The Tainted Quill

A carnal lover of books, an avid traveler, a voracious eater, and a novice writer.

[margotsoso-blog]

"It was one part that could not be chained." @Sex Museum in Tongli.

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May 35th

Orwell expressed that language can corrupt thought. It is of the utmost importance to find the right way to express something, as it will decide how a person remembers or does not remember a historical event.

This Tuesday, June 4th, marks the 24th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 that happened in China. Unlike September Eleventh or Pearl Harbor in the States, the anniversary of Tiananmen is not a day of remembrance, nor, I’m sure, will it be publicly discussed. The student protests began after the death of Hu Yaobang, who was the General Party Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. Hu was popular with the people because he was trying to reform a number of government policies, making the government more transparent and loosening its grip on the economy. These changes got Hu booted out of the CCP in 1987: he was forced to resign.

After dying in disgrace, people who were upset by Hu’s removal began petitioning to have his legacy restored, which then led to other demands: eliminate restrictions on protests, end newspaper censorship, and direct more money toward education. The protests escalated, and eventually the decision was made to suppress the protests with military force.

To this day, information on the event remains inaccurate because the government refuses to share what actually happened. The CCP seems incapable of self-reflection (at least publicly) and admitting that it made a mistake. Instead it denies the truth, misinforms the public, and manipulates the past. But the only way this could be done is through the language and coverage the event receives. Obviously all foreign journalists were banished following the crackdown and Chinese newspapers and reporters were used as the instruments of the government, but those tactical moves were easy. If the government really wanted to control how the people thought about Tiananmen they would have to think carefully about what they were going to call it.

 A name means everything, mainly because certain words are charged with different emotions. Take for example the words “martyr” and “terrorist.” If suicide bombers—people willing to die in order to kill others—are called martyrs, then they are being thought of in a much more honorable light than they would be if they were called terrorists, which is what our culture does call them.

Tiananmen Square has many names, each designed to manipulate how the public remembers 6/4/89. “Counterrevolutionary riot” was used to justify suppressing the demonstration with military force, as the word “riot” suggests that protestors were out of control. But this was while the events were taking place. The name given to the crackdown would be fundamental, because the name would be the only smokescreen for the government to hide behind. It would have to both establish a historical truth for future generations and somehow alter what actually happened for the generation that witnessed it. What began as a riot has been diluted to “the political turmoil between the spring and summer of 1989.”

The public of Mainland China mostly refers to it as the June Fourth Incident or June Fourth. These are neutral compared to the more emotionally and politically charged names that are used outside of Mainland China, especially in Hong Kong: The June Fourth Massacre, The June Fourth Crackdown. Still, the names people of Mainland China use suggest they have some idea that much more happened than what they have been told, but vague language is what they’ve been taught to use and what they know how to use. And in the age of the internet, the people must be especially careful about the language they use. Certain events and topics cannot be discussed in China; the June Fourth Incident is one of them, but some people have figured out that certain things can be discussed if they use alternative language to bypass the internet censors.

During the 2009 anniversary, the Great Firewall’s security was heightened to a monumental degree, as any foreign site that made any mention of Tiananmen was blacked out. This, of course, is another form of a “pro-democracy crackdown:” it is a crackdown on the people’s access to information. References to “May 35th” on internet chat sites were used by Chinese netizens to discuss Tiananmen and the heightened security that was seen around the country for that day’s anniversary. May 35th is a made up date that may also be referencing the May Fourth Movement that happened in Tiananmen Square in 1919. The internet has certainly made it difficult for the government to keep unwanted information and discussion from occurring, yet no organized action seems to come from it.

Young people are reasonably in the dark about the June Fourth Incident. A friend of mine who also teaches English at a university asked one of her young Chinese colleagues what she knows about Tiananmen to which she responded, “Oh, that’s when all the students were sent back to their hometowns by the government.” The conversation ended there. It’s best not to try and convince them otherwise, because, in truth, we don’t really know any differently ourselves. Some of my Chinese friends are convinced that I am the one who is brainwashed, and maybe it’s true. I certainly don’t think that all the information I am exposed to is completely transparent, and perhaps I think and feel the way I do because I was told to. China is not the only nation that knows how language can be used to manipulate/corrupt/change the way people think or what they think. It’s a very powerful tool. Perhaps, in this respect, every society is an Orwellian society.

[wexler]

[theniftyfifties]

Vincent Price for Smirnoff, Life magazine, 1955. Photo by Bert Stern.

[margotsoso-blog]

Brilliant!

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WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?

A fountain pen.

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It's just a notebook

Behold: my photo collection of Chinese notebooks. These are all the different notebooks I have seen my students with over the course of the year. They range from ridiculous to even more ridiculous, and I really don’t even understand what most of them are saying. Take this first one, for example. I have no idea what could possibly be meant by “you a chicken-hearted softie,” though it did remind me of a Shakespearean insult from King Lear: “a lily-livered, action-taking knave.” It’s actually worded like a Shakespearan insult. Still, I’m not sure what the entire quote and the puppy face have to do with each other.

I asked my student about this next one. He said he bought it at a cart that always parks right outside the school. There are always carts on the street that sell these ridiculous notebooks. The Chinglish must make sense to the students, though this student didn’t really have a reason for picking this particular one out from the large pile of notebooks. I would assume it has something to do with the fact that he can pretend he is a secret agent. Sometimes university in China feels more like middle school, or even elementary school.

I’m not sure if these are song lyrics or what, but there is something rather disturbing about this notebook cover. It’s just strange that any girl would ever want a notebook that so blatantly states this, though the design is definitely  very Chinese and one that would attract most girls. This is actually how a lot of my female students dress.

“Everything comes in order to exist”—I should get my head out of the gutter. “Survival of the fittest” is an idea quite popular with the Chinese, I would have to say. Except I think they have a very cutthroat interpretation of it—you do whatever you can to reach the top and don’t worry about what you do or who you hurt in the process. I have read, and see among my students, that Chinese people can be very awful to each other.

This notebook is my favorite. In case you can’t read what it says, here is a recreation of the three lines beneath “I am an elephant:” Hi, How are you? I am an elephant, not a telephone. Elephants live on the plain or in the zoo. What does that even mean? I really need to conduct an experiment and see how many Chinese people actually know what these are trying to say. It’s also curious, I suppose, that they would even bother translating sayings and quotes into English on these notebooks. Chinese people buy them, so the covers might as well be in Chinese.

No, Chinese people aren’t vampires. Blood type is believed to affect people’s personalities in most East-Asian cultures, especially Japan. People who have blood type B are considered to be more practical than people of other blood types. They are very goal-oriented and focus on everything they need to reach a goal until it is met. Obviously this person believes he/she would be compatible with a person who has this blood type.

Isn’t this a giraffe? If it were a deer it might make a little more sense, because then “deer” could be a play on the word “dear,” which is, I’m quite positive, what the word is supposed to be. My students really like all these little sayings about “the happy life,” having a rich and colorful life, and wishing each other all the best of life. I guess it’s cute.

And last but not least, “A Chinese History” written in French. This notebook cover has a popular propaganda poster with a happy, cherubic-cheeked Mao waving to his people. And in the background we see the many workers cheering for their great Chairman. Mao’s face can be found on every piece of currency in china, which is a brilliant way of making sure that future generations remember the fearless leader that established the Communist Party in China.

 My student stated that he didn’t buy it for any ideological reasons; he really doesn’t care about Mao. His face is everywhere, he’s responsible for completely changing the culture and course of China, but my students know very little about him. They really don’t care. My student says that this is just a notebook.

[simplymagdorable]

Sylvie Vartan is wearing a suit by Dior. Marie Claire France March 1964

(image scanned by Magdorable)

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Such a great suit. J'adore Dior.

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Possibly my favorite photo taken in China. This was taken in the Muslim quarter of Xi'an at a street market.

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The Uncensored Bucket List

I did an Oral English lesson on bucket lists for the last class of the semester. It’s easy to only see my students as faceless drones, but getting an insight into their deepest desires and lifelong goals gives them faces. I first shared with my students a few items on my own bucket list—I want to start my own literary journal, I want to have two daughters and a son, I want to perform Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre in London. I explained that these deep-seated desires aren’t so much goals as hopes of who I will be in this world. Who you are is very different from what you are and what you are supposed to be doing.

Unfortunately, most of us realize this late in life or on our death beds. In a TED Talk by Kathleen Taylor, she says that the dying people she works with through her job at Hospice have a tremendous sense of clarity that allows them to live and speak without abandon, hence the purpose of a bucket list. This clarity comes from the fact that when people are dying, Taylor says, all the bullshit melts away. You stop pretending. You stop kidding yourself. You see yourself for who you really are. The only other moment in our lives I can think of where this depth of clarity might come to us is in a moment of failure. J.K. Rowling saw failure as a blessing in disguise because it stripped away everything that was unimportant and gave her a solid foundation to rebuild her life on (she was finally able to sit down and write that book).

So I suppose my final Oral English lesson was about how my students could live their lives better, how they should care about who they are and not what they are or are not doing. Because a bucket list is not a list of things to be checked off once they have been completed, but a reminder of the things in life that are most important, that we actually should care about. And the sooner we make our bucket lists, perhaps the happier our lives will be.

My students seem to be living lives that are uninspired. I know that we all don’t wear our hopes and fears on our sleeves, but my students’ lack of expression makes them come across as vapid and superficial. But it’s not that they do not have hopes and fears for and about the future: it is that they are not sure they can express them. British photographer Adrian Fisk traveled around China to find its real voice, the voice of its young people. In a photo essay he asked men and women between the ages of 16 and 24 to write down their single most important thought to be photographed. In order to get them to say something real, Fisk had to gain their trust. In their very best English, thoughts expressed ranged from “if I have a sister would be better!” to “why people must to get married?” The most touching photograph was of a young woman farmer in Qinghai province who held a blank card because she was illiterate and said “my husband and I want to become migrant laborers, so we can work hard to make ourselves and our parents happy.”

Personal happiness and the happiness of their families is something several of my students consider important. Mary wants to travel all over the world with her family, live with them for life, live more happily than before, and buy a big house for her parents to live in. Mary is not my best student, but she does try very hard. I always dread having to grade her presentations because I can never understand a word she says or even know what topic she was presenting until she hands in her outline. It’s not even that she has an accent that makes her difficult to understand; it seems to be a real physical struggle for her to pronounce words, say complete sentences. The fact that she speaks about a mile a minute doesn’t help matters either. Based on her willingness to try her best in spite of her embarrassment over her level of English, I can certainly see her as being a very family-oriented person. I’ve never asked her about this, but I always imagine that Mary comes from some rural area in China, that her parents are poor farmers, that she managed to score high on the Gaokao and is now at university in Shanghai to try and make something of herself and provide a better life for her parents. This Cinderella tale is probably not true (most students at this school are well-to-do), but something in Mary’s appearance and demeanor sets her apart from the other students and suggests that she is not from a city.

Helen’s bucket list was full of ambition, which is something I expected from the student who always pays attention and actually takes notes on the rhetorical triangle, how to correctly organize a presentation, and appropriate presentation body language. Helen is always trying to improve herself, looking to be the very best that she can be. No taller than 4’11” and not weighing anything more than 75 pounds, Helen has an enormous presence when she gives a presentation. She speaks the best English of all the students I teach, and when she gives a presentation I can actually grade her on the content of her speech and not just on whether she stresses and pronounces words correctly. Her bucket indicates that she really wants to become a useful person who is useful in the world: “I want to read as many books as I can; I want to learn to read people; I want to travel around the world and find out what I can do to benefit it.”

Zack had much simpler desires than Helen, though I’m sure his life is anything but simple as he is quite obviously a gay man. Still, his mannerisms and orientation don’t seem to garner him any hatred or lack of acceptance from his peers. I still imagine that his life is filled with a great deal of confusion. I’m sure there isn’t much room or freedom for him to talk openly, and while his peers and most people are tolerant of who he is, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re understanding. Maybe they aren’t even aware. Maybe Zack isn’t even aware. Maybe my speculation is wrong, but it’s a reasonable one to make based on his high-pitched voice and the way he carries himself. Zack wants to be a performer. He one day hopes to take part in a singing competition like China Idol and perform in a drama. Other than that, his bucket list shows just how much he wants to enjoy life: “I want to eat as many beef sticks as I possibly can; I want to ride a rollercoaster until I throw up.”

I feel as though my students’ bucket lists are reaching for a happiness that exists beyond China’s constraints. To analyze each one would be to find what in their lives they are unhappy with right now. It would be to find what restrictions they face that prevent them from finding “true happiness,” or as Mary puts it a life that is happier than the ones they are now living. And so, students expressed their desire to have a pet, to build their own house, to have more than one child—a son and a daughter. Many want to study abroad, travel abroad, live abroad. Phei—a girl with giraffes on her notebooks, folders, pencils, paper—wants to raise a giraffe. Michelle, a girl obsessed with Gossip Girl, wants to be even slimmer than she is and be able to eat everything without getting fat. Jane wants to charter a rocket, and Chris wants to fight in a war.

My students aren’t lying on their death beds, but somehow giving them ten minutes to write down what in life is really important to them was enough to make them feel that sense of clarity where all the bullshit is wiped away and you’re left with the knowledge of who you really are. And knowing what they find important gave me a better sense of who they really are. I was finally able to see my students as individuals, but it was, unfortunately, our last class. A perfect example of a moment of clarity coming too late: I should have made the effort to get to know my students as people at the beginning of the year, not now that I will never see them again.