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Today, February 13^th, is the day before Valentine’s Day. In ESL class today, I worked with two small groups on English activities that pertained to Valentine’s Day. With the Level 1 learners, we worked on speaking and understanding vocabulary words that pertained to the Valentine’s Day holiday. This included words like cupid, valentine, mailbox, and other similar words. We worked on simple reading exercises that pertained to a Valentine’s Day story. With the Level 2 students, we focused on a cultural discussion about the meaning of Valentine’s Day in the United States. We discussed the differences between Valentine’s Day traditions in the United States compared to the different countries the students were from.

I had a lot of fun discussing the different Valentine’s Day traditions with the Level 2 students. Sharing holiday traditions is a great way to learn about other people’s cultures and stimulate conversation about differences between the cultures. Sharing in the cultural discussion helped me progress towards achieving the third course outcome that is outlined on our course page: to understand the benefits and challenges of living in a culturally diverse and globalized world. With students from twenty different countries, there were so many different types of Valentine celebrations compared to how we celebrate in the United States. It is important to understand the cultural differences because the way I would celebrate the same holiday in another country is much different. It was difficult for the students to understand some of the American traditions to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Many students did not understand that children as young as elementary school celebrated Valentine’s Day. This is one of the challenges of living in a culturally diverse world: having cultural misunderstandings. However, our conversation was very productive and demonstrated the positive effects of understand each other’s culture as well.

Partaking in the cultural discussions helped me develop a deeper appreciation for different cultures. The way each student described the Valentine’s Day holiday in his/her country was special and indicated certain values that were important to that country’s culture. I thought Valentine’s Day was an American holiday, but it turns out that Valentine’s Day has significant history and is celebrated in many countries. It was important to share the typical Valentine’s Day traditions in the United States, but it was also important to respect and understand the traditions that were important to each of the students. The reason we have many traditions and types of celebrations in the United States today is because of the rich cultural diversity that is present in the United States.

After discussing the Letter from Feng Yen to his Brother-in-Law, it led me to wonder what the history of gender equality has been in China. The letter exemplified many ways that men and women were not considered equal in ancient times:

• The man mentions he has several “concubines” and that was permitted, but the woman was not allowed to do the same.
• The man speaks in a vulgar tone about his wife. He is saying she is lazy I would not call a woman lazy who takes care of five children and a husband.
• The husband draws a parallel between the tyrant Jie of Xia, who is traditionally regarded as the one who caused the collapse of a dynasty.

When researching the history of gender equality in China, it was evident that the movement for gender equality in China has had many obstacles with the male-dominated Chinese society. Arranged marriages were a common custom in the Chinese culture. In China, this was a woman given to a man. Not until 1950 were women in China allowed to initiate divorce. The Chinese Marriage Law of 2001 offered mediation services and compensation for couples that suffer from domestic violence issue.

There continues to be a significant gap between males and females in the level of education. There are significantly less women who finish primary and secondary school than men. Healthcare has mostly been focused on men as well. The leading cancer for women in China is cervical cancer, which can be detected through a routine check-up.

The One-Child Policy, which was relaxed in 2015, allowed each married couple to have one child. Many married couples wanted to have a son, which stimulated an influx of sex selective abortion. Males were thought to be of greater value to a family.

Although many people think poorly of sweatshops and poor labor conditions in China, it has empowered women to be able to work in these types of roles. As of 2017, about 92% of married women were employed. Although there are still traditionally feminine jobs in China, much of this is due to the education gap that still exists.

There is a history of foot binding, trafficking, prostitution, lack of ability to own property, low participation of women in politics, and many other indications that women are not valued as highly as men in China. It is evident that gender equality is still a work in progress for women in China, although the mistreatment is not nearly as significant as in ancient times.

The source I utilized for this blog post can be accessed here.

1/30/2020

Today was the first day of my ICR experience/opportunity/volunteership. Today we went around and introduced ourselves, there was one other person from a high school around here and got a warm welcome from the class. The class worked on the quadratic formula via worksheets that the teacher, David, printed for everyone. I went around the room and assisted people who needed help. One of the biggest problems I saw was people would often separate the addition in the numerator after they evaluated the radical into two separate fractions rather than the addition and the subtraction. I tried to use a cooking analogy, but this had limited effectiveness. I look forward to the next topic the net time I volunteer here.

In my ED 227 class yesterday my class was fortunate enough to have a guest speaker who grew up in Afghanistan to speak with us about his childhood, and how society worked in Afghanistan especially regarding women and religion. He told us that when he grew up in Afghanistan women did not have really any rights to do anything besides be in the home taking care of the house, their children, and their husband. He told us that at the age of 9 years old, girls can begin to be married to much older men, always in arranged marriages. He told us that there was great disparity between men and women both in society and in their religion of Islam, but the essential argument we got from him is that women did not have any rights in Afghanistan, they were seen more as objects than women, or even people. He told us that it is extremely common to see teenage girls, even as young as 9 years old being married to men in their 30’s.

If we compare this to China we see that even though things are certainly not perfect for women in China from the examples that we’ve seen throughout our readings, they are certainly not quite like the conditions for women in Afghanistan. Yes, China does have a great deal of arranged marriages, but they are not marrying young girls to grown adult men. Chinese women are allowed to go out in public and wear clothes that they desire, but in Afghanistan women need to be accompanied by men in public and always need to be wearing their hijab in public.

The great disparity between the treatment and rights of women between China and Afghanistan is really shocking to me and I feel that sharing it on the blog will give good perspective between some of the culture differences between China and a nation in the Middle East.

Filial piety arguably plays the biggest role throughout the story of “Flame”. One of the biggest moments in the story was of the main character leaving the man that she loves, Hsu Peng, for a man that her mother wants her to marry. She is not happy with this, but she decides to go along with her mother’s plan not only because of her wishes for her to marry this man, but also because the other man would allow for her and her mother to be able to eat and in the long run to survive. So it was two fold for her decision to leave Hsu Peng, but she cites her filial duty as the main reason why she decides to leave the man that she loves and marry a man she has never met.

I would argue that something like this would never happen in the United States today or really any Western country for that matter. Sure, the duty and respect that we pay to our parents in our daily lives play a great deal. If I look at my life specifically, I hold a great deal of respect for my parents and their wishes for how I should carry out my life, and for the most part I do my very best to respect their wishes whenever I am physically possible. However, one area that I have tended not to hold my parents in high regard is when they have tried to tell me their wishes, or try to sway me in one way or another regarding my romantic life. And I would argue that most people in America would feel similar to that. The great disparity in filial piety, particularly regarding love and marriage between China and more Western cultures is fascinating to me, and it is difficult to say if one is better than the other. Simply because we have grown up and lived in a culture in which we marry for love and tend to not have marriages arranged by our parents, or even regularly accept their wishes regarding our relationships does not mean that the way China does it is worse. Couples get divorced in both countries, so one method is not fool proof or necessarily better than the other.

In these readings and in the documentary, it was obvious that women were not treated as equals to men. Like I discussed in my last post, the policy of having one child perpetuated the inequality between men and women especially in marriage. Something I have always found interesting but never learned much about was foot binding. I never knew why the tradition originated or what exactly happened to women’s feet. I found this idea intriguing because it kept a woman from being able to walk or move and would keep her oppressed. She had no escape in the most basic usage of the phrase. The tradition is thought to have originated in the 10th century by a woman who was a dancer. The size of a woman’s foot directly related to her marriage perspectives, and a three-inch foot was seen as the most desirable. Although it is easy to look at this process and assume that it was a horrible act of violence that could never happen here, it is important to look at our own beauty standards that subject women to pain. Foot binding was not unlike corsets that kept women’s waists tiny and kept them from moving around freely. It is easy to judge China and this cruel practice, but before we do, we must examine ourselves and see the inequalities that we are still perpetuating today.

Hey guys for today’s blog post I wanted to talk about the Chinese influence on the video games industry. Late last year the gaming company Blizzard received quite a bite of public backlash for the way it handled a Political statement at their October 6th Hearthstone Grand master’s tournament. The TL;DR version of the story is that the champion, @blitzchungHS had his title and prize money stripped for supporting the Hong Kong protests. For people who would like to learn more the video produce by Inside Gaming elaborates into more of the specific.

As for the reason this happened it is speculated that the companies share holder Tencent, a Chinese tech giant, had influence in the decision to ban Blitzchung and act the way that blizzard did. Gaming, especially mobile gaming for hearthstone, is a huge market in china. A point cited by the video, in order to exist in this ecosystem companies have to appease the Chinese government.

For all its faults I believe that the situation is much more convoluted than it lends itself to be through this video. Taking common business practices outside their own individual cultural contexts it has inherent value clashes between what the Chinese people think is normal and what the western world think is normal.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) has impacted the lives of many killing over 1000 victims to this day. As many believe the virus has not peaked, this virus’ impact could get much worse.

Earlier this year I applied for the Butler in Asia program. After many essays and interviews I was accepted into the Shanghai program. My group was notified about two weeks ago that there might be a change in my program as the virus may not be gone by May. Yesterday I was notified that my program was canceled due to China remaining at a Level 4 for the US State Department Travel Advisory and a Level 3 for CDC Warning. Thankfully the Center of Global Engagement was able to redirect my program to a different site (Tokyo, Japan), but I was still disappointed by this outcome (even though Tokyo will be awesome). Even though I understood fully that Butler could not personally do anything about this problem, it is sad that so many lives are effected by this new virus.

A cruise ship passenger in Asia contaminated the virus, passing it onto other ship guests. The ship was not allowed to dock in any country, stranding people for many weeks. A handful of healthy American citizens were on this ship as well, unable to come back home. As of today the American’s have been allowed off the ship and have been quarantined in a hospital. This virus has impacted everyone in a series of ways, making me question how much worse this virus will get.

This Tuesday at the IPS newcomer program, I was able to work with a different group of children, since they alternate between block A and B scheduling. This group of children was about the same in terms of diversity. I engaged in the same type of work as last week. I sat with the children and spoke to them while we all worked on our art projects.

This week I struggled a little bit more to connect with the kids because they were a little less outgoing. They also seemed to struggle with English more than the previous group. However, I have learned by volunteering at this school that actions truly do speak louder than words. One girl pointed to the Mexican flag that she had incorporated into her 3D drawing and smiled at me. This is not the first instance where I have encountered these children’s love for their home countries. I admire how passionate they are about where they came from and how they refuse to forget their roots despite starting their new lives in the United States. This sort of reminded me of After Cowboy Chicken Came to Town when the workers went on strike because of the pay disparity. They were using what they knew about their culture to try to solve an issue they felt passionate about even if it resulted in some getting fired. While I was sitting with a group, there was also one girl who had her head down the whole time and did not feel like speaking to anyone. I wanted to approach her, but decided it was better to just leave her per the teacher’s request. 

I talked to Mrs. Latta one-on-one about the nature of this community and how some students seemed more down than others. I asked her if the school had any designated “safe spaces”, and she said she was not sure if there was one that was completely finished yet. We talked about creating a sort of “safe space”/ “zen zone” for the students in a section of her art closet instead. I think this would be great for the students to have an area to just cool down or be in private with their emotions if they need a few minutes. I think this experience with some students not wanting to talk to me and putting their head down made me want to make an effort to solve the problem so I can better help the students with anything they may be struggling with, even if it is a small contribution. This experience also enhanced my sense of responsibility to others in order to help them be the best versions of themselves. I want to enhance the solid support system and environment for the kids at school.

After reading the story “Flame” by Ha Jin and briefly discussing cultural trends that affect marriage, it led me to become more curious about the differences between China and America in terms of the idea and culture of marriage.

I first examined one study, which you can learn more about here. This study included 214 college students in China and 154 college students in America. This was completed in 1999, so it is a bit dated and does not address the modernized version of marriage that exists today in America. However, some of the findings were still interesting. Overall, Chinese students expressed higher acceptance of divorce when children were involved and believed that children were necessary in marriage. More American students thought one parent should stay home with the children, but American students did not think it always had to be the woman and that women were equally entitled to a career. More Chinese students believed women had more household chores than men. However, women from both cultures believed that household chores should be split equally between spouses. Chinese students were far more interested in coming up with ways to communicate better with their spouse and were more likely to seek out premarital counseling. American students felt very strongly about parents not intervening in marriage matters, but this idea did not bother Chinese students at all (Xie, Dzindolet, & Meredith, 1999).

I then looked at a more recent study conducted in 2016. The paper first examined marriage customs. The paper was able to pinpoint specific dates and traditions that have impacted Chinese marriage customs throughout history. However, the American marriage customs were much less specific and defined. American marriage customs have adapted over time due to the diversity of the population within America. American marriage customs have been significantly influenced by many different countries; therefore, it is harder to specifically identify marriage traditions and customs from points in history. Overall, Americans place more of a value on falling in love in the grand scheme of marriage whereas Chinese see marriage as a ritual (Guo & Wang, 2016).

This paper mentioned the strong influence that Confucianism has on attitudes of marriage in Chinese culture. The family unit is seen as a pillar of social stability, so marriage became an opportunity to unite family units and for young couples to become stabilized in a social community. Husband-wife is one of the renowned Five Relationships that is taught in Confucianism (Guo & Wang, 2016).

The matter of the cultural differences and attitudes about marriage can be studied across many different cultures. There are many differences between the attitudes and customs of marriage between America and China. My research was very limited, but it is interesting to learn more about the history behind the marriage trends in each of the cultures today. The differences in the way marriage is viewed definitely affects the way a reader would respond to “Flame.”

Lei Guo, Lan Wang. Comparison Between Chinese Traditional Marriage Customs and American Marriage Customs. Humanities and Social Sciences. Vol. 4, No. 4, 2016, pp. 123-126. doi: 10.11648/j.hss.20160404.17

Xie, X., Dzindolet, M., & Meredith, W. (1999). Marriage and Family Life Attitude: Comparison of Chinese and American Students. International Journal of Sociology of the Family, 29. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/23070629?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents