large Hakka populations; in fact, the family I've been with are descendants of Hakka. The grandfather's mother tongue is Hakka yet raised his family in QC (which he also speaks natively). My first thought was that Hakka might have influenced the Cantonese of the city. There are some word choices that were similar (they have the same non-GC non-Mandarin way of saying peanuts, di-daau, for example). But further checking of some of the GC/QC differences came up short: Hakka could not explain some of the sounds or variance.   QC has several word choices that differ from GC. Take off (shoes/clothes) in GC is cheui, whereas in QC it is tyut; this is the same character as tuo in Mandarin. Yesterday in GC is kamyat but zoyat in QC; this is same characters as Mandarin again, zuori. So I wondered whether it might have been moderated by Mandarin in some way. But even more strongly, Mandarin if anything is the least predictive of any dialect or language to explain some of the pronunciation differences, less so than Hakka.   Why shouldn't neighboring or influential languages predict these? Perhaps, word choices can travel between dialects but actual pronunciation is like the genes of a language. If the languages are different breeds, they don't often mix. (I can think of only one circumstance where they would feasibly do so but it isn't the case for GC/QY so I'll keep it to myself.) Just like German wouldn't absorb French or English vowels, so wouldn't QC accept the sounds of Hakka or Mandarin, even if word choices were transferrable.   Which of course brings me onto Korean and Japanese, which both predict many features of Qingyuan effectively. I've got enough basic fluency and awareness of both to be able to crank out the analysis easily. Korean nailed (100% predictivity) a frustrating difference between GC/QC. QC speakers say sounds ending -i in GC as either -i or -yu; for example, zi (to know) is the same in the two dialects; yet zi (self) in GC is zyu in QC. At first, Mandarin seem to predict some but not all (about 70%). Then I recalled a strange difference when learning Korean.   I learnt Korean after Mandarin had became a strong second language for me. When learning Korean (a phonetic alphabet) I'd often notice the words that came from Chinese and guess the characters that they came from. Like Japanese, it had "Cantonese features": end sounds that Mandarin no longer has. But there were some sounds in Korean that didn't make sense to my Mandarin-mind. In Mandarin two words might be said "shi" but in Korean it would be either "si" or "sa". So I'd have to make sure I learnt the different ones well so not to overgeneralise from Mandarin (letting my L2 affect my L3, a common problem for many students with other languages). Recalling this, suddenly I realised that all the Korean "-i" were "-i" in QC, and all the "-a" sounds that corresponded to "-i" words in GC were "-yu" in QC. I'll be doing the final check when I go back for May Day holidays. Another mystery solved!   Having the same thoughts solved another anomaly, this time Japanese predicts when QC would use an ng- initial versus no initial. There are only a couple of other particular distinctions that aren't explained (yet) by going back, or is that across, to Japanese and Korean. Which really makes you wonder why these two languages predict so well.   Both Korean and Japanese have phonetic alphabets. Phonetic alphabets are like film in a camera when exposed to a foreign language. Both Japanese and Korean were exposed to a form of Ancient Chinese, absorbed many of the words and found a way to write down those sounds with the alphabets they had. 60% of Korean vocabulary originates from Ancient Chinese. Japanese may have a similar quantity mostly borrowed in the 5th - 9th centuries CE. This ancient sound interpretation process noted differences and attempted to reflect that. That these sound differences don't exist in Mandarin or GC, yet do in QC is an interesting surprise.   Though most of the energy of discovery has gone from my rampant comparative phonology, this field trip into the depths of this language and these languages has yielded some interesting common sense that are useful as a lens to understand any language, its evolution and the curiosities within. It has been a trip worthwhile.

Qingyuan dialect: The ancient sound of Chinese?

It started with a curious discovery. Some time ago I noticed Qingyuan cantonese (QC) using a non-Guangzhou cantonese sound "kyu" for the word district (usually keui in Guangzhou cantonese, GC) and marked it down. Then, slowly, I noticed more examples: hyu for empty (heui in GC) and gyu for geui (raise) and others. It presented a difficulty at first because the terminal -eui usually was pronounced -ui for most words (heui-hui, go; seui-sui, water; etc.); since my base knowledge of Cantonese was GC, if I wanted to say an -eui ending word I couldn't be sure if it were pronounced -ui or -yu.   I decided to do a background check on the sounds with an online dictionary and noticed that in most cases the words which become -yu in QC were pronounced -i in Hakka Chinese. To be clear, I don't know any Hakka, but it had been my theory that QC might have been influenced and inflected by Hakka (it is in a Hakka region). After checking all the examples, it was clear Hakka only helped distinguish them 75% of the time.   I decided on another tack, one that may sound a little odd: I decided to use Japanese kanji pronunciation to distinguish them. One of the unexpected benefits of having studied Japanese is that I understood the rhyme schemes of Chinese poetry better than the students who only knew Mandarin. Japanese preserves a lot of the sound and characteristics of Chinese from a particular time in Chinese dialectual development (usually said to be the Tang or Song dynasties). For poetry, Japanese kanji pronunciations show ending sounds well that Mandarin has lost, but Cantonese has preserved.    So I cross-checked it through Japanese and found that Japanese predicts the sounds that are different -eui/yu to a success rate 95% of the time. (The three sounds hyu/kyu/gyu are pronounced kyo, ku and ku in Japanese onyomi.) There was only one failed test: heui (go) is pronounced hui in QC* yet kyo in Japanese on yomi. This is just one aspect but quite an eye-opening one to test out on other GC/QC distinctions.   I found this article during my search: "In the 1990s, Akitani Hiroyuki, a linguistics professor at Ehime University (Japan), come to Qingyuan and found medieval and even ancient sound were well-preserved in Qingyuan dialect. After years of in-depth researches, Wu Qiushi holds that Qingyuan is the only one place where Mandarin Chinese of Tang and Song Dynasties are so well preserved."   I don't know what the good professor saw, but I've found one too!   *Apparently there are people/dialects who say this word "hyu" but I've never met them.

I am the captain of this ship!

For what has been a frenetic start to the year, it is a relief that the reward does in fact come in the end. Since April Fools Day, I have been Director of Studies (DoS) of my school. Also since April Fools Day, I've been either on my weekend, on leave, or not in the office due to the national holiday of Tomb Sweeping Day. So my first day in the office as the captain is today. I'd taken over most of the duties of DoS during the last month, but still had my previous boss on hand to guide, model some of the more advanced job tasks and support. Now it's just me. And for now, it's great!   I'm now a list maker. When I get into work, or even before I get to work on the bus, or even before I get on the bus at home, or even before I should be getting up from bed, or even before I go to bed, I make lists of tasks that need to be done, things that need to be said, e-mails that need to be replied to, problems that need to be solved. Each task starts with a box that will need to be ticked. That complements other systems to make sure that the things I forget to do are a few as possible. For sleep, lists are important too. They are the place to deposit thoughts and ideas so they don't harass you in the wee hours.   DoS was of course my stated goal of coming to China. But getting the job needless to say isn't the completion of the goal. It is to learn all the functions, to learn the skills and gather the experience so I can be a capable academic manager. So I guess it begins now.

Upane Kupane in the Dragon year

Dragon roars and dragon hugs! Well, that has been my greeting to people in the new year. The new year holidays were spent well in the coldest phase of this (comparatively warm) winter, in Qingyuan of course, bouncing from one relative's uninsulated place to another, drinking one alcoholic beverage (or another) and dining within my narrow gustatory limitations. We might be on the verge of the first real break in the back of this mild winter, and then it'll be a month of spring before the radiator of summer starts to crank out the steam.   Dragon roars, indeed! This year has started with more than just a hiss. Just prior to the new year's break, I received a flash of what was ahead: an email explained that the new management in my company changed the process for becoming a Director of Studies (DoS), the position that I basically came to China to occupy, and I was on the list of people due to be interviewed to evaluate my competencies. The interview, odd in its own way, was more of a conversation; the feedback was simple: I am deemed ready to be a DoS and may be one as early as April.   The new system is on the surface a logical one. Rather than latent applicants waiting for an opening within the company to spring into interview mode, the company now interviews pro-actively without an opening to mark those ready to take the reins, or to provide an action plan to those who aren't. It seems a simple concept (there have been later developments that show perhaps it isn't as idealistic, and more of a very pragmatic step, but I've got a promotion, I shan't speak ill of it further). As my current boss mused, despite the gloss it is still the same game with a few different rules: make those above like you and you win. Stand by your principles and prepare to wait.   Dragon hugs, indeed! My steps toward matrimony have been progressing smoothly even if my ideal of a Chinese wedding were thwarted. The Chinese concept of marriage is an odd one, not based on a moment or ceremony, but of an evolution of steps - and in these modern steps, no step in itself is necessarily essential. Legally, you need to have a formal marriage certificate, for which you need to go to (queue) in an official government bureau to say your vows and sign. That part barely needs two New Zealand dollars to do. Marriage is cheap. (That being said, the documents for marriage and organising yourself for marriage if you are a foreigner or out-of-household Chinese person can be expensive.) But some people don't do this because for most families a wedding banquet is what really makes you married in the eyes of people. It must be accompanied on the day by deistic ceremonies to separate the bride from her ancestral line and free her up to be reconnected onto that of the groom. Offerings have to be made to the ancestors (they are to attend after all). The banquet is open to everyone - you don't leave anyone off the guest list unless they're very distantly related. It is a witnessing process and there is no small reception option. It's either big or not at all. There aren't any vows at the banquet. The bride and groom offer tea to the groom's parents on the day, as they are becoming the bride's new family. But a couple doesn't have to do both the banquet and the registration; we could live with just one, and we have decided that our Chinese marriage status will rest only on the former, which is merely a legal recognition. Our marriage ceremony will have to wait till we can conveniently do it in New Zealand.   One modern ceremony for weddings is the "bridal veil photos". Of course, photos may be taken at the banquet or the registration, but they are not what are considered wedding photos in China. Hunsha zhao ("bridal veil photos") are almost essential. This involves, in its modern manifestation, a trip to a scenic spot with lots of different costumes, with a photographer in tow to take beautifully posed/staged photos of the couple. It is tiring, expensive, photoshopped and in my eyes, tacky, an opinion I shared quite early on. And fortunately it was one met with some sense of understanding. Cameras will be waiting till we get to New Zealand.   Marriage as an evolution is of course much more realistic to how it really is, although the western idea of a moment that seals the commitment is not only tradition but focusses the change down to a very sacred moment. I remember asking her younger brother whether he was nervous about the banquet, he said that he wasn't; he was just not looking forward to the ordeal of guest upon guest upon guest, hour upon hour upon hour. Very much like a duty. Like work.   The promotion has been like an evolution; the interview was not as a moment of reckoning but a green light at an intersection. Marriage will be the same in China - a signature on a piece of paper recognising what has been and will be. Onwards and upwards. Upane Kupane, as I haka'ed with an old colleague last Monday.

Stepping stones

The last seven days have captured a lot of the year: the sweetness of being together; the trickiness of living here; the ridiculousness of bureaucracy; the sheer endurance required just to keep one's head above water at work. It has had it all.   2011 in all may be a foundation year. It is of hard work, of learnt lessons, of persistence, of accrual (and not financially, let's save that till 2012). It was the consistency of the challenges that came that will make it memorable - and a brief look through the blog of the last year shows it: it was the year the bucked the trend increasing the number of blogs. I've thought a lot this year. Most of my thoughts never got close to being transcribed here.   One feeling that all trampers have is that of descending to the valley, down to the river. It could present a rapid descent, or sometimes the sound of the river teases you as you wind your way nearer and nearer. But then you get to the river-level, pass it in the way that you conjure, and then... It is (often) back up another steep incline, back into the trees and ascending to the next ridge. New years might be arbitrary markings in time, but they provide a reasonable landmark for us. A river between ridges to ascend. I like the significance of it. I like going from one phase to another.   Let's cross.

Stepping stones

The last seven days have captured a lot of the year: the sweetness of being together; the trickiness of living here; the ridiculousness of bureaucracy; the sheer endurance required just to keep one's head above water at work. It has had it all.   2011 in all may be a foundation year. It is of hard work, of learnt lessons, of persistence, of accrual (and not financially, let's save that till 2012). It was the consistency of the challenges that came that will make it memorable - and a brief look through the blog of the last year shows it: it was the year the bucked the trend increasing the number of blogs. I've thought a lot this year. Most of my thoughts never got close to being transcribed here.   One feeling that all trampers have is that of descending to the valley, down to the river. It could present a rapid descent, or sometimes the sound of the river teases you as you wind your way nearer and nearer. But then you get to the river-level, pass it in the way that you conjure, and then... It is (often) back up another steep incline, back into the trees and ascending to the next ridge. New years might be arbitrary markings in time, but they provide a reasonable landmark for us. A river between ridges to ascend. I like the significance of it. I like going from one phase to another.   Let's cross.

2 out of 2

"I've had a day here now: I've been approached by hawkers; eaten my first street food; smelt that funny "Please let that be anything other than sewage?" odour that wafts out of drains in the city; and been pushed in front of by little old ladies. Yes, if the sign after customs hadn't said it already, I'm indeed in China."   That was my first blog upon coming to China to work on November 15, 2009. I'd boarded my plane on the ominous day of Friday 13 November and the odd but now familiar time of 11:59pm, and landed on a cool, overcast day. The taxi driver that picked me up tried to talk me into teaching his son for 50 yuan an hour. Jetlagged and sleep deprived, I started to muse about teaching to help the less advantaged but remained wisely noncommital. Things have come a long way.   Two years have passed. I didn't celebrate it; someone else decided to randomly celebrate something else a day earlier and not wishing to detract from that randomness, I kept my own special day silent. Life also passed a stressful passage: the search for a new apartment. It ultimately ended in failure, we'll stay where we are but in some ways it cannot be regarded as a disappointment. It is only when you look at your other choices closely enough that you consider how lucky you are. Our apartment is wonderful (although a little far away), our rent comparatively cheap (we do want to save) and our landlord is fantastic (although too inclined to DIY repairs). Of course, it is when you re-sign your lease that the neighbours start renovating noisily from 8am every day. These walls make the scratching and hammering sound like they're in your room.   Work is attrition. Half the centres in my city are situation red, including my own. Our problems are two-fold: a historically struggling centre - students often don't come to class regularly or transfer out to the bigger centres; and it had been overstaffed to the eyeballs for most of the year and then shed almost all of its international staff... in fact, for a week in December and from early January, the international staff will be the boss and I. Staff deprivation unfortunately means that we cannot be picky about who we get, but students are. One of our soon to leave teachers is not appreciated by students by and large. He likes teaching but he doesn't have the skills to do it effectively or interestingly. He had got pressure from the boss to lift his game or face losing his job. He didn't like the pressure or the way his urgent need to improve was presented and resigned. When he leaves in early January, if no-one new comes, it'll be just the two of us. And then the students can have what they want: the two best teachers teaching continuously...   Part of my coming to the centre has been to help turn it around, not on the management side, but in terms of teaching quality, centre spirit, team spirit and innovation. I think the first three can still be delivered regardless of the red situation. It is great to be in the classroom and getting involved with students. But my plans for revitalising the centre academically (which have already been accepted by management) will be put on hold for at least two months. There is timing in these things. A season for holding steady, a winter perhaps, and a time to grow and get active: Let's hope I can spring in Spring!

In stride

If there is one thing that is true in my life, apart from work I can barely reasonably do one thing well at a time. Chinese has done well from me in the last two years (well, the reading classical novels and Cantonese parts at least). But these things rose and other fell away. One thing that did was my general fitness, and then my general health.   My trip back to New Zealand was a good reminder of this. The doctor said my immune system was low: that can be attributed back to diet and perhaps stress. Part of being a vegetarian in Guangzhou is the lack of variety that my body has become use to. And part of being away from the hills, valleys and mountains of my homeland is a lack of naturally occurring fitness. My fitness daily has been 15 minutes between home and subway twice a day and the stairs at work.   Part of being back has been to search for ways in which to make up for these. One concession has been to the expat way of eating. I've gone back to cereal and milk for breakfast and, with the luck of my new workplace, I've been enjoying falafel and humus and all the joys of a mixed diet.   My new workplace also has the novelty of inconvenience by subway yet the comparative convenience of food: at the quickest it'd take me 40 minutes to the office by choosing either bus or subway; by foot I can do the distance in an hour fifteen, which though not fast makes it a reasonable choice when I have time and leisure (and going home I often do). The temperature cooling, I can once again run without sweating myself parched. Ping pong and shuttlecock kicking becomes an easier option too (the latter best if there is no wind).   Our latest preoccupation has been whether to move. Our place though with inherent strengths has always been inconvenient. And two other dark marks against it: a poor sofa and a rotting cupboard under the sink. And it would of course be nice to save a few more pennies on rent. Yet there is no such thing as the perfect apartment. And the more one looks the more one is torn. If anything there is a temptation to spend even more. And with every place we look at it the better what we have looks.

A crisis of conscience and social trust

A mother distracted at her stall; her precocious two year old wanders onto the street outside; a van driver distracted runs her over with his front wheels and stops briefly; either not wanting to know what he hit, or perhaps fearing that he hit what he knew he hit, he continues running her over a second time with his back wheels; the CCTV records numerous passers-by having a glance some even stop or slow their vehicles; her mother has already realised she has disappeared but has headed up the street instead of down; another mother, walking hand-in-hand with her child, walks around the bleeding, crying, crushed little body on the road; another vehicle runs her over for a second time; an old lady, who spends her days pulling plastic bottles from rubbish bins for recycling, is the first and only person to do anything for her; she pulls her to the side of the road and gets people's attention; the mother finally comes over.   This is a what you could see uncensored on Chinese internet (TV clips of course are censored) of a very real event from earlier this week. It makes for brutal viewing - the first time I saw it I cried. It sent this country into a frenzy of blame and a gnashing of teeth about the sickness of the society. There are of course the two drivers who ran her over; they're in police custody. But the eighteen apparently normal people who didn't so much as call an ambulance on seeing a run over still living two year old infant boggle the mind. From the life of an outsider in China, it's the worst possible consequence of several factors which become increasingly apparent. This may have always been coming.   China is abound with the fear of all kinds. One of the fears is that of extortion. A pertinent example is the case of a good Samaritan who stopped to help a fallen elderly person. The elderly person was thankful at first but as soon as the authorities came suddenly changed their story to the good Samaritan having knocked them over and demanded they pay the medical costs. This is one of a huge range of "tricks" that exist in society. Most children from young are told to not pay attention let alone, consider believing, what they see and hear of people in need. Gangs do disfigure people so that they become better beggars. And there are those the prey on the basic goodness of people. Avoiding the bother that helping could entail is the consideration beyond the simple moral equation. We can ask how this justifies ignoring the cries of a mangled child whose life hangs in the balance, but it does if one considers that a mother could come out of the sideroad screaming to high-heaven that it was you who hurt her child, that if you don't pay up she'll go to the police and then even if you can prove it wasn't you, you've had terrible bother. It's an easier thing to just keep going.   Even the drivers' behaviour can be understood to an extent. In some small towns, drivers who hit people might be dragged out and beaten by family members (as some people can escape justice through their connections, villagers taking justice into their own hands is often common sense). This has been used to explain hit-and-run cases here. Drivers will often turn themselves in shortly after on their own terms straight to a police station, as is also the case here.   Every country has its outrages. Outrage is good. It would be a lack of outrage that would be truly evil. With outrage let's hope that it settles into introspection: those eighteen weren't deviantly amoral, insensate; they were just like all of those carrying outrage. Let's hope that those outraged notice and in themselves seek to change the way they react to the hurt and unfortunate.   It is interesting to know that the only one to do something was poor and uneducated, yet showed instinctive care. It took no moral courage to act. She was given money by the city representatives and gave it straight to the young child... who regrettably is likely to die soon or become a vegetable.

Autumn Floods

I walked home from the bus-stop barefoot on Thursday night. Many people did. It is not something I ever expected to do in suburban China, with its reputation for filthy streets, but there you go.   It'd started raining in the afternoon. It wasn't heavy but rarely let up. Rain of course isn't a rarity here. Even though the summer steam has eased, autumn is still rather tropical. Rain is a big problem for public transportation too, as the taxis become difficult to catch and people clog the dry subways. Rain snarls up the traffic so buses also come less and less often.I take buses in general these days, which is cheap and generally comfortable. My bus eventually came and pleasantly I got a seat in which to observe the outside happenings. The bus goes through and underpass, which was a foot deep with water at the time. The bus, like a charging elephant, ran through the river with a groan.   Guangzhou is a river city. The beautiful, yet stinky, Pearl river halves it. There are also numerous branches and canals through the suburbs (my apartment looks over one such branch). Though river cities flood when the water level rises, I've never seen this happen in Guangzhou. Guangzhou floods because Guangzhou can't drain. Guangzhou's extensive network of canals and streams should facilitate its draining but through civic mismanagement it doesn't. The humour from last year was that the city government put a lot of money into modernising its underground drains in one area only to flood worse than the old system ever did.   Anyway, so I was on the bus overlooking the aquatic mayhem. To be honest it didn't look that bad. I got off my bus and put up my umbrella and walked to the edge of a block, which was cut off by a decent bank of water. The sight of a passer-by, or should that be a wader-through, gave me enough to gauge it was close to knee height in places. I went to the other end of the block. Again: water, water everywhere. I was on an island! Looking closely at the people who had resigned themselves to standing under eaves and in shops and banks you could tell that they too had sensed no other option. There were no taxis to catch. Buses on this side of the road would take you farther away and possibly to even deeper, less familiar waters, and not many people have friends with cars to call over to pick them up. So suddenly one has to think how much damage a walk in the drink will damage one's shoes and tailored pants. Or how long it will take for the flooding to ease. (If the did wait they'd be disappointed: it rained well through the night and even heavier than you could ever imagine.)   Then came the answer to me: a gentleman came onto our island, plastic bag with his shoes and pants rolled up, walking calmly by with his umbrella. If the notoriously dirtophobic locals aren't scared of walking through floodwater barefoot, I'm certainly not. So off came the shoes, up-rolled by pants (although the material of my pants always made them slowly unroll, requiring re- and re-rolls) and I set off home. It was a good feeling. Guangzhou rain is fairly warm so it was a comfortable splash; the road surface nicely massaged the bottoms of my feet; and unlike New Zealand, and let this be known as one of the advantages of Chinese streets in general, there was no glass (which is fortunate because I'd hate to think what was in the water).

Children

So we were kicking around a shuttlecock in our apartment complex patio area when a voice came from behind us. It was a mother talking to her children about the game and presumptiously asking if they'd like to join us in the kicking. The two boys said they didn't but still walked around to a position that incidentally completed a triangle to observe us. Mid-play, the shuttlecock launched off the side of my foot in their direction and they leadfootedly let it drop down next to them without any attempt to kick it back into the air. "No-one got it!" I dramatically cried in Mandarin. Their mother from behind called out that they should join in when the oldest one stomped away yelling in English: "I'm from New Zealand!"   I had never expected him to say that! "I'm also from New Zealand!" I called back but he wasn't listening or wasn't interested.

Wind has turned

I was walking through the old town looking for something to eat. I bumped into three friends, all of whom were considerably older than me. We were on our way to somewhere, when we came across a blood donation facility. We went in. One of my friends muttered that he didn't want to donate but the others had already grabbed an application form. We'd mostly filled in the form when it became clear that there was a space to stamp a chop. We told the woman attending us that we didn't have a chop. She told us that we couldn't donate then. We were frustrated and were about to leave when I asked: next time, besides a chop, was there anything else we needed? "Anaesthetic." "Why do you need an anaesthetic? We don't use anaesthetic to donate blood in New Zealand." "Because it's painful. You need to get one of these," she showed me a bag of liquid that looked the same as saline solution. "Can I donate without anaesthetic?" My questioned trailed as she trailed away. She left the room never to answer my question again.   And that was roughly when I woke up. Chinese bureaucracy and service have obviously entered my dreams. It has become easier to dream, too, with the night temperatures dropping into the low twenties. The wind, as they say, has turned. It is cooler in the mornings and cooler in the evenings. Generally speaking it is a nice period to be outside and active. I went for a two hour suburban tramp this morning without the feeling of sweat running down my back. This is how mornings should be.

Zaraz Khan

I'm not quite a pacifist but have extremely mixed feelings no war. Especially when wars explode with an unwritten pretext. Being in China slightly takes away your scope of the lead up to events. China is after all a very inward looking country, even when it's staring outward. The first news about the Libyan war I remember was that the Chinese government was evacuating all 60,000 nationals from the country in a very short period of time. "Why are there so many Chinese there??" a student puzzled in Lounge Chat. It is a piece of the puzzle, the massive diplomatic and economic internationalisation of China, that most of China are unaware of. Economically China is extrememly international. And beside we all learn more about the world through America's wars, and even about ourselves.

 

Wars, though: The flags wave. Guns splitter. The media flickers. The anti-war people splutter. The rulers family are hunted. People's lives runs red in the streets. It's the devil's circus. A compelling one, at that. There is always one aspect of America's wars (and probably the war's of others, but allow me this indulgence) that was particularly offensive to me and it comes from great TV programme in China which finally gave me a name to get closer to linking it to the true inhumanity of it.

 

Zaraz Khan was a tall Afghani, he was famed in his small village for it. He walked out into the desert with two other gentlemen with him, purpose unknown. Does the fact that we don't know where he was going lessen what comes next? There is not much next because a missile from an unmanned Predator drone obliterated him and his companions. The people behind the obliteration of a completely innocent human were talking at ease. "Yeah, we spotted him with the drone. He was tall, and we knew Osama was tall. And he was dressed like Osama so we got the order to fire."  The obsenity of it is the manner in which people weigh up the lives of others. Zaraz died because he went for a walk, was tall and dressed like a devout muslim. But his killers showed no remorse. It is not hard to find other cases of unmanned (and probably manned) bombers too. Of course, apologists could say that the other side shows little distinction between those military and those civilian. It doesn't quite gel to me: you don't go to the level of your opponent; and the stronger power has the ability to be cleaner with their actions. This kind of slaughter justifies the 9/11 event. The scale in this particular example is different but the obscene result is the same: innocent, truly innocent people burning in the indiscriminate destructive forces of those wishing to kill.

Teaching Learning

Language, of all the things we can spend our time learning, is a peculiarity. Almost any thing you can learn about is easier to learn as you get older peaking in your twenties and then declining marginally ever on. We don't even try to teach finance to teenagers, maths to a toddler or philosophy to a tween. A language, however, is best learnt when we are young. There are many reasons for this: like walking, producing sound is a physiological process, a body skill; the brain is primed to learn language when we are young; and producing sentences is requires procedural memory, something more easily formed when young. Language is hardly a body of knowledge after all, but a body of skill. It is more akin to swimming than other subjects.

 

As we age the disabilities toward learning language accumulate: a tongue that doesn't naturally want to go between the teeth for the "th" sound; an inability to grasp the concept of tense; a reliance on translation from the mother tongue, and others. Experienced teachers often approach the realm of being a therapist to their students. Just like rehabilitating people who've lost the ability to walk, we have to nurture the desire to take those baby steps again, slowly and carefully, and provide the framework of poles so their muscles can again form to do the task. And that's why at our centre we have Dr English.

 

It was an idea adopted from another centre, but we quickly dressed it up better with signs, appointment times, and 10 minute slots. Being one of the doctors has been interesting as students who go to it have often struggled immensely with one aspect and have time to explain. I listen to their language, check their notebook, ask a few questions, diagnose and prescribe.

 

It is only now that I really have tapped into an area when I can contribute something groundbreaking. I didn't realise that I had such an advantage over almost all the other teachers in the school: I've been continually learning languages since I was 13. Most teachers in my school have never learnt a language successfully. Now, shall I preface this by saying that you can be a brilliant presenter and effective classroom language teacher without the experience of learning. But learning is a skill in itself, and language as mentioned is an almost unique field of knowledge to learn. To know how to advise people on how to learn, it is best that you've tried, failed and occasionally succeeded to distil great advice. You also need to have the realisations that your way of learning is suited to you, and what works for you may not work for others. And then you will have to build on this knowledge and use analogy to form advice for the others. That's where the over eighteen years of bumpy language learning come in.

 

I started with Japanese, which I approached wrongly, at high school. I used my academic brain to master its structures and memorise characters; the only thing I did right was to write down characters compulsively until the point that my hand had coordination to write characters smoothly. By the time I got to Japan, I was still mostly functionally unable to speak and listen although I had enough vocabulary to survive. My listening was terrible and I could only pick out some words and guess the meaning of the sentence. I then went onto Chinese at University which I started off on the same foot as Japanese but set myself better: I used language exchange at University; I had a long time in Taiwan to make me realise the heart of my mistake: I may be a very strong visual learner, but no matter how much I read and wrote, it would make no difference to how I spoke. This seems incredibly obvious but every student that I tell it to just like me has had the face of a recently enlightened Buddha when they hear it. In Taiwan, I wrote a 20 minute speech on a topic that burned deep within me (the treatment of trainees). Motivation and channelling interests into a language are of course crucial; yet most students are directed to BBC to topics that suit only the few interested in world affairs.

 

It was only when I returned from Taiwan that I started to read in Chinese for periods of time, and only then I discovered radio. It might seem strange that someone who is a visual learner might find the radio a learning tool. But that is one of the discoveries of my learning trajectory. You learn through your prime learning method and then review with the skills you are weaker at, without much assistance from your strongest suits. I tried it with Maori when I was learning it. I'm using it with Cantonese. It works. One method to learn; another method to generalise and consolidate the knowledge. In this world of subtitled movies, most students will use these together which obliterates the chances of nurturing your weakness; it only feeds your strength.

 

The difference in time and experience shows with my experience with Japanese. After coming back from Japan, and having had 5 years of high school Japanese under my belt and some misguided  self-study at University, I failed level 2 of the Japanese Proficiency test. 5 years later, a period in which I only went to Japan for a few days, had predominantly studied only Chinese, and went to one Japanese class a week for three months, I passed level 2 easily. The five years represented me finally realising what kind of learner I really was. It had taken twelve years of my language learning career: two thirds of the time! 12 years of inefficient unsuccessful, disheartening learning that had been eroding out of me every day. Other teachers at my school try to emphasise this to students: if you don't review, you are frittering away your money. But that's when it comes down to the key point: What is good review (for this particular person)? There is a concept for choosing learning strategies. It is called meta-cognition.

 

I went to the school lounge yesterday while I was heating my dinner and was beset by Betty, a great student who found she couldn't understand authentic English outside of the school. She could only understand with subtitles (English subtitles for English films). I asked her for her notebook, then gave it Jimmy who was looking on. I asked Jimmy to read from the most recent page: "Diseases are caused by germs." Betty's eyes lit up and said: "What's that? What's that?" I told her that if you want to review properly you will need someone else to read your notes to you and test you on the words that you have recently learnt. You learn listening by listening. And went back to get my dinner. I was starving. I hope she gets the idea and keeps it going. I'll ask her in a couple of days.

 

But if a small number of people have the quality advice and can only dispense it one person at a time it is incredibly slow. Dr English itself is a form of reincarnation of an old add-on service that "they killed off". When I started teaching here were what were called PAA, an acronym which I'm finding it more and more difficult to remember the meaning of. But in essence a student could book a whole hour with a teacher to ask for study advice. They could do it once every three months. As one of those who did them, I loved it. Students who knew about them loved it. (As with Dr English, the take-up rate was fairly low.) But there was a company idea to slowly move teachers to the chalkface where the money is made: classes which the money is linked to, and not the nice extras. Study advice was moved onto another department, the progress managers. (Chinese staff who are very proficient in English, who follow the progress of the students and check that they are studying at the right speed. They have lots of duties.) Over a year on, I've heard countless pleas from progress managers to give them help in giving study advice. My next step is to make an effective training for them to give quality specific study advice. But also give them a tool where advice can easily be shown on a powerpoint. Up to know, their advice is often challenged by intransigent students. It's time to give them the knowledge and authority to tell students how to improve.

Implosion, division and entropy

The process that began with the slow-motion firing of my ex-boss three months ago has led to a dramatic phase: complete reorganisation. Looking at ourselves this week perhaps the staff looks much the same to three months ago: next week two people effectively leave, the week after a new centre opens moving two people over and in that same week, too, another teacher departs. Compared to April, the school has effectively halved its staff, the schedule will be ripped to shreds and weekends splayed all over the place.

 

I have been a perceived loser in this process. For most of this time I've been seen as the odds-on senior teacher to go to the new centre, something that was seen as a developmental opportunity: I'd have been the main manager with a Director of Studies only in my school once a week. I'd have had the freedom to manage and organise staff as I would have wished. It would be the intermediary step to becoming a Director of Studies (one of my announced intentions of being in China – to get the experience to be an academic manager). It'd have been a challenge, to be clear. But it is not one that I've lost any sleep in losing. I need more time to get my style and ideas together. I even need more time to get my administration together and teaching consistent. This is my project after all. And teaching is going to be one of the main things I'll be doing over the next few weeks as a shortfall of teacher bites. But there is always a plan for us in this life.

 

I've been thinking more about those three who were leaving. One of them seems to be in some sort of strife now (something I'm not privy to), but when it gets down to it I still cannot really figure out how he led himself to this path. Of course, I really don't understand him well enough to speculate but I find myself doing so. Speculation is the son of Partial Ignorance and Curiosity. He seemed for a long time out of place, taking time to establish friendships, or perhaps needing time for his workmates to get used to his idiosyncrasies. Idiosyncratic is a good word for him. But nestled in his make-up as a person was an essential negativity or outward facing critique. A lot of the things he verbally has expressed frustration about have been the things that our old boss introduced, ironically where he has been persuaded to leave to.

 

There were several boiling critiques of particular policies and another department in meetings. There was an oblique suspicion of his drinking during working hours.  (It was an unconfronted issue, addressed indirectly to the whole staff – whether he was embarrassed about it, I don't know.) And there was one flashpoint involving me: I'd noticed that he was late for a Lounge Chat and there were students there waiting, and went over to remind him. He said he'd get to it in a minute. Minutes later he left the office and the building all together, not going to the Lounge Chat, to who knows where. Over lunch with my boss, I speculated that it might have been him reacting to being called out on it. It was about that but moreso that another workmate also appeared to be scheduled for it at the same time as him. It was a mistake on the schedule that I knew about already that day. He saw his workmate was just sitting there watching online TV not going to Lounge Chat and felt he was the being picked on. He hadn't spoken to his workmate to make arrangements to share the duty. He hadn't queried me for why I was speaking to just him. He just did the rather extreme action of leaving without a word and aggravated the situation. He resigned the next day. Yet we know that he didn't resign over this issue. One of the interesting things that my ex-boss taught me was that when someone has resigned or is about to resign yet is doubting themselves, they may subconsciously create a conflict situation that will consolidate their will to leave. Leaving with anger where one can clearly state to themselves and others why they're leaving helps one come to terms with such big decisions. His attitude was one of the reasons that he wasn't approached by management for some flexibility in departure times. He took the fact that he was the only one who wasn't approached to reconsider his resignation as indicating that we always wanted to get rid of him and expressed his feelings to other staff in and outside this department. The most irking thing for me really is that despite all this, thinking back through time, I can't think of any incident involving him apart from the minor. He has had a pretty decent time here from my outside view. I've had no incident with him either – I was disturbed that he'd leave the building over a perceived slight given that we had nothing but a clean past. Given time, he'd have progressed more as a teacher. Our school is pretty good at developing teachers. Or maybe it was just the city. An NZ colleague left the company early in his contract last year stating one of his reasons as Guangzhou itself…

 

I don't know if he'll regret any of this in time or have introspection on the point. He is still in his twenties, and perhaps that is an interesting range of ages to consider deeply from across the fence of thirty. Most teachers are either in their twenties or thirties and there are those common characteristics for each group. To manage a school you need to have a grasp of those different age groups and work subtly with their psyches to avoid these things coming up early.

 

The departures of the other two I'm quite sad about: a teacher I've helped mentor and a teacher who was widely seen as the most promising local teacher. I've enjoyed working with both, but I think it's unfortunate that they've chosen to be part of a simultaneous resignation. Does anyone want to be part of an evil plot to harm? Of course, it was expedient for my ex-boss (probably used as bargaining leverage) to get them to leave at the same time, but inflicts a rather savage blow to their former employer, and it's a blow that is not borne cleanly by those who my former boss would like it to hit.

 

Of course, the other side of them leaving was the option given by the other side. We can only imagine. My colleague thinks that a picture has been painted of what is possible over there. Our school doesn't offer part-time work. For people interested in travel and study (and that is a lot of us, including me if I weren't also interested in accumulating savings) there isn't an option; all three who left my ex-boss knew were interested more in those other areas than in career building. My boss thinks it was the birdy in the ear chirping how bad things were here and how over there it would be better. The birdy in this case is not my ex-boss but a disaffected teacher from the past, someone who general opinion has a very colourful view of.

 

Our company in this region is haemorrhaging people. Ours is not the only dismantling going on but I always think of ours as mundanely Shakespearean (well I was analogising to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, wasn't I, just a post or two before?) Either way, I hope the promises of the promised land aren't desert mirages for all three. I'm going to try and keep in touch. In crisis there is opportunity and in the haze of this sandstorm, I've been offered a parallel move to another centre. Let's see what comes of it.

Stories to tell

Our office has been particularly hit by a nasty cold. In our company you get 60% of your daily salary when you are unwell and it's hard to know if this is a good idea. You don't want people to take sickies; but you don't want sick people forcing themselves to work. The current spate of illness could be linked to a colleague who despite quarantining herself in a small demo room most of the time, but the rest of the time having necessary meetings, triggering two people infected, calling in sick on the same day (with scheduled classes, this is a big issue: the classes need to happen so teachers who are on duty that day sometimes have heavy schedules). This continued onto two other teachers, one of which didn't call in sick either, and perhaps that was why I'm sick now. I kept asking him whether he was OK and eventually sent him home early. I faded yesterday and then felt the full weight, in my head, of a nasty headcold this morning and dutifully called in sick. Fortunately I carpetbombed virus with vitamin C and banlangen (a Chinese herbal treatment) from the very first signs. Either way, I was feeling horrible in the morning and feel about 50% better now. An afternoon nap and a good sleep tonight might be enough to put me right.

 

Sick leave is a pleasant life pause, anyway. DVDs that were lent and gathering dust are playing. The most awaited was the middle segment of a documentary on modern Chinese history. Of course, when I was not hampered in my access to knowledge, I learnt a lot of what happened in the last century in China. But when you are on site in the country, in the city, in the space though not the time, your desire to know is all the keener. When you speak to those of that time, you are all the more thirsty to know.

 

And so I watched taking a few notes here and there because I like notes. You hear names in general and names, though in history class may remain just names, are the very tip of a human story, a human story that once suckled on a mother, had first love with limited knowledge believed something did something and perished. Throughout history a name could be deleted. Or stained through inclusion. Do something wrong and people will put your name on a board with your crimes, hang it from your neck, with very thin wire that would eventually burst capillaries and veins, while you kneel in front of a jeering crowd, the blood running down the wire and onto the board. While your father and brother look at you from amongst the crowd. In some cultures, names are face. And then we hear numbers, numbing numbers. Numbers, whether the American debt or people dying because a country wanted to make a leap forward, greatly, have no context or means to be interpreted. We just know they're high, far too high.

 

But when we get down to it, history should be the amalgam of countless stories, yet only a few that get to impress us as "the" story. I heard words from Jiang Kaishek's son (Jiang was the leader of the KMT who fled to Taiwan), I heard people denounced as they had, upon one moment where their tongue loosened or their heart boiled to say something, were beaten and sentenced to jailtime. We also talk to their tormentors, a gentleman admitted candidly that he liked to hit people, to see their pain. Former disillusion red guards. Former landlords. The son's of former landlords. The son's of former landlords talking about their sons, and how they cut their relationship with their sons to avoid them suffering the brunt of an intergenerational hatred.

 

This particular DVD set is likely to be a copy, made by someone who knew there was money, sold in a shop by people who knew foreigners would buy it. Of course, none of it would ever be allowed to be sold through any legitimate shop, and it would be interesting to know what would happen to a proprietor who allowed it to be sold. Possession would probably just mean confiscation, based on my experience on the border with a Mao book. Confiscation and taking are a big part of history. I went to an ancestral house on a trip to the countryside during spring festival and noticed that there were marks that things had been removed. I asked and heard it was the Red Guards, Mao fanatics, who for a brief time ran amok destroying anything cultural and assaulting anything that was authority. It was a beautiful stone carving of what I don't know.

 

History, as is well known, is written by the winners. But sometimes both sides prevail and fortunately eyewitnesses survive too. And, of course, as we know in this Michael Moore era (the filmmaker, not the former Labour leader), the documentary you see is the documentary someone has chosen to do, has selectively edited and purposefully edited. What the purpose, criteria for selection, and importantly the transparency of the desire to make such a film are all very important. This documentary leaves egg on everyone's faces, so I hope that it is as fair as possible. But really the egg is just the worst sides of human nature that we all share. We can be partial to sides but history shows the acts that members of both sides are capable of, and looking deeper will hopefully show how we can avoid the excesses of our own selves, rioting, destroying and whatnot.

Class struggle

It was likely very early in our history, possibly in our pre-history, that someone noticed that having all the warriors charging at each other on both sides was always inferior to having some sort of arrangement and timing. In chess, I always read: a strategy no matter how feeble is better than no strategy at all. Ambushes, surges, tactical retreats and ceasefires all came into the reckoning and all leaders knew their worth. Soon as an opponent sees the strategy it is a bother to him and he has to think of a counter. And China has never been a cold ground for conflict or war. Its culture was there earliest to codify war and study it. It produced the The Art of War and The Thirty-Six Stratagems.

 

Of course, modern wars often make a mockery of strategy with one-sided thrashings, descending into guerilla action where it finally begins again. In the business world this remains. And so when we had three resignations in two days out of the blue, it was at first a surprise and then a realization. Our opponent had struck a blow. One adorable thing about Romance of the Three Kingdoms is that the protagonists all knew each other. Cao Cao had shared drinks with Liu Bei. Zhuge Liang's brother was a strategist for the Kingdom of Wu. In the shower the other day, I was reminded of Liu Bei actually, and for the benefit of those who haven't read the book (most readers I presume) let me describe in my own words:

 

As Cao Cao had effectively usurped the Han throne – holding the emperor as a puppet, Wu (near Shanghai) was already an established kingdom… Liu Bei, however, was the model of loyalty and considered Uncle to the Emperor, and only late realized that the Han could not be restored and fled south, pursued all the way by Cao Cao and the soon to be Kingdom of Wei. Eventually, and it took time, Liu Bei arrived in Chengdu and set up his own kingdom, the Kingdom of Shu. Through charm, negotiation and battle, many strong generals eventually came under Liu Bei's flag and fought strongly to almost take down Cao Cao's evil empire. (It is worth knowing that the original is biased treating one side, Liu Bei's Shu, as the good guys and Cao Cao as the ingenious baddy; history may differ.)

 

The Liu Bei in my time would have to be my former boss, who from prominence as the Director of Studies at my school, fought battle after battle till he was beaten from his position and was sent lurking on the outside, looking for another position to ascend. This we have all known. And we knew he was about to get what he wanted. Then three resignations came within 24 hours, all with exactly the same text in the letter, almost tempting one to think that the strategy was going to be personalized. There was scrambling in the office as my current boss met with all to see who was leaving or staying. Thoughts went toward whether this was specifically timed: we have a new centre opening shortly, now it is unstaffable; it'd be a great revenge wouldn't it to deliver a blow to the company. And it is in the timing that such resignations become a strategy. It was bidden-time. It was a co-ordinated strike. It was the Twin Towers, albeit on a comparatively much less destructive scale.

 

Tied into this drama are loyalties. Several days prior to this flare up, there was a big meet up between my former boss and many company employees from many different branches. He announced that he had taken a regional manager position and will start from September 3. Resignations started coming in on August 3. I wasn't invited to this event. In fact, I only found out about it after the resignations started rolling in. (My fellow senior teaching buddy was invited, but couldn't to; now she wishes she had gone to find out this plan ahead.) I've never even implicitly been headhunted or lured. That despite the fact my former boss and I had a very good relationship… good enough for the higher-ups to suspect me of being the inside person. However, I wouldn't have left my job in his school under his leadership. Maybe he knew that.

 

My school chain could easily be spoken as being an evil empire. It is riven by power struggles. There is a degree of corruption and bureaucratic meddling. But this is not the only company with these issues, especially in China. Will the grass be any greener for the leavers? My senior teacher buddy still believes that this strike was not done by our former boss with spite; these were after all people he built great trust with, whose abilities he is sure of; any addition nuisance he caused to his old employers would be just a bonus. I'm a little less certain. And my current boss and his new boss hate him with a vengeance. I'm not in Wei dreaming of Shu. I'm where I am and I think this is still very much the place for me.

The measure of a man

He said earlier: "I have something to talk to you about," but then looked up to see his next "meeting" rise from her computer and then muttered that he had an appointment and that his topic could wait. An hour later, I was leaving and he said that he'd walk me out. I threw my papers in my bag and headed out with him. He asked a few questions indirectly without getting to the point. Had we been asked about any aspect of his performance? No, we hadn't. And then he just started talking and talking. Sometimes I interrupted to offer a parallel story for comparison, but his eyelids would bounce with slight impatience before continuing on at his disbelief at how his appraisal had gone.

 

Appraisals are a big part in my life. I'm creating systems for them. I'm being subjected to them. I'm occasionally taking part in the appraisals of others. And it is something that very few people take well. Some just swallow it, preferring to take what is given with passive acceptance. Others raise the fences, and launch spears to discredit the system (which will always have flaws) or the people performing those. Some, regardless of the appraisals high or low view of them, will just ignore it and get on.

 

He, however, had done what was "expected" of an appraisal, the thing that is often the least expected thing to do: he took it seriously. He spent hours poring over the descriptors and details; he tried to be as objective as he could in his own self-assessment to produce a copious document of reflection. What he was met with, though mostly complimentary, was a meeting that was about dancing the process step-by-step, arguing from authority's superior vision rather than any evidence. For what could they really know about his performance? They didn't ask for his observations. They didn't observe a single training he conducted. His main mentor wasn't there; we, his closest subordinates, were not asked at all. (But, of course, the system was not going to recognise the need.) And he was dumbfounded. And after, the conversation with me really was just him bouncing his experience off someone in an attempt to make sense of it.

 

He's my boss. And now, in terms of a major project that I and a colleague undertook, he is now a chief supporter. Our project is to have a transparent system of standards for appraisal. When we first talked to him about our project he was a skeptic and said it without blushes: There needs to be some blurriness in the system so the manager can have some discretion. That was a horrid idea to us, and how we were inspired into the project by our previous boss and mentor. Our previous boss had said that appraisal should really be a simple process of ticking off things with as little subjectivity as possible. My current boss had the opposite view until we used our tool to assist him in appraisals. He was shocked. If someone in their self-appraisal said they exceeded expectations, you could show easily that they only met them. It wasn't opinion anymore. And if anyone had any doubts about how to get higher, you just need to point.

 

Tomorrow I'll submit it higher into the atmosphere, which like the Explorer deep space spacecraft may yield life or may just end up for eternity in a dark void. But whether it is taken up by the company or rejected, it represent work, an achievement, and one that I'm proud of. An item that I'll raise in my own appraisal. Because it is what I've done. And it is what I want to measured on.

 

(This was written two weeks ago but, due to a technical problem, unpublished.

“没有天然的对错，只有必然的因果”

I might have mentioned that one of my chief sources of Cantonese learning is a radio programme that is a talk-back lifeline. It has been nourishing me lingually for almost a year now. I stumbled on it while listening to the radio (on my cellphone), headphones plugged in, walking back from my regular late night suppers. Once I realised that my foundation was good enough to pick up words and ideas from just exposure to Cantonese I quickly started listening to channels I randomly found. Some frequencies were more to my ears' pleasure, and particularly the drama of talkback on Ziu Gwonggwan Sangming Yitsin （赵广军生命热线). The stories were twisted and quaint. The hosts could be patient and clear; they could be sharp and devastating. Each call in, each text message read out was a little tale of mystery to my nascent Cantonese listening sklls. At first I was catching the general theme and thieving particular repeated words that I'd check at home. Soon my listening vocabulary covered a huge range of themes from family, love, life to career.

 

It is through repetition that language is learnt and the stories through life are often thematic and similar at their hearts. But ironically it was the most repetitive of language that was the hardest to crack. The programme as it begins and restarts from breaks had a recording with a man saying clearly several sentences with background music. These isolated wise sentences were some of the hardest for me to grasp. They were stripped of context and words that I had often learnt already in Mandarin in passing but were not familiar enough for me to guess. Others were of a deeper meaning so that even though I might have the language knowledge to know every single word, I wouldn't necessary think it was likely because it might seem meaningless unless I trusted my listening to take it one more step of thought.

 

One of the more fascinating was the phrase in the title of this blog, "mut yau tin'yin dik deui'cho, ziyau bityin dik yan'gwo" ("There is no inherent right and wrong, just inevitable (cause and) effect.") I might translate the last bit to "inevitable consequences". It apparently comes from a poem, or that's what I thought I heard when someone called in to ask. It is a very interesting aphorism and maybe a good reflection of the philosophy of the programme. There are no inherent right and wrong, is a phrase that would make a lot of people argue. But that is missing its true strength. Whenever we are in a dispute or trouble, we see more sharply the rights and wrongs of others and sometimes even ourselves. Seeing that the weight of error ways (more) heavily on others often causes others to abdicate responsibility. He did it! And with so many calls you hear exactly that: parents are unfair; husband is abusive; the boss is biased; my son doesn't listen to me. So how can I change them to see that they're doing wrong? In fact when others have done us wrong, we can feel like we need to get our pound of flesh, because it needs to be extracted, right?

 

But that's when the second half of the phrase kicks in, all actions when applied to situations will cause changes that will either be adverse or beneficial, or perhaps even neutral. If we are going to enable someone to do something to improve the situation, it often pays to take the right and the wrong out of the consideration and see where different actions will take us. What actions we can take. What can you do? Bothering to list the rights and wrongs (especially when it is from one side of the story, which is the only one you have access to) hardly will give anyone any more than sympathy. But what do we really want? "So why are you calling in?" or "What do you want to achieve?" is usually a question ten minutes into a call.

 

I'm quite proud of my listening now. I can listen and enjoy the stories. Sometimes I can understand smoothly enough to not realise that it was Cantonese that I was listening to (which is peculiar but a good peculiar). This though is the result of what is crucial to a learner, to understand how they learn. Listening was the sustenance to my Mandarin for the long time that I was in New Zealand without Chinese classes. Japanese radio online was what got me to pass the Japanese test I did in 2005. And now armed with an iPod (thanks, Brenda), archived radio programmes, and live broadcast I can have an hour's worth of exposure. And with my teaching skills I know how best to use this exposure to generate real improvements to listening skill.

The Unconsidered Life

I might arrogantly propose that my local chinese swimming pool could be taken as a microcosm of many aspects of Chinese society. It is a fifty by twenty metre pool with lanes painted on the bottom but no lane dividers on the surface. People swim both lengthwise and widthwise, standing splashing at all areas of the pool. Crashing and weaving. There are signs not to dive and jump into the water but the sound of bombs, dives and near misses (screams) prevails. Life guards watch from their platforms but only to blow the whistle when the pool needs its lunch break. Then it rains and people, for some reason, run out of the pool and to shelter...

 

The key themes are that words whether spoken or clearly written don't matter as much as what is being done. Even with a clear design of how things should work, people will find a way to subvert it, not with malice but with apparent laziness, or just a bizarre can-do attitude (it can be done so why not). People don't seem to consider their actions in non-set situations. (E.g. standing on the escalator they will think about everything except about how they are standing on the escalator and how their position affects others.) And even obvious supervision is not for the purposes you think they are there for. But anything unexpected can elicit the most unusual primal responses.

 

The general la-di-da-ness of your average swimmer here is depressing. They really don't seem to check where they're jumping, swimming and who might be coming from where. In the subway, people seem to treat getting to the scarce but hardly comfortable seats a matter of utmost urgency, worth preventing disembarking passenger getting out, worth pushing the elderly and women carrying babies. Apparently Guangzhou isn't the worst city in this regard but it is still a travesty.

 

I'm not sure which of the hoi polloi Socrates was musing when he pondered that the unconsidered life wasn't worth living. Was it just one that was considered for its Grand Purpose, or merely the correctness of their actions like I might like to regard it now? Probably both. Of course the relativist in the corner of my brain (he's often locked in his room) may cautiously aver that everyone has someone who looks at their lives as unconsidered.

 

All of this thinking while I attempt, in a wish though not a death wish, to swim a length of backstroke might lead you to think I've mastered the art of swimming while meditating on the universe. Regrettably this isn't the case. Getting back into swimming has been a relief as I've lacked a regular fitness habit but it is a recent thing for me. Swimming is perfect, and at 12 yuan (NZ$2.40) it is pretty cheap even though at peak time you'd be lucky to survive. And so close, barely 5 minutes away from home. Swimming in a hot climate is something I haven't had the pleasure of much prior to the recent months. The water is now at a constant air temperature close to 30 degrees, which allows entry without any shock at all. The "cold" shower after the swim is a pleasure. In fact, I might swim just for the freshness of the shower at the end. Swimming hasn't yet returned to the ease it had prior to my initial departure in late 2009 but that is just a matter of time.

 

The sooner I swim off this belly the better.