May exams

We finished our last monthly exams this week. The end of the semester and the final exams are not for another four weeks. I took my first exam in a year on Thursday. I slipped into the beginner Chinese class and took their exam along with four of my students who are also Chinese beginners. I was not prepared and had no idea what was going to be tested but I did okay, scoring 33 out of 40 points. I don’t learn a whole lot in the class because it’s taught in Korean but at least it earns me a lot of respect with the student’s because they see me as one of them.

I spent the day on Saturday with a number of the students. A school bus dropped us off in Shanghai and we went through two shopping malls before eating lunch at a pizza restaurant. While on the bus we talked about where we wanted to eat and when they mentioned Pizza Hut so I suggested an independent pizza restaurant that I was told had the best pizza in the city. It’s a place called New York Pizza that was opened by two guys from Brooklyn and word has quickly spread among expats that there is now good pizza in Shanghai. I think it was only the fifth time I’ve had pizza here and it was really good. Five of us split two pizzas that were so big we couldn’t finish them. It was funny to eat among several tables of Americans in a tiny restaurant covered with pictures and maps of NYC. The four students I was with, three of them Chinese and the other from Thailand, were a little out of place. They didn’t know what was in the shaker on the table (Parmesan cheese) and they had a hard time holding the big floppy pizza slices.

It was really hot and sticky so we ducked into stores as often as we could to cool off. I tried a new drink – a green tea shake with red beans – that was really refreshing and delicious. The little take-out only drink stalls that are so common here serve cheap and tasty fruit juices, milk and bubble teas, milk coffee, and smoothies. Those places and all the ice cream vendors were doing a brisk business.

There was a good article in the NY Times by an American primary school teacher in Beijing about English education in China and how cultural differences can muddle communication. There are some humurous tidbits on how the young and old China approach learning English. Where I live, the motivation to learn English isn’t because of the Olympics, as it is in Beijing, but rather because of American movies and music. My students also tell me that they want to learn English either to go to a university in an English speaking country, or simply to get out of taking English classes at universities here, or simply because their parents tell them that it is an important part of their education.

Dozens of books have been published on the decline of American Power and the new, multipolar world. One recent book on that theme is The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International. Even though I don’t have access to his book here, I came across him several times in the past week. I saw him on an episode of The Daily Show recently; he’s really witty and funny and it turns out, with about a dozen total appearances on The Daily Show, he is one of the most frequent guests, along with John McCain. I later heard him on a podcast and read a long article adapted from his new book.

Zakaria’s not so overly pessimistic about the future of the U.S. He describes it as developing countries around the world catching up to the Europe and North America, rather than an America that is declining. He weaves together a lot of important current trends – America’s dynamic yet troubled economy, our tremendous wealth and rising inequality, our world-class universities but moribund urban public schools, our unmatched military power and our failures in Iraq. It’s a good examination of where the world is headed and what the future role of the U.S. will be in a world where we will share wealth and power with a great number of other countries. And I am observing some of the trends he describes here, such as the expanding class of educated and skilled people in Asian countries that are not really replacing western culture but rather melding east and west.