History – Asian Lands – Page 7 – education and deconstruction.com

Don’t Be Afraid of the Bullets

The Book of the Week is “Don’t Be Afraid of the Bullets” by Laura Kasinof, published in 2014.

This ebook’s American author fell into a freelance journalism career. Fluent in Arabic, she is passionate about the Middle East. She had written freelance articles while witnessing unrest in Cairo in the single-digit 2000’s. She had cultivated contacts in the community in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, and was one of only a few correspondents in the country when anti-government violence erupted in the spring of 2011.

Although very suspenseful, this ebook (perhaps translated from Arabic?) was also edited sloppily. This blogger takes issue with a few misspellings (like “Marriot”), more than a few awkward prepositions and typos like “it” instead of “in,” misplaced words here and there, and sexist content. The author, in her mid-twenties, still calls herself and other grown women “girls.” She also uses the term “stewardess” (!) rather than “flight attendant.”

Read the book to learn about Yemeni culture in everyday life in peace and in war, the author’s appearance on a hit TV show, her abduction and other traumatic episodes, how she came to feel an exaggerated sense of self-importance, became desensitized and came to feel invulnerable to the bullets and shells flying around her, and the attitude of the people toward the installation of a new regime in Yemen.

A Death… – Bonus Post

This blogger skimmed the ebook, “A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel” by Pin Ho and Wenguang Huang, published in 2013. This is a story whose details get tiresome after a while, about the downfall of two powerful politicians in China in 2012.

One politician was Wang Lijun. To compensate for his lack of a college education, he added laughable lies to his resume, such as the entry for “a master’s degree in business administration through a one-year correspondence education program at something called ‘California University.” This blogger recalls that that was the fictional school attended by the characters on the 1990’s American TV show, “90210.

Wang Lijun also purchased an eMBA from the diploma mill of China Northeastern Finance University. During a ceremony, the president of Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications publicly announced that Wang held a PhD in law. He was frequently called professor, and certain media disseminated propaganda that he was a researcher, author, inventor and fashion designer. His real job was police officer and later, police chief.

In addition to his making myths about himself, Wang used the usual techniques of dictators to amass a tremendous amount of power. Unsurprisingly, “…Wang had gone through fifty-one assistants during his two-year tenure in Chongqing…” He wrongly accused businesses of engaging in organized crime, used illegal surveillance techniques, denied suspects due process in the extreme, and embezzled public funds. You get the picture. Bo Xilai was Wang Lijun’s rival. According to Bo’s intimates, as of March 2012, Bo’s family had larcenously obtained 100 million yuan; in April 2012, that figure was 1 billion yuan.

“Suicide from depression is common among leaders at all levels of the Chinese government” especially when they are “…under investigation on corruption related charges.” Read the book to learn: whether Wang Lijun used this way out, and about the international incident that he staged; what prompted Bo Xilai to act similarly to Richard Nixon in delivering a “Checkers speech;” about the governmental infrastructure in China that provided the means for Wang’s and Bo’s outrageous conduct; and here and there, about Chinese history– such as Mao Tse Tung’s anti-intellectual campaign of May 1966.

Apologies to My Censor

The Book of the Week is “Apologies to My Censor” by Mitch Moxley, published in 2013. In this ebook, the author, a Canadian journalist, describes the six years he spent in Beijing.

Moxley arrived in Beijing the spring of 2007 to work at an English-language state-owned newspaper. The reporting was limited to upbeat topics. Articles on Taiwan, Tibet or the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre contained propaganda rather than true statements. Ironically however, in everyday conversation, the Chinese people were brutally honest.

Many foreigners– who were paid triple the Chinese natives– worked at the paper at the time. In order for any native to prevail at a journalism career, joining the Communist Party was mandatory. This involved attending Party conferences on some weekends. For a short while, the author played basketball with his colleagues. When the Chinese players took a breather, they smoked courtside.

While in China, Moxley did various kinds of labor, more than just journalism. Most were unfulfilling for him. He engaged in the lucrative trades of: reading while having his voice recorded for the creation of English-language education-materials; posing as a foreign businessman working for a Chinese company for public relations purposes; and acting, dancing or singing in various videos to be broadcasted on the internet or TV.

Read the book to learn about the author’s life in Beijing– his workplace, living quarters, recreation, social life and romantic pursuits, and half-hearted attempts to learn Chinese– and his ambivalence about returning to Toronto.

Hong Konged

The Book of the Week is “Hong Konged” by Paul Hanstedt, published in 2012. This ebook recounts a year of experiences of a specific family in Hong Kong, as seen through the father’s eyes.

The Hanstedts were living in Virginia when the author was granted a Fulbright scholarship, “working with general education” around 2009. He describes the reactions of his three kids (ages two, six and eight) to their new environment.

As is still common in many parts of the world, expatriates are pressured to hire household help. In Hong Kong, 98% of the help is comprised of Filippino and Indonesian women. The family declined offers of assistance, as the author’s wife was available to take care of their two sons and daughter during the day.

In Hong Kong, only about one sixth of high school students are deemed fit for university, pursuant to their grades and scores on entrance examinations– for which they spend oodles of money on test preparation for more than a decade. There is so much hysteria over the exams because a degree guarantees the job of one’s choice.

The Hanstedt family’s day-to-day existence consisted of the kids’ commute to school, buying food, struggling with the Mandarin language and household chores. The author largely details their behavior during their leisure time– eating in restaurants, visiting attractions and their transportation woes.

As an aside, this blogger was appalled by the author’s ignorance of science in an episode in which a painful, rash-producing resin from a berry from a tree got all over his daughter’s skin. While erroneously thinking that hot bath water would wash off the irritant and splashing the water over her, he said, “Those seeds… were filled with oils that irritate your skin… You need hot water to cut through the oil. It dissolves it.” He might have been trying to simplify the explanation for his seven year old, but this blogger thinks that was a misguided approach.

Nevertheless, read the book to vicariously taste the food and see the sights in Hong Kong, and find out everything you ever wanted to know about the Hanstedt children’s temperaments.

Not Quite Paradise

The Book of the Week is “Not Quite Paradise” by Adele Barker, published in 2010. This is a personal account of an author and university instructor who went to Sri Lanka to teach literature. After her teaching stint in 2001, she returned to observe and write about the conditions of devastation the people suffered in the December 2004 tsunami.

When she first started teaching at the International School at the University of Ceylon in Kandy in the Peradeniya countryside, Barker learned about all the days the university was closed due to holidays, “…election days, election violence days, the religious holidays of four different religions, and university-induced holidays.”

Barker’s American mindset caused her to be stressed by the rat and ant infestation in her rented house, the leaking roof and tropical diseases. “TV has not been possible since the day the monkeys ripped off the antenna from the roof.” She also held the belief that the hobbies she adopted (French language learning and ladies’ football [soccer]) were terribly (British) colonialist, and that bothered her.

The scene at the bank is this: “People conduct their transactions by simply pushing forward en masse to the tellers’ windows.” There is no respect for personal space as there is in the U.S. Someone explained to Barker that in previous years, people got fed up with waiting in line when they were told there was no more of the product– such as garlic– for which they had been waiting hours. Currently, they display orderly patience only in religious rituals.

Nevertheless, “The relief of not being battered by the ongoing emotional sagas of American teenage pop queens and the latest sex scandals that pass for news in the mainstream American press is enormous.”

The presence of four different religions in Sri Lanka has produced civil war on and off through centuries. The author characterizes the country thusly: “Singing geckoes and curries, children in their whites merged with soldiers in body bags and posters of kids in Tiger uniform with their throats slashed.” (As an aside, “Tiger” does not refer to a sports team, but rather, the Tamil Tigers, a mostly Hindu ethnic group.)

Barker writes that in recent decades, the Sri Lankan economy and education system have been adversely affected by various historical circumstances (which has given rise to cultural stereotypes), including but not limited to: colonialism, ethnic conflict and a major natural disaster (the tsunami), that simply perpetuate a vicious cycle.

In 1948, Ceylon (later to be renamed Sri Lanka) became independent from the British Raj. It was then that ethnic strife began. The author met someone who said, “We’re not Sri Lankan anymore. We’re Tamil or Sinhalese or Moor.”

Only two of the three then-national languages (Sinhalese, Tamil and English) continued to be taught in schools. When English was removed from the curriculum, students became less worldly, especially the less wealthy, less privileged ones whose families, unluckily were not listed in the metaphorical “Social Register” in Colombo (the capital of the country). In 1958, a law was passed to make Sinhalese the sole national language. This did not sit well with the Tamil Tigers.

Generations later, the lucky elites continued to obtain lucrative jobs with merely an eighth-grade education. The lower classes have received no guarantee of a bright future, even after completing four years of university education. Therefore, in the 1970’s and 1980’s the latter found Marxism and Trotskyism appealing.

Starting in 1971, the lower classes incited violence, burning tires, jeeps and human beings. Some even attended the Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University in Moscow. A political faction was founded (the JVP), which fought against the Sri Lankan army and common people. There have been student protests, riots and murder raids, with Buddhist monks in the mix, who are not always innocent.

The year 1983 saw a recurrence of the civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil Tiger rebels. The latter began a separatist movement in 1976, claiming that Sri Lanka is their homeland.

Through the decades, political elections have also prompted bloodshed. “The grenade explosions started days before an election.” Sadly, as in many countries of the world, Sri Lanka is a land of natural beauty, but the behavior of some of its citizens has been ugly.

Anyway, education-wise, high school students are required to take two sets of standardized tests, the “O Levels” and “A Levels” in six subjects. The former are taken in what would be equivalent to tenth grade in America, and the latter are college entrance exams. Failure of exams means a future consigned to a low-level job, like selling clothing or other items to tourists in the marketplace.

The Sri Lankan economy was fueled largely by tourism, which basically disappeared due to ethnic violence in the 1990’s, and 9/11. This gave rise to the cultural stereotype that the Sinhalese are indolent. They failed their exams and there are no jobs for them. They might or might not be lazy. They might simply be culturally disadvantaged underachievers.

Read the book to learn about elephants, details of the fighting, why so many Sri Lankans unnecessarily died in the tsunami, and what the author experienced on her return trip in 2005.

Opium Fiend

The Book of the Week is “Opium Fiend” by Steven Martin, published in 2012. This ebook is the personal account of an opium lover living in Bangkok in the last two decades.

The San Diego-raised author, who supported his opium habit through freelance travel writing, also had a passion for collecting antique opium paraphernalia. He considered opium smoking an art form, and its equipment, works of art.

In the mid-1800’s, there were two wars between China and Britain over the lucrative trading of the drug. When China lost, she “…grew ever more addicted, corrupt, and ungovernable. To this day, China and many Chinese around the world view opium as a dastardly British trick that kept their country poor and backward long after the British opium trade had ceased.”

In the 19th-century, Christian missionaries in China produced public outcry against use of opium when they wrote of the drug’s horrible effects from addiction. Meanwhile, bigoted white Americans, seeing opium usage among blacks and Asians, were appalled that the drug “…encouraged the mingling of different classes and races!” These days, very few people are addicted to opium due to strict drug laws, and because it is expensive and hard to find.

An opium user actually receives a high from the vapors produced from a pipe and an oil lamp with a chimney. So as to preserve the drug’s alkaloid chemical composition, the oil used is camellia, vegetable, peanut or coconut oil, rather than kerosene or alcohol.

Read the book to learn of the way the author fooled himself into thinking he was enjoying his opium-centered life, and how he beat his addiction.

Big In China

The Book of the Week is “Big in China” by Alan Paul, published in 2011. This wordy ebook describes the experiences of an American expatriate family in Beijing, China, as told through the eyes of the husband/father. His wife, a journalist, got a three-year job transfer there.

Paul remarks, “Our fake rich lifestyle included daily household help, the gated community, regularly hiring drivers, and a general sense that access to anything was just a phone call away.” He was grateful for the extra freedom that allowed him to spend more quality time with his two-year old daughter and two older sons, play blues music in a band, blog about his new life, and write a music column for a well-known publication.

Paul relates details on cuisine, poor sanitation, social isolation, extremely bad pollution in the city, and the way his children were the center of attention on the street for their blue eyes, fair skin and light-colored hair. Nevertheless, because they were culturally curious, he and his wife made a conscious effort to break out of the expat community, taking their kids to see the “real” China.

Read the book to learn of their adventures.

Little Princes

The Book of the Week is “Little Princes” by Conor Grennan, published in 2010. This the story of a global aid worker who changed many lives for the better over the course of three years.

Initially, Grennan volunteered to be, in essence, a surrogate parent for a couple of months in Nepal in late 2004 at an orphanage, whose name in English is “Little Princes.” However, the children were not truly orphans. Months or years before, a child trafficker had told their parents, living in poverty-stricken rural villages, that if they gave him a lot of money– in some cases, their life savings– that their children would be fed and clothed well and get an education. Instead, the trafficker sold them into domestic servitude in private homes. Those lucky children had been rescued by a pitifully incomplete patchwork of international child-services organizations or a government official in Kathmandu. “In Nepal, there were no safety nets, no system where all children were cared for in an orderly manner.”

Grennan fell in love with the children at Little Princes, and they, him. He thus returned to be with them after a year’s interlude. He learned of a group that ran homes in Kathmandu, and visited with kids there, too. He, with a fellow volunteer, had a dream to form an organization to have rescued children come to live in their own children’s home.

After the decade-long civil war between the Nepalese monarchy and the Maoists ended, Grennan’s goal became to find the children’s parents and reunite them. In prior years, the Maoists had occupied villages and had been ruthless with people associated with aid organizations. A weeks-long expedition taken on foot in the high-altitude mountains to find the parents, was already fraught with the dangers of death by a fall, illness, marauders, and snow, and even in this day and age– the absence of communications devices (!)

Grennan encountered a traumatic situation, of which he knew not, how many of its like there were. While on an expedition like the one described above, he found out from a postal service worker that the parents of a fourteen-year old kid in a home were alive and well. At some point in the past, the kid had been given their death certificates. Grennan realized the certificates were forged. “Here was a boy who had grown up believing that his entire family was dead… I was struck by how viciously the civil war had torn this country apart.”

Once Grennan started having success reuniting children and parents, the latter were overjoyed to see the former again. “But when they learned that their child was being well taken care of, they were suddenly reluctant to take him or her home. Nepal is a terribly poor country; it is a challenge to support a family.”

Read the book to learn more about the author’s trials, tribulations and triumphs, which include a romantic subplot.

Tokyo Vice

The Book of the Week is “Tokyo Vice, An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan” by Jake Adelstein, published in 2010. This is a memoir about an American who went to work for a major newspaper in Tokyo in the 1990’s, and ended up investigating one of Japan’s major organized crime groups, the Yakuza.

Attaining fluency in Japanese was a major hurdle for him, but he managed. He discusses in detail how he survived his training, and the Japanese journalist culture. This includes personally visiting the home of the local police chief, and bringing ice cream for his kids. That is how Adelstein was able to report crime news before the competition. Unfortunately, he was a bit too passionate about rooting out corruption. For, he put himself and his family in danger. Read the book to learn their fate.

The Dragon’s Pupils

The Book of the Week is “The Dragon’s Pupils” by Kenneth Starck, published in 1991.

Starck was a professor from the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He visited China to teach journalism to Chinese graduate students in the 1986-1987 academic year. He detailed his experiences of the culture. Due to the ravages of Communism, the country had resumed its academic degree system only five years prior to his visit. In December, there was student unrest. In the 1980’s, “only 5% of each year’s 10 million high school graduates were admitted to universities. The country had 1,016 universities, about 1 for every million people. In the United States, there were 1,875 colleges, 1 for every 123,000 people.”

The author distributed the book, “The Best of Pulitzer Prize News Writing” (published in 1986) to his students. It had a story from the Korean War of 1950 and a quote that was an ethnic slur on the Chinese. The author lectured on historical context, explaining that at that time, the United States did not have good relations with China.

Under Deng Xiaoping, China was moving toward a more capitalistic society, but the government was resistant, because “There is loosening of family ties and the placing of individual self interest above community interest.” There was still censorship in higher education. Cadres (government officials) were charged with making sure students were appropriately schooled in political and ideological matters. Their titles ranged from ” lecturer” to” professor,” even though they were just party hacks. In May 1988, the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party Central Committee and the Central Committee of the Communist League co-founded the Youth Ideological Educational Research Center.

Read the book for more examples of the disturbing state of affairs in China in the late 1980’s, and her progress (or lack thereof) in terms of freedom of the press and the freedom of her people in general.