Student Blog

via Shanghaiist and Mark’s China Blog. The L.A. Times has recently written an article that claims that “in China, appetite slows for Western food.” While a little part of me really wants them to be right about this, they aren’t. Their thesis:

In the U.S., fast-food chains often thrive in tough times. But not so in China, where Western quick-service food isn’t the cheapest stuff in town and, in target markets like Shanghai, there’s too much competition. Plus, a growing number of consumers see it as unhealthful.

Their point makes a lot sense, but is ultimately laden with Western assumptions about fast food that don’t really hold any water in China. More and more franchises are opening every day across China, and new chains are coming over every year (the recent arrival of Dunkin Donuts for example, soon to be followed by Kristy Kreme).

Go into a KFC or a MacDonalds here and look around. Who are the customers? What are they doing? It’s a completely different customer base then the West, and the way in which people consume fast food in China is striking different, that attempting to even connect the U.S. brands with their China incarnations can take you for a loop.

The first time I ever ate fast food in China was in Jinan, Shandong Province in 2007. I was studying at Shandong University and myself and my Chinese-Canadian friend had finally hit that point where we needed to get our Western food fix. Jinan’s a pretty provincial place (compared to Shanghai anyway) so we just went straight for the fast food. Imagine my surprise, (coming from “ew-fast food” hipster West Coast Canada) to see that the KFC we had just entered was not only completely packed, but packed entirely with 16-25 year old… couples… on dates. We went to a Macdonalds the next week. The same thing. At all hours of the day, packed, at least relative to other restaurants, and packed with young people on dates or hanging out, excitedly chatting with their friends. There’s a rule that we could add about the conception of fast food patrons in China: they are never alone.

We want to imagine the fast food chains always under the cultural representations that they hold in the West. In Victoria, a Quebec poutine or a German shintzel restaurant isn’t going to provide either a healthy or a cheap option for going out on a date or just hanging out with for fun. But it will provide something interesting, new and very delicious. That’s what fast food restaurants are outside of the West.

There’s plenty of Chinese “shanzhai” knock-offs of fast food too. Mark in Xi’an, who I found out about the story from, could take a trip to Xi’an’s famous WuYi eatery where there are stalls selling big pieces of “knock-off” breaded fried chicken for several kuai. Or in Shanghai, one might want to venture to Kendeji (as opposed to KFC’s brand, Kendeqi) for their shanzhai’d KFC menu… they serve Chinese food too. Others are popping up, and transforming Western fast food into something actually quite cheap priced next to the original brands. But Western meat-heavy fast food is going to always remain priced above high-carbs/veg/poor-cuts-of-meat Chinese food, there’s no economical way of changing that. By virtue of that fact alone, I suspect the “novelty” of Western food has as little chance of wearing off here in China as the “novelty” of Chinese food does in America.

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So, I talked for a long time about creating a research project to top off my Chinese Language and Literature degree, something that emphasizes my anthropology background. First I was thinking of something more related to medical anthropology, emergent sexualities in China, but living in Shanghai, I feel pretty disinterested with the venues and activities related to that topic, so that kind of research will have to be saved for another time and another place. Instead, I decided to wait until an idea came to me. And about a month ago, that idea did, and I’ve been developing it since then.

The research plan is the first stage of research process that I envisage in this manner. Stages One through Four will take place here in China. Stages Five through seven, back home in Canada.

Stage One: Formulate the research question and research plan
Stage Two: Begin initial research, data gathering, participant observation
Stage Three: Clarify the research question
Stage Four: Narrow research, begin to organize data, cultivate informants
Stage Five: Organize data
Stage Six: Formulate the thesis
Stage Seven: Write like there’s no tomorrow.

My initial research topic I’ve latched on to comes out of how I’ve been practicing my Chinese reading ability and exploring Chinese culture.

For a long time, I’ve been keeping up with EastSouthWestNorth, a website run by Roland Soong, where he translates posts from across the Chinese internet. Finally feeling confidant enough about my Chinese ability, I decided to stop relying on translation from ESWN and the new translation website on the net, ChinaSMACK. I started reading the forums at Tianya and Mop, the two major Chinese news forums. Before my impression of the Chinese internet was very based on the news events of political interest that came to the attention of ESWN, but I found that I was fascinated by how people were using the internet to talk about the small conflicts in their life, their feelings about their friends, family and work. I’m still interested in the political importance of the internet in China, but I’m more fascinated with how people use the internet to report on their own lives.

The initial topic that I’m using to frame my research question is “Autobiography and Anonymity in the Chinese Online World.” I’ll follow up tomorrow with a discussion of my research question and the theoretical and social issues that I’m researching.

In my last post I laid out the basic research plan that I’m developing for my project. I thought in this post I should present the ideas that I’m researching right now. The topic that I’ve defined for myself is “Autobiography and Anonymity on the Chinese Online World.”

First then, what is “autobiography“? Well, we all know it’s a biography told by oneself rather than others. Or to break two definitions down into one, which I’ll be using for the sake of this project: autobiography is the act of giving an account or narrative of one’s own life story or stories. Autobiography is expressed in many different forms of media, the first that typically comes to mind being the autobiographical novel. As a novel, we typically call this genre of literature the memoir.”Gandhi” by Mahatma Gandhi or “Dreams of My Father” by Barack Obama are two examples that I will return to.

The most similar but different medium that we can contrast the memoir with is the diary. The difference is at the heart of this discussion, because a diary is private and a memoir is public. This project is looking not just into “autobiographies” as “complete, or extended life-story projects” (ie. memoirs), but more generally as “autobiographical accounts”, in two mediums: blogs and forum postings. Blogs have been popularly mislabeled by the mainstream media with the term “online diaries”, which conflates private and private text-based RSS feeds. An RSS feed is an web feed format which modifies HTML based websites in order to allow users to cycle “postings” that takes away much of the ordinary leg-work of maintaining a website. In the West, the primary hosting sites for these “blogs” are livejournal, WordPress and Blogger, which I am using myself. I think by now, nearly all internet users should have either used or at least viewed a blog. Forums are less frequently traveled in the Western internet and in fact could be considered to be in decline, with the rise of social networking websites such as Myspace and Facebook. However, the concept isn’t too difficult to understand. Forums are organized on subjects, and users can post topics for discussion.

Both mediums are particular for the public nature of them. They can not only be viewed by the public, but the public can also comment on the postings in both the blog and forum mediums. Both of the mediums are distinct from a novel in more than just the material on which they are written, but also the way in which they are written. Novels/memoirs are presented as complete stories consisting of plot elements; on the other hand, blogs and forums only present anecdotes, short life stories. Blogs present a stream of anecdotes, updating regularly. In fact, viewing a well maintained blog in it’s entirety from it’s earliest post is not much different from reading a memoir, albeit a poorly organized and unconcluded memoir. Forums present isolated anecdotes, as the reader of a forum is “reading a community” rather than reading an individual’s blog. The lens through which I’m viewing blogs and forums is that they can be understood as autobiographical, public-interactive. In either case, anecdotes tell funny stories, what you had for dinner, and of interest to my research, the personal problems and societal ills that Chinese net-users encounter in their day to day lives and choose to publish online.

How does autobiography compare to other mediums? Autobiography is self-reporting in nature; the alternative being reporting on events outside your own experience. So autobiography is personal and thus heavily biased to our own experiences and ideologies. The perspective of an autobiography is first-person, limited in scope to what the author can observe. That’s two important concepts to remember. First-person perspective and heavily biased: that’s the nature of autobiographical narratives. But the beautiful thing about autobiography that drew me to this subject and I think draws at nearly every reader is that autobiography allows one to “put yourself in someone else’s shoes”.

How does the reading public interact with autobiographical narratives? First, here’s five major types of reactions that I typically experience when reading an autobiographical narrative.

1. Apathy. If so, then I usually just move on.
2. Skepticism. Is it true? I read for facts and knowledge that will verify what the author is saying. Like many savvy net-users I typically spend a lot of time using Wikipedia and Google while reading news, blogs and other media, to cross-check and verify claims. I’ll discuss bias below.
3. Empathy. Pity. Anger. Enjoyment. Amusement.
4. Sympathy. Common life experience?
5. Call to action. People typically have a purpose when telling a story. Self-therapy, the amusement of others, the social mores of gossiping and… putting an idea in other peoples heads. Gandhi and Barack Obama’s memoirs are excellent examples. Autobiography is a potent form of rhetoric. This is one issue I hope to develop further, on the topic of the blogs of Chinese activists.

These reactions that we have are silent if we are reading a book (unless we go through the considerable and almost always wasted trouble of writing a letter to the author), but on blogs and forums, the online medium is designed for a public conversation to be capable of emerging from everything that is written (unless authors choose to disable commenting on their posts, a practice, that actually draws considerable ire from net-users, who are used to being able to respond to posts). Net-users express their feelings about what they see online. They share common experiences and the online autobiography becomes a conversation. This is the heart of what I’m researching.

There is also a dark side to the Chinese internet. The “human flesh search” or “人肉搜索” pronounced “renrou sousuo” has taken the conversation back into the real world, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad and sometimes for less then noble aims. I’ll discuss that tomorrow when I talk about anonymity online in China.

1. See at least three new places in China. I’m thinking the Tibetan villages of Deqin, and the Hakka Tulou fortress outside ex-colonial Xiamen in Fujian Province.
2. Start learning Arabic (I’ve already found an Egyptian conversation partner and I’m learning it as an L3, from Chinese)
3. Score a Level Nine or higher on the HSK (the Chinese Proficiency Exam). That’s the level that signifies that not only can you speak Chinese, but you can do complicated tasks in the language (ie. graduate school, law, foreign affairs).
4. Research and then write up my project… vague topic…. “Autobiography and Anonymity Online in China.”
5. Type up my diary from this last summer into a travel book.
- – - – - – - – - – - Return to Canada! – - – - – - – - – - -
6. Decide on what my diploma should say in 2010. Chinese Maj/Hons and Anthropology Maj/Min and… I’m also thinking of throwing a minor in Public Administration on top of that.
7. Start applying for internships/grants/jobs(?)/scholarships for 2010. Prefereably something that will take me either back to China, or improve my French/Swahili/Arabic in a native speaking environment.
- – - – - – - – - – - Ongoing projects – - – - – - – - – - – -
8. Maintain this blog. http://cnstudent.blogspot.com
9. Read the Southern Weekly 南方周末… well, weekly.
10. Last but not least, nurture the relationships that I already have and form new relationships with the people around me.

I’m responding to the article: “New High-School Elective: Put Off College” December 30th. Now I have a few choice words. So this is taking the form of an open letter below.

It’s sad that such elitist and establishment-based examples are how the Wall Street Journal choose to discuss something as simple and potentially democratic as the notion of a “gap year”. First of all, what is a gap year? What is the point of it? This article doesn’t seem to know. Is it a language program? Is it volunteering? It is being overseas? Is it character building? Is it down-time from high school? Or should it be action-packed with no downtime at all?

I say waste, because I firmly disagree with the notion that taking a year off in which a young adult can gain valuable experience about the world, and more importantly, themselves, is something that the middle class (and the day when these families can be described as middle-class will be happy day for America) can simply not afford. My own gap year, would normally fit into the top tier price-wise, valued at about $10,000 or more, was completely subsidized by the Government of Canada. Such financial aid options are widely available to Americans seniors in various forms. I’ve since traveled and volunteered quite a bit through the world, and I’ve learned that gap years, if properly conceived, are neither so expensive nor difficult to research in the slightest. The notion of hiring a consultant to accomplish something that can be done with google in an instant, smacks of a lazy elitism I find quite discouraging. The claim, for example, that there are “more than 100 programs in China” to sort through is simply untrue. There are perhaps half a dozen organized programs of this type in the entire country, unless of course you are a speaker of another European language, such as Italian, French or German, in which case a handful of other programs would be available.

Private schools and consultants are exacting an unnecessary price from uninformed rich parents. While a part of me applauds their entrepreneurship, the image they paint of gap years makes it seem as if the price tag would be a daunting price for others. I write this letter with much love and affection for my friends who are C.I.E.E. students currently completing an entire year here at ECNU in Shanghai. They are brilliant, exciting and hard-working young students with bright futures ahead of them. I suspect their soon-to-be-colleagues are going to be very similar. But $12 000/5 months or $20 000 is not something an ordinary American family can afford, and less-fortunate families that want to send their kids abroad should know… they can.

I come from a lower middle class family. But I have volunteered in Africa for my own gap year and gone to China twice on academic scholarship during my undergraduate degree, which I’m fortunate enough to benefit from the resources of Canada’s top universities. The cost to myself and family for all three of those overseas programs was together less than $6000, almost exclusively the cost of airfare. All three programs were subsidized by either the Canadian or the Chinese government. But It is possible to pay substantially less for the programs that these students and their parents desire without even a dime of scholarship money.

(I’m a Chinese Govt. scholarship recipient at the school she will be attending, with friends inher program, so I must admit some insider knowledge) The program which Ms. Kivel selected in the end, C.I.E.E. is the first result on any search engine when the keywords “Gap Year Program China” are typed in. Or perhaps, because C.I.E.E. is one of the oldest, and most established exchange program providers in America. That’s how her $2000 consultant found her $12,000 Gap Year program. The university she will attend charges less then $1400/semester and Shanghai has made host family services that will provide free housing (no commission) for English speakers to live with them. Additional classes and tutoring available to CIEE students should have a market value of more than $1000. Avg cost of housing in Shanghai for foreign students is $150/mth otherwise. Avg. living cost (for a foreign lifestyle) $300/mth. Avg. English teacher salary is $20-30/hr. Volunteer jobs are plentiful and again require no commission, just a phone call. A plane ticket to China 2-ways from a West Coast city costs $1000-1200, East Coast is $2000+. Look! I’ve just cut the cost of a six month program in Shanghai down to $6,300 (and that’s living QUITE comfortably in terms of access to ALL the comforts of home and having lots of fun activities and doing lots of shopping in the cheap goods heaven that is China! Of course, you lose a lot of the hand-holding and extra perks of a program as well laid out as C.I.E.E.. For some parents, five thousand, ten thousand more dollars doesn’t make a big dent in their minds, but for most teens, they simply wouldn’t have the opportunity otherwise.

So in short, high school seniors and parents, if you have an interest in taking a gap year, or sending your child on one, but fear that you can’t dole out the money of the rich and fabulous…

Do not fear.

Here are some steps to take yourself through to creating your perfect GAP year.

1. Do you want to take a gap year? Maybe you don’t. It can be an incredible adventure for some, but for others it can be a depressing time away from friends and family. Think first whether you’re really interested in living abroad or simply in the romanticism of traveling abroad. There is a immeasurable difference between going to an all-inclusive resort in Acupaulco and volunteering in Barrio in even the same city. Some people crave a cross-cultural experience. If you don’t, a gap year simply isn’t for you.
2. What do you want out of your gap year? Spiritual development? Maybe you should go the religious route. Want to become fluent in a language? Find a university or a homestay program. As a professional language student and part-time language teacher, I’ll even suggest a third (very cheap) option. If I had to do it all again, I would go to live in a country and teach the language to myself through a combination of exposure to all forms of media, immersion, a modular educational approach, and plenty of private tutoring. Want to save the world? Think first about what skills you actually bring to the table. If you have skills that actually are useful, find out where they’re needed. If you don’t, there are many humanitarian projects that will take on volunteers and teach you those skills and let you help people in need… for a donation, of course. I felt depressed after my time volunteering in Africa because I felt that I didn’t really contribute to the community where I lived in a meaningful enough way. I realized afterward that the point of going, was not for me to help them develop, but for the to help me develop! You having real skills that the community doesn’t is what separates humanitarian volunteerism for educational volunteerism.
3. Okay, you know what you want? Now where do you want to go? Think of a place you’ve always wanted to go. Sky’s the limit. But keep in mind, you have to want to live there. Not visit but live. If you can’t rough it out, developed countries are for you. If you crave the wild side, maybe the developing world will fit your personality. But be careful what you wish for. I’ve had many a gun pointed at my head, and had many close calls with dangerous political and health situations. Don’t put yourself into a dangerous situation.This is where private agencies and programs come in handy, but if you’re going the cheap route, that just means the research falls to you. Contact the American, British or Canadian consulate or embassy in the country you’re interested in. The State Department’s website also includes travel adisories on all countries. The CIA World Factbook and wikipedia are also good places to flesh out your interests.
4. You know where you want to go, you know what you want to do. Don’t worry, it could be multiple places. Now, open up Google and begin searching away, using as many keywords as possible. There are many websites that have databases of volunteering/educational programs and placements. One great example, for the environmental/agriculturally-inclined is WWOOF, the World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. For a small membership fee, you can have access to thousands of placements in various foreign countries on all inhabited continents. Generally WWOOF volunteers get free room and board, and education about agriculture in return for part-time farm labor.
5. Select a few top choices, send some inquires, figure out your plan. How much will it cost? Look for scholarships. Make your own scholarships. You might have made a doubletake there, but I am quite serious. In your community. you will have many charitable organizations and foundations. If you have financial need, and can explain the benefits of the program you want to embark on (teaching you a valuable skill, delivering humanitarian aid, etc) you can probably find a group. My small town municipality actually gave me $500 when I went to volunteer in Africa. All it took was a letter and a two minute speech before the town council. Other fraternal organizations helped me make up the remaining cost in donations. I had a bottle drive. Get a paper route. It’s shameful that the article I’m address didn’t even think to mention Rotary International’s international study abroad program (one of the biggest charities in the world), the original gap year program that sends high school seniors to… well… kind of re-do their senior year in a foreign country. Sounds like high school all over again, but it’s really not. It certainly isn’t a lot different than these programs in the previous article. Oh and did I mention? The Chinese government offers hundreds if not thousands of placements every single year for the Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC) award that gives full scholarships to high school graduates, university students, graduate students, researchers and others to study Chinese or even do full university programs in China. In fact, in the past, the CSC has complained about the lack of applicants!
6. Buy your airplane tickets, arrange your visa (if necessary) and away you go. These days there are plenty of budget airlines and it’s pretty easy to find cheap seats on the internet. We don’t need to use a travel agent to plan our holidays anymore, why would we need a “gap year consultant” at any time?

There you have an affordable gap year that if planned correctly costs no more than a year of community college. Minimal cost, maximum benefit. I previously gave the example of a six-month program in China. A program to a Latin American nation could cost a tiny fraction of that because the reduction in airfare and other cost of living differences. African and European programs are more expensive then Latin American and Asian programs for the reasons of popularity, cost, A gap year doesn’t need a luxury of the rich. It can be a resume, and character builder that all Americans can afford.

I was just looking at this map of Africa, with other areas of the world shown for comparison and it got me thinking that while Westerners like to think that we know a lot about the world our “knowledge” is heavily skewed by perspective. Like the economic disparities that Immanuel Wallerstein outlined within his notion of the “core-periphery”, there is also an awareness gap that exists between the core and the periphery, the developed and undeveloped nations, which leads the citizens of both to have wholly unrealistic ideas about the lives of the alien Other.

But in this globalized world, we often hold the attitude that the global citizen on the path to success. But I think we should qualify that belief and say that, the global citizen who finds his home in the first world, naturally benefits from the power of perspective. The perspective, and experience can bring political, economic and social benefits back home in the first world, or allow them to leverage their first world credentials in the developing world. For the global citizens who consider the periphery, the developing world, to be their first home, there is a mounting frustration with the way in which certain kinds of “global employees” or “global citizens” have leveraged themselves into positions where they can be gatekeepers for knowledge. There are no worse culprits than journalists (though there are many other ways in which Westerners can be bad overseas citizens). And I truly have great problems dealing with the continued state of international journalism in the media.

First, is a journalist an investigator of knowledge or a gatekeeper? It seems that journalists back in the heyday of early 20th Century journalism had the attitude of investigators and tradition of well-researched and vigorously fact-checked journalism developed. Sadly, modern journalism, perhaps reached it’s height in the Watergate scandal. For afterward, the media establishment began to become targeted by political and economic means of “changing the tone”. In the past couple decades, that has meant a real weakening of the journalistic institutions, and perhaps no place has been as damaged as international reporting.

International reporting is a intellectually challenging field in the first place. A journalist is sent to a foreign country, in which even if they speak the native language, they do not speak it as a native; they lack connections; they find their access limited by handlers, censorship and translators; and their bosses demand an exciting, yet simple to read story. Of course, for a foreigner to read about the goings-on of another country without reading about the history and culture of that place, the meaning can be completely changed.

We in the West have always loved stories about the Oriental Others. Especially those that fit in with our preconceived notions of what life on the Periphery must be like: brutal, impoverished, but of course, with a hint of exotic beauty. Looking at a map of Africa with comparable sizes to other countries prompted me to think about this, because we have been conditioned by the media to think of Africa, not as a continent, but as an singular location in our imagination, a country more like, “Africa” with scare quotes, that fits so neatly into our Orientalist stereotypes and makes such fantastic television. Are you surprised to see how big it is as far continents go? I admit, I was even in a little put back, and I would consider myself fairly aware of what goes on in Africa, having spent some time in Kenya myself.

I also have to consider my own current adopted country, China, where Western media bias, is not just a problem for us understanding China as it is, but now a serious issue that is bouncing back onto us as media-savvy, bilingual young Chinese have realized how our media is reporting on China. And they are not happy. The notion that Chinese people know less about what’s happening in their country then we do, is one so quickly bandied about in the West, that I almost think that many Westerners actually buy into this attitude. It all came to a head this year during the riots in Tibet, when Western media, reporting on the issue made several critical false knowledge claims without evidence (that if they were reporting on municipal politics would libelous, but they can get away with for international reporting, yet another fundamental flaw with international reporting).

The most graphic of these, was a video, that made it’s way onto CNN and Spiegel, in particular, and was also snapspotted onto the frontpages of many prestigious newspapers. The video showed Nepalese policemen cracking down on Tibetan protesters in a riot in support of their brothers in Tibet, that likewise turned violent, when emotional protesters attacked the Nepalese policemen, telling them they were protesting illegally. Lacking actual footage from inside Tibet, Western media outlets instead showed the video of Nepal, without telling their viewers that it was not actually Tibet. This and other media miscalculations were caught noticed by media savvy young Chinese, who enraged, promoted this around the internet. They founded a website called “Anti-CNN.com” which they promoted as a watchdog against Western misinformation about China. I remember viewing it when it was a very shabbily put together HTML set of links and embedded Youtube videos. Today, I looked at it again while writing this post and was surprised to see how it has morphed into a sleek, sophisticated website. Ironically now, Chinese people are now to believe our media is just as manipulated as we think there own is. Maybe they’re right.

For me, 2008 was a tragic year for Western-Chinese relations. But it was also a year of growing up. In 2008, Chinese people realized that Westerners think the worst of them. There is an air of defensiveness that now pervades every conversation about politics had between Westerners and Chinese in this country, as opposed to the openness I felt being here in 2007. Before, there was no real awareness of how China was talked about in the West. With sites like Anti-CNN all that changed, for better or worse. Now if I wish to discuss a social problem in China (and there are many) I feel the gaze of my Chinese friends asking, “so you want to confirm your baser suspicions?”

On the other hand, Westerners realized that Chinese people are neither anti-government, nor pro-Tibet. Chinese people are nationalistic, proud of their country and of great surprise to all of us, unwilling to blame the high echelons of the party for the corruption and gangsterism of the local political elites.

This last one is very important for me, because I see it as being largely representative of the very different political culture that exists here. The New York Times recently ran an article that reported on how activists had been jailed in a mental hospital in Shandong for trying to go to Jinan, where I lived last year, to report on corruption of their local level officials. Now, while there was a certain level of collusion in this case between provincial and local level officials, the nature of this kind of jailing of complaintants, is actually a “encouraged” act (encouraged that if complaintants succeed in registering complaints in provincial capitals or Beijing, it leads to punishments for the officials who allowed them to “rock the boat” not just the actual wrongdoers), that is heavily tied to the notion of devolution of power and decentralization within the traditional Chinese state. Yet this isn’t a some new wierd concept (though your image of China, compliments of the media, might be a little different) but in fact, the organization of the Chinese state has been based around a decentralized, self-regulating local rule, with a strong authoritarian state at the top which serves to protect the nation (ironically, quite similar to what Hobbes might have had a wet dream about and written a fanciful book of political philosophy called Leviathan). This organization has been around since the Tang Dynasty (1000 C.E.), and modern post-Reform and Opening capitalist government has repaired what few dents Mao and his buddies had made into this system. So long story short, the idea of local leaders sending mercenaries to lock up complaining farmers who try and make their way to Beijing may seem exotic and strange to a Western reader, but here’s something to chew on: this is a practice that has persisted for one thousand years.

Perspective.

About two weeks ago, I outlined my research plan and discussed the different forms of “autobiographical writing” online. I ended the post writing that “tomorrow” I’ll discuss the other key concept I’m examining: anonymity. As it were, this terrible thing called final exams rolled around… first it was giving final exams to the poor elementary kids I teach taught English to this past semester, now it’s the poor university age kid (me) who needs to survive his own week of exams. But, amidst the horror, there ‘ought to be room to procrastinate constructively and copy down the outline I’ve already handwritten explaining my understanding of this topic. EDIT: and now that failed too… it’s been another couple of days… -insert awkward laughter-

Well, the last time I talked about my research with my framing question about “autobiography and anonymity online in China”, I discussed the term “autobiography”. In this post, I’ll discuss the term “anonymity.” First of all, what is a good definition of anonymity? Well, anonymity is the state of being anonymous. From the Greek anonmos, a = without; nonmos = name, lacking name. Anonymous as I’m thinking about it here is usually defined along the lines of “having an unknown or withheld authorship or agency”. Authorship is an interesting issue, particularly due to Foucault’s essay “What is an Author?” which while very hard to follow (this summary might be useful) leads us into some rather relevant questions about the meaning of authorship. What is the relationship between a text and the author? To be horrifyingly simplistic, we could say that Foucault sees that in the how we consider literature, we can consider the role of the author is to act as a conduit for the representation of certain ideas that exist within their society. Foucault also posits, the rather memorable thought about the “death of the author”, a lens for which us to think of the author as more than just an individual. I would think that the “death of the author” is not that dissimilar to a state of anonymity, of course, Foucault is asking us to imagine the great authors as though they were anonymous, on the internet, our authors are not “the greats” but they are conveniently already anonymous, giving us the ability to skip right to considering them for the picture of society which they can give us.

I would state a fact I don’t care to verify with numbers: a minority of well-known online writers are anonymous, but a majority of online writers are anonymous. I would also note that all well-known online writers are bloggers. For most successful bloggers, the blogging medium acts as a self-promotion device. The ordinary online writer however, uses blogs and forums alike to “vent information” onto the internet. Anonymity for the ordinary the person means the freedom to be honest in expressing opinions and feelings.

BUT (I write in big scary letters and circle a few times in my notes) what happens when the readers choose to intrude on your anonymity. And that is a, if not the, central issue on the Chinese online world right now. China had a very predicatable 2008. The normal disasters, protests, counterprotests and finally the long expected and fully scripted Olympics… but no one expected the emergence of the Human Flesh Searches. The Human Flesh Searches have hunted down the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful in mass pursuits that not only highlight how much of our personal information can be garnered through the internet, but also how tenuous the anonymity we cling to really is.

Why do Human Flesh Searchers seek to unmask the identity of the authors or subjects of their targeted searches? Skepticism, anger and/or a call to action cause readers to wish they knew the author’s identity. Identity is context, which in turn lends verifiability to any knowledge claim. Is the internet a contextless space? At times, it may seem so spontaneous, but I firmly believe that the internet is a part of the physical world, as much as a book or a table might be, as such blog posts and comments on forums and blogs alike do not simply spontaneously “pop” into existance. They come from somewhere, and there is a certain hunger that us ordinary folks feel to know who is communicating that opinion to us, or who that is holding that placard.

Human Flesh Searches come out of this hunger for context that is quite understandable, but a very fundamental fear that observers of this phenonma have is how they have so often transformed into Witch Hunts, which we can clichely compare to the Cultural Revolution, which I’d prefer not to go into. Rather let’s focus our attention on this oh so important notion of real world repurcussions for online action. Certainly, this Human Flesh Search phenonma is going to forever complicate the way in which we think about anonymity in China.

Who are we writing to when we write online? I know the readers of this blog must number in the handful, dozens maybe. Though perhaps I could account for future readers, but even that seems a little self-indulgent. For the most part, I am writing for myself. Of course, my identity is out in the open. In my earlier post I discussed diary writing versus online writing as two distinct forms of autobiographical writing. An anonymous author of a blog or forum post about their own life is writing a diary in the sense that the act of writing does not unmask them in connection with the story they are writing about. It is still private for them. But simultaneously many people are free to read it and come to their own conclusions about the work, just as takes place with any published work. Now whereto is the author?

If he were alive today, I expect that Foucault would have a very big smile on his face.

If I want to feel good about the title of this blog, I might as well write a few posts outlining my philosophy for studying Chinese. I am one of many Chinese students that feel that the traditional 19th Century classroom approach to studying Chinese and the accompanying toolbox of “worksheets” and “memorization tables” are hopelessly outdated. I’m going to spend some time outlining the many mainstream and non-mainstream approaches to learning that I subscribe to, but first, since we’re all procrastinators at heart, I wanted to talk about my own self-created approach to exam-cram-studying Chinese characters and words.

I call it the fold method. You need but two things: a diary sized notebook and a pen or pencil (though pens make for good teachers, they keep us honest about our mistakes).

1. Identify the characters you need to learn and write them in two spaced out columns, one for characters and one for the English translation. If you feel you need pinyin, write the pinyin in the English column. Make sure to a lot at a time (min 40 new or forgotten words) Ok! You’re ready to begin! First give your vocab a once over aloud.
2. Recognition. Fold over the page from the right so that you cover the English translation/pinyin. Go through the list trying to remember the word in question. If you can’t remember it, skip it until you’re done the page. Feel comfortable with recognizing the characters? On to step number 3.
3. Memorization. Fold the inset of the previous page in your notebook just over the characters, keeping the English/pinyin column exposed. On the back of that page (left side), try and write the characters from the English translation. Again, skip the characters you don’t know.
4. Correction. It’s very important not to learn to write characters the wrong way. Check each word and character against the right hand page. If it’s wrong, rewrite it correctly on the left, if you didn’t know it, write it out twice.
5. Fold over or rip out the left side’s answers and repeat the process until you feel comfortable with the vocabulary.

I love movies. Maybe it’s because I grew up without TV, and my family watched first VHS and later DVDs religiously… all the great classics, modern Hollywood, and films from abroad. Learners of Chinese and any language for that matter know that exposing yourself to as much media from that language is one of the most important ways to study. Of course… not all film industries are created equal. And once you’ve gotten through the greatest hits collection of Chinese films you’re going to be hit by a terrible realization: Chinese movies and TV shows are awful. Not just the kind of silly B film status that some Taiwanese TV shows can claim, but just pure unmitigated awfulness. Most foreigners who watch Chinese TV too long in hopes of garnering their language learning from the telly, start talking about wanting to claw their eyes out and various more productive solutions for the lack of half decent Chinese media.

My solution is to simply not watch Chinese movies and TV, except for the few exceptions that I can know in advance are actually good. For everything else, there’s dubbing. Nobody likes dubbing. I don’t like dubbing. But if you’re going to study Chinese in the long term and watch films, you’re going to have to learn to appreciate it, warts and all. Head down to your favorite DVD shop and look for the videos that include “国语配音”. Start with the movies that you’ve seen more than once and wouldn’t mind seeing again. With the native Chinese films, that list is going to be pretty short. But with the whole world dubbed in Chinese the list is going to grow remarkably. I started out with Laurence of Arabia, Star Wars and Cowboy Bebop. Now I have quite a vast collection.

This is not just vegging out in front of the TV, you need to be actively learning. When watching a dubbed over film, you can pick a variety of watching styles. My favorite format is to simply turn on the movie with Chinese dubbing and no subtitles. Kevin, my roomate however, prefers to have traditional subtitles underneath. Do not watch the film with English subtitles! You make think that you can ignore them, but you’ll just be cheating yourself! If your Chinese comprehension isn’t very high/you can’t remember the movie or have never seen it before, there are two other approaches to take. One is to pause the film whenever you don’t understand and briefly turn on the English subtitles. Another is to keep your laptop or notebook handy and scribble out notes as you’re watching. You can look them up later, or if you have the wonderful little program WenLin, you can get the answer immedietely.

For viewers of all levels, the preeminent language learning blog All Japanese All The Time, recommends writing down the vocab and phrases that you actually want to know how to say and subsequently adding them to whatever memorization system that you are using. I highly recommend that blog to learners of all languages.