Jhender

*still amused at the kind of bridge hands i get*

watched Mad About English with jeremy yesterday. I just can’t decide what’s the motive of the movie. The movie highlights the fervour that gripped the (perhaps some of the) Chinese in the run up to the Beijing Olympics. It shows old folks taking up english classes in order to participate in the Games, do volunteer work, help the foreigners, be tour guides… it shows young kids going for english language camps to improve their language, for their future. it shows cab drivers desperately trying to pass the english test in order to be allowed to drive during the Olympic games. For some of them, it’s an obsession, or passion. For others, it’s a laborous struggle. Partly because they need to do it, but they also want to be part of their historic moment. Hm. The film also showed this ?brit guy going around correcting mistakes on signages.

when i watched the trailer, it was like such a comedy. ‘Velcome to Beijing’ is it a comedy? is it a sad thing that the kids attend intensive training camps run like a military institute or a church camp as jeremy puts it. in the entire movie, the guy behind the training camps was the one who disturbed me most. said he was tasked with training millions of chinese to be english-ready. i like it that he wants to modernize china, to get people to emerge from their china-centric, egoistical background and be part of the world. i shudder at his camps, at the psychological drilling and perhaps manipulation. i wonder. but it’s probably not so surprising in china, perhaps it’s so foreign to me because i can never accept being forced to do something. sigh.

?working hard to repay your nation ?working hard to repay your parents

i dunno. think about that. think about it mathematically. why mathematically, am i crazy? think about it on a symbol diagram, work out a phylogenetic tree or something. the next generation works to support the previous. there is a recursive backward relationship. argh i can’t describe it. why advance to the next generation just to support the previous one. which is the one in the pole position. it’s a very regressive idea. how to advance into the future like that? how to attain -ogical breakthroughs like that? you cannot build an engineering system like that. you cannot build a new power plant to repay the old one for the power you used to build the new one. confused miscomprehension.

the featured cab driver. poor guy, trying to make a living, trying to communicate in english, trying to talk to passengers, trying to pass his exam. trying to “contribute to society”. he kept trying to practice with passengers, of course he has lots of trouble understanding what they are saying. he keeps getting dejected, disappointed at how he can only manage with directions and places but cannot chat about other issues, cannot catch their vocabulary. he keeps saying ‘not good enough’, ‘need to work harder’. but he says it with a dejected tone of an obsessive clinically depressed person. dunno.

actually the beijing+english accent is kinda cute. nvm.

yeah it all sure reminded us of studying french. of figuring out the grammer and the vocabulary, of all the stupid things we said. reminded us of the times when people are surprised and impressed we can speak french, of how we truthfully tell them we cannot speak it well. haha. it’s so different learning a language as an adult. as an adult, you really Learn it. as a child, you just speak, heck care, it’s just a tool to get things done, to get what you want.

Olympics. there were some reviews in the papers (ST) today on the Opening Ceremony. talked about the chinese pride, the pride of singaporean chinese, of the extravaganza, of whether it did or did not reflect the culture, the history, the minority groups, the true china, the political and economic faces, and other stuff. i dunno.

i think it’s quite good timing that the olympics are in china. is it late, or early, we’ll never know. we’re not coral reefs. i guess everybody won, the west and china. the world got china to open up, to embrace english, olympic ideals, olympic rules, meticulous timing and impartial judging. actually there’s always been a ton of politics in olympics, but nvm. it got china involved in alot more world politics than it needed to. it put a responsibility on china, it put something on the line for them to lose, and that was such a powerful factor in probably alot alot alot of little decisions. it was, i think, a carrot-trap that china could not refuse. but it’s not all bad for them, they have their pride of face, the have their coming-of-age party, their Party has got something great to show (other than boring continuously rising economic figures. and nobody can fight a war nowadays). so it’s good, it’s a largely happy party. a good way to motivate the nation on a project big enough to catch the attention of the billion people. a good way to destress from the economic struggles of the peasants. a good way to catalyze expansion and openess. if they wanted it, good. if it was like the olden days when they were being exploited by the West (hm are they still? =] ) then not so good.

the fantastic thing is that, after all that, on TV, the Games always look like the Games. =]

sports vs politics is always such an issue. beijing or not.

actually, interestingly, with the current influx of the english language into china, the world could be locked in a English-Chinese state for a very long period of time with no particular language dominating. Hmm. instead of a chinese dominance as thought. India will probably get left out, too hard to understand all their languages.