First day teaching ESL
Apr. 27th, 2004 06:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icarusSo today I met my new student. She's from China and speaks intermediate level English.
She comes across, of course, like a little child, or someone without much education. I know better from my own experience of trying to speak German and Tibetan, but our perceptions of each other are so based upon language - how we use it, our vocabulary, what we choose to say - that I was still surprised that she was college-educated.
Her manner was matter-of-fact about it. You could tell it was expected, not a special or proud achievement.
I recall that China used to have a real deep separation between the sexes. Women weren't educated at all, and there was a lot female infanticide. I know who changed this: Mao Tse-Tung, the same man responsible for the Cultural Revolution and the destruction of Tibet. I wonder how many revolutions are so double (and triple and quadruple) edged. The definition of evolution is just 'change over time,' but some changes we can accept and some we can't. The very same policy of equal education took my friend Kyid-pe from his nomadic family, shipped him to a Chinese boarding school where he wasn't allowed to speak Tibetan, where he was was told what his name was now... and given a Chinese name. The kids were cruel because in a school of a couple hundred there were only four Tibetans who weren't allowed to associate with each other because they were to be Chinese now. The Great Leap Forward.
When he went home, years later, he couldn't find his family.
To the school administrators, they were educating a barbarian, doing him a favour. Without their intervention he would have raised horses and yak and never learned to read and write. This was a goal we would laud. But he wasn't given an equal education. That would have been taking it too far, because he wasn't really Chinese. Even if he had a Chinese name.
I wonder if there's also a sense of educating women, but only so far. My college-educated student, her husband's a Chinese Physicist, a Ph.D. There's still female infanticide.
I suspect that the bind Kyid-pe was caught in has less to do with the Cultural Revolution, and more to do with Chinese culture as a whole - that view of outsiders as barbarians - and how difficult that is to change. I suddenly feel a little empathy for Mao, despite all the suffering his unilateral policies caused.
She comes across, of course, like a little child, or someone without much education. I know better from my own experience of trying to speak German and Tibetan, but our perceptions of each other are so based upon language - how we use it, our vocabulary, what we choose to say - that I was still surprised that she was college-educated.
Her manner was matter-of-fact about it. You could tell it was expected, not a special or proud achievement.
I recall that China used to have a real deep separation between the sexes. Women weren't educated at all, and there was a lot female infanticide. I know who changed this: Mao Tse-Tung, the same man responsible for the Cultural Revolution and the destruction of Tibet. I wonder how many revolutions are so double (and triple and quadruple) edged. The definition of evolution is just 'change over time,' but some changes we can accept and some we can't. The very same policy of equal education took my friend Kyid-pe from his nomadic family, shipped him to a Chinese boarding school where he wasn't allowed to speak Tibetan, where he was was told what his name was now... and given a Chinese name. The kids were cruel because in a school of a couple hundred there were only four Tibetans who weren't allowed to associate with each other because they were to be Chinese now. The Great Leap Forward.
When he went home, years later, he couldn't find his family.
To the school administrators, they were educating a barbarian, doing him a favour. Without their intervention he would have raised horses and yak and never learned to read and write. This was a goal we would laud. But he wasn't given an equal education. That would have been taking it too far, because he wasn't really Chinese. Even if he had a Chinese name.
I wonder if there's also a sense of educating women, but only so far. My college-educated student, her husband's a Chinese Physicist, a Ph.D. There's still female infanticide.
I suspect that the bind Kyid-pe was caught in has less to do with the Cultural Revolution, and more to do with Chinese culture as a whole - that view of outsiders as barbarians - and how difficult that is to change. I suddenly feel a little empathy for Mao, despite all the suffering his unilateral policies caused.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-04-27 08:21 pm (UTC)I don't know about crediitng Mao with the bridging of the gap between sexes ... I'm interested as to why you say that. I wouldn't have called Mao's policies entirely unilateral - instead of putting everyone on the same level, it had a bit of a seesaw effect. For instance, my father was the head of his class until the Cultural Revolution, and then selections for the Red Guard started and he didn't get in til the very end because he was class president and not a peasant. Mao was primarily for the proletariat - not so much for evening things out as for having the working class prevail. I think this has had the detrimental effect of causing suspicion and a fierce competition between people in China - they don't often trust strangers, aren't friendly to anyone but people they know.
That's what I've gleaned through exposure, anyway, may or may not be accurate.