XXIV

I want to get back to language though. Tomorrow, the 12th of August, will mark a full year of living in China and of studying Chinese. My first semester here I spent four hours a week working one-on-one with either a teacher or a tutor and my ability, though not great, grew exponentially. Numbers, simple expressions, a small vocabulary, and a little grammar made me feel like I was making some progress. Rome wasn't built in a day, etc. but a discernible beginning had emerged. The second semester however I fell off these habits. Though I still met weekly with my teacher, I met considerably less with a different tutor (the previous one had left). This may sound like an excuse but this is my attempt to describe the situation: Simply, my teaching and service duties plus my writing schedule displaced my Chinese study. As I've discussed previously on this blog, I'm not a particularly motivated language learner and never have been. Combine that with a slow cooking brain, "shyness," and a deep-seated aversion to the kind of route learning that (I think?) is necessary for learning vocabulary, and I think it's fair to stay that my Chinese progress has stalled. I'm not too unique in this as many folks learning language tail off. That said, being surrounded by motivated language learners and professional language teachers I feel a sense of shame about this lack of noticeable progress and further, I fear that it comes off as a kind of disdain for their expertise. I apologize for the diary like tone of this opening.

In the present moment, since my ideal self tries to make choices that feel good in the long term (e.g. choices that don't compound the tiny grains of shame and guilt that build towards outwards expressions of insecurity and anger), I've resolved to build Chinese learning into my daily life. Thus in the mornings and, at least, half of the evenings when I ride my bike to and from work, I've been listening to Chinese Pod, a series of pretty great for learning Chinese resources. This means that I have to sacrifice listening to music while I ride which is one of my favorite things to do on a regular day. To give up one thing for another thing you value more, so I've been told, is the definition of sacrifice. And so the bigger theory here is that if I can't find a motivation within myself to learn, then I will slit the neck of the goat of listening to music while riding a bike and drink its blood, thereby communing with an otherworldly energy to imbibe the flaccid corpse of my language learning self. That, and working with a language coach, and maybe attending the introductory Chinese class again. I'd also say that I will study characters or use a flashcard app, but realistically that isn't something I can sustain. Reason being there are all my work duties listed above, but then there are also the entrenched habits of my personality, that is, talking to my girlfriend, reading, meditating, basketball, socializing, and writing in this blog. Huh. After writing that sentence it seems clear to me why I don't devote more time to learning Chinese. It seems more blood will need to be spilled.

Less violently however there are other ways to be in China and learn Chinese. Instead of reading about the insane and depressing politics in the United States I read about China. SupChina is a most excellent source for the newsletter (which aggregates a wide variety of articles relating to China from around the world), the podcasts, and original content. I read the Chinese newspapers in English, the left leaning (so I'm told) SCMP out of Hong Kong and some of the more state sponsored news sources just to see what's up (not listed here). In terms of academic like readings I wish I could say that I read history books about China but history in large doses always puts me to sleep. Instead I have recently been reengaging with a new (to me) translation the I Ching that has been quite helpful for philosophy as well as some history, and then there are always random scholarly articles about Chinese writing, education, and rhetoric that I'm lead to through teaching and research. All of the above is not language exactly but it's in the same neighborhood, i.e. culture. There seems to be difference however between riding a bike and watching a bike race, and in this metaphor, I've got a pretty good seat. Onward and onward, of being foreign. Two weeks until the semester starts and there is lots and lots to do.

XXIII (心: Part 2)

In the United States last Spring the public intellectual Jordan Peterson got a lot of press. And not just in the States, but in Canada and the U.K. as well. I can't speak for other places in the world but at least one of my Chinese students, a particularly media savvy one, had also heard of him. One can go to Youtube and find a thousand videos of his debates, lectures, and appearances on podcasts. Some of them have click bait titles like "Peterson Destroys SJW!" (repackaged from more official sites by god know who...Russian polorizers? Alt-right sympathizers? Fly-by-night internet parasites wanting to make a quick buck?) and some of them have descriptive headlines such as "Jordan Peterson Oxford Debate," posted by the BBC or Canadian public broadcasting (or its equivalent. Note: these are not real titles). The phenomenon of his popularity is one thing, and there are many different takes on his appeal. The dominant one, and one that he also acknowledges, is that people, mostly young men, are attracted to his bootstrapping message, where JBP provides folks with a way to be in the world, an "antidote to chaos" that pegs "neomarxist" identity politics and "post-modern" theory as major problems in the Western world. He is a clinical psychologist, professor, and academic who has published genuine academic research for the last twenty years. Controversy asides, it's amazing that a genuine researcher can become as well known as he's become.

Now, I don't want to talk about this person or the controversy around him. Instead, I want to illustrate how the political landscape in the States, and maybe even in the West at large, has become unrecognizable such that traditional left/right spectrums don't seem to apply. In painting this picture then, I need to acknowledge one of his arguments that I agree with, gulp, which is the idea that progressive identity politics sometimes goes too far. Meaning that just as extreme right wing identity politics (say, the kind that openly embraces racism and segregation) is gross and hateful, extreme left wing identity politics (say, the kind where people's careers and/or lives are destroyed by social media mobs because of a Tweet they made when they were a teenager) is also gross and hateful. A version of this then is Peterson's argument, that what he calls "political correctness" has gone too far such that in places such as academia free speech is being regulated to an alarming degree. His narrative suggests that one cannot say, "I don't believe in white privilege" without being accused of being a racist, for example. That's his argument, and generally I agree in that I feel that speech in the U.S. within particular spheres (academia, social media) has increasingly been watched and regulated in ways that, for better or for worse, remind me of ways that speech is regulated here in China. By this I don't mean in a "big brother" kind of way. I mean in the way that ideas are not harmless abstractions made of ethereal reasons, but that ideas are also moral. That there is such a thing as ideas that are good for us, and ideas that are not. The ideas that are not good for us then should be removed from the public sphere because they do real harm to people.

My point here is not about what constitutes a good idea or what right a person has to free speech. My point is that contemporary Western style debate, the kind built on science and facts, has been seriously challenged as of late. On the right you have Trump who continues to deride the media, claiming that all but Fox are liars not to be trusted. Fake news, alternative facts, and a polarized public has more or less "main streamed" what the post moderns pointed at a while ago, that is, that truth is a social construction. Cynics then (like Trump) have taken this idea to mean that if there is no ground for us to stand on, if the world is simply dog eat dog, then whatever it takes to maintain control is what's required. And as the world has seen, the guy seems to have very few principles outside of protecting his tribe of elites. At the same time, as Peterson's argument makes, there is also a contingent of this kind of thinking on the left, that facts are social constructions indicative of who has power. Because women, minorities, people of color were shut out, for the most part, of politics and power for much of the history of the West, the game has been rigged and therefore the rules need to change. I tend to agree with this view of history, yet, I also don't believe that everything is reducible to identity and power. My own conflicted views aside, the connection that I'm trying to make here is that both "sides" have seemingly adopted a similar relation to traditional conceptions of reality. There is not a right/left divide in this case, but a modern/post-modern divide. Peterson, his positivist psychology and Christian mythological framework, is very much a traditionalist striving to protect what has come under attack, which at its root are assumptions about a reality that separates the mind from the world. The challenge then is not choosing the correct side to take, but how to exist with others who see and act in the world in unfamiliar ways and more specifically, what rules, laws, and conventions we might abide by moving forward.

XXII (心: Part 1)

Last fall a potential faculty member (who is now a faculty member) gave a job talk about the dangers of assuming that a given word or concept in English will translate into Chinese, and then proceeded to outline some teaching practices that instructors could use to do a kind of cross-cultural interrogation of said word or concept. Specifics aside, the example they used to draw a contrast between English and Chinese was the word "heart," or Chinese, "心," (xīn). In English or more broadly, in the West, one's heart is the emotional center of a person. If one makes a decision with one's heart it means that one is making a decision with emotion. Letting your heart "speak" is to let emotion, whatever that is, dominate your thoughts. Thus implying that thoughts are not emotions but something else, a something else that usually originates in the brain or more abstractly, the mind. These kinds of divisions are fundamental in the West where Artistotle's ethos, pathos, and logos are still hiding in every corner of the modern world. A presumably rational mind creates abstract thoughts which are then translated into language for the purposes of communication. Emotion, or the heart, is presumed to be part of the body mass, a thing both unknowable and uncontrollable (except by those who are strong enough to marshal their inhuman desires a la the charioteer in Plato's Phaedrus).

Yet 心 in the Chinese is where both the emotions and the mind are located. What this means is that thinking is not necessarily separated from feeling and in fact, can be seen as one in the same time. 心 feels and thinks. That is not to say that mind/body separations are not also achieved in this image of Chinese philosophy and thought (see Slingerland and Chudek, 2011), but that the distinction between thought and feeling in the East, so called, are not so clearly demarcated as they are in the West. For me, understanding this difference has been helpful towards the ends of understanding why some things are done they way they are done here in China. For example, in May I traveled to Nanjing where I visited the museum and memorial for the Nanjing Massacre. The museum part, which already is an imposition that I'm not sure the creators of this place would make (i.e. if the memorial and museum can be separated), is essentially a history museum. There are artifacts from the battles and the occupation, narratives and pictures, a clear route to take through the building, and lots and lots of placards to read. What was interesting however in relation to the discussion above, at least to my American eyes weaned on Smithsonian style museums, is that the translated into English placards frequently described the horrors of the Japanese invasion in emotional terms. That is to say, they used adjectives like "brutal," and "terrible," and "horrible," and "awful" to describe what happened. To me this seems to contrast with the almost clinical view of history represented in American museums whose task is to present the "facts" of history, not editorialize them. Thus, the museum told the story of the Nanjing Massacre as well as how one should feel about these events. 

The broader implication here is that history is not just a series of events told through a sequence of facts, but that it also has a moral component: How one remembers is as important as what one remembers. One thinks and feels. Relating this back to 心, more generally then, every fact has an emotional component. Knowledge is not something that exists in the realm beyond but is tied to human intention. Following from this reasoning, in the case of the Nanjing Massacre memorial/museum it is not that the placards were poorly written, or that they were propaganda towards the ends of promoting negative public sentiment towards the Japanese (though I think many would argue that they do), but that a presentation of the correct facts also requires a presentation of the correct intentions through which to regard those facts. In other words, one always thinks with their heart and it is folly to pretend otherwise. Further, the law is not only about reason but about morality as well. In the West, or at least the United States, the post-moderns have hit upon a version of this idea for some time now, and at present, the lack of a publicly agreed upon objective reality is increasingly a major problem when it comes a shared public discourse. Though it is easy to see these disagreements through the lens of American politics and their competing factions (e.g. Republicans, liberals, progressives, alt-right, etc.), I think it is also possible to read this disagreement though the concept of 心, that is, that there is one side who believes in the province of objective facts, and thus, in the modern institutions of democracy and their laws, and that there is one side who believes that facts and feelings are inseparable. I do not think that these sides are divided along political lines.