Contra Carrie

Okay, I have a confession to make: I watched all six seasons of Sex and the City.

And yet, I hate Carrie Bradshaw with a passion.

How does this compute? The more I've thought about it, I watched mostly out of pure schadenfreude. When Aiden broke up with Carrie after he found out she'd cheated on him with Big, I let out a giant hurrah. I let out and even bigger one when Big Nose came close to losing her rent-controlled one-bedroom in the East Seventies, because she had spent all her moolah on Manolos. Carrie Bradshaw was one character I loved to hate.

When I've tried to explain this in online discussion forums, people have accused me of being "obsessed" with my hatred of Carrie. It's not really Carrie I hate; it's everything that Carrie represents. Carrie to me represents two equally repulsive things to me:

1) A certain kind of upper class mentality that only exists in New York. I call this the black Cadillac Escallade mentality, because one of the things I used to hate the most about walking the streets in New York was being prevented from crossing a street by--invariably--a black Cadillac Escallade barreling through the streets oblivious to the existence of anything in its path. Rich people exist everywhere, but in New York I think they have taken inability to acknowledge even the existence of people outside their tax bracket to new depths.

2) A peculiar kind of distortion of feminism--what I call Madonna feminism, because the Material Girl used to do it so well back before she started pretending to be an M.O.T.

Madonna feminism, to take a metaphor straight from Sex and the City, is the ultimate fake Fendi. It's feminism as fig leaf for behavior that would be utterly unacceptable under any other circumstances. Dress like a hooker just for the hell of it? You're just being a tramp. Make a dubious claim that you're doing it "because women have been ashamed of their bodies for too long?" That's feminism--Madonna feminism.

I think every character on Sex and the City, with the exception of Charlotte when she's not primed in Park Avenue mode, is really at heart a Madonna feminist. The overall message of the show amounts to:

"Well, society thinks it's okay for men to behave this way, so I will, too."

Generally speaking, when someone says this to me nowadays, somehow the behavior in question is never having a career, or waiting until 30 (or whenever) to marry the right person, or anything that my mother, the feminist par excellence in my life, would call a feminist issue. It's always something that smacks not of women's liberation, but of pure egotism--behavior that strikes me as just as disgusting when men do it. Oddly, I don't particularly care for it when men put money, sex, and power above every other good in life. When a woman claims it's okay for her to act this way "because men do it," I really don't have much sympathy for her. The simple fact that men--or, rather, some men with more money than sense--currently do something is not proof that anyone should do it, female or otherwise.

I'm always suspicious of claims that "society" thinks a certain way, or "approves of" certain behavior. Modern Western Society is too complex for that. There is no "society" that wink-winks when men sleep around but condemns women to the stock when they do it. There's the law, which has nothing much to say about the matter. There's religion, which in America is so diverse that it can't be said that it presents one vision of human sexual relations. There's modern feminism, in all of its various permutaitons, which says something else yet again. So which of these opinions represents the opinion of "society"?

Don't Take Liberties With My First Name

At the (admittedly small) risk of starting an online fracas, I'm going to comment on another reply I got tonight, this one from Robin Margolis, my co-conspirator in http://www.emunahavot.net.

Robin writes:

My office's templates show the wave of the future -- everyone addressed as just "Dear J.R. Wilheim," unless they have a professional title like Esq., Dr., Professor, Captain, Bishop, etc.

I continue to hold out for Mr. and Ms., but I will be swept aside on this matter in 20 years.

I suppose this brings up the opposite situation Leah Silberman Jenner chose to bring up--namely, using someone's first name where it isn't warranted. Unlike the issues surrounding Mrs. Rhett Butler, this one is equally bad for men and women.

The minute I get a piece of mail that begins, "Dear Jeffrey Wilheim...", I know it belongs in a circular file. A business that has my custom will have taken the time to find out whether I am Mr., Miss, Mrs., or Ms; a business that wants my custom will take the time to find out. A friend or family letter who is sending me a letter--not that I get many of these in this age of nonstop e-mail--will be on good enough terms to learn my first name. So a letter like this instantly announces itself as junk mail, almost as much as if it were marked "Urgent."

Sometimes, I get a letter from a company with whom I am already doing business that begins this way, and i am sorely tempted to do what my father once when he got a similar letter in the midst of a dispute with a credit card company. He actually sent a letter in reply that began:

Dear Mr./Ms. Last Name:

Note, this is a formal business letter. It begins with a last name and title.

Whether this approach got his dispute resovled any faster, I don't know. But it at least gave him back a shred of dignity.

I feel similarly in stores or, especially, when dealing with customer service representatives over the phone, who ask within 30 seconds of hearing my voice for the first time, "May I call you Jeffrey?" Um...no, you may not, I want to reply. We've just met, and not in a social situation. You are not my best friend from third grade. Please don't pretend to be.

Miss J.R. Wilheim, if You Please

Blogging, I've come to realize, is a strange form of communication. It seems to combine elements of very personal communication, like a telephone call, with elements of broadcasting. You never know who among your acquaintance is really reading your blog--until the odd reply comes in.

This evening, I took a look at the Far East Side Minyan and found a reply from (Mrs.) Leah Silberberg (Jenner), someone I met when she started coming to the West Side Minyan at Ansche Chesed a bit over a year ago. In reply to my hesitance about being asked to rename my Taiwanese students, Leah commented, from the perspective of Jewish tradition, on why she detests being called Mrs. Paul Jenner. I can appreciate her point of view, but thought I would add on some of my own thoughts about titles in English.

The traditional etiquette of women's titles, in case you don't know it, worked as follows:

A young girl was known as Miss First Name (i.e., Miss Scarlett). When she "came out" and got her first flannel shirt (okay, actually a rather prissy white dress the size of Texas), she would be either Miss O'Hara, if she were the eldest sister, or Miss Scarlett O'Hara, if she had younger sisters. Scarlett and her sisters collectively would be known as the Misses O'Hara.

Once Miss (Scarlett) O'Hara married, she became Mrs. Husband's First Name, Husband's Last Name (i.e., Mrs. Rhett Butler). She kept this name for life unless she suffered the stigma of divorce, at which point she would become Mrs. Scarlett Butler (in America) or Mrs. O'Hara Butler (in Britain). Two sisters-in-law who shared the same last name would be known as the Mmes. Last Name--i.e., the Mmes. Scarlett and Melanie Wilkes (okay, here's where my Gone With the Wind examples break down; Scarlett and Melanie may have shared Ashley, but they never shared a last name).

So it was always a cumbersome system. It dried to distinguish between too many different things with too few titles. Common sense would dictate that, if people really wanted to know if a woman was divorced, a separate title for a divorcee should have developed. But none ever did.

Nowadays, of course, we have Ms. , and somehow Miss seems to have fallen by the wayside, except in England, the Deep South, and contexts that involve the wearing of an ermine cape and a tiara--although, oddly, the only woman I know who strongly prefers tobe called Miss is a divorced woman from New England who has never, to my knowledged, entered a beauty contest.

But it seems to me Ms. doesn't always do what it's supposed to do. For instance, in professional settings, I notice that Ms. often seems to be the title of preference only for women not yet eligible to join the Red Hat Society, older women being called Mrs. I may never have seen The West Wing, but when my mother started talking to me about a character on it named Mrs. Landingham, I knew instinctively her childbearing years were probably behind her.

I remember reading somewhere that William Safire finally game the use of Ms. his blessing when Geraldine Ferraro ran for vice president, and it was clear that neither Miss nor Mrs. was really appropriate for her, as Ferraro was neither her maiden name nor the name of her then-current husband. It seems clear, also, that the existing titles also don't really work in a lesbian context. Confronted with the question of how to address an envelope to a lesbian couple who used the same last name, Judith Martin (a.k.a. Miss Manners) suggested the form, the Mmes. Scarlett and Melanie Wilkes. But, as I noted above, this could indicate that the women in question are sisters-in-law living together, not a lesbian couple.

On a somewhat different note, it's always struck me that, where the old system discriminated against women by forcing them to reveal their marital--or should I say, hymenal--status, our current system discriminates against men, since it now gives women four different titles to play around with, whereas we only get one. Well, maybe two if you count Master, but I don't think even spoiled sons of the British landed gentry get called that any more.

So I wonder--why don't I at least the choice of signaling to the world my marital status, if I want to? I think there are circumstances where being able to do this would be a real advantage. There just doesn't seem to be a title for this. Mr. is neutral. Master is gone and shouldn't be revived. And adopting Miss would make way too man people assume that I do a mean Joan Crawford imitation.

The best I can come up with his Bachelor--abbreviation Br. But I can't quite see it catching on. Mr. could do quite all right for married men. But what should a divorced man be called? Or one who wins a muscle-building contest on the boardwalk at Atlantic City? Or a man who builds his life with another man, with or without a marriage, civil union, or other legal framework?

How do we give this system an overhaul?

All suggestions welcome.

I Assume the Role of Mr. Bumble

In the second chapter of Oliver Twist, the villanous beadle, Mr. Bumble, explains how he was able to give a name to the eponymous hero, whose mother died before revealing her name, and hence the child's rightful surname. Mr. Bumble, it seems, has a system:

"'We name our fondlings [sic] in alphabetical order. The last was a S,--Swubble, I named him. This was a T,--Twist, I named _him_. The next one comes will be Unwin, and the next Vilkins. I have got names ready made to the end of the alphabet, and all the way through it again, when we come to Z.''"

I thought of the odious Bumble this evening, when a family of three came into our school to inquire about English lessons. A good friend of Ruby's, the father was formerly a detective with the local police but now works in immigration--perhaps a boon to me, as I will have visa issues to sort out--and his wife, I inferred, is one of Ruby's oldest and dearest friends. When they came into the school, I introduced myself and asked her her name.

She told me she had no English name, and Ruby intimated to me that I might have to give these three people their English names.

I have written previously about the use of English names in Taiwan. But it had not really occurred to me that I may soon have to bestow English names upon Chinese students.

Now, it happens that I have a longstanding fascination with names. When I used to try to write fiction, one of the things I liked best was to pore over baby name books to find just the right names for characters. I have always been intrigued by how names affect destinies--how we make one set of assumptions about a woman named Beulah and a completely different set about a woman named Bambi. But the prospect of naming an actual, flesh-and-blood person who is not my child--who has, in fact, a child of his or her own--is more than a tad strange.

How on earth does one go about such a thing? I thought I might start with the Chinese name, and try to pick things that had similar sounds in English. But since so many Chinese names seem to start with only a handful of distinct sounds, this might prove impractical over the long run. Or I could try based on meaning; find an English name that has the same meaning. This, however, might prove time-consuming and ultimately fruitless, as it would involve first translating the Chinese name into English, and then trying to find a name--a name that could be of Italian, Swedish, or Irish origins--with the same meaning.

I could fall back on English literature--this is an English school, after all--and end up producing a lot of little Emmas (Bovary) and Fitzwilliams (Darcy).

Then there's the whole ethnic question. Is it right to rechristen a multitude of Han Chinese people with the names of the British landed gentry, of the Scottish highlands, of the Lower East Side shtetl? Do I have a right to comb my own family tree in order to replace a Chinese name that may go back in someone's family literally for millennia?

What's hardest about this is the cavalier attitude that seems to prevail among Taiwanese people about these Western names. This is hard for a post-melting pot American to fathom. Back on the Upper West Side, every Rachel Cohen suddenly wanted to be Rahel, with that thick gutteral het sound unpronounceable to non-Jews. Gentiles seem to get into the ethnic thing, too. For instance, iIn Anne Tyler's latest novel, Digging to America, an Iranian-American family gives the baby they adopt from Korea an American name so run-of-the-mill that it completely escapes my mind; the white American couple choose instead to use their daughter's birth name of Jing-Ho.

Maybe it's silly to worry about this. The Taiwanese seem to regard these Western names the way white slaveholders in the Old South regarded the names of their black slaves--not as existential expressions of identity but, as one character in the TV miniseries Roots put it, "sumpin' to call 'em." If that's their attitude, so be it--I can't be considered guilty of cultural imperialism if the people who carry on the culture don't ascribe great value to keeping their real names. But then there's that nagging American part of me that says all of this is wrong. After all, the most meaningful part of becoming Jewish was getting to choose my own Jewish name--to tell the world (or at least that part of it that can identify the Amidah) that I was Mordecai Moshe.

So what's a politically correct American to do? It's sad that the best idea I can think of is a system like Mr. Bumble's. It certainly would be straightforward and practical. Keep one list of men's names, one list of women's, and just go down the list for each student who comes in needing a name. Amelia, Beatrice, Charlotte--no muss, no fuss.

Hmm...maybe, like Fagin, I think I'd better think it out again.

If Meir Soloveitchek Could Menstruate

In my last post on the topic, I pledged to say no more about the topic of patrilineal descent than I already said in an article published on Interfaithfamily.com last March. But an internet discovery has forced me into it, and persuaded me I need to add on a bit to what I said in that article.

Granted, in the article I was limited by a word limit imposed by my editor, and couldn't say everything I wished to about the topic. I left out, for instance, a possibility raised by Harvard scholar Shaye Cohen in his book, The Beginnings of Jewishness, that the rabbis extrapolated matrilineal descent from a more general understanding of kilayim (various prohibition relating to "mixed kinds"--yoking an ass and an ox together, or sowing two kinds of seed together). That discussion was particularly damning to the idea of matrilineal descent, since it raised the possibility that the rabbis had extrapolated the matrilineal principle from a discussion about whether a mule was "more horse" or "more mule." I can think of nothing the Jewish community should spend less time doing than figuring out if children with one Jewish parent and one non-Jewish parent are "more horse" or "more mule." I decided to leave this argument out, since even Cohen notes that it is one of the least plausible of the possible origins of matrilineal descent, and since, in writing for a website whose stated aim is to encourage Jewish choices among children of intermarriage, I felt it best not to expose children of intermarriage to the idea that Judaism regarded them as something akin to a mule.

The oft-repeated lie about patrilineal descent that comes out of the Orthodox community, and out of Conservative officialdom, is that it represents a break in the very nature of Jewish identity, by turning Judaism into a matter of upbringing rather than of automatic fate. But this week, I stumbled upon an article by Meir Soloveitchek, an Orthodox rabbi and cousin to Joseph Soloveitchek, one of the towering Orthodox decisors of Jewish law in this century. This article pretty well discredits the claim made by proponents of matrilineal descent that they are upholding the notion that Jewishness is a matter of fate, not faith.

Like Shaye Cohen, Soloveitchek rejects the idea that matrilineal descent has anything to do with the "certainty" of maternity--that is, the idea that a child's mother can always be known, while a child's father cannot. Unlike Cohen, however, Soloveitchek chooses to focus on the halakha about the status of a child whose mother converted during pregnancy. Traditional halakha holds that such a child is Jewish by birth and does not require conversion, as the child of a Jewish mother--even though the child was conceived through a non-Jewish egg. From this, it can be concluded that genetically imposed fate cannot be the reason for matrilineal descent.

Soloveitchek chooses instead to focus on a presumed qualitative difference exists between the kind of upbringing a mother gives her child, and the kind a father gives his child. Mothers, Soloveitchek, argues, are the source of mercy and nurturing love within the family; fathers, on the other hand, are the source of stringency:

The mother, on the other hand, will always see her child, no matter how old he may be, as the baby she bore. According to tradition, when the book of Proverbs describes a king reprimanded by his mother, it refers to Batsheva's reproof of her son Solomon after he married the pagan daughter of Pharaoh: “What, my son? And what, child of my womb?”No matter how old a child may be, Rabbi Soloveitchik observes, for the mother, the image of the baby, the memory of an infant held in her arms, the picture of herself playing, laughing, embracing, nursing, cleaning, and so forth, never vanishes. She always looks upon her child as upon a baby who needs her help and company, and whom she has to protect and shield.

For this reason, Soloveitchek concludes, the mother is the source of a chil's Jewishness because of the kind of nurturing love she will show to him, a love that extends throughout the child's life, into and through adulthood.

It really is hard to find a more retrograde view of motherhood than the one Soloveitchek presents. There simply is no evidence to substantiate the claim that mothers have a harder time than fathers allowing their children to grow up, or that mothers are more merciful and indulgent than fathers. Indeed, it would not be putting it too mildly to say that Soloveitchek's vision of smothering Jewish motherhood comes not from the Torah, but from Portnoy's Complaint.

Reading Soloveitchek's article, I am reminded of something Gloria Steinem once said in a famous piece she wrote called If Men Could Menstruate. Noting that white men consigned black men to poorly paid jobs because they were "stronger", while consigning women to poorly paid jobs because they were "weaker", Steinem said unequivocally that logic has nothing to do with oppression.

Nonetheless, Soloveitchek's bizarre understanding of family dynamics is worth bringing up whenever the Jewishness-as-automatic-fate defense of matrilineality is dredged up. It shows that, like white men underpaying black men because they are "stronger" and underpaying women because they are "weaker," the Orthodox community will embrace contradictory, morally dubious arguments to keep out thousands of people through whom the blood of Abraham continues to flow.

Yanks and Brits and Aussies...Oh My!

One aspect of the EFL industry I haven't said much about is that different spots on the globe prefer different varieties of English. In places that have strong historical or economic ties to Britain, such as Hong Kong, the preference naturally tends to be for British English. But in areas with stronger economic ties to the United States, American English has the upper hand.

On the whole, Taiwan falls into the latter category. I don't claim to be an expert on the Taiwanese economy, but from what I gather, Taiwanese firms do much more business with America than they do with Britain, by several orders of magnitude. Moreover, Taiwan's independence from the giant across the Strait of Taiwan depends on American support and goodwill. That it and of itself wouldn't be a reason for the Taiwanese to prefer molasses to treacle, or sidewalks to pavement (if they ever chose to put them in, that is). But to the extent that people learn English to engage in diplomacy, the Taiwanese are doing diplomacy with Washington, not London.

The preference for American English does not, however, seem to have any effect on who actually comes as a teacher to Taiwan. I suppose Taiwan has to recruit from every corner of the English-speaking world, and the teachers I have met so far have been a fairly even mix of Americans, Brits, and (somewhat surprisingly) South Africans. I have even met a couple of intrepid Aussies and New Zealanders. This latter fact is not surprising, since Australia and New Zealand are closer to Taiwan than America or Britain, and in fact are popular vacation destinations all over the Far East.

My school, Shane, has a mix of Brits and Americans on its staff, though the trainers I worked with in training were all Brits. Moreover, the school does play up Merrie Olde England in its advertising and promotions. Front office staff, such as secretaries and Chinese teachers, all wear a uniform of Union Jack scarves with a white blouse. In the Head Office, and in the school I got to see in Yangmei over the weekend, rooms were given the names of English cities: Oxford, Manchester, Canterbury. One wall in the head office features a mural of two little cartoonish-looking boys dressed as beefeaters, dutifully poring over their English homework.

Nonetheless, the textbooks I will be using are a mix of British and American. At the younger level, they're all British, which means that I'll have to be careful about spelling colour with the u, so as not to confuse my five-year-old students. I think kids that age are a little young to have to start dealing with all the nuances of British v. American usage, and I don't want to confuse them by spelling colour differently than it is spelled in the book, or getting them to understand that what is called a video in Hastings is called a VCR in Hastings-on-Hudson, where video denotes what is put in the VCR, not the machine itself.

As students get older, though, the textbooks have a definite American focus. The textbook for Junior High students, for instance, is called American Hotline. Students who complete American Hotline, and choose to continue with normal English classes instead of proficiency-test courses (English proficiency, I gather, is a prerequisite for getting into the better high schools in Taiwan), use a book called, I kid you not, American Wow! The very enthusiasm of that name calls to mind an America that is no more--some would say, an America that never was--full of boys in cardigans and girls in Mary Janes and knee socks, who all use expressions like Jeepers Creepers and worry about who will invite them to the next sock hop.

It is a joy, though, to get to meet people from all over the English-speaking world. And, unlike the citizens of the various member-states of La Francophonie, none of us really feel coerced into English. It is for all of us our mother tongue. My adventures last night helped me realize just how much we English teachers constitute a community out here.

A strange, crazy-quilt kind of community, but a community nonetheless.

Love Shack, Baby

When I took my Shane teacher training in Taipei, I stayed at a hotel near the Shane head office, known as the Love Hotel. I prefer to think of it as the Love Shack, as in the B-52s song. While I can't generalize too much from the Love Shack to the rest of the Taiwanese hotel industry, I do think the experience of staying there made me realize a couple of things about life in Taiwan I might not have realized otherwise.

The Love Shack, I gather, is not the absolute bottom of the barrel as hotels go in Taiwan, but it's pretty near there. Its rooms are done up in a gaudy style that strikes me as a bad satire of Western rococco decorating. The walls are covered in leather--yes, leather--despite the overall European look of the rooms. Rooms go for 800-1000 NT a night ($24-$30 American). This is remarkably cheap by the standards of America. Certainly in New York, that money would not get you a hotel room; at best, it would get you a bunk in a third-rate hostel. And even in small towns in the Midwest, I doubt there are any motels left going for $24 a night, even in the off season.

When I got into my room at the Love Shack the first night, I found I couldn't turn on the lights. Thinking something was wrong, I went back to the hotel desk and reported this fact. I was informed I had to insert a bar attached to my key into a slot by the door to turn the power on in the room. I went back to my room, did so, and voila! Let there be light!

I ended up at the Love Shack against last night, under unusual circumstances. My new friend Sherri, the manager at the Shane branch in the small town of Yangmei, put me in touch with one of the newer teachers at her school, a very personable Brit named Gary. It turned out Gary is a disc jockey and had a DJing gig at a Western bar on Roosevelt Road in Taipei, near the Shane Head Office and the Love Shack, and he invited me to join them. So about 4:00 yesterday afternoon, I boarded a south-bound train for Yangmei, met up with Gary, and headed off with him.

Now, I am not really the "bar" type. There's a line in It's a Wonderful Life that pretty much sums up my attitude toward drinking: "Boys and girls and music...why do they need gin?" I don't think I'm prudish about alcohol, and, unlike the Carrie Nations of this world, I don't think it's wrong for anyone to drink, under any circumstances. I myself have been known to have the occasional glass of merlot when out with friends. But I don't much care for social events or establishments where drinking is the main point.

In the States, I would probably not have come on this kind of outing. But in Taiwan, I figure that, when an opportunity presents itself to interact with other English speakers, beggars can't be choosers. And I will admit, I did have a reasonably good time, and even ran into a couple of teachers I had met and taken a liking to in the course of my teacher training and hoped to see again at some point.

It was a kickin' night at this bar. The music was good, and I did get up and dance a few times in the course of evening. By the time the clock struck two, however, I was royally bushed, and, as the MRT stops running at that hour and I had no means of getting back to Taoyuan, I decided my best bet was to get a room at the Love Shack. Fortunately they had a vacancy--albeit at the high price of 980 NT, which I attributed to its being a Saturday night or to an assessment of my desperation.

The next morning, before going back home, I decided to head over to Taipei 101, currently the largest building not just in Taipei, not just in Taiwan, but in the whole wide world. Gary had told me there was an excellent bookstore there called Page One, with a good selection of English titles, so I decided to check it out.

The bottom five floors of Taipei 101 are exactly what you would expect them to be, given that the building was constructed with the full knowledge that it would quickly become a tourist trap. Yep, that's right, they're an upscale mall. Aren't you glad to know that Taiwanese people have somewhere to go to buy their Brooks Brothers shirts and Piaget watches? I was so worried that Taiwan might not have caught on to the American obsession with upscale shopping venues.

But Page One turned out to be everything Gary said it was. I would say that about half the titles on display were in English, not counting books that were explicitly instructions in learning a foreign language. The literature section was particularly good and boasted a fair number of recent titles as well. I was warned before I came to Taiwan that it would be hard to find recent fiction and that I would have to settle for Penguin editions of the classics. Now, that would have been fine for me, as I do want to read more of the classics. But I was glad to know that at least I have some choice in the matter.

Life is All Right in America

A couple of years ago, I got to see an outdoor screening of West Side Story at the Tribeca Film Festival, in lower Manhattan. It had been quite a while since I had seen it on video as a kid, but I can honestly say, the experience of seeing it on the "big screen" (actually the wall of a warehouse overlooking the Hudson River) was breathtaking.

I saw the film with a couple of friends from whom I am , for reasons I will not delve into, now estranged. We had coffee after the film, and one of my friends asked me which of the songs in West Side Story was my favorite I didn't know then. But after a couple of meetings with people now, I think I do. I would have to say that honor goes to the song "America" ("Life is all right in America" / "If you all white in America").

Friday, as I noted in my last post, I met up with my new friend Jacky, whom I met while changing money at the Bank of Taiwan. Over coffee, he told me about his experiences studying in the United States, where he earned his undergraduate degree and spent a year in some vague corporate work I didn't understand before returning to Taiwan. He told me clearly that, had he had a choice, he would not have come back. The pace of life clearly seemed more manageable to him on the other side of the Pacific, and he returned only because he could not get a work visa to stay in the United States.

Then yesterday, our school had its grand opening--of sorts. I say, of sorts, because it turns out I won't start teaching right away. Eve and Ruby have decided that, since I have to go to Hong Kong on the 7th, it doesn't make sense to open the school and then have me take two days off so quickly. So the school will open on the 12th, when I'm back.

Anyway, among the other attendees at the grand opening were two women who made a point of introducing themselves to me. Their names were Claire and Sherri, and they ran the Shane English branch in a small town (by Taiwan standards, at least) near Jonghli, a bit to the south of us. Sherri told me that she, too, had studied in America--at the University of Oklahoma, of all places. I told her my family was in Kansas and that I have been to boarding school in Missouri, so I knew very well the kind of Midwestern milieu she had experienced there. Like Jacky, Sherri was also swept up in the desire to go back to the States.

The overall impression I've gotten from Jacky and Sherri is that Taiwanese people who go to America seem enchanted with what the perceive as the slower pace of life in America. Unlike the Taiwanese, we Americans are apparently not as prone to workaholism and a rush-rush-rush mentality. Even more so, Taiwanese visitors to America are impressed with the vast open spaces of the country. Jacky spoke of driving ten hours in parts of the Midwest and not coming upon a single town of any size. I imagine he must have been exaggerating; even to drive from Kansas City to Saint Louis is only a drive of three or four hours. But it amazed me how the drive across Kansas that even native Kansans find so onerous--it regularly gets compared to being an ant crossing a frying man--was found so exhilarating by both of these new acquaintances.

Back home, America feels like a society beset by insoluable problems: a sputtering economy, a failing education system, and standards of living that supposedly have not risen since 1973 (I actually think this last issue is a myth, but more on this in another post). The overwhelming feeling you get from the media is that America's best days are behind her, never to return. But to my new Taiwanese friends, America seems not to have lost any of its glory.

What does it say about America that so many other people around the world still want to come there? Even from a society as well-off as Taiwan, a country Americans used to fear as one of the "four Asian tigers" that was bound to overtake America's place as top of the economic heap?

I think it says that Americans need to be more grateful.

Jacky

The day after I arrived in Taiwan, my Director of Studies, Ruby, took me to find an apartment (more on this later in a post on Taiwanese real estate) and to buy some bedding and other small home furnishings. At a local store I can only describe as Wal-Mart reduced to Taiwanese scale, the checkout girl told me my money was no good.

"No good?" I said.

"No good," she said again.

I asked Ruby what the problem was. She took a look at the bill I had attempted to use and said that that particular bill had been withdrawn from circulation a few months ago, when the Taiwanese government changed designs slightly to foil counterfeiters. I would have to go to the local branch of the Bank of Taiwan and get it exchanged.

A few days later, Ruby took me to the bank. I was having difficulty getting the teller to understand what I needed. Luckily, a very nice young Taiwanese man, who was doing business at the same counter, explained the situation to him.

I thanked this stranger who had come to my aid and introduced myself. He told me his name was Jacky, and that he was also exchanging defunct money, having just returned from studying in the United States. We struck up a bit of a conversation and decided to meet for coffee.

Today, that meeting finally took place. It was good to see Jacky again, and even better to feel as if I've made my first real friend in Taiwan. Our conversation mostly centered around, of all things, EFL methodology. Jacky is very critical of the way English is taught in most schools in Taiwan. He described it as heavily reliant on rote memorization that failed to give students any real ability to use the language to express their own thoughts and ideas or, for that matter, to ask for directions on the street in simple English. I told him I expected to use very different techniques in my school, with much more emphasis on practicing for fluency, particularly with teenage and adult students.

We agreed to meet again once my teaching schedule settles into place, and he told me he could teach me some basic Chinese for day-to-day transactions and activities. This I am especially grateful for, because I really need Chinese for shopping. He has also said he would be glad to take me out and help me get acquainted with the area, as my life really doesn't extend far beyond my apartment, my school, and the local internet cafe at this point.

At last, my social life in Taiwan begins!

Should Rabbis Perform Intermarriages?

I wrote recently about my involvement in getting an organization together for patrilineal Jews, www.emunahavot.net. So far, I have not written anything about intermarriage in a wider sense, and the organization will not really tackle every issue pertaining to intermarriage or the lives of adult children of intermarriage. I think there are enough groups out there in the Jewish community doing advocacy on this issue.

That said, I feel I should make my feelings about the issue known somewhere. And since this is my blog, after all, why not here?

Traditional Jewish law forbids intermarriage and does not allow rabbis to officiate at wedding ceremonies at which a Jew marries a non-Jew. The intermarriage taboo has had a long evolution and is not necessarily consistent with the Written Torah, which provides examples of intermarriage even (possibly) by Moses himself. The prohibition on rabbinic officiation at intermarriages bases itself on an understanding of the contractual nature of Jewish marriage.

In a Jewish wedding, couples sign a document called the ketubah--a marriage contract. This evolved out of an earlier practice of the groom giving the bride's family money in exchange for the bride; the Torah makes explicit reference to the "bride price of virgins". Over time, however, the ketubah came to substitute for tihs as bride prices became exorbitant and beyond the means of most young men to produce at the time of marriage. The ketubah, as it evolved in the rabbinic era, functioned as a sort of life insurance policy for the bride. It stipulated that, in the event of divorce or death, the groom had put aside a certain amount of money to assist the bride. But the groom did not have to pay out all of this money at the time of marriage.

The ketubah operates "according to the laws and customs of Moses and Israel." The traditional understanding of this, with respect to intermarriage, is that a non-Jew is not bound by the laws and customs of Moses and Israel, and so lacks the capacity to contract Jewish marriage. Any marriage contract between a Jew and a non-Jew would be ipso facto meaningless.

I used to buy this argument. On its face, it seems straightforward. But the more I have thought about it recently, the more I have come to question this logic. I think this way of thinking ignores the nature of how contracts actually function in most legal systems.

To enter into a contract, a person often essentially agrees to be bound by the courts and/or arbiters of a particular jurisdiction. For instance, prior to coming to Taiwan, I was not in any way bound by Taiwanese law. But I was able to sign a contract enforceable under Taiwanese law. And indeed, it is common for business contracts to contain clauses specifying which law or jurisdiction the contract is under. Sometimes, a court will even have to enforce laws of a foreign country with respect to a contract--an American court may have to interpet a contract in accordance with French law, if the contract specifies that French law governs it.

I would argue that a non-Jew who wishes to marry a Jew can contract Jewish marriage--that he or she in essence places himself under the jurisdiction of Jewish courts for this purpose. The marriage is still in accordance with the laws and customs of Moses and Israel, and is still meaningful, Jewishly.

This leads to a second question: in view of the demographic problems of American Jewry, is it wise for rabbis to perform intermarriages? Some feel that rabbis should perform intermarriages--that refusal to perform intermarriages rejects a couple in a way that will ensure that they do not affiliate with Jewish institutions. Others argue that officiation has no effect over a couple's involvement in Judaism.

I think both of these positions are lacking in nuance. Surely, some intermarrying couples seek out a rabbi solely to make the Jewish partner's parents happy, and have no intention of doing anything Jewish after the wedding. But I don't feel rabbis have to perform either all intermarriages or none. A rabbi can refuse to perform an intermarriage if he is not persuaded of the couple's Jewish commitment.

The best approach, in my opinion, is something like what the Catholic Church used to do when a Catholic sought to marry a non-Catholic. The church would require the couple to undergo some teaching in the Catholic faith, with an emphasis on helping the couple understand the Catholic view of marriage. If, after that, the non-Catholic partner was willing to sign a document agreeing to raise the children as Catholic, the marriage could be performed. The Church also explicitly forbade co-offication with non-Catholic clergy, a policy I would also favor for the Jewish community.

Just my two cents on the topic.

"So How Is Everybody on Walton's Mountain?"

Until I came to Taiwan, I never really gave much thought to how much I relied not just on the English language, but on American culture. Americans, I suspect, often slip into thinking of their Americanness as a kind of void. We put all manner of adjectives in front of "American"--Chinese-American, African-American, Jewish-American--not just to express some kind of ethnic pride or identity, but to make the American part of ourselves less prominent, to erase a bit of its nothingness.

Indeed, I recall taking a class in college with a sociology professor who insisted that there was no such thing as American culture--that American society no longer had any coherent set of signs, symbols, and values that constituted a coherent culture. Though I understand where she came from in asserting this, I think that maybe a little time living abroad might change her mind.

I notice this most when I occasionally when I contemplate the English language, and realize how many expressions and terms there are that draw on a shared American historical or cultural experience. For instance, every so often, my mother goes to visit her mother, who lives in a small town in southwestern Missouri. Although she would dispute me on this, I tend to think of this town as being pretty much the middle of nowhere, the kind of place certain kinds of people on both coasts think of when they use the term "flyover country." To get a rise out of her, I sometimes ask about these visits home by saying, "So how is everybody on Walton's Mountain?"

Now, I've heard that expression used by people in America who have never, ever personally seen The Waltons. I think its meaning can vary depending on context. Either it can be a slightly humorous way of asking, "So how's the family?" Or it can be a half put-down, implying that the place someone has just visited is, well, really the sticks.

I thought about this at work today, mostly in the context of how I would explain this expression to a non-native speaker of English. How on earth do you convey the kinds of associations The Waltons has, both to its devoted fans and its most vehement detractors? How do you explain what the first president Bush meant when he said he wanted an America "more like The Waltons and less like The Simpsons?" I know every country, even one as urbanized as Taiwan, has its conception of a rural life. But how do you convey the kind of down-home folksiness combined with nostalgia that a reference to The Waltons implies in America?

Yesterday, I had to explain a similarly mystifying expression during a conversation with Casey, a Taiwanese woman who works in the head office of Shane. Casey had come to do a sort of last-minute inspection before the school opens. She asked me if I thought everything was in order, and I believe I told her the school was ready to open. I responded by telling her the school was "shipshape and Bristol fashion." Naturally, this required some explanation. I told her that "Bristol fashion" came from the shipbuilding industry in England; if a ship was "Bristol fashion", that meant it was just like new.

Later on, I looked up the phrase on the internet. This is actually not what "Bristol fashion means." Apparently, in the port at Bristol, it was very hard for a ship to navigate if it was weighted down by too much rubbish. So to go through Bristol harbor, a ship apparently had to scuttle its trash and clean up.

How many phrases are there like this that we English speakers use without really stopping to think what they mean? Or whose meaning is steeped in a culture and history we may or may not be cognizant of? How many people who use the term malapropism actually know of its connection with a fictional character called Mrs. Malaprop? When we talk about Jim Crow laws, do any of us really remember a nineteenth-century minstrel character named Jim Crow, who was apparently so popular that his name become one for African Americans generally?

Now, to be honest, I probably will not much opportunity to teach this kind of language in my classes, all of which are either for elementary-age students or for adults who are at what my school calls "foundation level"--meaning, they know the alphabet and not much else. I don't imagine Walton's Mountain will figure heavily in our discussions for a long time.

But I have been surrounded all my life by phrases like, "so how is everybody on Walton's Mountain," without really realizing it. Now that I have to explain phrase like that, I am coming to realize just how American I really am.

Ma Chungwa on the Line

Since arriving in Taiwan two weeks ago, I have been forced into a social experiment of sorts--or, I should say, an unsocial experiment of sorts, since it involved having little contact. I did something no self-respecting modern Taiwanese person would do:

I went two weeks without what locals call a shou ji--a cell phone.

Those two weeks officially ended today, and I have a phone that will allow me to call both domestically and internationally. Beware my wrath, ye who live in America; you may yet get a call at 3:00 in the moning your time.

I was forced to go so long without a phone partly due to my precarious visa situation (see my last post), and partly due to the strangeness of Taiwan's mobile operators, and partly due to my lack of a usable phone. Apparently, in Taiwan, you have to have citizenship or a residency visa to get a phone. I'm sure there must be services that rent phones for travelling business executives, similar to what I encountered on my trip to Israel, but I haven't seen them anywhere. So I was unable to rent a phone until I could get one properly.

Before my trip to Taipei, Eve (see last post) got me a SIM card for my existing phone, which would have been a fine solution except that I had misplaced my charger in transit, and so it was dead. I had to buy a new phone, which I did in Taipei--and promptly learned I couldn't activate the phone myself, as described above.

Today, finally, I got Eve to call up and activate the phone for me. From now on, I can recharge it at any local 7-Eleven, which means I am officially back in communication with the outside world.

This break from telephony has given me pause to consider what kind of communication age we live in. Thirty years ago, I think two weeks without access to a telephone would have been much more devastating. But as I still know hardly anyone in Taiwan apart from my employers, most of my communication was with the other side of the planet, I was able to conduct it entirely from the local internet cafe.

Strange, isn't it, that this should be the case--that it should be cheaper and easier to contact the other side of the globe than it is to contact next door? I suppose it hasn't helped my integration into Taiwan. Maybe without the internet at my disposal, I would have gone exploring around Taoyuan a little sooner.

Lost in Translation

I haven't said much thus far about my employers in Taiwan. At first, I felt it better not to say much about them, as anything negative I said might be found and read by them. But in the two weeks since my arrival, I have realized that their English is probably not up to the task of reading anything I might post about them on a blog. By this, I do not mean that they do not understand the niceties of English provided by Messrs. Strunk and White, or that they lack the ability to identify the future perfect progressive ("I shall have been working"). I mean that they lack basic fluency in English.

My employers are two sisters-in-law, Ruby and Eve, who have opened a new franchise of Shane, one of the larger and more reputable bushibans in Taiwan. They are both about fifty and, from what little I have been able to gather, they opened the franchise hoping that it would provide them security in their golden years. I suppose their English is better than that of Taiwanese people. But it is not, in my view, anywhere near sufficient to be in a business that requires working in close quarters with native speakers who speak not a word of Chinese.

Ruby is a teacher of Chinese literature at a local high school. Eve, as near as I can tell, has some kind of background in elementary education. But neither really speaks English with any fluency. Ruby, for instance, usually fails to use gendered pronouns correctly--everyone gets referred to as he, regardless of sex, causing me quite a bit of confusion when, speaking of Eve, she says, "he will do...". There are a whole series of quite common verbs and expressions she gets mixed up--I don't think she quite understands the difference between living somewhere (permanently) and staying somewhere (on vacation or while transacting business). Eve's English is somewhat better, but she frequently apologizes for her poor English skills.


A bit of background before I explain what has me writing about this tonight. When I first accepted the position for which I came to Taiwan, I was told to apply for a 60-day tourist visa, which would be exchanged for a proper residency visa and work permit once I got here. I had expected Shane to send me an inbound and outbound paper ticket to be used for these purposes, but the packet sent to me had only an outbound ticket, from Taipei to Hong Kong, for December. By this point, I had purchased my "real ticket" to come to Taipei from New York, and so I dutifully went to the TECO office with these tickets to obtain a visa.

I was turned down, I supect, because the flight dates were not within 60 days of each other. I had purchased my "real ticket" before I got this packet and so didn't have an outbound flight date to work with. After being turned down, I spoke with the recruiting agency with whom I was working--I had no contacts at Shane at this point--and was advised to go apply in Boston or Washington. This was a week before my flight date, and I really had neither the time nor the money to run up and down the East Coast on what I suspected might be a fool's errand. So I told the recruiter I would come on a 30-day landing visa and make a visa run to Hong Kong in order to apply for a residency visa from there once my landing visa expired.

Before leaving for Taipei, I had to exchange the outbound ticket for Hong Kong, as its date was not within 30 days of my arrival, and I thought Taiwanese immigration might not let me into the country if my flight out was in less than thirty days. I made the exchange online and discarded the paper ticket I had been sent, as it was no longer of any value. When I went to Taipei last week, I explained all of this to someone in the Teacher Welfare Department at Shane, who told me it was not a problem and I shouldn't worry about it.

But today, Ruby and Eve started the process of making arrangements for my visa run, and boy did we run into translation issues around all of this. After Ruby had purchased a ticket online for me, she told me I would need to present the original, 30-day paper ticket in Hong Kong to get a 30-day visa in Taiwan.

Well, this set off all kinds of alarm bells in my mind. First of all, I thought I was going to Hong Kong to apply for a residency visa, not another d****d 30-day tourist visa. I asked specifically about what kind of visa I should apply for--in very simple English. Her reply to this was complete silence. Finally, she had to call someone at Shane, who explained to me that, no, I would be going to Hong Kong in order to obtain a tourist visa. Hopefully this would be a 60-day tourist visa, but if I couldn't obtain that, I would have to come back in on a landing visa--and possibly make another trip to Hong Kong. She said that Eve and Ruby's franchise was still applying for its registration as a new English school, and so couldn't apply for my residency vis and work permit.

All of this traveling back and forth to Hong Kong is, you guessed it, on my nickel. So I had sharp words with this woman, telling her that if have to make a second visa run to Hong Kong, I expect Shane to pay for it, as this second run would be caused solely by their failure to get things together on their end. I gave the phone to Eve, expecting this woman at the Welfare Office would translate all of this into Chinese for her benefit. I have no idea whether she did or not, as this issue was not discussed among us for the remainder of the evening.

Finally, my flight to Hong Kong was booked, and Ruby told me again that I would have to present the paper ticket I had been sent in my packet in order to get back into Taiwan. I told her that I no longer have that ticket, as I had done an exchange online to get into the country. This was completely lost on her, and resulted in another call to Shane's head office in Taipei for translation. I explained the situation to another Taiwanese national whose English was not quite fluent, and she said she would have the Welfare Office contact us tomorrow.

Maybe I expected too much, but I never thought a school purporting to teach English would be run by people whose own English was not up to handling these kinds of situations. But we have these kinds of communication snafus on an almost daily basis. During the course of all of this negotiation tonight, I requested of Eve the phone number of the head office in Taipei, so that I could initiate a call and try to straighten out communication issues when need be. That resulted not in Eve's giving me the number, but in her dialing it.

On the other hand, at long last I actually have my teaching schedule. So far, 14 "contact hours" (in EFL parlance, this refers to actual time in the classroom) are on my schedule, but there are several students who have signed up for lessons who still need to be assessed for placement, and it's likely a couple more classes will be added to this is in short order.

Emet v'Emunah

I suspect that a good many of you reading this blog will recognize the title of this post instinctively. But for those of you who don't, a brief explanation:

Emet v'Emunah was a statement put out by the Conservative movement some twenty-odd years ago in an attempt to define Conservative Jewish belief. A longstanding joke in the Jewish community has is that, "Reform Jews and lazy, Conservative Jews are hazy, and Orthodox Jews are crazy." Emet v'Emunah was an effort on the part of the Conservative Movement to dispel a little bit of its haziness, and give the average Conservative Jew in the pews an idea of what Conservative Judaism was, besides being "not Orthodoxy and not Reform."

Since then, the phrase "Emet v'Emunah", which means "Truth and Faithfulness", has become a catchphrase or sorts among Conservative rabbis and some committed Conservative lay Jews, to indicate the "fullness" of Conservative Judaism. In contrast to Orthodoxy (which rejects modern Biblical scholarship and therefore lacks emet, or truth) and Reform (which rejects too much of traditional observance and therefore lacks emunah, or faithfulness), Conservatism is presumed to possess both emet and emunah.

I have had a love-hate relationship with Conservative Judaism for a long time. Love, because I really feel most affinity for a Conservative davenning (prayer) style and worship service, and also an affinity for the way the Conservative movement attempts to treat halakha (traditional Jewish law). Hate, because the Movement continues to define people like me out of the fold by insisting on upholding matrilineal descent despite the problems and sufferings it causes.

The "hate" side of the equation grew for me a few months ago, when the Movement decided to liberalize its stance on gay and lesbian issues. I hope people won't misinterpret what I say next, because I really, in my heart of hearts, believed this was the right decision morally, philosophically, and religiously. But I took the decision as a slap in the face to the thousands of patrilineal Jews who would like to affiliate with the Conservative movement, or who have converted and already do so, because it showed just how far the movement would bend over backwards to include everyone except us. If the Movement can uproot a Biblical prohibition to make an excluded group feel included in Jewish life, it can no longer offer any good excuse for refusing to scrap matrilineal descent, a rabbinic law that dates to no earlier than the second century C.E. The movement's current position thus lacks both emet--truthfulness--and, in my opinion, emunah--faithfulness to the moral values for which Jewish tradition claims to stand.

For a long time, I thought I was alone in my anger over this. But through the wonders of the internet, I stumbled upon a woman named Robin Margolis, who was involved in one of the first groups for adult children of intermarriage, Pareveh, back in the 1980s. (Pareveh is the Hebrew/Yiddish word meaning 'netural'; it comes from the kosher dietary laws, which define all edible food as milk, meat, or pareveh). Ms. Margolis now operates a website, www.half-jewish.net, for all adult children of Jewish intermarriage, and their offspring.

We have been talking, and I am now announcing I have a website aimed at patrilineal Jews who want to work to change the status quo regarding our status in the Jewish community. It can be found here:

http://www.emunahavot.net

After a lot of tweaking, the site is pretty much together. Everything except a "Contact Us" section is in place. So it looks as if we are finally open for business.

I will not pontificate here on patrilineal descent, more than I did a few paragraphs ago. For my views on that subject, www.emunahavot.net will suffice. For an academic treatment of the origins and purpose (or rather, lack thereof) of the matrilineal principle, please see an article I published a few months ago at:

http://www.interfaithfamily.com/site/apps/nl/content2.asp?c=ekLSK5MLIrG&b=297405&ct=3690573

Comments regarding Emunah Avot are welcome provided they do not disparage or denigrate patrilineal descent.

The Taiwanese Street

A lot gets said in the Western media these days about the "Arab street," an amporphous group of people in the Arab world who have hostile attitudes toward America and the West. But more dangeorus for an American in Taiwan is likely to be the Taiwanese street. And I mean, literally, the street.

Scooter mania is a fact of Taiwanese life. You see them everywhere. It sometimes seems as if every square inch of space not occupied by something else will soon be occupied by a scooter.

The scooters might not be so bad on their own. But combined with another aspect of Taiwanese street life, they can be hazardous. I refer to the general lack of what we would call sidewalks in America. To the extent that sidewalks exist in Taiwan, they are the underhangs of buildings, not definable sidewalks in the American sense. They often rise and fall abruptly as you walk along them, without ramps and without warning. And even these areas sometimes get clogged up by, you guessed it, scooters. So what is an intrepid pedestrian to do?

Often, walk in the street, vulnerable to oncoming (scooter) traffic.

The major hazard scooters pose to the pedestrian is their ability to come out of nowhere, very, very fast. For this reason alone, it's advisable not to jaywalk, even on a relatively empty side street. A scooter could be lurking just behind that seven-story building on the corner.

Fortunately, if you go to the nearest corner, you do find some help in the form of traffic and walk/don't walk signs. In Taiwan, the walk/don't walk signs are particularly amusing, and convenient. Amusing, because the "walk" symbol is actually animated, and actually speeds up his walking toward the end of the light cycle. And convenient, because, as soon as a traffic light changes, a count-down above the walk symbol tells you exactly how much time you have to get across the street. So, unlike in New York, I never have any doubts about just how long I have to get across before I risk becoming roadkill.

Which leads to the question...why can't American cities do things like this? The technology can't possibly be THAT complicated. Living here, I start to realize how many little rip-off aspects there are to living in New York. Not just the housing. Not just the poor service on the subway. But little things like walk/don't walk signs with no countdown and bus stops that have nowhere to sit. Why?

Oh, Darlies, How My Heart Grows Weary...

Way down upon the Sewanee River (okay, actually at the local supermarket), there they were:

Packages of Darlie Toothpaste.

Why do I comment on a brand of toothpaste? Well, Darlie was originally marketed in the United States not as Darlie, but as as one of the "less-refined" words for black people. And indeed, the packaging, even today, boasts a picture of a very clearly African-American man in a top hat!

I first heard of Darlie about a year and a half ago, when I went to a screening of a film called C.S.A.: the Confederate States of America. Darkie (there, I used it) Toothpaste was just one of a few products promoted in fake commercials during the film, which was a Ken Burns-style mockumentary of the history of a victorious Confederacy.

Prior to coming to Asia, I had read that Darkie Toothpaste was being sold as Darlie all over the Far East, though Colgate-Palmolive withdrew it from the American market in 1985.

Now, I'm not the most squeamish person when it comes to racist images. Nor am I one to buy or not buy a product because of its past racist marketing practices. I don't see the point, for instances, in foregoing Aunt Jemima products because the product used to be marketed with the now-offensive mammy-in-kerchief image. I even have a certain fascination with blackface, in a historical way, and have read a few books about it.

But actually seeing an image like that still in use was something else.

It's hard to know to what extent Taiwan is really a racist society, or to what extent Taiwanese people have adopted American anti-black prejudices and stereotypes. So far, everyone I have seen or met in Taiwan has been either Han Chinese or white, the latter group all being people affiliated with the ESL/EFL industry. But I have heard reports that, within ESL/EFL, a lot of prejudice does exist against African-African and other non-white teachers. ABCs (American Born Chinese...the term is widely used among Chinese-Americans and is not, as near as I can tell, offensive) apparently have the hardest time, since they often have to convince a skeptical Taiwanese public that they are actually native speakers. Oddly, it seems to be easier for native Taiwanese to find ESL/EFL jobs than for ABCs.

With respect to African-Americans, I gather that some "racism" is really more a lack of cultural knowledge and background. In Japan, the popularity of rap music has spawned Japanese fans who put on ganguro--literally, blackface--makeup, wholly unaware of what blackface signifies in an American context. When I noticed the tubes of Darlie on display, I pointed them out to Ruby, my director of studies, who was kind enough to take me shopping the second day I was here. I explained to her that Darlie had originally been Darkie, and what Darkie meant in American English. A kind of explosion of recognition detonated across her face.

"Ah...a word for despise black people...like nigger!" she said, with a smile that beamed a certain pride. I really have no idea how she picked up the N-word. If she were closer to my age, I could presume she might have gotten it from rap music, but she's on the north side of 50, and this seems unlikely. Her English is fluent but error-prone as it comes to formal grammar; for instance, she frequently fails to make gender distinctions in her pronouns and will refer to Eve, the head of our school, as "he".

But somehow, she knew the N-word.

How to Bitch Like a Real EFL Teacher

Okay...that title is facetious. I put it up there because, in the course of my training in New York, I presented a lesson called "How to Bitch Like a New Yorker," which was basically about how to sound really, really pissed off in English. I suppose the real topic of this post is how to sound like an EFL teacher, pissed off or not.

As I noted in my last post, EFL has more than its share of jargon. After giving a taxonomy of EFL/ESL/TEFL, etc., I felt I ought to add some discussion of other basic terms in the EFL industry:

accuracy v. fluency: A major issue in EFL instruction. Accuracy means, not surprisingly, producing language and grammatical structures correctly. Fluency refers more to students' ability to speak confidently in English and get their message across, even if their grammar and usages are imperfect. Naturally, a teacher wants his students to develop both accuracy and fluency, but an individual activity may be aimed more at one than at the other.

bushiban/cram school/hogwan: Known by different terms in different countries (here in Taiwan it's called a bushiban; hogwan is the Korean term), these are for-profit English schools for children and teenagers. Some, like mine, also offer adult classes and private tutoring. Cram schools have widely different reputations depending on the country you are in, and different schools within the same country can also differ tremendously. Some of these schools are well-established business that genuinely care about their students' progress in learning English and encourage teacher development. Others are fly-by-night operations that exploit teachers, provide inadequate materials and training, and basically steal their students' money.

CELTA: Cambridge Certificate in English Language Teaching for Adults. The most widely respected certification in the ESL industry. The basic standard of training in ESL/EFL is a minimum 100-hour course that involves teaching actual ESL students (not just fellow would-be teachers), and the CELTA is the most widely recognized course providing this. Centers offering CELTA operate all over the globe. I took the CELTA in New York prior to leaving for Taiwan.

collocation: A fancy word for a simple concept. Collocation refers to sets or arrangments of words that frequently go together. For instance, we say "do the dishes," not "make the dishes". The word "car" might have the collocations park (British term for a parking lot), wash, drive, etc.

controlled v. uncontrolled activity: Somewhat correlated with accuracy v. fluency, controlled v. uncontrolled has to do with a student's ability to use all of the language at their disposal and to make mistakes in the activity. Gap fills and drilling (see below) are the ultimate controlled activity; speaking practice for fluency is the ultimate uncontrolled activity. Even here, though, there is some degree of "control" since a teacher usually doesn't say "talk for five minutes" (though he might do this occasionally when he needs to, say, set up a CD player or video before class). Instead, the teacher gives a topic or asks students to brainstorm and put ideas on the board ("tell me everything you know about Britney Spears" or "talk about your last vacation").

cowboy: I'm not sure how widespread this term is, but I've seen it used in a couple of guides to the EFL/ESL industry. Cowboy is a term for a fly-by-night school that exploits teachers or is just a means of separating students from their money. But just as there are cowboy schools, there are also cowboy teachers--teachers who don't know the English language well enough to teach it, and are often just in the profession to finance travel.

drilling: Basically, having students repeat set phrases or target language (see below) over and over. The aim here is to produce accurate pronunciation and to get students more comfortable with talking in English. At their worst, these can be very, very dull. But there are ways to liven them up. For instance, the "substitution" drill, which works as follows:

Teacher: "I drove my car tot he supermarket."

Students (2 or 3 times): "I drove the car to the supermarket."

Teacher: "Movie theater."

Students: "I drove the car to the movie theater."

Teacher: "Jessica."

Students: "Jessica drove the car to the movie theater."


And so on.

Drilling is somewhat controversial in ESL/EFL these days, though still widely used. I tend to think of it as being something like diagramming sentences in regular English classes--controversial for the simple reason that it effects a clear educational purpose and has been used with success by generations of teachers actually to teach, not to boost student self-esteem or provide entertainment. My school relies on it quite a bit but provides a lot of suggestions (the substitution drill is just one example) to make it more lively.

eliciting: Giving hints or clues to get students to produce language. This can be used in a diagnostic way, to see what students know, or to introduce new language.


enthusiastic: In the real world, this terms means, "having strong excitement or feeling." In the EFL world, this term is the most common way of describing a child who is a royal pain in the you-kn0w-where. As in, "Brittany is very bright but could do with a little less enthusiasm."


gap fill: British term for what Americans call a "fill-in-the-blank" activity.

L1: Twenty-dollar abbreviation for a student's native language. I'm not sure whether this is an attempt at political correctness, given the negative connotations the word "native" can have, or just a shortened term.

lexis: At first glance, this might seem like an unnecessarily fussy term for vocabulary, but it isn't. The concept of vocabulary tends to focus on individuals words. Lexis, on the other hand, takes note of how many multiple-word phrases actually constitute a single concept--i.e., stock market or ballpark figure.

lexical set: A set of lexis (see above) all relating to a particular concept or having a unified context. For instance, if you were teaching students lexis related to grocery stores, you might have aisle, checkout, shopping cart as part of a lexical set, along with words for particular items like detergent or corn flakes.

MFP: Meaning, Form, and Pronunication. The basic elements of any piece of language. Every ESL/EFL teacher needs to be able to analyze target language for meaning, form and pronunciation. Meaning and form are often quite distinct. For instance, in the sentence, I'm taking my cat to the vet tomorrow, the verb am taking is present continuous, but the meaning is future.


monitoring: Basically, this is a fancy term for walking around the room and perking up your ears as students work on an activity in groups or pairs. The aim here is see what areas students are having trouble with, without being too obtrusive, and to offer small suggestions when asked for them (i.e., the student wants to know a word that hasn't been taught yet, or is confused about a particular point of grammar or usage).


needs review at home before progressing: EFL codespeak for, "Your child is so lazy and/or so much of a behavior problem that I would have him or her back in my classroom over my dead body."


onion: This refers to a set-up in which half the students stand on the inside of a circle, and the other half stands on the outside, both broups facing each other. One group or the other will periodically rotate. Onions are used in fluency-practice activities, more rarely in accuracy activities. They can also be used for ice-breaker activities on the first day of class...i.e., have students go around the room until they find someone who has been to Australia, likes Thai food, or swam the English Channel.


pelmanism: As noted before, this is what the rest of the world calls a card matching game. Used quite extensively in ESL/EFL contexts, particularly with YLs (see below).

phrasal verbs: A major bugaboo to ESL/EFL learners. These are the million or so English verbs that consist of the form verb + preposition: put off, give up, go down, blurt out, etc. Common practice is to teach each of these as a separate verb--i.e., don' t try to teach put off, put up with, put out, or put down as though they are all variations on the verb put.


privates: No, not those privates! This refers to "private students," i.e., students a teacher takes on aside from those from his school or bushiban. It can also refer to one-on-one lessons, whether arranged through the teacher's primary employer or not. In many countries, it is illegal for teachers to take on students outside of the school that sponsors their visa and/or work permit, but it's quite common nonetheless and, from what I hear, the laws are rarely enforced. If your school finds out you are teaching privates, however, it can be grounds for dismissal.


taking (or doing) the register: Apparently, this term is common in Britain even outside the ESL/EFL context. What Americans call "taking attendance."


target language: The language you are trying to introduce or practice in any given lesson. Often abbreivated to TL.


YL: Young learner. Essentially, children under the age of 12. There is, as far as I know, no particular EFL/ESL term for adolescent learners, basically because, by the time students reach adolescence, they are presumed to have the same level of ability to think abstractly as adults. YLs are the definite growth area in EFL/ESL today. Nearly all ESL/EFL teachers starting out overseas will have to teach YLs.

EFL by Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet

Worldwide, the teaching of English to non-native speakers is a booming business. Settings range from refugee aid groups in Britain and America to rooms full of, say, German businessmen who have been directed that all future e-mail correspondence within their company must be in English (this has actually happened at one big German multinational).

Like all means of earning a living that aspire to be called a "profession," the teaching of English to speakers of other language has developed quite a lot of ponderous, but ultimately quite silly, jargon. Even the name of the field is a subject of controversy.

First, as with all things, there is British versus American usage. The Brits tend to use the term EFL (English as a Foreign Language) regardless of the settling. Americans, perhaps a tad more concerned about political correctness and not wanting to label, say, Bangladeshi immigrants to America as "foreigners," or to treat English as a "foreign" language in the American context, tend to divide up the world of teaching English, literally:

In American education jargon, if you go and teach English in a country where it is not a native language, this called EFL. But if you teach English in an English-speaking country, this is called ESL (English as a Second Language). Both terms are clasped together as ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages).

Ay of these terms--EFL, ESL, ESOL--can be futher jargonized by placing a T (for Teaching) in front of it. So if you venture into teaching English to non-native speakers, you can be an EFL, ESL, ESOL, TEFL, TESL, or TESOL teacher, depending on the place and context.

In addition to all of these, there are some terms that can specify the type of English you are teaching, or the type of students to whom you are teaching it. A few of the more common ones are:

EAP (English for Academic Purposes): English for people who want to study in an English-speaking country, or who need English to keep up with their academic field. This can include everything from doctors needing to read the Journal of American Medicine to students who have a passionate interest in the novels of Ernest Hemingway.

ESP (English for Specialized Purposes, or English for Specific Purposes): This can mean a variety of different things, but is often used for industry-specific teaching of English. For instance, call center workers in India may take classes to learn the kind of language they need in handling complaints about your Dell laptop, but not the kind of English you need to draft business letters or analyze Wuthering Heights. Many industries have created a demand for ESP, particularly the hospitality and airline industries. When I was doing training in New York, I had a student whose goal in learning English was to work in a casino in his home city of Macao.

The most amusing form of ESP I have heard of it what is known in Japan as EFS, English for Shopping--basically, teaching pampered Japanese executives' wives how to buy Hermes scarves and Chanel handbags on their next trip to New York or London.

EPP (English for Professional Purposes): Like ESP, but not as limited. In many fields, fluency in English is a prerequisite for climbing the corporate ladder. The scope of teaching for EPP students will not be as limited as in ESP, and it may be easier for a teacher to convince someone whose job now requires only the ability to speak English on the phone in limited contexts that he should extend his vocabulary and knowledge of grammar to the point that he can write, say, a business proposal.

ENOP (English for No Obvious Purpose): Basically, English for people who have no particular goal or purpose for learning English. In my CELTA training (more about CELTA later), my instructor talked about his mother, who was taking a French course for no reason that he could see. She had no prospects of going to France, was not trying to read French literature in the original, or anything of that sort.

From what I gather, ENOP learners tend to fall into two groups. The first consists of retirees who use English classes as a form of entertainment or to create some sense of purpose for themselves in retirement.

The second--and larger--group, however, consists of people taking English for the same reason that denizens of the Upper West Side of Manhattan take classes in French cooking or pottery. I can't say how many shidduchim (matches) have been made in ESOL classrooms, but what little anecdotal evidence I have suggests it is high. This is particularly true since, in many countries, a knowledge of English carries a certain prestige and is indicative of high educational attainment, high economic status, or both.

Hammer Time!

This past week, as I mentioned earlier, I had a sojourn in Taipei in order to receive some training from my school. As not a few people have expressed curiosity about how you go about teaching a language to people when you don't know a word of their language and they don't know a word of yours, I figure this would be as good a time as any to write about what an EFL/ESL (more on acronyms later) teacher does in the classroom.

At the lowest levels and ages of language acquistion--I am talking about kindergartners or sometimes even preschoolers here--one teaches English about the way one would teach to English-speaking children. A lot of flash cards, a lot of repetition, and a lot of games. Actually, you will use a lot of games throughout the age and level spectrum, though the kind of games you use varies a lot as students get older and/or progress in language acquisition (not always the same thing).

Current thinking in ESL/EFL is that people acquire language better when they have actions they can associate with the vocabulary. So, to introduce "bird," you will probably be getting a room full of little kids to flap their arms and tweet. To introduce "car," you would play-act driving a car. And so forth. You can be inventive, as long as whatever you come up with will make the meaning clear.

Some language, naturally, lends itself to this kind of thing better than others. You can't, for instance, really do this with colors. For that, I suppose, you do a lot of flash-card repetition and pelmanism games. For the uninitiated, pelmanism is a twenty-dollar word for what the rest of the world calls a matching game: find two pigs, find two birds, etc. The key here is to make sure the game requires students to use the language. For instance, pelmanism should be played in a way that students have to use the word after picking up each card, . You also have to be very careful about not creating patterns, as little kids love to spot patterns and may end up learning, say, how to say "pig" every time the pig comes up in the rotation without actually learning what the word "pig" designates.

Classroom management at this age seems somewhat easier than what I had been lead to expect. A lot can be accomplished, say, by drawing three smiley faces on the whiteboard by each child's name and turning them into frowns if kids misbehave. Or drawing stars, pigs, etc., for things kids get right. Eventually, kids get old enough to realize this isn't a real consequence. But for very young children, it seems to work.

As kids get older, the games get more competitive. From what I gather, Taiwanese children (perhaps like children everywhere) are very competitive. You spend a lot of your class time dividing kids into teams and having them, say, race to hit the right word with a giant hammer (we actually call this the "hammer slap" game). Running dictations are also popular as a way of encouraging listening and reading skills. A running dictation works as follows:

1) Divide class up into pairs by having students say "Apple, Banana" or some such.

2) Post a text (a simple text for younger kids; can get more complicated as students get older) just outside the classroom.

3) Have each pair of students take turns running to the text to read a sentence or two and report back to the other student, who diligently (or not-so-diligently) takes it down from dictation. The first pair to get the text wins.

Another popular game, for various ages, involves any kind of thing that involves students having to hit the whiteboard with a sticky ball. This can include versions of tic-tac-toe, target practice, etc. Infinite varieties of this can exist, from what I gather, and at younger ages, students will think they're playing a whole new game if you merely change the shape of the target.

Another key is to be creative with scoring systems. Scoring systems have to be clear and easy to understand, but you can do a lot more than simply awarding one point to the team with the correct answer. For instance, you can draw a man walking the plank of a pirate ship, the goal being to get the man back to safety by answering questions or using the TL (target language) correctly.