Our 4-yr-old in her Chinese preschool’s Flag-Raising Ceremony

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Joel 大江

Our daughter goes to a local, all-Chinese preschool. We live in the neighbourhood and I’m their 外教。 She started last November but unlike most kids who go all day five days a week, she only goes mornings on Mon/Wed/Fri. We’re the only foreigners. This week she got to participate in the Monday morning flag-raising ceremony.

They deliberately put her in the class with the nicest teachers, who don’t criticize and shame and negatively compare and threaten as per normal in China (and like in the other classes). As the English teacher, I’m in each of the seven classes every morning so it’s easy for me to compare their discipline and teaching styles.

It seems like participating in this event and celebrating her birthday, which means going through the birthday kid routine that all the other kids go through on their birthdays, have gone a long way toward her fitting in — both in how she feels and how the other kids relate to her. Maybe it’s made everyone realize more that she’s a student, too, and not just some weird visitor. And of course it helps that her Chinese is way better now than when she started.

The chain is owned by an American/Chinese couple who are our friends and members of our NGO. This means I have way more leverage to address issues than I normally would, so this is an exceptional situation for us. I don’t know what we’d do if our only options were normal preschools. Even for the most cross-culturally savvy families, sometimes putting a foreign kid in a Chinese preschool just doesn’t work. There are endless possibilities for deal-breaking conflict.

Their sashes say “I’m a little flag-bearer” 我是小旗手。 Here’s the video of her little performance:

(Part of being at this local Chinese preschool is a horrible, disorganized sound system. Normally this doesn’t matter, because the point of a Chinese sound system is not to clearly amplify speech or music; it’s to make noise so that events feel more 热闹。 On this day, the mics they first tried to use at the base of the flagpole were set to broadcast inside the school instead of outside. But the other mics that do broadcast through the outdoor speakers couldn’t reach all the way to the flagpole, so they moved the kids over to one side. And then the batteries were worn out and fuzzy and loose. But anyway… :)

She said:

大家好！我是小二班的陆心语。我刚刚四岁了。我要给你唱一首歌：
我爱我的幼儿园
幼儿园里朋友多
又唱歌来又跳舞
大家一起真快乐

Which means:

Hi, everybody! I’m Lu Xinyu from Little Class 2. I just turned 4. I want to sing a song for you:
I love my preschool
At preschool there are lots of friends
There’s singing and dancing
Everybody’s happy together

This was our first day, at the end of October:

More Chinese preschool stuff:

Teaching English in China (topic)
American kids, Chinese preschools & cultural challenges
So I’m in this Chinese girl band…

“That’s right, I’m a foreigner!” 对，我是外国人！

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Joel 大江

Once upon a time we went to an all-Chinese mall in Vancouver, Canada to practice Chinese. We overheard this group of college-age girls say, “Hey, those wàiguórén speak Chinese!” Wàiguórén (外国人) meaning “foreigner.” And never mind who was in whose country.

Anyway, saw this shirt tonight and had to share. Reminds me of the mzungu shirts worn by wàiguórén in East Africa during bad reactions to culture stress. But with a twist. And not worn by a mzungu/wàiguórén:

“对，我是外国人！” — 弗 2:19
“That’s right, I’m a foreigner!” — Ephesians 2:19

Aside from just being funny, it’s also interesting because of China’s general love/hate relationship with wàiguórén/the West. Just this week I come across usage of “fake foreign devil” 假洋鬼子. And not to mention Chinese Christianity‘s complicated relationship to the English language, Western culture and Western Christianity in particular.

Maybe the t-shirt’s just a Bible joke and not meant to reference any of that. Or maybe it’s deliberately redefining the terms. Either way the joke’s historical-cultural context is hard to ignore. Because historical-cultural context is always hard to ignore. At least for this 外国人。

P.S. - And lest anyone feel like accusing this guy of being a fake foreign devil (假洋鬼子), I should point out that not only does he not speak any English, he doesn’t even have an ‘English name’. Dude is just not interested in “sniffing after foreigners’ farts.”

Related stuff:

Our neighbourhood’s anti-Japanese restaurant

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Joel 大江

I ducked my head in this restaurant to see if they served dog. Turns out they don’t serve Japanese. And they totally weren’t seeing the slogan possibility with serving dog but not Japanese. Anyway:

“Diaoyu Islands are inherently China’s territory,
this restaurant will not receive Japanese people!”
钓鱼岛是中国固有领土，本店恕不接待日本人！

Interestingly enough, the restaurant right next door is also very patriotic, with “Comrade Mao Zedong” posters on the wall.

For more about popular Chinese hatred for Japan:

“A pile of loose sand” and civic consciousness in China

Posted on February 27, 2013 by Joel 大江

Read Ian Johnson’s Wild Grass: Three Portraits of Change in Modern China (2004). Plenty of important insights to be gained from this book, particularly since “evil cults” have been in the news again and Johnson does a great job illustrating why and how certain groups can be so brutally persecuted. A related insight that I find interesting is the challenge of developing “civic consciousness” among ordinary Chinese.

“A pile of loose sand” and the lack of Chinese civic consciousness
In the early 20th century, Dr. Sun Yat-sen famously referred to the Chinese as “a pile of loose sand” and apparently saw nationalism as the solution:

For the most part the four hundred million Chinese can be spoken of as completely Han Chinese with common customs and habits. We are completely of one race. But in the world today, what position do we occupy? Compared to the other peoples of the world we have the greatest population and our civilization is four thousand years old; we should therefore be advancing in rank with the nations of Europe and America. But the Chinese people have only family and clan solidarity; they do not have a hundred million people gathering together in China, in reality they are just a pile of loose sand.

That was almost a century ago. Today, China suffers from nationalism overload, yet the same lack of civic consciousness still plagues domestic China. Consider these comments from award-winning journalist Ian Johnson describing late-90′s China:

A friend of mine liked to argue . . . [that] the crackdown showed that Chinese actually didn’t care much about each other or the discrepancy in what they saw and what the [authorities] did. There was no solidarity with the persecuted, unless they were family members or personal friends. It was like the traffic accidents that one sees in big Chinese cities — crowds gather only to stare; almost no one stops to help. No wonder [the authorities] could hold on to power so easily, he said. It doesn’t have to divide and conquer its enemies; they are divided of their own accord. I had to agree with him, because I rarely encountered a person who got really angry about the way [the authorities] treated [the persecuted] adherents. While some far-thinking people saw the campaign as unjustified and cruel, most simply shrugged and wondered why people bothered to stand up for something they believed in. Concerned with their daily struggles, they couldn’t understand why [the persecuted] believers insisted on exercising publicly. “Why not just exercise in the living room?” was the most common response I got when I asked about the repression… [pp. 288-289].

For more about the specific persecuted group referred to above and a similar group, see these links:

Oh, the other Canada…

Posted on November 25, 2012 by Joel 大江

I’ve heard people joke, especially pre-9-11, about how Americans think there are only two kinds of people in the world: Americans and Foreigners. Well that applies at least as much in China; I’ve heard Chinese tell that joke about themselves, that there are only two countries: The Middle Kingdom and The Outside Kingdom. And to a Chinese learner’s half-tuned ear the way people talk sometimes sounds ridiculously funny, because when you hear things too literally all the time it sounds in Chinese (to you) as if “Foreign Country” is proper noun and people do think there literally are only two nations in the world.

In English we have “abroad” or “overseas” and those words don’t sound or look anything like Germany, the USA, France, etc. And we have to have an article in front of “foreign country” (a foreign country). In Chinese, many oft-used country names are two-syllable words all with the same last syllable: “~国” (“[~]” + “country”). For example:

德国 dé guó – Germany
法国 fă guó – France
美国 mĕi guó – USA
俄国 é guó – Russia

Pay attention to these last two:

中国 zhōng guó – China (literally: “central” + “country”)
外国 wài guó – abroad, overseas, a foreign country (literally: “outside” + “country”). “Foreigner” = “outside” + “country” + “person” (外国 + 人).

So whenever Chinese talk about going abroad, it literally sounds like they’re dividing the world into two different countries, even if they aren’t.

But sometimes… I wonder. This morning I was somewhere meeting a bunch of new people, and there was this kid, maybe 10(?), who was all about quizzing the foreigner while he had the rare chance.

Qingdao kid: “Where are you from?”

Me: “Canada.”

QK: [leans in, stares closely at my face] “But your eyes look like foreigner eyes.”

It took me a couple seconds to figure out what had happened. The kid had never heard of Canada, and “Canada” in Chinese isn’t “[~]” + “country” like all my examples above, it’s just a transliteration of the English: 加拿大 jiā ná dà. He heard a name for the first time, and it wasn’t obviously a country’s name, so he assumed it was somewhere in China.

Most of the adults present had a good laugh, though I’m not sure some of them weren’t as confused as the kid. We do occasionally bump into grown-ups who don’t know where Canada is or if it’s even a country.

And just to be fair, a week ago today we had a group lunch that included an American woman who ended up saying, “Shanxi? Where’s that? Is that in Qingdao?”

Anti-Japan protests channel uncomfortable amounts of Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Joel 大江

We were more than a little stunned when we first came to China a few years ago and discovered that people, even young, educated people, had strong, positive feelings for Chairman Mao and his legacy. I thought we’d gotten used to it, but seeing these photos and slogans from the anti-Japan protests made me realize I’m still amazed at how, despite everything that was done in his name and on his orders — in living memory! — the Party has altered his legacy in the minds of the people. Click the link or the photos to see more pictures of Mao at the protests:
Mao comes back to life amid wide spread anti-Japan protests in China

“Chairman Mao, the Japs are bullying us again.”

“Grandpa Mao says: ‘Get the dog-f—ing Japs!’”

On the influence of the Cultural Revolution in current Chinese politics: Total Denial and the Will to Forget

A collection of riot photos: In Photos: China’s anti-Japan fury

More about Mao’s legacy, real and imagined:

More about the Anti-Japan protests:

“Japanese and dog no nearing”

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Joel 大江

The Chinese government is allowing irate Chinese to protest publicly against Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands dispute (though things are getting out of hand and they’ve had to use tear gas and water cannons on some mobs, among other means of trying to put a lid on it.). Here’s a photo a friend in Tianjin took the other day:

“Japanese and dog no nearing” 日本人和狗不得靠近

There are two things you need to know about to have the most basic understanding of the photo above and why so many Mainland Chinese are freaking out over a couple of rocks in the Pacific: the Japanese invasion of China during WWII and the legacy of Western colonialism in China. (For now I’m skipping the psychological angle regarding repression, anger, anxiety, and stress due to current societal pressures in China that are unrelated to Japan, though no doubt that’s just as relevant.)

WWII and anti-Japan sentiment.
Any dispute with Japan, no matter how small, is automatically super-charged, waiting for a spark. When the Japanese invaded during WWII, they committed such atrocities that the Nanjing Massacre (aka The Rape of Nanking) is one of the few events in modern history that people dare to consider in the same league as the German Holocaust. However Japan has never made anything close to a satisfactory official apology (though some individual Japanese do), and victimhood is cemented into the Chinese psyche via their patriotic education. (See Why they hate the Japanese and Japanese apologies for more about this.) The anniversary of the Manchurian Incident, the staged even used as a pretext by the Japanese for launching their invasion of northern China in 1931, is September 18.

In WWII, real Chinese patriots destroyed their own Japanese-made vehicles, unlike the current crop of frustrated Chinese, who I’m representing with the photo above. Never mind that the “Japanese and dogs no nearing” sign is attached to a Japanese-made motorcycle. And never mind that it’s parked outside of a luxury Japanese shopping mall (Isetan – according to my friend who took the photo). This kind of irony is not uncommon. And this anti-Japanese sentiment is drawing on more than the Japanese WWII invasion; it’s also fueled by anti-colonial feelings. The “No dogs or ____” thing pops up whenever there’s a heated dispute with another country/race.

Colonialism and Anti-Western/Foreign Sentiment

“No dogs and Chinese allowed” 狗与华人不得入內

It’s debated whether or not the “No Dogs or Chinese” sign outside a Shanghai park in pre-Liberation China actually ever existed, but the truth of the matter is moot because it’s now a legendary part of the cultural fabric. The sign in the photo was famously smashed to bits by Bruce Lee in Fists of Fury, and it serves a symbol of national/racial/civilizational victimhood and humiliation. It’s automatically remembered in conflicts with foreign nations. Hence the license plate above, and this taxi sign below:

“Refuse to carry frenchmen and dogs” 不载法国人和狗

This was taken during the 2008 Olympic torch anti-French protests after some yahoo tried to steal the torch from a disabled Chinese athlete. The Olympics were such an emotionally charged event for the Chinese, and the protestor was protesting T!bet (another super-sensitive issue), so it sparked some popular resentment that drew on the “No Dogs or Chinese” legacy.

This “no dogs or peasants” signage is from a high-end shopping mall:

I assume it’s unintentionally ironic.

And finally, here’s a cute cartoon I found depicting the sensitivity of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Island dispute and the propensity of some (not all) Mainland Chinese to trash other people’s Japanese property. Japanese touching the islands is like pushing a “flip car button” in China:

“Flip car button” 翻车键

Click the image for the source.