English as my students see it.

It's exam-marking time again and, as usual, I have some real winners. This is how my students see English. Some of these students have studied English intensely for a decade or so....

First, the "find the wrong word and correct" type of exercise. For example the incorrect sentence "He open the door and stepped into the light" would be corrected as "He OPENED the door and stepped into the light."

• She was found guilt BY murder.
• If you are luckily, you MAY get away with a fine of $800.
• He might impose a five-year prison sentenced on the CRIMINOLOGY.
• Many CRIMES are let off with a fine these days.

Next, some true and false:

• Salmon is a kind of shellfish. TRUE
• Good study habits require planning; you can't just study when you think you have free time. FALSE
  (No wonder these kids aren't learning anything!)
• The best way to learn vocabulary is by studying vocabulary for two hours once per week instead of studying ten minutes every day. TRUE
• A quick way to expand on vocabulary is to learn the different forms of a word (like "construct" and "construction") at the same time. FALSE
• It is not possible to learn English vocabulary on your own. TRUE
  (GAH!)

How about some opposites?

• The opposite of "fatty meat" is "thinny meat".
• The opposite of "cooked onions" is "fresh onions".
• The opposite of "tough meat" is "sturdiness meat".
• The opposite of "fatty meat" is "gaunt meat".
• The opposite of "tasteless food" is "dulcet food".
  (Someone snuck an electronic dictionary into the exam for the above two I see. Ironically he still only scored 54%...)

And some free-style fill-in-the-blank work. The filled-in answers are in CAPITALs.

• ...English idioms are typically formed of similes and DIFFICULT.
• ...English idioms are typically formed of similes and SENTENCES.
• More modern idioms, however, especially in business, are based upon the TRUTH metaphor...
  (So that's why all the cheating here! Truth is metaphorical!)

Meanwhile, in the listening section, we've got gems like:

• Name of his FIST: Siti
  (The missing word was actually "wife"....)

When know-it-all ignorance blends with xenophobia

There's a story on CNN today about the recent knife attack on children—students—in China. The story itself is pretty typical of modern reportage: mostly factual, but obviously slanted for maximum sensationalism. (Why only "mostly factual"? Well, at one point they say this attack was "slightly different" because the victims were college students. They kind of also forgot to point out that this attack was a gang attack, not an individual one. This, to me, represents a rather large departure from the previously-reported attacks but it doesn't further the sensationalist "OH MY GOD LOOK AT THE PEOPLE ATTACKING CHILDREN IN CHINA!" slant of the story to note that so they move on and hope you don't notice.)

That's not what I want to talk about today, though. What I want to talk about is one of the comments underneath the story by one ignorant know-it-all working under the name "oldthis". Just to make sure I avoid any claims of taking him out of context, here's what he says in its entirety:

Hope this helps for people not familiar with the region: 1 - Guns are illegal in China. If you are Chinese, unless you served in the military, you've probably never even touched a gun. 2 - there is a reasonable degree of unrest in certain regions of China. Afterall it is a massive area and has very distinct differences from region to region. There are very broad civic problems such as those that all countries must deal with, but there are also regions or pockets where some problems are more prevelant than others. Some of the most significant problems China faces right now, that don't have "easy button" solutions.
A - there are 30 Million more men in China than women between the ages of 18 & 35. This is a direct reflection of China's one baby policy that was in place for many years and rual farmers needing a son to carry the family forward as the parents aged. Female babies were often killed. This means that if you are a Chinese male in that group, your odds of finding a mate aren't spectacular, particularly if you live in the country side.
B - China has some significant growing pains: Inflation, shifting populations, large pockets of unemployment resulting from the global economic slowdown, govermental corruption (predominately at the state level), polution, a largely uneducated population, a largely rual population contrasted with "extreme megacities".

OK - gotta get back to work. The point is, by attacking children these guys are attacking the establishment itself. China doesn't really care about an individual, it cares about the group (its the communist way). The only way for these guys to make a statement is to be bold and utterly horrible in their "statement" to the government. Enter kids at govt paid for schools. That said, this attack seems different. It could be that these are some local guys POed that the college boys are "taking all the women" (refer to "A" above). I am going out on a limb here, but given that it was a dormatory that was attacked and the article says (one student had HIS hand cut off) and knowing that China isn't going to have co-ed dorms...it sounds like an attack on a male dorm. The more I think about it...this is definately not the same thing that has been happening where people are trying to make their frustration known to the govt. This is retribution for something. Has to be. 5-6 men could've created a heck of alot more carniage than this. They did a hit and run on these guys either because one of them had wronged a member of the "5-6 man hit squad" or b/c the "5-6 man hit squad" was growing frustrated with the overall presence of that group of people (college boys) in general. The other school incidents only gave this group of ding-a-lings the idea.

So ... where do I start in dismantling this pile of bullshit? I'll stay above an obsessive critique of spelling and grammar or of composition skills other than to note that it sadly fails to surprise me that native speakers of English are, again, proving less able to use their own language than many EFL speakers of my acquaintance. Perhaps I'll just go after the major points in order.

1 - Guns are illegal in China. If you are Chinese, unless you served in the military, you've probably never even touched a gun.

This information would come as a shock to those in the Chinese countryside who hunt to supplement their food intake, who have firearms to protect themselves from some of the more dangerous wild animals and who in general, you know, use guns. Firearms are not illegal in China. They are heavily controlled. There is a difference.

A - there are 30 Million more men in China than women between the ages of 18 & 35. This is a direct reflection of China's one baby policy that was in place for many years and rual farmers needing a son to carry the family forward as the parents aged. Female babies were often killed. This means that if you are a Chinese male in that group, your odds of finding a mate aren't spectacular, particularly if you live in the country side.

Would these be the rural farmers for whom the one child policy doesn't apply? These same farmers?

The one child policy is a policy for urban Chinese, not rural. Indeed, for urban Han Chinese, not minorities. Rural Chinese are permitted to have a second child if the first is a female for precisely the reason cited above as the grounds for the purported infanticide. The rules for minorities, urban or rural, vary by minority and region, but again are laxer than the one child policy inflicted on the Han.

B - China has some significant growing pains: Inflation, shifting populations, large pockets of unemployment resulting from the global economic slowdown, govermental corruption (predominately at the state level), polution, a largely uneducated population, a largely rual population contrasted with "extreme megacities".

Anybody who says the corruption in China's government is largely at the state level is ignorant, a liar or a fool. One of the things that has always astonished me in China is the utter omnipresence of corruption. Everybody who can be, in China, is on the take. Those who are not wish they could be.

OK - gotta get back to work. The point is, by attacking children these guys are attacking the establishment itself. China doesn't really care about an individual, it cares about the group (its the communist way).

So the Chinese have been communist for 5000 years? Because, short of that little hissy fit of Mao's (called, for some quaint reason, the Cultural Revolution) there has been basically no change in China's cultural fundamentals. Right down to the purported groupthink. (The reality is far more complex than the stereotype, as is to be expected, but that discussion is far out of scope for today.)

The only way for these guys to make a statement is to be bold and utterly horrible in their "statement" to the government. Enter kids at govt paid for schools.

Government paid-for schools? Which China is he talking about? The China I've lived in for almost a decade has no government-funded schools worth mentioning. Families work themselves to nubs to pay for their children's entry into schools. Schools are government controlled, yes, but certainly not paid for!

That said, this attack seems different. It could be that these are some local guys POed that the college boys are "taking all the women" (refer to "A" above). I am going out on a limb here, but given that it was a dormatory that was attacked and the article says (one student had HIS hand cut off) and knowing that China isn't going to have co-ed dorms...it sounds like an attack on a male dorm. The more I think about it...this is definately not the same thing that has been happening where people are trying to make their frustration known to the govt. This is retribution for something. Has to be. 5-6 men could've created a heck of alot more carniage than this. They did a hit and run on these guys either because one of them had wronged a member of the "5-6 man hit squad" or b/c the "5-6 man hit squad" was growing frustrated with the overall presence of that group of people (college boys) in general. The other school incidents only gave this group of ding-a-lings the idea.

This is the first (and only) piece of insightful commentary this man has made. The first (and only) that is based on a solid observation of fact. The first (and only) that involves speculation that is not, in fact, entirely ungrounded in reality. I'll give him a C- with a little annotation saying "facts are available in published sources; there's no reason to make them up".

Student contrasts

I think I had the perfect contrast between good students and bad students in microcosm today.

My students entered my class late this afternoon with ham-acted "I want to die" statements. When I asked for why they were so universally wishing for death, they said they had too much work in their previous class.

Them: "We had to write 70 words in 45 minutes."

Me: boggles

Me: "That's less than two words per minute. Come crying to me when you're told to write 500."

Them: "But English is your native language."

Me: "OK, I'll do it in German, then, if you like. Or even French."

Them: boggle

They were really not happy when I gave them an exercise (pre-planned! I swear!) in which they had to ad-lib a speech that worked out to roughly 300-450 words....

Now in this class I have a "guest". He's a student in another program (computer technician) who has decided he needs to improve his English skills so he sits in on my classes when he's got free periods. He also talks with me as I go home after class to help practice. Today, on the way home, he mentioned that he had been finding his classes very difficult this term to the point of wanting to give up. As I was about to encourage him he blithely continued, explaining that this had changed after he went to the library and studied some supplemental material that was easier to understand than what the teacher was giving in class.

And that, in a microcosm, is the difference.

Poor students only go to class and bitch and moan about doing even miniscule amounts of work. They don't do any work outside of the classroom unless forced to (and then usually cheat anyway, thus invalidating the whole point of self-study).

Good students, when faced with adversity, work harder to learn by taking extra classes, spending extra time studying, finding other sources of information, etc.

The dangers of cross-cultural plagiarism

I'm doing a bit of textbook editing on the side. As is usual here, the material is mostly cribbed from elsewhere with the questions sometimes done by the "writer" and sometimes themselves cribbed from elsewhere.

This can lead to disaster as it would have been in this case had they not asked me to do some editing for them.

In one section of the book there's an activity to make a restaurant menu. They have a sample menu at the top of the page as a model. Here's what the model menu says:

WONG WONG's

CHINESE FOOD MENU

LUNCHEON SPECIALS SUM YUNG CHICK $6.99 Different And Delicious WON HUNG LO $6.99 Chinese Meatballs CHU SUM TWAT $16.99 Dinner Parties Of Three Or More SUC MI PORK $9.69 Chef's Special FUC YU MAN $6.69 Speciality Of The House

DINNER COMBINATIONS 1. GOO IN HAND...$9.69 For Those Dining Alone 2. GOO WEE CHICK $6.99 Sloppy Seconds No Charge 3. CUM TOO SOON $6.99 Order Early These Go Fast 4. SUC MI WANG $6.99 Traditional Chinese Meatloaf 5. SUM DUM CHICK $4.99 You Get What You Pay For 6. LIK MI CLIT $6.99 Delicious Lip Smacking Oriental Delicacy 7. CHO KON IT $9.99 Not For The Light Throated 8. FUC SUM NOW $6.99 For Those In A Hurry 9. TUNG SUM CHICK $8.99 A Taste Bud Tingler 10. SUM GULP CUM $9.69 Low Cal Diet Special

Amazing service.

Try and get this kind of service out of Canada Post!

On the 13th of February I got a phone call saying that I had a parcel and the truck with it was waiting outside the gate for me to get it (instead of dropping it off inside the campus post office). Let me list the ways in which this was amazing:

1. They phoned me to tell me the package was there. Now to be fair my mobile phone number is on the address label, but I'd bet that if you mailed something in Canada with a mobile phone number you wouldn't get called. Canada Post doesn't offer that service.
2. The mail truck waited for me to go get it instead of dropping it off inside the campus.
3. February the 13th was a Saturday.
4. February the 13th is also Spring Festival Eve, a holiday that involves, basically, 99.44% of the country shutting down.

If you want to know what this feels like in terms of pleasant surprises, consider getting a parcel on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve and Good Friday all rolled into one. On a weekend.

Lost continuity

This is a maudlin story today so if you're not up to reading emotional trash skip this blog and wait for the story about Lucas' haircut which is going to be much more fun to read. Assuming I ever get it into words.

The story begins with me carrying Lucas in a toy store today and with Lucas pointing to a prominently displayed toy, crying "House!" (actually he said "Haush" but I'm going to translate his expressions into human speech for purposes of this story) and reaching to play with a familiar old friend. Immediately after this a pang of pain and, to a degree, guilt stabbed through me and tossed me into unfamiliar emotional territory for the rest of the afternoon and even partially into the evening. In short I was a wreck. To understand this reaction you'll have to understand some of the back story. (This, by the way, is called "in media res" and is a classy way of telling stories unless you make the mistake of pointing it out to the audience.)

So...

The back story starts with Lucas' house. You can see the house in question in the picture to the left. It's one of those child activity centres you can find all over the place, given to him when he was around 9 months old. (The picture is from his first birthday, but this wasn't his birthday gift.)

When we bought him the house it was far too advanced for him. Still I reasoned that as long as it caught his attention (bright colours, interesting shapes and a keyboard that played single tones or whole tunes) it would be something he could grow into.

Grow into it he did. It rapidly became his favourite toy and, when a new toy of the moment temporarily displaced it, it remained the centre of his playtime existence. (More often than not we'd find his other toys stuffed inside it for storage. Whether they fit or not. Don't ask.) As he grew older he would find more and more things to do; become more and more capable of coping with the various puzzles the house offered. Other toys came and went, but none had the staying power of his house.

All good things must come to an end and the house was no exception. We lost the house to Joan's cousin. The cousin's family had come for a visit when Lucas was 18 months old complete with their son (almost a year older than Lucas). The son loved Lucas' house as much as Lucas did and was playing with it for the whole afternoon. When time came to leave the boy refused to let go of the house and kicked up an enormous fuss. (They're called the "terrible twos" for a reason, after all.) It was decided that we would let the boy take the house with him, complete with the play pieces, and we'd just get it back next time we visited them.

(Not decided by me mind, but decided nonetheless.)

I had an inkling of trouble when I saw Lucas' worried face as the door closed to the van and the family drove off. He knew the house was in there and he was very unsure what was going on. For a few days after that he'd ask after the house and cry when we told him he couldn't have it. (We didn't word it that way of course, but come on. He was eighteen months old. "It's not here" just means "you can't have it" at that age.) We always intended to go get the house from the cousin's place when we visited in a few weeks, but you know what they say about the Good Intentions Paving Company.

Weeks turned into months and we still hadn't gone visiting. Lucas had forgotten about his house, or so we thought. (This, in the trade, is called "foreshadowing" and is also a sign of class as a writer as long as you don't draw attention to it....) When we did finally visit my inkling was proven correct: the house had been viciously played with by the boy and was effectively gone: broken with most independent pieces lost.

I'd like to state, just to make it clear, that I don't blame anybody for this. It falls firmly into the camp of "life happens" and at no point was anybody being unreasonable, unfair, selfish or anything of the sort. Joan's cousin's family are some of the nicest people I know and they have done a lot for us in the way of clothing, toys and general companionship. They even bought a nice toy for Lucas to replace the house (a toy he still occasionally plays with). Nobody could have guessed what happened next. (Well, had I been thinking I could have, but I was too busy lying to myself like everybody does. We call it "rationalization" but it's really just lying to ourselves.)

We didn't worry overly much about things. We assumed that Lucas had forgotten all about his house and that other toys had taken over as The Toy. He had toy cars aplenty (and as you can see if you peruse the album linked to by that photo above he's somewhat automobile obsessed!). He had as many toys as we could find that we thought appropriate for him and that we thought he'd enjoy. Obviously he'd forget about that silly house, right? (This is called a rhetorical question, BTW. Another sign of class in writing. This is really turning into a great work of prose, isn't it?)

Here's a clue. I'm almost 44 years old as of this writing and I still have vague memories of some of my favourite toys from when I was a very young child, even some from before I went to school.

Our illusions were utterly shattered when, almost half a year after the house went missing, Lucas stumbled across a small piece of green plastic. It was one of the animal shapes from his house designed to be pushed in through an appropriately-shaped hole in the top (and which would have the house making the sound of the appropriate animal as it was pushed through). Lucas, upon seeing it, immediately recognized it and started asking us for his house again and would not take "no" for an answer. He cried loudly with a wrenching, heartbroken sound that echoes in my head to this day when I'm reminded of it. He was inconsolable and cried for hours, refusing every attempt to distract him with his other toys, newer and older alike. For days afterward he asked for his house (despite our quickly throwing out the piece that identified it for him) and would cry for a while when told he couldn't have it. Still, eventually that simmered down and he was back to being his usual happy self.

This brings us to today's little moment. The house in question that Lucas pointed to with such fondness was, of course, the same as the one he'd lost. The pang of guilt can be understood now, I think. The pain, however, is harder to explain.

What I felt there was sorrow. Sorrow at lost opportunities. Sorrow at broken continuity. The house that Lucas had was tied in deeply with all of his other toys. It was a prime playing piece of its own as well as storage for the other things he loved. Had it never gone missing it would still likely have occupied a central role in his playtime as he figured out more of its puzzles and as he found more uses for it. When Lucas saw the house today I saw the echoes of these opportunities, but only the echoes. He was happy to see his old friend, but it wasn't anything special anymore. It was one of a few hundred (thousand) things in the store he wanted to play with. Even if I had decided then and there to buy it as a replacement for his lost toy it would not have had the central role it used to have. That, more than anything, left me feeling depressed the rest of the day.

Just to keep the ending on an up note, I'd like to end by showing you what might well turn out to be the new central toy of his life (purchased just today!). It's amazing how colourful wooden blocks can interest a child, isn't it?

Shooting for zero and accomplishing it!

My family owns a large KEEP in the south of England. When I was 18, I studied WATER at college so that I would understand farming better. My brother is in charge of one part of the business and he PICK cows and sheep. Some of these are HARVEST and sold for their meat. he also sells AGRICULTURE such as maize and wheat. We DAIRY vegetables for a few years, but we didn't make enough money at it, so five years ago we GROW a lot of apple and pear trees instead. In the late summer we have extra workers to help FARM the fruit and AGRICULTURE the wheat. Some years are very difficult in farming. Last year, there was no rain for two months, which caused a PLANT. The CROP was very hard and we had to GROUND the maize every week.

This is a student's long-winded, fill-in-the-blanks way of saying "I didn't bother with homework at all this term".

Since I hurt my leg in the accident, it's been difficult to BITE my knees.

I should bloody well think so!

Do you think I can OVERDO my homework if it's not very good?

I rather suspect that in your case you will not be overdoing homework at any point in the foreseeable future.

The alarm didn't EXPLODED this morning – there must be something wrong with it.

Talk about a strict morning routine!

The police believe the young boy was responsible for HIS PARENTS.

The RCMP is teaching cops abroad now?

I had to COMB my nose in the middle of the lecture – it was a bit embarrassing

I can only imagine.

I always sit ON the table for dinner.

"...but I can't figure out why people have stopped inviting me."

Put this coat on – it'll MAKE you dry if it rains.

Does it only dry me when raining or will stepping under a shower do?

• How many MISTAKE do you MAKE at school?
• About twelve including two languages and all the sciences.

...Words fail me....

• What's the matter?
• I don't know but I MIGHT BE getting headaches. I think I should make an appointment to see the doctor.

My arm might be broken as well and it is quite possible I've been decapitated.

If you don't go to bed when you have a flu IT OFTEN GETS DARK.

...and if you get out of bed when you have muscle cramps it often snows?

remove writing from the board = PUT it off

Yeah, I procrastinate on cleaning up myself.

The children were here a minute ago, but now they've RECHARGED.

Never ever recharge your children. It takes forever for them to run out of energy.

A fall in sales could lead to A PAY RISE FOR ALL THE WORKERS.

I wish my employers were so enlightened in these harsh economic times.

If you start to recover from an illness YOU PROBABLY DON'T GET BETTER AT IT.

And I was trying so hard to perfect my flu too!

Lest you think I'm being unusually cruel even for me, keep in mind these two points:

• These are university students planning to study abroad.
• This is all lifted directly from the homework they were supposed to have been doing all term.

Oh, and every entry up there is from a different student.

Exam time cruelty

So, my first exam of the term is behind me: English Vocabulary. The students were concerned about this one for the past month or so, constantly asking me if it was going to be difficult. I was always on-message when I told them "if you've been doing your assigned homework this will be an easy exam".

This is literally the case.

The course texts for this class are a pair of books called English Vocabulary in Use and Test Your English Vocabulary in Use. I assigned homework in the form of the mini-tests in the latter every week to be done for the next class. Each class I would spot-check the homework by taking one of the mini-tests and grading it. Each mini-test is worth 30 points (in question sets that varied from 1 point to 15 points each). I was getting an astonishing number of people passing in mini-tests with scores of 29 and 30. Well, astonishing unless you noted that the back of the book had answers to all the questions.

The silly students thought I wouldn't notice. (Hint: if you're copying the errors from the textbook's answer page, I'm going to notice!)

So, back to the exam. For the exam I made up eight pages worth 20 points each. Each page had exercises taken directly from the book they had been assigned as homework. I did eight pages but each student only had 3. This was done as an anti-cheating mechanism: no student was going to be sitting next to someone with the same mix of exam questions and at first glance it's going to look like I actually did what I had threatened: made 31 different exams. (Cheating is an epidemic in Chinese academic environments, you see.) But the key is something I have to stress again: each question was taken directly from the book they had been assigned as homework. So quite literally this exam would have been a cakewalk for the students who did their homework.

I haven't graded the exams formally yet, but I have glanced over them rapidly as a sampler. There's going to be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over this one.

Maybe writing the following on the board in bright, cheery red letters before the exam was going overboard:

EXAMS ARE FUN!
(for the teachers...)

Amusing small minds.

So, being the only person in the adult portion of the family with a sense of fun, it is always left up to me to find ways to warp the mind of amuse the kid. Here's one of the simpler things I do.

This game is played in the bathroom (or anywhere where there is a sizable mirror). When the kid is looking in the mirror, make a face. (I personally suck in my cheeks until my lips protrude like fish lips.) Wait for the kid to spot you in the mirror. Almost invariably the kid will look to the real you to see what's going on. The trick is to make sure that you erase that face before his eyes focus on you. Now he's faced with a mystery: the you in the mirror has a distorted image. The real you looks perfectly normal.

I can keep Lucas entertained for quite a while when I do this. He hasn't managed to catch me in the act yet.

How to spoil a birthday in one easy step...

Get struck down by fever.

So yesterday was Lucas' second birthday, but I got some nasty virus or other and spent most of the day and well into the night wandering in and out of semi-consciousness. I basically missed his second birthday. This means everything here is second-hand information.

First, I have to apologize to my mother. There are no pictures because Joan forgot to take the camera when she went out with Lucas and her mother. You'll have to do the same as me and just imagine.

The first thing the intrepid trio did was go shopping for some foodstuffs. In the process they got a small cake and ate it with Lucas. After shopping they went to a small park in the middle of Wuchang called Hong Shan park (literally "flood mountain park"), meeting up with Joan's cousin with whom we have a very close relationship. There he ran around and looked at everything and generally had a good time. There was some kind of "drumming for kids" display there that Lucas partook of, apparently striking his drum with great zeal (but no sense of rhythm if I know my boy). Indeed he thought it was so much fun he stole the drumstick. (Nobody noticed this last point until they were a looooooooong distance away from the park, so now he has a drumstick.)

After the park it was time for the restaurant and eating. This went as usual but for one small thing: Joan's retainers accidentally got left on the table, wrapped in tissues. She didn't know this until everybody made it home, however. She called the restaurant and asked if they'd seen them but nobody had. She had to make the long trip back to the restaurant and then root around in the (dry) garbage until, just shortly before she was about to give up, she found them. Some extreme cleaning measures later she has a pair of retainers again.

I'd like to post more, but I'm still a bit dizzy so this is it for today.

Shopping with the master of disaster.

So, we were shut in most of the day yesterday between the annoying drizzle of rain and the low (for here) temperatures. Lucas, my sweet little idiot, was all ramped up on energy because the apartment really isn't big enough for him to safely release any. (When he starts things break. Or get annoyed. Or both. It all really depends on the sentience levels in question.)

Finally, after dinner, and after a few hours without rain, I'd had enough. After having browbeaten Joan for long enough we finally left the apartment as a family to take a longish walk.

Lucas has a new game, incidentally, that causes heart stoppage in the adults in his life. It follows these steps:

1. Run full-tilt down the sidewalk.
2. Suddenly collapse to his knees.
3. Follow that up with collapsing to the ground in a sprawl.

He loves it and plays it endlessly while we look on in shock (the first few times) and annoyance (Joan and her mother) or laughter (me).

This is where shopping enters the picture. While we were out, we walked past a small supermarket. I'd been there lots before but Joan and her mother had never stopped in. Since we needed some vegetables, Joan's mother decided to go check it out. (It turns out that some things are available there cheaper than the usual haunt.) I took Lucas inside partially for warmth and partially for the sheer fun of it.

Lucas, in his inimitable fashion, and after the initial wariness of someplace new, took to the place like carassius auratus auratus takes to oxidane^[1]. He ran up and down the (very narrow) aisles happily looking at all the strange stuff while his father desperately tried to keep up without knocking anything off the shelves.

Now, I've seen badly behaved children in departement stores before, especially in Canada where parents seem to think that it's perfectly OK for their children to pull things off of shelves, open packages, etc. In China this is more rare. Even by local standards, however, Lucas was a marvel. For example quite by accident we stumbled over the toy aisle. This was like kiddie crack for Lucas: dozens of interesting things that he wanted and wanted now. Here's the difference, though, between Lucas and tens of thousands of other children I've personally witnessed. He'd follow these steps:

1. Point excitedly at an item and say "要！" (want!).
2. Look expectantly at me with a grave face.
3. Listen to me gently say "no".
4. Move to the next item.
5. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Note the absence of any of the following:

• Tantrums.
• Whining.
• Clinging.
• Grabbing. (Well, he did grab one thing, but this was after looking at me and me nodding because I was considering actually buying one; I decided against on quality grounds.)
  

Other dumb things he did included playing shy with the store clerks (who subtly flocked in his general vicinity like flies to sugar) in just the right way to charm them and, get this, quietly going past the bulk candy (which he recognized excitedly) after being told, once again, "no".

I actually enjoyed going shopping with a toddler. Man, I must have done something really nice in my past life to warrant this kind of son!

^[1]Goldfish takes to water.

A glimpse of the future.

Living in China has its disadvantages. It is, after all, a brutal communist dictatorship so it's like living in Exxon or Microsoft or the like: a corporate state. (Anybody who disagrees with this parallel has either never worked in a medium- to large-sized company or has never lived in a communist state.) It is heavily polluted. It is alien beyond all belief at times.

One advantage that I have, however, living here in China, is that I know the future before you do. While I'm writing this, for example, most of the people who read my blog are still living in the year 2009. I've been living in the year 2010 for almost a whole day now. Magnanimous guy that I am, however, I will give you a glimpse of what the future will bring you.

The future is pretty much the same as the past.

There you go.

And 新年快乐 (Happy New Year) to you all!