This is a hyper-competitive, meritocratic* culture (if that’s even a word); some describe it by saying that in Taiwan, children start being evaluated the moment they’re born. One of our friends says that test-taking is Taiwan’s national past-time. Typically, it’s the mothers who are most involved in making sure the child squeezes every last possible advantageous drop out of every minute of their childhood. They are competitive with one another, and they groom their children to compete with their classmates. All this usually involves maintaining a degree of pressure on the child that many Westerners just can’t stomach.

One primary arena is the buxiban scene. From some Western perspectives, bǔ xí bān(s) look like special Asian torture institutions designed for use on children; aka “cram schools.”

It’s a traditional belief that parents should send their kids to all kinds of crammers in order to compete against the other talented kids. Therefore, most kids in Taiwan have a schedule packed with all sorts of cram school lessons [link].

This is perpetuated by a meritocratic culture that measures merit through testing, with entrance into college, graduate school, and government service decided entirely on testing [link].

Technically, PEI is a buxiban, but Mingdaw has vowed to make it distinct and give the kids a positive learning experience (and this is paying off – the kids love it here for the most part). Buxibans are private for-profit after school schools that specialize in various subjects (math, English, etc.). Every family that can afford it fills up their children’s after school hours with as much buxiban-ing as they can without causing their child to have a nervous breakdown.

It’s standard practice for the competition to rank every student (name and grade) on a public poster each semester. At one buxiban near us, no student (out of dozens) has less than 95. We just received junk mail from a larger competitor that listed the name and grade of hundreds of students – the lowest score was 80. We have some students that pout or even threaten to break down in tears when they get 95 on a test. 95 isn’t good enough. Heck, some even get upset when they lose at sight-word bingo. Losing to your peers in school is not an option – period.

Knowing something of the amount of pressure these kids are under, and what can happen to some of them at home if they’re perceived to be under-performing, we inflate their grades. We still grade harder and give lower average grades than the competition, and we grade fairly, but 90 says something different here than it does in North America. In North America I imagine I’d give 10%-15% lower grades on average.

Today I gave a student just under 90 for the semester, averaged from six categories, and that was the lowest grade I handed out. Her mom was clearly disappointed and wanted an explanation. I tried to prepare for this kind of thing by praising the kids as profusely as possible in the Teacher’s Comments section of the report card (except for one kid, but she had it coming). I told this mom about how great her daughter is in class, and that it was just a couple incomplete homeworks that lowered her average. The mom was not happy. I hope I didn’t ruin anyone’s winter break.
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*This seems to be a huge paradox in Chinese cultures: the meritocratic nature of the system is evident; that has roots in Confucius, as I understand it. Yet at the same time nowhere else on earth is the old saying more true that, “it’s not what you know it’s who you know.” One’s guanxi network of personal connections is what makes the Chinese world go round.

Pronounced: b? x� b?n
Means: special Asian torture institutions designed for use on children. Aka “cram schools”; technically, what we teach at; private for-profit after school schools that specialize in various subjects (math, English, etc.).

As far as I know, we don’t have apocalyptic literature as a genre in English. That’s a big reason why books like Daniel and Revelation are so hard for us to understand. I’ve heard that the Russians have apocalyptic literature, but I don’t know what it is.

My Saturday morning English class isn’t reading apocalyptic literature, but I realized today that the books for this class were all written in the wake of massive cultural upheaval: Time Machine and The Christmas Carol, and now we’re starting Les Miserables (all ‘young readers’ versions). I was trying to explain to them that these stories came out of times when these peoples experienced big social changes, and that many nations have these experiences: Britain’s Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, Taiwan had Japanese colonialism, mass immigration from China in the 1950′s, and the ‘economic miracle’ in the last few decades, and China’s current high-speed Industrial Revolution. That’s a rather ambitious lecture for an EFL class, but this one has my oldest students. I was pleased when they suddenly broke into a torrent of Mandarin as they made the connection with Taiwan history (in special cases I let them use Mandarin). I have no idea what they said exactly, just that it was about Taiwan history.

Reading China’s history one could get the impression that turmoil is China’s natural state of being. What is the literature from China’s eras of turmoil? What is being written now, in response to the ongoing high-speed industrial revolution? I don’t know, but one day I want to read it – in Chinese!

Pronounced: d� zh�n
Means: earthquake.

We just had an earthquake… literally 30 seconds ago. I’m at the school and I could see the Christmas ornaments on the tree swinging, but only two of the four of us in the room could feel it.

Weird!

Update:

Content – the stuff you need to know to effectively do and pursue becoming the things you want to do and become. Content is what you know or understand, but all the knowing and understanding in the world can’t do what process does.

Process – intentionally or unavoidably engaging practices and experiences that grow and shape you over time, changing you and what you’re capable of. Engaging the process is applying what you know, and what that does with you. Process in part depends on the right content.

(I found this in the drafts – it was written during this last semester, probably in November sometime. We turned in our last assignments Dec. 23.)

I’m blowing off some steam here. I can’t wait to get this M.A. degree business out of the way and start some real Mandarin learning. I love the books and the learning, but we’re way overdue to enter the real world of family, jobs, and people.

I’ll always read, always pursue learning, but I’m sick of a life dominated by books and papers. Where are the people? When do we get to focus on our family? (that’s not a James Dobson reference, for anyone concerned ;) ) To earn our own living? To start life?

We are Word doc typing machines. We can’t really ‘read’ the books, let alone think about them, but somehow we’re supposed to produce pages of creative critical interaction. We’ve been through senioritis and burn-out before with school, but this is different. You start to wither after living too long in this artificial environment where reading books and writing about their content dominates your time and energy. It sounds like a luxury to people juggling jobs and marriage and kids, and it is – but it’s not a luxury in which I want to live to the exclusion of more important things.

In the beginning it makes sense to spend time front-loading content at the expense of process – I guess. But (overused metaphor ahead) a sponge will rot if all it ever does is soak. I’ve seen this happen, it’s ugly and sad. Absorbing content should always continue, but there’s a point when acquiring content should take a back seat to engaging process. I can’t wait.

This post is dedicated to Ryan, who once accused me of carrying a man-purse – a baseless allegation that I categorically deny.

However, a growing population of male Chinese yuppies is embracing the man-purse as a status symbol.

From the IHT article, “For Beijing men, it’s in the handbag”:

After Zhou, 29, made the leap from graduate student to doctoral candidate and freelance journalist, he cast aside his backpack for a sleek leather bag, a cross between a small attaché case and, well, a purse.

It’s the shou bao, or men’s handbag.

“People take it as a symbol of your identity,” Zhou said, adding that for many men the bag signifies professional success.

Annie Shi, Dunhill’s regional sales manager, noted that the handbags have special appeal for men aged 30 to 50 who want to show that they are moving up in the world… “It’s a status symbol.”

FYI, it’s called a shǒu bāo (手包) (it bugs me that people render Chinese words in English without tone marks… really, what is the point?).

Anyway, despite popular cultural myths/values to the contrary, the West definitely has its own social hierarchies; status matters big-time in the West. However, Chinese culture takes observing status and hierarchy to a whole different level, and the man-purse thing is tied up in all that.

I don’t have much to say about status, hierarchy, and face practices (“saving face,” etc.) right now, but I’m reading a fascinating book on it called The Remaking of the Chinese Character and Identity in the 21st Century: The Chinese Face Practices by Wenshan Jia (abstract here, look inside here). It’s his dissertation examining the role of face practices in Chinese culture, how they inhibit the transition of Chinese societies into the modern world, and how those practices might be changed to accommodate modernization while preserving Chinese cultural identity. The real life case studies are particularly interesting. There’ll be posts on this book in the future.

Pronounced: sh?u b?o
Literally: hand bag
Means: man-purse
*This entry dedicated to Ryan.

Pronounced: t? ch? c�
Literally: She eats vinegar.
Means: to have jealousy. One of our friends humourously explained, “If my husband talks to another woman, I will ch? c�.”

I used to unconsciously assume that modernization = Westernization. After all, it’s our technology and science that grew out of our worldview, our Industrial Revolution… Surely societies can’t absorb all that and remain unWestern. Surely adopting these things must make their culture almost unrecognizable within one or two generations…

I don’t know if Kishore Mahbubani engages in wishful thinking or accurately describes reality when he says that, although many Western ideas, values, and assumptions have seeped into virtually all non-Western minds, “the hearts and souls of other civilizations remain intact” (112). Before we’d come to Taiwan, I would have assumed that sentiments like that were just wishful thinking. Now, after a year of observations (which certainly doesn’t make us experts!), conversations, work, play, and readings I’m not so sure he’s wrong to see this kind of Western influence as essentially a “veneer” (112).

Michael Harris Bond makes an important observation, I think, in Beyond the Chinese Face:

It is worth noting in passing that modernization began in Western countries earlier than it did elsewhere. It entailed just as dramatic changes in these Western countries as it did (and will) in other countries. To confuse modernization with Westernization is to confuse process with origin. Western countries are also changing under the impact of modernization. The question is whether all countries are converging (or developing toward the same end point) (112).

Mahbubani and Bond both refuse to equate modernization with Westernization, and I’m tempted to agree with them. A year ago I would have called Japan ‘westernized’ and I bet that’s probably accurate regarding certain aspects of the culture. But the hearts and minds of the people? They are different for all our influence, no doubt. But Taiwan was influenced in similar ways by the USA during the same era and I can’t call the Taiwanese westernized. Even the young, trendy, rich kids that drink coffee in knock-off $tarbuckses, play guitar, and dress and pose like they stepped out of a Hollywood movie still seem much more like wannabes than truly Western. It’s kind of sad actually, both that they would seemingly want to ditch their culture for ours, and that for most of them that’s an impossible goal. Their mothers are Chinese, and most of them will never step foot outside Asia. Even the little kids we teach, who prefer McDonald’s and KFC to any kind of Chinese food, struggle to perform exercises in class that cater to typically Western modes of thinking rather than Asian modes of education. When it comes to our same-age friends here, many of whom are young, trendy, and traveled, the more we get to know them, the more we realize just how much like us they aren’t.

But regardless of my anecdotal impressions, some research apparently bears this out:

Yang Kuo-shu’s studies on the modernity of Taiwanese people show that traditional and modern attitudes do not exist in opposition to one another. Those who are modern are not necessarily non-traditional. …The Oriental culture appears to be producing a marked variation in the profile of a modern person from what one would find in a Western culture (Bond, 114).

Even a few generations after WWII, I’m betting that the Japanese are more Asian than Western and will continue to be so for a long time. Which, if you think about it, is amazing given their 20th century history. Mahbubani says of his experience with Asian students that come to the U.S. for study that Japanese university students have the toughest time adjusting. He attributes this to the cultural cohesion from which they come.

Still, I have a hard time imagining a non-Western society adopting technology or entertainment developed in the West, by the West, for the West, in response to Western cultural needs/desires, and not being somewhat “Westernized.” Form and meaning aren’t the same thing, but I wonder if that relationship is tighter than we often think, especially when the forms are in part predetermined by the meaning. How will our communication technologies, which increase our individual autonomy and our interpersonal alienation in the highly individualistic West, affect individuals and relationships in more relationally-oriented and interdependent cultures? Bond talks about how the Chinese are conscious of the struggle between modernization and cultural identity, and seems to suggest that “selective adaptation” may be a real possibility.

I don’t know, but it’s interesting to observe as we live in times and places of rapid change.