12/14/09 - Session 5 - Dube - China: 1976 to present

I received K16 education in China. It's interesting that Chinese students have started learning English in the middle school since 30 years ago. However, it is not very common for intemediate schools here to offer foreign language classes even today.

[Edit by="lwang on Mar 6, 7:25:24 PM"][/Edit]

I visited Russia back in 1988, and it was a stressful time with underground disco's and we traded our Levi jeans...that were worth many rubels, with fun fur hats and lacquer boxes. I distinctly remember that there were Japanese students there visiting in lennigrad (st. petersburg) the Hermitage museum...and they kept giving us the the origami cranes...and then when I went to Japan( 20 years later), I understood why they were making cranes to give to us in Russia....that the girl whom they have the peace memorial in Hiroshima (who died from Lukemia), she made over a thousand cranes in hopes that it would save her from dieing. All of these Japenese students were spreading PEACE back in Russia I love it. Not to mention that when we went to this phenominal museum in Russia, we got to see the AMAZING Fabrige eggs, and the jewel collections of the royalty. It was incredible how much wealth there was. I also experienced a very horrible thing, death. A lady just fell over & died on the street. No 911, no body even lifted a finger. It was April, very cold & snow all around. Actually everyone just wore brown, there didn't seem to be any color anywhere. I was screaming, and finally there was a crowd & some offical type of people started to help out. I had brought a package of make-up & books & clothes to a family that knew from my sister's friend in the US. It was a big challenge to give them this package, & we had to meet in a public place. It was a little scary but exciting to give these precious things to them, that they so appreciated, that I thought of as junk. Amazing.

I enjoyed learning about changes in the Chinese economy from mainly agricultural to a diversified economy. Prof. Dube said that the most important thing is "diversification of the economy". This was a particularly interesting concept because of the state of all economies right now. I would be interested to spend time with some teachers in Asian cultures to learn about their styles of teaching their students and how they get them to do their very best.

Did anyone else see the cover of the March 6th issue of The Economist? The cover is heartrendingly simple. Black background, large pink lettering of GENDERCIDE and below the question, "What happened to 100 million baby girls?" are two empty, pink, sparkly, girly shoes.

There are three interesting articles in that issue. The first is the cover story,Gendercide. , the second, The War on Baby Girls, and the third is a review of a book written by Xinran Xue, called Message From an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love.

Besides the obvious horror of what has happened to so many female babies, they highlight the terrible emotional scars the mothers carry. It usually is not the mother that kills the baby, but the in-laws, or the mid-wife, who charges more to make the mother think her little girl was still-born.

One article opened my eyes to what could possibly happen in the future when men outnumber women in China by large amounts. They have a term for the surplus of bachelors-"guanggun", or "bare branches".

Here is a quote I liked: "Mao Zedong said 'women hold up half the sky.' The world needs to do more to prevent a gendercide that will have the sky crashing down."

Boy, I missed the boat on that one. I just finished a post office unit in February and have large stamp templates and allowed my students to design their own stamp. I wish I had thought to have them design a stamp to celebrate Chinese New Year or one of the many inventions my class learned about during my Chinese unit. Good idea Curtis!
Well, there is always next year.

What a tragic story. Indeed we need both male and female babies, to help spawn the next generation. With the pressure to have a male baby so that he will take care of you when you are elderly, the picture becomes more complicated as you layer on specifics. Ultimately this type of action is tragic in nature to all parties.