Thoughts on 'race' and living in Asia

Living in Asia has been a lesson in living as a minority-- on getting extra attention and being treated as not quite a real person. Don't get me wrong: My experience bears little or no relation to the experience of underprivileged minorities in their home countries. I am a very privileged minority here. And there's something more than that: this is not my home. I do not have to take responsibility for the demons here, and even if they did affect me negatively, it would be more like the misunderstanding of strangers than the disapproval of a parent.

I learned during my first two months in China, over the summer of 2006, how much I used 'race' to define people in my mind, despite education and good intentions to the contrary. You see, whatever the majority of people in a person's life look like is what they will spend the most time defining. Growing up in predominantly White Iowa, I noticed a lot more about the variations in skin, hair, and eye color in white people I met than I did about others. For the most part, I probably would not know more than a couple people in a given minority in any particular social group, so their being Black or Asian or Latino/a or Native was enough to give them a unique identity in my mind.

I'm not sure that this tendency itself qualifies as racism*, but it is definitely a convenient jumping-off place for discrimination. When I have put everyone who is not The Same As Me into handy categories, it is very easy to attach any label or stigma to all of them at once, instead of having checks built into my mind to remind myself that no one characteristic, even one as defining as heritage, can tell you what is most important about a person.

So, when I came to China, at first everyone just looked Chinese to me. Everyone had black hair and skin a different color than mine, and my mind was overloaded. There were simply too many people to fit into a convenient Minority category, and I had to start paying attention to what they actually looked like.

What I realized was that Chinese people look a lot like the White people I was used to describing more carefully in my mind's eye (and, I have since had time to confirm, a lot like people from many other races and backgrounds). There are Chinese people with long faces and thin noses, with melancholy eyes and mouths that droop in the corners. Tall and wide with booming voices, thin and pale so that it seems an unkind word could knock them over. Over and over again I looked at someone and realized that if their skin was a just a little lighter, or the lines in their face had slightly different angles, I would think of them as White rather than Chinese.

I am always afraid when I attempt to voice realizations like this that it will sound like I have been amazed to find that other humans are human, which feels horrible. What amazes me is to find that despite always having known and professed that all humans are human, I still use racist shortcuts in classifying people in my mind. I am sure that I do this is all kinds of ways. Living in China and Korea, and especially trying to function in Chinese, has made it easier for me to remember that a persons ability to express themselves in a language I understand is not a good indicator of their intelligence, but it is still much easier for me, in a frustrating situation, to think of people who I can't communicate with as stupid. I know I make assumptions about people's gender or intelligence or even just interests based on things that are simply convenient and not all that meaningful. Perhaps all of the evidence I use does mean something about a person's identity, as race certainly can, but they are not all-meaningful.  I am grateful for my constant opportunities to re-learn how to pay attention to who a person really is.

*so I'd love to hear what you think!

And when I wake for goodness' sake, these are the songs I'll keep singin'

I have been reading a translation of Anne Frank's diary into German*, just saw at the back an advertisement for a book by a childhood friend of Anne's and knew that Jacqueline van Maarsen could not have guessed when she was a child that that particular friendship would be a topic which thousands of people would want to read about later. It put me back in touch with the truth that you cannot treat any human being with too much respect. It makes me wonder how many of the people whose lives are tangent to mine, how many  old classmates and acquaintances or current Facebook friends, are living with thoughts too big to share with me, and even too weighty to share with the people much closer to them. 


I have been working on being alright with myself, on feeling confident enough about who I am and what my past joys and mistakes have been to see who I want to become. A friend introduced me to a video called "How To Be Alone" yesterday, and it gave me a lot of momentum.


I have been seeing so many people who didn't mean to end up where they are or, worse, don't want to be there. I think it would be more than alright in many ways to know a few things about myself and just see where they take me. That may, in fact, be the genuine best life path. 


At the same time, though, I want to know that my goals are formed of more than convenience or ambition. I want to become something(s) that I want to be, and not things for which I want to be recognized, and not things things that just don't make me uncomfortable.


I have been thinking about expectations and their dangers. We expect children to learn in a classroom, often on teachers' terms and not according to the individual shape of students' minds. We expect ourselves to be happy with reasonable situations, and don't allow for the emotions that run in monthly or yearly or decade-ly cycles and can pull us from functioning to stuck in our thoughts or to exhilaration at merely being alive in the space of a thought.


Goodness, I thought this was a post with a point but I am wandering again. Ah well, welcome to my mind.


This talk that a friend shared has helped me a lot in finding words for what I have been struggling with: Brene Brown at TEDxHouston. She talks about
*it was originally written in Dutch. I had been certain it was German to begin with, but the Frank family moved to the Netherlands in 1933 when Hitler came to power. So by the time Anne started writing in 1942 she was functioning in Dutch.


Title is from Weezer's Heart Songs

"All this living's so much harder than it seems// you know, this livin's not so hard as it seems"

So I've had kind of a strange couple of weeks. I was rather low for awhile and this was compunded by my feeling foolish for feeling low and it took me a while to, first, give myself permission to not be happy and, second, to investigate why I wasn't happy.

This is a phase that I go through regularly; I want to say once or twice a year. I have to re-realize that being unhappy does not make me a failure, but it is probably telling me something important about myself. It trips me up and makes me realize I've been crawling. I have been thinking about this article (Depression's Evolutionary Roots, in Scientific American), which discusses depression as an evolutionary necessity, as the mental analogy to a physical fever-- an automatic response that helps to eradicate another problem.

Other than dealing with my emotions, as always, I've started seriously looking into education as a career. I'm looking into Iowa state certification, Chinese language teacher training, and Waldorf and Montessori certification. My ego will be a bit upset with me if I don't decide to pursue higher education in Science and become part of my generation's Badass Female Scientist League, but I think I might be happier as an educator. I see many of our problems today rooted in the fact that students don't learn to investigate truth on their own in school; they learn to mimic those 'smarter' (probably really only more educated) than themselves, so that after school all important issues easily become a competition between sides who have already decided what they think. (There will be more on education later, I hope, as I have yet to understand to my satisfaction the difference between the Waldorf and Montessori philosophies.)

Basically, after a couple of weeks of mental bewilderment, I have come to the conclusion that what I need to decide what direction to move in my life is a systematic exploration of topics I am interested in... like, maybe, a weekly blog series! I am too clever for myself, sometimes.


Title is from Jack Johnson's "Dreams be Dreams."

Searching for a language that fits

I don't really like the way my "exploring the world" series is feeling. It's too vague, and not really helping be systematic in my decisions about myself and my future.

What I need to be searching for, or deciding on, this year is a language. Maybe German or Chinese or perhaps even Korean, but I don't feel I'll completely have to choose between them. I know that studying and reading books in foreign languages will always wake up my mind and my motivation and I'll be able to use them for whatever I do.

I have to choose an angle; I need a primary language through which to view the rest of my life's learning. I don't know if it should be a scientific language-- Chemistry's language of atoms and the push and pull of electrons between them driving life's processes, or Geology's language of the bones of the world. I could study the rise and fall of landforms and the dance of continents around the globe. Or then maybe Biology's tapestry of genes and food webs and the struggle to quantify what keeps life going. Physics would give my quantitative brain a lot of joy and would still let me zoom to any scale of study-- planets swirling through space-time or quarks spinning inside electrons.

Education is important to me-- I would like to continue teaching. I had the great opportunity to work in a Waldorf preschool while I was myself only in sixth grade. The Waldorf community speaks a language much more similar to the language of homeschooling than of public school. They both speak of children's ability and desire to learn on their own terms; to let children use their minds rather than push them to be used.

Living in Asia I have seen a different educational language: one that places discipline at the center and speaks not of what is in a student's mind, but what can but put there. Both of these have some wisdom-- I think it is dangerous to encourage children to search in their minds without also teaching them how to search outside of them-- but on the whole I think that it is more dangerous to teach them only to look outside themselves for wisdom and guidance. I am not sure how to translate these thoughts into a path.

So, in my previous post I tried a bit of writing in the Geologic tongue, and will find a different language for next Thursday. 

Sorry!

I spent the weekend in Seoul at the behest of the TaLK program. I was apprehensive about it, but it turned out just lovely. However, it put me behind for this post. I thought I could throw some links together at least, but my mind just won't show up for it.

On Thursday I will be posting a re-thinking of my second blog series.

Jeju Island Geology, for a start

I have been enjoying living on an island. It is perhaps the exact opposite, geographically, from living in the middle of Iowa. Jeju Island was formed by a volcano-- similar to the Hawaiian island. The volcano, Halla-san (san means mountain in Korean), stands tall in the center of the island, almost always shrouded in humidity and clouds, sometimes poking its head out above them. I have only seen the whole thing clearly once so far. My co-teacher says that it is usually only visible for 10 days a year, or that's what people say.

There are scattered around the island about 360 "parasitic" volcanic cones-- that means that for at least part of the time that Halla-san was active, the amount of magma underneath it was so great that the main volcano was not big enough to release it and it pushed its way through all over the place. The small peaks are visible all over the place-- in Jeju's dialect of Korean they are called "oreum." I have climbed a couple so far, and I love to see them in the distance and imagine the lava shooting out and pooling over the landscape. This would have been a truly dramatic place to live a few hundred thousand years ago.

There are remnants of Jeju's dramatic past all over: the sharp divide between land and see, sometimes dropping off from basalt cliffs to deep water; the oreum scattered across the island, sometimes with their feet in the water; and the lava tubes. Christian and I visited one lava tube called Manjang cave.
I wasn't able to get a good shot with my camera, so here's one from Discover Korea.

It is a place where lava pushed through-- perhaps taking advantage of a crack in the rock--  the outer layer of lava solidified and the rest kept flowing. This picture is of the end of the tunnel that is open to tourists (Manjang cave being one of two or three sections of tunnel open anywhere on the island, out of I think 5 or 6 known tunnels-- one of which is more than 13km long). As we were leaving, I noticed that a lot of the ceiling had light patches. I wondered what they were, and Christian suggested that they might be minerals leached from the soil above. I said, naahh, that's possible, I guess, but highly improbable. Well, one of the first sentences in the UNEP report is that that is exactly what happened, and that is it rare. So, I feel silly, but not completely silly?

It's a beautiful place! Come visit!

--Pretty much all of the information in this post that isn't a personal anecdote is from the United Nations Environmental Project Report on Jeju island as a World Heritage Site, which you can download for your very own self! It's only about 6 pages long, and chock-full of great information.

--also, please note that each of these 'exploring the world' and china series posts are labeled as such, and the tags are at the top of the list on the righthand side of this page. If you just want to view one of these series, just click on its label!

我整天做梦 (a beginning exploration of Chinese language)

My first introduction to China was through language. I chose to start Chinese my sophomore year of university because I had studied German and a little Spanish and wanted to try something away from Europe, and farther historically, culturally, and linguistically from the US (Europe and the US have a lot of important differences, but many of our differences take place upon common assumptions and values).

Chinese is very different from English, and leaves many points in studying it that one can either be frustrated or enraptured with the language. You don't get many breaks-- there aren't the same familiar patterns to find as there are in Romance languages or German. Sometimes this makes things easier: you don't have to conjugate verbs, so there are fewer boundaries to expanding vocabulary. You don't have to spend hours memorizing different forms of a verb-- once you've learned it, you know it. The same goes for articles; there's none of this "der, die, das" or "el, la" business. Simple. Clean.

There are also two dimensions of language in Chinese that no European language has, and I'm guessing many people reading this can name them: Characters and Tones. The fact that one can see a Chinese word written in the Roman alphabet, for example "ni", and yet not know what it means or even how to pronounce it correctly is baffling at first. It's also invigorating.

Tones are an extra factor in Chinese sound. They multiply the number of meaningfully different sounds that can be made from a relatively small phonetic array. It's perhaps more confusing because English does use tones as well, but in English they are used as a factor of emotion or intention, not the simple meaning of a word. An English speaker's tone rises at the end of a question*, and can be used to put extra emphasis on key words. Quite a few native English speakers who visit China, especially if they haven't spent much time studying the language, feel like everyone is shouting angrily at each other. But they aren't. Tones just mean something very different in Chinese than they do in English. They are harmless and important indicators of meaning.

Characters are magic. They are a whole new dimension of meaning that we simply do not have in English. One of the things I spent the most time on at first was spending time with characters to get used to the fact that words must be represented by more than a sound-- if you don't know what a word looks like, you don't know what it means.

Some characters are very straightforward: 一, 二, and 三 mean 'one,' 'two,' and 'three' respectively. 上 means above and 下 means below. 凹 means sunken and 凸 means protruding (though neither are very commonly used. Thus far I haven't seen them outside of historical fiction). Some characters are a poignant description of the meaning of a word: the characters in 目前, or 'present' (as opposed to future or past-- do you see how we could use another clarifying layer of meaning in English sometimes?) mean first 'eye' and then 'in front of.'

The etymology of many Chinese characters is less than obvious, especially since the standard Mandarin taught in most schools in China and in the US is simplified (though other Chinese speaking countries and many Chinese speakers in the US use traditional characters)。漢字 (Han letters, or Chinese characters) became 汉字, for the sake of improved literacy rates. And they are indeed easier to learn and easier to write, but they are not always as clear about their meaning.

A linguist or psychologist would be able to more clearly analyze it, but I like to think about the different ways that Chinese and English are constructed. In my mind,  English words flow together more. Words can contract into each other, and concepts must be pinpointed by a squadron of "of"s "when"s "who"s "which"s, prepositions, and articles. I've heard Chinese described as more contextual, eg, the lack of verb conjugation: you know who the verb relates to from the rest of the sentence or conversation.

Chinese characters are stronger entities than English words; they pull in meaning and carry the ghosts of their neighbors into other words. The example sitting on the cover of the book next to me is its title: 藏地密码。西藏 [Xizang] is the Chinese name for Tibet, and 土地 [tudi] means land (土 means earth and 地 means place, though the word for 'place' in full is 地方). 藏 implies 西藏, 地 implies 土地 so that in two characters you can fully represent the meaning of four. Consequently, Chinese friends are always asking me what the "short way" to say something is. Do you really have to say all those words to get your meaning across? Yeah, you generally kinda do.

*as does, according to the members of Monty Python, a Welsh person's tone when they are upset, as opposed to British person whose tone goes down at the end of a sentence emphatically.

The title is from 我不是黄蓉 by 王蓉, and it means "I spend all day dreaming"