Wherein our heroine travels to Hangzhou, China to teach English to an assortment of various students, thanks to an... interesting approach to organization. Let us hear a great cheer for intercultural communication.

Monday, July 05, 2004
Conversations

On Saturday, we blessedly did very little. In the evening, though, one of the Chinese English teachers, David, and his girlfriend, Emily, came over. Emily is preparing for interviews to get a job at one of the private English academies in Hangzhou, and she wanted to practice with Gina and Lee. Somehow, David ended up staying in my and Mary's room to talk to people while Emily was off practicing. We had some interesting conversations.

David has 4 brothers, two older and two younger. We asked him if the size of his family was unusual, and he said yes. For one thing, few families have so many boys. For another, though, the "one family, one child" policy was instituted in 1978. David was born in 1977, so he got in under the wire, but his two younger brothers didn't. I teasingly said that they had been breaking the rules, and David said, "Well, no, but it is kind of hard to explain. My father, he went to have the operation, but... it didn't work. Maybe they didn't know very much about how to do the operation then." I guess the government has to be lenient if you really tried to comply, but modern medicine let you down.

Later, David asked if I had ever been to any other foreign countries besides China and Japan. The first thing I thought of, naturally, was Taiwan. He smiled broadly and said, "But Taiwan is part of China." Whoops. I had noticed on the weather in the morning that when going through the list of cities' highs and lows, Taipei is listed right in there with all the other T's. I quickly tried to save myself by turning to countries in Latin America, which I know are all indisputably separate countries.

1 Comments:

Blogger Sean said...

South Korea also considers North Korea to be part of thier country. It all one 우리나라 (our country)

8:31 PM  

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