and this was followed by a comment from a Russian

Nice comment, I totally agree
(At least I’m not an English teacher)

Well, as I have written before, I am used to comments like this and I suppose there is some justification for them. There’s no smoke without fire, as the old adage has it, and some of the English “teachers” I have met over the years have been unqualified, psychotic, alcoholic, incompetent etc etc. But but but…the majority are normal, likable, interesting and decent people who are capable of teaching English very well. (Just like me! Shucks.)

It should also be said that some “English teaching” does verge on the pointless, particularly when teachers are stuck in, and then stuck with, a class of students who don’t want to be there and indeed often have no good reason to be there other than that the lessons are a parental or governmental requirement. I am lucky enough to be able to avoid teaching classes like these. I teach motivated university students, businesspeople, and adorable little kids.

I am an English teacher. It is my job and it is part of my identity. When people ask me what I do, I say I am an English teacher. I suppose I could, if I was feeling poncy, reply instead that “I teach literature and applied linguistics at a University” but that would be, well, poncy.

Anyways, a couple of weeks ago, via the wonderful haohao report, I came across an interesting article that both analysed and criticised that bally rotter the Chinabounder. In case you know him not, Chinabounder is (was) a young English teacher from the UK who wrote what became an infamous blog about his womanising in Shanghai. He then became the victim of a storm of indignation and media curiosity when a certain Dr Zhang, a university psychology lecturer, demanded he be hunted down and kicked out of China for humiliating and mistreating Chinese.

The article was from a site called The Middle Kingdom Life which has the subheading Perspectives on Living and Teaching in China. It is run by a few people but there is a Dr Greg (Gregory Mavrides, Ph.D.)who does most of the writing and moderating. In his own words… Dr. Mavrides is an American psychoanalyst who has been working in China as a professor and mental health consultant since August 2003.

I left a comment saying, more or less, that while Chinabounder is a prat he does have some insightful points to make about China and Chinese society. But that’s by the by, what I want to focus on is the Doc’s response and the point he made about English teachers in China. He said…

If Chinabounder’s situation was a relatively rare one, there wouldn’t have been any reason to write an article about it. In fact, he is a very common type of male foreign English teacher in China and I just used him as an example, as he decided to go public with his adventures.

I think the claim that the bounder is “a very common type” of English teacher is unfair and way off the mark and I commented back

I have been in Dalian for two years now and have hung out with an awful lot of, mostly male, English teachers and have never met anyone who sleeps with lots of Chinese women and brags about it. I have some colleagues who are young, male, and horny and in some cases absolutely smitten by Chinese femininity, yes, but they don’t sleep around and “break hearts”. They mostly joke about how all the beautiful girls are out of their league! Most of them are after a serious girlfriend…just like everywhere else! Anyway, I think you have an unfairly poor opinion of male English teachers in China, you even use “English teacher” in scare quotes…I do not think Bounder is representative of anything but a tiny tiny minority of English teachers. That’s my experience anyway.

To which the Doc replied

From the situation you describe in Dalian, it sounds like a very special, even unique, city in regard to foreign English teachers. We’ll have to investigate that for future editions of the guide.

This sounded distinctly sarcy to me so I tried to post this comment in response…

I must beg to differ. I am assuming your comment is not intended to slyly point out that I am wrong in my judgment of English teachers in Dalian and am taking it at face value. So, it seems to me extremely unlikely that Dalian is somehow unique…I mean, why should it be? Also, I have talked to English teachers who have worked in Ningbo, Shanghai, Jinan, Beijing, Changchun, Chongqing etc, and they all say that Dalian is very nice, but none of their stories suggest that the “English teaching community” is significantly different than the one here. Could I therefore suggest the point that it is not that Dalian is unique, it is that your opinion of English teachers is unfairly low? Cheers for now.

but the Doc censored it. That is, he wouldn’t allow the comment to stay on his site. More about why not later.

Anyway, this little to-and-fro then prompted another article by the Doc called What Exactly Is An English Teacher?. In this, Doc expanded on his previous comment

And, for the record, I have absolutely nothing against English teachers: they were certainly among my favorite in high school. It’s just that I don’t think it’s reasonable to refer to anyone who can speak English as an “English teacher” (even if they’re being paid as one in China), hence my use of quotation marks. I’m sorry that wasn’t clear to you.

and went on to talk about some of his experiences with “real” and “genuine” English teachers, who, in his opinion, are those who teach English as an academic subject rather than as a language.

This is one definition of “English teacher”, but there are quite clearly others and I found it amazing that the manager of a site purporting to help English teachers in China would be so blinkered and condescending. Accordingly, I attempted to post a reply stating my opinion about other definitions, but again the Doc wouldn’t allow it on his site.

Here it is for those of you interested…

Dear Dr,

Hello again. I came a bit late to this post, but to be honest I found it hard to believe what I was reading! As a manager of a website for English teachers in China, you do surely realise that “English teacher” has different meanings in different contexts? Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that you consider a “real” English teacher to be an English literature/grammar teacher, and a trained and qualified one of course, and probably a native speaker of English. I am inferring this from the following parts of your article;

two genuine English teachers
Because he is a real English teacher
I thought again about how loosely the term “English teacher” is thrown around in China

But this is just one type of English teacher and no more “real” (or “professionally authentic” perhaps) than me or any of my Chinese friends who teach English at Chinese schools or universities. If you ask my Chinese colleagues at Dalian University of Foreign Languages what they do, many of them will simply say that they are “English teachers”…although at University level they might mention a specific focus.

So, what about me? I am not qualified to teach English literature/grammar in England, but I have been an English teacher for 12 years now. I have a TEFL certificate (a month long starter course) and I have an MSc in Applied Linguistics. I am an English teacher: I teach English to people whose native language is not English. I have worked (teaching English) in Universities in Hungary, Japan, Thailand, England, Scotland and China. I have both taken and given teacher training programs, and I have taught general English in Private schools, multinational companies, and kindergartens. And I am not that unusual, there are a lot of people with similar professional experience in the world these days because teaching English is big business! There is also a huge literature, including several academic journals, devoted to the field of teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL, TESOL etc) and to work for a university or for a quality institution like the British Council or a respected private school, you have to have a Masters degree or a Diploma in English Language Teaching to Adults (DELTA). Both of which take a year or more to get. To work as an English teacher in most universities in developed countries these days, you need a PhD.

What about those teaching English who have no other qualification than that English is their mother tongue? Are they the ones who are disqualifying me and others like me from being “real”? Well, they are there because there is a demand for them to be there. The desire to have a “native speaker” as a teacher is misguided in my opinion, but it is strong enough to mean that there are not enough qualified people to fill the posts. So, you get people teaching English who are not properly trained. Some of them turn out to be very effective teachers and some do not; some of them like the job enough to go and get certified, and most go on to other things.

But please, just because there are maybe more unqualified first-timers (as well as some chancers/sexpats etc) in China than in, say, Japan, please do not assume that there is not a body of well qualified and dedicated English teachers here, both Chinese and native speaker.

To repeat my main point, the term “English teacher” means different things in different contexts and to try to limit it to “English literature/grammar teacher”, presumably because that is what your “English” lessons consisted of at school, is misleading and unhelpful. Please use your site to welcome a broad church of English teachers to China and please give them more professional respect. Thank you!

End of comment.

Again, the Doc wouldn’t allow this on his site, but he did at least have the courtesy to tell me why not. He sent me an email explaining that…As I have spent upward of one year researching, writing, and revising this guide, I am going to use this website as my personal pulpit and not as a forum for open debate…I’m going to use it to proselytize my point of view…Of course there are exceptions, as pointed out in the guide, but I don’t feel the need to air them in a way that casts dispersions (sic) on or distracts readers from the main points that have been raised.

Well, there we have it. It’s not only the CCP that thinks that reasonable and rational discussion is “unhelpful”. If you don’t like the voice of the other side, silence it! (NB The only comments I have censored on my blog have been insulting or abusive ones…yes Dude, those ones.)

On the other hand, it’s his blog (his little domain) so he can do what he wants. Fair enough, I just think it paints a misleading, not to mention condescending, portrait of English teachers.

We’re not that bad, are we? Comments welcome.

Bloody peasants keep on voting for the wrong party! Suggestion:Why not switch to the Chinese system?

Anyway, during the street fights one of the pro-government peasants, a 55 year old man, was killed. He was beaten to death with golf clubs. Apparently, golf clubs are “the weapon of choice” for the Pad and this speaks volumes. Golf encapsulates very aptly the gap between the prosperous, leisured, often right-wing urbanites, and the great unwashed of the countryside. What…those Lao bumpkins have the temerity to vote for a party we don’t like? Let’s batter them with golf clubs.

I’ve nothing against the game of golf of course, just what it has come to stand for. Most “golfers” are not really that interested in golf and are arrogant cocks, and the golf courses themselves gobble up water at an alarming rate.

I say ban it! Anyone who disagrees gets pummeled with a pool cue.

Twice a week for the last year I have been taking the school bus from Dalian City centre to the outskirts of Lüshun (aka Port Arthur), where the new campus for Dalian University of Foreign Languages is located. It’s a 40 kilometre trip and takes an hour. Come along for a ride and we can take in a fair amount of what makes Dalian an appealing and increasingly prosperous city.

Leaving at 7am, we first go round the back of Labor Park and pass a “scenic viewpoint” that always has a group of of old folk doing their morning stretches while looking at this picture postcard view…

Actually, that photo is a bit old and there are a fair few more skyscrapers downtown now. A new one every month it feels like.

Then we stutter along the busy Dongbei Lu and about 10 minutes later the next landmark on our journey is the “world famous” Xinghai square. It’s a BIG square by the sea.

But it’s a bit of a mystery just how big it is and where it really comes in the rankings of bigboy squares. Having been in Dalian almost 2 years now, I’ve heard tell on numerous occasions that Xinghai is the largest square in Asia, and have even read somewhere that it’s about four times bigger than Tiananmen. But at the back of my mind I thought I remembered that Tiananmen is the largest square in the world, and so I did what homo modernicus does and googled “largest square in the world”. The vast majority of sites agree that the answer is Tiananmen.

According to Wikipedia’s “Largest City Square” rankings page, for example, Tiananmen Square is first at 440,000 m² and Xinghai is 36th at 45,000 m². Moreover, googling “world’s largest square” will get you almost nothing but Tiananmen, yet put in “asia’s largest square” and you’ll get almost nothing but Xinghai. Hmmm… last time I checked Beijing was in Asia.

Something funny going on there. Can anyone shed some light on this?

Anyroad…we bear right at Xinghai and creep along the bloody busy commuter road leading to the Software Park and the Hi-Tech Zone. God only knows what this road will be like in 10 years time when the number of cars on Dalian roads will very likely have tripled.

This Software/Hi-Tech area is one of the reasons Dalian is on the up in the world and is even being touted as the next Bangalore. It’s an already impressive place with pleasant modern buildings and plenty of well planned and preserved green bits. See below.

But soon, just along the coast a bit, the “shock and awe” extension will open and many of Dalian’s IT workers will be manning the phones and clicking their mouses in a grandly corporate hilltop setting of mock castles and palaces and gleaming glass office blocks, with lakes and bridges and aquaducts dotted around. All with a nice seaview. I’ve watched that place being built over the last year and it is certainly the most impressive and über-modern business area I’ve seen. Makes Canary Wharf look a bit old and stuffy.

Then as the bus turns right past this Brave New World, we are out of Dalian and moving onto the road to Lushun proper…and the hills let out a sigh as the concrete clutter finally fades away. Dalian’s hills are occluded, crowded, or pockmarked by tower blocks, TV towers, observatories and the like. The hillsides seem burdened by the sheer number of people living in China, and it is rare indeed to get a glimpse of a clear green view around town.

But the first few kilometres of the road to Lushun verge on the image of the rural idyll. Grey slabs of stone give way to green slopes and trees and a few squat little peasant houses with their orange roofs nestle at the foot of the as yet untouched hills. And you have to wonder how much longer this will last. How much longer until Dalian and Lüshun melt into one big conurbation?

For a kilometre or two the road winds its way through valleys, but soon the land opens up to an undulating plain on the right with distantly looming hills/mountains where a huge and expensive housing complex will soon be built. At the moment the roadside is lined with the construction company’s billboards, adorned with optimistic representations of what the houses will look like and of course with slogans.

The slogans are in Chinese and in “English”, this being a high-class housing complex you understand… you gotta have your gobbledygook English to be really classy. But one of the more coherent slogans that sticks in my mind is “Texture of Nature. Life of Poetry!”. Ah, yes…poetry! Nature! Construction!

It must be said that when the winter sets in the Dongbei landscape becomes an almost uniform dusty brown, but right now it is gentle shades of late summer green. Autumn is beautiful too: “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” autumnal breezes and the changing colours of the leaves. And the spring is sublime…come springtime on the road to Lüshun and the hills are alive with bursts of Forsythia and Cherry blossom. “Loveliest of trees the cherry now, is hung with bloom along the bough”, and we have the Japanese occupation to thank for a lot of that. Only a non-Chinese could write that last sentence.

Actually, the Japanese originally got their national obsession with cherry blossom from the Chinese, but they have made it their own and it has assumed an importance in Japanese culture that far outstrips the Chinese concern with it. But as we pass the small town of Longwantan (we are two-thirds of our way to Lushun now) there is a park where, come the season, scenes of cherry blossom viewing very reminiscent of Japan take place. To the best of my knowledge, the trees here were mostly planted by the Japanese.

Then it is only a few more kilometres past fruit trees and the occasional building until we reach the Lüshun coast. Turn right again and as you are driving along the remaining couple of kilometres to Dalian University of Foreign Languages you can view one of the calmest seas in the world. It is, as my Dad would say, “as flat as a millpond” almost all the time and that makes it ideal for “seafood farming.” I’m not sure exactly what marine creatures are being kept down there (crabs, abalone, sea cucumbers, for Dalian’s fancy seafood restaurants?) but I can see the sea is dotted with buoys to show the fisherfolk where to go for harvest-time. And huge lorries full of kelp are a common sight round here.

Lüshun is an “up and coming area” so the next feature on the coast road is a huge new housing complex with a couple of towering tower blocks and row upon row of European Villa-style houses. It’s called the “The Blue Beach Resort” and I guess it’s for those rich enough to want a second house by the sea. There wasn’t a beach there a year ago, but they’ve managed to ship one in somehow. They’ve also constructed a moat and a marina, and there is a mountain backdrop and a sea view, so all very nice…apart, that is, from the lingering piscine pong.

Almost there. Another minute’s drive and we turn right again (I’ve just realised the whole journey consists of right-turns) to get my university…the resplendent Dalian University of Foreign Languages.

I’m not being tongue-in-cheek - it really is nice now - but about a year ago, for the first few months, it was pretty grim. To save money the students had been ordered in well before the place was ready. The roads weren’t even tarmacked, the students had no hot water - and sometimes no water at all - the paint was still drying, there were potholes everywhere (and my Mexican friend Emiliano fell into one and nearly broke his leg) trucks full of construction materials and migrant workers roared around everywhere and it’s amazing nobody died, the builders were in a great hurry to put down the paving and did a very sloppy job, and the 80% female student population felt a bit uneasy about being stared at by the hordes of male migrant workers who were living on campus with them. It was all fairly depressing and if that kind of crap had been attempted in any democratic country I guess there would have been a student uprising. I did hear a few students grumbling, but really not much, considering the circumstances and considering that this is a university that is considered “expensive” by Chinese standards. By and large they seemed stoical about it and I remember there appeared some graffiti on the gym wall scrawled in permanent marker pen…”It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness“. Well, indeed.

But anyway, anyway, I digress. And it’s nice now…really! Rose gardens, plenty of trees, restored paving, good restaurants, hot baths, nice roads, warm classrooms, a lovely big library with lots of computers and lots of censorship, a grand new concert hall, and lots of happy-looking students suffused with the soft afterglow of the Olympic spirit!

The actual town of Lushun is still a couple of kilometres away…over the hills and down the vales… and despite the fact that a lot of foreign teachers live on campus, and that the Medical University next door has about 500 foreign students attending, it’s still not entirely clear if foreigners are allowed to go there or not!

Lüshun/Port Arthur is a naval base you see, and was strictly off limits to foreigners for ages. Because they might see some secret ships or seduce some sailors or something. Or they might even wander into the city centre and buy a KFC, yes there is one. Can’t have that! But the rules have - reportedly - been relaxed, and I have indeed spent a pleasant day strolling around the town and viewed the battleships from Baiyu Tower (below) without being bothered, apart from by the photo tout at the top.

But then I was told that I had been lucky and that actually it’s better not to go because foreigners do still occasionally get fined and arrested. Who knows? Welcome to the military mentality. Put me on the peacebus back to Dalian!

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone actually utter the word, but I know it well coz Wordsworth used it in “Daffodils”, one of the most famous poems in the English language. When speaking of the gleeful dancing daffydillies he emoted

A poet could not but be gay, / In such a jocund company

which couples, so to speak, an archaic usage of “gay” with our equally archaic “word for today.”

And I also half-remembered Conrad using it in “Heart of Darkness” for a grimly humoured description of some skulls on poles, but when I checked the quote I found

a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and, with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth, was smiling, too, smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber.

so it was jocose, not jocund. And who the hell uses “jocose” these days? it must be even more obscure than “jocund.” I guess that’s why it’s not a “Jocose Hut” round the corner from where I live.

And then I also remembered that English was Conrad’s third language and that he was wont to use it somewhat eccentrically from time to time; a habit that led to literary critic FR Leavis’ catty comment that “Conrad’s sea smells of Roget’s Thesaurus”.

Anyways, maybe Chinese and Japanese electronic dictionaries are going to resurrect a few long dormant and/or incredibly obscure words and blazon them on the shopfronts and T-shirts of the Pacific rim. And then we English teachers over here will have to find out what they mean.

Have a jocund day!

K

And someone recently dredged up another photo from the Spanish women tennis team’s website showing some of the same high jinks.

In the fuss that has followed some interesting issues arose. The US media pondered aloud as to what the Spanish team thought they were up to by publicly insulting their hosts. And NBA superstar Jason Kidd opined that had the US team done the same they would have been thrown out of the Olympics and not been allowed back in the NBA. The Spanish retorted by calling it “an affectionate gesture” and pointing out that the Chinese themselves hadn’t seemed to have taken offence at all, insofar as to date there have been no comments by the Chinese media on the incident. Fair point!
But then the US and UK (evil Anglo-Saxons) insisted on placing the “affectionate gesture” in a context of other “Spanish gestures”, including “the monkey chants that greeted England’s black footballers in a friendly game in Spain and the blacking up of some local fans when Lewis Hamilton was competing in the Spanish grand prix.”

My take on it all is that who cares if a bunch of greasy spics take the piss out of the chinks? I’m like so totally, yeah…whatever.

Not really! Just my little joke. Geddit?

Actually, I have a fond memory from about 15 years ago when I was living in Hungary. I was studying in a rather sleepy provincial town called Debrecen and one afternoon I witnessed a visiting schoolboy choir from Korea getting off their bus in front of the concert hall. The local lads had probably never seen real live asians before and so the Koreans created quite a crowd of little gawkers. Then one of the wee rascals thought it would be funny to pull his eyes into slitty position and this soon spread until you had a crowd of laughing Magyar boys pulling slanty eyes and pointing at their Korean guests. Hilarious!

But what made it memorable for me was the Koreans’ response. After about a minute of being taunted like that, they responded by making big round goggly eyes with their fingers and pointing back at the local kids and laughing. I loved them for that. It made me proud to have a Korean name.

Wouldn’t it be cool if the Chinese national basketball had a photo done pulling big goggly eyes next time they go off to play Spain? Not particularly, it would be childish. But that’s kind of what the Spanish athletes are guilty of, being childish…but surely not malicious or racist.

But while Britain is certainly cloudy, Chinese still tell me that London is a foggy city, even though it hasn’t been so since the sixties. It seems a fair few people’s perceptions of other countries are 50 years out-of-whack.

But since a lot of the poem is actually attacking “daddy”, is the famous line better interpreted as being ironic? Maybe…but there is also a well documented type of trauma that results from physical as well as psychological abuse from husbands and fathers due to the strong and irrational feelings of love the victims foster for the perpetrators.

And the line, and the ones that follow it, and the connotations of the type of trauma described above, all made me think of Mao.

Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

When I think about Mao, one of the things that baffles me about his ongoing popularity amongst the CHINESE is that this was the guy who was responsible for the unnecessary death and suffering and humiliation of millions and millions of CHINESE. He didn’t inflict much suffering on other countries, it was his own nation of CHINA who bore the brunt of Mao’s murderous madness. And CHINESE culture didn’t fare too well under Mao either. Let’s face it, his reign was an almost unmitigated disaster for CHINA and it was only after he died, and after Deng XiaoPing managed to get rid of Mao’s legacy, that CHINA could start to thrive and prosper again.

So why would any proud CHINESE who loves CHINA have any fond feelings (let alone love) for a man who wrecked the country they love and killed the compatriots they love?

Well, I guess one reason is because whatever else Mao wanted, he certainly wanted a great and powerful China. He wanted China to be a world power, of course, and everything he did, every sacrifice he made, was in the name of that cause. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, or without starving millions of your countrymen, or without starting a cultural revolution that closes all the universities, or without…etc etc.

And I suppose another reason is because younger Chinese don’t know what villainy Mao got up to because it’s all been airbrushed out and all that’s left are portraits of a chubby uncle with a ruddy friendly face and a big smile. “Our founding Father who fought off the Japanese and established a new free China! Hurray for Mao! And hurray for the CCP!”

And these reasons make sense to me, and I find they help explain his popularity. But those lines of Sylvia Plath’s also come to mind and they unsettle me and suggest a darker, more troubling, but also - it must be said - slightly less convincing reason.

How many of those who have been brutalized by a strong male authority figure really do end up trying to pardon him and find love in his actions? It’s kind of pre-modern “old testament” stuff, I guess, though probably quite a common psychic tic amongst females in strict Islamic cultures.

But it doesn’t really ring true. In much the same way as the Plath quote isn’t really trying to be “true” either, it’s trying to grab our attention by shockingly overstating the case.

And in China I don’t see such a big gender split. It’s definitely a sexist country in many ways, but not a profoundly sexist one. Women don’t have much power in the public realm here, but at least they don’t get overtly discriminated against, and at least there are some female business leaders and politicians. And the situation is getting better because Chinese women are not prepared to put up with it so much anymore.

But what the lines also point to is a love of power. A big fascist daddy is a power figure, and a lot of Chinese do seem very hung up on power. “I like the US because it is a strong country”. “One day China will be number 1″ are comments I have heard more than once. And I suspect that some of the Chinese love for Mao is a love for and fascination with power. And the fact that he massively abused that power seems neither here nor there!

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not getting all idealistic here. We will never be able to extract power from the equation…it’s part of the psychic air we breath, as the following quote from the French philosophe Foucault nicely captures

“The strategic adversary is fascism… the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”

But fascism is power manifested in a particularly nasty and mean spirited way, and it needs to be rebelled against. And Plath’s poem has a strong, sassy, and liberating ending to it…

And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

The day the Chinese are through with that bastard Mao will usher in better times. Dancing and stamping on the old waxwork in Tiananmen would be cool. And the day that citizens all around the world can get through with power worship in general will be a very happy day. May it happen soon. World peace, dudes.

As the man himself says, “This is a book about how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since.” It has potted histories of cosmology, astronomy, paleontology, geology, chemistry, physics, and more, and some greatly entertaining snippets about the great and the good of the scientific community. How about this one from the life of Charles Darwin? Apparently after coming back from his famous voyage on the Beagle, Darwin opted to let his notes and observations (later to become The Origin of Species) sit in a draw for almost ten years instead of publishing them, as he knew they were bound to cause a storm. What did he do during those years?

Darwin fathered ten children and devoted nearly eight years to writing an exhaustive opus on barnacles (’I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before,’ he sighed, understandably, upon the work’s conclusion). (p467)

Bill Bryson is a funny man, and a deservedly popular writer. “A Brief History of Almost Everything” is a bit of a departure from his normal genre of travel writing, but it works very well and deserves all the hyperbole on the blurb, and I couldn’t put it down. Well, actually I could. I put it down when I finished it. I’m not still clutching it in my clammy mitts, you understand? But when I had finished it and had thought a bit about it and was about to allow it to slip from the front of my focus to let my back brain masticate on it in a more leisurely fashion…something struck me. It’s a well known affliction for the long term expat: almost everything you read or hear or experience that is non-Chinese sooner or later gets put through the “and what does this say about China?” processor.

And I realised that Old Billy Boy’s Big Boffins Book has almost nothing about China in it. No Chinese names, no Chinese scientists mentioned, and not even any mention of compasses or paper or gunpowder! And no Indians or Indonesians or Thais or Japanese come to that.

The story in this history is of a succession of clever westerners wrestling with all the problems and questions that beset the curious, and triumphantly solving almost all of them. As befits the subject matter, Bryson is more concerned with what gets solved than with who solves it, but he does have a knack for the bringing to life the personalities behind the science too…and in his account they are all westerners.

There are a couple of references to China, but they are rather unflattering ones. There’s a brief mention that as China is now opening up, western scientists are at last able to travel unimpeded and do some proper research on dinosaur remains. Here’s the other one:

In China, a gifted Canadian amateur named Davidson Black began to poke around at a place called Dragon Bone Hill, which was locally famous as a hunting ground for old bones. Unfortunately, rather than preserving the bones for study, the Chinese ground them up to make medicines. We can only guess how many priceless Homo erectus bones ended up as a sort of Chinese equivalent of Beecham’s powder. The site had been much denuded by the time Black arrived, but he found a single fossilized molar and on the basis of that alone quite brilliantly announced the discovery of Sinanthropus pekinensis, which quickly became known as Peking Man. (page 527)

Well, if I were a Chinese nationalist reading that, I might be forgiven for sniffing out some condescension. A not completely unfair paraphrase of the above passage might run as follows:

The silly old Chinese were buggering everything up with their blundering half-baked beliefs, but luckily a proper western scientist got there in the nick of time and made a great discovery for the benefit of the enlightened scientific community…which doesn’t include Chinese by the way!

Anyways, it’s not so much what Bryson may or may not be implying about China, it’s the omissions that are more serious, I think. As the recent piece over at Frog in a Well shows all too well, China contributed a lot to scientific understanding over the years, and although this didn’t translate into a modern scientific/industrial revolution it is a big gap if you claim to be writing a history of nearly everything. Though to be fair, he did say nearly everything!

There was a time when the Chinese were considered to be scientific trailblazers and here is a nice quote from a review of a recent book about the life of Joseph Needham “The Man Who Loved China” , a book that is getting a fair bit of attention in the English language Chinese blogosphere these days.

“Four thousand years ago, when we couldn’t even read, the Chinese knew all the absolutely useful things we boast about today,” wrote French philosophe Voltaire in 1764. But if today in the West we widely acknowledge those words to be true, that’s largely due to an Englishman.

That “largely due to an Englishman” sounds a bit smug, doesn’t it? And did he have to mention that Voltaire is French, it’s kind of superfluous.

Well, anyhoo, Needham was he of the notorious “Needham question”, namely “Why didn’t the Chinese beat Europeans to the Scientific Revolution?” especially since they led the field for so long. My guess is that the answer lies in an unwillingness to learn from other nations and too much thought-policing by strict authorities. But the Chinese are a competitive bunch these days, and hungry for scientific knowledge and international prestige, and you gotta wonder if they’ll start being innovative and trailblazing once again. One thing is for sure, the first Chinese to win a Nobel for science is going to be a MEGASTAR.

But that kind of nationalistic fretting and pettiness really should be beside the point. Science, among other things, should help us to overcome our nationalistic blinkers and celebrate the achievements of Homo sapiens and not just Caucasian man, or Sinanthropus pekinensis. When I was reading “A Short History” I forgot that I was living in China and the “what does this mean for China” question only occurred to me after I’d put the book down. And that is as it should be, basically. Although it’s interesting to compare cultures and to look at science from different angles, nationality is insignificant whenever we start to consider the big picture.

Having been an English teacher for donkey’s years, I used to get asked from time to time to teach children and my answer always used to be, “I don’t do kids”. But about 5 months ago when I went with my wife and 1 year-old baby to a nearby swanky kindergarten to inquire about prices and lessons etc, I was again offered a job and on very good terms. I only had to teach weekend mornings for a couple of hours and my baby daughter could go to the kindergarten for free anytime she wanted, and on top of this they’d pay me a hundred an hour. I told them I had never taught kids before (and only just resisted saying that I never want to) but they shrugged this off and said I should just try it out…so I did. This kindergarten is a franchise of a well known Australian brand, “Kindyroo!”, and they teach all their “lessons” in English, with a Chinese translator. All the foreign instructors apart from me are Filipinos, and the Chinese management was keen to have “a white face” at their school, to appeal to the daft and rather racist idea that a proper “外教 waijiao/ foreign teacher” shouldn’t be asian looking. Ho hum, good for me I guess.

The lessons turned out to be surprisingly easy and enjoyable. I have only ever had to teach the “cooking class” and so on weekend mornings I help the little darlings to make tacos or cookies or cupcakes or burgers or whatever. It’s a “language and culture” cooking class, so we introduce them to western food and teach them some polite phrases “Yes please, thank you very much, it’s yummy etc” and run through the list of ingredients in English and get them to repeat. And I usually get to sample the fares, so what a great job! And the kids are lucky because I don’t actually do any of the cooking, we have a proper chef who does it. Lessons would be deserted and the school would be forced to close were I the chef.

The age range is 2-6, and they pay 190RMB ($26) each for this particular class, which makes it rather pricey. As I said before, the school is very nicely designed and decorated, and the staff are well trained and good at their job. Apart from me that is, I’m just some big-nosed joker who turns up and tries not to scare anyone… and as I have to do a bit of singing and dancing every lesson, that’s not an easy task.

And I have found that teaching kids in short spells is not too bad, but it’s tiring and I wouldn’t want to do much more of it than I do now. It takes a sunnier temperament than mine to “keep up with the kids” and although they are mostly deeply cute and well behaved I just couldn’t hack it as a full time job. Most of the staff at Kindyroo are there because they love kids and while most of them are also well-adjusted adults, there are a few who have “the look”. This “look” is a kind of glaze to their features that radiates the unfazeable radiant cheerfulness of the terminally baby-besotted. (And, sorry, but it is an exclusively female trait.) Maybe these types start to revert to normal if you take them far away enough from kids but as I’ve never met them outside of work, I wouldn’t really know.”The look” is not so obviously a bad thing of course, but it reminds me of the “Stepford Wives” or “Brave New World” a little too much for my comfort.

Maybe the most positive thing to come out of all this is that I am able to be unabashedly warm and fuzzy in my feelings and reports about Chinese kiddies. We have all read in some papers, I think, that because of the one-child policy China is bringing up a nation of rottenly spoilt “little Emperors”…but my findings are quite to the contrary. This is an expensive school we are talking about and the well-heeled mummies are clad in designer clothes and accompanied by nannies and so there is a fair bit of potential for pampered little brats. But they are not; they are charming and well behaved and lovable and…ayah, I am becoming a big soppy baby softy.

Oh yes, and the best way is to boil gently for half a day or so, depending on weight. I found that roasting and frying leaves the meat a bit too tough. Add salt according to taste. Yummy!