Pardonne moi

One of the things I say in my Oral English class is that pronouncing words in the Chinese language, with its four tones and different pronunciation of “ch”, “q”, “sh”, and “x” compared to standard English, invariably makes me mangle the language. “This should give you permission to speak and not worry about pronunciation and grammar. Just speak EnglisChe (the Dutch spelling I use for Chinese-English),” I add.

“I born in Shenyang,” is perfectly OK in our setting since it is universally used. So is “I very shy.” Students spend 10 years of being corrected, and the reflex result is to clamp down. I say, “If you find yourself in Chicago or Boston, you might want to insert the linking verb ‘was’ between ‘I’ and ‘born’, and ‘am’ between ‘I’ and ‘very’, otherwise, you are understood.”

Once the permission is given to speak freely, they stand in front of their classmates and introduce themselves in English in a prescribed format. Most classes teach students to pass tests, familiarizing themselves with the “right” answers of the previous year’s tests, readily available in print the year after.

My classroom work is to get students speak about themselves—to put words into their experience (noticing of the sense, not perception of the mind), their feelings (preferences, which tend to be metaphorical because Chinese art hide real feelings best kept secret), and their ideas and thoughts (the final intent of cognitive learning and critical thinking). Thus, talking of a subject they already know without reading a book loosens the tongue. Then I use the word “encounter” to point to meeting themselves and others, perhaps, for the first time. 

They also bump into a “crazy” teacher, a “shen jing ping”, the word for a nutty person, sometimes used endearingly, like “you’re crazy,” and sometimes not, like when we refer to one as a “crazy fool.” But primarily, the phrase is my cover for pedagogically getting the students away from worrying about grades (that’s my worry) and focus on the task of learning. I get snickered at when I pronounce the name of the country’s President Xi Jin Ping, in the same way I pronounce “crazy person”!

It is in this last sense that we received last week’s news of the purge in North Korea. Kim Jung Un’s uncle and erstwhile trustee Jang Song Thaek was summarily dismissed, arrested, and executed for treason in a week. Politics seen as a world of intrigue in western practice (Machiavellian) is, understandably, the lens used in viewing all political maneuverings around the world. The media has a field day trying to analyze and explain what is happening in North Korea.

Designating North Korea as a “totalitarian” regime means that leaders do not come to their positions by general election. Holding elections is how we measure how democratic governments are. The reform movement of Thailand led by Mr. Suthep who depicts the current Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra as dancing to her deposed former PM brother Thaksin’s tune do not see dissolving Parliament and the holding of general elections as the way to conduct reforms. He wants to head a 400-person People’s Council with members both elected and appointed. “General elections only confirm corrupt people in government,” he says.

I am not sure a non-elected government is the way to go. On the other hand, the Shinawatra family has four members in politics following a politician father and royal Chiang Mai princess mother. The prospect of defeating their candidacy is nil.

Which brings us to “nepotism,” a second charge leveled against Jang whose relatives are in government positions. In a country that prides itself on the rule of Kim, Kim, and Kim Unlimited, next to countries inured to dynastic rule like China and Japan, we assign malevolence to the practice? We would not use the term on the families of Bush, Clinton, Cuomo, Rockefeller, and the Kennedy in U.S. politics, nor of the British monarchy. Mr. Suthep, however, has a point. But convening a people’s council sounds like the communes after the French Revolution that made Napoleon Bonaparte very attractive!

Third item on the lens is the word “brutal.” Jang was executed without benefit of an open trial. Executions after all smack of capital punishment quietly tolerated, if it is to poison an Arafat, or when chasing al-Qaida leaders that might involve innocent victims. Fear is floated in North Asia as SoKor military goes on high alert. Kim Jung Un, after all, is a despicable tyrant, not to mention having bad haircut taste!

Collateral damage is the phrase for civilian victims of drones and Syria’s chemical warfare. Toxic effluent disposal into an irrigation system has recently emerged as a practice in Taiwan to boost IT corporate profits. We did not learn a lesson from the thalidomide disaster in Japan in the ’60s. This is hard to ignore. I once watched a healthy 40-year-old person convulse on the sidewalk because a fish he ate delivered a rogue radioactive atom that activated its laser beam-like fury.

Dick Cheney led Bush to go to war against Iraq for fun, to kick ass. That brutal? How about the systematic deportation of 2 million immigrants out of the United States since Obama moved to the White House?