Emotional wreck!

Phew, what an emotional weekend!
I cried more in one weekend than I have since.... since.. the day I said goodbye to my family at the airport.

The first time I cried was because I was wallowing in self pity. Side effect of Giardia?
The second time was when I showed "Miracle on 34th Street" to my class and suddenly realized how much I'm going to miss celebrating Christmas with my parents.
The third time was when I saw (via Skype) my entire extended family at their annual Thanksgiving luncheon, and learned that my cousin is pregnant and realized I couldn't celebrate with her in person.
The fourth time was when I Skyped with my parents today and they showed me the Christmas tree they bought, and I started to think how lonely they might feel on Christmas day opening gifts by themselves.
The fifth time was tonight when my students dazzled me with their performances at the host/hostess competition, and I realized how incredibly happy and proud I am to be their teacher.

Yeah, I need to get a grip.

Omg, I teared up after reading this.

get a grip, get a grip

Travel

我和我的朋友二月去柬埔寨度假十天。 我的朋友告诉我在那里玩得很开心。我等不及要去柬埔寨！
我觉得下次我待中国陆游。我家人告诉我一定要去北京， 因为北京有很多名胜古迹，比如说长城和天安门广场。我要去北京的陆游胜地，但是北京太远，而且我不喜欢太大的都市。我觉得重庆太大，我不喜欢，但是我知道重庆的夜生活和购物是很有名的。

alive and kickin!

I'm back! Yeaw, had a bad case of Giardia, but it seems like that little fucker has finally had enough of my intestines.

My students are sweet. I am up to my ears in fruit, and Jocelyn, who is also my tutor, just gave me an ear full on how I ought to take better care of myself. Honestly, I didn't eat shit on purpose! I don't even know how it happened...

agro-imperialism

ahk, no time to finish reading this, so will hold it here before it disappears into cyber never-neverland. seems like a great article!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/magazine/22land-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=magazine

obama zhuxi

The Peace Force's Commander in Chief is so close, but so far away. Hey, Obama, float on down the Yangtze, won't ya?

Interesting comments on his brief visit:
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/asian-readers-tell-us-what-obama-could-do-for-your-country/?hp

Dream Deferred

by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Unfinished

Ah I am messy and I need a decent place to store good links.
I will post this here so that later on, when I eventually watch Showboat and The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, I will think of Berlant. But I betcha I'll end up searching high and low for this baby:
http://magazine.uchicago.edu/0878/investigations/sentimental_ed.shtml


I finially FINISHED The Female Complaint. Reading it was slow work, but for the past several weeks I enjoyed having it with my breakfast. I've always dismissed the romance genre as dumb and unworthy of serious critique, and yet, when the demands of the day are almost too much to bear, I like to unwind with movies like He's Just Not That Into You. I guess I always thought it would be anti-feminist to be publicly intimate with this intimate public. In a way, chick flicks, especially those that make allusions to or are adaptions of movies that were originally released before the "liberation" of women, make the feminist in me feel dirty, kind of like a porn-watching preacher. And yet, even porn-watching preachers can save souls.


Often, these citations [of sentimental classics] are not so deep: they are gestures toward the tradition of sentimental adaption that explain this time around why the great transformative and fulfilling love, the revolution without the trauma, must remain imaginable whether or not it is possible, discernible only in its smoldering remains.

But what remains is a resource, an unfinished event. Adaptations of sentimental realism are always about splitting and bargaining to stay in the scene of the fantasy of the better good life, as atrophied and confused as the manifest content of that fantasy can be. Possessing the object of desire matters les in these texts than does the re-experience of poteniality - the "tomorrow" in today where one works with what one has in order to survive. The delicate historicity of sentimental work provides pointers to the materials available for transformative opportunity. These scenarios are also archives of tactics for being undefeated, and indeed it is an attachment to this archive that also magnetizes the intimate public. To become not-someting is to unlearn a way of being, to see affective and emotional recalibration not only as possible but as desirable. in other words, in the view of the intimate public, there is no politics without the sentimental aperture/overture because that promise of emotional continuity can sustain people in the social amid the flux of change.

- Lauren Berlant

plagiarism

Got English Cornered tonight. Holy moly, I really wish I could spend all of tomorrow in silence. But tomorrow's office hours is an indoor version of English Corner. Holy moly.

I am a not a monkey. I am not a monkey.

But I definitely am a fool.
I felt a kind of maternal pride after reading the first batch of midterm essays. Even in light of small grammatical errors, some of my students write beautifully and often surprise me with their prolific, poetic prose. But then I began to find essays containing the same beautiful lines.

Yeah, I was pissed. And yet, how could they cheat, much less plagiarize, on the essay section of an in-class exam?

I did some detective work and found out that nearly all of my students have been quoting or paraphrasing Mao's Little Red Book. Sure, some credit the man, but most don't bother, probably because his words come to them more naturally than their own - probably because their words are his words.

At the beginning of the semester, I swore to give them F's if I ever caught them plagiarizing.
But I've never been good at keeping promises, and this seems like a good one to break, though it certainly gives me no joy. After all, plagiarizing Mao is probably the safest thing a student could do here.

Maoism meets Obamaism

A student's essay on the role of young people in today's world:

I think young people today play an important role in society. Mao Zedong once said: "Young people are the sun of eight or nine o'clock in the morning." Young people are important for our country's development and strength. The world belongs to the young people, even though young people know little, are small, and don't have much experience.

After last year's Wen Chun earthquake, young people tried their best to help the people and use their own ways to tell the world "yes, you can." Not only in China, but in other countries. Young people play a role that can't be ignored.

I always believe that young people are the new leaders of the world. Anyway, fact or theory, the young people play an important role in today's society.

"We are the flower and future of our country"

A student's essay on discrimination:

Discrimination has existed from our life comes. No matter human being or animal, there is always discrimination. But discrimination by human beings is more serious. In ancient times, when our country was strong and had deep influence, we couldn't be discriminated. We were full of pride and other envied us. Then, when we were invaded by Japan and other countries, the more we experienced discrimination or were looked down upon. They called our Chinese "the patient of East Asia" and thought our "yellow skinned people" is inferior to "the white skinned people." This is race discrimination.

What's more, we had the glamorous and colorful culture in the past. We invented the compass, the ways to create paper and other two inventions. Then the western countries would learn from us. But when we are poor or weak, the other countries treated our culture as nothing.

So, to be the college students of China, we are the flower and future of our country. We must study harder and harder to calculate the experience and knowledge to make our country stronger. Just like in the past or even better. Only by building ourselves better, we can get rid of the discrimination.

20 Years of Collapse

By SLAVOJ ZIZEK

Published: November 9, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/09/opinion/09zizek.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

I wish I could read this excerpt to students whenever they ask me about what America thinks of China. Then instead of spinning something lame about how Americans are in awe of and perhaps even envious of China's economic growth, I could respond by saying, "Well, America is scared shitless, and for good reason:


A further twist is added by those countries in which Communists allowed the explosion of capitalism, while retaining political power: they seem to be more capitalist than the Western liberal capitalists themselves. In a crazy double reversal, capitalism won over Communism, but the price paid for this victory is that Communists are now beating capitalism in its own terrain.

This is why today’s China is so unsettling: capitalism has always seemed inextricably linked to democracy, and faced with the explosion of capitalism in the People’s Republic, many analysts still assume that political democracy will inevitably assert itself.

But what if this strain of authoritarian capitalism proves itself to be more efficient, more profitable, than our liberal capitalism? What if democracy is no longer the necessary and natural accompaniment of economic development, but its impediment?



I just wrote in Chad's little box what I was going to write here. I think Zizek nailed America's fear. It's true, impossible shit gets done here, and quickly too, thanks to big bad authoritarian capitalism. Consider Fengdu, for example. An entire city rebuilt because it's former self is now submerged as a result of the 3 Gorges Dam project. Nor will I ever forget the time Rach and I were escorted to our longdistance bus by Besty's army captain uncle. For the first time we were in Chengdu, I didn't have the urge to grumble about traffic. Betsy's uncle was like Moses, parting the Chengdu freeway. And for what? So we could catch a lousy bus!

If this isn't efficiency, I don't know what is.

But it seems like people here are always being told that their form of capitalism IS liberal, and that their form of government IS democratic. Aren't we in the west told the exact same things by the powers that be? So maybe capitalism is at the very least inextricably linked to the tale of democracy.

dress is always code

Gender Gap = Generation Gap?

Can a Boy Wear a Skirt to School?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/fashion/08cross.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=fashion

Excerpts:

Dress code conflicts often reflect a generational divide, with students coming of age in a culture that is more accepting of ambiguity and difference than that of the adults who make the rules....

Dress is always code, particularly for teenagers eager to telegraph evolving identities. Each year, schools hope to quell disruption by prohibiting the latest styles that signify a gang affiliation, a sexual act or drug use.

But when officials want to discipline a student whose wardrobe expresses sexual orientation or gender variance, they must consider antidiscrimination policies, mental health factors, community standards and classroom distractions.....


When a principal asks a boy to leave his handbag at home, is the request an attempt to protect a student from harassment or harassment itself?...

“One day I heard a student say, ‘Man, there was a girl in the guy’s restroom, standing up using the urinal! What’s up with that?’ ” Mr. Grace recalled.

Bathrooms can be dangerous for transgender students. But the other student replied off-handedly, “That wasn’t a girl. That’s just Jack.”

aborted abortions

Abortion Was at Heart of Wrangling

By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and JACKIE CALMES

Published: November 7, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/health/policy/08scene.html?hp

Excerpts:

To save the health care bill [Pelosi] had to give in to abortion opponents in her party and allow them to propose tight restrictions barring any insurance plan that is purchased with government subsidies from covering abortions...

“If enacted, this amendment will be the greatest restriction of a woman’s right to choose to pass in our careers,” said Representative Diana DeGette, Democrat of Colorado, one of the lawmakers who left Ms. Pelosi’s office mad.

Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, said the bill’s original language barring the use of federal dollars to pay for abortions should have been sufficient for the opponents. “Abortion is a matter of conscience on both sides of the debate,” Ms. DeLauro said. “This amendment takes away that same freedom of conscience from America’s women. It prohibits them from access to an abortion even if they pay for it with their own money. It invades women’s personal decisions.”

.....The representatives of the nation’s bishops made clear they would fight the bill if there were not restrictions on abortion. In an extraordinary effort over the last 10 days, the bishops conference told priests across the country to talk about the legislation in church, mobilizing parishioners to contact Congress and to pray for the success of anti-abortion amendments.

the moon and the scars

I particularly like these two passages from The Female Complaint:

1) This is why love's attack on memory is not usually considered a bad thing. Love is supposed to transcend or at least to neutralize the contradictions of history. When people enter into love's contract with the promise of recognition and reciprocity, they hope memory will be reshaped by it, minimizing out the evidence of failure, violence, ambivalence, and social hierarchy that would otherwise make love a most anxious desire for an end to anxiety. A fantasy norm unevenly bolstered by the institutions that are said to be its main supports, then, modern love requires the lover to produce an epistemology that works against the defenses of knowledge. In this convention, when love fails, the trauma of memory becomes a scar the failed lover carries around for life, declaring it as deserving of care, nostalgia, and mourning. But what is the failed lover ultimately mourning, if not the amnesia love's optimism creates?


2) As their smoke intermingles ... she says, "Oh Jerry. Don't let's ask for the moon! We have the stars!"

What does Charlotte mean by this phrase? Don't ask for a totalized object in love when we have so many bright and scattered opportunities? Or don't desire what you can't possess, and, ergo, desire what you can? Or, embrace your queerness, Jerry, don't be distracted by the big satellite when you can preserve the multiple practices and possibilities your desire has already created? Something about the difference between shining and twinkling? In the movie, the music swells when she makes this bargain, and the camera moves up to the starry sky, leaving the two lovers to their privacy.

Goya's Ghosts

Set in Spain during the French Revolution and the Inquisition, Goya's Ghosts portrays the irrational, ungodly power of institutions that claim to speak the truth. The film reveals that in corruption, torture and bloodshed, these two events, often considered together as a clash between reason and faith, actually have much in common. The "true faith" that promised Ines eternal freedom put her "to the Question," squeezed out of her a false confession, and kept her in prison for years. Her crime: refusing pork. She was released thanks to a creed authored in the tongue of Enlightenment, only to be driven insane by Lorenzo, her now-rational former lover and newly proclaimed apostate.

This film seems to warn that an arrogant belief in truth depends upon the production of lies, and the exercise of cold rationality necessitates the creation of insanity. After all, it was released during the Bush regime...

private violence in the public eye

As we do our best to assert private violence as a public concern, perhaps we must remember that such gross public exploitation of private affairs may intimidate even the boldest among us into keeping silent.

Following the whole Chris Brown-battering spectacle, I had so many questions for Rihanna. Why would someone with fame and wealth on her side go crawling back to her batterer? She had options. Like many others, I accused her of being stupid and weak. And I was disappointed in her for failing to be an example of strength for young women who are not fortunate enough to live such privileged lives.

But I had forgotten about the power of shame. Enough of it can paralyze us and make us want to hide within the often unsafe privacy of intimacy. For some of us who do have options - isn't that why we remain in violent relationships? Yet is a battered body really better than battered pride? But regardless of the choices we do or do not have, perhaps we should really look into the shame/pride dichotomy and think about how and why this duo has amassed such power.

Rihanna speaks: 'Love is so blind':

CNN http://edition.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/11/04/rihanna.good.morning.america/index.html

"There are a lot of women who experienced what I did, but not in the public, so [that] made it really difficult," she said. "I just thought 'Oh my God,' here goes my little bit of privacy. Nobody wants anybody to know, and here I am, the whole world knowing."

That photo, allegedly distributed by two Los Angeles Police Department officers, made a bad situation worse, she told Glamour magazine.

"It was humiliating; that is not a photo you would show to anybody," the songstress said. "I felt completely taken advantage of. I felt like people were making it into a fun topic on the Internet, and it's my life. I was disappointed, especially when I found out the photo was [supposedly leaked by] two women."

Rihanna told "Good Morning America" that Brown was definitely her first love, but that the more in love they became, the more dangerous the relationship turned. It was a reality she was too embarrassed too admit.

"I didn't want people to think that I fell in love with that person," she said. "That's embarrassing that that's the type of person I fell so far in love with, so unconditionally, that I went back."

People put her on a pedestal "with all these expectations," she said, "but I'm a human being, and I'm not perfect." Now, she can admit it was a mistake to give the relationship a second chance.

Nearly 10 months have passed since her secret came tumbling out for the world to see, and Rihanna said it was her fans who helped her finally speak up about domestic violence.

drinking tea from an empty cup

"Don't think about that home, Anjin-san," Mariko had once said when the dark mists were on him. "Real home is here - the other's ten million times ten million sticks away. Here is reality. You'll send yourself mad if you try to get wa out of such impossibilities. Listen, if you want peace you must learn to drink cha from an empty cup."

She had shown him how. "You think reality into the cup, you think the cha there - the warm, pale-green drink of the gods. If you concentrate hard ... Oh, a Zen teacher could show you, Anjin-san. It is most difficult but so easy. How I wish I was clever enough to show it to you, for then all things in the world can be yours for the asking ... even the most uobtainable gift - perfect tranquility."

- James Clavell, Shogun (858)

underworld

Good news: chest pains are gone
Bad news: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/asia/04crimewave.html?_r=1

Chongqing = big bad city???

chest pains

My heart is sore. It's as if it's breaking, and I don't know why. Deep breaths, deep breaths.

I noticed the pain when I awoke at 3am from a bad dream. I almost never dream, so when I do, I tend to think it's quite significant. Usually I'd email Jordan and ask him to interpret for me. But this time, the mere thought of what this dream could mean me scares me.

In this nightmare, I was at the funeral of someone I like very much. I was standing in front of his grave wearing a long black dress, holding flowers and reminiscing about the tender moments we shared together (none of which have actually happened.) In spite of the tears that kept streaming down my face, I was lost in my (dream-world) memories of him and was experiencing joy that was pure and sublime. When I could almost feel his face pressing against mine, I remembered that he was dead -- then I woke up, feeling both horrified by his death and elated from having been loved in such a way.

I remember thinking: Oh crap, if anything happens to him anytime soon, I will freak out.
Then I went back to sleep.

When I woke up again at a more decent hour, ready to start the day, the pressure on my chest was immense. Did the dream cause it? Or am I just under stress?


I wouldn't doubt that stress has something to do with it. My actions and reactions seem to come from someone other than me. I barely recognize myself, and it's starting to scare me.

For example, this afternoon as I was walking to my office, some kid hit me with his soccer ball. Granted he wasn't aiming for me, but he shouldn't have been kicking a ball that hard when there were people walking nearby. When the ball hit me, it slammed into my hand and sent my water bottle flying across the sidewalk. Without even thinking, I turned around and shouted: FUCKING WATCH IT!

He apologized meekly and I could understand his friend well enough to get the gist of his comment: "I didn't understand her. I think she was speaking English. She said you should fuck-in wachit."

Oh I felt horrible after. What if one of my students heard? What if the one of my fellow teachers heard? And why the heck couldn't I control my temper? I've never sworn at anybody before - not loudly and to their face, anyway.

It was as if all of the frustration that has been building up over the past month exploded out of me at that moment.

When I got to my office, I did all I could to compose myself before I had to go to tutoring. But all that yelling exacerbated my heart ache, and the deepest of breaths did diddly to calm me.

So, either my heart is breaking for the death of a love that never happened, or my chest hurts from the prickly stuff that is quickly growing over my heart. I hate to say it, but I really do think China is changing me, and while I'm glad that it's making me into a tougher person, I'm not quite sure I like who I'm becoming.

apathetic to apathy

I saw THREE kids sleeping in one of my Oral English classes today.
I almost went ballistic.
It took all the nerve I had not to drag each one out of the room by the ear.

I calmed down, though, because it's always the same three who contaminate the classroom with their apathy. I already sing and dance, what else do they want?? A nap, they want a nap. They probably want me to stop all my edutainment stunts so they can nap more peacefully.

The sad thing is that, as the weeks go by, I feel myself becoming more apathetic toward their apathy. I use to yell, my eyes used to twitch and bulge, and I would show them the big zeros I was writing for them in my grade book. Now, I do my best to ignore them, knowing that while an explosion of anger will certainly ruin their dreams, it will also ruin the rest of my day.

Have I given up on them? Perhaps, but if they're not going to meet me half way, why should I jump through hoops for them? But am I expected to go out of my way for them? Is it my job? Basically, the dilemma is: to care or not to care.

I feel bad for kids like Jany. She sits in the front and stares at me with her big eyes, eager to absorb everything I dribble out. And what does she get? A grumpy teacher.


I try not to play favorites, but there is one class that outshines the rest. Just so happens it's immediately before my dreaded apathetic class.

Today in this golden class, I happened to take a peek at a student's script for their horror skit.
The line that caught my eye went something like this:

Mr. Yuan: "Oh fuck it! Holy shit, shit, it's a ghost!"

"Um, you can't say that in front of the class, okay?"
"Okay, Kacie. Are those words too informal?"
"Yes, well, sort of. I'll tell you about them later."

Lol, can't you see why I like them?

James Clavell: My Japanese Squeeze

People tend to think that just because I've got Japanese blood in my veins, I can speak, read and write Japanese. Thus, they assume learning Chinese is easy for me. WRONG! The sad thing is that they would probably be right if only I hadn't goofed off so much in Japanese school.

If it's any compensation, I've been picking up some Japanese from James Clavell's Shogun.
OMG, it is so good! I was in the mood for adventure and romance, so I stole the book from the library in my office. I doubt any of my students would be interested in reading a 1200 page novel in English, much less Chinese.

Usually I'm unfairly critical of white authors whose stories are set in non-white lands, and while I do think that Clavell romanticizes Samurai life, I think he does a brilliant job with juxtaposing Japanese and Western brutality, as well as the different values and rituals these cultures uphold as meaningful.

But aside from all the fighting and hacking off of heads, the love story between Blackthorn and Mariko, a poignant part of the plot that is woven so subtly into the rest of the story, is absolutely beautiful....

Yet nothing about their romance makes me wish I could be Mariko. I know I could not endure her world, even for the sake of love. I wonder if that is an indication of the novel's failure... or of its success.

stratospheric stress

This is depressing:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/education/edlife/01public-t.html

Excerpts:

Universities have reached deep in their pockets to protect vulnerable students from tuition increases. Mark G. Yudof, president of the University of California, defends his university’s record in preserving financial aid, noting that families with incomes under $60,000 pay not one penny of their fees. “The real crunch,” he says, is helping families that make roughly $100,000. “The most at risk at this time really are going to be the middle class.”


Mr. Shulenburger sees the tuition increases as part of a larger movement toward privatization of the most desirable flagships. With state contributions largely flat or down over the last 15 years, and enrollments and costs up, many top flagships are turning to nonpublic sources for money and, in some cases, accepting larger numbers of out-of-state students, who often pay twice the tuition of residents.

At the same time, applications are pouring in from students shut out by the stratospheric cost of private colleges. That’s generally a good thing. Flagships are attracting more wealthy and better-prepared students. Yet as the counterargument goes, a flagship’s traditional mission is to educate its own, especially a state’s low- and middle-income students. The evolution under way is putting some flagships out of reach for the students who were typically enrolled even a decade ago. Each year, the quality of students as well as the budget model skews closer to that of elite private universities.

All this makes me scared to go back to school. What has this got to do with UH? Well, "stratospheric costs" seem to be contagious. And depth trickles down faster than wealth. And I worry about affording school after UH.

Nobody better touch the Regents Scholarship. I think that might be the last hope for the middle class, local young'uns. As for prospective grad students: we're screwed.