Pop quiz

At the bus stop this morning, out of curiosity, I gave Aiden an impromptu quiz.

“Who is 세종대왕?" “He made 한글."

“Good! How about 이순신?" "He fought against the Japanese. He made 거북선."

“Yeah! How about Mao Tse-dong?” “He was China’s first.... uh.... I forgot the word.” He just read a story about Mao in school so I knew he was familiar with the name but hadn’t yet absorbed the vocab of his title.

“How about Confucius?” Blank look. “Maybe you know him as 孔子.” He shakes his head and says, ”不知道。“ Ah, maybe you know him as 공자님?" “Ah! Isn’t he a god?” “No, he was a philosopher. He’s the guy who said, ‘Respect your parents, love your children.’” “OH, I think I know. I thought he was a god.” (Has has achieved almost deity-like status...)

“OK, how about George Washington?” His face lights up. “He’s a famous basketball player!”

I guess we have some work to do.

It’s always interesting to think about what materials we use to learn language and culture. My own Chinese textbook includes a lot of old stories which teach both vocabulary but also a kind of cultural and philosophical point of view. We had an argument about this story (very roughly translated from memory):

A businessman, a banker, and a politician were lost, walking through a forest near a mountain. As it was getting dark they finally found a farm. They knocked on the door and asked the farmer if they could spend the night there. The farmer said, “Sure, but I only have room for two people. The third will have to stay in the barn, and the smell there is quite bad.” [臭气 was the vocab word for “bad smell,” but I found it only applies to rotten or sort of BO type smells, not, for instance, to drying paint, which is what I attempted to use it to describe.... anyway....] So the businessman volunteers to stay in the barn. They all go and lie down, but a short time later there’s a knock at the door. The businessman says, “The smell was unbearable!” The banker says he’ll go and sleep in the barn. Shortly he too knocks at the door, saying that the smell was overwhelming and he too could not handle it. The politician scoffs at them, saying something like, it’s just a smell, how is it that you can’t handle that in order to get some rest? A short time later there’s yet another knock at the door. The farmer, angry, opens it and draws back in surprise, for rather than the politician, he sees all the barn animals.

A funny story. Our interpretation was that the politician smelled so bad -- in other words, that he was so despicable -- that the animals couldn’t stand it. We took the story as a humorous criticism of politicians. The teacher’s interpretation was that politicians are such extraordinary people that they can handle anything. She said it was not a criticism of politicians.

I haven’t paid as much attention as I should to Aiden’s lessons (I’m trying to spend more time teaching and playing with Max when Aiden’s with the Chinese teacher), but the Mao story surprised me. I asked his teacher what Chinese people think of Mao. Do they still consider him a great leader? She said, rather carefully, that Mao “enabled them to stand,” (站起来), that he was great in the beginning, but he did some “bad things too.”

That’s a whole post in itself, but I started to think about public figures/symbols in cultural consciousness, and how much the longevity of a figure rests on the repetition of that person’s name and his/her stories. I’m sure Aiden has heard to George Washington before -- In fact, I’m fairly certain I explained to him that Washington, D.C. was named after him -- but the absence of George’s head and stories in his life made that information both irrelevant and quickly forgotten. King Sejong, however, is on Korean currency, there’s a museum (which Aiden’s been to, though he probably doesn’t remember) named after him, and stories about him abound. There’s a statue of Admiral Yi Sun-Shin in Kwanghwamun, there was a movie or drama made about him while we were living in Korea, we saw a model of the turtle boat at the Lotte World museum, not to mention that for little boys he’s a kick-ass dude. Now that we’re living in China (and thinking about taking a trip to Beijing) I’m sure Aiden’s little brain will be collecting impressions and images of Mao, Confucius, and other Chinese characters without even knowing about it. He’s not yet studying history (they take social studies, which very neutrally started with Ancient Egypt) so his historical knowledge is pretty spotty.

Anyway, I owe another language post, but I’m really behind in a bunch of areas and skipping class to catch up, so I’ll have to write it another day. But I wanted to record this before I forgot about it!

First time back to Seoul since the move

Rather rambling, unedited description of our first trip back to Korea.

So we’re just back from three weeks back in Korea. This was our first trip back (and the kids’ first trip out of China) since moving 6 months ago. I had imagined leaving the kids with the in-laws and having oodles of time to catch up on reading and studying while there but that didn’t happen. We were running around like crazy people pretty much the whole trip, seeing as many friends as we could and having the kids return to their old schools, piano lessons, swimming lessons, and taekwondo. It was great.

We landed at Incheon on a Saturday evening. Pretty much from the moment we landed there was this sense of lightness and relief. The signs, the language -- everything was familiar. We all stopped in the bathroom and I was tickled to be back in a place where you can reliably (in the airport, at least) find toilet paper in the bathrooms. There were no people yelling at each other. And then there was -- a mother yelling at her daughter for wanting to get divorced. That was weird. They were both clearly from the countryside. Later as we were leaving she was crying and holding onto her mother’s leg, begging for forgiveness. [It reminded me to the begger children around People’s Park here in Shanghai -- some of them only 3 or 4 years old -- who grab onto your legs when you walk by and beg for money.] But that’s the thing -- I knew this particular incident was odd. I have enough sense of Seoul to be able to interpret whether something is normal or an exception. In China (because people kept asking me to describe China) I just have no clue. All I can really see is my own reactions to China, with no reliable sense of what lies underneath.

On the airport bus I wanted KC to stop talking to me so I could take in the landscape. “It looks so peaceful and organized, doesn’t it?” he asked me. It did, but I think that’s as much a function of expectation than some sort of reality. Parking on the sidewalk, small stores with contents spilling out into the sidewalk -- my perceptual habits are used to accommodating scenes like that. Our neighborhood in China is relatively new and nice but China in general is still an assault on my senses, because so many parts are still puzzling or unfamiliar. Coming into our neighborhood in Gangnam things seem even more orderly because Gangnam-gu has spent so much money in recent years straightening sidewalks and repaving. The newer buildings also have fewer signs on the outside. The effect of this is a rather restrained, and organized atmosphere. It reminded me of going to Tokyo some years back. Although cities in general tend towards a sense of crowdedness and chaos, the precision of the small details in Tokyo made it feel much more orderly than Seoul at the time.

There was snow on the ground, so after we got off the bus the boys started a snowball fight. Max still has the idea that snow and Christmas belong together, and was quite puzzled when presents arrived without snow. When we got to Seoul he asked, “Is it Christmas again?”

Sunday morning the first thing I did after a nice meal (courtesy of my mother-in-law) of 떡국 and Seoul Coffee Milk was get a much needed haircut and 두피 treatment. As my friend Ming once said, when you move you can always make new friends but it is really hard to find someone to cut your hair. I’ve only cut my hair once in Shanghai (out of desperation) and my hair guy in Seoul spent a good deal of time holding up various parts of my hair going, “Wha....? What happened here? Why is it cut like this? Who cut your hair? Why didn’t you go to a nice Korean salon?” Ha. For the record, I wanted to do it on the cheap in a neighborhood place, and the job they did wasn’t bad, but they did hack one side oddly short. Anyway, I was chatting with the woman who washes my hair and she commented that I seemed to have forgotten a lot of Korean. The words were just coming... rather... slowly. I kept thinking in Chinese first. It was a weird feeling.

Max had a little trouble with Korean too. KC and I decided not to move around much for those first 6 months because we wanted to give the kids a chance to settle down. By the end of 6 months, though, we had all made incredible improvement in Chinese and gotten out of the habit of speaking Korean. We debated about going back to the U.S. for the Chinese New Year holiday (I’d really like to see my friends and family there, especially my new niece) but we decided that on top of the distance, cost, and time difference, having the kids speak Korean and renew all their social and familial ties to Korea would be more important. Watching Max and myself stumble with Korean those first few days made me glad we made the choice to come back to Seoul.

Aiden and KC didn’t have any trouble with the language. Aiden’s at the right age, I think -- I’ve heard (or read? can’t remember) that 8 is the magical age for languages. Aiden jumped right back in with no noticeable difficulty. It took Max and me a few days and then we were fine. And Max surprised me by having whole conversations with me in Chinese during this time. Since we mostly speak English and Korean at home I hadn’t realized just quite how good his Chinese is. He uses conjunctions and will pick up on any word I use and use it back to me, correctly. Blew me away. I knew he had improved a lot, but I had underestimated him.

KC had suspended my cellphone account so I could keep the number while gone and I had to wait until a weekday to reactivate it. So Monday morning I sent out a spate of text messages announcing that we were back and asking if we could make playdates. It was so nice to have my old number and phone intact, and the messages started coming back immediately. I spent so much time on the phone that day that I ran out of batteries and began to think Aiden needed his own secretary.

It was wonderful to re-enter our old communities; it was as if we never left. I felt, again, grateful for doing all those classroom cleanings and lunch duties with the first grade moms because we have a bond now that was slow to build but is now strong. We’re depending on the kids having strong relationships with their friends in different countries in order to maintain both language and cultural knowledge, plus the desire to maintain those. But I’m starting to realize how dependent I am on the mothers of his friends to keep those friendships up. They need to value the relationship as much as I do or it doesn’t really work. I’ve started to notice myself scrutinizing Aiden’s friends’ parents; not because I care so much what their socio-economic backgrounds are but because their values do really matter. Aiden has a new friend in Shanghai that we invited over a few times and each time his mom said no. It didn’t matter to me what reputation his friend had as long as they liked to play together, but after meeting and talking with his mom I began to realize the friendship probably wouldn’t go very far. She’s a very ambitious mom, and pushes her son in all sorts of areas, but just doesn’t seem to place much value on his social relationships.

I really appreciate this about the Seoul moms I’ve gotten close to: that they make an effort to sustain those relationships. And because so many of them, like us, have either lived abroad or are planning to expose their kids to multiple educational systems, they are good to talk to about the experience of moving back and forth. I hear from friends who have repatriated that because the experience of living abroad is relatively rare in the U.S., friends back home often don’t really want to listen to stories of the time spent away; the experience is too incomprehensible, or maybe they feel threatened or something. My friends back home have been pretty supportive but it was good to talk to these moms nonetheless. They know how much effort it takes to try to keep a foot in each culture. It took me a long time to break into the social group here, but those ties, once made, seem pretty strong.

This time back I was really glad we had sent Aiden to a neighborhood school. Walking around the place we kept bumping into people we knew. The first day back (after my haircut) we went to lunch at a neighborhood udon place located next to a large complex where one of Aiden’s friends lives, and while we waited for a table I jokingly said to Aiden, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we ran into Dylan here?” Not five minutes later a pack of boys runs around the corner -- not just Dylan, but Dylan and three more of Aiden’s friends. They immediately begin jumping up and down and shouting, “장웅재! 장웅재! 장웅재!" I had told Aiden that the first day would be a family day, but so much for that. He ate a quick lunch and joined his friends to play. If he had gone to international school (or even local school with an international section, like he does now) we wouldn’t be able to depend on seeing familiar faces upon returning; the turnover rate is too high.

Between running around seeing friends and sending the kids back to their own schools we were continuously busy. The kids in Korea were on vacation too but I assumed that they would be pretty busy with hakwon and other activities so I had planned, with the help of my father-in-law, to send the kids to piano, taekwondo, and swimming nearly every day, having them resume the lessons they left off when we moved. We’ve found lessons surprisingly expensive in China -- perhaps because they are more geared towards the well-off than they are in Korea, where each neighborhood has its own small piano, taekwondo, etc. studios, keeping the prices competitive. The kids come home from school late in Shanghai and with the overwhelming task of adjusting to a new language we decided not to enroll them in anything extra (though Aiden has swimming once a week at school and Max takes piano in his kindergarten). Max started taekwondo this time. It was nice to see him willing to go as long as he could follow his brother. Aiden held his hand and showed him what to do.

Our insurance is in Korea so we also had to do all the uncomfortable medical and dental check-ups. Aiden’s eyes have gotten a lot worse so the first Monday morning we were at the eye doctor, and then later in the day I took him to the Coex to get him new glasses. KC and I have been going to the same store in the Coex for the last ten years or more, always to the same guy there, who knows us well. I left Max with my in-laws and Aiden was positively jubilant the whole way there -- riding the subway, walking down the street. His face was beaming and he was jumping up and down with glee. Not just because he got to have some mommy time but because, I realized, he was so ecstatic to be back in Korea. He’s usually a happy kid, but he was bouncing with happiness to be back. I could, in that moment, really get a sense of how hard the move has been on him. I felt that sense of lightness too, being back in Korea, back in our old stomping grounds, full of random knowledge about where to go for this and that and how to phrase things with tact. It was how I felt going back to the U.S. during those first few years of living in Korea.

Anyway, we got to the glasses store and I was talking with the guy (I can never remember his name, because he looks like an Asian John Cusack, and that’s all I can think about when I see him) about our move and stuff and I had a flashback to the first time I was in that store. It was before we were married, so that must have been over 11 years ago. He gave me an eye exam and I couldn’t understand a word; KC had to translate for me and I felt very uncomfortable and embarrassed because I couldn’t understand. It was a measure of how far I’ve come, to be able to bring my son back here and go through the process of getting him glasses and conversing about a range of topics without a dictionary, without preparation, without even thinking. It felt really good, and reminded me that the feeling of ease and lightness could be had in China too, if I gave it some time.

Both kids went back to their old schools. Max’s kindergarten principal told me just to send him for the whole trip, which was unexpected and very nice of her. I had already scheduled all the other classes so I ended up sending him less than half the time. It’s still the same school year (since they go March to March and we left after their first semester) so his old classmates and teacher mobbed him upon return. Aiden’s teacher also told me to send him, since our last week there overlapped with their first week of school after the lunar new year break. The Korean school schedule is a bit weird. They pretty much finish the curriculum by the end of December, then have a month off. Then they go back after the lunar new year for exams, but in the lower grades there are no exams. So Aiden went to school for a day and watched movies, played games, and made things with paper. No real studying. It was nice to see his classmates though.

I was going to write more but I see this post is already really long. By the end of the trip my Korean was back, Max’s Korean had improved a great deal, and so did Aiden’s. Aiden’s become quite a bookworm. I caught myself scolding him a few times for going over to friends houses and reading their books instead of playing with them. I bought him a new manhwa book on Obama’s life, which he read in something like 30 minutes. I couldn’t quite believe he read it so quickly, so I started quizzing him, and then he accused me of being like Obama’s mother, because I’m always getting after him about studying. Ha. Our luggage was quite heavy with books for the kids and for myself. I picked up TOPIK and KLPT books while there, but I don’t know which one to take. Anyone want to give me some advice?

Several of Aiden’s friends’ moms commented that he’s matured a lot since we left. One called me to tell me that he had told her, “옛날에 할아버지가 잔소리 하시는것 되게 싫어했는데, 이제는 얼마나 사랑하시는지 느꼈어요." (Something like: I used to hate it when Grandpa would nag me, but now I understand that’s how much he loves me.”) He’s been less shy. Neither kid wanted to return to Shanghai, but Aiden said he was still glad we moved because he could appreciate the differences. Max announced, as soon as we arrived, that he loved staying in Grandma and Grandpa’s house and that we should stay there and not go back. I said, “What about Julia?” He said, “She can get on an airplane and move to Korea!”

One of my main accomplishments during the trip: I finally got around to making and printing about half of our Seoul Life book. Long time readers will recall that we make a travel book for each of our trips (I’m almost caught up on those too -- the last trip before the move and the one trip to Shenzhen hadn’t been made yet, but have been now) but I wanted to make a book about our life in Seoul. Aiden and I spent some time brainstorming what it would include: people we know, places we go, schools we’ve attended, food we eat, holidays, seasons, etc. I’m not really sure where to get things printed yet in Shanghai, but I have a guy who did all my printing in Seoul and I wanted to use him so that was good incentive to knock out a bunch of the book. Cost me about 100,000 won in printing, I got a lot of it done, and it was great to be back and look through the pages with the kids and my in-laws. Not only did it give us the chance to look back at all the fun things we did in our five years in Seoul, but it also let us watch the kids grow up again. I had forgotten how little Aiden was when we first moved. And since Max was born in Seoul, looking at his baby pictures again was great fun. I wish there was some way I could post parts of the books online for people to see, but the files are huge.

Anyway, we’re back in Shanghai now. Although it’s great to be back in our own place, and the warm weather has triggered a kind of biological excitement at the approach of spring, there’s a feeling of reluctance to return, a kind of dread at being back in a place where I’m too nervous to even get my hair cut at regular intervals. Aiden’s been complaining about going back to school. I have to remind myself that this feeling will pass, and that it is not the fault of China, but rather a natural shrinking away from the unfamiliar and challenging. I have to remember to be patient, and to appreciate the battles we already won, and know that this feeling, in time, will pass.

Multicultural living forum on Shanghai Family

Hi everyone,
I recently got involved with Shanghai Family magazine, which has just launched its website. Check it out! And, for all you Shanghai people out there, look at the forums. I'll be moderating one on "multicultural living." I hope that we can get some good discussions going there. I've pasted my intro to the forum below.


You may be thinking, What is “multicultural living,” and why have a forum for it?

If you’re anything like me, when you move to a foreign country your first instinct is to think through the logistics: Where will we live? What schools will the kids go to? What do I need to bring? How do we get our visas? But I’ve found, after two such moves, that those are the easy things. There are resources available to help you make such decisions and a finite number of choices.

The hard part, for me, is learning to feel at home in the new place, to cultivate relationships with the people I meet there, and to feel like I belong as I move alongside strangers and go about my daily tasks. I find myself in a new place where even people’s gestures are incomprehensible, where they have different rituals and standards of politeness, and where I stick out like a sore thumb even when walking around.

And I’m not just talking about interacting with locals -- I spend just as much time trying to decipher other foreigners!

So on one hand, I suspect that there are a lot of questions floating around out there about the proper way to behave at a wedding, how much to put in a hongbao, what to bring as a guest at someone’s home, and the meanings of various rituals.

But there’s another side to the idea of multicultural living as well. I'm married to someone who grew up in a different country, speaking a different language and raised in a different culture, and we’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to articulate and work with those differences over our marriage. And since want our kids to feel comfortable in both cultures and languages, “multicultural living” has been a kind of domestic experiment: how can we raise our kids to be able to move across boarders and feel at home in different places?

Even for people who are not in a cross-culture marriage, this may be something that you are interested in for your children -- especially for the kids who have grown up abroad.

So whether you have
- questions or insights about cultural differences living here in Shanghai,

or
- ideas or questions about ways in which to incorporate multiple languages and cultures in your own or your kids' lives

THIS is the forum for you!

Welcome to the forum, and post away!

The age of criticism

First, a belated response to some comments.

David, thanks for the warm comments. I hope you are all well, and that we'll be able to see each other soon -- maybe in HK or Shunde? We miss you all. I love seeing the pictures of Susie. No matter where you end up, I think hearing Korean from a young age will help her down the line, even if she doesn't continue with the language. I suspect that part of the reason I've been able to pick up Korean and Chinese relatively quickly is that I was exposed to Cantonese when I was young.

Micah, thanks for your comment! I agree with what you said about memorization. One of the reasons I'm content with Pinghe right now is because they do, through subjects taught in English with American texts, include more creative expression than I was expecting. Aiden's doing a speech to run for mayor of the class today, he made a poster to save the sharks before that, and made a model of ancient Egypt before that... those were the kinds of activitis I did in public school in the U.S., and I think I had a very good education. These projects involve some relatively long-term planning and a variety of forms of expression: verbal, 2-dimensional art, 3-dimensional art. I'm not sure what the U.S. is like these days (and of course the U.S. educational system is very regional); but while I think the U.S. in general is good with creative problem solving and critical thinking there seems to be strong distaste for memorization. And sometimes I think memorization is good. You've got to memorize the times tables. You've got to memorize spelling. And when it comes to learning a language you've got to do some memorization. Even in a speech, you've got to be able to hold the structure in your head and talk around it. So my comment about memorization wasn't to embrace it wholeheartedly, but to recognize (as someone who also has had a distaste for it pedagogically) that a little memorization can be a good thing. But I should have also commented that in his curriculum overall memorization has been accompanied by other more creative and critical techniques.

This is a bit tangential but I really like the writing textbook they are using. I've done a lot of teaching of writing (to graduate students and for younger children) and I was really impressed but the book. But (as I'm finding now) this kind of work (creative writing, projects like those described above) requires a lot of participation from the parents.

Some kids are more self-sufficient (most girls seem to be able to do these things by themselves, if my quick survey of the other moms counts as evidence) but with Aiden I have to spend a lot of time helping him break his projects (and test preparation) into steps, making him work on those things daily, helping him through the process of revision. As any writer knows, most of writing is being able to step back and think through a piece of work in multiple ways, to be able to sense structure and flow, and then to revise. Aiden’s a “let’s finish this quickly and play” kind of kid. Helping him with projects -- helping him tame his ideas and make them presentable and polished -- requires a lot of patience (I’m failing in that area) and attention. Memorization, from the parent’s perspective, is easier. It doesn’t require much thinking on the parent’s part. Maybe my standards are high (I don’t think they are) but this kind of schooling (assuming the projects are done at home -- the kids in American schools have very little homework) requires a lot more of the parent than the other kind does. I’m very glad that I’m not working and can spend this time with him, because he really needs the help. Max is a different animal. He sits next to us at the table and works with a great deal of concentration on his workbooks and drawings. I’m guessing that he’ll be able to do his work more independently. I don’t know how much of that is related to birth-order (he likes to do what his brother does, even if it means sitting at the table and “studying” for several hours every day) and how much is personality. Max has always been more detail-oriented, better with small-motor control, more into drawing. I’m teaching him to read Korean now and he’s catching on surprisingly quickly.

On another tangent, my blog and my other writing has suffered from this lack of time. I’m in school all morning and I have to save energy and patience to help Aiden with his homework all evening. I have a few hours in the afternoon to split between building my social relationships, doing household things, and working on my own long-term writing project. It tires me out.

What I’ve been meaning to write about: the age of criticism

Until a certain age Mommy and Daddy are just Mommy and Daddy, not People -- but the main sources of comfort, security, and knowledge of rules and boundaries. Kids Max’s age can’t think of their parents as people, they just are. But at some point kids start to realize that their parents are not perfect, that they can be criticized like anyone else. And once that criticism starts, it never stops, does it?

Aiden’s reaching the age of criticism. He’s old enough to have accumulated a large set of evidence -- make that grievances -- about the way that we treat him. He’s been around the block and seen the large discrepancies in the way people parent in different families and different places. I have taken care to explain to him (many times, I tend to run at the mouth) why I make certain decisions that are different from his friends’ parents: why he’s not allowed to watch much TV, why I won’t buy him a Nintendo DS, why we have to move, etc. There are unintended side effects to everything. A few weeks ago we met the daughter of a friend and after a few minutes Aiden sidled up to me and whispered, “Mom, that kid is really spoiled.” He then spent the rest of the evening making whispered analysis of all the ways in which the mom encouraged the kid’s spoiled behavior. So he’s able to see the ways in which parenting choices mold the behavior of children, and I think that’s generally a good thing (as long as he keeps it to himself in the name of politeness) but it’s also encouraged him to increasingly turn his critical eye on my parenting choices. Some days I’m feeling a little like a Big Three Executive meeting Congress. But with a little more to show, I hope.

The other day he was being extra fidgety with his Chinese tutor (who has learned that days when Aiden doesn’t have gym class are days in which he cannot sit still) and she jokingly said, “If you don’t listen to me maybe I should start hitting you.” He said, very seriously, “You can’t do that!” She said, “Your mom doesn’t hit you?” He said, “No, of course not! If she did I could leave and go to another family.”

Where did he get that idea? But this idea seems to have taken over his thinking. I guess I have, in retrospect, presented parenting, living, behavior, etc. as a series of choices, emphasizing the ways in which we can pick and choose how we want to be, and it makes sense I suppose to extend that to family. The other day he was complaining that an old reward system that had existed in Korea was no longer (I had taken advantage of the move and let it expire). I explained that since he was older he no longer needed to be rewarded for that particular behavior; he was mad and said, “I don’t want to be a part of the family anymore. I want to go to a different family!” I laughed at him. Not a nice laugh, I was pissed. “You want to leave your family over a piece of CANDY???” Because I forget that although he can be supremely rational about some things, he’s just an 8-year old, unable to look past the blow of a loss of a piece of candy and remember all the ways in which his family is really good.

In other kid news...
Both kids are speaking so well it is a little scary. Aiden now has character dictation once a week and they’ve progressed to some tough characters. His stroke order is more correct than mine, and he can now understand grammatical patterns without ever learning them as such. (It’s so different with the adult learner. Though I do remember finding myself using grammatical patterns I never learned in Korean; one day they just started emerging from my mouth. Surprised me as much as anybody else.) Max can now have short conversations in Chinese, and he speaks whole sentences easily.

I’m so jealous.

Aiden came home one day to tell me a story about an incident in gym class that included the following: “...and he hit me with the 쇠 hula hoop and then the 후반장 said, “下课了？“ And the teacher said, “没有。” It made me laugh. We tend to mix a lot of Korean and English at home, but that was the first time he threw some Chinese into the mix. It used to be Korean with a little English, then it was something like, “Mommy will you 고쳐this 장난감for me? 빨리!" (Max) And now it’s more like, “Mommy can we have some 계란for dinner?” Just a word here and there. Though they still tend to talk to each other in Korean. We’ll go back to Korea for a few weeks in January and I think their Korean ratio will rise at that time. I’m just playing with percentages now.

***

I’m not sure how long I can keep the Santa Claus charade up. I took them to see Santa at a fair at Concordia school last month and Aiden said with suspicion, “Is this the real Santa?” One of the volunteers said, “Is there any other kind?” Then just before we sat on Santa’s lap he asked me, “Can I speak to Santa in Korean?” I was mentally kicking myself for having told him last year that Santa can speak all languages in the world. The circumstances necessitating that declaration are fuzzy but I think it was probably because he wrote his letter in English and Korean last year. This year it was all in English. Anyway, I told him something lame like, “This is an English-speaking fair and for the sake of politeness maybe you should stick to English.” And then a week or so later we went to see the lighting ceremony at the Hongqiao Marriot where there was another Santa. Aiden said, “Mommy, this is a different Santa!” I think the jig is almost up.

From last year, here’s my post on “Lies I tell my kids.” It still makes me laugh.

Four Months in

I can hardly believe we’ve been here for four months. I’m feeling more settled. I really love our apartment and neighborhood. Now that the weather has turned cold and I spend the mornings shivering in an unheated and damp classroom, I am supremely grateful for our apartment with its heated floors, double layers of windows and sunlight. So many Shanghai residents spend the winter (so I hear) with their windows open and no heat. I suppose that’s better for the environment but I’m such a wimp about cold I can’t imagine it.

Speaking of the environment, I meant to mention some of the features of our place that I really like. We control our water temperature, so we only heat the water when we need to use it. The boiler doesn’t run all the time; you turn it on before you need to take a shower or run the floor heating system. (Our apartment has ondol heat which is not common in China but since we sleep on the floor we looked for an apartment with this feature; our neighborhood has a lot of Koreans and therefore a good number of ondol apartments.) You can turn it off when you’re not using it. Same thing with the condenser for the air conditioning and the heating system. Also each room has controls for both floor heat and ceiling level air conditioning/heating. And, like in Korea, there’s a switch to shut off the gas when we’re not cooking. Gas, electricity, and water are relatively expensive in Shanghai and we use them as sparingly as possible, although I have been going a little crazy with the oven (having not had one for the last 5 years) and I do like to make the floor nice and warm when I get home in the evening. Sometime in the middle of the night I’ll turn everything off. Our apartment is pretty well insulated (unusual for China) and retains the heat well.

I also love our neighborhood. The complex itself is very nicely done, when I look out my window I see trees and water and the effect is very peaceful. Cars can’t come into the interior of the complex so it is quiet and safe for the kids to play. There are lots of hidden paths which Max loves to explore. In the mornings there are always a lot of people doing taeqiquan and some sort of sword-dancing. In the afternoons the interior areas are dominated by kids riding their bikes or playing badminton. Just outside of our apartment are shops and cafes. A Sephora and Zara are opening across the street which may pose a danger to my budget. The subway station is a little far compared to Seoul but I found that it only takes me 15 minutes to walk at my pace, and the station is on line 2, which is a really good line for going to Lujiazui or Puxi.

The big language news this month is that Max has started speaking. He started perhaps a week or two ago -- I noticed it when two of his friends came over to play. One of his friends doesn’t speak much English (though she speaks Spanish and French) so the three of them were fighting in Chinese: 这是我的！不，这是我的！ Max was saying it also. After that he took off and seems really keen to speak it. He asks me for translations so he can say all the things he wants to say. One day he came home upset because, “Michelle told Julia ‘I won’t be your friend anymore.’ But she said it in Chinese.” So he understands more than what he can say, and he’s able to respond to questions appropriately most of the time. I’ve also made some headway teaching him to read 한글. Considering how much time I have to spend with Aiden on his homework, this is quite an accomplishment. KC brought back some workbooks from Korea on his last trip and now when Aiden is busy doing his homework (if Max is not still working in his dinner) Max sits at the table and does his homework too. He can now recognize 가,나,다,라, and 마. Poor second child, completely neglected by mommy. He’s also doing better with English lower case letters and phonics. Good thing he likes to draw and write.

Aiden’s recognition of characters is very good now and they’ve started to write and have dictation in the last few weeks. Like me, he can recognize many characters but blanks on how to write them. He also has trouble remembering stroke order. He continues to do 2-3 hours of homework a night. After yelling at him for a half an hour about why he can’t remember the difference between plural and plural possessive I have to remind myself that I’m asking him to absorb an awful lot of information at once and asking an 8-year old to concentrate for that long is, well... asking a lot. The other moms are telling me to give it 6 months; they say after 6 months it gets a lot easier. Overall he’s happy and cheerful although he often complains about having to go to school.

Lately Max has been asking a lot about death. I remember Aiden having similar questions at around 3 or 4 years of age. Max asks, “Why do people have to die? Will Mommy die? Who will cook me food then? [this made me laugh] How will I die?” I told him that everybody dies and that this is why we should live each and every day well. So Aiden said, “But how can I do that when I have to go to school every day? It’s a waste of time! I can’t play, I just have to study.”

As for me, I feel like I’ve hit a plateau, but that may not really be the case. I remember in studying Korean that my progress seemed to follow a step-lilke pattern -- I’d feel like I was stagnating and not learning anything for a while, then all the sudden I’d make a lot of progress. But the hard thing is that often you don’t realize how much you actually are progressing. It’s not noticeable. It’s hard for me to get a sense, for instance, of how much my Korean improved after moving to Seoul. I don’t have a clear memory of what I knew at the point at which we moved, but I do remember that I only understood about half of my conversations with my neighbors. I also remember that there were so many words I didn’t know when KC and his parents talked to each other that I didn’t bother to ask what they meant. By contrast, I understand almost everything they say now; if they use a word I don’t know I ask about it.

The problem right now is that I am a very poor student. I don’t do the homework and I don’t review. For shame. Also I skip class whenever I’m too busy or feeling sick (like right now). The other problem is that I don’t interact enough with Chinese people. I talk to Aiden and KC’s teacher every day, but you have to talk with a variety of people in order to really learn to speak and listen well, especially in China where there’s so much variation in usage and pronunciation. When I was in Korea meeting with other school moms I got to hear a lot of Korean -- they talked a lot and were generally nervous about speaking English. But here when I meet the school moms they are all comfortably bilingual. They speak to each other in Chinese but speak to me in English. Their English is so good and my Chinese so poor by comparison that it feels inappropriate for me to inflict my Chinese on them, therefore I have less chance to practice.

One thing about moving abroad is that you learn that you have to work at cultivating social relationships from the moment you hit the ground. I’m willing to skip class more than I should if it involves meeting people, because I know that I need those relationships for psychological and practical purposes. The biggest accomplishment over the last few months is probably that we have connected with a bunch of other people through our schools, neighborhood, and random other ways.

Three months in

We’ve just passed the three-month mark in Shanghai. I haven’t settled into much of a writing routine yet but I’m trying to continue to jot down notes on our language acquisition.

Max still hasn’t started to do much speaking. He had almost no exposure to Chinese in Korea so I know his listening time will be longer. He has surprised me by offering translations lately -- he’ll tell me “Mommy ‘gei wo’ means ‘give me.’ Gei wo blah blah” where blah blah is some Chinese-sounding thing he makes up and explains to me as “the ghost that killed the bad guy and has to hide under the table” or something like that. As far as I know translation is a different skill than being able to speak so I’m surprised to see him so actively translating. Perhaps this offers some insight into the way he thinks. I think of him as a very verbal kid, a kid who easily repeats what he hears, but looking back I guess he’s only repeating that which he thoroughly understands. That explains his recent Korean explosion, I suppose -- he’s finally verbalizing that which he had heard before but hadn’t understood well enough to say.
Max is also very conscious of who speaks what languages. He seems to categorize the kids in his class by what language they speak well and seems a little suspicious of being good friends with the kids who only speak Chinese -- at least, that’s how he sounds when to talks to me about them. But his teachers tell me he gets along well with everyone and he’s pretty chummy with a little Japanese-Chinese girl who doesn’t speak English. It’s hard to figure out how much weight to give his self-reporting.

Recently Max likes to say, "aiyah!" He says it very seriously and tells me that that is what his piano teacher says when she gets mad. Ha.

I forgot to write about this funny incident in my last post: Max takes piano lessons in school and told me, one day, that his teacher speaks a lot of Korean. I was surprised and asked him, “What Korean words does she say?” He said, “Do rae me fa so la ti do!”

One of Max’s best friends is a little girl named Julia who is black. Max has lived his whole life in Asia and hasn’t seen that many black people, so when we’d go out every time we’d see a black woman he’d tell me that she must be Julia’s mom, and any black kids must certainly be Julia’s siblings. Ha. Anyway, Julia’s mom and I had been exchanging text messages trying to get the kids together to play. (aside: One bad part about being a second child is that your social life always takes a back seat to your older sibling’s. I have been trying to make an effort to find Max a close circle of friends and give him more play dates.) We finally met on a school field trip and then they came over to our place to play afterwards. Julia’s mom is from South America and speaks Spanish, French, English, Chinese, and a little Portuguese. Her Chinese is very good and she’s doing a masters degree at a local university. It was very interesting to talk to her; she’s lived in Asia for a long time and her older son in particular has had a more difficult time finding friends because they stand out so much. Shanghai’s foreigner population feels much higher and more integrated than Seoul’s but most foreigners are white, Asian, or Indian. Her son is local school too (not the same one as Aiden) and it sounds like its been a rocky experience. Julia speaks very good English and Chinese and is quite the social butterfly in kindergarten, but her brother had some trouble with language confusion too. Julia’s mom used to have a good Korean friend (back in HK?) and was talking to me about how she reached out to some of the Korean moms here because she missed her Korean friend, but how hard it is to break into that social circle. I can totally understand that -- it took me a long time in Korea to really break in, even though I spoke Korean well. But I haven’t had any trouble here, I guess it is like riding a bike. I kind of know when to speak, when not too, what to say, how to time my approaches. Talking to her I thought that if we had a third kid I’m not sure how I’d introduce the languages -- three at a time? Or two first?

Aiden has just really started to speak: I see it and he is also reporting to me that he can now participate a little in Chinese during “tai quan dao”-- no longer “taekwondo.” He now will answer his tutor in Chinese. He has covered 30 chapters of their current textbook in class and can recite almost all of them by heart -- he’s got a good memory. I was a little uncertain about the value of so much memorization (especially since the text includes some pretty difficult and bizarre passages) but he does pull out relevant sentences and use them in real life.

We just returned from a weekend trip to Shunde in Guangdong, where my paternal grandmother is from. They speak Guangdonghua there which is totally different from mandarin. We were last there three years ago and Aiden played with a bunch of my cousin’s kids; at that time, they didn’t have any languages in common and communicated with body language and “argh, pew pew, zzzt,” etc -- fighting words, basically. This time they spoke putonghua (Mandarin) to each other -- we were all surprised and delighted to see how well Aiden could get along with putonghua, English, and body language. Aiden doesn’t know how to tease in Chinese but his textbook has a passage about a “mommy chicken” so “mommy chicken” became his new teasing insult, complete with chicken-like head bob.

Aiden’s progress is truly amazing, and his pronunciation is incredibly clear. I think I have pretty good pronunciation, but he puts me to shame. He has also really gotten the hang of pinyin and can spell correctly based on sound. He doesn’t always get the tones right though.

I heard guangdonghua when I was growing up because my parents spoke it to each other (mostly when they were trying to talk about me and my brothers without us understanding) and to their friends, and I always thought it was normal, and putonghua (Mandarin) was a sissy, wussy sounding dialect. Well, after not really hearing guangdonghua for many years I went to Hong Kong a few weeks ago and was shocked to find that guangdonghua is really, REALLY weird sounding. Actually, it sounds awful. It has a lot of sharp, guttural sounds. At first I was so surprised I couldn’t pick out any words. After a few days I started remembering some words. Then this weekend we were in Shunde with my relatives, all of whom were speaking guangdonghua (but speaking putonghua or English to me and KC) and I could pick out more words. Now that I’m learning putonghua I can start to translate word for word (when there is a word for word translation) and appreciate how different the dialects are. “Mei wenti” (putonghua) is “Mo wentai” (guangdonghua), but “xihuan” (putonghua) is “jongyi” (guangdonghua, my romanization). Totally different. Even though I’m a slacker student, putonghua is feeling more natural to me these days, and sometimes if I’ve been speaking Chinese I have trouble switching to Korean.

KC’s made a lot of progress. His ear has improved a lot so he can guess the general meaning of a lot of conversation despite having the least time to study (he’s still the worst one in the family). His knowledge of characters has helped a lot and also I think his general very utilitarian attitude -- he doesn’t try to sound perfect, he just tries to communicate. Shanghai people are pretty used to trying to figure out what others are saying despite differences in accent and in normal conversations I’ve found listeners to be pretty forgiving. I can make all sorts of mistakes (that will cause me to blush and hit myself on the head later) and they will still understand. Perfectionist tendencies must be pushed to the side during the beginning stages of language learning.

Starting now I'm making more of an effort to speak Korean at home. All of us have naturally begun speaking more English (and better English) as time has passed. I think we have to make a conscious effort to make Korean our home language before we get out of the habit of speaking it altogether. If we don't make a habit of speaking it we'll all forget it (especially the kids and I) pretty quickly.

Languages aside, I’m finding that three months in we’re still really adjusting. I know that the process takes a long time but I have to remind myself that even though we have a routine and things have gone smoothly that the psychological toll of moving to a new place (and a new country) is a long-term one. We’re all a little rough around the edges, we all have trouble holding our tempers, we all find ourselves less nice than usual. I’m usually the temperamental one and KC is usually pretty even-keeled, but we’ve both been equally affected and for myself, at least, I need more time to spend alone with my own thoughts so that I can be on better behavior with others. This is the tricky thing about moving -- it’s not a wound you can see or a hurt you can sense, but something that just makes you feel a little less like working and a kind of rawness that makes you get angry before you can think about why. I think that much of the dissatisfaction expats have with their new country of residence has to do with those unrecognized psychological discomforts than with something that is really there -- of course, there are difficult parts, but often the anger at those difficulties seems irrational or overblown. Another American friend of mine who also recently moved to Shanghai after living in Seoul for a long time told me she worries she is depressed. She doesn’t really want to go out, she’s happy to be alone, she just hasn’t been herself. I told her I think it’s just the move and to give it some time. I think it must be even harder when you’re older (she’s probably 20 years older than me) and have lived in the previous place longer.

Language notes

I am not exactly sure who reads this blog (beyond the friends and family who are compelled to read) but I suspect that a few stick around because they’re curious or interested in our little language experiments. What follows are my notes from the first two months of living here... not as organized as I would like, but I want to write as much as I can down.

As most readers know, my kids are 8 and 4 and bilingual (Korean and English). They both attended bilingual preschool/kindergarten and Aiden attended Korean elementary school for 1.5 years. The language they favor shifts over time; we’ve intentionally traveled a lot, spending at least a month or two in the U.S. each year. After one of those trips they will always speak a greater percentage of English to each other and in the house. As time goes on they’ll speak less, but it never disappears. We also mix languages a lot at home but so far neither of them have had trouble with language differentiation. They speak Korean to Korean speakers and English to English speakers. (Once one of them -- I think it was Aiden -- informed my in-laws that they were not allowed to travel to the U.S. because they didn’t speak English.) I have noticed that whenever we travel their languages get better, and always both languages at the same time, which is really extraordinary. Since been here Max’s Korean has skyrocketed; he is using expressions that I don’t know and up until recently has been speaking Korean almost exclusively at home.

I know that children listen a lot before they start speaking a new language (thanks to my friend Elaine who has schooled me with her extensive knowledge on language acquisition in children). Aiden took about a year of Chinese in Seoul, but not intensively. Only once or twice a week, and some Rosetta Stone at home (the frequency varied depending on how much other stuff he had going on.) He couldn’t speak much but I think he got the basics of pronunciation, pinyin, and his ability to listen was primed by these lessons. When we arrived here he still had a month before school started so I enrolled him in a 3-week Chinese class (two hours a day) at a local (Korean) hakwon. I put him in the beginner level so it was pretty easy for him. I didn’t push him much to speak, especially because I know he’s shy and I think he has to do things at his own pace. When you’re learning a language in a different country you have to force yourself to practice speaking, but when you live in the place where you need the language all the time, the sense of urgency comes with the air you breathe and the food you eat. Aiden’s been on the receiving end of my opinions about the importance of languages and he’s had experience translating for English-speakers in Korea, so he knows very well how important language study is. But this is the first time he’s in a place where he has to do the learning.

After a few weeks, I noticed that every now and then he’d pop out with a full sentence. One morning when he was having trouble waking me up he said, “我饿了。“ [I’m hungry.”] Then, when KC’s teacher came over one day, he said, “爸爸是学生。” [“Daddy is a student.”] When his friend Martin came to visit from Korea we took the kids to Yu Yuan, and afterwards they had fun looking at all the different vendors. When Martin couldn’t understand what they were saying he would call Aiden, who apparently could understand what the venders were saying.

Once Aiden started school the sense of urgency became more pronounced. Aiden is going to a Chinese bilingual private school with an international section; in practice that means that the kids in his class are from Taiwan or Hong Kong, or born in the U.S. to Chinese parents. The week before school started I took him to the campus for his health check and then again for orientation. Even though the school has an international section it is not really geared towards international people who don’t speak Chinese; there were no instructions in English and I felt relieved to be able to navigate using observation, common sense, my elementary Chinese skills, my Korean, and my charm. (OK, maybe not the last one. Though it does come in handy.) There were problems getting him on the bus roster, and problems getting the correct size uniform for him. During the first week of school, KC wanted to take him to meet the bus in the morning (KC had always been the one to take Aiden to school in the morning and relishes that time together) but Aiden said, “I think Mommy should take me, just in case there are problems with the bus Mommy can use her Chinese to fix them.” Watching me deal with all the problems was, in retrospect, really good for him because he could see how important the language skills were and he could see that even though I wasn’t fluent I could still figure out how to get things done. (I almost lost my cool during the bus debacle but luckily when some Korean moms stepped in to help I was able to calm myself down. Good thing. The kids are incredibly observant; I was able to provide a much better example by remaining calm). Aiden often praised my Chinese to others, which made me feel pretty proud.

I should also mention that Aiden is a big fan of the 마법천자문series (he’s read and re-read all 16 books that have come out) and because of that he’s able to recognize a good number of Chinese characters. He’s also a very visual learner.

In Aiden’s school some subjects (in his grade, Math) are taught in Chinese and others (social studies, science) are taught in English. In addition they have both Chinese and English (grammar, reading, etc.) and P.E./swimming/art/music are (I think) taught in both languages. They have quite a lot of Chinese, and most kids in the class can speak fluently. He is in second grade, but because his Chinese isn’t good he and two others go down to first grade for Chinese. There are some other kids in the class who go down to first grade for English.

The Chinese is intense. I had heard that in China first graders start with pinyin and not characters but the book Aiden’s school uses begins with characters and knowledge of pinyin is assumed (good thing he already learned it). They learn at a furious pace; I’d say about 6 characters a day (recognition, not writing). They have computer software they use to learn to recognize characters and learn to type the pinyin. The text is difficult -- I have trouble following it. That’s because it organizes the characters by pronunciation and not frequency of use or simplicity. Thus the vocabulary he is learning is quite difficult and not all that useful for every day conversation.

Every week the school sends home a progress report. After the second week the teachers reported that Aiden was having trouble concentrating in class and following the lessons in Chinese. KC’s tutor offered to teach him for 30-60 minutes every day, which we’ve done since then, and his progress has been dramatic. He can read an incredible number of characters and his comprehension has increased a great deal. Because the text is aimed at native speakers he is not progressing the way he would if he were in a class geared towards CSL (Chinese for Speakers of another Language) students but he’s keeping up now and I hope that his comprehension and speaking will follow. He also takes an extra CSL class once a week. (The school provides CSL and ESL classes for the many children who are in similar situations.) It’s only been two months, so we’ll see. The other day we were in a taxi together and he started to read the text on the back of the driver’s seat (explaining the cab company’s responsibilities, etc.); he also reads the ads in the elevator.

On the school bus, the teacher tells me that Aiden understands her. In our first month here, before Aiden started school, we also sent him to 3 weeks of Chinese classes at a local hakwon, 2 hours a day.

In retrospect the order and the timing seems right. Aiden’s time in the Korean school system, with its attention to etiquette/protocol and its more stricter structure of education, has primed him to be more comfortable in a Chinese school where they have a patriotic salute to the flag on the field every Monday morning and the class leader (반장) orders the class to greet the teacher and also does minor disciplining. I’m meeting a lot of Korean parents here whose kids started elementary school in Shanghai, attending American international schools. They worry that when the kids return to Korea they will be unable to adjust to Korean schools. I, on the other hand, have no doubt that after dealing with these kinds of schools, Aiden will do just fine in American school. (If he knew how much fun the American schools were he would refuse to go to his school.) He had enough exposure to Chinese and to Chinese characters before we came so he’s able to pick up the language quickly now. And because he’s such a strong visual learner with reading habits in two other languages already established it isn’t so confusing. He used to exclusively read Korean books for pleasure, but because he’s getting more English at school he now goes back and forth between Korean and English books. A lot of the same Korean moms are concerned that although their kids speak Korean at home they lack basic reading and writing skills. Those kids attend Korean school here on Saturdays. We thought about sending Aiden too, but it seemed too much. Since he got a good beginning with Korean while we were in Korea I think that as long as he keeps reading and speaking he’ll be fine.

A couple weeks ago he told me that my worry was right. “What worry?” I asked. “I think if I stay here for a long time I might forget Korean,” he said. Its easy to forget how much he hears and remembers the things I say. I told him that we would no longer do English and Chinese homework at home beyond what he was given from school (since I used to assign him additional homework) since he was studying those subjects at school. I told him that instead I wanted him to just keep on reading as many Korean books as possible and send email to his grandfather and friends in Korea.

Another note: we had the choice of moving him up to 3rd grade (he’s the right age for 3rd grade) but since he had only completed half of 2nd grade in Korea we decided to hold him back and have him start 2nd grade over again. I’m glad we did that. It makes things easier for him linguistically and skill-wise. I knew math would be taught in Chinese but felt pretty confident of Aiden’s ability to perform well since he was good at math and solving problems above grade level in Korea. They were just starting division in the 2nd semester of 2nd grade in Korea. But here they did division on the first day of 2nd grade, no review or anything. I’m not sure what they do for 3rd grade math. I wonder how this compares to the U.S.; it seems awfully fast to me.

Aiden’s school day is very long now; he comes home at 4:45 (compared to 12:40 in Korea). As soon as he comes home he does about an hour of Chinese with his tutor, then has dinner, then does about an hour of other homework. If there’s time he plays with Max and I let them watch Korean cartoons on skylife (another method of keeping up the Korean -- we usually don’t let them watch TV). It’s a long day, and when he’s really tired at night he talks about how hard it is and how little time he has to play. But in general he’s happy to go to school and he’s happy when he comes back. The school gives them a lot of breaks during the day, including 90 min or so for lunch, which means they have a lot of time to socialize. It’s a large school, and it is also a boarding school, so he comes home full of adventures exploring all the different parts of the school, trying to sneak (unsuccessfully) into the girls’ dorm, etc. And they also (much like Harry Potter) have teams that run across the grades to build interaction between older and younger kids. Aiden’s on the tiger team, and they compete periodically in academic and sports contests against the other teams. Social interaction is important to me for a lot of reasons, including: he’s a social kid and needs it, kids develop a lot of language skills socially, and I hope his social relationships will extend his relationship to Shanghai beyond our stay here.


Now for Max. Max started preschool in mid-August. His school is also bilingual; they spend half the day speaking Chinese and half the day speaking English, with both an English and Chinese teacher on hand all the time. The kids come from different backgrounds, some speak Chinese well but not English, some speak English well but not Chinese, and a few speak a third language at home (like Japanese). I haven’t expected him to be talking much yet, just listening, but he loves to sing and has been singing the “wo he ni” Olympic song from the first or second day of school -- not correctly, but he gets closer and closer all the time. And he also will suddenly come out with a sentence or phrase. We were eating dimsum with some friends and he suddenly said, “Kuai dian, kuai dian! That means ‘eat faster,’ mommy!” (He is a very slow eater, he probably hears that phrase a lot at mealtime.) He is also able to repeat, verbatim, sentences from Aiden’s Chinese textbook, because he hangs around and plays while Aiden studies with his tutor.

Unlike Aiden Max is an extremely auditory learner. He’s able to repeat what he hears very quickly and easily. (His teacher told me that from the first day he was telling the other students how he had lived in Korea for 5 years before moving to Shanghai. She said, “But you’re only 4 years old, how does that work?” He’s heard me explain to people that we lived in Seoul for 5 years before moving to Shanghai and is repeating what I said.) He loves to talk and sing and play with language. He likes to instruct me by making up Chinese words and making me repeat them and commanding me to memorize them by tomorrow. As I mentioned before, his Korean his become incredibly good in the last two months. I think everything he heard over the last 4 years is starting to trickle out of his mouth as he is finally able to put it into a coherent linguistic picture. He hasn’t started to speak much Chinese, at least not in front of me, but his burst of Korean is a sign that all the languages are improving, I think. He takes a nap at school and his teacher reports that when he wakes up he has long conversations with the little boy who sleeps next to him, Matthew. Matthew doesn’t speak English and Max doesn’t really speak Chinese, so they talk and gesture to each other and figure something out. At lunch time a non-English-speaking ayi helps feed them and clean them up; Max is a notoriously slow and picky eater and his teacher tells me that he has learned how to engage in negotiations with the ayi using “zui hou” (the last, as in “the last bite.”). Max is very conscious of who speaks Chinese and who speaks English; he’s able to categorize the kids in his class for me, and seems more skittish about interacting with the ones who only speak Chinese. He’s had less exposure to the language but he’s such a good verbal mimic that I think once his brain has absorbed enough of the language he’ll start to speak it freely. Will have to wait and see.

The danger with Max is with Korean. Unlike Aiden he can’t read; I’ve started to teach him hangeul at home but because he is not as visual it is slow going. He has just recently become more interested in learning letters, such a contrast from Aiden, who knew the alphabet at 18 months. Different kids, different learning styles. I am trying to make teaching Max hangeul a priority for our home work, because I want to make sure his Korean will survive. He spends hours examining the same books as his brother, wanting to imitate him in every way, and I should take advantage of that. Plus he notices that Aiden gets a lot of attention when he’s doing homework and even though Max is content to play by himself while I’m helping Aiden, he also (I found out recently) will apply himself to doing hangeul worksheets. We all sit at the table together, Aiden doing his homework, me helping him or studying Chinese, and Max tracing 가거고구그기, his face serious and focused. It helps that he (unlike Aiden) loves to draw and derives a great deal of pleasure from choosing a pencil or crayon to pen his masterpiece.

As for me, what can I say? I’ve taken a few weeks of classes now and they have helped a lot. Not because I’m a good student, but because listening to a language for 3 hours is very very good for developing that language. I don’t pay much attention to grammar and I’m lazy about reviewing, and I think that the reason is that to some extent I now trust my unconscious mind to work on my behalf even when I’m not telling it to. With Korean I noticed that at some point I began using patterns that I never fully understood in class or that I had never learned at all. At some point I developed an intuitive feel for where certain words belonged. Some people in my class are very insistent on getting an exact translation for each word, but I don’t try to translate that much, I prefer to listen to the teacher explain a word in Chinese and use it in a few example sentences. I get a better sense of how the word is used that way; sometimes translating imposes false categories or connotations on a word. And when there’s uncertainty it doesn’t bother me. I can’t remember if it used to bother me or not, but now if I don’t fully understand I just put it aside and move on. I trust that I will learn it from context eventually.

I spent the first (many) years learning Korean from books and in the classroom so going out into the field provoked a lot of anxiety -- I stressed about saying things wrong, about not understanding, about making stupid mistakes, about my brain freezing. But after Max was born I didn’t studying Korean from books or dictionaries, I just picked it up as I lived and listened, and I learned to work around words that I didn’t know. I think that’s the main reason I feel more comfortable being lazy this time around. I’ve lived here for two months and been able to get a lot of stuff done with what I knew and a good deal of help from people I was able to lean on. I try to speak as much Chinese as I can and don’t worry much about making mistakes. People understand anyway. When I don’t understand I can generally make a good guess from context. In two months (not really a long time!) my listening ability has improved a great deal. I took my mother-in-law for a foot massage last week and a TV program was playing; I was able to understand a great deal of the program (a sort of reality show about trying to reform a delinquent young man who was living off his mom).

I’ve noticed a shift in expressions; my teachers in Seoul were mostly from the North, and the Shanghai southerns speak a little differently even when they talk in Putonghua. They don’t use append er much; they say “yi dian” instead of “yi dianr” and “you bian” instead of “you bianr,” which has required some shift in my pronunciation habits. (I said “yi dianr” to Max and he said, “No, Mommy! It’s ‘yi dian’!”) People here don’t use “xing bu xing,” they say “ke yi ma?” Shanghai people also tend to pronounce “sh” as “s” and “zh” as “z,” so “Ni shou shenme?” is pronounced “Ni suo senme?” “sishi” is “sisi” and “wo zhidao” is “wozidao.” I’m appalled that I now hear this in my head even though for the most part I pronounce the sh and zh. If I can ever get to the point where I speak putonghua with some level of fluency it would be useful to learn Shanghai-hua, but right now it is completely incomprehensible.

KC’s also improved a lot, though he says, “When you’re starting from zero any improvement looks good.” His pronunciation has gotten a lot better and so has his listening comprehension. He studies a lot, especially on weekends, and it gives Aiden a great deal of pleasure to tell his dad how easy KC’s textbook is. Aiden really enjoys showing KC his own textbook and asking him to read it, which KC cannot (he can read it in Korean though). I think it’s good for the kids to see how seriously we both take learning the language and how much effort we both put into it. But it’s also good for Aiden to see how much harder it is for us because we’re older. Study languages when you’re young, folks!
A non-language note... Aiden gets more and more interesting to talk to the older he gets. Shortly after we moved I was talking about how even though moving is really different, I’m really glad to be able to experience different places and people and things, and how I didn’t want to live a boring life. He said, “I don’t want to live a boring life either, Mommy.” Perhaps that was peer pressure, but I think he meant it.

I haven’t been blogging much lately because I’m tired in the evenings (all that conscious and subconscious language processing takes energy), but so far things have gone really well and I intend to keep observing and recording as much of the process of learning as I can. But sorry for the long pauses between posts... I was going to write more about how the kids have dealt with moving, but I think this post is long enough! For another time, perhaps.

Over at printculture, I put up a “Keeping up with the Kims.”