Why I've Been AWOL from Blogging

February was the Student Research Competition

http://www.csulb.edu/divisions/aa/projects/grad/research/winners/

Now we're working on getting the finishing touches of our Asian Studies Grad Student Conference put together before 3/18.

http://www.csulb.edu/colleges/cla/departments/aaas/graduate/conference.html

http://www.csulb.edu/colleges/cla/departments/aaas/docs/program3.4.11.pdf

Then at the end of March and beginning of April, I will be in Hawaii for the Association of Asian Studies Conference, Session 418.

http://www.asian-studies.org/Conference/Program/Saturday.pdf

I just finished my first mid-term portfolio on Early Chinese Culture, including Confucianism, Daoism, and the evolution of civilization and government. Tuesday I have a mid-term presentation for the class entitled: "Is There a Confucian Revival in Contemporary China?"

Confucius now stands on Tiananmen Square next to Mao Zedong's mausoleum.

I have to present a different paper on 3/19 from the one I could present in Singapore, at the CSU research competition, and in Hawaii, because I co-authored that paper with one of my professors, who will be a discussant for our conference. So I am tweaking my final paper from the Asian Studies seminar last semester: "The Hot and Sensitive K-pop Hero: A Contemporary Re-mix of Ideal Neo-Confucian Masculinity?" I have done a lot of research on Neo-Confucian ideals for masculinity while working on my thesis. I am not so familiar with Korea and Korean pop culture, and I have been doing research beyond what we learned in the seminar last fall so that I will be able to answer questions after presenting the paper. I have also been working on my power point for that presentation.

Gotta love the always hot and very sensitive K-pop sensation Rain!!

Now I have to find a 10-15 page scholarly article in Chinese on Jin Yong, the martial arts novelist whose opus is the subject of my thesis. I have to translate 3 pages before May 1st and upload them with my application for a summer translation workshop in Shanghai, sponsored by the Confucius Institute. The problem so far is that all the articles I have found are either 4-6 pages or more than 40 pages. There just does not seem to be a happy medium in Chinese scholarly journals.

http://www.confucius.ucla.edu/languageprograms/translationworkshop.htm

I have the whole outline of my next post blocked out in my head. I just have not had the time to get it fully written. I had set aside time this weekend, but on Friday my professors sent me the link to the translation workshop and told me that I really needed to apply... And the best laid plans of mice, men, and Teresa went out the window as I spent hours searching for a 10-15 page Chinese article... I will do my best to make time during the week.

Family Road Trip

My dad took the girls and me to the airport. For the first time, I took three little girls alone on the plane. We flew non-stop to Miami. Yuni was there at the airport to meet us. We stayed in the home of one of Yuni’s customers. It was all fixed up, but they were still in their alternate housing, so we had a whole house to ourselves. Even though we were in Miami six months after the hurricane, the streets were still piled high with debris. Some of the houses in the cul-de-sac were inhabited, some were partly repaired, and others were still completely ruined.




We spent a day or two in Miami meeting the people whose houses Yuni had helped repair and visiting the places he had scoped out during his time there. He had been working six days every week and had not really done any sightseeing, so he only knew how to take us to the beach. He had a van and we headed north on our first family road trip.



We visited friends in Orlando and took the kids to Disney World. Then we visited Lynne in Atlanta where we saw Stone Mountain and the Coca Cola bottling plant. We went to up to DC where we visited our friends from church, Cousin Brian’s family, and the pandas at the National Zoo. The twins turned five while we were in DC, and Cousin Brian took us all to Chuck E. Cheese’s for a party. It created a dangerous precedent.



From DC we went north to Philadelphia where we met my mother’s cousins. They had a parrot named DB (Dumb Bird) that had the run of the house. The kids were entranced. We also visited Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, but I think the parrot was more interesting to the children. From Philly we headed up to Connecticut to visit my brother Tom. He took us to Mystic Seaport. It is a living history museum with people in period costume working and doing the normal activities of people in a seaport around the time of the American Revolution. The girls thoroughly enjoyed it.



On the way back, we went to a number of other living history museums. There was one in Virginia with a number of different colonial farmhouses, each in the style of immigrants from different countries. We also went to Williamsburg. We stayed with friends of friends from church. They homeschooled their children, and their son played the piano and harpsichord. The night we arrived he was giving a harpsichord concert in one of the halls in Williamsburg. We all attended. It was fascinating. We spent another two days there, and every evening, I had long conversations with the mother about homeschooling. It seemed that it could be a feasible option, especially if there were resources in the community that gave the kids opportunities for enrichment. The second day we were touring Williamsburg, the daughter of our hosts was in a sewing circle in one of the mansions. The girls were so excited to be in on the secret.



When we got back down to Miami, we did more sightseeing based on my guide books. We went to Sea World and the Everglades. The highlight of the Everglades was an airboat ride where the guide fed marshmallows to the alligators. I expect that the alligators in the Everglades all have rotted teeth.



We were on the road a little more than a week. The girls and I went back to Seattle first, while Yuni finished up a job or two before coming back himself. Upon his return he began to set up his own business. Business was quite slow. The first month he had one half-day job and earned less than $100. Of course, we had spent what he thought was surplus on our great trip. I continued with my translation and took on more students. By the next month, more work came in and things got better and better, but we had a tense time of it for about six weeks.

Happy Year of the Metal Rabbit

Today is Chinese New Year’s Eve. In less than two hours, it will be the Year of the Metal Rabbit. The Chinese horoscope says that the year of the rabbit is a welcome respite after the tribulations of last year’s Year of the Tiger. I have also read that because this year is a Metal Rabbit, it carries a little bit more of a kick than an ordinary year of the rabbit.


This lunar year begins tomorrow, February 3, and ends January 22, 2012. Since the new year falls before February 4, it is considered a lucky year for romance and marriage. It is also a good year for endurance and creativity. The rabbit energy likes comfort and serenity in its surroundings. The metal energy implies courage to face the changes in the world around you. And rabbit years are supposed to be good for healing. They are also supposed to be relaxed and more easy-going than other years. It may be a year to forget the rules!!

People who are born in the year of the rabbit are supposed to have temperaments like rabbits. They are serene and easy-going. They are peaceable, sensitive, and creative. They like to be around other people, but they do not like conflict. They love their homes, and their homes are usually well-kept and nicely decorated. My mother is a rabbit, and this description seems to fit her.

In Chinese mythology, the Rabbit is related to the moon. Some Chinese see a hare in the moon with the elixir of immortality in his hands. The moon represents the power of Yin, which is dark, secret, and passive. People born in the year of the rabbit tend to be lucky naturally. Their business deals tend to go well without much effort. Rabbit years are supposed to be lucky for pretty much everyone, as the luck of the moon and the rabbit rub off on all. So many Chinese horoscopes warn people not to get too lax in the year of the rabbit.

On New Year’s Eve, Chinese tradition says that each household should finish their spring cleaning before the evening meal. Everyone in the family puts on new clothes before dinner—preferably bright red clothes. They all eat together in the biggest family get-together of the year. Dinner consists of many special dishes like dried meat, sausages, different kinds of rice cakes, and always there is fish. Everyone eats a little of the fish, but there has to be fish left over at the end of the meal. This means that the family will be prosperous and will have abundance to spare at the end of the year. After dinner, unmarried people get red envelopes of money from the married people. Once you are married, you are expected to grow up and contribute. Before you are married, you can relax and enjoy the bounty of the family. After you get old and your children are married, they give you red envelopes, too.

And everyone says: 恭喜發財，紅包拿來! Then you get a red envelope like the one here.

Thoughts about Homeschooling and Tiger Mothers

In my last episode of the story of our family, Yuni was in Miami, and I was babysitting, tutoring, and translating while running the household and caring for the kids in our new house in Bellevue.



About a year before we moved out of Seattle, Truth began spontaneously reading the captions under pictures in her coloring books. By the time we were in Bellevue, she could read quite well. Love got quite worried that something was wrong because she could not read like her twin; she began begging me to put her into school.


I started looking into preschool programs near us. I really liked a Montessori school, but it was a Cadillac plan with a Cadillac cost. There was no way we could afford to have one kid in school there, much less three. I checked into the Head’s Up preschools near us, but they were comparatively far away, and I did not want to put the kids into them unless I was forced to. After talking to my friends, I learned that many of them were not satisfied with the public schools near us, even though we were living in one of the best school districts in the country. A number of my Asian friends were spending hours after school giving their kids extra homework so that they would not be behind their cousins in Japan or Malaysia or Taiwan. So those children were going to school from 8:30 to 3; after they came home, their mothers had them do their 30 minutes of American homework, and then they did MORE homework. Some of the mothers got textbooks from their home countries and used them. Others ordered textbooks from a homeschool curriculum company and had their kids do the exercises in them in addition to what they were doing in their American elementary school classes.


One week, when Yuni called, I discussed the matter with him. He was concerned about the fact that the Asian mothers thought American schools were not on a par with the schooling in Asia because part of our master plan was to shuttle back and forth between the US and Asia. We were planning to take the kids back for upper-level elementary school and junior high in Taiwan. If they were behind in subjects like math and history, there was no way they would be able to handle the transition. Yuni told me to keep doing research.


One of the mothers using the homeschool curriculum lent me the product catalog. The content and methods seemed pretty good, and they had books for two and three year olds so that younger siblings could do school, too. But I could not see having my kids do six hours of school and then another three to four hours of extra work on top of their school day. I wanted my kids to have a great education, and I wanted them to be able to keep up with their cousins in Asia, but I also wanted them to have fun.


One of our weekly field trip destinations was the library’s preschool story time. We always checked out piles and piles of books. While the kids were getting their story books, I went to the non-fiction section and got some books on homeschooling. I read lots and lots of them. And the more I read, the more I thought that teaching the kids might really work for us. We could keep them bi-lingual, use a “Cadillac” curriculum package, and my kids would not have to spend nine or ten hours a day on schoolwork when they were just in elementary school. We could also take our vacations when plane fares were cheapest. With five fare-paying passengers to Taiwan, that was a huge consideration.


On the negative side, I would not be able to get a regular job. Yuni would have to support the family almost single-handedly. I would only be able to do my tutoring and translating and maybe a little babysitting. At that point, I didn’t order any text books, but I did get all the information together so Yuni and I could go over everything after he came home from Miami.


Then in the next phone call, Yuni dropped a bombshell… He had sent plane tickets for me and the girls. We would meet him in Miami; one of his customers worked at a rent-a-car company and would get us a great deal on a rental van. We would drive the van up the East Coast to see my brother in Connecticut and visit a number of friends and other relatives along the way. He said that he had made lots of money, and in addition to what he had deposited for me, he had amassed a pile of cash for our vacation. He was also sure there would be plenty left over so that he could start his own business when he got back. He had informed the boss of his old company that he would not be going back to work there. … So I began packing for our trip to the East Coast.


As I was drafting this post, I read Amy Chua’s article in the Wall Street Journal about Asian tiger mothers. It reminded me of my Asian friends who kept their kids going for hours and hours a day. I don’t know if my kids would consider me a tiger mother. I certainly had high expectations of them, but I think that the focus of her method is that the mother works through things with her kids until they arrive at the standard she has set for them. I certainly practiced that while my kids were growing up. I did, however, try to give them enough time for free play because all the books I read on cognitive development and learning stages said that preschool and early elementary school children learn through their play. The strength of the Montessori Method is that the children are in a “rich” environment with many attractive, educational toys, and the adults facilitate the learning aspects of their play. The children are also expected to pick up after themselves and handle the responsibilities appropriate for their ages.


I am adding the links to the WSJ article and Chua’s interview with Stephen Colbert. I read on a Chinese news blog that in China her book is being marketed as the work of an overseas Chinese. The Chinese title is something like “Parenting in America.” So the mainland Chinese, at least, are not embracing the idea of the tiger mothers. I can’t really make any more comments, as I have not read Chua’s book, and that won’t happen until summer break.


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.html?mod=WSJ_hp_mostpop_read


http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/372153/january-25-2011/the-battle-hymn-of-the-tiger-mother-controversy

Conference in Singapore

My professor still hasn't forwarded me the pictures of the sightseeing we did, but she did write a letter to the deans and my department chair giving a report of our trip and thanking them for the funding. She attached a few photos. So today's post consists of excerpts from her letter and her photos. (I really have to get my own camera before I take another trip.)

Dear XXX, XXX, XXX, and XXX:

Amidst all of the enrollment/scheduling madness we’re in, I thought
I’d share some positive news.

I just returned from Singapore and Hong Kong with AAAS M.A. student
Teresa Zimmerman-Liu. It was an extremely stimulating and productive
trip, and we want to express our gratitude to the Dean’s office and
AAAS for the financial support that made our trip possible.

On January 8, we presented our co-authored paper, entitled “Making
Sense of China’s State-Society Relations: Protestant House Churches in
the Reform Era,” at a conference on “Christianity in Contemporary
China: Socio-Cultural Perspectives,” sponsored by Nanyang
Technological University in Singapore. It was an exclusive conference,
with about 20 participants in attendance, and roughly 20 invited
members in the audience. Participants included scholars from across
the globe, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, China, Taiwan,
England, Australia, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and the United
States. The keynote speakers were accomplished senior scholars
Richard Madsen (Chair and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at
UCSD) and Peter Tze Ming Ng (Director of the Centre for the Study of
Religion and Chinese Society at the Chinese University of Hong Kong).
The conference organizer, Francis Khek Gee Lim, plans to compile a
subset of the presented papers in an edited volume that he hopes will
be published within the next eighteen months or so. We are quite
hopeful that our paper will be included in the volume.

Following the conference, we traveled to Hong Kong, where we conducted
interviews that will further our research. Perhaps our most well-known
interview subject was Han Dongfang. Mr. Han was the most prominent
worker activist to assume a leadership role during the 1989 “Tiananmen
Square Movement.” After surviving prison following the June 4, 1989
massacre, Mr. Han returned to Hong Kong to continue his activism to
promote labor rights in China. Through his Hong Kong-based
organization, the China Labour Bulletin, Mr. Han hosts a weekly
call-in radio show that is broadcast into mainland China via Radio
Free Asia. He is known world-wide as China’s most influential labor
activist. Along with our interviews, while in Hong Kong we discussed
our current and future research with faculty at the Divinity School of
Chung Chi College at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

In case you’re interested, a few pictures are attached. They are: (1)
us with conference organizer Francis Khek Gee Lim (Associate
Professor, Department of Sociology, Nanyang Technological University);
(2) us with the other conference participants; (3) us with Han
Dongfang; (4) us with Lung-kwon Lo (Director) and Tobias Brandner
(Assistant Professor), Divinity School of Chung Chi College, Chinese
University of Hong Kong.

We deeply appreciate the support of the Dean’s Office and AAAS in this
endeavor. It was an incredibly enriching and rewarding experience.

Our next stop is the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian
Studies in early April, where we will be presenting a revised version
of our paper.

Hong Kong Holiday--2011

I am back from my trip. It was fantastic. I spent a number of relaxing days in Hong Kong before and after my time at the academic conference in Singapore. Here are some of the pictures.

This is the Chi Lien Nunnery in Kowloon.
The wooden buildings are built in the style of the Tang Dynasty.



There is a tea house in the South Lotus Gardens across the street from the nunnery.
The tea is delicious. The tea house is also built in the style of the Tang Dynasty. It overlooks a koi pond; unfortunately, it was raining so hard the day I was there that I didn't spend time looking at fish.





The Star Ferry is still running between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island. The skyline on Hong Kong island is much changed. The ferries are the same. They may be discontinued next year in the name of progress.

 

There is a pagoda like those in the imperial palace in the South Lotus gardens. There is also an exhibit of the different ways Chinese builders join timbers without nails.




No trip to Hong Kong would be complete without a pilgrimage to see Pommes the Wonder Cat from the e-cuneiform blog. Here he is on his throne surveying the minions of his realm. He wanted me to post this picture for Miss Kitty. You will notice that he has lost much weight. He has been pining away for Miss Kitty and his other adoring fans while the scribe has been absent from the blogosphere.



I went with the scribe of e-cuneiform to the Hakka village of Tsuen Wan. The scribe was going to a Chinese doctor and requested my translation services. The doctor was quite competent. Her first response to his ailments was to warm his kidneys and the other parts of his anatomy connected to the kidneys in Chinese medicine (quite different from Western medicine). The scribe was so happy with all the warming that he took me out for dim sum.



Since the dim sum shop was in the Hakka village of Tsuen Wan out in the New Territories, there was sui banne, a delicious dish that my children used to eat regularly when they were toothless babies in Taiwan. It was presented more elegantly in the restaurant than it was on the cart from the peddler who sold it in Chungli, Taiwan, but the flavor was the same. I had ordered something from the menu that I did not recognize. Imagine my surprise at getting an old favorite!

If you plan to visit Chris, Regina, and Pommes in Hong Kong, you had better go prepared. Pommes is a true tyrant when it comes to exacting tribute from visiting artists. Since I do not paint or cook, and my viola was in the US, Pommes had the scribe shove a square of sticky, wet clay in front of me. A stylus was thrust into my hand, and I had to write a poem or two in payment for the privilege of petting his inky blackness. Fortunately for me, there are Chinese calligraphy forms that were used when characters were carved into bamboo or metal; I could use one of them to write somewhat legibly with stylus in clay.

Chinese Seal Script
From http://www.china-tour.cn/Chinese-Arts/Chinese-Calligraphy.htm

The poem I wrote follows in modern Chinese, as my computer does not have a seal script font.

偶詩

(With apologies to 孟浩然)

失眠，時差搞。

黑貓獵小鳥。

夜來，談談天。

笑話知多少。

Of course, I am no good at writing my own Chinese poetry, but in best Chinese fashion, I took part of a famous Tang Dynasty poem and adapted it to my purposes. When Pommes noted that I had cited the poet whose work I had adapted, he insisted that I copy out the original for his edification and enjoyment. He truly is a demanding cat...

春曉

by 孟浩然

春眠不覺曉，

處處聞啼鳥。

夜來風雨聲，

花落知多少。

I tried to do an original piece called "Doggerel to Scare the Cat," but English letters just do not work when writing in clay. The poem was smudged and blurred and illegible. It's probably just as well; Pommes has a reputation as a ferocious hunter. I wouldn't have wanted him to have scratched my eyes out for impertinence. 

I am waiting for my professor to e-mail me the pictures that she took of our adventures in Singapore. When I get them, I will post about my first professional academic conference. The entire trip was totally awesome, and meeting Chris, Regina, and the formidable Pommes was one of its highlights.



A Beautiful Pearl

Sorry to have gone so long without a post. I finished the semester and crashed for a week or so of much needed rest and relaxation. I will be leaving Saturday night for two weeks in Singapore and Hong Kong where a professor and I will be presenting a research paper at an academic conference and doing more research. I will see some friends along the way. The next time I post will be well into 2011. Here's wishing everyone a safe, happy, and prosperous new year!

While Yuni was away in Florida, and before he had sent me cash or figured out how to feed the ATM, I needed to find ways to get money for groceries. One of my friends from church had a daughter who was 45 days older than the twins. My friend is not Chinese, but in the interests of protecting the innocent, I am transliterating the girl’s name into Chinese—珍娜, and then retranslating it back as ‘Pearl’. My friend is a nurse, and she worked three or four days a week. Her older child was in school, and little Pearl needed child care. Our home was the perfect place.


And so I adopted my first of many foster daughters. Pearl would come very early in the morning on the days that her mother worked. Some days she was in her pajamas, and she would go into the girls’ room and wriggle into the bed with them. (They had a bunk bed with a full-sized bed on the bottom and a twin bed on top.) Three small three-year old girls fit quite easily on the full-sized bottom bunk. Pearl’s clothes and things were all in a back pack that her mom would drop off at the doorway as she dashed off to work.

Since the girls were sleeping, I would go into my computer to do translation work. Eventually, there would be sounds of giggling from the girls’ room. A door would creak; someone would dash out and grab Pearl’s pack. Then the door would slam, and they would be inside getting dressed. That would be my signal to get them breakfast. The five of us all sat around the kitchen table eating, talking, and laughing.

After breakfast the girls would play in the yard or in the toy room. If my translation schedule was not too heavy, we would take a field trip on the bus. Some days we went into Seattle to the aquarium or just to take a ferry ride. Other days we went to the doll museum in Bellevue or to the downtown park. I had gotten lots of strange looks with my three little girls all of an age, and now I was zipping around with four. The strange looks multiplied, but that was okay. We had lots of fun. We would come back by 3 in the afternoon because at 3:30 my ESL tutoring students would arrive.

When I had an ESL student, the girls were finally allowed to turn on the TV. Our house was blocked by hills, and as I was earning enough between babysitting and tutoring and translating, we got basic cable to mesmerize the giggling beasts. When Pearl was around, they watched a lot of Disney movies. When she wasn’t, they watched a lot of Animal Planet. They also did tumbling on the old couch in the TV room, build forts out of blocks and legos, and dressed up in costumes from a box of clothes my dad’s wife had given them. I usually tutored from 3:30 to 5:30 every afternoon. When my last student was gone, I rushed to make dinner.

Pearl’s mother worked 13 hour shifts; her father frequently traveled for his business. Many times Pearl stayed for dinner with us. After Yuni’s time in Miami, he would frequently arrive home while I was tutoring my last student. The girls would let him into the TV room through the sliding door, and he would play with them until dinner was ready. After the student left, he would take them into the back yard to play ball or build things. Because the table where I did tutoring overlooked the backyard, we found it necessary to keep my kids out of the yard so my students could focus on their work.

After dinner, Yuni was in charge of the remote. He and the girls and Fei watched TV, while I cleaned the kitchen and did my things. Sometimes I had other students to tutor, and at other times I had more translation work to do. Pearl usually left by 8; my kids went to bed around 8:30, and I would read to them until 9. If I had a translation job involving people in Asia, I would get on the phone and computer and work until midnight or 1 am. The next morning it would start all over again around 5:30 or 6. At that point in my life, I was reasonably healthy, and I was having a lot of fun. I thoroughly enjoyed all four of my daughters. The translation and tutoring gave me just enough adult contact to make being a housewife really fun.