Cultural Differences
As I've noted before, one of the hardest things to get used to here was the differing level of cleanliness when compared to the Western World. I have already seen children peeing and pooping on the sidewalk here (they have slits going from the front to the back of their pants specifically for this purpose), but never before had I seen it in a restaurant. After I finished my final exams on Friday, Allyssa and I went to one of our favorite restaurants, a Korean one that serves a great curry dish and an Italian-inspired one with noodles. This also happens to be the cleanest restaurant of which we know in Weihai. Well, near the end of the meal, a little boy (but one that was old enough to be walking around and climbing onto different objects) started motioning that he needed to go to the bathroom, and instead of using the one at the back of the restaurant, the mother pulled out a paper cup, pulled down the boy's pants, and held the cup as he urinated into it. She then stepped outside to dump it onto the sidewalk, though she almost tripped on the way, which would have sent urine flying all over the inside of the restaurant. Allyssa and I looked at each other dumbfounded.
A less disgusting difference I have noticed lies in the method used to draw stick figures. Chinese draw them as seen below, sort of like a big snowball on top of a house,
while Americans draw them like this:
I was trying to think over what the difference might mean.
Do Chinese people have no necks? Is this why they are shorter? Are their legs attached directly to their arms?
Are Americans perpetually happy? Or frustrated and clueless?
Perhaps the Kiwi way is the best:
Finally, after reading through my students' final evaluations of my teaching and the courses I taught, I realized that the many Chinese attribute dissatisfaction or unhappiness to themselves and their own actions, and less often to external factors or someone else. Some of the students wrote that at times the class was boring, but instead of writing of ways I could improve it next year, they wrote that perhaps they should participate more in class and work harder. I remember some awful classes and professors at Vanderbilt, and when evaluation season rolled around, we couldn't wait to criticize the teacher and the class. Rarely did we reflect on how we could have made it better ourselves. Similarly, I attribute most of the students' unhappiness here with their own efforts and less with myself. I feel somewhat justified in this though, because I did work each week to alter my lessons and make them more interesting, and pretty much only one class by the end of the semester wrote of the lessons being boring, and as expected, they were the ones that made the least effort to participate in any class activities and discussions.
I wonder if this difference results from the pressure placed on each student to succeed at every level of schooling. As the high-performing students are continuously pared down through examinations and they become closer and closer to reaching the ultimate goal of acceptance to university, their lives come to involve little more than studying. If they ultimately fail to achieve acceptance to university, they and those around them conclude that it is only because of their efforts, or lack thereof. Perhaps this is a formula for creating a responsible society, but it also results in one so competitive there's little room for enjoyment of what the hard work has brought. Once students begin university, their weekend nights continue to be occupied largely with studying, and those who don't follow this trend are accused by their peers of wasting the opportunity they have. While this process is also at work in the Western World, I think it has been tempered a bit by becoming comfortable with success. Here, though, every step toward success also offers a possibility of straying from the path, and students are so wary of being left behind that they stop at almost nothing to achieve that success. Many of them plagiarize papers and cheat on exams, and in most circumstances it goes unpunished. While this doesn't always enable them to get ahead of the pack, it does assure them of not falling behind it. In any case, it certainly doesn't do anything to improve China's reputation abroad as being uncreative, something the students are fully aware of, as they often woe the fact that China has never produced a Nobel laureate. For the time being, though, with all the pressure placed on students to succeed, it doesn't look like anything will be changing soon.
A less disgusting difference I have noticed lies in the method used to draw stick figures. Chinese draw them as seen below, sort of like a big snowball on top of a house,
while Americans draw them like this:
I was trying to think over what the difference might mean.
Do Chinese people have no necks? Is this why they are shorter? Are their legs attached directly to their arms?
Are Americans perpetually happy? Or frustrated and clueless?
Perhaps the Kiwi way is the best:
Finally, after reading through my students' final evaluations of my teaching and the courses I taught, I realized that the many Chinese attribute dissatisfaction or unhappiness to themselves and their own actions, and less often to external factors or someone else. Some of the students wrote that at times the class was boring, but instead of writing of ways I could improve it next year, they wrote that perhaps they should participate more in class and work harder. I remember some awful classes and professors at Vanderbilt, and when evaluation season rolled around, we couldn't wait to criticize the teacher and the class. Rarely did we reflect on how we could have made it better ourselves. Similarly, I attribute most of the students' unhappiness here with their own efforts and less with myself. I feel somewhat justified in this though, because I did work each week to alter my lessons and make them more interesting, and pretty much only one class by the end of the semester wrote of the lessons being boring, and as expected, they were the ones that made the least effort to participate in any class activities and discussions.
I wonder if this difference results from the pressure placed on each student to succeed at every level of schooling. As the high-performing students are continuously pared down through examinations and they become closer and closer to reaching the ultimate goal of acceptance to university, their lives come to involve little more than studying. If they ultimately fail to achieve acceptance to university, they and those around them conclude that it is only because of their efforts, or lack thereof. Perhaps this is a formula for creating a responsible society, but it also results in one so competitive there's little room for enjoyment of what the hard work has brought. Once students begin university, their weekend nights continue to be occupied largely with studying, and those who don't follow this trend are accused by their peers of wasting the opportunity they have. While this process is also at work in the Western World, I think it has been tempered a bit by becoming comfortable with success. Here, though, every step toward success also offers a possibility of straying from the path, and students are so wary of being left behind that they stop at almost nothing to achieve that success. Many of them plagiarize papers and cheat on exams, and in most circumstances it goes unpunished. While this doesn't always enable them to get ahead of the pack, it does assure them of not falling behind it. In any case, it certainly doesn't do anything to improve China's reputation abroad as being uncreative, something the students are fully aware of, as they often woe the fact that China has never produced a Nobel laureate. For the time being, though, with all the pressure placed on students to succeed, it doesn't look like anything will be changing soon.
posted by Mysteries of The Orient at 6:36 PM
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