Essays on Writing and Language in Honor - Sino-Platonic Papers

Schriftfesrschri#: Ersap in Honor of John &Francis
incomprehensible original text is replaced by an even more incomprehensible and
unreadable translation. The heirs of this tradition maintain -- as one student of
Japanese at the Institute once insisted - that no one (including natives) understood
a sentence unless he had noted comprehensively the etymological history of each
word in that sentence. I have decided, from anecdotal evidence, that when they
write the sociology of sinology and of japanology they will discover that the least
well-adjusted individuals of previous generations gravitated toward the study of
rare languages. This is symbolized by an unforgettable experience a generation ago
in a Harvard College Chinese class: the only non-Oriental in the class never bathed,
never combed his hair, and attended class barefoot.
Over the years, despite the explicit warnings in the brochure and the
application forms about the importance of interactive learning, some of these
students have enrolled at the East Asian Summer Language Institute. I reflect now
with bemusement on a skit that was performed by the Japanese School a few years
ago, involving an alien, from Mars, making cutting remarks about Americans and
about Japanese. Is it surprising that the student who assumed the role of the alien
was a solitary, anti-social, enthusiast of etymology? I am happy to report that
students of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are getting more and more wholesome
year by year. (At this summer's reception, my wife remarked with some optimism
how normal the students looked: only one person appeared eccentric. "Who was
that?" I said: "Describe him." After being told it was someone with a scraggly beard,
a swarthy complexion, and long hair gathered at the back, I realized she was talking,
not about a student, but about Kathy's husband.)
If we are to recognize the teaching of languages as a humanistic profession,
we must take care to differentiate between our identities as natives and our
identities as teachers; we must not confuse who we are with what we &. We are
ethnically Chinese, American, Japanese, Korean, or whatever, but what we do is to
teach these cultures.* There will be times when loyalty to what we are and what we
do may be in conflict. But they needn't be if we remember that no one is @ to be
native, just as no one is paid to breathe: that comes naturally, and is worthy of no
special notice or reward. (Although frankly I have encountered too many people
who are cultural nativist snobs: they can't get over the misfortune of others not
being born into the culture which gave them birth.) What a teacher is paid to do is
to understand and to respect the culture of teaching. The culture of language
teaching is especially complex, for the good language teacher is both caring and
critical, personable but not personal, social and interactive without being frivolous
and flippant. The native foreign language teacher realizes that the culture he
teaches has a particular personal significance for him, bred of familiarity, and
internalized through habit: but while he recognizes the fact that this native
endowment confers many advantages, it does not constitute supreme authority.
The non-native teacher is compromised by an inevitable estrangement from the
* Even here, the situation is more complex than we realize. For some of us do not belong
ethnically to any one culture, but rather to a combination of cultures: Chinese-American,
Korean-American, Japanese-American.