Learning English in China

One of the striking things about my visit to China was how interested the Chinese, young and old, were in learning English. They were particularly happy to hear me speak English with my American accent. They said they wanted to learn that rather than a British accent. Some visitors to the Conservatory, while I was there, were from New Zealand; the Chinese students said they had difficulty understanding their accents.

Accent among English speakers is something I've noticed, but except in a few instances it hasn't prevented my understanding. I spent my first 15 years in the US above the Mason-Dixon line, and then my family moved South, to Atlanta, where I went to high school. More important than differences in accent were differences I found in sociability. Southern hospitality was new to me; the new habits of social interaction were more difficult to assimilate than differences in food or accent. When I began to listen to blues, while in Atlanta, the deep southern accents of the African American singers made sense to me. Years later, when transcribing blues lyrics for my dissertation and for my second book, any difficulties I had in making out the words were due more to the poor technical quality of the recordings, and to the occasionally specialized vocabulary of Black English, than they were to accent. Listening to British speakers presented no challenge to me, apart from occasional differences in vocabulary. Australian and New Zealand speakers seemed to speak a regional British form of English. I could understand, though, how for Chinese, sensitive to intonation in language (theirs is a tone language), and used to British accents, New Zealand speakers could be a challenge. 

Since the death of Mao, increasing numbers of Chinese have been learning English, to the point where for the last 20 years it's been the chief foreign language taught in the schools. Chinese students are diligent, and although the two languages are very different, they are able to learn English, particularly how to read it. Pronunciation is more difficult. I noted a marked difference in the English proficiency of Chinese under about 25 and those above 35. 


I was walking along the streets of Beijing one afternoon and I came upon a group of middle-aged men and women, perhaps a dozen of them, clustered around a young man with a large artist's sketch pad in his left hand. With his right hand he wrote English words and next to them, Chinese translations. Boat: 小船. Coat: 外套. Throat: 喉头. Vote: 表决. Seeing me, he realized I was probably an American or a European, and possibly a native English speaker. He asked me if I would pronounce the words in English for them. I said I would, if they didn't mind an American accent. He said they would prefer it. And so I did, and they pronounced the words after me. From the English teacher I learned that these middle-aged people had each paid the young man the equivalent of about 25 cents for an hour's lesson in English, right there on the street in Beijing.

Gardening and writing in China and Maine

I was in China between Oct. 31-Nov. 9 giving a series of invited lectures on music and sustainability, sponsored by the Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing. I met several faculty members and students of university age. In the course of conversation they asked me what I did with my time in the US when I was not teaching. I said that I had a place in the country where I went in the summers to think and read and write and make music and grow apples and vegetables, and that working in the gardens and the orchard helped me think and write. I said I worked on restoring old violins and other stringed instruments and that also helped me think and write. I said that when I could get away in the fall I went there for long weekends to do the same.

My Chinese hosts found it difficult to understand how anyone would want to be a farmer. Farming is something that much of the population still does, in China, and they produce an abundance of food. At every meal there was much left over. The restaurants do not distribute it to the poor. Not even the cafeterias do that. Nor were students aware of organic farming and gardening, even though traditional small farming in China has been organic for many many centuries. One does not farm for pleasure, or to free the mind; one does it out of necessity to make a living. Farmers and scholars belong to different classes of people. Scholars (not only academics but anyone who writes, whether poets or accountants or scribes or philosophers) go back to Confucius' day.

For contemplation, scholars, like emperors, had gardens. And gardeners. Gnarled old cyprus trees, and ancient rock formations, were favored. These were not food gardens. These were contemplation gardens. Above is part of an emperor's garden in the Forbidden City, Beijing.

After sitting and thinking a scholar might go into a building and write a poem. Emperors went into temples like the one in the Forbidden City, above, to write theirs.

Contemplation sitting in a garden of stone and cyprus followed by inspiration to write a poem (in calligraphy) sitting in a temple gives me something to think about. Hoeing beans followed by writing an essay doesn't seem to belong to the same order of experience. Perhaps I would write better essays if I first contemplated in the forest back of my house in Maine, sitting on a moss-covered stone outcropping in a clearing, surrounded by spruce trees. I'm going to try it.

Probably if I had to be a farmer for a living I would not write about it as I do now. I'd like to think I'd still write about it--I know farmers who also are writers: Wendell Berry to take one prominent example. Or is he a writer who also is a farmer? I don't want to be cute about this. In Berry the two vocations are complementary.