Daily Archives: May 10, 2016

An Optimistic Advocate for Chinese Literature

Interview

The Harvard-Yenching Institute looks just like any of the other red brick buildings around Harvard. Except it also has two stone lions—door guardians in some Asian traditions—on either side of the path. Upon entering the building, I see a marble staircase that is pristine white, like the walls and hallway around it. The building is quiet, with only the faintest of voices coming from the Yenching Library. Each time someone walks across the tiled floor or a door opens, the sound echoes lightly in the halls. The space simultaneously feels sterile, like a hospital, and sacred, like a temple. Walking towards Professor David Der-Wei Wang’s office feels like a pilgrimage in itself.

That is, until he opens his office door somewhat frantic and apologetic because he needs another five minutes. He hasn’t had lunch yet. When he opens the door again he’s holding a container of Maruchan Cup Noodles. A sense of sympathy rises in me because he was eating ramen that many students avoid unless they have no options left. I wish I had Korean Shin Ramen to offer, a notch better.

Professor David Der-Wei Wang is the Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard and also has a joint appointment at Harvard in Comparative Literature. He is kind and welcoming, and makes me feel at home despite the earlier awkwardness about the noodles. (Professors of high esteem are human too.) His office is open and filled with natural light, which makes it a comfortable space compared to the immaculate hallways. A look around at his bookshelves gives a glimpse into his wide research interests in modern and contemporary Chinese fiction, late Qing drama, comparative literature theory, modern Taiwanese fiction, and Asian American and diasporic literature.

Wang came to the U.S. from Taiwan many years ago to pursue a M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin at Madison after completing his B.A. in Foreign Languages and Literature at the National Taiwan University. Speaking about his love of Comparative Literature, Wang told me, “I thought it was fun. In a way it is a romantic vision to be able to compare and contrast and learn text from various cultural, national, and even continental resources.” His training in foreign literature and cultures laid the foundation for his future work and led him to realize that he couldn’t study Chinese literature independent of world literature. He says, “…[I] actually couldn’t do justice to studying Chinese literature without referring to world literature, because by nature, modern Chinese literature would be nothing without world literature.” He explains that the modern Chinese novel only came into being after the introduction of the European novel, which argues for the inherently Anglo-European nature of the discipline.

Wang is a lively conversationalist. Our discussion covers authors such as Mo Yan, one of the most prominent contemporary writers in China today. We talk about the literature and politics of his 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature and what that means for Chinese writers. We also discuss a Boston local and one of his good friends, the Boston University professor Ha Jin, who is currently exiled from China despite being a popular author on the mainland. We discuss the “Chinese-ness” of the Chinese-French émigré Gao Xinjian, currently based in Paris. Gao won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000, but is mostly unknown in Mainland China due to ideological differences with the government. Speaking of these authors, Wang discusses the role of politics in literature, going beyond politics to note the continuing power of literature through today’s new forms, such as the internet novel.

Wang asks students of literature to look at literature beyond its established genre borders and in terms of its future potential. Unlike other China scholars I am aware of, he is optimistic about the role of literature in China despite the prevalent censorship, and I must say his optimism is contagious. Returning to the interplay of Chinese politics and Chinese literature at the end of our interview, he says, “Politics is a lively and even somewhat literary pursuit….” He calls the Chinese Dream—a Chinese version of the “American Dream”—mere poetic propaganda and considers censorship as just political literary analysis. The government can use literary elements and the people can use them as they wish as well. It’s fascinating to see where literature has been in the crossroads of the world and the national and in Western and Eastern perspectives. In the end, Wang tells us to “use our imagination” to define where it will go in the future.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Victoria Yu (VY): Speaking of the difference of Western and Chinese notions of world literature, while reading world lit, I feel that its performance. You have to portray a particular image of this country’s life and culture for it to be processed by the rest of the world because the ones choosing what goes into world is still coming from an Anglo-European lens.

Professor David Der-Wei Wang (DW): It’s all too true because comparative literature as a field originated with a continental approach to “literature”. Even literature as a discipline emerged in the 18th century aesthetics with Schindler and Goethe. Secondly, you talk about the uneven development of world lit, inevitable, the orient, Asia, or any say, culture or nation of the second or third world will inevitable have to succumb to the paradigm to world literature with the world – first and foremost – based in continental Europe. That’s something literary critics of the past twenty-some years have tried very hard to take issue with.

Edward Said talked about Orientalism. Either orientalism is projecting the image/vision of the orient or self-orientalizaiton. China is not the only case of one that has to subject itself to tokenism. People have been criticizing tokenism for a very long time. You recognize it, now how do you overcome this fixation od and obsession with certain tokens such China has to have only one Lu Xun and Japan has to have one Kawabata Yasunari. So that’s one way of critiquing it. Fredric Jameson of Duke University, a famous Marxist theoretician, wrote about nations developing their national literature around the notion of national allegory. Jameson meant to be supportive to third world countries, but when he claimed that third world countries could only develop in national allegories, he inevitable worked himself into a corner.

Why can’t we develop our own modernist writing? Why can’t we develop some kind of writing Western writers even cannot imagine, even cannot allegorize, even cannot decipher what we are up to. “National” and “allegory” are both very Western terms. “Nation” was first conceived by Westerners and solidified by Westerners. “Allegory” is biblical and religious. I found it very questionable. So back to the issue of tokenism and it is still an issue of debate. It can work for someone or country’s interest. But sometimes it can be bad.

VY: On the topic of tokenism, I remember when Mo Yan won the 2012 Nobel Literature Prize. Activists blamed him for not advocating for the release of Liu Xiaobo and some literary critics were saying his writing wasn’t good enough.

DW: Mo Yan has been under so much pressure that he couldn’t produce anything new after 2012. That kind of tokenism was imposed upon him by foreign media and domestic expectations. It fits self-orientalization and self-exotification. However, I never understood why the Chinese were so eager about the Nobel. I bet 99% of the Chinese population has never read Mo Yan or even heard of him before 2012. I don’t believe Xi Da Da has ever any of his books.

VY: I remember suddenly his books were in every bookshop and even my mother was gifted a whole set of Mo Yan’s works, so now I have everything at home.

DW: In a way, I feel pleased – better than not winning the award. Chinese pride is being sort of being satisfied and Mo Yan did deserve international recognition. Literature still enjoys some kind of mysterious prestige in China, which is not bad although people don’t read about it. But people want to imagine how great literature really is. That’s a kind of tokenism. That’s what I mean about the proactive sense. The image of literature is really sacrosanct.

VY: So another thing I’ve been thinking about with the Nobel Prize is how literature is China’s push in recent years of the Chinese Dream, how the government has branded Mo Yan as the “First Chinese Nobel Literature Prize Winner” when there was Gao Xinjian before him in the year 2000.

DW: Gao Xinjian is definitely a Chinese writer. He wrote in Chinese. He’s still writing in Chinese. But for one thing, he didn’t and doesn’t agree with the Chinese government agenda. He was stigmatized primarily because of ideology. Literature is never that clean.

VY: I didn’t even know Gao Xinjian existed until I did an independent study to figure out the whole politics behind the Nobel 2012 situation.

DW: Exactly. I remembered Chinese media, backed by the government, came out to say when Gao Xinjian won in 2000 that the Nobel Prize was the most disgusting kind of award to the people of China. This is an award first established by European “Capitalists” and enterprises. And then in 2012, you read the Foreign Ministry’s announcement after Mo Yan’s winning of the Nobel Prize. This time, the Chinese government was thrilled. Either is extreme. If you really are confident in the power of your country, you don’t really bother about either praises or condemnations.

So to go back to where I was, literature was suddenly put on the spot. That’s great. It becomes something for contestation, for debate – better than nothing.

VY: Right. We briefly mentioned Ha Jin in the beginning and I sometimes feel that there aren’t a lot of writer that are who emigrated out of China that are well known. I can only think of Ha Jin and Yan Geling.

DW: Ha Jin, particularly, as an Anglophone writer, is the one and only Chinese writer who could really make it into the arena of English writing in the United States. 99% of his work touches upon political issues but definitely not radical. But Ha Jin is still denied entry visa back to China for political reasons. Which is really ridiculous because on one hand, the People’s Literature featured him.

VY: I remember growing up reading some of his work.

DW: Yeah. The People’s Literature chief was just here not long ago. When he was here, the delegation really wanted to meet Ha Jin. Isn’t it funny that People’s Literature, as the number one national literary magazine, took the trouble to come here and meet with Ha Jin while another ministry, the Foreign Ministry, said, we don’t really want to let him in. It’s totally self-contradictory and it’s very sad for Ha Jin that even when his mother was dying the US Department of State, even the senators of both Massachusetts and DC sort of petitioned on his behalf, but no he shouldn’t be allowed to go back to China.

Is China penalizing a writer or is China penalizing itself? It’s really stupid, and bad, and negative image. They knew he was famous and that he wasn’t that harmful to 和谐社会 (harmonious society) and he somehow has been “harmonized”. So to be a writer, this is the other side of the story. It’s not easy.

Mo Yan has come a long way because he wants to be creative and independent. On the other hand, he wants to sell his books in China. And now he’s been made the Vice-Chair of the Writer’s association. Foreign media immediately came out and called him a sell-out. I’m very sympathetic to Mo Yan. It’s definitely easier to stay away in a foreign country than it is to find the line to balance censorship, knowing the history, and what the government can do. Indeed, while we celebrate Mo Yan, we don’t want to forget about Liu Xiaobo as you mentioned. Which is also a peculiar case of politics.

As someone who works in the field of Comparative Literature, I really want to address the multilayered contexts. It seems the government is afraid of literature. What does Liu Xiaobo have? And the Chinese Dream as you pointed out, it’s a very literary concept. The national leader is using literary rhetoric for national propaganda. Why not? But on the other hand, Mo Yan is a very intriguing story. So I have enormous respect for him. I was back in China last summer. Life for him really hasn’t been that great for him while trying to represent the country.

VY: It is a very hard country to represent.

DW: But as a literature student, you don’t want simplify questions like the questions you are raising. Instead, I think our capacity is to make everything as messy as possible. That’s our duty. We always think different kinds of thoughts. We somehow just think in multiple threads, which we should take pride of.

VY: What are ways for us make it more public knowledge so people can think about literature and the people that are representing it in a more comprehensive way?

DW: Well in China all writers are complaining about book sales going down. It’s never easy to be a writer, but believe me, it is easy to be a writer in China if you have a membership to a writers’ association. Because you have a minimum salary, you have all these social welfare benefits – not here. Here, you’re on your own. But I was trying to be sarcastic.

It is definitely more difficult to be a writer in China because to write is to seek freedom, to project yourself into the world of the imagination. However, you also have equally imaginative censors, who read between the lines and know your intent. So in that sense, when you talk about the politics of literature, I would say that’s a part of Chinese cultural history, but each period has its own way of policing literature. And each period has its own way of liberating the power of literature. You really learn how to appreciate the power – this is the perfect way to end, actually.

Literature is going strong. Just imagine how many people are creating internet novels? Just think about how many people are writing these Weibo blogs and Weixin micro-blogs, and taking on weird personas. Language has never been so active. So don’t confine yourself to the four genres of the stupid, narrow definition of literature. With Internet culture, everything has become possible. So I think the Chinese people try to have the mediation of literature through 文 (literature-ness) or even upbringing. So now, we’re at the other side of the story in virtual space. There is the ability to manifest.

VY: That’s good to hear because a lot of people I speak to whom study China have very negative views of Chinese censorship and the Internet.

DW: We can address that part but I’d rather address the liberating power of literature. Because we know the oppressive part, we know it too well. When we talk about China, we talk about it in such a socialist, communist country of totalitarianism da da da. But as a literature promoter here, when I speak on behalf of China given the fact that I actually come from Taiwan, I really don’t buy the ideological thing of China. But I think there must be an alternative way to address the issue – much more polemic and interesting.

VY: Well thank you so much and as a student of literature and international relations, I feel much more balanced.

DW: No problem, and again, politics is a lively and even somewhat literary pursuit as well. Use you imagination.

 

 

The Most Honorable Gesture

Interview

An interview with Renata Rivkin Haag, Coordinator of Wellesley College’s English Language Resource Center

Renata Rivkin Haag and I met on a Monday night in a small, plain study room on the fourth floor of Wellesley College’s Clapp Library.  Amid the dull hum of library air conditioning, she told me she’d just come from soccer practice.  (Whose soccer practice was unclear—with Renata in sneakers and sweats, and with her curly hair pulled back in a ponytail, it could have been her children’s or her own.)  Under normal circumstances we might have run into each other downstairs, in the more elegant Sanger Room, where Renata works as the coordinator of Wellesley’s English Language Resource Center (ELRC), an offshoot of the Pforzheimer Learning and Teaching Center, focused on English language teaching.

Renata spoke to me about her work as an English teacher, both in the ELRC and at the Showa Boston Institute for Language and Culture, a Japanese women’s college in Jamaica Plain.  Renata’s teaching method, she says, is very “intuitive.”  She teaches pronunciation, for instance, by paying attention to her own speech, and telling her students to pay attention to theirs.  In telling me about this more technical side of her work, Renata revealed her personal teaching philosophy.  She’s committed to developing a good relationship with her students, based on understanding and reciprocity.  “Even if it’s just basic,” she says, “taking the time to learn something from another culture shows a lot of respect.  When you say hello to someone in their own language, people get so excited.  Even if you don’t know anything about it, you’re saying, ‘I’m open to learning about your culture.’  Meaning, ‘I’m open to learning about you.’  It’s one of the most honorable gestures.”

Renata feels conflicted about the use of English as a lingua franca.  When non-native speakers use English to communicate with each other, she says, there is a loss of cross-cultural understanding.  She gives the example of a business contract between a German speaker and a Chinese speaker, both of whom are using English: “The Chinese person hasn’t learned that Germans start almost every negotiation by saying ‘no.’  They’re not really saying ‘no’; they’re saying, ‘Convince me why I should say yes.’  Even though these negotiators are saying words everyone theoretically understands, they don’t have the same meaning.”  In other words, even if there’s no lexical miscommunication, cultural understanding—a key component of the negotiation—gets lost in translation.

For Renata, the issue is more than purely theoretical. She’s familiar with it from personal experience.  After studying Spanish in high school and college, Renata moved to Germany to teach English, where “for the first time in my life I was illiterate.  I realized that this is what a person experiences if they’re learning English when they come to the States for the first time.  So when I teach, it’s something I carry with me.”  These experiences include the kind of linguistic mishaps that elicit empathy for one’s students.  Renata frequently shares stories of her own howlers in the classroom.  One memorable exchange occurred during her time in Germany, where she and her husband lived on the fifth floor of an apartment building: “I came down to get something from my father-in-law and went to run back up the stairs.  He asked me, ‘Why aren’t you using the elevator?’  I said, ‘Oh, this is good for your butt muscles; I want to make my muscles tighter.’  But what I said in German was, ‘I want to make my butt tighter.’  Which doesn’t refer to your muscles, but rather is something that gay men say…  Later a gay male friend heard me say this and said, ‘No, no, don’t say that, sweetie.’”  A mistake, Renata says, she hasn’t made since.

It’s clear that for Renata, foreign language teaching goes beyond checking grammar and pronunciation.  Genuinely connecting with her students is what makes all the difference.  In other words:  to err is human.  To teach a foreign language is to make your errors useful.

 

Edited Transcript

Emma Stelter:  I’d like to ask you first about the English Language Resource Center.  When you’re working in the ELRC, what kind of problems do people come in with, and how do you address them?  What are some of the techniques you use to help them out?

Renata Rivkin Haag:  I would say 85% is going over papers and editing with students.  A smaller percentage of students want help with pronunciation or building their vocabulary, and in that case we just speak.  When I hear a sound that they’re making incorrectly, it’s just really helping them to get the position of their tongue and teeth right.  I have students put their hands on their throat, to feel the vibrations or to hear where the sound is coming from.

ES:  It sounds very technical.

RR:  There’s a lot of technical things about it—there are many technical things people do—but for me it’s actually more intuitive.  You can teach it more naturally if you listen to how you speak.

ES:  In that intuitive teaching style, are there certain things that are more challenging to explain?

RR:  Spelling makes no sense whatsoever.  Explaining spelling rules…you need not do it.  There’s also a lot of spoken English, a lot of idioms and expressions.  Like, “I’m going to follow up with you tomorrow.”  It’s hard to explain why it’s “follow-up with you” and not “follow through with you,” or “follow with you”…  Grammar rules are easier to explain.  There’s a concrete rule; either the student gets it or they don’t.  If they don’t get it, it’s a nice challenge for me to figure out a way for them to get it and to remember how to use it.

ES:  Are these the same kinds of things you do at Showa?

RR:  Yes.  At Showa I use the same tools, except I work with only Japanese speakers, which is more challenging, because then they rely on speaking their native language in class for understanding and clarification.  When they don’t understand me they just ask the person next to them.  Whereas when you’re in a mixed group, the person next to you may not speak your language.  Then even if you’re asking a student, you have to rely on an English explanation.

ES:  Obviously teaching in front of a classroom and working one-on-one with students are different regardless of subject matter, but in general, do you find that there’s a lot of cultural exchange between you and your students?

RR:  Absolutely.  So, I’ll talk about Showa first.  When I’m teaching students from all the same background, I might ask something like, “How would you say this in Japanese?”  When you understand that there’s no male or female pronouns in Japanese, you understand why when Japanese students speak English, they often mix up “he” and “she.”  I can ask my students to teach me words in Japanese, and I mess those words up a million times.  I tell them a story about when I were traveling, or about when I learned another language and how I made mistakes.  They tell me stories about how they made mistakes in their English classes, and it really opens up a dialogue.

ES:  Would you say giving examples of your linguistic mishaps to your students facilitates teaching?

RR:  Yes.  It builds trust.  When I tell them about how I made mistakes, they know it’s safe for them to make a mistake.  I’m not gonna yell at them.  They’re not gonna get a bad grade.

ES:  How are things different in the ELRC?

RR:  I really like the ELRC because it’s one-on-one.  Even if I’m correcting someone’s basic grammar mistakes, here students’ speaking and understanding is often at a much higher level, and that’s really nice.  After my session ends, I can talk with them about their culture, where they’re from, why they came to Wellesley…  You build a relationship a lot faster, because here you’re working very closely with the students and judging their work.  Students may not internalize it so much, but when you ask somebody to read your paper, in essence you’re exposing your weakness, which might be, “My English is not the greatest,” or “my ideas are not the greatest.”  It’s a very interesting, powerful kind of bond, even if you never see them again.

ES:  Can you speak a little bit about your own language learning and how it has influenced your teaching?

RR:  Well, I spent four years in high school attempting to learn Spanish, and another two years in college re-learning what I hadn’t learned.  But then I moved to San Diego, where I was close to Tijuana.  There you often have a need and, in my case, a desire to speak Spanish with people in the community.  Then I moved to Germany, and for the first time in my life I was illiterate.  That was a very important experience for my teaching.  I realized that this is what a person experiences if they’re learning English when they come to the States for the first time.  I had this fear of being misunderstood or that people would presume I was dumb because I couldn’t speak the language.  So when I teach, it’s something I carry with me.  I tell my students the most embarrassing mistakes I’ve made speaking other languages, and we laugh, because they’re funny stories.  But—again with the trust—it’s good to know that your teacher also made mistakes while learning a language.

ES:  Could you share one of the stories that you tell your students?  If you’re willing, that is.

RR:  Well, they’re not that embarrassing.  So, here’s one I tell my students.  I went down to Mexico with two friends who were fluent in Spanish—I wasn’t.  We stayed with this family who lived in a small village.  There was a mother, a father, two little kids, and some chickens that would run in and out the door.  I can’t remember what I did, but I told the mother, “Soy embarazada, lo siento, soy embarazada.  I’m really sorry; I’m so embarrassed.” And the woman’s just looking me like, “No.  No, no, no, no, no.”  My friend Eric comes in the door and hears part of this conversation, and says, “Renata, you just told her you’re pregnant.”  Now I’m really embarrassed.  But now I’ll never say “soy embarazada” again, unless I really am.  In Germany, I made a slightly different mistake.  We lived on the fifth floor of an apartment building with an elevator.  I came down to get something from my father-in-law and went to run back up the stairs.  He asked me, “Why aren’t you using the elevator?”  And I said, “Oh, this is good for your butt muscles; I want to make my muscles tighter.”  But what I said in German was, “I want to make my butt tighter.”  Which doesn’t refer to your muscles, but rather is something that gay men say…  Later a gay male friend heard me say this and said, “No, no, don’t say that, sweetie.”  I was like, “Oh my God, I just said that to my father-in-law last week; I am so embarrassed.”  But I did not say “soy embarazada.”

ES:  Slightly broader topic.  What are your thoughts about foreign language education for native speakers of English in the US?

RR:  I personally think learning a second language, no matter who you are or where you are, is very important.  One, it’s important for just communicating with other people.  Two, you never learn another language without learning about the culture too, even if you’re just in a classroom.  Three, learning another language helps you understand your own language.  I never understood English—the grammar—as well as I did until I started learning German.  You really start to think about language and how it’s used.  But I really think that even if it’s just basic, taking the time to learn something from another culture shows a lot of respect.  When you say hello to someone in their own language, people get so excited.  Even if you don’t know anything about it, you’re saying, “I’m open to learning about your culture.”  Meaning, “I’m open to learning about you.”  It’s one of the most honorable gestures.  I think Americans are at a great disadvantage as a society.  Yes, there are many Americans who speak a second language, but there are so many who don’t speak more than one language, or if they do learn a language they start in ninth grade versus starting in first grade.  To wait that long is a disservice.

ES:  Thinking about learning another language as a gesture of respect, do you feel that the fact that the predominance of American English in particular might be a problem in global interactions?

RR:  So…yes, it does.  Here’s an example:  I’ve worked with Germans, teaching them English, so they can go to China and communicate with Chinese people…who had to be taught English.  So now you have two non-native speakers, negotiating contracts in a language that is not their first.  There are different power dynamics if one person has better control over the language than the other, but overall there are all sorts of miscommunication.  Just the style of the word “no,” for instance.  Having learned English and not German, the Chinese person hasn’t learned that Germans start almost every negotiation by saying “no.”  They’re not really saying “no”; they’re really saying, “Convince me why I should say yes.”  And when the German is learning English, they’re not learning the culture of the Chinese speaker.  Everyone is speaking through an English lens.  So even though these negotiators are saying words everyone theoretically understands, they don’t have the same meaning.

ES:  There’s kind of a degree of separation.

RR:  Exactly.  At least if the German person learns Chinese and speaks it poorly, and the Chinese person learns German and speaks it poorly, they’re learning each other’s cultures.  I mean, I get it; you can’t learn every language.  You need some kind of lingua franca.  You do lose something, but it is a smaller world and you have to make compromises.

ES:  I have one last question.  What do you enjoy most about your work?

RR:  Hands down, I enjoy the people.  I would love to go to every single country in the entire world, and that is not possible.  Teaching English is the one job where people of the world come to me.  Especially here at Wellesley, I meet people from all walks of life, from all age groups, cultures, social backgrounds…I get to meet them and talk to them.  It’s the most amazing job.  I wouldn’t change it for the world.

“A Dialect with an Army and a Navy”

Interview

Interview with Suzanne Flynn, Professor of Foreign Languages and Linguistics, MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy

On the eighth floor of MIT’s Stata Center—structurally beautiful but difficult to navigate—sits the university’s department of linguistics. This is one of MIT’s most famous and prolific departments; its professors and researchers study a variety of different topics related to language. The eighth floor was fascinating: when I stepped off the elevator, an assistant asked me if I was looking for “the room” wherein, apparently, there was a study on native Portuguese speakers taking place.

Down the hall from “the room” is Professor Suzanne Flynn’s office. Her research focuses on bilingualism and second language acquisition in children and adults. I sat down with her on a sunny April afternoon to talk about bilingualism, language acquisition, language education, and the political factors that influence them.

As we talked about our common experiences with multilingualism and our shared interest in the political factors that influence language, it became clear that Flynn is deeply excited by these topics and is very passionate about her research into it. She told me, “I’ve always been driven by bilingualism and trying to understand how it is that someone has multiple languages in their head.” Indeed, she has studied bilingualism in depth: how it works, how we become bilingual (i.e. what factors in the school, home, or culture lead to bilingualism), and how it affects the process of learning more languages.

Flynn did not start as an academic. She came to the topics of bilingualism and language acquisition by teaching in a bilingual Spanish-English program in Puerto Rico and later, in the Boston public school system. After this teaching experience, she went on to get her masters in linguistics at Cornell, with a focus on second-language acquisition. Since then, the scope of her research has expanded and changed, just as the theory of linguistics itself has.

Beyond bilingual Spanish and English speakers in the United States, Flynn has studied people who speak somewhat rare languages, like Kazakh. She has worked with people who speak at different levels (i.e. native speakers, second language learners, and beginners). She has studied people who have learned their second or third language in an assortment of different contexts—for example simultaneous Spanish-English bilinguals in the United States, native Chinese speakers learning English in the United States, and Kazakh speakers learning Russian in school.

Flynn also elaborated on the political factors that drive language education—like policy, ideology, and national identity. Obviously, language acquisition does not happen in a vacuum—who learns what language where is deeply influenced by political factors. Flynn is clearly well versed in these factors and how they affect the way in which we talk about language. She quotes the sociolinguists’ adage that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” That is to say, languages have more political clout than dialects. Flynn gave the example of China—where the country’s languages are called dialects even if they are structurally very different, because it is important that the country be politically unified rather than divided by different languages. It is clear that the way that we talk about language, and even the way that we learn and understand it, is driven by political factors. Flynn is conscious of these factors, especially the way in which they influence schools and language education. She has worked extensively with Spanish-English bilingual schools in the United States and understands how policy and American national identity have influenced these.

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Professor Suzanne Flynn (SF): I started out as a bilingual teacher—Spanish-English—in Puerto Rico. I came to Boston and taught at Boston High School in the bilingual system; I taught English and Social Studies to Spanish speakers. I’ve always been driven by bilingualism and trying to understand how it is that someone has multiple languages in their head. I went to graduate school at Cornell and got a PhD in linguistics—my area of study was adult second language acquisition. I was trying to understand if there is a critical period for language acquisition—if beyond age twelve you aren’t really able to learn a new language.

At that time, the theory of linguistics was changing a lot. We were moving from a descriptive approach to language another that is represented by Chomsky, here [at MIT]—a more genitive approach that talks about language faculties and the uniqueness of language. I used that as the basis of my research in second language acquisition with adults. I also used complex syntax in very controlled studies—looking at comprehension and production in multiple languages.

The original languages that I looked at were controlled for level of proficiency were Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese. We were looking at adults learning English as a second language—the whole range, from beginners to advanced speakers. That has expanded, so now the language groups that I’ve looked at have expanded. And I’ve also moved on to look at children too, to compare children who were simultaneous bilinguals to children who were learning English as a second language seeing if, beyond the age of ten or twelve, they looked like adult speakers. What you find is that their patterns of development, of syntax, are the same—controlling for the first language.

Now I’m looking at third language acquisition. So we started out by looking at Kazakh speakers who learned Russian, who learned English… Some of them were simultaneous learners of Kazakh and Russian, we controlled for that. Basically, we were looking at Kazakh speakers in Kazakhstan who had learned Kazakh in the home. At that time—though it’s changed now—they learned Russian in the schools, because they were only taught in Russian. Then they learned English. Then we also looked at—because things had changed over time—children who were simultaneous Kazakh and Russian learning English as well, so who were learning English as a second language. So, though there are some different patterns, the general patterns of development are the same.

Now, what we’re trying to tease apart is interference from the first language. We’re trying to see what role other languages play in subsequent acquisition when you’re doing it sequentially. We have found that they can only help you. There is a traditional belief that they interfere, but they really don’t.

Alessandra Saluti (SF): So if I speak English and I’m trying to learn a second language, English can only help me?

SF: Yes, depending on the language’s properties. So we looked at Kazakh, which is an SOV language (subject object verb). Japanese, for example, is also a subject object verb language. If you compare Japanese speakers to Spanish speakers learning English, they both eventually acquire the language, but Spanish [is an] SVO (subject verb object), like Italian and French. And English [is an SVO language] too—though it used to be SOV because of its Germanic roots. And German used to be more SOV, but English switched—because it’s both a Germanic and a Romance language. English changed before Shakespeare. At that time people were trying to make English more like Latin, so you could have double negatives and triple negatives. Even though some Romance languages allow double negatives, they were trying to make English change. And [it also] became more of a written language, and literacy rates were increasing—these things helped.

So, anyway, if you look at Japanese speakers learning English, their patterns of development for the particular kinds of things I was looking at, look a lot like young children learning English.

But if you look at Spanish speakers learning English, controlling for the same properties, it looks like that they’ve been given sort of a boost. This is controlling for levels of proficiency, knowledge of the lexicon and the stimulus sentences, so there is no way that you can explain the differences in patterns other than by the differences in the properties of the language.

So when Kazakh speakers (which is an SOV language) learn Russian (which is an SVO language) their patterns of acquisition look like those of Japanese speakers learning English. But then when you look at Kazakh and Russian speakers learning English as a third language, their patterns of acquisition look like, say, Spanish speakers learning English. Some of the properties that they have represented in their brain with respect to Russian enhance their acquisition of English. This shows that what you know [in terms of language] you can use in subsequent acquisitions and your first language does not drive everything.
AS: Even if you’re switching from an SVO language to an SOV language?
SF: If you’re switching from an SOV to an SVO you’re going to have to establish most of these “branching” properties anew, like a young child.

AS: What about learning a language in school versus the home? This is the case for a lot of Spanish-speaking kids in the United States. The level of Spanish that they speak at home sometimes surpasses the level of Spanish they learn in school—unless they are enrolled in a bilingual program. So, let’s say they are fluent in the home, but at school they are taught English and outside of the home they speak English. What is the effect of that?

SF: We are actually just starting a project on that. People tend to treat them as a homogenous group, and they’re not—it all depends on how much of their first language they got in the home, when they switched, etc. What we are finding is that the lexicons differ. This is true for Spanish-speaking children in the U.S, Chinese-speaking children in the U.S… Turkish speakers in Germany… it all really depends on how much language exposure they got. But what they find with bilinguals in general, whether it’s heritage learners or not, the difference is in the lexicon. Each individual is not exposed to the exact same environments so that they know the same items in each language. So when you talk about bilingual deficits—it’s not a deficit, it’s that people learn different registers. That’s also true of dialect speakers in the U.S. So it’s a lot of things… it’s lexicon, it’s registers, but it’s not the basic language structures.

AS: Are dialects considered to be different languages?

SF: Well, Chomsky makes the claim that there is really only one human language, and that everything exists on a continuum. So he would say that one’s ability to speak another dialect is basically the same thing that underlies ones ability to speak different languages. It’s just that some dialects are closer to the home language than others.

So, for example, what they call dialects in China are really separate languages. In other places what they call language differences are really just dialect differences. So it’s a political construct: “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” China calls them dialects because they’re united more by a common system of writing, but many of them are structurally very different.

AS: And that’s political too. That’s one thing I’m interested in: for example how the education reforms of the Third Republic affected the dialects in France… the decrease of the dialects in France. Versus in Italy, the education reform [was not so strict]

SF: It’s very interesting to look at the history of these things. It’s the same in Spain. There are all these different languages: Catalan is different from Galician. But all of this is politically motivated. For example, the U.S. was very much a multilingual nation up until the late 1800s, and then with the “new” immigrants coming in—Italians, Irish, Greeks, all these different groups, coupled with Chinese speakers, posed a “threat.” Also, during WWI and WWII, it became somewhat un-American to speak these languages. But prior to this time, there were public schools and religious schools that were supported using public funds, where the language of instruction was not necessarily English.

AS: I also want to talk about the history of bilingual education in schools and why it’s underfunded in the United States. How much of that is political?

SF: Actually, the U.S. in some sense is more of a model these days for other countries. I used to think it was the other way around. But it’s only true the other way around with historical distinct language groups, like the Sami in Norway. But other countries are now looking to the U.S. to try to understand their waves of new immigrants.

So in the U.S. there was a lot of public funding up until the turn of the century, and a lot of religious schools. After WWII, all of that pretty much went underground. But then with the Cuban Missile Crisis in the 1960s, we had Spanish speakers coming to Florida. They were very wealthy for the most part. They wanted to maintain bilingualism, so in Coral Gables, Florida, the public school set up this two-way immersion language program. Spanish speakers were learning English, English speakers were learning Spanish. This program was a great success, and other schools wanted to replicate it.

At this time, the Civil Rights Act was passed, and there was a case where a group of parents in Chinatown in San Francisco sued the U.S. government because their children were being denied educational services. They successfully won the suit. So after that, in all school districts in the U.S. you had to—if there were more than X number of students in a language—provide services. But that meant that, since it was mandated by the federal government, that they had to take care of everybody’s needs. So the Coral Gables program became eviscerated.

Recently, there was an act in California, Colorado, and Massachusetts that said that you could only stay in a bilingual program for two years. It’s horrible because two years is not enough. Massachusetts has tried to get around a lot of that—what they have now are a lot of independent programs within the public school systems. But there is a lot of battle in Cambridge about these programs because they feel that it is not serving everyone—they feel that it’s only serving those who are on the other end of the SES scale.

AS: It’s interesting how the socioeconomic factor plays into it. Do you think that in towns where there is generally a higher level of income, there are more bilingual programs?

SF: The school systems run on the taxes of the town, so in towns that have more resources, they will be more likely to have these kinds of programs. There are a lot of these Saturday or Sunday schools where people from different immigrant communities can come to maintain their first language or the language of their parents—there is one for the Polish community here in Boston for example.

What I am seeing now, with these bilingual programs, is that even the second generation, a lot of the students want to reclaim their language. This is also because being multilingual is now considered to be more valuable. We have the heritage learners program here [at MIT] for Spanish, for Chinese, they’re trying to start one for Korean, there’s one for Arabic, Russian is being started up again. Students want to learn those languages again. Students want to get beyond what they had as a home language—because there’s only so much you can do in the home. […]

Literacy helps a lot—parents always ask me how they can help maintain their children’s language skills. I always tell them to read to their kids at night in the home language. That makes a very big difference because if you can become literate, you can self-teach in some sense.

AS: If you only become literate in your 20s, let’s say, is there a strong difference between you and people who became literate earlier on?

SF: To learn to write in any language—especially if you’re using the same kind of alphabet—helps. But you can also take a child who has been literate in English their whole lives…literacy doesn’t mean they can write well, because they’re being reinforced for things other than writing when they were growing up. That’s why MIT is constantly upping the ante in terms of writing requirements! […]

Learning the conventions of writing in any language, there are ranges for anyone—native speaker or not. Controlling of writing has to with controlling of register, of conventions. This is true for any language.

AS: Is there a big difference if you’re learning a new alphabet?

SF: There’s lots of variation in skills, but the earlier the better for learning a new alphabet. It still takes a child up to 12 years to learn the phrenology and everything associated with their first language. Adults want to do it within one year—they want to sound fluent. Your accent is not an indication of your fluency, but in terms of accents, the earlier the better… but people can still get rid of accents.

AS: Is this whole age cutoff thing just a myth?

SF: There’s nothing in the brain that happens around age 12. People often learn new languages as adults. If you consider the fact that there really is only one computational process in the brain that allows for human language [like Chomsky says], a child is born being able to learn any language. So if you take some piece of that or believe that, which I happen to, it’s not that big a deal to learn a new language.

 

 

 

 

 

A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma

Interview

An Interview with Elizabeth Brainerd, Professor of Economics at Brandeis University

Elizabeth Brainerd’s office is located directly off the busiest hallway in the International Business School at Brandeis University. Although a buzz of student voices leaks around the corners of the closed door, Brainerd’s quiet, serene voice easily dominates the space as she describes her research and voices her concerns about the future of Russian-American relations. Russia experts are rare in academia, and becoming even rarer as Russian studies shrinks in favor of scholarship about China and the Middle East. Economists who focus on Russia are even more scarce. The prestigious Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian studies at Harvard University (of which Brainerd is a member) lists only about 10% of the participating faculty as economists.

As the only Russian Area Studies major in my class at college, I was particularly interested in Brainerd’s decision to pursue this niche topic within economics. Although she had no familial connection to Russia, Brainerd explained that as a child, she was fascinated by what life might be like on the other side of a curtain, which in her imagination was actually constructed of iron and divided West and East. She signed up for introductory Russian during her first semester at Bowdoin College and went on to pursue a double major in Russian and Economics. After graduation, she lived in Moscow before returning to the United States to pursue her Ph.D. Several years later, in 1992, the Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, who was advising President Boris Yeltsin about post-communist economic reforms, gave Brainerd the opportunity to travel back to Russia; there she collected Russian data that became the basis for her dissertation.

Brainerd’s work today spans a vast range of topics, but many of her projects revolve around women in Russia. Brainerd believes that conditions for women have improved in Russia lately, but also notes that despite the Soviet Union’s effort to improve women’s education, gender discrimination in Russia is still much more prevalent than it is in the United States. She cites the low numbers of women in high-ranking roles in business and government, as well as the large percentage of women who still stay home to cook and clean. Her channels of investigation into women’s lives in Russia range from divorce rates in pre-revolutionary Russia to unbalanced sex ratios resulting from sex-selective abortion in the Caucasus. Even when she discusses some of the most surprising results from her research, her tone is that of someone who is accustomed to being surprised. She speaks about Russia as endlessly fascinating, “There’s always something that’s unusual and that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere else.”

Brainerd speaks matter-of-factly about her pessimism regarding America’s relationship with Russia. She laughs quietly as she mentions that her husband’s prediction of President Vladimir Putin’s assassination has failed to come true for the last ten years. Brainerd comments on the apparent lack of Russian dissatisfaction with the current system of governance, but does not attempt to explain it. She is an economist, and this is not her area of expertise, but even sociologists and political theorists sometimes struggle to understand the ideology of the Russian people. Brainerd, like all the best Russia experts, seems to have accepted that even when one thinks one knows Russia well, some things will always remain mysterious and unexplained.

Clio Flikkema: I understand that you double-majored in economics and Russian. I was hoping you could start by telling me a little bit about what lead you to two such different fields of study as an undergraduate.

Elizabeth Brainerd: When I got to college I was taking lots of intro courses. I took intro to economics because it fit into my schedule, and it turned out it had a really great teacher, Peter Gottschalk, who is now at Boston College. It was inspiring and I found the economic way of thinking appealing. It was also challenging, it was harder for me than what I thought I would major in, which was politics or history, which came to me more easily. I actually liked the challenge of economics, so that was not that difficult a decision. Russian…I’d always been interested in Russia, I don’t know why, I don’t have family from Russia. I think it was because when I was a little kid, I thought that the iron curtain was real. I thought there was really a true, literal iron curtain that divided east and west, and I thought it was really fascinating what it might be like to live on the other side of the iron curtain. In college, I needed a fourth class, and very much randomly, I took russian and had a really great teacher. I ended up majoring in Russian, and then I went to live in Russia after I graduated. I worked there, this was 1986 when it was still the Soviet Union, as tutor for a deaf American boy. I was actually living in a Russian apartment in Moscow, it was pretty unusual.

CF: Has learning the Russian language influenced your decisions about your area of research?

EB: Oh, absolutely. Knowing Russian has been critical to what I have done.  When I went to get my Ph.D. in economics, I actually didn’t intend to study Russia, but I started my Ph.D. in 1991, and then in 1992 Jeff Sachs went to Russia, famously, to advise the government. The way he operated at the time was to take a bunch of graduate students with him to be on the ground and be his eyes and ears. He convinced me to take a year off from my Ph.D. program and work for him in Moscow, and the only reason he did that was because I spoke Russian, and my Russian at the time was pretty good from having lived there. When I was in Moscow, I was able to get some household survey data that was all in Russian, that no one else could get, since I was physically there and making contacts. That became the natural thing for me to write my dissertation on. One of the things they teach you in Econ 101 is comparative advantage, and I realized that I definitely had comparative advantage in studying Russia. Plus this is what I understood and what I was motivated to learn more about from my experience living there, so learning Russian was just critical. Even now I use it whenever I do research because a lot of the data I use is written in Russian. Now it’s easier, they print a lot of their yearbooks in English and Russian , but some of the archival work I do is all in Russian. Some of it I just couldn’t do without having learned Russian, you can’t get google translate into the Soviet Archives.

CF: How is the availability of data coming out of Russian about the economy today?

EB: It’s much better than it used to be. Is it reliable? I think it’s reasonably reliable. It’s frustrating for me as a microeconomist, there’s not much in the way of household surveys. Most developed and developing countries make the micro data from their censuses available, and Russia still doesn’t.

CF: You’ve done a lot of research about women in Russia and the Soviet Union, especially in terms of labor market outcomes. How do you think the issues women face today differ in the United States and Russia?

EB: I think there’s a lot more gender discrimination in Russia than here in the US, even though Russian women tend to be highly educated and skilled, they’re still discriminated against. There are more pervasive gender roles, it’s been more difficult for the gender roles to evolve. Not that they’re completely evolved in the US. Women in Russia still take on a much larger share of housework and childcare and so on than men do, it’s very unequal. Women are discriminated against in that, but I think in the workplace too. You don’t see women reaching really high levels in business, or even in the government. There’s still much more gender segregation in occupations in Russia than here.

CF: Аs a scholar of Russia, what do you think are the most common misconceptions that we as Americans have about Russia?

EB: I think people perceive Russia as being more monolithic that it is. I think it’s more heterogeneous than people appreciate. Even I sometimes fall into the trap of thinking Moscow is representative of the rest of the country. Especially going there, you tend to think that the standard of living is pretty high and that people are doing reasonably well, but it’s not the case in the rest of the country. But people tend to think of Moscow being the same as Russia, when it’s not.

CF: Where do you see Russian-American relations going in the future?

EB: It’s hard to be anything but really pessimistic about it, as long as Putin is still in power., and there’s so much corruption, and such a lack of democracy and basic human rights. It’s hard to imagine that US-Russian relations are going to get much better without a change in the top leadership. My husband has this theory that someone’s going to just assassinate Putin, and he’s been saying that for a decade and it hasn’t happened. Even if it did happen, it’s not clear that democracy is going to be the norm, or basic human rights for that matter. I’m pretty pessimistic, especially because Russian people, although this is a stereotype to some extent, don’t seem to be willing to affect change at the political level. They seem willing to accept what they’re given. It’s a lot better than it used to be in many ways, but they seem to be reasonably satisfied with the lack of a basic democratically functioning system.

CF: Do you have a theory about why scholarship about Russia is so much less common than other areas of cultural study?

EB: It used to be much more popular during the cold war because Russia was our main antagonist and everything seemed to revolve around nuclear treaties, NATO and so on. Now our attention has really turned towards China as an economic partner, and to the problems in the Middle East. I think it’s just faded as something that’s in the headlines all the time, and also Chinese just seems so useful, whereas perhaps Russian doesn’t seem so useful anymore.

CF: What do you think about language requirements at universities? Are they helpful in rounding out a student’s education?

EB: I support them, yes. I think students need to learn not just the language, but another culture. Learning the language really opens your eyes in way that reading the literature in translation doesn’t quite convey, and it also motivates you to actually go to that country. I think it adds another important dimension to a student’s liberal arts education. I think it does something in your brain too, I’m not sure what, but it seems like it helps you think in a different way to learn a new language.

CF: Through your research on Russia, has there been anything you discovered that you found really surprising?

EB: One thing I’ve studied is unbalanced sex ratios, and the original motivation for that was how the loss of men in World War II affected Russian women. As a part of that research, I’ve read a lot about other countries that have unbalanced sex ratios like China. I was looking at the former Soviet Union, and although I didn’t discover this myself, I started doing research on this incredible increase in sex ratios at birth in the Caucasus, in Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia. They are using sex-selective abortion to abort girl fetuses, and it’s as extreme as in China and India. To me that was just shocking, because I thought I knew this place reasonably well, and there was never any outward evidence of son preference. Especially since, although the Soviets did many negative things, one of the positive things they did was require equal education for boys and girls. They did do a lot to promote gender equality, not always successfully. Given that women are relatively highly educated, relatively engaged in the workforce and able to earn an independent living, it was shocking to me to see this happening in these countries. This happened right after the break-up of the Soviet Union, and my first line of research into that question was whether this was something that pre-dated the Soviet Union, something ancient that goes back a long time, or was it something about the collapse of socialism and the transition to capitalism that made boys more valuable. It’s hard to answer that question, but the research I’ve done suggests that it goes way back. This region is always fascinating. That’s one reason I keep doing research on it, there’s always something that’s unusual and that doesn’t seem to fit anywhere else.