1. If
there is one thing that I hate more than reality TV and facebook, it’s CSPAN.
As someone who seeks meaning in life, CSPAN stands against everything I believe
in. When I scan channels, I always shudder when the screen is just that same
empty congress room with papers spread out on the desks. It’s a sad truth that
a filibuster is quite possibly the most exciting thing ever broadcasted on
CSPAN. What’s worse, is that there
are multiple CSPAN channels, showing different shades of the same boring grey. In China however, when the new leaders
of China were ‘selected’ for the communist party, the equivalent of CSPAN was
actually broadcasted on over half of the channels. The TV I was watching had 49 different channels, and over 30
were the exact same image and sound. In addition to this, the English channel
was also covering the ceremony, but with dubbed audio. I didn’t know how good
we had it in America with only four CSPANs.
2. I
always loved playing telephone when I was little. For me, as is the case for
most people, the most fun part of this game is when the original phrase become
something totally different. This is actually the only game I enjoyed losing,
because if we ‘succeeded’ in telephoning the phrase correctly, it wouldn’t be
any fun. I don’t know why, but my students don’t find this aspect of the game
fun. Unaware that there could possibly be any goal other than prompt task
completion, they will, with the grace and poise of a beached whale, try to
shout the sentence to the last person in the line. When stripped of the ability
to blatantly cheat, the students will just freeze up in line, saying, “I don’t
understand.”
3. I’ve
been in China for about 1.5 years now, and I am still very much perceived as a
foreigner. For more on this,
please read the rant… I mean post… entitled, “White on Rice.” Nevertheless,
last year, one of my colleagues got a job volunteer teaching in Kentucky. This
has provided me with a similar barometer for what the inverse to my work here
is. She has reported back to me some funny things, such as, “It’s stressful to
have so few people around” or “No strangers come up to me asking questions” or
“American football is funny.” Most
recently, during the election, she was asked who she voted for. When she said
she was Chinese and couldn’t vote, her students were shocked because they
figured that if she was in America, she must be American. One student logically
concluded that if she wasn’t American, she must be in America illegally. I guess the American equivalent of the ethnic
exclusion I encounter as a Laowai in
China is a total ethnic subsumption into being either an American or an illegal
in America.
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