Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

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Here is an article that talks about the difficulties an international TA would face due to language barrier, cultural barrier etc. It also talks about a 0.2 drop in GPA for students taught by an international TA. So what to do. Cornell has a program called International TA Development Program. I work for it, and I think they do a great job of introducing international TAs to American culture, helping them with pronounciation and intonation. I also think ITADP is better than the “crash courses” other universities in the article implement because it runs all year long. TAs take classes, meet with language partners and are regularly evaluated during the year.

I think we(undergraduates) forget sometimes that graduate students who come to Cornell are very very smart. Their English is not an indication of their intelligence. If you read the article, you will see that trying to listen just a little bit harder to your TA who may be lost in this American culture might do some great things for your GPA, and you might even end up being friends with someone from another culture.

I was in Korea this Spring Break and I noticed one of my younger cousins was memorizing a 19*19 multiplication table. I don’t know about North America, but when I was in Korea, I had to memorize 9*9 multiplication tables almost religiously. I wasn’t the most mathematically gifted student and I didn’t particularly like memorizing in general, so it was especially tortuous for me. So I sympathized with the youngsters of today who had to memorize 19*19 tables. A lot of people agree with me.

19*19 table seems to be a bit of an overkill, even in the educationally competitive country like Korea. A lot of people think that children are tortured enough with education as it is. Keep in mind, a lot of these kids are 1st and 2nd graders. Plus, memorizing more will just reinforce the notion that math is blind computation rather than concepts to be grasped and applied. The proponents of the new mulitiplication table argue that 19*19 table allows for faster computation and higher levels of confidence among students.

I think faster computation is a perk, but not a necessity. If you pursue math long enough and far enough, faster computation comes with the territory. As for higher levels of confidence, if it helps the students feel better about themselves because they have a slight edge over other students or because they can finish problems faster, then sure, go ahead. But if the 19*19 tables become widely used, which seems to be the trend, then the average speed of computation will settle at a higher level than before and the new tables will just be another tool to edge out people who are not inclined towards memorizing long list of numbers and more interested in solving problems creatively.

I guess anyone who hasn’t been living in a cave for the last week knows about the tsunami in South East Asia. The death toll is estimated to be over 150,000 according to the UN. Every time I check the news the number seems to have gone up.

The death toll is about 30 times that of 9/11. Nature can be more destructive than humans. This time, there’s no one to blame. I wonder if that helps people to unite. No polarization or warmongering, just trying to move on and help people recover.

Sad how these things happen to those who can afford it the least. Not that I’m saying that I wished the tsunami had struck a more industrialized nation like the US or Canada. But if it had, measures would have been and still are in place for earlier warning. Less people would have died, and maybe it would have been easier to recover, too. Why is it that people who had the least had to lose more?

Our family has never been a big fan of Korean drama shows. In the last seven years that we’ve been in Canada, homesickness has never expressed itself in the form of wanting to watch Korean TV shows. There are reasons besides just our lack of interest. Videotapes of TV shows are hard to come by where we live and until recently, the consensus was that K-drama just wasn’t all that good.

Recently though, my parents have been watching some K-drama. Perhaps it’s the lack of entertainment, or rather, headache my sister and I used to provide for my parents since we both left for college. Also, there’s been a lot of buzz surrounding a show called “Winter Sonata”. It has been a huge hit in Japan, and maybe that bit of international recognition sparked my parents’ interest. So my dad came home with 5 episodes of “Winter Sonata” on videotape. After playing with our VCR, which hadn’t been used since we got a DVD player, we finally sat down to watch “Winter Sonata”. And I must say, I was utterly disappointed.

Basically the story goes like this. Boy and girl fall in love. Boy gets hit by a car and dies. Few years later, girl is engaged to a childhood friend. But wait, her new client looks just like her first love! And he’s going out with her childhood friend who seems intent on ruining our poor heroine’s life for some odd reason. So far, that’s all I’ve watched, but I can guess the rest.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t like the show. I was starting to get mad and frustrated at the show. I could forgive the overused plot, the stereotypical characterizations and half-decent acting. What I couldn’t get over was the heroine. I know I was supposed to sympathize with her, but I was wanting to smack her. She was wimpy, passive and couldn’t stand up for herself. At least, that’s how I saw her character. The writers of the show probably wanted to portray her as a hardworking, intelligent career woman, but the number of scenes devoted to making her look capable is miniscule compared to the number of scenes that made me want to smack some sense into her. I would have been rooting for the villain had she not been so manipulating. The villain had character traits that I would have liked. Aside from her horrible hair and evil schemes, she seemed independent and actually went after the things she wanted. At any rate, to break the glass ceiling, which I would imagine is lower and thicker in Korea, people like our heroine wouldn’t stand a chance.

The show could have been so much more. The characters could have been more complex than just good and evil. The story could have moved much faster. I could probably get the gist of it from the first 2 episodes and the last 2 episodes.

Keep in mind that I’ve only watched the first 5 out of 20 episodes. My dad claimed that I “didn’t get it” because I had become too much of a banana - yellow outside, white inside. Still, I’m not sure I want to “get it” if it involves not saying what I want to say or having to swallow indignant situations. Especially if “it” involves being a silent, dainty lady who doesn’t seem to mind being stepped on.

Something from a psychology paper I just wrote - it was about effect of culture shock on identity.

There was a passage about a woman who was speaking Portugese, Japanese and English to different groups of people at a dinner party. She reflects on a comment by a guest who noticed that her personality seemed to change depending on the language she spoke. She wonders if she has split-personality, but concludes that all the personalities are hers.

According to the article, people growing up in different cultures acquire multiple sets of behaviours in order to fit in with different cultures. This is an unconscious process and when people first realize what they are doing, they wonder whether they have split-personality.

Interesting thing is, I’ve noticed myself doing the same thing. Languages bring out different personalities because they are so closely related with culture and different cultures call for different sets of behaviours.

The amount of respect accorded to the elderly is reflected in Korean and Japanese (don’t know about Chinsese) through the extensive use of honourific forms. While you can certainly be polite in English and show the same amount of respect in English, with Korean or Japanese, using a whole different form of the language automatically places the other person on a different level.

So if you want to know about the culture of a country, try reading their dictionaries.