Literature-ification

A few days ago, one of my students, Susan, a girl whose enthusiasm is match only by her capacity for messy writing, asked me during class if I thought life was like theater and theater like life. I was a bit taken aback to get a question like this from one of my grade ones, but it was a good reminder that these kids are really smart and that so often my perception of them is colored by the fact that their language skills simply lack far behind their reasoning abilities. This has proved a real challenge in some of our debates and discussions and is certainly something I've felt in my study of Chinese; a 24-year old mind expressing itself in a 10-year old's vocabulary. But, to get back to the original story, I answered simply that I thought it was certainly true in some ways, but that the comparison wasn't perfect. After class though it got me thinking about this relationship and I wondered if occasionally writing about my life had made me think of things in a literary way. Events become stories to be told with a beginning, middle and an end, and the people in my life becoming the characters who drive those stories. But something I struggled to find the words to describe to Susan is that I think such a comparison results in a oversimplfication, by nature of the genre. Literature is both powered and limited by the fact that the author must make choices about what to include. While it enables the writer to illuminate a particular point or develop their theme of choice, you cannot describe every leaf of every tree nor can you construct a literary relationship to match the complexities of its real life counterpart. So, the questions for today are which parts of you would form your character? Which events define you? What role would you play?

Tibet beginnings

So, I've had a lot of trouble writing a significant post about my travels to Tibet over the Spring Festival holiday without it sounding like some horrible list of what I did (the bane of both blogs and travel writing). At first I thought I was just lazy, secondly that I had some kind of blogger's block, but at this point I've come to the conclusion that there are just some things that it's hard or maybe even impossible for me to write about. I think that this moment of giving up is the strongest endorsement yet that I've really got no future in writing. Good writing makes us feel as though we ourselves have loved, hated, journyed, or experienced whatever it is the author wants to tell us, but if I feel I took anything from this trip it's the importnace of personal experience. I tend to think these days that it's a lack of personal experience that accounts for so many misconceptions around the world. What's worse than complete ignorance (a word that has for too many people annoyingly become synonomous with stupid)? Incomplete information whether willfully selective and misleading, as in propaganda, or unintentional, as in the case of most of us who take what we're told at face value and don't take the time to question things or look at them from a variety of informed perspectives. For example, Tibet has, in Liuyang and around China, taken on a kind of fantasy full-filling quality from its appearances in magazines and musical montages on t.v. and nobody really seems to know anything real about it. A myth, like most, built on hearsay and conjecture. Apart from the awe and wonderment that colors every image, there is also a sense of remoteness and fear of a journey. For centuries this may have been justified, but several teachers here seemed quite convinced that their heart would stop or their head might explode on arrival. Maybe the most disturbing thing is that people seem content with their myths, and will fight to the death to keep them.
So, is this a rant to excuse not writing about travelling? Maybe, but tough noogies and I'll try to do better next time.

A Grey Hair in My Tofu

There's alot of talk these days about the greying of China, social security and health care for the elderly, so I thought we should take a minute to examine a few perspectives on aging in China - When a man reaches the fine age of forty years, he, like a fine cheese or an oaky port has reached his peak and we can call him Yi zhi hua, a flower. A woman on the other hand who finds herself looking back on her 40th is dou fu zha, which is the useless curds left over after making tofu. Other ways our students described women during a class discussion on age and beauty include as a flower at 20, a vollyball at 30 and a football at 40. Finally in a stunnig display of vocabulary by a boy from the back of the class, but equally stunning in it's level of inappropriateness (is that a word), a woman of 40 is "excrement". Rest assured he was beaten up thoroughly by the girls following that comment.