Chinglish

Growing up in the diverse city of San Francisco, and living in the relatively integrated neighborhood of the Excelsior district, I have come across a wide spectrum of social situations and encounters. I think sometime during my high school years, I came to consciously realize that I will employ a different language for each of these different social situations. In fact, I just about almost use a different language for each person I know. Only back then, I did not call these ways of interacting “languages,” believing languages only meant the systems of communication specific to a region or country. I will change my diction or tone specific to the person, based on my previous experiences with that particular person; or if the person is someone I have not met before, I default into a cordial, almost defensive tone. After giving this concept of “languages” some recent thought, I pinpointed one particular language that I have been using exclusively with one person my entire life. That language is Chinglish, and the person is my mom. Chinglish is basically using Chinese and English words interchangeably when speaking, and usually involves a greater proportion of Chinese words compared to English words. I use Chinglish because, as I speak Cantonese, I encounter a particular word I do not know or have momentarily forgotten, and will then substitute its English equivalent in its place. I use Chinglish only with my mom because she is the only person I generally speak Chinese with, but who also has some knowledge of English as well. But sometimes the words I cannot say in Chinese are words she cannot understand in English, making for frustrating dialogue, and resulting in some searching in a Chinese-English dictionary.

Brown Yellow

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsHYIGgnlx4

The link is to a video made by some students from my high school graduating class. I attended a San Francisco public high school with an admission requirement based on middle school GPA and the state-administered STAR test. Consequently, a majority of our school was Asian, mostly Chinese, including myself. Whites comprised most of the rest of the student body, and blacks and Hispanics formed a microscopic minority. Although the stereotypes portrayed are obviously exaggerated for comical effect, the video does hint at something real at our school. To get into our school is hard enough. To succeed at our school is even harder. It requires a way of life that involves "AP Calculus-BC ... AP Chinese" (not AP Karate, regretfully). Our school, like our city and the Bay Area in general, definitely is a contact zone. And if contact zones involve a dominant and a submissive culture, the "AP way of life," strongly associated with and practiced by Asians at our school, was the key to a big name institution of higher learning and, presumably, success.

Improving the Human Experience

I have been well instructed in research ethics through my college experiences for the past couple of years. Research must demonstrate a realizable, prospective benefit to the world in some way. Otherwise, the research is unwarranted. This is especially true when the research involves experiments with human and animal subjects. Basically, research, in any area, is about improving the human experience, not knowledge for knowledge's sake. Reciprocity, then, is really just achieving that end at the site and time of the research. I learned about reciprocity actually just two months ago in another class I was taking this summer - Medical Ethnobotany, with Professor Thomas Carlson. Professor Carlson talked about research agreements such as reciprocity and the return of research results to the host country, not just obtaining prior informed consent, which up until then I assumed all research agreement meant. Professor Carlson gave examples of reciprocity where he asks the local community what they need, prior to any research being conducted. Sometimes it meant a clean-water system, and at other times it meant school supplies. This is similar to Ellen Cushman allowing members of the community she was studying access to her university's computers. It may not mean too much to Cushman, but it could be important to those community members. So reciprocity can definitely exist in research. At times it is difficult to make the connection between the highbrow research conducted within the hallowed halls of a university setting, and the everyday people waiting for a cure or hoping for change. But the connection is there, and we all, especially the researchers, need to keep this in mind as we do our best to improve the human experience.

Word of the Day: Play

Ayodele Nzinga walked into our quiet classroom and told us all to play, told us that the ones who had not played in a while are the ones who needed to play the most. The students in the class smiled at the concept and the zeal with which she advertised it. Play was something probably most of us were not too familiar with growing up from grade school to high school. To get into a distinguished university like Cal, we had to work, not play. We had to compete to get into a high school that would put us on the fast track to higher education, and when we got in, we had to compete some more. Although work and play in a school environment is not necessarily mutually exclusive, it often felt so at times as I was force-fed facts I did not care for and crammed for tests in my numerous AP classes. It was during these times that I most wanted to play, to be somewhere other than at my desk. After reading Mike Rose's "I Just Wanna Be Average," I realized what exactly I was feeling then, and still do now: You try to focus on the problem ... but the tension wins and your attention flits elsewhere ... There is no excitement here ... There is, rather, embarassment and frustration and not surprisingly, some anger in being reminded once again of longstanding inadequacies. Although I felt this way at times, I was able to overcome it due to a number of different factors. I was able to overcome an educational system that predetermines a number of students to succeed and a number of students to fail, a system with cracks in the road that we had to step over, but without a safety net to catch those who fall in those cracks. It's easy to understand what leads some to give up and say, "School's not for me."