December is Human Rights Month

Did you know that December is Human Rights month?

Competition or Cooperation?

(taken from
THE VALUES AMERICANS LIVE BY
by L. Robert Kohls)

The following is one of 13 values outlined by the Washington International Center in 1984. It was meant to be a guide to help foreign visitors better understand Americans, and it has been valuable in helping me to be more aware of my own values while I live in a country that is so different.

"7. Competition and Free Enterprise

Americans believe that competition brings out the best in any individual. They assert that it challenges or forces each person to produce the very best that is humanly possible. Consequently, the foreign visitor will see competition being fostered in the American home and in the American classroom, even on the youngest age levels. Very young children, for instance, are encouraged to answer questions for which their classmates do not know the answers.

You may find the competitive value disagreeable, especially if you come from a society [that] promotes cooperation rather than competition. But many U.S. Peace Corps volunteers teaching in Third World countries found the lack of competitiveness in a classroom situation equally distressing. They soon learned that what they had thought to be one of the universal human characteristics represented only a peculiarly American (or Western) value.

Americans feel very strongly that a highly competitive economy will bring out the best in its people and ultimately, that the society which fosters competition will progress most rapidly. If you look for it, you will see evidence in all areas -even in fields as diverse as medicine, the arts, education, and sports -that free enterprise is the approach most often preferred in America."

In the same spirit of competition Phil and I have begun an informal battle of the blogs. First prize is merely the chance to avoid the shame of being second place. Our battle will be fought both tactically and strategically, with each side employing a large staff who will carry out such tasks as monitoring the opponent’s blog or analyzing results from the highly scientific surveys included on the task-bar.

Recently our people sent his people an envelope wishing him luck. The envelope was laced with a virus whose only side-effect is an extreme reluctance to post blogs. We will inform you of updates as we receive them.

The Ooley campaign needs your help, and accepts suggestions on techniques, tactics, or strategies 24-hours-a-day. If you have an idea for a story, please submit it asap via dustinooleyinchina@gmail.com or click the comments link below for anonymity (really – you can suggest anything!).

Cheers!

Hot Seat

In our Oral English class we tried an activity that I found on the Internet at Dave's ESL Cafe. Each student volunteered to sit in the hot seat (in the background misspelled as "hotseat") and be subjected to 5 questions by their classmates. Whether or not they had to answer the question I didn't say. As with many activities we do, I don't like to impose too many rules. Waiting to see how far it goes is usually more interesting, and I can always move things past awkward moments or even cancel the activity completely.

It took the students a few questions before they got the idea. When they really got going there was certainly a pattern to their questions.

What I found most interesting about the activity was how much their questions revealed their own culture and the individual who was in the hot seat. Questions that were often repeated:

"When will you get married?" (by far the most common).

"What kind of girls/boys do you find attractive?"

"What do you think of the girls/boys in our class?"

The last question is telling because it shows just how much students who know one another very well can still keep some of their true feelings hidden away. Overall their questions were about relationships - a reflection of a long history of Confucianism (don't tell them, though - they feel that they are far more modern than their parents).

I learned a lot about individuals but, more importantly, how the students in the class felt about certain people. Some of the questions were as follows:

"Do you think you're so cool?" (the class thinks he acts too cool).

"Do you have a bf? What do you like about boys?" etc. (she is very nervous and shy around boys).

"Is your duty to your family or your boyfriend?" (A girl who, in 2 years, will have to decide whether she returns home to her family or to the province from which her boyfriend came). Her answer, by the way, was an incredibly well-spoken balance that led to class applause.

A Trip to the Post Office

Yesterday, on the way to the Post Office I saw this sign. I understood some of the words and the general meaning, but the exact meaning was elusive. I looked at my electronic dictionary. It's something like, "Societal order - everyone does their duty." These signs are nothing new in China, and were used with great success by Mao to convince people of... whatever. Capitalism is bad? Make a sign about it. It's one reason people will have certain convictions that might be without thought. They were told what to believe and then they create justification after the fact. It's similar to McCarthyism in the 1950s (and yes, we too had some pretty heavy propaganda in America at that time). In front of the sign are workers waiting for odd jobs (and playing cards in the meantime).



I mailed something to my parents.



Then I returned home to find these older men playing "Beat the Landlord," one of about 5 games that are very popular in China. This game is a combination of Skill and Luck, like most games the Chinese seem to favor (majiang, chess, and go are others). But like any game, money must be involved. The stakes were high (5 yuan per round), and the men slammed their cards down with an Alpha-confidence accompanied by a loud grunt.



I dropped my things off at my apartment and headed to the office for my office hours, meeting some students along the way who were cleaning the campus. If you didn't know already, that's how it works here. The classroom belongs to the students, so it's their job to keep it clean. The campus belongs to the students as well, who clean it on rotation. Each week the entire campus is cleaned by students, not a hired cleaning crew.

One of the students didn't understand why I was taking their photo for such a mundane event and I explained. "Oh," he said, "they wouldn't believe that we do this, so you are showing them."

"Exactly."

Chinese Names

One interesting aspect of teaching students in rural Guizhou is that very few people enter the college English department with an English name. It falls on the foreign teacher to provide the students with a name - a task that I learned to pass on this year. Sure I had the opportunity to give names to students who are now my friends, making their names more special. But the process was dreadful.

"Sandy... what does it mean?" one student asks.

"Ummm..." I reply, dumbfounded. Actually, unless you ask me what my own name means, I have absolutely no idea about name origins or meanings. And I suspect, to some extent, neither does anyone else in America.

The back-story for Chinese names could probably go on forever (almost), but there are some general differences between Chinese and English names.

My brother's name in Chinese is 艾论，which probably means something like "handsome talker,"but, more importantly, phonetically represents my brother's name using Chinese characters (AiLun - Aron). It's not a perfect phonetic translation because there are many sounds in Chinese that don't exist in English and vice versa. This is the main reason people have accents: they approximate sounds they cannot say by using something close in their own language (Hence: Flied Lice).

So I'm standing there after class and the students have a barrage of questions: "Which English name means 'flower?'"

"Which English name sounds strong and also means clever?"

"What does 'Garth' mean?"

Again I respond:

"Ummm..."

To make it simple I will put it like this: Chinese names are much easier to understand because they are like Native American names. I don't mean that they are names about nature, but that they have a strong relationship with words that are used in everyday speech. An example would be the Native American name, "Running Bear." If we break these apart they will but used in everyday speech. 'Running' and 'bear'.

It's a little more difficult in English. For example: David.

Of course we have 'Dav,' which means ?, and 'id,' which is part of the subconscious.

You see my point? They are words that are derived from other languages and different traditions, rather than one long, continuous history. Sure we could trace 'David' back to Hebrew (and maybe farther than that), and we might even find the words represented by the name. But today it's not so easy - especially when the name is not your own.

Chinese names are broken into two parts: Family name and Given name (in that order). The family name is one character. The 3 most common Chinese family names are: 王 Wang (wong), 李 Li (lee), and 张 Zhang (jong). Tracing these names is probably similar to tracing English surnames, as these names are often related to where someone is from (I think).

Given names are simple, I think. Here are a couple names (family name included)

张美丽 (Zhang Beautiful)
王云超 (Wang Exceeds the Clouds)

The given names can often be broken apart to have meaning (云 means cloud), so it's no surprise when a Chinese student mistakenly takes us for name experts.

My Chinese name was taken from the phonetics of my surname, Ooley. In Chinese is is pronounced /ou lei/ and written 欧雷. My new "family" name is 欧，which means 'Europe,' and my new "given" name is 雷, or, 'thunder.' Though people don't typically combine their family name with their given name to understand the meaning, doing so with my name yields, "Thunder over Europe."

Russia beware.

Dreams from My Obama

Every night I dream of Obama now. Most of the dreams are unrealistic scenes from home, where I hang out with Barack’s family. “Do you want a bagel?” I ask Barack as he enters the kitchen with the morning newspaper.

“Sure – would you toast it for me?” he replies.

“No problem.”

I still remember where I was when Obama announced, live, his intention to run for President in 2007. I was on the treadmill at the gym, and I scrambled to switch my headphones from my iPod to the miniature television attached to the machine. Part of the reason I remember so well is that I almost went off the back of the treadmill when switching the headphones.

It wasn’t long after that I began analyzing his voting record, scouring his history through Internet leads, and trying to learn more about the man who would eventually become our President. When he came to Seattle I bought a ticket and listened intently to a well-delivered, though policy-thin, speech. And to be honest, though I was likely to vote for Barack Obama, I hadn’t ruled out voting for Hillary Clinton.

It was about this time that something was happening in Washington D.C. that would change the next two years of my life. My Peace Corps application was finally complete and approved, and it had been passed on to the Peace Corps China official. I got a call and eventually accepted the invitation to serve in the People’s Republic of China.

The volunteers were much like my colleagues in Seattle: most of them were liberal, and most clung to some kind of idealism. We would have intense discussions about the relative merits of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but favor eventually shifted to Obama. During these conversations you could always pick out the Republican: the quiet one on the other side of the room. Not long after, Obama won the nomination, and later, the election.

That’s when the dreams began, I think. You see, I’d always harbored some kind of grandiose idea that I would be a part of his cabinet. I’m 27, I have some wordly experience, and I have a decent education. Though I have just described a large portion of the U.S. population, I still felt that I was different somehow – worthy of making those important decisions or, at least, toasting a bagel just right.

Since the dreams began, every morning I wake up to disappointment. I am not in the White House, looking over Obama’s schedule and making last-minute changes, nor am I furiously typing a last-minute article that outlines the subtleties of U.S. – China misunderstandings at a societal level (to be stamped and approved by you-know-who before it is published under his name).

Throughout the campaign I badgered the people in his country-wide election offices, offering to help with the campaign. “Even though I am in China, I could still do something… right?” I never heard back.

Part of my thinking was encouraged by the constant emails from the Obama campaign. With the ability to insert my name in the mass email, the Obama people made me feel special - like they were sending me an important email. It sounded to me like, "Listen, Dustin, we couldn't reach you by cell phone. Would you ask the other volunteers which states they're from? We also need some information about the rural Chinese perspective - what exactly do rural Chinese have to say about Obama? Thanks."

But, of course, these emails were more like, "Dustin - if you give 50 dollars today, we'll send you a t-shirt."

So I wake up and here I am: China. I am thriving here now, but getting caught up in this grandiose thinking always leads to disappointment. During the last days of the general campaign, there was an email that said giving a donation now would automatically enter you in a drawing to have dinner with Obama. I immediately sent 20 dollars, about 1 percent of my annual income. The response was a phone call from America, asking if I could help do some last-minute doorbelling. “Sorry,” I said, obviously upset. “I’m in China.”

I haven’t thought of any solutions to this constant dreaming of Obama. How does one control one’s own dreams?

I guess, for now, I’ll have to make the most of my Sunday afternoons with the Obama family. “Come on,” I say to his daughters, “let’s go grab some ice-cream.” Michelle and Barack look on with smiling faces, not thinking that it’s weird at all.

Peace Corps China Blogosphere

The blogosphere remains quite small amongst volunteers, but I wanted to point out an interesting blog by Phil Razem, a Chongqing volunteer. Phil's school has around 55,000 students compared with my 5,000 and he lives in a city with millions and millions of people (compared with around 300,000).

Phil's blog is written with a different style and he has some clear goals related to informing people about cultural differences. I have enjoyed reading his blog, if only to get a different perspective of life and teaching in China.

Phil (the handsome guy you see running on the Great Wall in the above picture) and I have an ongoing blog battle where we see who will post more often (don't tell him - he doesn't know about this yet). It's hardly fair, as the content of his blogs is rich and offers links to other places. I am lucky to write enough letters to make up a word, let alone a sentence or paragraph.

Check it out - I think you'll like it.

***UPDATE***
Phil has accepted the challenge.