IASISK – Shanghai
Casey, who teaches English in South Korea and runs the blog It’s Always Sunny In South Korea, recently visited Shanghai with me. Since I never got around to talking about it on the last podcast, I figured I’d just recommend her article.
Here’s an excerpt:
Shanghai has a cosmopolitan, big-city feel but there is also something quite unique about it. The architecture is simply fascinating – check out some of the photos below to see the stunning skyline. There are some buildings that look like they came straight out of a sci-fi movie, while others have clearly not been renovated in many years.
As cool as it was to see the futuristic element of Shanghai, my favorite part of the time we spent there was wandering through back alleys and random neighborhoods, seeing how average people lived. It was shocking in some ways – for such a developed city, people were living in sparse and often dilapidated apartments. In one area, I noticed that the sewage system was an exposed pipe near the front door.
We did have one sobering encounter with a little boy, which I still struggle with when I think about it.
We were leaving the Jade Buddha Temple (which is really just a huge, ridiculous farce that I will cover in another blog post) and heading to lunch when a little boy, about 10 years old, started walking beside us. His face was filthy and his shirt was covered in dirt and he was giving us the saddest look I’ve ever seen.
The boy clearly wanted money, and was clearly experienced at begging for it. Even after being told no, he kept pace with us, repeating the same phrases in Chinese over and over again. At one point, he stuck a finger down his throat, I assume to indicate that he was hungry. I could feel my stomach starting to turn.
It’s not that I’ve never encountered a beggar before. I’ve lived in New York City and Washington, D.C., so I’ve met my fair share of homeless, desperate people, some more heartbreaking than others. But this was the first time I’d been approached by a begging child. It was horrible.
To read the rest, head over to IASISK.
Your Mom Stops Traffic in Xian
From ChinaSmack:
Yesterday afternoon around 3 o’clock, while this journalist drove towards the North Street and Xihuamen intersection, suddenly appeared ahead a middle-aged woman around 40-years-old walking amongst traffic, “collecting toll” from all of the cars passing through this street, skillfully knocking on the driver’s side windows of every car, then demanding fees from the driver, and the drivers all helplessly and more or less paying the toll.
Perhaps it was because yesterday’s temperature was too high (note: at the time, this journalist’s in-car thermometer showed 45 degrees Celsius), this female toll collector had a towel on her head and her upper body indeed was only wearing a white bra.
The Great Wall
A handsome gentleman with a mysterious past posted a wonderful article on his personal website. (And he uses way less adjectives than me.)
You can check it out here.
Note: If you have a slow connection, give the site a minute to load. It uses some hella big images.
“Injustice has a cause, debt has an owner, out the door and to the left is the government building.”
In the past few weeks there have been multiple stabbings in Chinese kindergartens.
Last Thursday, a man in Taixing city injured at least 28 four-year-olds when he entered the kindergarten and started attacking people with a knife. Two other attacks had happened before that and schools are terrified of more attacks. McCoy’s school, and many others around Beijing, have had guards posted in the mornings and are under lock-down during the day. No visitors are allowed to come or go.
There have been a lot of articles speculating why this keeps happening and why people are targeting schools. I’ve seen a bunch of different explanations ranging from “romantic issues” to “mental illness” to “frustration over the increasing economic disparity.” But I want to focus on one article by a Chinese blogger Han Han.
Han Han is a novelist and one of China’s most famous bloggers. He’s also a racecar driver. (Before you say something like “that doesn’t make sense,” I’m going to have to remind you that this is China.)
Anyway, his article is full of criticism for how the Chinese government has been handling the attacks. You can read the full thing here. And below are some highlights:
Aside from Yang Jia, nearly all killers choose to begin by killing the weak. If they feel there’s no way out in society, then killing those even weaker than themselves becomes their only way out. I recommend that all the police guarding the doors of local officials nationwide be transferred to guard kindergartens. A government that can’t even protect children doesn’t need so many people protecting it.
…
After the Taizhou kindergarten murder incident, the media was controlled. These children were born at the wrong time [i.e., unlucky] and they died at an even worse time. In this jubilant atmosphere [of the opening of the Shanghai Expo], this incident is just noise to the relevant government departments. All we know is that according to the government, 32 people were injured and no one died, but on the streets there are rumors that many children were killed. So who should I believe? If the government is telling the truth, then why are they not letting parents see their children? They’ve also blocked off the hospital and shut off the news, and there are no photographs or video of children. Moreover, a murderer chops up thirty two people with a knife and no one dies? Was he really committing murder or performing surgery?
…
I was very astonished. The Taizhou government has successfully sealed information, closed the hospital, controlled the media, forbidden visitors, and diverted public attention, but now they have successfully taken the people’s anger at the killer and directed it at themselves, and for what?
…
It’s their usual process: eat, drink and be merry all night until something happens, then hide, isolate, remove the media, make prohibitions, send press releases, make compensations, cremate the bodies — then go back to eating and drinking. Their way of dealing with things isn’t much more noble than a murderer’s. No wonder I saw online a kindergarten hanging a banner: “Injustice has a cause, debt has an owner, out the door and to the left is the government building.”
…
I don’t want to delve into the social reasons for the killing, I just want to tell everyone here that a man rushing into a kindergarten and stabbing children can’t even make the news.
Ready for his powerful final paragraph? If you don’t love Han Han already, you will after this:
Perhaps in the eyes of those old men, you children are just spoiling their fun.
Wretched children, it is you who are poisoned by milk powder, harmed by vaccines, crushed by earthquakes, and burnt in fires. Even if there’s a problem with rules in the adult world, you are the ones adults stab in retaliation. I truly hope it is as the Taizhou government says, and you’re all just injured and no one has died. We elders have failed in our duties. I hope that when you grow up, you will not only protect your own children but build a society that protects everyone’s children.
“The Most Frustrating Thing About Teaching: Parents”
Casey, who teaches English in South Korea and runs the blog It’s Always Sunny In South Korea,wrote a great article yesterday titled The Most Frustrating Thing About Teaching.
She describes some of the horrible circumstances that parents have put both her and their own children in. Here’s an excerpt:
His mother told the co-teacher that her son really likes me, but that she’s worried because he sees me as his friend, not his teacher. She also said that he has an older brother at home and that they play very rough together and fight, so she is worried that he is too wild for me and that I can’t handle him.
Then she said that she wants me to “scare” him into listening because he doesn’t behave and needs discipline.
I was furious. Of course I flat out refused to do that. Scare him? How can this woman even be serious? This is her son she’s talking about. Why would you ever want anyone, let alone his teacher, who is still practically a stranger, to deliberately threaten and scare him? Why would anyone want to do that to a five-year-old child? (Of course, I do know the potential answers to that but it still seems incomprehensible to me.)
You guys should definitely check out the complete post and leave a comment telling her what a great job she is doing in such a terrible situation.
As far as my own commentary on this goes, I haven’t actually experienced it first hand with my own students’ parents. The maltreatment I see usually comes from the Chinese assistants.
I do know my kids well enough to be able to guess what kind of parents they have. Being extremely over-protective is one of the traits I suspect is most common, which is preferrable to asking a stranger to scare and discipline your child. Jesus Christ.
I have a theory that the over-protectiveness when it comes to Chinese parents is not out of true genuine concern for their children but rather a side-effect of the one-child policy. That is a mere opinion though and I can’t back it up with any empirical verification.
Anyway, head over to It’s Always Sunny In South Korea and give Casey some support.
