Have you ever seen your hometown in a movie or book?
If you're from New York or Toronto or Tokyo I guess you see that all the time, but if you grow up in a small place, a plain place, there's an electric, almost perverse thrill in seeing or reading about the streets you know in a medium that transcends our own small and desperate lives.
Glimpses of St.Catharines, Ontario in the media were rare. When I was in Grade 2, the big book around town come Christmas time was The Welland Canal Monster meets Santa, by Frank Proctor, a local radio host. The Welland Canal is one of St.Catharines' (few) claims to fame, and the fact that it was featured in a book, and that the writer actually came to my school to read about it -- well, words fail me. There was also, of course, that Yuletide classic A Christmas Story, parts of which (including the legendary tongue-stuck-to-the-icy-pole scene) were shot at a school in St.Kitts.
Other than that, I can only think of a couple of others -- an early book by Terry 'Waiting to Exhale' Mcmillan, in which the characters drive through Niagara Falls and St.Catherines (a misspelling, but at least she mentioned us) and Canadian writer Howard Engleman, who has written a series of detective novels featuring Benny Cooperman that take place in the fictional town of Grantham, which is modelled directly after Engleman's hometown of St.Catharines -- right down to the street names and the local diner named Diana Sweets. (I remember slacking off one day when I was about sixteen during a lull in my job at the St.Catharines library, skimming through an Engleman book, only to have a weird sense of something-like-deja-vu-but-not-quite when the main character wandered into the Grantham Library, modelled quite clearly and recognizably after the very place I was reading the book in. He even remembered to mention the weird, metallic statues of Adam and Eve that perpetually loitered in the lobby.
Living just outside of Tokyo, I'd often purposely seek out books that were set in or around the nation's capital, or the multitude of towns nearby I'd visited, just so I could mentally picture precisely what the author was describing. And I remember watching a movie in a theatre in Shibuya (the downtown, teeny-bopper hub of central Tokyo and modern Japan), a movie in which the main characters walked around, well, Shibuya -- and right outside of the very theatre I was watching their adventures in...
Phnom Penh flicks are few and far between. There's a new documentary out on DVD that I have (but haven't watched yet) called S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (a nice, gentle title, eh?) which is about the infamous Tuol Sleng prison that is just down the road a ways from where I'm writing these words. I've been to the actual prison a couple of times; I'm interested in seeing how this flick portrays what went down there.
And then there's City of Ghosts, the Matt Dillon flick that I wrote about in my second blog entry a few months ago. It presents Phnom Penh as a dirty, sleazy place populated by low-life expats. Accurate? There's no argument from this corner...
It's fun and more than a little strange to watch films and read books about a place that was the very definition of foreign; it's fun to make a place your own, and then to compare another version of it to see if it matches your perception, your reality.
The thing is, novels and movies, when they work, can do two things: they can take us out of our everyday lives to some place extraordinary, fresh and pulsating, or they can reveal the hidden secrets and unknown alleyways that form and align the places we think we know so well. When I was younger, a place wasn't real, wasn't validated, unless I could see it on the silver screen, or reimagine it myself within the safe the pages of a novel, guided by the author's (hopefully) sure hand.
I don't know if I need a place to have that kind of imaginative affirmation anymore, but still, it's comforting and stimulating to see a place you know so well transformed by another's artistic intent. Strange and, if you're lucky, magical. You can nod your head with the sights and tone of place that you recognize, and throw popcorn at the screen at the obvious (to you anyways) oversights and omissions of your hometown (or the town you're now in.)
It's a tangible way to connect the gritty ground beneath your feet with that other, higher level of shimmering stability that the best art strives for, and sometimes even achieves.
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
Monday, January 10, 2005
OPRAH, CRUISE, POL POT...
A few nights ago on t.v. I caught the end of the really fancy/schmancy concert that was held recently in Norway for this year's winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, a distinguished female African university professor whose name I've of course forgotten, but she did really important things for the environment in Kenya, so she deserves her props.
The weird thing was, the hosts of the show were Oprah Winfrey and Tom Cruise. Not exactly who first comes to mind when you here the word 'Nobel', is it.
Makes perfect sense to me, though. Both Oprah and Cruise represent the kind of innovative thinking that the Nobel spirit represents.
I'm serious.
Oh, and they can sing.
For the finale, the Canadian jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall did her version of John Lennon's 'Imagine' (with various other artists contributing a verse here and there), and so we were treated to the sort-of-weird sight of Winfrey and Cruise rocking and holding hands and squinting at a teleprompter as they did their best to sing in key.
Here you have the most prestigious, important prize in the history of the known universe, a concert hall filled with the super-elite of the world's hoitiest-toitiest intellectuals, all of it presided over by two people who, when they were growing up, were nobody's vote to succeed at much of anything.
Winfrey was a poor black girl in 1950's Mississipi; I don't need to say anything more than that. Cruise had a single mom who bopped around America with her three daughters and little boy looking for work (and ending up in Ottawa, Ontario, for a couple of years, where Cruise attended junior high, believe it or not. So let's consider him an honorary Canadian, alright?)
Neither is a university graduate. Neither was groomed for success. And yet they are, without question, two of the most powerful people on the planet, if power is measured in money. (It usually is.)
How does this happen?
They did their own thing, is what they did.
They went after what they wanted to go after.
All too often, the good things in life tend to go to those who follow the traditional path -- the university educated, play-it-safe scholars and businessmen who become part of the Establishment and reap its benefits.
But the true movers and shakers, innovators and inventors, are the ones who have created alternate pathways for themselves, or been able to emerge from circumstances that do not seem to necessarily lend themselves to lives of greatness. The Bill Clinton who was the son of a hairdresser in smalltown Arkansas; the Bill Gates who dropped out of university; the Einstein who was a patent clerk; the Quentin Tarantino who dropped out of junior high. These are the people who society neglects to consider, or who are deemed somewhat insignificant, and yet they are the very same people who, later in life, create the disruptions that truly revolutionize the worlds we live in. The middle-to-elite help run the world; the oddball who persists changes it.
There's a downside to this kind of fiercely independent thinking, of course. I'm reading a new biography of Pol Pot by Philip Short (which is very readable, because the guy's a journalist and not an academic) and in this book we discover that, by age twenty-seven, twenty-eight, Pol Pot was, well, not much of anything, really. Not considered a revolutionary. Barely remembered years later by those who attended school with him. Gained a little bit of clout as a really, really good teacher of French literature. (Go figure.) And yet, slowly but surely, daring to live outside of the Cambodian norms laid down by Sihanouk (first as king, then as p.m.) within twenty years Pol Pot was the murderous dictator responsible for reimagining, then destroying, an entire country.
Works both ways, I guess.
I just find it strange -- that those who are born on the outside of the elite economic and political systems that rule us all are sometimes the very people who end up representing, modifying and altering those very same systems. The very people we look to for entertainment, enlightenment, illumination. The very people that can lead us into temptation or (some) form of collective redemption, if we're lucky.
The weird thing was, the hosts of the show were Oprah Winfrey and Tom Cruise. Not exactly who first comes to mind when you here the word 'Nobel', is it.
Makes perfect sense to me, though. Both Oprah and Cruise represent the kind of innovative thinking that the Nobel spirit represents.
I'm serious.
Oh, and they can sing.
For the finale, the Canadian jazz pianist and singer Diana Krall did her version of John Lennon's 'Imagine' (with various other artists contributing a verse here and there), and so we were treated to the sort-of-weird sight of Winfrey and Cruise rocking and holding hands and squinting at a teleprompter as they did their best to sing in key.
Here you have the most prestigious, important prize in the history of the known universe, a concert hall filled with the super-elite of the world's hoitiest-toitiest intellectuals, all of it presided over by two people who, when they were growing up, were nobody's vote to succeed at much of anything.
Winfrey was a poor black girl in 1950's Mississipi; I don't need to say anything more than that. Cruise had a single mom who bopped around America with her three daughters and little boy looking for work (and ending up in Ottawa, Ontario, for a couple of years, where Cruise attended junior high, believe it or not. So let's consider him an honorary Canadian, alright?)
Neither is a university graduate. Neither was groomed for success. And yet they are, without question, two of the most powerful people on the planet, if power is measured in money. (It usually is.)
How does this happen?
They did their own thing, is what they did.
They went after what they wanted to go after.
All too often, the good things in life tend to go to those who follow the traditional path -- the university educated, play-it-safe scholars and businessmen who become part of the Establishment and reap its benefits.
But the true movers and shakers, innovators and inventors, are the ones who have created alternate pathways for themselves, or been able to emerge from circumstances that do not seem to necessarily lend themselves to lives of greatness. The Bill Clinton who was the son of a hairdresser in smalltown Arkansas; the Bill Gates who dropped out of university; the Einstein who was a patent clerk; the Quentin Tarantino who dropped out of junior high. These are the people who society neglects to consider, or who are deemed somewhat insignificant, and yet they are the very same people who, later in life, create the disruptions that truly revolutionize the worlds we live in. The middle-to-elite help run the world; the oddball who persists changes it.
There's a downside to this kind of fiercely independent thinking, of course. I'm reading a new biography of Pol Pot by Philip Short (which is very readable, because the guy's a journalist and not an academic) and in this book we discover that, by age twenty-seven, twenty-eight, Pol Pot was, well, not much of anything, really. Not considered a revolutionary. Barely remembered years later by those who attended school with him. Gained a little bit of clout as a really, really good teacher of French literature. (Go figure.) And yet, slowly but surely, daring to live outside of the Cambodian norms laid down by Sihanouk (first as king, then as p.m.) within twenty years Pol Pot was the murderous dictator responsible for reimagining, then destroying, an entire country.
Works both ways, I guess.
I just find it strange -- that those who are born on the outside of the elite economic and political systems that rule us all are sometimes the very people who end up representing, modifying and altering those very same systems. The very people we look to for entertainment, enlightenment, illumination. The very people that can lead us into temptation or (some) form of collective redemption, if we're lucky.
PRELUDE TO A COUP
Five a.m. air, cool and dark
Cloaks the Royal guard as he sleeps
At his post.
I run past,
Aware
Of the limp M-16
Resting against his leg
As somewhere beyond him
The newly crowned king
Stirs in his sleep
Troubled by dreams
That hint,
That allude,
To inertia
Unrest...
A trigger cocked.
His patient enemies
Rely on sleeping guards
To sleep a little longer.
All of them,
Waiting
For the day
To break
Cloaks the Royal guard as he sleeps
At his post.
I run past,
Aware
Of the limp M-16
Resting against his leg
As somewhere beyond him
The newly crowned king
Stirs in his sleep
Troubled by dreams
That hint,
That allude,
To inertia
Unrest...
A trigger cocked.
His patient enemies
Rely on sleeping guards
To sleep a little longer.
All of them,
Waiting
For the day
To break
Friday, January 07, 2005
THE TAO OF BILL MURRAY AND THE WOW OF WES ANDERSON
I'm not sure what universe Bill Murray inhabits, but it's not ours. I think he just visits here, popping in from time to time to visit old friends and make a few movies. His latest, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, is directed by Wes Anderson, who previously directed Murray in Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums; Anderson, too, is not from this earth, so when his universe and Murray's universe somehow align themselves in space and time, weird stuff happens. Good stuff happens.
I won't say anything specific about the movie. It's out now in theatres in big cities in North America. I watched it here in Cambodia. If you've seen Wes Anderson's other movies, you have an idea of what you're in for. If you haven't, and you watch this flick expecting another Ghostbusters or something, I feel for you. Usually, a lot of people come out of Wes Anderson's films saying "I don't get it". This time, I think a lot of Wes Anderson fans will walk out of this Wes Anderson film saying "I don't get it."
This is a good thing. This is a great thing, in fact, because The Life Aquatic is a bizarre, slightly off-kilter experience that resembles Anderson's past work, yes, and it bears some kind of tangential relationship to the real world that we walk through and talk through most of the days of our lives, certainly, but it has an inexplicable, internal logic that our world lacks, and that Wes's world somehow summons at will.
I actually met Wes Anderson in '97 or '98. This was before he had worked with Bill Murray three times, before Martin Scorsese had labelled him his favorite young director, before his first movie had even been released in actual theatres. His first movie was called Bottle Rocket, a small independent movie he had shot with his Texas roommates Luke Wilson and Owen Wilson, and the three of them (along with the older Wilson brother whose name I forget) were schlepping the flick around Canadian college campuses, hoping to generate some buzz before its limited Toronto release.
It wasn't working. At York University, they used to (maybe still do?) have movie nights using the big screens draping the lecture halls. This particular night they had a screening of Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, followed by Bottle Rocket, with the director and stars in (nervous) attendance.
A few hundred people laughed their lily-white asses off all the way through Ace Ventura II.
Then came Bottle Rocket.
Then came the sound of seats being thwack-thwuck-thwicked down as people gradually, then rapidly began leaving the theatre. After the movie was finished, there were only a dozen or so people left.
Wes Anderson came out, as did Owen Wilson and Luke Wilson and the other Wilson brother. They didn't look happy. They looked, what's the word, glum. (I felt bad for them. I don't think it was their movie that people didn't like, necessarily; York is mostly a commuter school -- I think people just wanted to get home, that's why they were leaving so early. And hey -- Jim Carrey is a tough act to follow.)
My friend Eric asked a particulary filmish question to Wes Anderson, who replied with a particulary filmish answer. Anderson had geeky classes and Don King hair and looked exactly like they kind of guy who would, and did, inhabit our film classes. (In fact, he looked exactly like the kind of guy who would make movies like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
After the (very brief) q and a was over, me and Eric went up to talk to the director and stars. They were all very nice, low-key guys in their mid-twenties, not much older than us, and I remember talking to Owen Wilson, who later went on to co-star in movies with such no-names as Jackie Chan and Eddie Murphy and Robert DeNiro and Gene Hackman, and I got them all to sign my copy of ESQUIRE with Al Pacino on the cover, and I'm convinced that I was the first one to ever get an autograph from these guys. To tell the truth, my friend Eric and I kind of felt sorry for these dudes, because most of the audience had left during the flick. I cornered them in the hallway outside of the lecture hall and had them sign their names and felt kind of dorky, them not being famous and all, but what the hell.
And then they walked out of Curtis Lecture Hall L that dark and snowy night, probably talking dejectedly about what a poor screening that had been, not knowing that they would soon, in a few short years, be big, big movie stars, and high-profile directors, and that that black and cold York U night would recede into their memory like a bad (but not forgotten) dream.
It's so weird, is all I'm saying. Anderson's movies, Murray being in them, me watching them in Cambodia. I was watching a scene with Owen Wilson arguing with Willem Dafoe, and I suddenly remembered that I had spoken to both of these guys at different points in time, Owen Wilson before he was famous, in a classroom at my school, and Willem Dafoe in a movie theatre in Toronto, when I suddenly realized that the guy waiting in line in front of me was none other than the dude who had died in Platoon and died as Jesus. So I asked him if he was Willem Dafoe, and he sheepishly smiled that creepy smiled and said he was, and I asked him what he was doing in Toronto, and he said filming a movie, and I said which movie, and he said Existenz, by Canadian director David Cronenberg, and I don't know why that's so important to me -- this acknowledgement, as I watched The Life Aquatic here in Cambodia, that I had exchanged a few words with the people on my t.v. set.
Maybe it goes back to where I began. To Murray, and Anderson's movies, and their mutual, unspoken agreement that life is filled with unusual coincidences and longings.
Bill Murray is a real, honest-to-goodness human being. (I know, because I was the biggest fan of Meatballs and Stripes in the world, and when I was fifteen or sixteen I convinced my dad to take me and my friends to Camp White Pine while we were in Haliburton, Ontario, because it was there that Meatballs had been filmed fifteen years before, and just the fact that we drove along the same road leading to the cottages that Murray had trod upon many summers ago was enough to make my day, month, year, enough to solidify once and for all that Murray was flesh and blood, had walked the same earth as me. And, incidentally, if you haven't seen Stripes, or even Meatballs, you must. This is Bill Murray in pure, crystalline form. The Murray in Rushmore is the Murray of Stripes twenty years later, the wiseass engulfed by the drudgery of life who yearns and learns to smirk and feel once more.) And yet Murray marches to his own drum. So does Anderson. In fact, it's not even a drum they march to, no, but another, unfamiliar instrument only they can hear.
When you watch their movies, so much is intrinsically offbeat and skewed; so much is angular. But there's a rhythm to their off-rhythm beat, a recognition of our need for connection and empathy. Murray is not sentimental, and neither is Anderson, but boy can they taunt and toy with emotion; man can they hint at what makes us puny humans love and need each other so muchy.
It's in Murray's smile, I think. He wields it like a knife. He doesn't smile often, and he doesn't do it easily, but when he does, what you see is humanity shining through. You see goodness. You see his smarm and cynicism about life that is his trademark stripped clean. It's a wink to the audience, a nod to the good will we can still summon through the dark.
Overanalyzing? Of course. When you're dealing with people as complex and heightened and enlightened as Bill Murray and Wes Anderson, you can't help but examine life differently. You can't help but wonder whether our own individual versions of the world will somehow, someday resemble theirs, of if they sometimes already do.
I won't say anything specific about the movie. It's out now in theatres in big cities in North America. I watched it here in Cambodia. If you've seen Wes Anderson's other movies, you have an idea of what you're in for. If you haven't, and you watch this flick expecting another Ghostbusters or something, I feel for you. Usually, a lot of people come out of Wes Anderson's films saying "I don't get it". This time, I think a lot of Wes Anderson fans will walk out of this Wes Anderson film saying "I don't get it."
This is a good thing. This is a great thing, in fact, because The Life Aquatic is a bizarre, slightly off-kilter experience that resembles Anderson's past work, yes, and it bears some kind of tangential relationship to the real world that we walk through and talk through most of the days of our lives, certainly, but it has an inexplicable, internal logic that our world lacks, and that Wes's world somehow summons at will.
I actually met Wes Anderson in '97 or '98. This was before he had worked with Bill Murray three times, before Martin Scorsese had labelled him his favorite young director, before his first movie had even been released in actual theatres. His first movie was called Bottle Rocket, a small independent movie he had shot with his Texas roommates Luke Wilson and Owen Wilson, and the three of them (along with the older Wilson brother whose name I forget) were schlepping the flick around Canadian college campuses, hoping to generate some buzz before its limited Toronto release.
It wasn't working. At York University, they used to (maybe still do?) have movie nights using the big screens draping the lecture halls. This particular night they had a screening of Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, followed by Bottle Rocket, with the director and stars in (nervous) attendance.
A few hundred people laughed their lily-white asses off all the way through Ace Ventura II.
Then came Bottle Rocket.
Then came the sound of seats being thwack-thwuck-thwicked down as people gradually, then rapidly began leaving the theatre. After the movie was finished, there were only a dozen or so people left.
Wes Anderson came out, as did Owen Wilson and Luke Wilson and the other Wilson brother. They didn't look happy. They looked, what's the word, glum. (I felt bad for them. I don't think it was their movie that people didn't like, necessarily; York is mostly a commuter school -- I think people just wanted to get home, that's why they were leaving so early. And hey -- Jim Carrey is a tough act to follow.)
My friend Eric asked a particulary filmish question to Wes Anderson, who replied with a particulary filmish answer. Anderson had geeky classes and Don King hair and looked exactly like they kind of guy who would, and did, inhabit our film classes. (In fact, he looked exactly like the kind of guy who would make movies like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
After the (very brief) q and a was over, me and Eric went up to talk to the director and stars. They were all very nice, low-key guys in their mid-twenties, not much older than us, and I remember talking to Owen Wilson, who later went on to co-star in movies with such no-names as Jackie Chan and Eddie Murphy and Robert DeNiro and Gene Hackman, and I got them all to sign my copy of ESQUIRE with Al Pacino on the cover, and I'm convinced that I was the first one to ever get an autograph from these guys. To tell the truth, my friend Eric and I kind of felt sorry for these dudes, because most of the audience had left during the flick. I cornered them in the hallway outside of the lecture hall and had them sign their names and felt kind of dorky, them not being famous and all, but what the hell.
And then they walked out of Curtis Lecture Hall L that dark and snowy night, probably talking dejectedly about what a poor screening that had been, not knowing that they would soon, in a few short years, be big, big movie stars, and high-profile directors, and that that black and cold York U night would recede into their memory like a bad (but not forgotten) dream.
It's so weird, is all I'm saying. Anderson's movies, Murray being in them, me watching them in Cambodia. I was watching a scene with Owen Wilson arguing with Willem Dafoe, and I suddenly remembered that I had spoken to both of these guys at different points in time, Owen Wilson before he was famous, in a classroom at my school, and Willem Dafoe in a movie theatre in Toronto, when I suddenly realized that the guy waiting in line in front of me was none other than the dude who had died in Platoon and died as Jesus. So I asked him if he was Willem Dafoe, and he sheepishly smiled that creepy smiled and said he was, and I asked him what he was doing in Toronto, and he said filming a movie, and I said which movie, and he said Existenz, by Canadian director David Cronenberg, and I don't know why that's so important to me -- this acknowledgement, as I watched The Life Aquatic here in Cambodia, that I had exchanged a few words with the people on my t.v. set.
Maybe it goes back to where I began. To Murray, and Anderson's movies, and their mutual, unspoken agreement that life is filled with unusual coincidences and longings.
Bill Murray is a real, honest-to-goodness human being. (I know, because I was the biggest fan of Meatballs and Stripes in the world, and when I was fifteen or sixteen I convinced my dad to take me and my friends to Camp White Pine while we were in Haliburton, Ontario, because it was there that Meatballs had been filmed fifteen years before, and just the fact that we drove along the same road leading to the cottages that Murray had trod upon many summers ago was enough to make my day, month, year, enough to solidify once and for all that Murray was flesh and blood, had walked the same earth as me. And, incidentally, if you haven't seen Stripes, or even Meatballs, you must. This is Bill Murray in pure, crystalline form. The Murray in Rushmore is the Murray of Stripes twenty years later, the wiseass engulfed by the drudgery of life who yearns and learns to smirk and feel once more.) And yet Murray marches to his own drum. So does Anderson. In fact, it's not even a drum they march to, no, but another, unfamiliar instrument only they can hear.
When you watch their movies, so much is intrinsically offbeat and skewed; so much is angular. But there's a rhythm to their off-rhythm beat, a recognition of our need for connection and empathy. Murray is not sentimental, and neither is Anderson, but boy can they taunt and toy with emotion; man can they hint at what makes us puny humans love and need each other so muchy.
It's in Murray's smile, I think. He wields it like a knife. He doesn't smile often, and he doesn't do it easily, but when he does, what you see is humanity shining through. You see goodness. You see his smarm and cynicism about life that is his trademark stripped clean. It's a wink to the audience, a nod to the good will we can still summon through the dark.
Overanalyzing? Of course. When you're dealing with people as complex and heightened and enlightened as Bill Murray and Wes Anderson, you can't help but examine life differently. You can't help but wonder whether our own individual versions of the world will somehow, someday resemble theirs, of if they sometimes already do.
Thursday, January 06, 2005
SAY WHAT?
Teaching English has become one heck of a big industry around the globe (just check out www.daveseslcafe.com to see how big), but if you're not white and from Canada, America, England, Australia or New Zealand, you might have difficulty in getting a gig in developing countries like Cambodia.
I'm not sure it's racism. If it is, it's a kind of benign racism, if such a thing is possible. Meaning, for some reason that eludes, the thinking is: white skin = native speaker of English. The people who are acting racist don't actually know they're acting racist, if that makes sense. (Which I guess makes it even more racist, doesn't it.) If you're black, they might not hire you simply because they don't think you actually grew up speaking the language; again, the thinking is that white skin equals native speaker. Period. Being a black or African English teacher in this part of the world isn't impossible, no, but it ain't too easy, let me tell you.
Similiarly, if you're from a country like the Phillipines, they might decide not to hire you because English technically isn't a native language there, even though most Filipinos speak better English and can teach better English than half the Canadians I know.
A lot of this unconscious (?) predjudice has to do with accent. English language learners are paranoid that they have to learn from teachers who speak the Queen's English, and that if they learn the language from someone who doesn't speak exactly like the Queen Mum, then they're screwed, their linguistic future having been lost to the wind, their money burned to a black and pointless crisp.
Doesn't work that way.
The fact is, English is a global language, spoken with extremely different accents not only in every country, but usually in different parts of each country as well. (You ever heard a Nova Scotia or Newfoundland accent? Or an authentic Alabama one?)
If you learn English from someone with a slightly odd accent, it makes you listen harder. It forces you to listen closer. It engages you in a way that may not be easy at first, no, but it will actually improve your overall comprehension ability. And in a place like Cambodia, many students will eventually try to get a job at an international NGO, where the people speaking English will be from places like Sweden and Germany and Finland and Norway, and guess what? Their accents will be thick as molasses. If students aren't accustomed to hearing English in somewhat altered, even eccentric ways, they're in big trouble.
Language is a commodity that is bought, sold, traded and given away, free of charge. It does not belong to a particular national group, let alone race. It arises from a particular place and time, true, but once you learn it, it becomes your currency, and you will add to it your own shadings, nuances and pathways to its presentation. It becomes personal, individual and possessive. To limit the teaching of English to solely those individuals who were lucky enough to have been born into its daily use is to deny the willing learner of the essence of language itself -- namely, its magical, slightly mysterious ability to seize hold of the foreigner, the novice, the illiterate, and slowly, gradually make its powerful presence heard, then felt.
I'm not sure it's racism. If it is, it's a kind of benign racism, if such a thing is possible. Meaning, for some reason that eludes, the thinking is: white skin = native speaker of English. The people who are acting racist don't actually know they're acting racist, if that makes sense. (Which I guess makes it even more racist, doesn't it.) If you're black, they might not hire you simply because they don't think you actually grew up speaking the language; again, the thinking is that white skin equals native speaker. Period. Being a black or African English teacher in this part of the world isn't impossible, no, but it ain't too easy, let me tell you.
Similiarly, if you're from a country like the Phillipines, they might decide not to hire you because English technically isn't a native language there, even though most Filipinos speak better English and can teach better English than half the Canadians I know.
A lot of this unconscious (?) predjudice has to do with accent. English language learners are paranoid that they have to learn from teachers who speak the Queen's English, and that if they learn the language from someone who doesn't speak exactly like the Queen Mum, then they're screwed, their linguistic future having been lost to the wind, their money burned to a black and pointless crisp.
Doesn't work that way.
The fact is, English is a global language, spoken with extremely different accents not only in every country, but usually in different parts of each country as well. (You ever heard a Nova Scotia or Newfoundland accent? Or an authentic Alabama one?)
If you learn English from someone with a slightly odd accent, it makes you listen harder. It forces you to listen closer. It engages you in a way that may not be easy at first, no, but it will actually improve your overall comprehension ability. And in a place like Cambodia, many students will eventually try to get a job at an international NGO, where the people speaking English will be from places like Sweden and Germany and Finland and Norway, and guess what? Their accents will be thick as molasses. If students aren't accustomed to hearing English in somewhat altered, even eccentric ways, they're in big trouble.
Language is a commodity that is bought, sold, traded and given away, free of charge. It does not belong to a particular national group, let alone race. It arises from a particular place and time, true, but once you learn it, it becomes your currency, and you will add to it your own shadings, nuances and pathways to its presentation. It becomes personal, individual and possessive. To limit the teaching of English to solely those individuals who were lucky enough to have been born into its daily use is to deny the willing learner of the essence of language itself -- namely, its magical, slightly mysterious ability to seize hold of the foreigner, the novice, the illiterate, and slowly, gradually make its powerful presence heard, then felt.
Wednesday, January 05, 2005
THE FREAKY-LOOKING TEENAGE KID WHO BAGS YOUR GROCERIES
Right now I'm reading this book called The Koreans: Who they are, What they want, Where their future lies by a British journalist named Michael Breen, and it raises a couple of points that are a little bit interesting -- at least to me, hopefully to you:
1) Koreans don't allow non-Koreans to become Koreans (in a spiritual, nationalistic sense). This is a typical refrain that I've read in countless books about Japan, too -- that foreigners, even those who have lived in the country for decades, speak the language, are married to its citizens, are still not fully accepted into the patriotic brotherhood of the country.
I've never quite gotten the point of this point, because it's usually used to highlight how xenophobic Japan/Korea/insert country name here usually is. It seems to me that almost every single country in the world, with the possible exceptions of, I don't know, America and Canada, wouldn't accept a foreigner as one of its own. I don't find that racist or indicative of a 'closed' mentality at all; I find that to be human nature. It's like that new kid that joins your elementary school in Grade 4, after you've gone through the last five years of school with the same classmates. Sure, the new kid is part of the school, yeah, but he'll never be considered truly one of the boys. Most countries are freaking old, right, so how or why could a foreigner possibly be accepted, integrated, amalgamated? (New countries like the U.S. and Canada, being immigrant countries to begin with, are better at this sort of thing...although, I'm wondering by how much.)
2) It's a shame that most people can't read Korean, because they're literature is out of this world. This is a point that I wholeheartedly agree with, meaning, it is too bad that the majority of the people in the world can't read a certain country's language. There's so much nuance, texture and just plain coolness in foreign languages; if you don't know the language, entire artistic continents are, unfortunately, labelled off the map. (Certain of the arts, namely cinema and music, are still able to be enjoyed by the world's masses; others, like books, are forced to rely on the good graces and skills of translators, who do admirable jobs of capturing the essence of the work, but inevitably, something is lost -- that something being the musical cadence that makes language, well, language.)
The root of this book, and others like it, centres around identity. Who are these people, and why do they act the way that they do? Anytime you're in a foreign country, whether it's for days or weeks or months or years, you're going to be find yourself asking these questions.
And I'm not sure an answer is possible.
I'm not sure an answer is necessary.
The search is necessary. The questioning is necessary. It puts you more in touch with yourself and allows your curiosity and empathy about others to flourish.
The answer, though?
There is no answer to the who and the why. There's theories and observations. That's all. And yours are just as valid or crazy as the next guy's.
In the end, trying to pin down the actions, emotions, sensibility and transparency of an entire nation is a pointless task. It's hard enough to understand a single person, let alone a country or its people.
Just imagine if you could understand, truly understand, in all his contradictory human complexity, the freaky-looking teenage kid who bags your groceries at the supermarket, the kid with the tattoo of you're-not-sure-what on the base of his neck.
That would be a book worth reading, I think.
1) Koreans don't allow non-Koreans to become Koreans (in a spiritual, nationalistic sense). This is a typical refrain that I've read in countless books about Japan, too -- that foreigners, even those who have lived in the country for decades, speak the language, are married to its citizens, are still not fully accepted into the patriotic brotherhood of the country.
I've never quite gotten the point of this point, because it's usually used to highlight how xenophobic Japan/Korea/insert country name here usually is. It seems to me that almost every single country in the world, with the possible exceptions of, I don't know, America and Canada, wouldn't accept a foreigner as one of its own. I don't find that racist or indicative of a 'closed' mentality at all; I find that to be human nature. It's like that new kid that joins your elementary school in Grade 4, after you've gone through the last five years of school with the same classmates. Sure, the new kid is part of the school, yeah, but he'll never be considered truly one of the boys. Most countries are freaking old, right, so how or why could a foreigner possibly be accepted, integrated, amalgamated? (New countries like the U.S. and Canada, being immigrant countries to begin with, are better at this sort of thing...although, I'm wondering by how much.)
2) It's a shame that most people can't read Korean, because they're literature is out of this world. This is a point that I wholeheartedly agree with, meaning, it is too bad that the majority of the people in the world can't read a certain country's language. There's so much nuance, texture and just plain coolness in foreign languages; if you don't know the language, entire artistic continents are, unfortunately, labelled off the map. (Certain of the arts, namely cinema and music, are still able to be enjoyed by the world's masses; others, like books, are forced to rely on the good graces and skills of translators, who do admirable jobs of capturing the essence of the work, but inevitably, something is lost -- that something being the musical cadence that makes language, well, language.)
The root of this book, and others like it, centres around identity. Who are these people, and why do they act the way that they do? Anytime you're in a foreign country, whether it's for days or weeks or months or years, you're going to be find yourself asking these questions.
And I'm not sure an answer is possible.
I'm not sure an answer is necessary.
The search is necessary. The questioning is necessary. It puts you more in touch with yourself and allows your curiosity and empathy about others to flourish.
The answer, though?
There is no answer to the who and the why. There's theories and observations. That's all. And yours are just as valid or crazy as the next guy's.
In the end, trying to pin down the actions, emotions, sensibility and transparency of an entire nation is a pointless task. It's hard enough to understand a single person, let alone a country or its people.
Just imagine if you could understand, truly understand, in all his contradictory human complexity, the freaky-looking teenage kid who bags your groceries at the supermarket, the kid with the tattoo of you're-not-sure-what on the base of his neck.
That would be a book worth reading, I think.
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