Understanding China—and its primary language—has never been more important.
By Tim Johnson
Soon after North Korea tested a nuclear weapon this past fall, the students in Chinese 425 started their discussion of the crisis-in-the-making by considering Beijing’s official reaction.
The jumping-off point for their classroom dialogue was a news account from an officially sanctioned Chinese wire service, quoting the likes of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, just as the text had appeared in the Chinese press.
The students noted that Hu said the sorts of diplomatic things one might expect a national leader to say: that China “resolutely opposes North Korea’s nuclear test” but would strive for a peaceful, negotiated resolution and a resumption of six-nation talks to defuse the situation.
Moving on to a more general discussion of the North Korean problem, Hang Du, assistant professor of Chinese, presided over what proved to be a fairly lively interchange. She maintained a swift conversational pace—here questioning a student on a phrase or concept, there injecting a joke or a serious comment and inviting others.
What’s noteworthy about this course, Contemporary Social Issues in China, is that it’s conducted entirely in Chinese. Not just the readings, but all the class discussions, the individual student presentations, the essays, and other written work—all are in Chinese. In fact, when Du arrives in the classroom, the custom before the session begins is for everyone to stop speaking English and revert to Chinese, even in informal banter. (“What did you do last night?” or “Could I borrow your car?”) This comes almost naturally to these students, most of whom have been through the Middlebury summer language school and a semester’s language study at the Middlebury school in China, located in Hangzhou—programs that both entail a pledge to speak nothing but Chinese.
The fall semester’s readings—from newspapers, journals, and other current Chinese sources—have covered a heady array of topics: Chinese college life, student suicide, sex and homosexuality, national demographics (the problem of caring for pensioners, the growing male-female imbalance), China’s role in global warming, the legal system and the death penalty, Sino-Japanese relations.
Now and then Du would throw something utterly unacademic into the mix. In the run-up to Halloween, there were some contemporary Chinese ghost stories. Perhaps the most unconventional reading assignment was a poignantly elegant essay, an arresting declaration of love titled “I Want to Hold Your Hand”—composed by a nameless applicant in Shanghai on a written portion of this year’s Chinese college-entrance exam.
Yet for all the time Du and her students spend talking about issues, Chinese 425 is still fundamentally a language class. Du’s Ph.D. is in linguistics and, while her assigned readings reflect her interest in other fields as they pertain to China (sociology, international relations), the main thrust of her work in the classroom is to help students master the key phrases in the texts they read.
“Xian mu, what does that mean?” she asked during the session on the “Hand” essay, referring to two characters she’d highlighted in the text. The expression is normally translated as “to admire,” but the definitions she invited, of course, had to be in Chinese.
“Yan hong,” one student suggested. This literally means “red eye,” or figuratively, “to envy.”
“Not quite,” Du replied, and then explained the distinction: one compound has a positive connotation, the other, negative.
The “Hand” essay demanded an unusual amount of nuanced interpretation and inference. Neither the gender of the writer nor the gender of the object of the writer’s affection was explicit. The best inference was that both were male, and that the piece was, in fact, an avowal of homosexual love. Some students figured this out in their first reading; others reached the “Ah ha” stage later, as the class went through the piece.
Whoever had to grade the essay in China apparently read it the same way. It purportedly received a score of “zero” in the college-entrance exam, Du said.
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When the students in Chinese 425 speak in general terms about the China they’ve experienced, one of the recurrent descriptions they use is bao shou, by which they mean “socially conservative.” China is a place, after all, where sexual freedom is commonly frowned on—where an essay like “Hand” can get a failing grade and where a collegiate one-night stand can be grounds for expulsion.
On the other hand, China’s breathtaking economic growth is leading to societal changes nobody could have predicted a few years ago. A common observation among the Middlebury students is that government control of personal expression is much less severe than they had anticipated.
During one class, Kate Leyland ’07 said that while in Beijing, she had seen a private showing of a film on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest—including the iconic scene of the man standing up to the advancing tank.
That such a film could be shown in China came as a surprise to Du, who is from Beijing. “I never saw that movie when I was in China,” she said later. Now in her third year teaching the course, she added: “Every year, I learn something new from
the students in this class.”
Something else that’s new to her—but old hat to the students who have lived in China in the past year—is the phenomenon of the wang ba. These are Internet cafes, often smoke-filled dives, where many Chinese young people hang out. Leyland suggested that blogging would be a force for social change.
Leyland’s comments came during a class presentation on her impressions of China. Every fall, students are assigned a 10-minute oral discourse on their personal views of China. Most accounts were heavily anecdotal, drawing not just from experiences in and around the university at Hangzhou, but from travels, from temporary jobs, and from encounters on the street.
One undercurrent in most of these talks was a fondness for the country and for people the students had met. They repeatedly mentioned that their language facility paved the way for insights, contacts, and understandings they could never have achieved as mere tourists. Most of them said they wanted to go back.
Leyland concluded her talk with an anecdote that, she said, was emblematic of the public face that China likes to present to the world.
When she went to visit Mao’s tomb in Beijing, it was closed for the day. The public face in this place, a grand national showcase, belonged to a security guard who told her to come back another time.
He was, she told her amused classmates, the most handsome man she had seen in China.