Ascriptive and Descriptive Chinese Identity in Contemporary History

Taught through Memoirs and Visual culture: Assessed through research and

composition.

Caveats and conditions

I ask more questions than I’ll answer in a presentation.

I try not to read slides and use silence. It’s in progress. This is meant to be handed out, or gone over

in less than 5 minutes total.

How I looked when I got here.

What I felt like on arrival.

1. Can we ID the animal? 2. Define its home and

relate to our goals in a statement of 30 seconds or less?

Once I oriented myself, relationships became more

apparent. What’s the bolded word mean

in this context? What’s the etymology? What possible significances can we infer?

How does the directions one faces relate in other cultures.

Are personal relationships fundamentally different (East vs West)

Peter’s (?) note Re: comparative values/ marriage

How/ who you insult.

Which way am I facing?

How is identity defined for US? Place Behavior/ practice (gender/sex) Language Other? Guilt (for Catholics and Jewish people that I know of). Is the personal political? If so to what extent does the teacher owe disclosure?

In lieu of that, spoken word for on your own time.

How is identity constructed for Chinese peoples. Relationships (well over 100 words for family relationships).

Guanxi Blood – to what? Clans, tribes, patrilinear lines?

Face (Mien/mian dz) Yiqi (ought – see Qiu Xiaolong’s fiction)

Shame (who you are vs who you ought to be). Food (you are what you eat, and old ginger is the spiciest). What makes you “su fu” – or where.

Lao jia – ancestral home – important word to know – you will be asked – and for some Americans the answer’s more of an abstraction which can complicate our discourse.

What is a discourse community?

Define community? Where do they exist? How is identity formed within a group

(personal and collective)? How can writing be part of a larger dialogue? Why is it important to try to understand others

who seem so different from ourself?

Potentially Useful Links

Composition through Chinese culture wiki (soliciting participation and collaboration) http://tinyurl.com/GregChina

Popular culture resource list with reviews (most now available at our library).