Reading And/Or Writing

One of my courses is called “Reading and Writing,” it is a writing-intensive, topic non-specific literature course for English majors. The kind of course where you really can make anything you like out of it. Responding to student writing has been a challenge–I know perfectly well that pointing out every error can seriously discourage language learners, and so “choosing my battles” has been something I’ve had to take very seriously. What I hadn’t thought about was the question of modeling.

First, it’s not plagiarism

I had to deal with the question of plagiarism a lot, and right away. The very first writing assignment I gave (a summary of “Bartleby, The Scrivener”) came back with well upwards of 50% of students copying directly from Wikipedia or other easily googlable source. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that if everyone was doing it, there mst be some fundamental misunderstanding, I threw out that assignment and had them all start from scratch. I had several students remark confusedly that their English Language teachers had encouraged them to find good examples of English and copy them to add to their own vocabulary and usage. Giving these past English teachers the benefit of some doubt, I suggested that they had misunderstood their English teachers who were not talking about copying whole paragraphs or whole essays, but individual turns of phrase. And that the goal was not to “copy” them but to take them as a model, learn the nuances of the wording that interested them, and then make that wording their own. Phew! Stage One accomplished, we were ready to move to Stage Two.

On Bartleby, and Scrivening

I assigned Bartleby as the first piece because it is relatively short, and I’ve had good luck discussing a wide variety of issues springing from Bartleby in the past. I confess, I didn’t think all that much about the vocabulary in it except to think that Melville is a great writer and that they would have exposure to a major piece of short American literature.

And then came “imprimis.” Melville uses the word “imprimis” early on in the story. One of my students asked me what it meant, reasonable enough. I replied that it meant “first” or “first of all,” an off the cuff definition not so far from the one Merriam Webster gives. Then my students went home to write some more. Lo and behold when the next batch of writing came in, several students used “imprimis” in their essays. Awkward, in several senses of the word. I hadn’t told them that the usage was antiquated. I hadn’t explained that to revive the usage would not make them sound educated and fluent, but instead, at best, priggish.

A Problem of Orwellian Proportions

Not long after Bartleby, we read Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” in part because I was feeling the desire for more shared meta-vocabulary to discuss language and writing. You may recall that Orwell rages against, among other things, “dead metaphors” in this piece. Several of my students complained anxiously that they would have no idea what metaphors were dead and what alive–how could they know what was overused in English? While we discussed some ways they might guess, for example, metaphors involving long dead technology were likely to be dead themselves, the larger point the students made was sound. How could they find out what was standard usage? In answer, I pointed them towards reference works like Garner’s Modern American Usage, and I think that will help, but it has actually changed how I talk about the literature we read a lot. I find myself being freer with value judgements, a la Orwell that I would rarely if ever have made in my American classrooms: “This phrase is eloquent; This one sounds brusque; He is being abrupt/sarcastic/ironic; This is a lovely phrase here but would be antiquated if written now.”

In Literature Classes, we don’t Write as We Read

That seems to be the moral of the story, and not a particularly opaque one at that. There are some forms of writing that we can read and use as a model. But many, indeed most, of the pieces we are inclined to teach in literature classes do not make good models for student essay writing, and teaching the differences between genres of writing seems to be a bigger job in an advanced ESL classroom.

Never was it more clear to me, though, than a few weeks later teaching Edgar Allen Poe. I love Poe’s prose style, adore it. But I was very glad to have had these conversations already by the time the Poe rolled around, lest I had to read tales of their phantasmagorically difficult assignments that crept up on them like fog over a black and lifeless tarn…

Many years ago, at Phillips Academy, I decided to study Russian. It was my 3rd year in High School and the academic year 1992-1993. The Soviet Union had fallen. Gorbachev was gone. I had seen the Hunt for Red October, but I was not studying Russian because “It is wise to study the ways of one’s adversary.” I came of age in a time when the Cold War was already warming–I had never personally thought of the Russians as “the enemy.”

At 16, I had no idea that this was precisely the moment that people were turning away from studying Russian in droves. My decision to study Russian was basically apolitical–lots of my friends were studying Russian. Amazingly, the Russian Club was cool (for certain incredibly geeky values of “cool”) and I wanted to be involved with all the great Russian-based activities at school–I was in it for the чай. And as the title of our adorably outdated Soviet textbook told it, Russian (was for) Everybody!

Oh the Humanities

My teachers also did not seem invested in “othering” Russia and Russians; they were interested in language, literature, and culture. In that way, my Russian class was no different from the Spanish classes that had preceded it. I only began to think recently about how different that experience might have been if I had been 10 (or 20, or 30) years older, or if my teachers had had a different attitude. It’s a question that, while I’ve been living here in China, has been repeating in my head: In times of global conflict, when is studying foreign languages not part of the liberal arts? 

And it’s not just conflict. A colleague of mine tells a story of meeting a English professor from Japan at a conference and getting her card. “Department of Economics” the card read, and my colleague of course asked: “But I thought you taught English?” the professor from Japan replied, “The English courses are all taught in the Economics department.” The logic of that university dictated that English study was a necessary part of business study, even literature. Studying literature was a method of cultural studies that would enhance the (future) businesspeople’s ability to understand their international colleagues and to have social conversations. It is still unclear to me, taught that way, how “liberal” a liberal art the study of English is.

Understanding a language well does entail understanding something of the culture(s) from which it proceeds. One might argue that even when studying the languages, ways, and cultures of an enemy, liberal arts educational goals are are still being served, to the extent that real cultural understanding is achieved. Yet I still wonder–if the goal of the learner is to excel in business or to triumph in war–then how much does the goal of the education matter?

The Goal of Education

Recently, William Pannapacker published an opinion piece in the New York Times on the Liberal Arts education.

In a period of rapid, unpredictable change, a combination of traditional liberal-arts education, collaborative research, workplace experiences, and a “can-do” attitude is the safest bet for future employment, as well as the foundation for good citizenship and a life that’s engaged with culture and thought.

I read his piece in the context of many pieces that I have read recently about the troubles of recent college graduates in China, from the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Businessweek, to name just a few. The rapid expansion of college education in China (the New York Times article notes that the number of colleges and universities in China has doubled in the last decade, and the number of college graduates has quadrupled) is raising serious questions here about the purpose and the nature of a college education. One educator in China put it this way:  In the past, English majors, and foreign language majors in general were considered useful tools of the nation, mostly for diplomacy and business. If they understood western languages and thought, that understanding was only useful to the extent it could be used towards those two goals. Most universities with foreign language emphasis were founded with that understanding, but right now, that attitude is changing. English majors are being re-worked into real comparative literature majors; thinking critically, exploring ideas, and developing new modes of understanding are only just now being proposed as goals of English education. It makes it a particularly exciting time to be here.

China seems to be approaching what Pannapacker both advocates and foresees for American liberal arts education, but from a very different direction. To oversimplify the point by a lot–Pannapacker seems to suggest that in the past, liberal arts graduates were great thinkers, and could learn to do anything, but they didn’t really know how to do anything straight from graduation. He suggests that the influx of technology into the humanities, along with other pedagogical strategies, will make liberal arts graduates into competent and adaptable job candidates. China’s English graduates have long been regarded only for their skills–understand this, translate that, interpret for this–but haven’t been trained in the kinds of thinking that characterizes American liberal arts graduates. Changing this (at least at one university) is part of what I was hired to do: when I teach an essay-writing class, my students are well-trained to churn out reasonably “correct” writing. But what makes this a new challenge is that I am (it seems) the first teacher that many of my students will ever have had who tells them to experiment. To try something even if it doesn’t work out. To explore questions even if they can’t find answers. (Alas, as more No Child Left Behind students come of college age, this is also becoming more true in the U.S.)

And the Digital?

I’m really excited to be traveling to Nanjing and Zhejiang to give an introduction to the Digital Humanities in two universities. If this trend in China really picks up steam, I believe that there is no better way to ensure that China’s first real generation of liberal arts graduates (I heard from one professor here that the person who received the first ever PhD in English in China is still alive!) will be well prepared for the world they are entering than by ensuring that technology is not left out of the introduction of liberal arts. Right now, it is assumed that science and engineering students need access to high quality technology and technological education to do their work, but the same is absolutely not true of language students. I hope that I will help convince universities that this is not true and an investment in liberal arts should also entail an investment in humanities technology.

Surprisingly hard

In reading student response papers, I find myself repeating the phrase “surprisingly hard” to describe a couple types of language errors. I am hoping that also by using this phrase in the marginal notes, I am able to convey to my students that they are not being dense, this particular thing is just surprisingly hard to understand. Here is one I encountered today. On a revision of a paper, at the bottom, a student wrote: “At last, thank you for your careful feedback.” Had I received this note from a native speaker of English, I would have assumed (not without some umbrage, I imagine) that this student was needling me for being late or delinquent in giving feedback. (I wasn’t, but that’s not quite the point.) What I realized after a moment was that she meant something closer to “Lastly.” And herein lies the category I’m calling “surprisingly difficult.” “At last” and “lastly” take up very much the same type of space in a sentence like this–they would both be introductory clauses that say something about the temporality of the action contained in the rest of the sentence. They both, of course, contain the same “last” root, and there is something final, so to speak, about both of them. But they don’t mean the same thing, and they won’t accomplish the same goal.

Another in this list of distinctions is the difference among “different” “distinct” and “inconsistent.” Nuances of article usage are getting me too: I went to some trouble to explain why we say “development of the computer” but not “development of the high technology.” Don’t even get me started on how happy I am never to have had to learn a language with as many conjugations/tenses as English has from a language with no verb forms at all! (Though, I did have occasion to be browsing through the archives of old computers on my hard drive and found my old Attic Greek verb synopsis sheets. I cannot imagine a transition more difficult than going from Chinese to Attic Greek!)

Grammar, it’s important!

Part of what this all means is that this semester will certainly see (and already has seen!) me developing my grammar meta-vocabulary more than I ever have before. Like a lot of native speakers educated largely in public schools, I was taught little English grammar. Well do I remember the day in 6th grade Spanish when my teacher, after raging at us for a long time about the fact that we didn’t know a direct from an indirect object, stopped teaching Spanish for two whole days to teach direct and indirect objects in English, so that we could subsequently learn them in Spanish. Thank goodness I took Spanish! I learned the subjunctive first in Latin class, then in Spanish, never, to the best of my recollection, in an English class. The list goes on. I finally understood participles when I took Russian. One might say that everything I know about English grammar, I cobbled together from the bits and pieces of other languages. (Perhaps one of the greatest ironies of my English education was that some of the best grammar education I received was from a teacher later disgraced and incarcerated.)

(A) Student Teaching

When I’m brave enough, it seems to help my student to tell anecdotes of my Chinese learning. When they have to listen carefully and ask me to repeat for them to understand even the words I’m saying, it seems to give them confidence to speak up more themselves. Making it clear that while, yes, I know more about this class’s subject area than they do, they know a lot more about Chinese than I do seems to be creating a blessedly egalitarian classroom environment (in a culture which, I’m learning more and more, tends to take pedagogical authority as inviolable, almost infallible). For example, I may bring them my most recent panic, when I was attempting to type the left-hand character pictured here and kept accidentally typing the right-hand one. After mailing this snippet of screen cap to my teacher, I came to the root of the problem: basically, they are in different fonts, one a little more archaic than the other. These elementary troubles that I am having 2 months into my Chinese education are lifesavers in the classroom.

It reminds me that all of us teachers are (I hope!) also learners. Keeping our students tuned in to our roles not as “already knowing” but as “always seeking to know” helps make our classrooms communities of seekers and not rigid role playing exercises.

Before I came to Shanghai, I didn’t know I was going to come to Shanghai. I didn’t dream about Shanghai as a child. I didn’t plan to move to China.

My local grocer now: vegetables, meat, eggs, tofu, all in an open market. Not at all like Stop & Shop!

But somewhere a few minutes into my graduate program in English Literature I learned something I hadn’t known when I applied to graduate school: if I wanted to pursue being a professor in English Literature, it was very unlikely that I was going to get to choose my city. During graduate school, before the job market, I went back and forth on this, from “I will take any job I can find in the city or cities I love” to “I’ll take a good job anywhere!” Of course, by the time the job market rolled around, both of those sentiments were dialed back a bit. My experience in picking up and moving to Shanghai for an undefined period of time has got me thinking a lot about how this experience is unusual, but this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about how this is the experience of many, if not most, junior academics.

On grocery stores, water, and yoga studios

Sometimes, unexpected goods. The tag says these are “American Turkey” flavored Cheetoes!

I was lucky that I had been to Shanghai before. When I think about the number of junior academics who take jobs across the country or across the world having never been in their new home for more than a campus visit, or perhaps a quick trip with a realtor to find an apartment, I realize that I was very lucky to have a few relaxed weeks here last summer. So when I arrived, I might not have known the most convenient stores, but I knew a lot! I knew the kinds of goods that most local Chinese grocery stores carry, or perhaps most importantly, the goods they were unlikely to carry. I knew how to tell soy sauce from very dark rice vinegar on the shelf. I knew which brand of bottled water I liked best, and more important than that, I knew not to drink the tap water… and why. These things didn’t make up my dissertation, but they are the very stuff of a functional life in a new city. Where do you find the goods you need to eat, sleep, brush your teeth? Even a move as culturally un-shocking as my move from undergrad in New York to grad in the Boston area required a shift from Duane Reade to CVS, from Grand Union to Stop and Shop, and then further nuancing from there. Here, where none of the shops have familiar names, and where I cannot read the labels on most of the goods, those challenges are heightened, but they are not unique.

Thriving

My Shanghai refuge

Yet, shopping for groceries and laundry soap doesn’t complete a new-city life. I have very few relationships here. I am here with my partner for this semester, due to a timely sabbatical, but in the fall, I will be living alone, and I have to think about how to construct a life that will not only involve lurking on the internet, waiting for my friends in EST (or UTC -5 as I’m growing used to calling it, here in UTC +8) to wake up. I started to take up running while back in the states, thinking that I had seen running clubs and the like in Shanghai, but it turned out my (recovering but not fully healed, or, um heeled) plantar fasciitis wouldn’t allow a real running program. I love cycling, but the roads and traffic here have me a bit leery of striking out on two wheels. (And really, the air pollution here suggests that outdoor exercise might not be the wisest path…) So, I finally found a yoga studio, with classes both bilingual and in Chinese. (I have learned to recognize “inhale” and “exhale” in Chinese!). I haven’t made friends at the studio yet, but I’m not without hope. In the meantime, a membership to a lovely yoga studio is a present I’ve given myself to make sure I’m up and out and doing something.

Studying

My local grocer has more kinds of tofu than I’ve ever seen before.

When I moved to Boston, I didn’t find the culture shock noticeable. It turns out, I think, that that had more to do with my ability to notice, than it did with a strong similarity between New York and Boston. Over time, yes, I learned to take the Red Socks seriously, or at least the fans, I suppose since I never went to a game. I learned the the Kennedys meant something different. I learned traditional associations with places, neighborhoods, historical moments. But I never studied them, and made a lot of Boston-faux-pas in the process of learning my way around. (Many, if not most of them, involving the Red Socks.) Shanghai has been a blessing because it’s so clearly different, I don’t have to wonder whether I should be researching actively–I must! So I’m working hard on Chinese–after two weeks I can understand and communicate successfully in most basic retail and taxi transactions. I am also being willing to ask questions that in the past felt stupid: “Is this common here?” “Is this done this way everywhere in China or is this a Shanghai thing?” “What is the appropriate way to do this?” A born and bred Brooklynite, my instinct is to power through and make mistakes and hope for the best. Turns out, though, that asking, and observing, and asking more have great advantages.

Fun

I’m doing some experimenting too! Last time I was here, I met someone who turns out to own a club. Last night, I ventured out (leaving the house about at my usual bedtime!) to see Studio-Shanghai. I don’t know if the folks I met last night are my new best friends, but my goal was to help use this new city to venture even further outside of my comfort zone. Not just stick with one Shanghai, the one of my block and my neighborhood and my school, nor even two Shanghais, including the neighborhood of my yoga studio, but to see if I could really start to engage as many Shanghais as would open to me. I doubt that, at this point in my life, I’m suddenly going to discover my long-lost club-kid identity, but you know what? I’ll probably go back. Because I still don’t know exactly what the identity of PhDeviate in Shanghai is, and I’m eager to find out.

P.S.

I have used the fine service at is.gd, to make easily shareable links to the various Shanghai Chronicles.

http://is.gd/shanghai1
http://is.gd/shanghai2
http://is.gd/shanghai3
http://is.gd/shanghai4
http://is.gd/shanghai5

So, yesterday was the first day of teaching at Shanghai International Studies University.

Shanghai International Studies University, Songjiang Campus

I teach only on Wednesdays, which is something of a blessing, in that the campus where I teach is an hour away (they provide a shuttle bus). I had received my faculty ID (on the campus which is near to the faculty housing) the day before along with my spandy new name! I can only imagine what they must have gone through seeing the four rather sizeable names on my passport, but they chose the first and last (I usually go by first and third, but they couldn’t have known that) and went at it. The result: 孟玛塔 (Pinyin: Mèng Mǎtǎ) The surname 孟 (Mèng) is well-known as the surname of the philosopher westerners know as Mencius （孟子）and the first name means (so my Chinese teacher tells me) agate tower. So, ultimately, I am well-satisfied with my new name. It is the most disorienting feeling, though, not knowing how to write my own name with ease. I have it written down in my notebook with each stroke numbered and the direction indicated, but I cannot write it from memory, and I am still a little hesitant even with keyboarding it. (For reasons that I suspect are obvious, though I still feel uncomfortable about, I am focusing on speaking, listening, reading, and keyboarding, and leaving writing lagging a little behind.) My Chinese is coming along well, though predictably slowly, but somehow even the idea of learning a new name for myself is unreasonably disorienting.

Support

SISU has been wonderfully supportive. The university sent someone to meet me at a known landmark and show me where and how to get on the bus. She showed me where my classrooms were, and my office, and handed me my key. The university even bought lunch the first day! I’ve adjuncted at a lot of places, and frankly have never had it so good. Because it is the school of International Studies, most of the students speak reasonably good English, and I could have been sent on my way with only room numbers, but it was so wonderful to have a guide, who could point out the water boiler, where potable water can be found, and to point out that there are washrooms in the building with both Chinese and western-style toilets. Things I didn’t anticipate include the fact that while my office has heat, my classrooms do not, and yesterday was about 45F/8C. Next week, should the weather be the same, I will certainly be in shirt, sweater, and suit coat, but this week it was just a button-down shirt and my fingers were numb by the end of class!

Classes

The classes themselves were great. The students seem good humored and interested in the material. The only element of my planning that I will probably redo is my graduate course: Race, Class, and Power. I had thought that they were going to be graduate students in English literature. As it turns out, about half the class is in American and British studies, the other half in intercultural communication, and a few in translation, oral and written. So, the were expecting (and indeed, I will deliver) much more of an American Studies class, and less of an American Literature class. It’s not a problem at all, just a little scurry to rearrange things. Ultimately, I think it will be more fun! I asked what they were interested in and politics, history, and the American South and legacy of slavery were main topics–alrighty! I think it will be a great group! Both writing classes were more as expected. I will have to wait until next week to see how they do on the reading to know if the level I’ve pitched it at is too high, or too low. I’m excited for both kinds of classes.

English

I am not an ESOL teacher. I have a little training in teaching foreign languages, but not much, and all of it was as an undergraduate teaching assistant in Russian! Of course, I wasn’t hired to be an ESOL teacher. But neither can I and my classes just politely ignore the fact that I’m the only one in the room who speaks English as a first language. I’ll be interested to see how that goes. Their proficiency so far seems great, and they have a will to speak and write well which goes far. Some are very nervous to speak out loud–I have warned them that I will keep speaking Chinese to them until they are convinced that their English is in fact better than my Chinese–fortunately, this is not a hard piece of convincing! I’m still very bad. But I’m getting better!

Signpost in Quyang Park

So, the first week of teaching in China draws to a close. I am still beyond glad I came on this deviation–off the road, indeed. And so many roads yet to explore here!

I do promise up front that I will not blog with this much specificity about every lesson I plan. But I found this process fascinating, so I hope you will too!

(CC BY-NC 2.0 by Thomas Hawk)

When I am being the teacher I dream of being, I re-read everything I’m going to assign and take new notes, or flesh out old notes, with this upcoming class in mind. It’s been almost 2 years since I taught this essay of Audre Lorde’s, and I had it in mind to teach it both to my upcoming undergraduate class as well as to my graduate students, so I sat down the other day to give it a re-read. What follows are some excerpts from Lorde, along with some notes that I made preparing to teach the essay to Chinese students.

“Western European”

“MUCH OF WESTERN EUROPEAN history conditions us to see human differences in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior.”

Two ideas immediately occurred to me on reading this, the first sentence of the essay. First, while I am able to agree, at least more or less, that “Western European history conditions us” in this fashion, I wonder how much my students will know about Western European history. This in turn led me to wonder whether Lorde meant the “actual” scope of Western European history (as if the history itself might be doing the teaching), or Western European history as most of us will have learned it in school. The second idea I had was whether my students will agree (and I’ve certainly had American students who did not!) that these oppositions she lists are “simplistic.” My experience so far with at the very least the few people I’ve gotten to speak with in depth in China, is that at least words like “good” and “bad” are used, unmodified, a lot more than I’m used to. I don’t know yet whether this is a pervasive cultural attitude, but it’s something I’m keeping an eye on.

“american”

“Traditionally, in american society, it is the members of oppressed, objectified groups who are expected to stretch out and bridge the gap between the actualities of our lives and the consciousness of our oppressor.”

I have a marginal note to talk about Lorde’s capitalization practices. Chinese, of course, has no capital letters, and I think particularly my writing class will be interested in this. The history of capitalization in Germanic languages, capitalization as a sign of respect, or lack thereof. I think this may be a fruitful discussion in itself!

Educating the oppressor

“Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity.”

However, the larger issue I thought of in this sentence is how, in China, Americans typically make it the responsibility of the Chinese to make things comprehensible to them. Already, I have had many people be surprised that I am interested in learning Chinese! Yet, of course, within China, the Chinese are the dominant group. Yet, still, on the world stage, they not the clearly dominant group. I think questions of oppressed and oppressors have the potential to go in directions I won’t necessarily be able to predict up front.

Those of you who read my last post might have caught my distress at the language I read on expatriate bulletin boards. Without quoting the terrible language I read there, I will say that many westerners in China seem to be requiring the Chinese not only to educate the westerners as to the humanity of the Chinese, but are starting from a default position that such humanity doesn’t exist. All the thinking I’ve ever done about these questions before, however, has been in positions where “Black and Third World people” are immersed within a local context of oppression. So I wonder whether this concept will seem as familiar, or as terrible, in a Chinese context as it does in an American, tied up as it is here in the context of hospitality.

“Mythical norm”

“Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each one of us within our hearts knows “that is not me.” In america, this norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, christian, and financially secure.”

This is an idea that I’m very interested to talk about in an international context. I strongly doubt that this particular mythical norm is the one that dominates the Chinese imaginary, but I hope that I can bring the abstract concept into strong enough relief that my students will be able to draw a picture of what this mythical norm is in their lives. Is it still male? I’m guessing so. Is it still heterosexual? I’m guessing so. Thin? I’m guessing so. But young? I’m not sure. And Christian? I’m guessing not. I hope it’s a fascinating discussion!

“You” & “We”

“Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your
children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.”

The last point I’ll draw out is this one of person. This essay was originally delivered orally, so the address to “you” makes perfect sense in that context. But what happens when the “you” Lorde imagined is mapped onto my Chinese undergraduates? Will they be able to identify with that you? Will they feel extra-alienated from her context by being addressed? Will they identify with the we, instead? How will this potentially complicated identificatory response affect their reading? And what of the male students, who, in America, are frequently alienated by this language because they have never had to confront head-on, and respect, the existence of a “we” to which they do not belong?

Onwards to teach!

Classes start in just over a week, so this is probably my last update until then. If you are interested in my complete marginal notes, send me a message with your email and I’m happy to send them. Perhaps needless to say, these are only a few of the thoughts I had. It’s clear to me that the more I learn about China and Chinese culture, the easier planning lessons will be. Stay tuned, also, for a post about how planning (and eventually, teaching!) these lessons is making me think about transnational academic cooperation and how we, as western academics, generally require non-western academics to perform these very tasks that Lorde describes: to educate us about their humanity, as well as the validity of their scholarship.

Any thoughts you have to contribute to my planning process are welcome!

Settling In…

We are settled in to the “Foreign Expert’s Building” in the Hongkou District.

We are right near the major football stadium, and a few blocks away from the main campus of Shanghai International Studies University. The liaison assigned by the university to help us with the kinds of settling in tasks that require speaking Chinese was concerned for us that we wouldn’t like this street–it’s quite bustling! But as it is, I find it enchanting. Last time I was in Shanghai, I was living in a fairly well-to-do neighborhood, heavily settled by westerners. This was perhaps a great initiation, but I’m very much preferring this

I suppose it shouldn’t have been a surprise that Coca-Cola is everywhere.

neighborhood that seems much more local. Few people speak English, which is a bit troublesome now, but I think will help me a lot when I’ve started studying Chinese. The Spring Festival is coming up, which gives everywhere I’ve gone a lovely festive air. Though not all is festive, so I present to you my most artistic photo to date.

Expatriate Boards

There are plenty of English-language message boards with suggestions about life in Shanghai. One thing I didn’t expect was the amazing racism I find on these boards. It’s not universal, but over and over people write with at best dismissiveness and at worst open derision of China and all the Chinese. The kinds of sweeping statements I have been fortunate enough to encounter only very rarely are just rampant. Yet, expat boards seem to be the best way to get English language information about some of the things I need to know about. It’s unfortunate that I cannot begin Mandarin lessons until after the Spring Festival holiday–these attitudes make me all the more anxious to be able to function in Chinese.

Planning

The semester doesn’t start for some weeks yet, so I won’t have too much to report on the academic side until then. Now that my internet connection is up and running, I will be reaching out to Chinese academics interested in technology and its intersection with the Humanities. If there are people that any of you would care to suggest, do feel free to email me! Marta at this very domain name. As soon as I can wrangle up a proper organizing committee, I look forward to beginning work on THATCampChina. The best of my ability to research suggests that it will be the first gathering of its kind in the PRC.

Teaching

I have learned that my Wednesdays are going to be even longer than previously thought. I’m teaching classes not on the Hongkou Campus, but on the Songjiang Campus. I’ll be on a shuttle bus at 8:15AM on Wednesdays and on a shuttle bus back at 8:40PM! For some reason, this is turning out to have a salutary effect on my planning process. Such a long day as that (though I don’t deny that I’m grateful that all my classes meet once a week and that on the same day) is inspiring me to have my lessons more thoroughly planned, further than advance, than I usually do. It seems a great thing, in fact.

Facing the Wind by Xu Hongfei

It’s actually a great dry run. So far I’ve had almost everything I’ve needed, and while I’m still here in the states, I get the opportunity to buy things as needed still. Not that China doesn’t have things, but it is still rather amazing to me how comforting having my familiar lotion or preferred vitamin is. And seeing as how I am 5’9″ and not a small physical presence, I have tried to calculate not needing to buy clothes in China–it is difficult to find things in my size in anything other than shoes. (In spite of maybe my favorite piece of art that I saw in Shanghai, right).

Planning Classes

So that’s started. As I mentioned recently, I’m going to be teaching 3 courses–two sections of “Reading and Writing” for English majors in their third year, and one course of “Race, Class, and Power” to MA students. I’ve been working first on the Reading and Writing course. In spite of the amount of time I’ve spend teaching First-Year Writing, planning this course has been an interesting challenge. I have been trying to imagine the ways that it is and is not like a First-Year class. I’m sure it is similar, in that some topics in writing are perennial. My suspicion is also that, because for the first time in my teaching career, 100% of my students will not be native speakers of English, that this course will not be pitched precisely the way a course for American 3rd year English majors would be. I received a list of topics from the school that is supposed to serve as a guideline:

• Summary and Synopsis
• Argumentation
• Cohesive Devices (Logical and Grammatical Cohesion and Lexical Cohesion)
• Book Report
• Formal Letters
• Intercultural communication: Register Variation and Thought Patterns
• Term Paper

Note the penultimate: Intercultural communication. It’s not something I’ve ever incorporated consciously into a writing course before, and honestly, now that I’ve seen it put so baldly, I think it’s not something I’ll ever omit again! What a great idea. It also feels to me like a luxury to get to teach this to English majors, so I can unashamedly, unabashedly, and freely use literature as my teaching tools. I am thinking of any one of a number of wonderful immigrant narratives for the Intercultural Communication unit. Mona in the Promised Land comes to mind, or Woman Warrior, or When I was Puerto Rican.

Even though I’m there to teach American literature, I can’t help but lean towards Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet when thinking about letters. This course is shaping up, and while I was initially a bit disappointed to be teaching more writing (after all, most of us who get into the English PhD gig get into it to teach literature!), I have realized that doing it within the context of English majors puts a whole new spin on it. I am planning very much the course I wish had existed when I was an undergrad. Certainly, if a course such as this did exist, I never knew about it, and so I’ll be teaching to past-me in a way.

Race, Class, and Power

This course is exciting, not only because I’ll be teaching MA students, which has its own excitements, but because I’ll be teaching in a context where I absolutely cannot rely on understanding my students experiences of race, class, or power. I can expect that 100% of my students will be Chinese, that for them I will be a racial other, but, I imagine, in a very different way than it is true in the United States. For example, I can expect that few if any of them will ever have met a Puerto Rican, and that any associations they might have (and honestly I don’t expect they will have many!) with the idea of Puertorriqueñidad will be very different from ones I’m familiar with.

Of course, talking about American perceptions of race in reference to the Chinese will be interesting… I took this picture in a restaurant in Shaoxing.

I’ll be teaching in a country where the majority race is not white, for the first time. There are many things about racial understanding in China I do not yet know. I recognize also that it is not my job to know them, only to teach about what I do know, America. Yet, I will not have, or at least I cannot count on having, common experience to draw on. Planning this is fascinating.

Talking about class will also be interesting. In the U.S., I have noticed that the two names that make college students roll their eyes fastest are Freud and Marx, both of whom dominant student wisdom seems to indicate are completely debunked. I’ve spent a fair amount of time working to de-debunk Freud. But Marx! Teaching Marxism in China! I’ll have more to say about this (no doubt), but for the time being my mind is still in the “boggle first” stage. Not that Marx is the only word on class, of course; it’s just that that’s the one word that is causing the most boggling. I am also thinking of Fanon, Moraga, Lorde…

View from my window of the Wannsee

It is truly one of the most remarkable places I’ve ever been. A lovely building, grounds, view–this was the view from my bedroom at sunset. We got to stay from when it looked like this first picture until it looked like the next one. Truly a place of transcendent beauty. To and of the staff who run the place, I could write ardent words, but I will let it suffice to write that I am not aware of ever having been party to a better organized, better run, and more friendly and cheerful crew of people working for cross-cultural understanding and sharing.

The Wannsee in the Snow

The mood there is relaxed, contemplative. It is the kind of place that seems designed to allow you the silence of your thoughts. The rhythm of almost each day is similar. Lovely breakfasts in the mornings, frequent interesting lectures in the evening. It put me in the mind of a song from the Natalie Merchant days of 10,000 Maniacs.

Verdi Cries

The man in 119 takes his tea all alone
Mornings we all rise to wireless Verdi cries
I’m hearing opera through the door
The souls of men and women, impassioned all
Their voices climb and fall, battle trumpets call
I fill the bath and climb inside, singing
…
I draw a jackal-headed woman in the sand
Sing of a lover’s fate sealed by jealous hate
And wash my hand in the sea
With just three days more
I’d have just about learned the entire score to Aida

I include these lyrics in part because I saw and heard more opera this semester than I have since my music history and later my music theory classes in high school. I was able to attend Henze’s “We Come to the River” in Dresden, go backstage, and eat dinner after with the gracious director Eytan Pessen. I saw Carl Maria von Weber’s “Der Freischütz” in a theater in Bad Lauchstädt that was designed by Goethe. I saw Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” in Berlin with the sets that had been designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel around 1815. And those were only the most remarkable opera experiences! (Unfortunately, I got sick and missed La Bohème–it wasn’t tuberculosis, fortunately, but it still seemed vaguely appropriate to miss La Bohème, if one must miss it, for an upper respiratory infection!) In this way, this post seems at least in part my own version of what I think Natalie Merchant was getting at in writing “Verdi Cries.” Being exposed to amazing music in an amazing setting gets under your skin, into your bones, the stories and images come out in surprising ways, even in sand drawings.

Holidays must end as you know
All is memory taken home with me
The opera, the stolen tea, the sand drawing
The verging sea all years ago

I write this post also out of gratitude. The end of graduate school was crushing–as it seems to be for all I’ve known who finished. This major source of stress and energy that has been propelling you forward for years, and years, and years, suddenly evaporates in a rain of pomp and circumstance and it seems–confusing–unmooring. I feel that I understand now, well in advance of my own first one, what the sabbatical is designed for. My thoughts are clearer after this semester, not of vacation, but of holiday in the old sense–the days set aside to make the other days make more sense. My time in Germany, with the art of the museums, the music, the ballet gave me a re-grounding into the human race, and the beautiful modes of production and creativity that we have, and reminded me some of why I wanted to study all this beauty to begin with.

So I begin my renewed commitment to blogging my teaching experience in China with a post of gratitude for the place and the people who helped me find what feels like the strength for the road after the next bend.

Yet, by the time I finished and graduated, I had, to use a favorite phrase of my father’s “gotten the joke.” I deviate; it’s what I do. Even so, when I chose my username, blog title, domain name, twitter handle, and blog tagline, I had no idea how far “off the road” this journey would take me. Which leads me to:

An Announcement

As of spring semester 2013, I will be a professor* of American Literature and Cultural Studies at the School of English Language and Literature of Shanghai International Studies University.

* N.B. I am still riddling out the academic ranks in China. I will either be something that translates to “lecturer,” or something that translates to “Associate Professor,” neither of which sound completely accurate in translation. I’ll keep you posted!

How did this come about?

Through a series of mostly comedic circumstances, I ended up spending much of the summer semi-stranded in Shanghai. Nothing desperate, I just thought I’d have something to do, and it turned out I didn’t. After the initial shock of that wore off (in addition to the most amazing jetlag of my life), I started having meetings with Chinese universities, at first just because I was interested in how things were different, what an English department that is also a “foreign language” department feels like, and other questions. But the longer I spent in China, the more I enjoyed it, and the more interested I was in Chinese literature and in the language. I started making inquiries about working in China, and after many backs and forths over email, it looks like I leave for Shanghai in February!

But what will you DO?

Teach, of course

In the spring I’m teaching three courses: Two sections of a course called “Reading and Writing,” which sounds a bit like First-Year Comp, but entirely is not. Think of it as “Reading and Writing about Literature for English Majors.” It’s a course for third-year English majors, designed to be writing intensive. A complement, I believe, to the reading intensive survey courses. The last course I’ll be teaching is to graduate students, mixed MA and PhD students, I believe, called “Race, Class, and Power.”

THAT Kind of Project (The Humanities and Technology)

I’ve also put forward a proposal to work towards a digital humanities/humanities and technology center in China. There are currently no centers, at least not that I have been able to unearth, in the People’s Republic, and I’d like to help create one! The kind folks at SISU are pursuing how we can find funding for it, and we’re going to start by picking a date sometime this spring for the inaugural THATCampChina. If all goes well, THATCampChina will help be a springboard to help bring together people who are already doing digital humanities work in China, and move forward on founding a center.

And of course…

I plan to learn Chinese. I say “of course,” but it seems from everything I hear that a lot of westerners move to China and never bother to learn a word. I was just visiting this summer and learned several! And I found the language completely fascinating. I’ve never been outside the Indo-European language group before, and having studied (in order of proficiency) English, Spanish, Russian, Latin, Greek, French, Polish, German–and now Chinese, not one of those “foreign” languages was ever as foreign to me as was Chinese. Perhaps it’s my previously mentioned penchant for deviation, but the very difficulty of the language is part of the fascination. When I started Russian in 1992, I thought it would be daunting to learn a new alphabet, but the amazing department at Phillips Academy, Andover and my first-year teacher Victor Svec had us through that in just a few days. However, confronting a non-alphabet-based, and non-phonetic language–I no longer think “daunting,” I think “FUN”!

Staying Connected

I plan to blog while I’m there. I have let this blog go more or less fallow, but I think that now more than ever it will be an important way to stay connected professionally to my colleagues all over, and to keep you updated on my life. I will probably include more observations of the world than I have before, simply because the world I’ll be observing will be more unfamiliar to me. I additionally hope that working within a very different academic landscape will help me develop observations about U.S. academia that might prove useful. As always, you can find me through email, through the contact form on this blog, through twitter @PhDeviate (which is, admittedly, intermittently blocked in China). I will continue to be involved in the TransformDH collective, and will be launching a new site soon! So, you’re not losing me, I’ll just be coming to you from 12 (or so, depending on where you are) hours in the future!