ChineseSpeakers

Start of summer term & GTP

Sara — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 17:53:45 +0000

I promised in my last post to talk in more detail about what my GTP year entailed. I will come to that later, but first a brief update on school life two weeks into the summer term – not that it feels much like summer, with the weather we have been having. But the variety has certainly brought weather vocabulary to life: I don’t normally teach ‘hailstones’, so it was great when students asked to learn it.

I was amazed to discover that half my year 7 class (27 students) had some connection to China. The discussion started in the first lesson back after the holidays with a student bringing in a beautiful chopstick set which an uncle had recently brought back from China; another showed a photo of her father cuddling an eight-month-old baby panda in Sichuan. Her father had impressed his Chinese business colleagues with his daughter’s Chinese exercise book. Other students mentioned: having a (European) grandfather who had been born in China; a sister participating in a student exchange; a yearly stop-over in Hong Kong (which she hadn’t realised was part of China) en route to the Philippines; parents who had celebrated their anniversary with a holiday in China, etc. It is the first class I have taught with such contact, and I am thinking about how to harness this, perhaps with a project of some kind…

Meanwhile, my Y8 class is working on a cross-curricular project on ‘journeys’ with the English and Drama departments. The focus is knights and sailors, so we are going to look at the ‘Water Margin’. My Y10s have just started work on ‘holidays’, in preparation for their first speaking controlled assessment in June. It was a shock (but perhaps not altogether surprising) when a number of them submitted homework in pinyin, with no characters in sight.

So, back to the GTP (teacher-training) year. By this time of the year, I was well on the way to completing my portfolio of evidence against the 33 teaching standards, which cover ‘attributes’, ‘knowledge and understanding’ and ‘skills’. I had also completed 16 ‘school-based’ tasks, essentially essays, often accompanied by lesson evaluations, on different aspects of teaching such as behaviour management, differentiation, pastoral care, assessment, etc. But the bulk of my time was still spent preparing lessons: planning them according to all the good practice I was learning, plus making the powerpoints and classroom resources. There were many late nights! I remember asking colleagues how I could get quicker; all replied that it was a question of practice, and they related tales of their own early woe similar to my own. I am happy to relate that they were right: I now manage not only to mark students’ books more often, but also a bit of a social life as well!

If you would like to comment on anything raised here, please go to the members’ forum to do so.

Teacher training

Sara — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 12:44:02 +0000

Here’s a taste of my experience of teacher training, in response to a question from Elizabeth.
I was lucky enough to get a Graduate Teacher Programme (GTP) place with a school near me. GTP is one route for graduates to gain Qualified Teacher Status. The other is a Post-Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE). The key difference is that GTP students are based in schools (with additional input from universities), whereas PGCE students are based in universities (with teaching placements in schools). GTP students are paid by their schools, usually as unqualified teachers.
In my school (where I am still teaching), Mandarin had recently been put on the curriculum from Year 7. The university input was provided by a partnership of universities and training schools, which had trained a Mandarin teacher the year before I started. I was fortunate in benefitting from her expertise in my second school placement. It took a fair bit of negotiation to set all the pieces in place.
I had my own classes from day one – it really was jumping in at the deep end! The basis of a GTP is that you learn on the job, with lots of support from your in-school mentor. My school’s Mandarin teacher did not have QTS, so my mentoring fell to another member of the languages department – an excellent teacher of French and Italian. The rest of the department were hugely supportive, letting me observe their lessons and also giving really helpful feedback in their observations of my lessons. In addition, I took part in the school’s training sessions for other trainee teachers, ranging from behaviour management to differentiation to pastoral care.
Meanwhile, on my college day, I received input on a wide variety of areas, much of it generic to teaching but also including some specific to language-teaching (but from no-one with knowledge of Mandarin). Most of this was practical, with days spent in the training school being particularly informative. The college day was a useful breathing space to share, and reflect on, experiences with GTP colleagues from other schools. These colleagues (about 25) were training to teach a number of subjects; about half a dozen of us were training to teach languages.
In school, I was not only a Mandarin teacher, but also a form tutor (on a shared basis) and a teacher of Personal, Social and Health Education (PSHE). The latter included areas as diverse as sex, drugs, human rights and personal safety. Later in the year, I also took on some French classes.
I was not alone in finding it an extremely demanding year, mostly because of the sheer volume of work required. I also had the additional puzzle/challenge of how to adapt what I was learning about European language teaching to the teaching of Mandarin. I will talk more about what my GTP year entailed in my next post.
If you would like to comment on anything raised here, please go to the members’ forum to do so.

Yang Fumin: The Future of “Tai Ke” Literature

Conor — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 08:50:32 +0000

(Originally Published on eRenlai.com)

Yang Fumin (楊富閔) is a promising young writer whose recently published short story anthology Huajia Nanhai (花甲男孩) was lauded by many famous writers and critics including Luo Yijun (駱以軍) and Shi shu (施淑) amongst others. His work captures the interesting duality of the Taiwanese psyche, with descriptions of folk customs and beliefs humorously juxtaposed to icons of popular culture in Taiwan, like Star Boulevard, BBS and the Wolf 125 motorbike. The satirical humour of his work is underscored by a note of compassion and self-identification which makes his work more human and touching than a lot of his predecessors. The proliferation of cultural references and the use of Taiwanese language structures make it a difficult but (with the help of a good search engine and Taiwanese dictionary or friend) worthwhile read for foreign students. This is an interview with him conducted in the Graduate Institute of Taiwan Literature at which he is currently undertaking a Masters degree.

Listen to the Chinese Audio here, and follow the transcript below:
final_yangfumin_4 (I suggest opening it in a new tab – so you can still follow the transcript)

Yang: I come from Tainan, and I’m just the kind of person who likes writing… When I say Tainan I mean the countryside. Actually I’m just a normal guy, just kind of a typical Taiwanese young person. I grew up in a good family, I grew up going to cram schools, studying, taking exams, went to university, graduated with flying colours and got into graduate school. I haven’t had any major problems in life, nothing really bad happened to me.

Nick: So you would say you grew up in an average Taiwanese family?

Yang: Well yeah, my family is average, but everyone’s family environment is different and particular to them, so you can’t say it’s “average”, but no matter what the peculiaraties, you can say that at least it wasn’t bad. However there were certainly some exceptional aspects to the way we grew up. One example would be because we lived in the countryside, so I have an interest in things related to temple festivities, including worship at temples, gods, ghosts and monsters. I like this kind of stuff.

Conor: Who do you think reads your work?

Yang: Who reads my work? People with an affinity with me, because I don’t really know… When I started writing…

Conor: So you were writing for yourself or with other people in mind?

Yang: I just wanted to write, and then I discovered if you want to write you have to publish too, to publish you have to enter competitions, so when I finished writing something I would enter it in a competition. So I would put it like this, I wanted to write so I started writing, somethings would bother me, so I wrote them out, in the style of a short story.

Conor: In your work you often seem to bring up Taiwanese…

Yang: …Folk customs?… I write about so much folk culture or customs that maybe it might come across as overly superstitious. But writing about that kind of thing I find is a kind of mal du pays, like reminiscing, the melancholy affection for my hometown that reminiscing triggers in me. And actually, I don’t really like these folk customs that much, I actually despise them. I despise them, and I grew up amongst these customs I’ve seen too much of them, I’ve also seen the negative side to the whole thing. When people think of temple festivals, they think of people on the margins of society, children who don’t study hard, with bad grades, so folk culture is stigmatized in a way. So when I was younger I kept away from it, but it’s only when I grew up that I realized that that is where I came from. So in the process of writing about it, I stopped despising it. I realized that it is still a part of who I am. I not only stopped despising it but I accepted it as a kind of energy… one of my motivations for writing.

Conor: Has coming to Taipei influenced the writing process or the content of your writing?

Yang: After coming to Taipei I’ve only written one short story, Huajia (〈花甲〉), the last story in the anthology. I still haven’t really become accustomed to the pace of life in Taipei, the busyness of it, and I’m also taking my Masters degree, so I feel I should focus on my studies for the moment. I still haven’t really settled in yet, so I get nervous.

Nick: What does Huajia Nanhai (《花甲男孩》) mean?

Yang: Well, as you know, Huajia (花甲) is one of the stories in the anthology. Nanhai (男孩), because it would be too simplistic to just call the book Huajia (花甲), so I added Nanhai(男孩)… Huajia (花甲) means 60 years old, and Nanhai (男孩) is the word for boy, so the title means 60 year old boy providing a paradoxical contrast, which I thought was interesting.

Nick: Does this refer to yourself?

Yang: It’s not me exactly. I think it’s a work that reflects the way I think.

Conor: In the book you use a lot of Taiwanese language, in terms of sentence structure and vocabulary. How do you feel about foreigners reading your work? Is it strange for you?

Yang: Actually I’d be very interested in whether you both were able to understand it, or if there are lots of things that you can’t quite grasp.

Conor: I think that there were certain bits that were hard to understand, but if you just look them up on the internet you can find out what they mean.

Nick: In your work you mention computers and you also mention more traditional things.

Yang: Yeah, there’s a lot of very Taiwanese things, but also a lot of modern things.

Nick: Do you think these provide a contrast?

Yang: They do, but that’s not something I deliberately tried to write about, because this contrast is a part of our lives. In my own life this kind of extreme contrast often arises and you realise its absurdity. It is these kinds of contrast that I like, so I write them into my work, they have the effect of making people not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Nick: Do you think that Taiwan has a very Taiwanese identity?

Conor: Would you say your work is self-representative or representative of a common feeling of being Taiwanese?

Yang: Of course I think my work is self-representative. It’s not my place to represent Taiwan, but you could say I represent my view of Taiwan. My view of this imaginary place. Taiwan after all is just a place, an island.

Nick: How would you compare Taiwan literature to other Chinese literature in China and the Chinese diaspora?

Conor: What is the definition of Taiwan literature in your mind?

Yang: I don’t think I’ve captured this in my work. I’m still grasping for a definition. We’re studying Taiwan Literature now. In the process of studying it, you try and understand what it means. It’s natural for me to speak Taiwanese, so it’s not a contrived gesture. It’s natural, just like when I talk with you I sometimes use a bit of Taiwanese.

Nick: What do you like to do when you’re not writing, studying or working?

Yang: I like sleeping. Haha, I like walking but I also like watching TV a lot, but it’s not like I am addicted to it. I like watching the news, there is lots of news in Taiwan, don’t you think? 24 hour news channels, so there’s news to watch 24 hours a day. I’m pretty normal, I like cycling, riding my scooter and just generally being out and about. So I’m not a geek who just stays at home all day (awkward laugh).

Conor: How would your friends describe you?

Yang: Eh… well how would you describe me then? Haha. My classmates all say I’m good fun, and not a very serious guy.

Nick: I saw on the internet you styled yourself “the revolutionary Taike author who swam down the Zengwun River .”

Yang: That actually came from the publishing house. It’s kind of a marketing technique, it’s not really that dramatic. Embarrassing though it is to admit.

Conor: Would you like to publish more?

Yang: I think I’ll continue to write, but I guess that’s up to fate. I think continuing to write is more important than getting published. You write if you want to write and not just to get published.

Conor: Do you get any pressure from the publishing house?

Yang: No, it’s not everyone who wants to get published. A writer has to have a certain attitude towards their own writing.

Nick: Where do you get your inspiration for writing?

Yang: Inspiration? Like I said from life, from TV, from walking and from the my background and where I grew up. I write what I’m familiar with, I don’t write science fiction or detective novels, because I don’t have that kind of experience.

Conor: You mention death quite a lot in your work.

Yang: I’m pretty scared of death actually because from when I was very young, I was often in contact with things related to death. Like for example in our institute we often hear the sound of funeral parades going down the street, the sound of dead people. An important part of my writing is death.

Conor: You write about spirits and ghosts? Are you scared of them?

Yang: I don’t write horror stories. It’s just part of the mal du pays and missing home. Everybody was together there, there was a sense of homely humanity.

Conor: Along with the nostalgia and the reminiscences there also seems to be a sense of duty and guilt no?

Yang: Yes…

Nick: Do you think this sense of duty is too much of a burden on Taiwanese people generally?

Yang: I don’t think it’s so bad, and I think for some people, they wouldn’t think of it as a burden or pressure, but rather they think it’s just what is right… Its of use to them. Sometimes it can be pressure, for others it’s helpful. It can make you more determined or it can be a burden.

Nick: Who has influenced you most in terms of other writers?

Yang: 100 years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and in terms of Taiwan, at my former university Tunghai University (東海) one of my professors was also a writer, Professor Zhou Fenling (周芬伶), I’ve read a lot of her work. However I’ve also taken courses like the Literary History of Taiwan, and I liked the majority of the authors we read, it’s part of the process of literary enlightenment. I’m a little bit embarrassed that I started writing without having read a lot of the work of other writers, after writing it leaves you slightly empty. So I think it’s necessary to read more widely, both Western and… it’s not even just about reading, but about broadening one’s horizons.
_________________________________________________________
(1) Taike refers to a subculture in Taiwan stereotypically characterised as beetlenut chewing, with dyed red hair, wearing blue and white sandals.

Read an excerpt from the short story anthology below：
逼逼

Yang Fumin’s blog and 〈暝哪會這呢長〉

Re/turn

Conor — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:45:35 +0000

Performance Friday 15th April 2011, 7.30pm

My teacher gave me some tickets to see this performance, by the Tainaner Theatre Troupe. I’d been to the theatre in the Xinyi branch of Eslite before to see a play inspired by the songs of Chen Qizhen, a Taiwanese singer (膚色の時光 Once, upon hearing the skin tone). I remembered so clearly having been there before because the stage is slightly unusual in that it is a round stage that divides the audience into two sections at either side of the stage, which means they enter through two separate doors. The last play I’d seen staged here had been interesting technically but weak in terms of plot. This play was similarly weak plot-wise – think a school production of Back to the Future fused with the cheese factor of popular Taiwanese TV dramas (Meteor Garden, The Devil Beside You). The story is about several connected love stories gone wrong. The death of the female protagonist’s mother halts her wedding to a closeted gay man, and her mother comes back through time via a magic doorknob acquired in Tibet from an antique seller (who was portrayed with possibly the weakest piece of acting in the whole play). This sets off a series of events which changes the lives of the protagonists (in Sliding Doors fashion), so that they get the chance to “Re/turn” to the scene of their unresolved regrets and “amend” them. The female protagonist is reunited with her lost love, and the gay man is accepted by his best friend as a teenager (again thanks to the magic doorknob) so gets the confidence to come out early in life and so avoids the pitfalls of soliciting rent boys and using (God help us all) marijuana (there is an amusing scene where a major police bust over one joint).

The major problems with the play was not the acting, which was convincing, but rather the whole concept of the play, certain elements of which seemed to be lifted right out of Taiwanese popular culture and films. The obsession with making the play “international” without incorporating any international actors was also a problem for the play. It pandered to the Taiwanese obsession with European and Japanese culture, in that a lot of the play was set in London – where the male lead Charles had apparently grown up with an American accent; there was also a Taiwanese actress playing a Japanese dancer, two very Taiwanese sounding Americans as well as a Taiwanese playing a British postman. Only the latter was vaguely funny, with deliberate use of British English terms designed specifically to make the audience laugh, and none of them sounded natural in english. The director and writer Cai Bozhang (蔡柏璋), though a good singer, was a little self-indulgent as he sang in Taiwanese inflected English through most of the play. My companion for the evening, one of my classmates pointed out something that I think speaks true of my experience of the contemporary Taiwanese Theatre: that because the writers of a lot of the plays produced nowadays also act as director and actors, the scripts that they write are not really the focus of their work, and do not stand alone as literary works. Rather, the event and the production takes first place. The result is the rather paltry, soap-operaesque dialogue seen in this production.

It was a pity that the talented acting of the actors wasn’t put to a better use, more worthy of the stage, otherwise the only role of theatre in Taiwan would seem to be to give a live experience of soap operas.

If we are to take the piece seriously as a piece of theatre, the other thing I have a problem with is the moralistic pedagogy of the production, and its assertion that there is “right” path in life that we are diverted from, which seems a rather simplistic and egotistical exercise in self-affirmation by the director (people who don’t follow my liberal ideology are following the wrong path). Any deeper exploration of the idea of regret and “fixing the past” is absent, sexuality too, receives quite a superficial treatment in the play. There are two major gay stereotypes in action within the play. The director plays the role of the “gay best friend” of the protagonist, described as her “妺妺” (little sister) that we “might think is a little unusual”. There is, however nothing unusual to a Western viewer about this kind of character: the emasculated, non-predatory inocuous gay male referred to by terms usually reserved for females (think of a slightly updated version of Are You Being Served‘s Mr Humphries, or a character lightly based on Taiwanese celebrity Cai Kangyong (蔡康永). His “one true love”, Peter, (pause – wipe off the vomit – continue) is dead, so his sexuality is essentially safely removed from the present for the audience. The closeted gay fiance reversion to type after coming out also suggests that his previous masculinity was but a ruse, and at the end of the play he is shoe-horned into the “gay best friend” role as evidence of his acceptance of his sexuality. The other two representations of gay men, are also stereotypes, the predatory older man who chases the closeted gay man when he is a high school student, and the rent boy, whose brazen sexuality and drug-use lead him to arrest, which can be seen as divine justice within the play. As opposed to representing sexuality in a more diverse way, the production instead homogenises sexual and gender roles.

To sum up, the play is easy watching, its ending is predictable and safe. This is the territory of liberal morality and its pedagogical unfolding is suitably bland. None of which is what motivates me to go to the theatre, why pay 600NT or more to see a low-budget, albeit live, rehash of a feel-good movie. The night I went the production overran by about 40 minutes, so expect to be impatiently looking at your watch while you watch the happy-ending play out at length to the crooning wails of the directors singing.

For more information go to the blog here.

2005 Outdoor Taiwanese Opera Company Festival – The Legend of Liu Mingchuan 外台戲歌仔戲匯演: 烽火英雄-劉銘傳

Conor — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:43:06 +0000

Performed by 一心戲劇團 (One Heart Theatre Troupe)

I saw this DVD in the library had English subtitles and my curiosity got the better of me. For 3 years now I have glimpsed bits of Taiwanese Opera performances in parks, in crowded night markets, and in the street where I live, but given that the scripting of the performances isn’t very rigid by all reports and there is a lot of impromptu dialogue and improvising, they are rarely subtitled in Chinese let alone in English (and the language used is for the majority Taiwanese or Southern Min Dialect). The performances are quite kitsch to the Western (or even the Taiwanese) viewer, very brash colours and lots of women playing male leads. The performance I watched on DVD was selected from a festival of outdoor performances which meant that it was probably of a higher quality than your average Taiwanese Opera.

The Opera opened with photos of old Taipei with the modern place names in brackets which I thought was cool.

The opera turned out to be a dramatization of the adventures of Liu Mingchuan in Taiwan. I took a module on Taiwanese History last year (the teacher was amazing and really funny, if anyone’s at NTU and has an interest in history I recommend you to take one of his classes Li Wenliang 李文良, he’s got a class called Maritime East Asia and Taiwan (東亞海域與臺灣)) and the opera was laced with historical references to events that actually happened as well as to the folk mythology that surrounds Liu Mingchuan.

One doesn’t really need to understand Taiwanese to realise that there is a lot of overacting and melodrama in Taiwanese Operas, but that is part of their charm in a way. The play reminded me in some ways of Brian Friel’s (Yes, another Brian Friel reference, god help us all) Making History which deals with the legendary Hugh O’Neill, a major figure in Ulster’s history. Both the opera and the play make history more accessible to the reader by endowing the characters with modern humour. The dryness of historical record comes to life in the (overly) dramatic style of the opera, much as Li Wenliang’s comic delivery made history class so much more interesting. This is also a historiographical approach to history, wherein one realises the human frailty and doubt behind the great cycles of history that seem perhaps, in retrospect, to be predetermined.

The opera still deifies the wisdom of Liu Mingchuan and sets out from a determined ideological standpoint: Taiwan is a great new land of opportunity, Hoklo, Hakka and aborigines should unite against the evil French invaders. Although the segregation of different groups is brought up, it is very much underplayed, and Liu Mingchuan is an advocate of unity and a bringer of development (although a lot of Liu Mingchuan’s fiscal reforms weren’t actually realised fully due to the Japanese handover). Liu Mingchuan is definitely idealised, and the oppression of the aborigines seemingly ends with his arrival, and the aborigines in the opera seem to be treated in a similar way to Hoklo and Hakka, when in fact they weren’t even considered human by the Qing. I remember one lecture in the history course when I happened to be sitting behind two of the girls from the younger year in my institute, one Aborigine and one Hoklo. The teacher told a story about two Han men who came across an aborigine and killed him, then buried him. Later they regretted wasting all that good meat, so they went back and cooked and ate the guy. They were brought to court, but were found innocent of murder because aborigines were not “people” (人). It was interesting to think how differently people could conceive of aborigines then, the two men wouldn’t have even thought of eating a fellow Hoklo or Hakka, but they genuinely thought aborigines were some sort of animal. The difference was emphasized when the Hoklo girl leaned over and pretended to eat the ear of the aboriginal girl, much to my amusement.

The Liu Mingchuan love story was far from moving, and the soppy romance between his nephew and the aboriginal girl lacked any realism, but these two parts did not dominate the opera and if you know to expect a bit of melodrama then you can find it amusing in a kitsch kind of way.

Would recommend it as an interesting way to understand the way Taiwanese people collectively conceive of their own history.

It’s on tudou with Chinese subtitles only if anyone is interested.

Film Review: Le tribunal itinérant Directed by Zheng Wenqing

Conor — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:37:14 +0000

A woman tearfully reads a letter from her paraplegic husband which grants her a divorce from him. The husband looks on as she reads his words advising her to divorce him so that she can have time for herself and to look after their son instead of being a full time carer for him. The wife breaks down in tears and we catch a glimpse of something approaching smugness at the emotional outpouring he has elicited with his self-sacrifice. The court official, frustrated with the lack of efficiency first tells the wife to calm down, then asks her to pass the letter to a court official who reads the letter as disinterestedly as if he’s explaining the rules of Monopoly – the emotional words of the wife, punctuated with breathy cries are transformed into a dull bureaucratic legal confirmation, a tick in column A and column B so to speak. These two elements of the documentary were the elements that most lucidly translated to my own experience of China. The first being the naïve sentimentality woven into the framework of personal tragedy, be it a wife eulogizing her husband’s self-sacrifice, or the evident pride with which the husband perceives himself in her reaction. These scenes, which are common in Chinese soap operas and films (think A World without Thieves, Together or even Infernal Affairs in the scene where the policeman is thrown off the roof.) They seem at times to be the equivalent of corny lifetime movies, when children get cancer but remain irritatingly upbeat about it or the emotive conceits of film noir. There is an unashaméd yank at the heartstrings that is counterbalanced by the other element of Chinese culture that hit me hard in the culture clash, that is the unrelenting Kafkaesque nature of bureaucracy, where people’s (overly-) emotional rending is treated like a tax receipt that has been filled out incorrectly. The itinerant court sets up in absurd locations, carrying the plaque of the republic which is hung over classrooms, and in muddy village squares. The judges seem reasonable enough though they play to the crowd at times who seem to have come for the entertainment value (I’m reminded of the staring immobile faces that surround Chinese car accidents.) The documentary’s grasp of these elements of Chinese society, both its strength and its weakness, make the documentary interesting for foreign viewers, as this is the elements of culture that are so alien to the contemporary Western world.

Interesting but not essential viewing

Book Review:《那些人，那些事》- 吳念真

Conor — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:15:35 +0000

Hello everyone,

I’m Conor. I’m currently doing a masters in Taiwanese Literature at National Taiwan University and Frances asked me to suggest some books that might be useful for everyone to keep up their Chinese and for discussion if anyone is interested in literature. So I’m going to be blogging from time to time and welcome any feedback or comments. You can contact me at conorstuart88@hotmail.com – I’m currently working part-time for eRenlai magazine, so if anyone has anything they’d like to contribute you can let me know too. Any Chinese I use in the blogs will be in traditional (forgive me) but it’s not hard to switch between simplified and traditional on google or elsewhere.

《那些人，那些事》 Review

If Wu Nianzhen’s (吳念真）name sounds familiar, it might be because you’re familiar with his work with internationally acclaimed Taiwanese director Hou Xiaoxian (候孝賢）as a screenwriter and Dust in the Wind (《戀戀風塵》) is based on his youth; although he’s also a director in his own right and has done a lot of TV work as well as recently directing a series of plays in Taiwanese which have been exceptionally popular with Taiwanese audiences (《人間條件》系列). If you’re living in Taiwan, he’s the man from all the TV advertisements, in fact it’s pretty much impossible to go through one commercial break without seeing him at least once. He started out, however, as a short story writer, and this autobiographical collection of short stories first published in 2010 mark his return to this medium.

In keeping with Wu Nianzhen’s notion of the stoical (or 堅強) nature of the Taiwanese character, these stories are very understated in style. The simplicity of the language used makes this semi-autobiographical collection of short stories a good read for a foreign speaker of Chinese, whilst still being very emotive and moving. Some of the stories are deeply personal, in one of them he talks of his brother’s suicide, and when he first met his wife, other stories are about stories of the people he came across growing up. The stories are all written with a sincerity which is disarming – he even records the words of his brother’s suicide note which imply that his own fame was part of the reason his brother felt it hard to cope in life -

大哥
你說要照顧家裡﹐我就比較放心
辛苦你了
不過
當你的弟弟妹妹也很辛苦

Wu Nianzhen’s writing gives a good sense of how traditional values are mapped to modernity. The stories in this collection don’t idealize Taiwan’s past nor are they steeped in nostalgia for it, the characters are real people – and offer, perhaps a more realistic portrait of working class Taiwanese than other writers today, who are more interested in experimenting with modernism (Wang Wenxing 王文興 and Zhu Tianwen 朱天文 for example) than writing for a larger Taiwanese audience.

The book is available here

I’m currently reading an interesting book by Taiwanese author Hu Qingfang (胡晴舫) called My Generation 《我這一代人》, so will hopefully have a review up soon.

Learning characters

Sara — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 18:17:08 +0000

Continuing the theme of ICT and picking up on a member’s comment from my last post, I have to say that I have found no more effective way of getting students to learn characters than repeated copying by hand. Many, however, don’t find this the most riveting use of their time! Some lucky ones manage to alleviate the boredom by using an iPad. Competitions and incentives (eg form points, good notes in journals and postcards home) are useful motivators.
Stroke order, likewise, is not top of many students’ priorities despite my attempts to stress the value of it. For beginner classes, I ask students to copy me writing on the board; for more experienced classes, I show how to write only more complicated characters.
Time is, of course, an issue. So I also encourage students to refer to stroke order in their textbooks as well as stroke-order websites. Some students get bitten by the bug, and take pride in trying to write characters correctly. Many, however, do not see the point of following stroke order, and seem to relish inventing their own ways of writing characters – is this a teenage thing? Often they manage to produce characters which look fine. But I admit that I do wince inwardly when I see them writing in all sorts of peculiar ways!
As to whether typing pinyin into computers to produce characters is a hindrance to learning to write characters, I was struck when I last visited China by comments from Chinese people (mostly the teachers I met at the school where I was based) that they were forgetting relatively common characters because they were so often writing characters with computers. What will be the long-term consequences of this? Has anyone seen any research about it?
Character-learning also cropped up repeatedly at my recent Year 7 parents’ evening. This year’s Year 7s are a particularly enthusiastic lot (27 in each of the two classes). One student told me that she was decorating her bare bedroom wall with characters for words and sentences. It was gratifying to hear that, despite initial worries by a number of parents who hadn’t chosen Chinese, most were delighted that their daughters were loving the subject so much – and were now less concerned about their own perceived inability to support their daughters.
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ICT

Sara — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 15:18:31 +0000

The half-term holiday is nearly over. But, as someone told me soon after I started teaching, teachers are never more than seven weeks away from a holiday! We break up for Easter on 30 March…

The week before half-term was particularly hectic, as we were visited by the National Inspector for ICT. Although it was my ICT colleagues who were really under the spotlight, he was also very interested in how ICT is used across throughout the curriculum. The language lab installed last summer holidays has enabled students to use ICT more often in language lessons, ranging from accessing language websites to making mini-films of themselves to skyping Chile (in Spanish). Websites and apps to aid Mandarin learning are increasing in number, and it is hard to keep abreast of what’s out there. One of my current favourites is http://www.hellomylo.com/. If anyone reading this has their own favourites to share, it would be great to hear from you.

Returning to the subject of holidays, the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust (SSAT) has just confirmed the dates of this year’s ‘China camp’. In October half-term, I hope to take a group of students from the current Year 9 and 10 to China. What a fabulous opportunity for them! Our school has participated several times, and students (and staff) have found it an eye-opening experience.

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Happy new year!

Sara — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:34:59 +0000

恭喜发财！Happy new year of the dragon!
Welcome to this blog in which I hope to give you a flavour of life as a high school Mandarin teacher. I recently trained as a teacher after a career in the civil service (Foreign Office and Home Office), and am lucky enough to teach in a school with Mandarin on the curriculum from Year 7. I share the teaching with a Taiwanese colleague, and this year we have our first year starting GCSE.
The start of Chinese new year last week was an opportunity not only for Mandarin students, but for the whole school to learn more about Chinese culture and customs. We decorated the languages block with posters and lanterns, had Chinese food (with a menu in characters) in the canteen, and emailed a new year quiz to the whole school. The response was tremendous – some students told me they were waiting in the library before school to receive the quiz; another logged on from home, even though she was off sick; our Chinese science teacher admitted to having to Google some of the answers! The winners received ‘hong bao’ containing White Rabbit sweets (very popular) and a house point.
Thanks to the HSBC advert, many more students knew about ‘hong bao’ – but it took some highly leading questions to tease out why HSBC might be using Chinese themes in its adverts.
All our Mandarin classes, except one, enjoyed lessons about new year. The exception, sadly, was the Year 10 GCSE class which is in the middle of its first written controlled assessment (15% of the GCSE marks). They have nearly completed their six hours’ preparation to write 100 – 150 characters about the topic given to them. They will have one hour for the writing, with access to a dictionary and a planning sheet with up to 40 characters on it. (Exams have changed enormously since my ‘O’ levels many years ago…)

This evening is Year 10 parents’ evening, which I am looking forward to. The class has a wide range of abilities, but the students are all highly-motivated, and are a real pleasure to teach. I am sure I will enjoy the evening!