Category Archives: Interview

An interview with a notable person in the field, including an edited transcript and a profile of the interviewee.

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.

 

Germany, America, and Intertwined Crises: An Interview with Professor Sabine von Mering

Interview,

When I sat down in downtown Wellesley’s Peet’s Coffee and Tea to interview Sabine von Mering, a professor at Brandeis University, I was incredibly nervous. This was our first meeting and I, over-thinker that I am, had managed to persuade myself that everything would go terribly. The worst scenarios flashed through my mind; I was convinced that I would stumble through the questions I had prepared and make a complete fool of myself. To my relief, none of that came to pass. Von Mering, who completed her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Germany before moving to the United States to obtain her Ph.D., was very friendly and easy to talk to.

Having lived in both Germany and the United States, she offers a unique perspective towards, and understanding of, the differences between the two countries. Germany, which since reunification has become more and more important in a variety of areas, fascinates many American students. It seems as if every week there’s a new article in The New York Times or The Economist discussing the political or economic importance of Germany. But as von Mering points out this is a somewhat limited view of the country; the vibrant German cultural scene, both historically and in the present, “appeals to students studying art, music, and theater.”

Of particular interest to von Mering, however, is Germany’s position in the world as a leader of green technology and environmental protection. I myself am no expert on climate change and the issues surrounding it but von Mering, who encouraged me to do more research on the topic, peppered our discussion with film and book recommendations. My “things to watch” list now has everything from Flow, a short 10-minute film by Germany’s Umweltbundesamt (the country’s main environmental protection agency), to Michael Moore’s most recent documentary, 2015’s Where To Invade Next. It may not be a traditional beach read, but Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, another recommendation, will likely be my first book of the summer. Her current research, which centers on climate change and how German/European and American attitudes and perspectives towards it differ, is something she’s clearly passionate about.

When we spoke about the current European refugee von Mering said something that has stuck with me. We cannot separate environmental crisis from human crisis. The European Union’s Schengen Agreement is, as she said, now dead, and things have the potential to get far worse; as the central regions of the world heat up due to climate change, the number of refugees pouring into Europe and the US will get larger and larger. Her comments left me to dwell on one question— If countries do not deal with the climate/refugee crisis now, what will they do in the future when it is far too late?

S = Katharine Starke

vM = Prof. Sabine von Mering

S: First thing, I really appreciate this and would like to thank you for being here… Since it’s been in the news recently I’d like to ask you about American students and German. Since there’s been so much talk about the German economy still being strong compared to other places and the country being in the news so much, have you noticed more people being interested in learning German and learning about Germany?

vM: Yes, definitely. Germany as a place, for example, that has shouldered the startup costs of the Green Revolution, the renewable energy revolution, engineering… there are students who are interested in politics who see Germany as an interesting place, not only because of its economic power but also because of its role in Europe and its role in possible shaping European politics… Students who are interested in economics see that Germany has a very successful history of supporting small businesses, something very different from the corporate model here in the United States. You have thousands of world-class tiny companies in Germany that are competing at the highest level, and they’re family-owned, they have been for decades, and their model is very different than what we here would consider success. They basically narrow in on a small niche and say “We’re going to make the best screwdrivers or pencils in the world.” It’s interesting to students who are going into business, and since so many students are broke by the time they graduate they are interested in going into business! But it’s not just about business; Germany also appeals to students studying art, music, and theater because it is a vibrant cultural place. Museum curators, film people… many of them come to Germany.

S: I’d like to ask you about what said about renewable energy… One criticism I’ve heard, and I’d be interested to hear your opinion of it, is that especially after Fukushima and the closing of the nuclear power plants, is that countries are simply going to be importing energy from countries with lower safety standards. Do you think that’s happening?

vM: Well first of all, I don’t think anyone other than Germany has decided to shut down their nuclear reactors. Not even France did. And the decision in Germany to shut down the reactors was made by the Red-Green coalition, long before Angela Merkel came around. Angela Merkel actually then campaigned with the slogan “Exit from the exit,” so she didn’t actually want to shut down the reactors. When she did shut them down after Fukushima it was a very spontaneous and badly-understood decision that was, you know… she’s a physicist, she knows what nuclear energy is about, and she decided that it was too risky to extend the lives of these old reactors. Germany is selling electricity to France. It’s not true that we need nuclear power. Nuclear power is excessively expensive… it’s interesting to me, by the way, that Americans… I don’t know what the physics textbooks say in high school but American students love nuclear energy. There’s no understanding of the danger of nuclear energy in this country.

S: They do kind of teach us that it’s the greatest thing ever.

vM: Yeah! Who is behind that? I’m really interested in that because it strikes me as so odd given that, for example, here in Massachusetts we have several nuclear power plants in our vicinity that are super old, that are leaking, that are constantly having to shut down because of failures in the safety systems and yet everybody has this idea that somehow nuclear energy is perfectly safe. It is not! I mean, the only countries that are investing in nuclear energy right now are China and North Korea. And China… it is a dictatorship! There’s no public discussion about it there.

S: They are subsidies to build solar panels in Germany, yes?

vM: It’s complicated… I honestly don’t know the exact situation right now because what the Merkel government has done is they’ve kept changing what they initially said the project was. I think there still are some subsidies, but they’ve been wound down quite a bit.

S: To switch focus a bit, let’s talk about the EU. How do you feel about the future of the EU? Do you think it’s going to survive the refugee crisis?

vM: (laughs) Well that’s a big question. Clearly the European Union Project was a peace project as well as an economic project. It started out as an economic project but it always was also meant to preserve the peace on the continent after decades of tensions and war, and I think that the mistakes that were made include growing too fast, and expanding too wide, and taking in countries like Greece and Portugal who were actually not quite ready to compete inside the free market… taking on the Euro probably too soon… so in a way there was an optimism that guided the process that probably should have been curbed a little bit. At the same time, if you look at the European Union, the states… yes, they are incredibly disordered and when they have come to make a decision they usually come out fighting and it usually ends up being a bad compromise, but if you look at the EU… well, just look at the Republican Party in the United States. That’s one party in one country and they can’t get their act together? And now you think of 28 countries with different cultures, different economic systems, different languages, different histories, getting together on a regular basis to try to fight it out with each other? That is a huge accomplishment, and if we look at the ties that actually tie the European Union together, everything from pens to paper to baking stuff… whatever it is, it’s regulated on the same basis throughout all European countries, so you can’t sell a pastry baked with twice as much sugar or charge so much more for an item than another country, so there’s really a lot of regulation that is very beneficial for people but no one has been good at explaining it, so people just see the money going to the central government and the negative aspects… I mean the fact that you can sue at the European Court and have a law changed… that’s a huge accomplishment. We can’t even get that done in this country from state-to-state! If you have health insurance in one state you can’t use it in another… it’s ridiculous! Americans are very critical of the European Union, but I think that underlying that there’s a lot of jealousy. There’s the whole “you can’t tell my state what to do…”

S: Like states’ rights?

vM: Yes! States’ rights! And I think it does make this country weaker. (Laughs) I didn’t answer your question though… the truth is nobody knows what will happen with the EU. The Schengen Agreement right now is dead because of the refugee situation and with climate change we will have more refugees coming, there is no question about that. And that will put more pressure on the same countries because they are coming from the south, and eventually you could see the European Union fortressing itself off. You could see England get out… I doubt it, I think they will stay in, but you could see Russia asserting itself again against the European Union, which could have two possible effects, it could bring the EU together or it could tear it apart. I hope that people keep in mind the achievements and I hope that the strong ties that exist will hold when other forces are against it.

Why Not?

Interview

Profile and Interview with Ludovic François, Founder of MSolution.IO

Ludovic François founded MSolution.IO in Venice, California in September of 2014. Ludo was born in Arras, France and came to the United States while working for a French-American company, DDN Storage. He received his master’s degree at the EPITA School in Paris as a computer engineer and has since been involved in numerous types of high-tech product development. He moved to the United States in 2008 on a L1 visa working for DDN Storage. Ludo’s story incorporates an overlooked immigrant perspective, as a highly skilled software engineer. Ludo is one of many immigrants who came with hopes to explore new places and advance in the tech world. While Ludo acclimated to the United States, he became an integral member of my extended family.

I met Ludo on the Champs-Elysées when I was 12 years old. My mother had brought me along for the trip, but of course, she had to continue her business meetings as usual. Ludo agreed to meet us for a bike ride, on the night of Bastille Day. Ludo is a brilliant, technically savvy engineer; he’s also an outgoing conversationalist.

Ludo and I have always talked about traveling and sailing. None were surprised to hear that he had sold all of his belongings (except his motorcycle) to travel the world for the following fourteen months. He set out from Paris for Istanbul via train and then spent a few months in India. After returning to the United States he cranked up his motorcycle and rode from Los Angeles to Miami. Ludo met many people along the way as he traveled, and frequently couch surfed instead of staying in hostels or hotels. He remains in contact with many of the friends he made along his amazing trip. After fourteen months as a nomad, Ludo resumed the sedentary life, returning to Venice Beach, where he loves the people, the good vibes, and of course the beach.

While traveling he brainstormed to create his company, MSolution.IO. MSolution.IO is a consulting company that specializes in data storage tuning and DevOps workflow. Ludo has proudly built his company from scratch, hiring fellow EPITA interns and graduates to join him in his startup. MSolution.IO has a varied clientele that ranges from large corporate entities like CBS to smaller Silicon Beach startups like KEYPR. MSolution.IO offers tailor-made solutions for its clients and has used the past 18 months of consulting to launch its own product line addressing commonly asked questions such as “How can I save money on the cloud?” Ludo has created a one of a kind consulting company within his field of expertise, high-tech, to cater to a specific clientele while enjoying the freedom of being his own boss on the beach.

 

 

Rachel: Thank you so much, Ludo for being here with me, I really appreciate it. I would just like you to introduce yourself, explain a bit about where you are from.

Ludo: Okay so thank you Rachel for having this interview with me – I am very honored. So, I am from France as I guess you can tell with my accent. I was born in Arras, it’s in north of France, a small town outside of Paris city, two-hours drive from Paris.

I got my high school diploma, which we call a baccalauréat in France, and after that I did two special years of mathematics and physics, what is called “maths spé”. At that time I got into one of the schools I really liked, an engineering school, where at the end you get a master’s degree. I was a teacher assistant – if you ever have a chance to be a teacher assistant, do it, it was great- you learn a lot. You will first learn what you don’t know, because you will get students better than you.

I had to do an internship outside of the country to validate my degree. So first I wanted to come to the US and it didn’t happen. One friend introduced me to a company in Sweden. It was an interesting experience, but at one point I felt I needed to move on because I was not feeling challenged in the job, and I started to look around to move back to France, especially because I was not very well integrated in Sweden. I was young, and I never learned the language, which I think was a huge mistake. In France I took a job for a national company working in defense. I spent one year there and then DDN found me on Internet. In 2004, DDN found me on Google.

R: What Google search prompted you?

L: The name of my school

R: And what is that?

L: EPITA – it’s a French school very well known for computer science. So Laurent Thiers searched the name of the school in Google and he found my name and sent me a message. I was still young, and I was like, wow this is nice, I’m out of college the guy is inviting me to a nice restaurant. They offered me a better salary than my current job and gave me a company car. So that is how I got hired at DDN, but it was not all that easy. In France when you resign your job, you need to provide the manager three months notice, so I gave my three months and I joined DDN.

R: Was it different working for an American company in France or was it almost the same as the defense job?

L: It was totally different.

R: Can you tell me about the differences?

L: Sure first it was different because the first company had 60,000 employees, and I joined a two-employee French company. I was in charge of logistics, import and export certificates for the deals that were affiliated with France. One of the big differences was not that it was an American company, but that it was a big company versus a small company.

R: Did you like the small company feel?

L: Yes I loved it. That feeling was the best; you have the opportunity to build something. You have way more responsibilities, and you are not able to hide, because if someone needs your assistance, you are the only person to provide it.

R: Wonderful. So how did you get from DDN France, of 2 people, to DDN LA?

L: I was in France doing everything and at the same time nothing, because when you try to do a lot of things because the job asks you to do lots of things, you do a very small part of everything. I wanted to become a software engineer because it was my title, but I hadn’t really been one yet. At the same time, DDN US was building a new engineering team to build out a new product in Los Angeles. Even though it was an internal job opening – I still had to go through the process. I saw the opportunity to test something in my life, to be a software engineer, so that is mostly why I decided to move.

R: When you applied for the job offer? Was it hard to get a visa?

L: No. I am a very lucky profile, because I was working for the same company so it took only 2 weeks to get the visa. It’s interesting feeling when you have a visa, because the visa belongs to the company; it doesn’t belong to you. When you move to a new country, it’s a new language, new culture, and you become very humbled. Now I am way more confident then when I came, (in France I was very confident) but you start from scratch. When I was working for DDN France, if I was not happy with something I would just say so or I had an option to quit. When you are working for a US company and the visa belongs to the company and not to you, you don’t have this freedom anymore. Because if you quit, you go back to France.

R: So where are you now? Right now? Where are you sitting?

L: Right now I am in my office, which is interesting kind of office actually. I can give you a tour… It is an office, but it was my house one year ago.

R: You are working in Venice, right?

L: Yes, I love Venice, because I love the vibe here. Even if it is not the Silicon Valley, you can have a very good job and a good life. I love it next to the ocean.

R: Is it nice to live in a place that is less high-stress in regards to a startup environment instead of the Silicon Valley?

L: Yes and No. I don’t know if it is better. It has some good parts about it. I am still pretty connected to the Silicon Valley, because I know a lot of people, and you can bring the technology of the Silicon Valley here to the city. The Silicon Valley feels like EPITA. In LA you bring your skills, to a different field. A lot of my clients are in entertainment.

R: How did your company MSolution.IO come together?

L: The few first months of my trip I didn’t think about it. Just one guy I sat next to on an airplane in Dubai asked me, “Why don’t you setup your own company, you know a lot of things, you should create your venture” and I said “I don’t have the courage to do it.” He said, “Yes that is what I wanted to hear, you don’t have the courage to do it.” After that I thought why am I not brave enough, what is the risk? I started to think what I could do. I am pretty technical, so I started contacting people, telling them I would to be back in a few months, or if they have a job for me I’m in India today or Lithuania, they can send me work and I can set aside a day to do work. So I came back to the US expecting people who said they would give me a job, to give me a job. It didn’t happen, but almost 18 months later, all of them gave me something.

R: What did they give you?

L: Some people gave me small projects, but what was interesting to see finally these people carry through; you don’t want to lose hope in people. In December I got some work with CBS and I started to line up a lot of clients.

R: Did you already have your own company by this time or was it just you?

L: It was my own company, with only me. MSolution.IO was established in September 2014. By November 2014, the company did not make any money. In December 2014, I started all of the work, networking, a sort of professional dating. I was trying to meet as many people as I could everyday, just to find something to do. In January I got paid for all of the work I had completed in December. I had not made any money in fourteen months.

R: When you were building out the company, you made the entire web design and platform with your computer science background, right?

L: Yes. I bought the logo for $5; it is the only investment I made in the company in addition to the business cards.

R: So everything has been generated from you?

L: Yes the first version, yes.

R: So now, in 2016, where is MSolution.IO?

L: Now we have 11 employees.

R: What are some of the clients you have worked with?

L: We have two types of clients, well-established companies like CBS and DataDirectNetworks and smaller startups like Cargomatic, Tradesy, and KEYPR.

R: And if I am a client, what am I asking for?

L: Usually you are asking for two things. We have a lot of skills in computer science and software development. We know how you should store your data and how you should look at it. For example, Tradesy has a basic platform. They store a lot of pictures of the clothes or accessories you want to sell, but we were able to accelerate the landing page by 30%. We also have a lot of knowledge of cloud services and DevOps. DevOps is between development and operations. We help with the transition between the development team and the production team to make it as smooth as possible; we will make your workflow agile and release a new product every 6 months with a waterfall system.

R: And do clients outsource some of their more computer-related technical aspects too?

L: Yes definitely. We are helping setup the workflow with DevOps and after a while they may need help with the infrastructure side of their solution. 60% of our revenue is in DevOps, 20% is data storage tuning or troubleshooting, and the last 20% we are starting to release our own products.

R: So you are not just consulting anymore, you yourself are becoming a manufacturer?

L: It is a goal. Consulting is very nice and grows quickly, but for some companies it is difficult because they’ve gotten used to my face. And that is an issue with consulting. I have a lot of young people, and it can be tough for your client to trust someone different. With products it’s a lot easier to scale because you just need to design the product and have someone sell it or it sells itself today with software as a service and the visibility you get on the Internet.

R: So tell me a bit about your product line.

L: We have three products. Mainly focused on monitoring, and making the best of your infrastructure, to help you assess what you have today. It is meant to use to see what you have and tell you how you can use it to your benefit. The three products are based on all the work we’ve done in the last 18 months, answering the same recurring questions: How do I save money in the cloud? How do I make my elastic search data store faster? How do I back up my data? What happens if I get hacked on my AWS account? We built a tool called TrackIt and this product is going to make an assessment of what you have, and pool your AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft bill and tell you how you spend money and how to save money. We will make the announcement in a few weeks at NAB. So the products are based on what we have done in the last few months as a consulting company, and now we have invested some time to a dedicated team building the products instead of case-by-case science projects.

R: Do you have a long-term vision for MSolution.IO?

L: To change the world! The long-term is to continue to build the team, grow organically, and keep our clients happy by delivering the same caliber of work.

R: Thank you so much for your precious time and this great interview. I really appreciate it.

Learn more at https://www.msolution.io/

 

 

Connecting Past to Present: Polish Jewry

Interview

I first met Jonny Daniels in the Warsaw airport; I heard a booming, unfamiliar voice with a British accent saying something about the anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto and the transformative experience I could only assume I was about to have. I was among a group of jet lagged American students who had just arrived in Poland for a Holocaust education and service trip. The trip was led by the organization From the Depths and focused on not only what had been destroyed in the Holocaust, but what remains today.

Daniels is the founder of From the Depths, which works to preserve memory of the Holocaust. The organization draws its name from Psalms 130, in which a psalmist pleads for mercy, saying “from the depths, I have cried out to you, O Lord.” These “depths” are a metaphor for anguish, and the goal of the organization is to bridge the dark, painful past of the Holocaust to a better future. Since starting From the Depths three years ago in Poland, Daniels has been working to uncover Jewish hiding spots and unmarked graves, commemorate Poles who saved Jews from Nazis, and return Jewish gravestones used for post-war construction back to Jewish cemeteries.

He realized that thousands of Jewish gravestones are to this day used as building material in Polish family homes, roads, and even playgrounds, and no one is working to honor the individuals they represent. Daniels tasked himself with this project and decided to move to Poland from Israel. He was born and raised in London, England, but took a gap year in Israel before college, fell in love with Israel and never moved back. He then served in the Israeli army as a paratrooper and went on to study Political Science at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv. After getting his degree, Daniels worked as an adviser in the Israeli Parliament, so navigating a new political and social scene wasn’t new for him. Poland, however, was a unique challenge, especially for a foreign Jew who wanted to dig in Polish backyards.

The uncovering of what remained of Polish Jewry after the Holocaust is a very recent occurrence in Poland, which has a long history of antisemitism. During Nazi occupation of Poland, some Poles participated in the killing of Jews. After the war, there were several outbreaks of antisemitic violence targeted at Jewish refugees. Under the Soviet-imposed Communist regime which lasted until 1989, the tiny number of Jews left were used as scapegoats by both the regime protesters and the regime itself.

Some disturbing remnants of this history are easy to spot in modern-day Poland and were a source of culture shock for the American students—myself included—who traveled around Poland with Daniels. On a narrow, crowded street of Warsaw, we passed an antique store with the cover of a Torah scroll displayed in the window. Decorating this cover was a Nazi uniform cap. Several blocks away from the store was a souvenir shop with Jewish caricature dolls. The dolls came in all sizes, were dressed in Hasidic black clothes and Jewish prayer shawls, and generally held a large gold coin. I mustered the courage and asked a shop owner, “What are these for?” She responded in broken English, explaining “ehh… people who look like this…in the past,” (she added, probably remembering that there are none left) “have a lot of money and keep it. So if you have one, you will have a lot of money and luck!”

In a place that seems completely devoid of sensitivity—where sacred Jewish texts, swastikas, and Jew dolls are all just souvenirs along with Warsaw fridge magnets—it’s remarkable that Daniels has been able to find so many Poles willing to help with Jewish restoration work.

Volunteers including Polish Strongman Federation members—led by the winner of the Strongman Cup, the strongest man in Poland—have helped move the (physically and emotionally) heavy Jewish gravestones used in construction projects back to Jewish cemeteries. A group of Polish high school students teamed up with the firemen in their tiny rural town to clean the abandoned local Jewish cemetery. Several hours of driving away, residents of Krakow help run the local Jewish Community Center, which is staffed almost exclusively with non-Jewish volunteers. These volunteers play a crucial role in helping the few local Jews, many of whom have only recently discovered Jewish roots, to explore their history and identity.

The trip allowed me to meet both individuals who entirely lack sensitivity and care, and individuals who are willing to help commemorate a history that they have no personal connection to. It has been several months since the trip but I’m still processing these polar opposite realities existing side by side. I’m only beginning to formulate the questions that I didn’t have the time to ask in Poland.

RT: How did you get into the business of Holocaust education?

JD: I started working in Holocaust education when my daughter was born. We named her after my ex-wife’s grandmother, who was a survivor of Auschwitz and unfortunately passed just before my daughter was born. And I realized that there would be nobody around to speak and to tell the stories to my children. No survivors would be left. And it was on our generation to do something about it.

I flew to the States and I met with Professor Elie Wiesel and asked him, “Professor, how can I be involved? Who am I? You know, I’m not a Holocaust historian, I’m not an educator, I’ve got no PhD. How dare I discuss such a thing?” He said to me, “Jonny, your generation needs to stand and must stand and become witnesses of the witnesses.” He said to me, “Jonny, you’re my witness.” So really what spurred me in terms of Holocaust education was the thought process that our generation is the last connection to those survivors and we have to stand and do something. If we don’t, absolutely nobody else will. And that’s when I really decided to start my organization, dealing with the issue of Holocaust memory.

RT: Why was Poland your focus?

JD: My great-grandfather himself survived the Holocaust. He was born in Poland. I was born and raised in the United Kingdom and Holocaust survivors were a very important part of my upbringing.

Poland, you know, was the main focus, the center place of the Holocaust. This is where the majority of killings were. This is the site where most of my Jewish brethren lost their lives. So in terms of dealing with that, I found that Poland would be the most interesting place to work. Over the last few years Poland turned from a very difficult communistic regime which they had up to about 25 years ago, into a country where there were people who had interest in discussing their past, were interested in building for a future. So in terms of the work that we do, really, there wasn’t anywhere better for us to do that than Poland itself.

RT: On the student trip, we met several people who had just discovered that they were Jewish. I was wondering why is it that it has taken so long? Why is it that people have held on to that secret for decades after the Holocaust?

JD: Well after the Holocaust Poland was taken over by the Soviets. It was a communist regime where any kind of religion was looked down upon, and especially Judaism. Poland was also remarkably antisemitic. In 1968 there was a purge where the Jews, the few of them who had remained and were public about it were sort of, you know, held responsible for the evil communism in this country, which, needless to say is untrue. And so to be Jewish under communist rule wasn’t something, necessarily, that you’d want to speak about. So those that did keep their Jewish roots, or knew of them, would hide them. And there was obviously the epidemic of hidden children, where children were hidden during the Holocaust who then later found out that their parents weren’t actually their parents and that they were saved from the train going to Auschwitz or hidden in a monastery and no one came to collect them. So the last 25 years you get this openness in Poland, this democracy. There’s been a real want and interest to understand that past.

RT: How do you think antisemitism in Poland is different from Western Europe and North America? I think this is particularly interesting because everyone in our group of Americans had culture shock over the fact that there were antisemitic caricature Jewish dolls sold in souvenir stores. It’s really something that people almost don’t believe exists, but it does, clearly.

JD: In Poland, Poles don’t view them as antisemitic. In Poland, Poles view them as good luck charms. They don’t see it as something that’s anti semitic or wrong and it’s a question of sensitivity whether we view them as wrong. Needless to say, it’s not nice to portray or caricature anybody. However, on the other hand, they’re not doing it to necessarily be evil. In fact Poles have them in their houses as good luck charms. We know it’s nonsense and pathetic. However, they feel that it’s something sort of meaningful and important to them.

And it differs from Western antisemitism especially that we’ve seen a rise in. Because antisemitism in the other parts of Europe isn’t the same antisemitism that it was seventy years ago. Seventy years ago we were seeing antisemitism by Christians, we were seeing antisemitism by locals. Killing of the Jews was done by Germans and Poles and Ukrainians. What we’re seeing now in Europe is that antisemitism is unfortunately happening by radical Islamists. And they don’t have those in Poland. Poland is a very Polish country, with very few immigrants. So we don’t really see that kind of antisemitism.

RT: Has antisemitism been in the way of your work? Have you experienced it? Has it hindered anything you’ve tried to do?

JD: I think it’s very interesting that in Poland itself, I don’t feel or see much antisemitism. The antisemitism that is here is definitely not institutional. It’s not antisemitism that comes from the government or from any main institutions. It’s more from people and that purely comes out as a result of ignorance as opposed to anything else. By ignorance, I mean people who have heard something about the Jews but have never met one before. For example, I was with the right-hand man of the Polish Minister of Culture and he turned to me and said “oh, we all know that Jews treat women the same way that Arabs treat them. Women aren’t allowed this, they aren’t allowed that… When they divorce their husbands, their children get taken away.” You know, a very strange understanding. But more than anything it’s all ignorance and from the fact that there are no Jews really living there for them to ask, that they have these opinions. So antisemitism hasn’t really affected me at all. In fact the philosemitism, the strong connection towards Judaism that a lot of Poles feel has actually helped.

RT: On the trip you mentioned that in some social circles Jewish things were seen as cool – Jewish cuisine, Jewish names among a completely Polish populations.

JD: Right so 10% of the Polish population pre-1938 were jews and Jews had a large impact on the Polish culture. Some of the most famous writers and singers and chefs and cuisine, were Jewish. And there’s been sort of a nostalgia to that past that’s presented itself over the last few years. In Poland last year there were something like 28 Jewish culture festivals where Jewish music was played, Jewish food was eaten, and people feel very strongly connected to that. A lot of people will tell you that they know they have Jewish roots or they can feel that they have Jewish roots. So it’s seen as something very cool.

RT: Could you talk about the Polish volunteers that restore graveyards and report mass grave sites. In a culture that’s historically been antisemitic, what is their motivation?

JD: We have to remember that Poland was the country that Jews lived in for close to a thousand years when no one else would take us in. There wasn’t one country that wasn’t antisemitic. You know, the United States was grotesquely antisemitic until a couple of years ago. So times change and people change and I think we’re seeing a lot of that on one hand. And on the other hand, like we spoke about before there is an interest amongst the young generation to look at their past and a certain nostalgia. And so I think it’s that more than anything else.

RT: Is the Polish Jewish community growing or shrinking?

JD: It’s definitely shrinking. There’s the issue that the older Jews are dying. It’s also not the easiest place to be a Jew. Kosher meat isn’t readily available so a lot of people will move and head off to other places, go to different countries, for example, Israel, the United States. So it’s definitely not a sustainable community. There’s no sort of real Jewish life to be had.

RT: Does that mean it’s going to get harder to commemorate Jewish life?

JD: Of course. But I mean it’s a trend. Like we’ll see synagogues in certain states and cities in America where there once were Jews and there no longer are. And again it doesn’t necessarily mean anything bad. So this is just a trend that we see a lot and it’s nothing specific about Poland per say. It’s just Jews are a traveling people.

 

Exciting Does Not Have to Be Exotic: An Interview with Travel Writer Kim Foley MacKinnon

Interview

I stumbled upon Kim Foley MacKinnon’s travel writing two years ago before departing on my first trip outside the United States. I had been looking for exotic travel tips on exploring Europe, staying in hostels, and finding myself—and instead found her “Sleeping in Unusual Airbnbs Across the US.” Her article advised travelers on making the most of a rushed family vacation, and reminded me that it’s the spirit of travel, more than the destination, that make for exploration.

MacKinnon is a Boston-based travel writer and journalist who specializes in the New England area but also tackles global destinations. As I discovered during our interview, MacKinnon’s career began when she undertook a co-op with the Boston Globe while studying at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She received her training in journalism at the Globe before becoming a freelancer and then a guidebook editor.  After editing and contributing to guidebooks for a number of years, MacKinnon began to write her own guides and eventually became a full-time travel writer.

Just minutes before MacKinnon and I were about to meet, I received an email from her saying that she was stuck on the phone filing an insurance claim. Despite being in a car accident the night before, she met me with enthusiasm. Her insistence on continuing with the interview spoke to the spirit of creativity and adventure that appears in her travel writing. Aside from her creative article about staying in strange AirBnBs across the United States (highlights ranged from a renovated school bus to a converted hardware store), MacKinnon’s writing also includes pieces about staying in a Snow Hotel (quite literally made of snow) and taking a jazz-themed cruise on the Queen Mary II. MacKinnon believes that it’s her unique perspective and desire to find new angles for stories that has contributed to her success as a journalist: “Every time that I think that I’m pitching a crazy story, that’s the one that gets the most attention, that’s the one the editors want to read.”

Though her writing is unique and adventurous, MacKinnon tells travel writers that their work doesn’t have to be about distant and exotic locations to be interesting. In fact, MacKinnon encourages young writers to learn strong journalistic writing at their local newspapers and to not be afraid to cover local travel topics. MacKinnon herself has become an expert on her local New England neighborhoods, making her a valuable reference and contributor to Boston-area guidebooks. In her own writing, MacKinnon describes places she has encountered on family vacations or hidden treasures she has discovered in her own neighborhood, bringing alive day-to-day stories and transforming them into original travel narratives.

Much of MacKinnon’s writing is defined by a spirit of creativity that has less to do with where you go and more with what you do. MacKinnon emphasizes that the best travel advice she gives and follows is “to talk to people.” In her travels, MacKinnon herself talks to everyone she possibly can, embarrassing her teenage daughter no end. Yet MacKinnon continues. “You talk to people, it opens doors and breaks down barriers.” For good travel and personal growth, MacKinnon urges travelers to stay open-minded about different cultures and destinations. Despite the uncertainties of travel, MacKinnon says that’s why she keeps traveling: “to see what’s different and not what is the same.”

——————–

Edited Transcript

Cecilia Nowell: What is your day-to-day life as a travel-writer like?

Kim Foley MacKinnon: I don’t really have any sort of defined schedule. I work from home, so depending on what assignments I have or what I need to write or work on that dictates my day. For example, I’m doing a story for the globe today and I have to do research at one o’clock so I’ll be leaving here and it’s about two hours to drive up north to do an interview. Then I’ll come home and download my pictures and look at my notes. And then, it’s sort of a two-part thing, so I have stuff to do next week so after I do those interviews then I’ll assemble it all together. Meanwhile, I’ll be working on four other things at the same time. As a freelancer, you’re happy to have the current thing that you’re doing, but you’re always looking for the next one. So, I’ll be answering emails, I’ll be emailing people, and trying to think about other ideas for stories.

C: How do you look for good ideas for stories?

K: A lot of it comes from travels that I do. Some of it is something will catch my eye; I’ll think it’s interesting. There are a lot of public relations people who will reach out to me and send me ideas. So it’s sort of a mixed bag.

C: Can you speak more about your coverage of domestic travel?

K: New England is basically my bread and butter work. I write guide books, I contribute to guidebooks about New England and Boston. There are policies at lots of magazines where you can’t take any free vacations or get any perks from anybody and there’s a lot of that in travel writing. There are a lot of trips that people will pay for, but the Boston Globe is not one of those newspapers. So, I do work locally for them that I pay for. I will be doing that research, and nobody’s giving me anything for free. That’s the benefit of working locally: you become the expert in your area. And then people will come to you. Like some photographers came to me to update a couple of their books because they had seen my work in New England and wanted to work with people who were local and know their towns or neighborhoods. So if you can become a local expert or whatever it is food, or hiking, or whatever thing it is that you’re interested in then people will come to you.

C: Do you have a favorite place that you’ve ever traveled in New England or outside New England?

K: I mean it’s usually wherever I just was or where I’m about to go. But, for international travel I’ve been to India which was really cool. Thailand is really nice. My family is doing a family trip to Italy where we love to go if we can and we’re doing that with two other families so I’m turning that into a couple of stories and that’s a family vacation but I’m going to turn it into some travel pieces. Locally, there are so many places in Massachusetts. I’ve written hiking books so I’ve explored a lot of the state. I love Martha’s Vineyard; it’s one of my favorite places. We go down there a lot.

C: Is there any clear path that journalists take to becoming a travel writer?

K: No, I don’t think so. It really depends. It’s a little bit different than when I was growing up in journalism. I was a co-op. I went to U-Mass Boston and did a co-op at the Boston Globe. I did the midnight shift, I did transcription, I wrote obituaries. I eventually left the Globe as a staffer and did freelance for community newspapers. I covered school board meetings, I did all of that. I then became the editor at a guidebook and then, after editing for a while, I wrote a guidebook. And then I really, I’ve always loved to travel, so I started doing travel pieces and that’s that. But I know there’s people who were life-long straight-news people who later decided to turn to travel writing and then there’s people nowadays—with blogs you can go straight into it and if you’re good at it you can make a living. It didn’t used to be that you could go straight into travel writing, but it seems a little more like you can do that now.

C: Do you have any good travel advice that you give people?

K: To talk to people. I talk to everybody. It horrifies my daughter, she’s like “Why do you have to talk to everybody?” But you talk to people and it opens doors and breaks down barriers and people like to talk about where they live and what to do. I talk to everybody.

C: Have you ever traveled anywhere where you’ve had a strong language barrier or cultural barrier and how have you worked through those differences?

K: I’ve been to the Philippines and India, it’s pretty foreign. I’ve been in positions where you do have some barriers, but I think that generally most people in the world are usually pretty friendly and will help you. When I went to the Philippines there was a miscommunication with the people who were supposed to pick me up and I had a lot of different strangers help me figure out where I needed to go. I think I was alone for twenty-four hours in the middle of nowhere and it was a little bit scary at times. But in the end it was completely fine.

C: How do you prepare before you go out on these stories?

K: When I have a story I do do my homework. I read, see what else has been done, I like to come up with a new angle. I write a lot about food, and that’s an exciting thing: everybody likes to eat and talk about food which is a really good way to get into whatever culture you’re looking into. People like to share their traditions and favorite things. When I don’t know what I’m doing, then I just try to keep an open mind and my eyes open.

C: Do you find stories from speaking with other people or going into new situations?

K: I think it’s both. Sometimes you don’t know what a story is until you’re in the middle of something. And something will fascinate you or be really interesting and you just ask more questions until you figure it out.

C: It seems like you like to write about things that are interesting, different, and weird?

K: I don’t like writing and I don’t like reading straight-up pieces of news. Everybody has read about Caribbean beach vacations. I’d rather find someone different to talk to or a different kind of experience. I like quirky things and I love AirBnB. That article about AirBnB was fun, and a lot of research and a lot of work to do. But it was a really good time in the end.

C: Do you have suggestions for how to come up with original content?

K: It’s so trite to say this, but you really have to be true to your personality and how you think about things rather than conforming to what you think people want to hear. Every time that I think that I’m pitching a crazy story, that’s the one that gets the most attention, that’s the one the editors want to read. So I’ll be like, “I have a really crazy idea,” and they’ll be like “I love it!” So you have to take some chances and not be afraid to sound crazy.

C: Where do travel writers get published the most?

K: There is no answer to that question. It’s such a changing landscape for journalism, especially for travel journalism. There’s a lot less pages and it’s just a moving target.

C: What tips would you give to aspiring writers?

K: You have to be willing to work really hard, you need to be creative, you have to believe in yourself. You have to have a certain amount of ego to think that people want to read what you’ve written. I would say definitely start out small. You’re not going to start out at Travel and Leisure and you need to not be too proud to write for your local paper. That’s when you learn how to write fast and write accurately and make contacts.

C: Do you have a favorite travel story?

K: I think being open-minded is just the best thing you can have. When I went to India, and I went with a group, and half my group couldn’t stand it and half my group loved it. I loved India. But it was one of the most intense experiences, and stimulating, and there’s the people and the poverty and there’s just a kind of liveliness there that I’d never experienced anywhere else and I think that’s why I travel. To see what’s different and not what is the same. I don’t want to have the same experience that I could have in Iowa when I’m out of the country. That’s what I love. I’m completely addicted to traveling, so that’s what I love.

Spanning Cultures: Arthur Goldhammer

Interview
Photo courtesy of Arthur Goldhammer - @artgoldhammer
Photo courtesy of Arthur Goldhammer – @artgoldhammer

“When the army found out that I could speak French, they sent me for training in Vietnamese,” Arthur Goldhammer explains. Thus began his foray into translation, which would turn into a career of three decades. With a bachelor’s degree and PhD in Mathematics from MIT, Goldhammer took a less traditional route to translation. That does not seem to have been a problem, however: over the course of his career, Goldhammer has translated over 135 French works, more than any other single French to English translator.

If it had not been for the draft notice Goldhammer received in 1968, it is possible his career would have taken an entirely different path. Goldhammer left for Vietnam intending to return to MIT and pursue a career as a mathematician, but as he says, “unbeknownst to me my passions had changed” during his time as an interpreter and translator in the army. In Vietnam, Goldhammer found that because the Vietnamese officers with whom he was working had been trained under the French colonial system, it was easier for them to communicate using their second language, French. “I really used my French in that capacity,” he explains. Having spent that time abroad, Goldhammer discovered he wanted to see the world. He recalled his first trip to Paris and wanted to go back. But despite his restlessness toward the end of the War, Goldhammer’s pragmatism took over: “I figured that my best shot would be to finish graduate school so I’d have something to fall back on,” if Paris did not work out.

Goldhammer’s translations run the gamut—he has translated both fiction and non-fiction, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Emile Zola and Albert Camus. Most recently, he translated the French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) and The Economics of Inequality (2015). Goldhammer’s translation of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published by the Harvard University Press, was the first book published by a university press to top the New York Times non-fiction bestsellers list, selling over 1.5 million copies in its first year.

Goldhammer came upon his first translation project, a book by the French sociologist Michel Crozier, somewhat by chance. Living in Paris after graduate school, Goldhammer decided to look for work and turned to translation because, as he recalls, it “was an obvious thing to do.” A friend connected him to Crozier, who was looking for a translator in Paris. Goldhammer had no professional translation experience apart from what he had done in the army. “At the beginning, I did a lot of ancillary reading of works connected with the book that I was translating because I was really learning the subject as I was going along,” he says, the truth of this is obvious from the walls lined with overflowing bookshelves in his living room. “In non-fiction, you’re usually translating for a community of scholars so I wanted to know how similar books had been [done] before, what the established jargon, technical vocabulary in the particular field was.” Despite needing to be abreast of the appropriate vocabularies, he explains that in the end, the shape of the final product is up to the translator: “You have a great deal of liberty.”

Goldhammer translates professionally from French, using English as the target language. He is more comfortable translating into English because he has a stronger grasp on grammar and stylistic conventions: “When I translate into French, I don’t have that same strong feeling that I’ve got it right.” He mentions a theory of translation based on a study that correlates cognitive skills with success translating in both directions. The study found that success translating into the foreign language was correlated with mathematical skill while success translating from the foreign language was tied to musical skill. Given his math background, Goldhammer is an anomaly to this study as his math background is much stronger than his musical ability, but he has had more success and comfort translating from French into English. Goldhammer says, “I thought, ‘this is interesting because mathematical ability has to do with logic, deduction and structure and the ability to have intuitions about structures’—I have that ability, but I don’t have the same confidence translating into French.”

Goldhammer retired in September 2015, after translating Piketty’s The Economics of Inequality. Reflecting on his career of 30 years, Goldhammer says, “translation allowed me to range widely. I’ve learned a lot of things about a lot of different fields that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to become as deeply involved in as I have. I would have been very impatient about having to stick to one thing.” Instead, he explains, “I feel I have a depth of connection with another society that would have been hard to acquire in any other way. So for me, that’s a very privileged position.” He points out that despite only living in France for a short time following graduate school, he travels there often and feels that he’s “really a part of the culture.” It’s almost, he says, like being a French citizen.

Looking ahead, Goldhammer plans to pursue his own writing. “Being able to write well in your native language is just as important as being able to understand the foreign language,” he notes. Goldhammer writes prolifically on his blog, “French Politics” and has a regular column in The American Prospect covering European politics. He describes his newest book project as a comparison of French and American democracy growing out of his translations of Tocqueville. Remembering his translations of Tocqueville and others on democracy, Goldhammer smiles: “part of the challenge was to differentiate styles so that they didn’t all sound like Goldhammer.” Now as he focuses on his own writing, it is going to be all Goldhammer all the time.

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Arthur Goldhammer: I was an undergraduate at MIT majoring first in physics and then in math. I started graduate school at MIT in 1967 and at the end of that first year of graduate school, so the summer of 1968, I went to Europe for the first time. When I got to Paris, I fell in love with the city and it was all over. French was the language that I had studied starting from the 8th grade, but since I was totally involved in science I never thought whatsoever about ever winding up in France.

When I got home, I found a draft notice waiting for me. I went in November of ’68. When the army found out that I could speak French, they sent me for training in Vietnamese. So after going through several months of training, basic training and intelligence school, I was sent to Vietnam as a Vietnamese interpreter. When I got to the country and was assigned to an intelligence unit, I found out that the Vietnamese people that I’d be working with had mostly been trained under the French colonial system so they spoke French. My French was better than my Vietnamese. I really used my French in that capacity.

When I came back, I intended to continue with mathematics, but unbeknownst to me my passions had changed. I had always wanted to write fiction as well as to do math, but in those days, the government was giving out lots of scholarships for people who were talented in math and science because Sputnik had been sent up and we were behind the Russians, or so they thought… I figured I’d do math and write fiction on the side.

So I went to Paris. When my money started to run out I thought what can I do to make money while I am living here—translation was an obvious thing. I had an American friend who had taken a job with Michel Crozier, the French sociologist, who had just finished a book and was looking for a translator. Since he spoke English quite well, he wanted to supervise the translation and was looking for somebody in Paris. I was there, so he agreed, even though I had no experience, to take me. He didn’t really supervise the translation. When I was all finished we had lunch and he kind of riffled through the pages and sent it off to the University of Chicago Press.

That was a really fortuitous connection because Chicago, at that point, was very interested in translations. It was doing more translations than any other press in the country and they had signed up a bunch of works in French history by annales historians like Jacques Le Goff, Georges Duby. They liked what I had done with Crozier and asked if I’d like to try those.

They started me on this series of French history works. It was a great opportunity for me because annales history was in vogue and widely read. They had enough to keep me busy steadily for several years and if you’re a freelancer, that’s always the difficult part of the job because there are sometimes lapses in between commissions, and then, how do you survive during that time. So I had pretty steady work, which was very lucky for somebody who didn’t have very much experience at that point. That job got me connected with the Harvard University Press. They had this series, A History of Private Life, which was a five-volume work by different authors. That was great because it meant that I would have work for 3-4 years. I did a number of multivolume works after that and having worked for both Chicago and Harvard, my reputation was well established, so I got lots of other commissions and that pretty much kept me busy for 30 years. It was incredible.

Sammy Marrus: Did you find that once you had connections at Harvard and Chicago you were able to have more say over what you translated?

AG: Getting a book approved for a university press is a complicated process because there’s an acquiring editor who then sends the work out to a board of reviewers; it’s a long time consuming process. Occasionally I did suggest a work, but then you’d have to wait a long time for it to happen and I found it wasn’t worth my while. I found the books that I was getting were interesting enough so I stopped trying to influence the process.

SM: Would you approach a book in exactly the same way each time or would it depend on the topic?

AG: It depends very much on the topic. At the beginning, I did a lot of ancillary reading because I was really learning the subject as I was going along. In non-fiction translating, you’re usually translating for a community of scholars, so I wanted to know how similar books had been translated before, what the established jargon was, so I’d read related books. I still do that to some extent. As I got more experienced, there was less necessity.

SM: How do you see the role of the translator? Do you have liberty to change the text and make it make more sense in an English context?

AG: Yes, you have a great deal of liberty. I’ve often availed myself of that liberty. In the case of Piketty, it was less necessary because he writes in a straightforward style. That book sold more books than any other book I’ve translated. It was not the most challenging book to translate by any means because the language was straightforward and inflected by English economists. Piketty himself had taught at MIT and written in English, so the rhythms of his style were more congenial to English than some other books.

With works in French history, there’s often an elaborate rhetorical style that doesn’t go very easily into English, so you have to do more work shaping the sentences to fit into English. What I often found was that the first one or two chapters of a book would go more slowly than the remainder because you have to work into each author’s style; there’s a certain resistance at the beginning.

The collective works posed a particular challenge—you’d have 30 or 40 different authors writing about similar themes. Part of the challenge was to differentiate styles so that they didn’t all sound like Goldhammer. Preserving the voice and what I like to think of as the music of the prose is very. It’s not just about understanding the ideas; there are other elements to prose. I always thought of myself as a writer first. Being able to write well in your native language is just as important as being able to understand the foreign language.

My role is to serve as a bridge between the author and the community. With a work of history or economics or sociology, you know that you’re writing for a group of scholars, so they’re educated people who understand the kinds of ideas that are being expressed in the book. Your role is to transmit the writers’ thoughts as forcefully as you can, in a matter that reflects, in your judgment, the manner in which the author would have if he were a native English speaker.

SM; Does it change the ease or your approach if you’re able to meet the author and understand his or her positionality?

AG: I have to say, no. In the early days, it was rare for French historians who were kind of hexagonal in their orientation, to speak English well. Now, with the younger generation, most educated French people do speak English well. I have been able to communicate with them more freely about the work. So with Piketty, for example, I worked very closely.

For me, the process of writing is a very silent process. It’s communing with the text and seeing how it sounds in your inner ear. You fall back instinctively on how it sounds, you tinker with the sentence until it clicks into place. When I translate in the other direction, into French, I don’t have that same strong feeling that I’ve got it right. I’m much more timid as a writer because I know that certain things are correct. There are ways in which I would be more daring in English that I am not in French because I’m not sure that it’s correct.

There’s a book on the theory of translation that cited a study in which they correlated skills with success in translation in both directions. They found that success in translating into your own language corresponded to musical talent, but translating into the other language, particularly Latin, correlated with mathematical ability. I thought, this is interesting because mathematical ability has to do with logic, deduction and structure and the ability to have intuitions about structures—I have that ability, but I don’t have the same confidence translating into French.