Definitive Post, Conclusion

If you were like the many who thought that I was done, you’re wrong. I need to conclude the gargantuan endeavor that is this blog with one final post. I’ve been back in the United States for about a week and a half now, and I’ve begun packing and preparing for my return to the University of California, San Diego. Workload permitting, I’ll edit over this whole blog so it flows like a novel, consolidating posts where necessary and refitting everything so it works, more than partially so that I can relive the experience that I am so missing, and know that I will continue to be nostalgic of for the foreseeable future.

And if because of the reverse-chronological format of blogs you arrive at this post first, I encourage you to start at the beginning four months back. Though I’m biased, I think it’s worth it.


Des Amis, Des Ennemis

I have this nasty habit of getting sick in some way or another before entering a new environment. So before heading off to Hong Kong, I happened to be going through the usual. It kept me going to the bathroom in short and my head was persistently and consistently hot. Thinking there was the possibility of getting quarantined, I can’t say I filled out the health declaration form truthfully, and I self-medicated to get me through the lines should they take my temperature.

Showing how much I knew, since Hong Kong just gave sick people respiratory masks and advisory literature but nothing more, I entered the cab on the way over marveling at the sheer number of bridges on surface roads that there were and the lights of Central, only to be nearly shocked at the superficial condition of buildings outside of the tourist drag.

I was sick and I get sick in such situations because of my nervousness and I know it. I didn’t know who my roommate would be, how cliquish the locals would be, how accepting my fellow exchange students would be of the contrast between my national origins and my ethnic roots. All I could tell myself was that it would all work out and that whatever happens happens.

And as I’m blessed time and time again, through privilege and circumstance, everything worked out better than I could have ever assumed. Out of my perceived adversity, though profoundly false, I guess I could say that I became a stronger person in my first learning experience of my four-month exploration.

I guess I’m a naturally shy and soft-spoken individual. Though I do enjoy the company of others on a regular basis, I also enjoy my own company alone, reading a book, writing (this blog), and much less often watching television.  For some reason I had a hunch that I would be the second case more often than not. That’s not to say that I can’t have fun, because in new situations I turn up social butterfly mode and go with it until I have at least a few good friends.

And more than a few good friends I got. They weren’t exactly the friends I was hoping for, being that I wanted to immerse myself in Hong Kong and its locals, but in some ways making friends with other international students gave me a better world view, especially an Anglophone world view, rather than just a Hong Kong- or Chinese-centered one.

Of my friends, of course some were better than others; for a few we parted ways over personality, never ideology. So I guess I’ll go bad news first.

My luck with roommates varies a lot over time. I know he doesn’t read this blog, so in this conclusion, I have few qualms about describing our dealings, especially keeping him in anonymity (at least from those who don’t know him).

He happened to have come from Illinois, the same state where I can say my parents are from (having been educated there, met there, married there, and lived there for a long time). That’s not to say that he’s like my parents though, because he turned out not to be in so many ways.

In being cordial we were good friends for the first month and a half. Though it sounds corny, this was what I like to call the honeymoon period—that being before people fully get to know each other and personalities fully materialize. Things that were so minor to me during the honeymoon period, such as his perceived need to get a girlfriend right then and there in the first two weeks, and his staying up way late to play video games only to complain of exhaustion and boredom during the day began to really annoy me.

In addition, his preconceptions of me came out one by one, one by one revealing themselves to be more specifically misconceptions. For one, he kept insisting that both my parents are from China, to which I had to remind him that my father’s from Detroit and my mother is originally from Hong Kong and immigrated mid-childhood. It followed that during a discussion about learning languages he believed that I speak Mandarin natively, as taught to me by my parents. I had to remind him that my father is a natural-born American and that my mother is from Hong Kong (where they overwhelmingly speak Cantonese over both Mandarin and English), to which I told him he should be able to speak standard German, since he claimed Austrian roots.

And I’m no saint, but on the other hand many of my hunches about him turned out to be true. For one, he whined a lot about not having enough money, though he blew it like no other, spending plenty on drinking and partying. And when he found out that I don’t get financial aid from the government, he assumed that I’m from a rich family, thereafter pointing to expensive sportscars and telling me to buy them for him. The cherry on top was the rigid attitude that he had to all things world. He described his disdain for Islam Week at HKU and described the locals in terms he should have thought twice about before saying to me and my Asian self. In his intelligence, he managed to tell his mom about me in not-so-excellent terms with me in the room. He assumed since I had my earphones in that I wasn’t listening when in reality he should have saved it for later, when I wasn’t present.

It all culminated towards the end of reading week, when after landing at the airport from our group trip to Beijing, he said that had to get off the plane to go meet his friends, with the implication that we were not his friends as denoted by his overly forward tone.

That friend turned out to be a “girlfriend” located an hour’s ferry away in Macau who he probably met on the Internet. In earlier weeks, he would browse the personals section of Craigslist in his boredom, telling me about them while I was trying to study. I ended up disappearing to the library more often than not to study or at least get away from him and he ended up disconnecting from the group and disappearing to Macau nearly every weekend to go see her. That’s not to say I assumed their relationship was one of convenience, because I know how he described her to some of my other friends.

And on the upswing, throughout the whole semester, his opposition to picking up a few words of Cantonese became quite irksome. Yeah, others were like that too, since it’s plenty evident that it’s not hard to get by in Hong Kong on English alone, but with him, it fit his personality in such a way that could only be described in American English-only campaigns by many of the uneducated too lazy to press number “1” or “2” on their phones when prompted.

This isn’t to say that we weren’t friendly though, being that we had to be as we were roommates and all. We parted ways on the appropriate note. He packed away all the People’s Liberation Army “Commie” hats at Mao Zedong quote books for his friends and had be chuckle at the appropriate time. I told him he gets cheap thrills from that stuff. He said it was for his friends. I modified my statement to say that he and his friends get cheap thrills from that stuff. He also was trying to figure out how to pack away a rolled poster for his right-wing father that featured Obama morphed into Mao. He thought I was laughing with him at the witty piece of art. I was laughing at him since he couldn’t get it into his backs without crushing it, putting about thirty folds in it. And as much as I can disagree or even hate someone, defiling someone’s image simply isn’t constructive and if you have to lead with your emotions than you aren’t going to get anywhere (or haven’t gotten anywhere).

And in another falling out, this friend happens to read my blog instead of updating his own (October, November, and December all went down without a single word). This is the friend who I described as not understanding face (in the universal sense) and social relationships that I used as an example in my Traditional Chinese society class.

All of a few hours after my post went on screen he called me during class. I hung up on him since I was in class, so he texted me describing how sorry he was and how he wanted to start anew. I forgot about it by the end of the day, so he ended up sending me a message on Facebook telling me that I defamed him to the point where I should remove and retract my statements. I told him that he was in the wrong, and since it would be sufficiently difficult to figure out that it was him (though the lack of a name and a face), and because I presented my writing as my opinion and not as undisputable fact that in no way could my statements be construed as libel (which he incorrectly termed slander). In addition, he had no career of which to speak to ruin, no would anyone care about what I say about him. I told him that those people who figure out that I was talking about him already have opinions formed of him, and that my little post wouldn’t shift things one way or the other.

With nothing good to say to him and knowing that he had nothing good to say to me, we avoided each other until the last few days. We were cordial and did not mention the disagreement we had.

Later, I was told that he doesn’t like me. I replied to her that I don’t really care. What happened happened and it had gotten to the point where I practically brushed it off my shoulder.

And for the good news, most of the people that I met were genuine and open-minded. I found myself discussing contemporary issues with them and debating the past (often over coffee). I found good travel buddies after thinking for the first few weeks that I should probably find some tours to take me travelling.

Though it seems that I sold them short in this conclusion, I described much of what we all went through in nearly all of my previous posts, from travels to classes and simple cultural differences.

Seeing all of them go was in itself the end of this Study Abroad chapter in my life, since they were more than there for all of it—they were an integral part of it. I plan to stay in contact of course, and who knows?—maybe we’ll have a Hong Kong reunion in a decade’s time.


Lectures and Tutorials

It may just be because I belong to this system, but I can’t describe fully how much I appreciate the liberal arts education. Something also must be said about learning in the common language rather than the elite language.

But first things first: liberal arts as a type and theory in methods of education has a different meaning to the general public and American university students than in the international higher education community, especially along the Anglophone front. Here, we like to think as liberal arts as primarily and often exclusively referring to those institutions of higher learning termed liberal arts colleges. Names aside, this distinction is made primarily to distinguish them from research universities—the difference having less to do with what is liberal arts and more with how big the student population is, how many students there are per class, and what the professors do during their free time.

Liberal arts colleges aim to boast more intimate student experiences, with students being able to learn better through a more Socratic classroom environment with the format more along the lines of a pseudo-discussion rather than a rote lecture in which only the (doctored) professor talks.

On the other hand there are the research universities, where professors teach large lectures with much of the grading being left to teaching assistants, often graduate students, allowing them to research with the time leftover (though often research comes before teaching). In this sense, students have to work at getting to know their professors, most notably by taking advantage of office hours. Misconceptions about research universities stem from that basis—that because lecture halls regularly encompass three hundred students, they cannot be nearly as effective as liberal arts colleges.

In my opinion, people should choose what works better for them rather than just thinking that liberal arts colleges are just better or worse. I know two things: that both formats work well for me, with me myself preferring the anonymity that a large lecture hall can afford me, and also that out of the fourteen or so classes that I have taken thus far at UCSD, most have had less than seventy students, with my smallest class having around ten. I believe that the value of what you get out of anything is what you put in, meaning that it’s irrelevant which format, whether it be large lectures or small discussions, you choose, insofar as you take full advantage of the resources at hand.

But American public definitions aside, what is really meant by attaining a liberal arts education is not the methods in which you met you ends, but rather what you get out of it. As I understand it, without consulting any literature on the matter, the liberal arts education is one of breadth, notwithstanding continuing depth, meaning that you should come out of college understanding not only your subject, but also other subjects—not necessarily all of them, but of those that you do, at least their basis or even some finer points, or in other words, well-roundedness. The theory behind this is that by getting a good depth of feel for more of what our universe of knowledge is about, you can produce more profound critical thought on your own discipline, seeing material in a more comprehensive manner if you will.

In this sense, American universities and colleges are all based in liberal arts, since all have general education requirements of sorts to gain breadth {as well as to keep accreditation). You can contrast this with vocational schools, which, being more skill-based, teach you what you need to know for your future job with much less emphasis on critical thought.

In other countries, higher education is often somewhere in between liberal arts institutions and vocational schools. In Hong Kong for example, general education is advertised by the university as something for personal enjoyment rather than as a requirement. So in this sense, breadth is more an optional asset rather than a requirement for graduation.

Of course, there are pros and cons. Using the simple comparison between the American education system and that of Hong Kong, graduates from American universities and colleges come out as highly skilled in terms of critical thought, or more pragmatically put—problem solving. Graduates from Hong Kong universities will come out with more specific knowledge on the specific fields that they’ve trained for.

So automatically, one would compare the two and ask which one is better. On top of the fact that I just got back from Hong Kong, I compare the two because of their similar economies. Hong Kong’s is based on the service sector, largely in finance, with much industrial manufacturing having gone to nearby Guangdong Province in Mainland China. That of the United States is going in that direction, with (industrial) jobs going overseas because of cheaper labor in places like China. As such, Americans are finding it more and more necessary to upgrade their educations with children now being expected to go to college or likely end up in a dead-end job.

So which system of higher education is better? Though I’ve tried to fully express my viewpoint in earlier posts and very simply stated my ardent appreciation of the system I happen to be in, I’m not going to delve into that again here, because then I’ll end up going into dollars and cents, and past subsistence (including security), I’ve never felt like happiness or the meaning of life were embedded in numbers of any sort.

The second point of contention that I intend to mention is the language of instruction. Hong Kong, having been a British Crown Colony for the vast majority of its successful history, tends to over-idealize and overestimate its colonial heritage. As such, much emphasis is placed on English-language education, with the appropriate policies being in place and in action in the territory’s major universities, of course including the one that I attended on exchange.

Before coming to Hong Kong, I read in the pamphlet that the school sent me to help me find my way upon arrival that though classes are all in English, the local students speak to each other in Cantonese. I took a double take at the sentence, knowing that there is generally the tendency to prefer speaking in the language with which one is most comfortable in. It was in a sense of what was to come, because the pamphlet was correct as expected.

While I fully believe in language rights, certain things about Hong Kong local students weren’t quite clicking as I was hoping. The pamphlet itself used funny English. It had funny constructions, odd prepositions, and “the” before nearly every noun, whether it needed it or not. I assumed that the way the pamphlet was written simply reflected the variety of English used in Hong Kong. I don’t think this was an unreasonable assumption at all. It is well known that especially since English has such large geographic spread, there are bound to be vast differences in various technical usages of certain words and even different grammatical features. For example, a British English speaker would say, “at weekends,” whereas an American English speaker would say, “on weekends.”

As I would find out, it’s hard to classify Hong Kong English as a true variety of English. This is because the differences in word usage between Hong Kong English and American English were anything but consistent (and hence not predictable and not easy to internalize). When Hong Kong English speakers would say something, it seemed often that any preposition could go in conjunction with any verb, and because of that, it took a great deal of effort during my entire stay there (meaning it didn’t get any easier) to understand what people were saying.

Their lack of English skills was in large created by the fact that they don't speak English with each other, and based on what I have heard and witnessed, that they seem to subconsciously view English as a hindrance to their educations despite its advantage in their futures. The reason I say that is because during a floor meeting at Lee Hysan Hall, the students conducted all their business in Cantonese despite the presence of non-Cantonese speakers. This meant that instead of everyone switching to English (which they are all expected to be able to speak), they had one member translate for those who could not understand. It seems as though if they had more practice, they would either get their prepositions correct or at least consistent.

I say this to mean that everyone should speak English properly, like many Americans would have it be, just that in a school that boasts English as its language of instruction, it might be good as a student to get to speaking well a consistent variety of the language if not an already existing standard.

This isn’t to say that everyone was a bad English speaker, for I’m sure there are. What I mean is that overall, the local student population needed dearly to refine their English-language abilities.

What this meant for my classes was that in my opinion they were largely diluted. Ask me what I learned in class and I’ll tell you I’d rather talk about my travels. Professors had to speak slowly so that students understand. This meant that in the fourteen-week semester (my quarters at UCSD are ten weeks), I feel I learned less than back in California during a significantly shorter term.


La Gran Obra de Arte

I know I’m not the first in using my passport as a something of a symbol of my travels, but I’m going to do it anyways. Doing so is popular because such a representation is apt. After all, that little booklet accompanied me all along the way.

The original sections of that little booklet were completely full by the end. If you recall, by mid-November, it readily became clear that my passport book was filling up with stamps. Since Hong Kong and Mainland China have separate immigration schemes, the fact that I did a lot of frequent traveling to the mainland meant that most of those stamps were red rectangles and ovals. Under advice online from the Department of State, I ventured over to the consulate-general to have more pages added to lessen the likelihood of being turned away when going through immigration. Unfortunately, none of those pages were actually used since no one wanted to be the first to stamp on those pages, being that they are a different color from the rest of the booklet. Instead, they took the liberty of being economical and went backwards the booklet, stamping wherever they could find a corner here and there.

Most know of the pride I take in my passport, and the fact that I will have to get a new one soon means that this one, once invalidated, will likely find its way into a bank vault somewhere (though probably not). I may be one of the few who do this, but I like to exhibit my passport when people ask about my travels. The fact of the matter is half of them are asking to be polite more than out of interest, so handing over my passport to them for the first time gives them something physical to match with the various stories wandering around my brain. I know that I’m not the best storyteller in speech, and I don’t deny that there is always room for improvement in my writing.

Before going to Hong Kong, I had been to China for the first time in my life on a two-week tour of some of the major sights. Prior to that trip, my international travels consisted of one road trip to Canada from Ohio with my aunt and uncle in Dayton. Back then you didn’t need passports to re-enter the United States through that border—just American birth certificates or American naturalization certificates plus identification. Even now with passport control, the United States doesn’t stamp Canadians (I’m pretty sure) and Canada doesn’t stamp Americans (I’m certain).

I went through Canada again at the end of an Alaskan cruise, having been routed through Vancouver. But the bottom line is that I got my passport first for my trip to China. I used it again for going to the Schengen Area when my family and I toured Paris and much of Italy. This means that in the first three years of having my passport, the first two pages were used: one with my Chinese visa and one with immigration stamps.

Applying for my Hong Kong student visa through the university and receiving my new full-page sticker made me pretty happy despite the fact that it was one of the ugliest pieces of paper ever designed. It made me realize both the definite fact that I was going to be going on a long trip and that that trip was happening soon.

And as visas go, I had to get one more to enter Mainland China, for which I applied and received in Hong Kong. The process reaffirmed my nationality in the fact that my visa cost over $1000 HKD when most other people in line paid less than $300 for exactly the same piece of paper.

And on my multiple-entry visa, I got most of my passport stamps. On exchange, I went to Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, and Guilin, crossing the border between Hong Kong and Mainland China twelve more times. Other trips that I made were to Macau and Taipei. Outside of Greater China though, I only made one trip—to Phuket, Thailand. I genuinely intended to get to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, and Tokyo, had it not been for the increased costs in traveling alone, and I’m confident that had I stayed for the entire year, I would have gone to Vietnam and Cambodia as well.

I guess it’s difficult for me, especially as an American, to say that I'm not well traveled. Because although the farthest trip I made when I was under 10 was from northern Los Angeles to San Diego and my first plane trip happened the summer right before September 11, 2001, it’s hard for me to claim such a statement in the present. The fact of the matter is that not only have I gone to New York state and back through thirty states, but also my passport has become the great work of art that it now is.

With my internalization of the fiction that is nationality, I understand that talking about my passport in such a manner can be construed as a double-edged sword, but because it’s recorded the majority of my travels in such a succinct yet unique way, it serves me more as a momento and a souvenir rather than a document proving my citizenship.


Dollars, Yuan, Baht, and Those Unsung Heroes

In planning this conclusion, I initially intended to list out the costs of my study to Hong Kong. I’ve decided as of now though to stop short of this. I will say that after making my final summations the number is not small, or at least not nearly as small as I would have expected.

I consider my lifestyle comfortable, perhaps upper-middle class, but not lavish or particularly elitist. My travels were much of the expense. Encouraged my mother in words and parental financial assistance, I found myself going somewhere nearly every other weekend. In short, traveling outside of Hong Kong added up to about 40% of my total expenses.

However, my biggest single purchase came in the form of a digital single-lens reflex camera, which, being on sale, I splurged about 9% of my total expenses on. I got a Nikon D90, which sits at the top of the mid-range section, right under professional.

It cost me so much that in a very stable, rational matter I assure you I just about didn’t hand over my debit card to my salesperson. After the fact, I lamented for weeks about how much I paid for it, comparing it to how much money I would have spent on more trips and such, how much it costs to free a modern slave, how many times over I could have paid off my friend’s library late fees.

Since I did study abroad rather than just travel abroad, I should probably mention how much I paid for my education abroad. At just over 30% of my total expenses, tuition was about $4000 USD, paid to the Regents of the University of California. I actually don’t know how much it costs to go to the University of Hong Kong because since the University of California sends as many students to the University of Hong Kong as the University of Hong Kong sends the University of California (under the exchange program), students pay their home institutions. This means that the amount that I paid was about equivalent to how much as semester would have cost at Berkeley or UC Merced.

And herein I start my thanks. At the urging of my father, I applied for a $500 USD-scholarship at UCSD (with multiple recipients). This is one of the very few merit-based scholarships that don’t look at financial need.  I happened to get this scholarship (for whom I have no idea who to thank) and it was automatically transferred to my EAP program in a miracle of the bureaucracy that feeds into UCSD Finance office.

For the longest time I had no clue where the $500 came from in my EAP financial accounting. I assumed it was a glitch in the system. When I had to pay a bill to UCSD though for a Programs Abroad Office administrative fee, I saw the two register lines devoted to this scholarship (receipt and subsequent transfer). So to whatever committee or person thereof that I got this scholarship from I owe my first thanks.

My second thanks goes off to the Programs Abroad Office here at UCSD, the staff of which (save one particular advisor for the Global Seminars Program) were all extremely nice and helpful. They, along with the system-wide Education Abroad Program office helped me and all the exchange students sift through all the paperwork involved. Especially regarding immigration-department paperwork for Hong Kong students, these two offices, along with the Center for Student Development and Resources (CEDAR) pushed all my paperwork through the bureaucracy of Hong Kong immigration.

If memory serves me right, I had to submit about ten forms through the offices. The two big forms were the application to the University of Hong Kong after my acceptance to the program which took me the better part of an hour to fill out in English and my student visa application that in all its thirty pages was divided into parts “A” through “K” with every letter in between.

Of course, my greatest thanks go to the financiers of this expedition and my support crew, both of whom happen to be my family. As cliché as it sounds, my family has always been there for me, if not emotionality at least in person, and without them it is clear that at my age, and especially because of my financial viability, that this trip would not have gone as far as it did. Without their assistance and their blessing, I would not have had the ability to jet around East Asia. I also acknowledge that while my parents pay for much of what I do so that they have a controlling interest in what I do, it is always for my own good if not for the good of the family.

And in this sense of family, there is one thing left of my heritage that I think is not only important but also incredibly moral. I vow never in my life to ever just send them off to a nursing home. The fact of the matter is that while I’m told I was an easy infant to take care of, the amount of good that my brother and I brought to their lives in constituting a family is offset by the negatives, such as opportunity cost in careers lost, significantly long periods of sleep deprivation, and financial well being. At one point in my mid-teens, my parents noticed I was drinking expensive lactose-free milk at such an alarming rate that I equated the situation with water being flushed down a toilet. But ultimately from a moral perspective, it would just be wrong to cast off one’s parents in their time of need.

Honestly though, I can’t say that it’s only because of my heritage that I aim to espouse such a principle in my conscience. My parents have always struck the right balance between being imposing and controlling to the point where I’m led in the right direction and laissez-faire to the point were I could find the right direction by myself. Because of that, not only have I never had an intense period of rebellion, whether it be in middle school, high school, or right after leaving the nest, but also my parents are the two people who I’m most open with, whether or not they would like to believe it.

And though friends don’t usually get mentioned in such a context, I feel I owe thanks to my friends both at UCSD and at HKU who gave me first-hand support. From my friends at UCSD, their interest in the normalized craziness of what I was doing have a certain kind of value to this endeavor that, while kind of superficial, made me enjoy the whole thing that much more. And my friends at HKU, who came to the territory as disoriented as me helped pull me through all the changes set in front of us, though many of us came from different backgrounds, different homes per se. I guess it was through diversity that we aided each other in perceived adversity and because of the lot of them that I went from missing California then to missing Hong Kong now.

If you haven’t slipped into beta mode yet, you probably realize that I gave you enough information to figure out how much I spent in acceptable detail. I just didn’t want to throw numbers around for people to preoccupy themselves with.


In the Quest

This blog itself had an interesting role in my experience abroad. Though I had no intentions of telling anyone about my blog because I wanted to have the freedom of conscience in a sense to write whatever I wanted to write on it, word leaked. I could blame Facebook for not allowing me (at least at the time) to promote my blog to friends back home at the exclusion of new friends in Hong Kong—but that would be somewhat irrelevant.

In this age of social media, I knew what I was getting myself into by starting a blog for the whole thing rather than just writing my thoughts down into a physical journal. And therein lies a paradox in my said motivations in writing a blog rather than a traditional journal.

I have said a few times that in all my writing I write for myself. And it’s true. So the paradox that seems to be lies in the fact that I write for myself yet I publish it on the World Wide Web for the whole world to see. Now I wouldn’t be publishing it online for others to read in my own self-interest.

Actually I would. Let me explain. I write for myself in the sense that most directly I write for my own purposes—say so I may be able to read this when I’m old and crumbling. I also write for myself in the sense that ultimate benefit will come to me. This isn’t to say that you lot who have read my blog won’t get anything out of it—just that by you reading it I get some ultimate benefit, often in addition to yourselves.

This works on two levels. I talked about how on a superficial level seeing that other people take interest in what I’m doing gives me satisfaction in the sense that what I’m doing is worth something rather than in the sense that now I can become popular. On the higher level, me publishing what I have to offer (in a sense) puts something out there for everyone, including people to whom I have no connection, to comment on. This means ultimately that as I get older and mature into a career, I will have mileage posts to speak of about my life. From there not only will I able to reflect upon my past, but also what other people have to say about my past. For all my uncertainty in life, this blog is staying on the Internet.

To me, this means that this blog can prove more interactive and in a sense provide advantages over traditional publishing. Taking a step back, I write papers for class ultimately because I need to get a good grade on it to a good grade point average to go to a good graduate school and establish a solid career in which I will hopefully be able to do meaningful work. These papers are unlike a blog though in that there are only a few people who will ever read them.

Because of my inhibitions about my work, I am and have always been hesitant about putting it out in the open for everyone to view. But because of the fact that blogs and the Internet come off in my subconscious as quite anonymous, I have few qualms about putting nearly everything about my experience out there on the web.

And honestly, it’s nice not having any editors past yourself. I’m ultimately going to have to go over this monstrosity of over well one hundred ten thousand words (a mid-size novel) to make it flow. My photos that I have put in separate posts out of convenience could be integrated into my text, ultimately reducing the number of posts (currently one hundred forty-six), which I’ll make look more like chapters, yet increase the number of words in smoothing everything over.

As for the style of my narration, I wrote everything descriptive in the past because everything of substance happened in the past. In terms of flow, I understand this blog to be more formal-sounding than most. I have also been told that I write like I speak, which meant close to nothing to me since I think the best writing is genuine thought, regardless of research. My conventions I wrote in my native dialect without regard to Standard American English (except in orthography). This means that the overwhelming majority of grammatical mistakes you seem to find are actually perfectly fine in my eyes. If you see few and far between in the way of weird words and odd grammatical constructions, it means that you and I have more in common than you may outwardly imagine. Bottom line is that my balance between sheer informality and stringent formality strikes a tone of authenticity in myself from which you can gauge yourselves.


After the Quest

I go to UCSD, but when I was applying to Harvard I wrote for one of my essays something I entitled “The Last Prologue.” Obviously it either wasn’t enough to get me accepted or it was enough to get me rejected, but either way I mean the title as a way to see how I positioned myself in my surroundings.

You could say that immaturely, I felt like my childhood was kind of a prologue to me real life, which would begin when I became an adult. The first time I doubted this conviction came the day I turned 18 and felt nothing different. In my newfound adulthood I was no different than the day before, and at that moment I thought in a different way how there are so many young people who have wisdom beyond their age and so many old people who lack the years that they possess.

I don’t mean maturity in playful banter. In this regard arrogant people would be classified as immature. Ultimately though, if my childhood of eighteen years was my prequel, then my old age lasting a few decades, say from retirement, would be my afterword, my conclusion, and my epilogue beginning with my death. In my reformed mindset, I feel that since to call old age an afterword would be unfair, to call childhood a prologue would be nonsensical.

I now firmly believe that one’s life is the entirety of one’s life. So though there’s no getting rid of your past, for the rest of your life there is always opportunity for maturity.

In the same regard, I will be graduating college within a year and a half. It could even be as soon as fifteen months, each month of which I am confident will fly by whether I want it to or not. Before studying abroad, I’ve gone through my childhood and the various levels of education in the public school system. I’ve worked in a few very small jobs as a tutor and as a translation assistant and I’ve also sat on a large non-profit’s Board of Directors. After studying abroad, I’ve lived and studied outside the country. I’ve felt lost in translation but not as lost as some people. I’ve discovered that I’m a dual national. Most notably yet most simply though, I’ve advanced one term in my university career and became a more mature, open-minded individual in the process.

People like to say that the journey is the destination in that what you learn is in the journey. I would like to modify this to say that the journey is but after. I have learned so much my studying abroad, but I know that as much as I have learned and will have learned by the time I, say, turn 50, there will always be more to learn. Hence, the journey is after, and in that sense, you’re always in a journey, since the day after tomorrow is but tomorrow come today’s tomorrow.

And so in the title I refrain from calling this the last post, because though this is indeed my last post to this blog, in no way is it my last bit of writing. And though it’s usually uttered in a different context, it’s always the case that when one door closes, another one opens, even if it’s not the one you planned for.

So out of college in less than a year and a half, what’s my next door to open?

After the Quest

The Trips that Never Happened

I thought I was going to go out with a bang. To end my stay here, I was going to travel around—to Singapore, Japan, and South Korea to be exact. Despite my intentions though, I won’t be going to any of them in the near future, and while I’m a little saddened, I know I’ll get over there some day. 

It came down to a lack of earlier planning and the fact that I would have been traveling by myself. I was highly advised by my parents not to travel alone, because it’s always good to have at least one traveling companion for safety, even if you speak the language. (English and Mandarin for Singapore—yes, Japanese I could brush up on, South Korea I would have been relying on hoping to find English speakers.) I understood my parents concerns, but I wanted to go for it at least once. I heard that traveling alone is an experience like no other, and similar to studying abroad, I wanted to make this experience my own.

The ultimate reason why it didn’t work out was because of money. Because I hadn’t planned earlier, the prices were all inflated for the holidays. Because I was to be traveling alone, accommodation priced for two was little cheaper for one. One of the major services that I’ve been using, Cathay Pacific Holidays, doesn’t even allow for single travelers to book because all their prices are worked out for parties of two.

I looked into a weeklong trip to Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Hotel and flight alone would have cost me $700 USD. For just $300 dollars more, I could have brought along two more people. So in the end, I decided that in order to spend money in a more sensible manner, I would postpone these trips indefinitely. After all, I’m most definitely coming back to East Asia sometime.

Nanjing: Planes, Trains, and the Paparazzi

So my last full-fledged trip of this term started out as all the others—with transportation of course. This one required more than the others though, because as my travel buddies were aiming to save money, we opted to take trains over planes.

Nanjing is 733 miles or 1,180 kilometers from Hong Kong and would have taken two hours to fly there. As trains go, the one going from Shenzhen (Hong Kong’s Mainland border city) to its terminal at Nanjing Station would have taken twenty-five hours. In contrast, the train to Shanghai South Station would take eighteen hours and then a high-speed train to Nanjing would add on two hours from Shanghai Station via a twelve-stop metro journey. We opted for the latter.

And we couldn’t take one of the MTR through trains, which go almost non-stop to either Shanghai or Beijing from Kowloon (Hung Hom Station), because they go every other day, which for our schedule happened to fit on the wrong days.

Chinese trains are annoying. They’re decently convenient time-wise and reasonably priced. The problem is that you can’t book tickets online. I went to a travel agent (China Travel Service) and found that you have to book tickets at the stations themselves. Hong Kong’s train stations are owned and operated by the MTR Corporation, the same company that owns and operates the subway system. This means that to buy tickets in advance, you would have to truck yourself the hour and a half north to Shenzhen to buy your tickets since the rail facilities here are neither owned nor operated by the same people in Mainland China.

This trek up to Shenzhen wasn’t too appealing, and we figured we’d be able to get tickets shortly before departure, since we did the same for one person for the train to Guilin. Also, there was only one train scheduled each way each day, so we figured that ridership did not afford more than one train a day. Ultimately, we had to find our way up to Nanjing, because we’d already paid for the hotel and I’d already booked my flight back.

We were wrong on both accounts. The train was to leave at 13:29 and arrive at Shanghai South at 6:58, so early in the morning on Friday we got to Shenzhen. We went up to the counter and we were kindly informed that there were no beds left. This meant that we had to buy a seat. Fine. We had to get up to Nanjing, and a seat would do just that, so we bought our tickets and started counting down the hours until hell.

Now I know how I do with long flights. I’ve got a yearly quota for the number of flights over five hours I can handle. This train was going to be eighteen hours sitting. In comparison, my flight from San Francisco was only fourteen hours long and my flight earlier this summer from Los Angeles to Zurich was but eleven.

Well, anyways, the time came and we all got squished while queuing to get onto the train. I always thought it was pointless to squeeze onto mass transit vehicles, because if you’ve got a ticket, you’re getting on, and the vehicle isn’t going to go any sooner if you get on it first. Oh well.

The train was set up in tables. On half of the train, there were six seats in two rows of three around a four-person table. On the other half of the train, there were four seats in two rows of two. In between was an aisle just slightly bigger than that on an airplane.

Like the train to Guilin, in between the sleepers and the seats there was the dining car. While looking for it, I realized I had no idea how to call in Mandarin, so I called it a restaurant, and the staff looked at me like I was stupid. Instead, we met a businessman named Sharp that had approached us half because he was just being friendly and half because he was taking advantage of the opportunity to practice his English with us (my white friends more than me).

Eventually we got our dinner and found wandered back to our table set up. It wouldn’t have been so bad if the seats were facing in the same direction, because the guys across from us wouldn’t stop staring at us, half because my friends are white, half because I was speaking English, and entirely because we were all associating ourselves with each other.

What made the trip worse was that it just seemed to get more and more crowded. People were crowding the areas between cars as well as making use of the bathroom sinks and floors as beds. With pooper stoopers, the floor just got dirtier and dirtier, and it was pretty apparent as seen by the color what this dirt was actually made of. These people who wandered onto the train without a seat I assumed paid to stand, but took the opportunity to claim a seat when one arose. After going to the wrong side of the train (because Car No. 1 was connected at the back to Car No. 16), we found some guys in our seats. I asked them to move in Mandarin, and an older man replied to me in English “switch seats.” Without gesturing which seats to switch to, had he meant switching at all, we just waited until they got out of our seats. In the process of moving themselves and their stuff, they had to move their circular saw from under one table to another, which I thought was peculiar. We had just gone through x-ray security not fifteen minutes ago.

Needless to say, I read an entire book in one sitting (though it was only 180 pages long) in two hours and proceeded to eat two trays of Mandarin oranges and one tray of bananas that we paid ¥10 CNY in total for. After exhausting things to do (because it was difficult to pull my binder out of my bag to study) it was about time to go to sleep. We had hoped that they’d turn off or at least dim the lights after 11:00 p.m. But when 11:00 p.m. came and went, we hoped for midnight. And by the time I fell asleep it became apparent that the lights were there to stay. I got all of about five hours of sleep on that eighteen-hour train ride. One of my friends got as little as half an hour. We all decided that airplanes are much better than hard seats on Chinese trains.

We arrived at Shanghai South Station at about 7:30 a.m. but had to stay there until the ticket office opened at 8:00 a.m. to help my friends buy tickets back for later in the week. I was to leave from Nanjing by air but they were going to come back to Shanghai to scout the place out. One of them studies Mandarin but neither of them felt they had the capacity to negotiate hard-sleepers back to Shenzhen. I actually found that I did the whole thing without any effort. They got their train tickets back, and what’s better is they got hard sleepers—so the hellish ride there wouldn’t be a hellish ride back.

We ate breakfast at a place called Mister Donut in the train station. My problem with eating doughnuts is that they make me feel like a doughnut in the short term as well as in the long term.

Next up, we had to get from one train station to the other, because trains to Nanjing left from Shanghai Station, and we were currently at Shanghai South Station. This was anticipated and hence smooth. For ¥4 CNY, we went the twelve stops along Line 1 of the Shanghai Metro to Shanghai Station.

Although it was going very well, at Shanghai Station, our luck had apparently run low. We waited to buy train tickets to Nanjing at the automated machines and waited for a long time. By the time we got up to the front, the every other machine went out of order, including ours, so we were ushered a block down to the ticket office. It was packed. Luckily we got our train tickets without much ado.

Waiting turned out to be a prelude for what was to come next. Already in the eighteen-hour train, our group of three had elicited many looks from the Chinese countrymen. What are two white people doing in a Chinese long-distance train? What is that Chinese guy doing with them? Is that English they’re speaking? 我听不懂! Needless to say, I explained to a lot of people who asked that they’re Scottish and Australian. If you care, I’m American. Yes, they’re my classmates and we study in Hong Kong.

In the waiting room in Shanghai Station though, we noticed though that people were taking pictures. My friend said, “Paparazzi, twelve o’clock.” I looked. There, on one knee a guy had his camera phone out with the lens noticeably popped out, snapping away at the white people. Another guy had a full-on camera out. One of their flashes went off. I wondered if these people saved these pictures for their friends and went like “I saw white people at Shanghai Station!” I don’t think my friends got their pictures taken in Beijing, and I thought Shanghai had more tourists and non-Chinese business people and non-Chinese people in general. Like I said though, this incident was a prelude.

The train journey from Shanghai to Nanjing was about two hours in length. The modern high-speed trains of China Railway High-Speed (CRH) were a lot cleaner and a lot more streamlined than the aging conventional rail ones. The staff were friendlier as were the passengers themselves, though granted this time we were all facing the same direction. The English displayed on the message board in the cabin was a little shotty and all, but at least it was understandable—bottom line was that we weren’t there for the English.

While napping, one of the staff members picked up my friend’s camera and woke her up. He said something to the effect of she should put that camera away because people can take it while she’s sleeping, especially because there’s nothing pretty to take pictures of inside this train. Between each statement, he would say, “” to which she would nod her head. I thought that she was actually answering his questions, that she did understand what he was saying like he asked. She was just nodding yes. So here’s a lesson: like my mom’s friend said, if you don’t understand something, it works more often than not to answer in the negative. No!

After arriving in Nanjing, we had our hotel address on a piece of paper (in pinyin only, unfortunately). We got in an unregulated taxi by accident and got ripped off. For the three of us, he charged ¥200 to take us to our hotel, which wasn’t that far away. However though, he helped us through our address dilemma, since it seems that most people in China don’t read pinyin (because they read the harder characters). He drove us to one hotel, where we asked concierge where our hotel was. They didn’t know the hotel’s name (it was a Holiday Inn, but no one calls it that because it has a Chinese name), so he said he would take me to the address. I said that was great. Later, looking at a map, the hotel was super close to one of the metro stops and we could have gotten there, had we planned better, for ¥2-4 each. Oh well. Lesson learned.

Class Roundup: Phonetics

Here I sit in the medical library—three exams down, three to go, and that’s it to the semester. I think I did well enough on my last final, that being for Phonetics, one class which I’m glad to have taken abroad. It’s not so much that it’s bad back home, because it’s not; it’s more because I get to study phonetics in light of other languages here, and the best part is that instruction is still in English.

I’m told that here, HKU imposes a curve. I’m used to curves just being advantageous to the student, because back in UCSD professors have a lot of leeway in letter-grade assignment. Hardly ever would a curve be used if it would systematically lower most everyone’s grades. I had one teacher who only gave out Fs to people with less than 40% in the class (whereas the standard F grade is under 59% or 60%).

So I don’t think I did poorly in the class, but I hope that I did better than average. Even though most of the class was focused on English (and I have English intuition), I found that on the first midterm I missed a lot of points because I wasn’t dealing with Standard American or British English. It worked to the local students’ advantage because they got to memorize standard language rules, whereas I had a hard time memorizing standard language rules since I had intuition to contend with. On the other hand though, the local students were allowed to go by their intuition in the Cantonese segment of the course.

The final examination turned out to be all right. It wasn’t super easy but it was fair. It turned out to be okay mostly because the professor allotted us a lot of choice, all languages considered.

For the last two assignments of two exercises each, we had to transliterate a series of sentences and phrases in and out of Cantonese and Mandarin to the International Phonetic Alphabet. It was difficult for me because even though I have some experience with both languages, many of the words that I know in my head I wouldn’t know how to write down. This is because while there are something aspects of writing characters in Mandarin that lend hints as to their sounds, there is little to no other indication of how to pronounce characters you don’t know (especially considering the tone). Colloquial Written Cantonese, using many of the same characters as Standard Written Chinese (based on Mandarin), is a whole other story, since many older speakers of Cantonese can write things down as they would literally say it. Luckily, I have a friend who helped me pronounce these phrases, and with the fact that we went over them in tutorial before turning them in, there was no problem with the exercises.

What was disconcerting was that the professor said that he’d have some similar problems on the final examination. It was a little worrying, but I was confident that he would try to accommodate the few exchange students because not knowing what characters were going to be presented beforehand practically meant that you had to learn the language to do the test. After the TA/tutor sent an email out asking for a reply for those needing accommodation, I was confident that it would be fine—and it was. The final had six questions translating the orthography of English, Mandarin, and Cantonese into the International Phonetic Alphabet and six from the International Phonetic Alphabet to English, Mandarin, and Cantonese. We only needed to answer two out of each set of six, so I ended up picking the two English ones in each section after having a look and subsequently deciding I had no idea what was written in Cantonese and Mandarin.

In addition to those two sections, there was a vocabulary (definition plus example) section that I think I fared well on. What was different from the midterm examination was the addition of essay questions—two to be exact. They were straightforward enough, and I’m confident I got most all points for both. What was almost to be expected though was that though I had spent plenty of time studying for the examination before the fact, the subject of one of the essay questions was something that I had literally study half an hour before the test, sitting at Starbucks on campus with my venti drip coffee.

Now, I don’t know if everyone studying linguistics (especially phonetics) does this, but I find that when I study, I talk out loud to myself. It’s not complete sentences or anything that makes sense, more examples that I’m told exist and I just want to check.

As an example, I’ve read over to myself “Polish is great.” Written down, give it to a group of people and have them read the sentence. Chances are, there will be two ways of pronouncing “Polish.” One reading means polish as in nail polish. The other refers to the Polish nationality, with the grammar of the sentence suggesting that what’s meant is the Polish language.

In phonetics, though, I find myself doing stuff like realizing that in fast speech, “rider” and “writer” are pronounced pretty much the same by American English speakers. Today though at Starbucks, I was trying to straighten out my Mandarin affricates, because I can pronounce all the differences when I’m presented with Hanyu Pinyin but I need to equate Pinyin to the International Phonetic Alphabet. To this effect, I was sounding out. There are six in total in Mandarin (in comparison to two in English), but I pronounced nine sounds in total to get the system straightforward in my head. In Pinyin, it would be “s, z, c. x, j, q. sh, zh, ch;” in the International Phonetic Alphabet, it would be rendered as [s, ts, tsʰ. ɕ, tɕ, tɕʰ. ʂ, tʂ, tʂʰ]. I got some looks, probably from people thinking I was mental, but whatever.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author. 

King's College

Teaching English as a second language has always been something I've always tossed around in my head. Whereas in general I probably couldn't cope teaching English high-school style, teaching it as a foreign language always tickled my fancy, as it has to do more with the practical and conversational than the philosophical.

English is in high demand here in Hong Kong. As one of the region's official languages and one its business advantages in the international arena, people who can speak English have an automatic leg up on the competition. Statistics show that Hong Kong isn't nearly as cosmopolitan as it's purported to be. Ninety-five percent of the population is Han Chinese and ninety-five percent use Cantonese primarily as their daily language.

From what I gather, English is taught in many secondary schools, but trying to talk to many service workers here in English, reasonably presuming they attended secondary school, whatever they learn tends to fade away. Talking to secondary-school students (I have no idea what grades they are in because they use the English form system), it's apparent that they, at least the ones I've talked to, have a good grasp in speaking the language. Comprehension is another issue, because whereas they can understand each other's English and I can understand theirs, they cannot understand enough of mine. And seeing as most native English speakers speak more like me and less like them, it would behoove them to improve their comprehension skills.

With this thought in mind, many Hong Kong people, several starting from scratch, pay oodles and oodles of money to get tutored (or coached) to make their English better and closer to standard varieties. Many tutors make $100,000 USD per year, from what I've heard. Others who have invented themselves as celebrities have become multimillionaires by such means. If I had the proper documentation to be allowed to be employed in Hong Kong, I might have tried my hand. But since I didn't, I participated in something second best.

Back to the secondary-school students--the reason I got in contact with them is through a program(me) that was publicized through the Office of International Student Exchange (OISE) here at HKU. It was advertised mainly to exchange and international students as the King's College English Teaching Programme. Sounds really intensive, doesn't it?

There was no pay, but that was understandable. It was a volunteer program in which after their school, we were to walk across the road and down half a block to King's College, a local boys' secondary school. though the program name had "teaching" in it, it was more of a mentorship, for they already had English class in school.

We first learned about it in non-local-student orientation back in August and I was excited to apply. They were supposed to send us applications shortly thereafter, I thought, because the program was to last most of the semester. I was wrong. After enquiring by email, I was told that application would be made available, but much later.

Around came the middle of September, nearly a month into my four-month stay here. The application had come and I was ready to apply. Only then were we told that it was but a four-week program, where we would teach for one hour a week on a given day. So I applied for a few timeslots I had available.

Now this happened to be going on during that whole shopping-for-classes fiasco, so I didn't definitively know when I was going to have free time. About two weeks later, I had registered after much ado for my tutorials. They were sporadically (and thereby inconveniently placed), so I wondered if both my class schedule, being my first priority, and the King's College Programme would fit together.

A few weeks later, well after I'd finished shopping for classes, registering online for classes, and registered partially online for tutorials, the selection came out. It was clear that they had more applicants than they needed. I had a partner to "teach" six students, and it just so happened that I got the Wednesday 4:00-5:00 timeslot, which proved to be problematic.

During that timeslot, I had my tutorial for Hong Kong and the World, so quickly I emailed my tutor Sebastian to see if he would allow me to move when I attend to an empty slot on Thursdays so that, if necessary, I could withdraw from the program as early as possible. The next day he graciously granted my request, since we were already well into the semester. I was now in the program.

The program dates were set to begin shortly after reading week. Orientation was scheduled in the latter half of reading week, but when it was found out that most of the exchange students couldn't make that date, it was moved earlier. I couldn't make either day.

I told OISE (specifically Queenie) that I wouldn't be able to attend and she sent me the orientation materials after the fact. there was a conspicuous lack of lesson plan stuffs, though it was suggested that in the first session we have the students give us a tour of King's College and that in the fourth and last session (which was today), we give the students a tour around the University of Hong Kong. Oh and a big piece of advice that proved a little unsuccessful was to talk about sports with them--yeah, that topic lasted like ten minutes total.

Week One

I arrived straight from my Humanity in Globalization lecture. The professor was beginning to give us advice on how to write a good paper, and I had to leave since he was going over on time in order to get to the first day of the program.

We were to pick up our folders and then proceed to our classrooms (which were marked on maps for our convenience), and we were each given a small bottle of water. At the entrance to the school, I met my partner, who I learned if from Singapore but normally attends university in Australia, here on exchange for one semester.

This first session a mere four of the six students showed up.

Going to start the first session, I found that he was talking a lot more than me. Though I tried to increase my presence by inserting more into the conversation, the students all directed their questions at him rather than at me. I figured that they found it easier to understand him, because although he speaks good English, his accent and their accents are quite similar.

As expected, they gave us a tour around King's College, giving me some insight into the life of a secondary-school student in Hong Kong. We were shown their athletic facilities and canteen, as well as their library and a hallway that students were not allowed to go through.

Hong Kong is like Las Vegas in that it implodes its history and builds upon the rubble. So King's College and a few buildings at HKU are some of the few remaining examples of the colonial style.

Week Two

This week, all but one of the six students attended.

One student brought a newspaper clipping. It was about how a Hong Kong woman in finance decided to quit her job and start a frozen yoghurt business. They all thought she did it to make more money, assuming selling yoghurt can make more money than her high-paying corporate job. Though it is possible, she will, for a very long time, will be losing money on startup and then be making lots less money than her former career. I presented this argument to the students, that switching to selling frozen yoghurt was more a labor of love than a financial pursuit. They thought I was joking.

After that all, we completed unsuccessfully a crossword puzzle of sorts. I maintain that it was poorly designed with definitions too vague (and sometimes flat out wrong) for the specific words they were looking for. Needless to say, we moved on.

Hangman was the name of the game, and we went back and forth throwing random words at each other to see if we could get them. We kept the words easy, as did the students when it was their turn. Because we had some substance to this meeting, time went a lot quicker than in the last session.

Week Three

This week was actually two after Week Two because they had their finals the week in between. Two decided to show up (the most talkative two).

My teaching partner, at their request, told them how he served in the Singaporean Army (as there is conscription of young men there) in order to defend themselves against possible attack from Malaysia. Though Singapore officially operates in four languages, the one and only in the army was Malay. His position was the army police, to suss out all the contraband and maintain internal order.

We went over another newspaper article. This was was about tonsils and tonsil stones (which accumulate in your tonsils and pop out when they get too big after a bit of prodding). Big words such as tonsilitis were skipped understandably, and at the end of the article they admitted that big chunks of the article didn't make sense. We verbally summarized the article for them.

Though I told them in the first place that I'm American, they learned that little fact again. I answered questions about the United States, pointing out where I'm from on a big bad chalkboard drawing, drawing New York state onto the map, and explaining that the smallest state Rhode Island is not an island at all.

Week Four

The last session was earlier today today. The same two students as last week were the only ones to show up, and they were really excited to get shown HKU by us.

So we walked them there. As with any good tour of HKU, you start at Main Building. It's the oldest and most historic (and prettiest) building on campus. The main room in Main Building, Lok Yew Hall, is where the university hosts all its A-list events and ceremonies (except for graduation, which is being held this year at Asia-World Expo on Hong Kong Airport Island).

We continued around campus and showed them the library (but entering requires a HKU ID card, so we looked in from the outside), as well as a few canteens and some unique buildings. After we got through in just forty minutes, I was reminded how small campus is.

We walked them back to the bus stop and they went home.

Closing Ceremony

I won't be able to attend the ending ceremony for the program. It is to be held next Wednesday at Lok Yew Hall. I told them that I was probably going to go until I realized that I have class during then. All in all, though it was not exactly what I expected, I'm glad that I participated because it was a good experience.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.  

Phonetics

I figure that I’m probably the first student in the UC system to take Phonetics here at the University of Hong Kong. Whereas the other classes I’m taking (with the exception of Humanity in Globalization which is a new class) were all listed on the EAP catalog of classes for HKU, Phonetics wasn’t. The database is a guide and unofficial, because it gathers data based on classes former students have taken, and now, Phonetics is listed with the other HKU classes.

In the class of probably seventy-something (though half that many show up with any regular frequency), I am but a handful of students. The professor, a white American, speaks Cantonese and Mandarin in addition to English, and the tutor/TA at the beginning of the quarter would make all announcements in Cantonese, which I would then have her repeat in Cantonese.

Other than the obvious reasons for taking Phonetics here rather than back home, namely that I’m here and I need to take Phonetics as a required class for my major in Linguistics, I enrolled in this class because whereas back home the class is all about English, probably only American English, this class here focuses on American and British English as well as Cantonese and to a lesser extent Mandarin.

This fact is ultimately why I chose to take this class here and not here, and for the most part I feel like—1. It’s given me some insight into the one language that through my childhood had given me the worst time learning; 2. It’s helping me learn Cantonese more accurately and more efficiently now.

There’s one problem for me though—most of my classmates are native Cantonese speakers. Whereas back home most of my classmates would be native English speakers, with my classmates being mostly native English speakers, and with the class being in English, here, everything’s the opposite except that the class is taught in English as set by school policy. Whereas back home we analyze our English intuition and transcribe the way we ourselves speak, here we’ve analyzed British and American English, lightly touching on Australian and New Zealand English a bit, and then analyze our (or their) Cantonese intuition and learn how to transcribe that.

This has manifested in a couple of ways. First off, when I voiced my opinion about American English intuition, it was replied to by saying that I don’t speak standard American English—which I would admit to, but then again no one truly speaks a standard form of a language. On the other hand, the Cantonese speakers in the class when they voice an opinion on Cantonese intuition, it gets replied to in the way that I felt like I should have been replied to. “Well, that’s how you speak and linguists aren’t here to correct your language, but observe it,” or something along those line.

I guess it’s fair, and I’d never complain to the professor or the tutor about it. I have to learn about Cantonese sound systems without the aid of intuition and they have to learn about English sound systems without the aid of intuition.

What might not be so fair is that I don’t know too many colloquial Cantonese characters. See, he the last homework assignment he gave us two big assignments, neither of which I could do without the help of a native Cantonese speaker from Hong Kong. If I understand correctly, Hong Kong Cantonese writers use a lot of colloquial characters to write down what cannot be directly written down in Mandarin in informal contexts but write in standard Chinese in formal contexts. In addition, some words in Hong Kong Cantonese are so new that there are no characters for that syllable, so they write out the sounds in English letters.

The assignment was in two sections: the first gave Chinese characters (many of which colloquial Cantonese ones), of which you were to transcribe the sounds into the International Phonetic Alphabet (which was designed to be able to use to write down all human languages); the second was to take IPA transcriptions devoid of tone which we had to write the Chinese characters for. I don’t mind asking for help on assignments if people don’t mind helping me—and they don’t so I don’t mind. But, after all my help, I only completed about three quarters of the assignment. Don’t worry, though—he went over all the answers before we had to turn it in.

Later he said that there will be similarly structured questions on the final examination (styled quiz). The professor knows though that I, along with a few other students, can’t easily do that without sufficient aide, and with this being an English-medium class, I’m confident that he’ll do his best to accommodate me.

Now that Monday’s over, I only have two weeks of instruction left. Next week I’ve got two finals ace, for which I’m bringing study materials this weekend to Thailand. Au revoir!

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.

Hairdye and Contacts

I work with the latter but not the former.

I guess just thinking about how studying abroad is thought to change your perspectives and make you more mature, more open as a person, and more knowledgeable about the world and about different cultures, made me think that it would to well for me to evaluate my own.

A little to late, you say? Better late than never, I'd say.

Socialization is a funny thing, because as most people know, we are all born with a clean slate. We learn before we take our first breath of air. We learn social convention (some better than others). We learn a language or two natively. We develop who we are as individuals. We begin identifying ourselves and conform to that prototype.

I am no different, of course, and as a person, I have been learning throughout my life and will continue to learn until I die, I suppose. Who am I though? I'm not so sure I know this myself, actually. Here I find that in some ways I am so mature in many ways, yet so immature just based in the fact that I have lived on this planet not two decades yet. Growing up, I've learned through experience more than through dictation how to be have; what to say and what not to say; what people expect of me--and as a result, what I expect of out myself.

Whereas I was spoken to for a while in Cantonese when I was young, my parents always spoke English to each other, and my no conscious decision of my own, I picked up the latter but not the former. In a very immature way, it still boggles my mind that people can think efficiently in a language besides English, my language, and it's always been funny to me to hear little kids speak their native foreign languages. Some things will never change.

I know who I am as an individual, and yet I don't. I'm quick to acknowledge my ancestry, but never would I tout it nor say that I identify myself as Chinese before American, Californian, or even Chinese-American. I find it mildly annoying that some people try to identify themselves by their ancestry as if it is more than residual, because for while some it is, for more it is not. I understand that at anything and everything that I do, I will never be the best of the best, though I will not stop trying. I know that no matter how much I learn and no matter how much I experience, I know but a small fraction of the infinite universe of what there is to know.

I identify myself as Christian, because of how humbled I am by the world and because of the comfort of knowing of a higher power and the solace I find in knowing that nothing I do is really for myself. I identify myself as liberal (in the American sense) because I know that not everything in the world can be done by (fictitiously) saving money, nor solved by asserting superiority on the international front nor on the domestic battlefield. Because who are we to judge others and assert our righteousness in faith, lifestyle, or personal choices that ought to remain personal?

I identify myself as a heterosexual man, who wears darker-colored clothing and finds it better to cut hair shorter than leave it grow, who has been brought to the realization of the subconscious lowering of his voice yet still does it, who finds a woman more appealing with a voice higher than lower.

I see and observe the people here and notice that, while they possibly share more genes with me than many of my classmates back home, they are so different. The girls most all dress like guys and the guys most all talk like girls. But that is, of course, my judgment, and who am I to say anything without making sure that the listener knows its but my opinion, and that while I will defend my own, I still respect all well-founded opinions because what's right is as simple as a consensus of the minds.

If everyone's wrong, then everyone's right. If everyone's a winner, then no one is.

While I won't go so far as to say that I've never thought about it, I've never used hairdye, even as the majority of my classmates went bleaching their hair blond in fourth grade. As much as I say I prefer contacts over glasses because contacts maintain better peripheral vision, the reasons number beyond that.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author. 

A World English

Last year, I was in a social anthropology class called Language, Identity, and Community at UCSD. Taught by an academic (whose name I have chosen to omit), who has done plenty of research regarding the use of Spanish and Catalan in the Catalonia (an autonomous region of Spain), the class aimed to give us an understanding about the role language plays in creating and enforcing identities among individuals and communities among groups of individuals. Though that was a very interesting class (albeit I got my lowest college grade in that class), that’s not what this is about.

The professor shared with us a story that I feel can be related with by one of my friends here. This professor was from the western side of New York State. Unlike a “standard” American accent, which many purport to be like that of Chicago newscasters, she had a regionalized Midwest accent that many people unfortunately could not understand.

And it’s really not that uncommon. Though I would be quick to point out several differences between a more standard Midwest accent and a Californian accent, in many ways characteristics of the two have converged with spoken media (such as Hollywood productions) becoming widespread, and as such, neutral. The logic of which is as follows: there is no one natural way of speaking. As such, everyone has an accent in the language(s) that he or she speaks, though some may be seen as more neutral than others due to exposure and proliferation.

This means that accents that aren’t heard on widespread media are generally understood less. So a regionalized accent such as Cajun, Scottish, or Southern, is often stigmatized as not being the norm. With such speakers’ non-standard pronunciation (and often grammatical forms as well as lexicon), they tend to stand apart from the crowd.

Such problems are made worse as students learning English as a second language are taught British Received Pronunciation or Standard American English. When learning a second language, students are taught what is wrong and what is right, and sometimes things are just different.

This story that she shared took place in Spain, with an audience from all around the world. It consisted of a guest lecture taking place in English by a German scholar. At the end of this scholar’s lecture, she asked a question, which received an answer. Afterwards, she heard people trying to figure out in hushed tones who “that woman who asked the question” was, because they could not understand her. These people were speakers of English as a second language, and in her experience she realized that being a native speaker of English did not automatically give her the ability to be understood in English-language settings. On top of that, she found that those people who spoke English as a second language felt they spoke better than her because they could not understand her regional accent.

Like I said, HKU is an English-language institution, which makes it arguably more attractive to a wider range of students over a different Chinese university where they would teach classes in Mandarin. As such, and possibly to my disadvantage, I rarely have to speak any form of Chinese here as most of the exchange students appear to converse to each other in English.

But this isn’t to talk about Cantonese again. Improperly so, this is to talk about English. I heart English, and as a student of linguistics, I’ve made a point of noticing all the different varieties I’ve heard.

To start, there are the people who’ve learned English as a second language. In that range, I’ve met and heard people from the Netherlands, Spain, France, and Norway.

Native English varieties I’ve heard are Scottish, British, Australian, Canadian, Californian, and Midwestern American. Some that I’ve mentioned I cannot be more specific about because I do not have enough experience with such varieties to the point where I could narrow it down further.

In particular, my friend from Scotland finds herself having trouble being understood the most. Except on the phone, I have little trouble understanding her. Though she is a native English speaker, the lack of understanding of her variety really shows how English is a world language of sorts.

So what have I seen?

Well, English speakers overall use most of the same words, so we can understand almost all of what we’re saying if we speak clearly. There are several words that I’ve not heard of and many more that have different meanings. The majority of the differences are in drastically different sounds.

So how do we cope?

Well we explain things to each other of course. We often make fun of each other though for the particular words that we use. It’s all in good fun. Part of learning about other people is being accepting and understanding.

I don’t have an accent, right?

Well no one thinks they really have an accent, because everyone feels like they speak naturally. So how has my speech changed since coming here?

Well for one, I’ve never really used California slang. I’d be hard-pressed to say there’s ever been a point in my life when I’ve used “dude” excessively, in say every sentence. Beach Boys-slang I’ve never used. Terms like “wipeout” never made it to me, though I know where all the places in their songs are. The thing I used the most that regionalized me is “like.”

Like though I’ve like learned how to, well, like monitor my use of “like” so if I like don’t want to say “like” so much, I like can.

So here I don’t use “like” very much at all. I’ve heard more “hella” here than I’d like from people from Northern California, and have come to terms with it here. Luckily I haven’t incorporated that particular term into my lexicon yet.

The biggest change in my speech is my intonation of questions. Whereas as home I would ask something like “Have you eaten yet?” Like , I find myself making questions sound more like . Whether or not you get what I mean by this, I’m sure I’ll still sound like this for a while after I get back home.

Speaking of returning, I just got back from my reading week trip to Beijing. Stay tuned for all the juicy details and awesome pictures!

Thanks for reading.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.