Seth’s blog

In Moscow on the Hudson, the Robin Williams character, a Russian defector, goes into a New York supermarket and faints: So many brands of breakfast cereal! Whereas my head merely spun when I shopped for headphones and encountered hundreds of choices in a building near me. It’s an electronics mall, full of office-sized booths each with a different owner and product line. Maybe eight  specialize in headphones. In Berkeley I live miles from a Circuit City where I might find four or five headphones I’d consider. Radio Shack is closer; they might have two or three possibilities. In Beijing several of these electronic malls are near me.

During my Chinese lesson with the girl who sold me my cell phone I told her that after the lesson I was going to shop for headphones — the electronics mall is across the street. How much do you want to spend? she asked. About $40, I said. Because you are a foreigner, they may cheat you, she said. Her boss went away and came back with two choices. One was $40, the other about $60. After the lesson I went to the mall. I found the $40 headphones. Price: $9. Before bargaining. I went back to my teacher and told her what had happened. She spoke to her boss. She came back and said: Maybe it wasn’t the real product. As if someone would counterfeit a brand (Somic) you’ve never heard of. It was exactly the same item.

“One bed two dreams” is a Chinese proverb. Here the two dreams were $9 and $40. In One Billion Customers, James McGregor writes, “The Chinese will ask you for anything because you just may be stupid enough to agree to it.” It has nothing to do with being a foreigner. “In China business, the expectation is to be cheated,” says McGregor. A friend of mine graduated from Beijing University, one of the top two schools in the country, with a finance major. She got a real estate job in Shanghai, her home town. When she got there her salary was half of what she had been promised.

My criticisms of undergraduate education (e.g., here) have three bases:

• my experiences at UC Berkeley. Both sides — faculty and students — disliked the situation. I accidentally found a way that worked much better.
• my theory of human evolution. My theory explained what I saw at Berkeley, and a lot of other stuff. It says that learning specialized job skills is a basic part of being human. Our brains have been shaped by evolution to make this happen.
• the everyday observation that people successfully learn specialized job skills all the time and did so long before colleges. Or any schools.

Set up by people who didn’t understand how learning works — the crucial ingredients — colleges teach poorly, just as malnutrition is common.

At Berkeley I was a teacher. In Beijing I’m on the other side — a student — in a different but similar learning situation: learning Chinese. We learn languages naturally, without any special structure, just as people learned job skills. There is the same broad dichotomy: between language learning via official channels, involving classes and textbooks, and natural language learning that happens without any classes and textbooks. So there should be a better way to learn Chinese than via a textbook or a class or even a tutor.

What that is, I’m trying to figure out. For reading, flash cards may work. I’m starting with food words — I see hundreds of them every time I eat a meal (in the student dining halls) — and sign words and the preset messages on my cell phone. Listening and speaking is harder. When I get better maybe I can watch TV but now I can’t understand any of it.  I always enjoy my Chinese lessons but they happen without context. During the day I may want to say “Where is ______?” but my lesson happens much later, when the motivation has gone. Maybe I will get a tape recorder show I can record what people say to me and then play it for my teachers to translate.

I’ve been here a month. I’d been here before — not just to Beijing but this exact area. I taught a month at Beijing University, right next to Tsinghua, met lots of PKU students, who are similar to Tsinghua students. So many aspects of life here don’t surprise me. But here are four things that have surprised me.

1. The beauty of the Tsinghua campus. It’s huge, more like a village than a campus, and it has an unusual Jane-Jacobsian beauty. Lots of new building, lots of old buildings, vast diversity of uses (elementary school, high school, big natatorium, little corner shops that repair bikes, barbers, tailors), lots of paths of different sizes through lots of greenery. Few cars, lots of bikes. It isn’t pedestrian friendly because things are so far apart but it is very bike-friendly. Basically quiet.
2. How much time I spend bike riding. Perhaps an hour in a typical day. It is still a little scary to ride outside campus but I have seen a vast amount of bike riding and no accidents. There are big bike lanes — very different from Japan.
3. How slowly I am learning Chinese. I thought I would learn in some conventional way — hire a tutor, go through a textbook — but the one tutor I tried was boring and the conversational textbooks teach stuff people never say (just as my Chinese friends reply to “thank you” with “not at all”). But I do have a burning desire to learn, it is connecting that desire with the right knowledge that is the problem. Ideally I would have someone with me all the time and when I wanted to say something or understand something I would be told the answer.
4. How rarely I leave my neighborhood. I’ve gone downtown once. I went somewhere else once. Just getting internet access has taken a significant amount of time.

Basically I’ve been turned into a child. Learning the language, bike riding, not going far from home. Fortunately without school to attend.

At Tsinghua University, students are said to spend more on bike locks than on  bikes. A friend of mine, a senior, is on her fourth bike. I met a faculty member who went to get her bike just as it was being stolen. She saw how it was done: The thief had a large number of keys. She shouted at the thief to stop, a crowd gathered, and he gave the bike back. Later she encountered him while buying pork: He was the butcher.

From James McGregor’s fascinating One Billion Customers (2005):

The Chinese were befuddled and worried by the five-hundred-page contract that McDonnell Douglas lawyers drafted to seal the $1 million deal. The Shanghai director looked forlornly at Chang [a McDonnell Douglas employee] as he signed it. “I am signing this because I trust you,” he said.

Yeah. I read this the day after I signed a five-page employment contract with Tsinghua University — the hard part was coming up with a Chinese name — that I couldn’t read a word of. I signed it because I trusted them.