American Topics I Talked About With My Tutor
Ke$ha’s new song. Who the Beatles are. Why Lil Wayne thought he was a Martian. How Kanye made pink polos cool but pink on men is passé nowadays. Why Ciara left Future for a new boyfriend who wouldn’t have sex with her (“that makes no sense!”). How Ciara was super “open-minded” for posting this snapchat after her wedding bragging about the sex she just had with Russell Wilson—also, when I first told my tutor about it, she assumed it was a paparazzi thing.
How Teddy Roosevelt liked to both kill large mammals and make public parks.
Why everyone thinks Trump Jr. is stupid. What a “shitstorm” is and why someone in the White House said “shitstorm” to the media. Why Trump Jr. doesn’t have someone to do his tweets for him. That the president doesn’t have someone who tweets for him.
Chinese Topics
Chinese tinder scams where girls take you to a particular bar, buy a crazy expensive drink, and peace. The ranking system for tourist attractions in China (everything that’s anything the government has assigned between one and five A’s). What Chinese people do in regions that have bears but aren’t allowed to have guns (“just play dead!”). How I must be extra smart because I swing my badminton racket with my left hand but write with my right, so I’m using every part of my brain.
A Request
I have these random conversations for four hours a day and I could use some help coming up with material. With 500 words, there’s only so much I can say about Kanye West. Email me if you have topic suggestions you want to hear Chinese reactions to!
The Chinese as Children
I’ve been reading history about the evolution of western views on China. The first wave of western missionaries in the 17th century had an extremely high opinion of Chinese culture. Jesuit missionaries like Mateo Ricci spent decades befriending Mandarins and studying ancient Confucian texts. The letters they sent back to Europe then shaped Enlightenment opinion on the Middle Kingdom. Philosophers from Voltaire to Leibnitz admired their inventiveness and social structure. In particular, Voltaire enjoyed needling the Catholic Church with the idea that a whole civilization could cultivate virtue without any regard to God.
A new emperor in the 18th century shifted policy to cut ties with the West. Very few Europeans after 1750 got a chance to learn Mandarin and interact on more than strictly commercial terms. Confined to a handful of foreigner-only neighborhoods in southern coastal cities, these foreigners began to sour on their hosts. Instead of a diverse nation filled with sophisticated scholars and shocking poverty, Europeans began to gloss over the Chinese. In their minds they turned from adults to “very much like children.”
When first reading about this, I figured it was straight colonial racism. There was surely plenty of that in the mix, but after getting out of westernized Beijing to pretty damn Chinese Guilin, I even find myself flirting with this trap.
Layering a language barrier on top of a cultural one means that both parties to the conversation have to dumb themselves down to lowest common denominators. Pointing and gesturing all the time is childish. Since subtle jokes don’t land, you make simple ones. You even start thinking fewer nuanced thoughts knowing that you just won’t be able to express them. Thankfully, I have the chance to spend two months doing nothing but language learning to get past this phase.