The Mixed Signals

The Christian Science Monitor Radio, despite being my favorite broadcasting, was obscure in China, comparing to Voice of America (VOA), almost a household name. When the Monitor wasn’t available, I usually tuned to VOA, if its signal could come through.

As starter, I listened to its Special English program, known for a good source to learn English, because it’s easier to understand. It talked slowly, used limited vocabulary, and spoke simple sentence.

The first time I heard it, I felt it’s so weird that American spoke that way. It’s like baby talk. But instead of a baby saying “A dog walks in the park today. He pees on me”, which came cross naturally, the baby from VOA would say “The stock market crashed today. The Dow Jones Index lost 287 points”. It took me while to get used to it; it’s helpful when I was yet to understand adult English.

It came with a price, though. Before long, I noticed that my talking style began to resemble the VOA’s. It wasn’t so bad if I were speaking English, since I couldn’t do faster and use the fancy words anyway. Then, the same pattern started to creep into my Chinese. Having seen enough concerned eyes, I decided to stop listening to Special English once for all; turning my native language into baby talk would be too much a price to pay for a radio program.

VOA’s regular English program was the best alternative to the Monitor. But I enjoyed it less than the latter. Not that I was bothered by its slight propaganda tone—anyone who grew up in a propaganda state would have developed a good immune system. The problem was that VOA became so visible in China that the authority worked very hard to block it. Rather than jamming it in your face, however, the invisible hand broadcasted its own English program, Radio Beijing, in the same frequency. So it happened, sometimes, I heard something like this:

“The Tiananmen Square was…(inaudible)…It’s proved again that our Party is wise, our military is decisive, and our country is strong…(overlapping)…several thousands of civilians were estimated…(inaudible)…on the socialism road firmly and steadfast…”

I might be able to survive the Radio Beijing alone, but mixing it with VOA was just too much for me. As a result, most of the time, I quit both.

“This Is Christian Science Monitor, I’m Jessie Blood”

During my freshman year in college, I bought a portable radio/cassette player. It cost me—well, my parents—a fortune, something like one-month salary. I justified it by declaring a noble motive: to improve my English listening comprehension.

At first, the player was fulfilling its noble mission. Most of my waking hours, I was listening to English 900, the popular audiocassette that recites 900 of the “most commonly used sentences in Britain”, starting with, Hello.

I had a plan: repeating after each one until I could memorize them all. While I was making a progress, the sentences started to get into my nerve. By the third week, having advanced to the 248th (“I lost my pet cat yesterday”), I snapped. Just like that, my noble motive was gone with the lost cat. Since, it’s mostly the pirated cassettes of Taiwanese pop singers in playing.

I felt sorry for my parents’ investment, before this unexpected turn.

One day, I was playing with the radio part of the player, tuning in the shortwave broadcasting randomly. All of a sudden, a clear, distinctive American voice came through the headset, out of nowhere:

“This is the World Service of the Christian Science Monitor, I’m Jessie Blood. Here is the headline news…”

In a brief second, I didn’t know what to think. I never heard a real American speaking live before. It just hit me—her rhythm, the pace, the accent, the purity, the clam, and more. Hell, I didn’t know Christian is a Science, nor had any clue what it Monitors. It didn’t matter. I was fascinated. And from that moment on, I was hooked.

As I became more familiar with the program, I realized it’s not just the style, but also the content and authenticity that really captivated me. I was a news junkie, but had been tired of the junk news I received from the typical Party propaganda. It’s so all-too-familiar that I could lip-sync the newscaster even before he read the piece.

I was elated. Finally, I was exposed to the news that’s original, lively, and authentic. It didn’t bother me that I often barely understood what story was about—I was too ignorant to the basics of American politics and society. What really pissed me off was that the signals were often jammed. In bad days, it made the traffic in a busy street sounds like a symphony in comparison.

Even if I guessed the story half wrong when the signal was clear, or had to bear with the noises in pain when the invisible hand were busy working, it’s still beat lip-syncing the official mouthpiece. And to my amusement, the list of the prominent people in my vocabulary had shifted; Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat, and Kim II-sung like were out; Ronald Reagan, Casper Weinberger, or even Michael Dukakis were in.

That’s the period when my listening comprehension soared beyond my belief, while the English 900 cassette was collecting the dusts somewhere.

My parents’ investment was a huge bang for their bucks after all.

"When I Was Walking Down Harvard Square..."

When I first started college, I was still hostile toward English. But by the time I graduated, I studied it with awe and elevated it to a shrine. I had several people and a few things to thank for the drastic reversal.

Start with a teacher.

I took a freshman Spoken English class and, as expected, was miserable. The teacher had us listen repeatedly to the audio cassettes, such as the faked conversation between students, supposedly in library or whatever, or the short talks about the ecology of African wasp. The tone was always dreadful. In turn, she forced us to imitate one of those on tape.

Then, the luck struck. Half way through the term, the teacher took a maternity leave. She was replaced by Ms. Dong, who looked so young that she could be easily mistaken for a junior student. We soon knew better.

In her first class, Ms. Dong stepped out from behind the lectern, sat on a desk in the first row, and laid her feet on a chair. Looking at us rather innocently, she said: “OK, we are not going to listen to those crap. Let’s have some fun.”

I might have fainted right then and there, because I had no recollection of what happened in the succeeding minutes. Teaching is a sacred act in China, mind you; no teacher I had ever met, young or old, sat down in the class, let alone sat on a desk with her legs dangling. And no teacher in China talked about “fun” in classroom. Ever.

The “fun”, as she later put it into play, was eye-opening for me. She paired us two or three in a group, told us to talk about the real people and things, and never bother with the grammar and rule. And topics? Anything we chose or made up, as long as it interests us. No more faked conversation and simulation.

Up to that point, it never occurred to me that English could be taught like that. Did she know what she was doing? Or was she indeed a junior who pretended to be a teacher? It took me a while to quash the doubt, and I did my best to play along. Surprisingly, as I became more comfortable in her class, I began to enjoy and attend each class eagerly.

Of course, it helped that she was pretty beyond any doubt, always dressed distinctively, and spoke such a perfect American accent that it sounded like a melody. Once, she posed a question off-handedly before answering herself: “While I was living in New England several years ago, I was walking down Harvard Square the other day. Guess who did I bump into?”

Man, that’s music to my ears.

Karl Marx, Me, And Learning English

While attending graduate school in the U.S. over a decade ago, I was occasionally asked how long I had studied English before coming to America. I always hesitated before answering. If I told the truth (ten years, six of which in grade school and four in college), then I would desperately want to end the conversation soon. Five-minute of talking in English seemed to be the utter limit I could handle without looking either dumb or anti-social.

I was neither. But, then, how could I explain that, despite of the decade-long effort, I still spoke the broken English beyond repair, and wrote nothing original but “on the one hand…on the other hand”?

As far as I could tell, my case was typical, at least among Chinese. Many had studied English longer—and harder—than I, but most of them weren’t much better off. I figured, unless acquiring second language is harder than studying rocket science, which many of us seemed to have no problem with, there must be something awfully wrong with the way we learned.

As my own experience tells, in retrospect, I would say everything went wrong. When I first studied English at the sixth grade, I was eager; ever since I watched the TV coverage of Deng Xiaoping’s first visit to the United States, I became obsessed with everything associated with America. My eagerness, however, faded quickly. And six years in a row, English came in the second subject I hated the most, after the ultimate champ, Socialism Studies.

To be fair, it’s no fun to study any subject at school in China—teacher always made sure we suffer as the sign of the progress. But I expected that English was taught at least differently from, say, Algebra. I was wrong. All of my teachers followed the same philosophy that's as old as the Confucianism: the only way to instill something in student is to drill the same rule over and over until his brain spins.

My English teacher was fond of this in particular, and she did it with an immense zeal. Man, let me tell you, solving a thousand algebra equations was one thing; working on subject and verb agreement a thousand times was totally insane. Yet, she was never tired of it.

Even if I survived the teacher, I had no chance to stay sane with the textbook. Half of the texts were mad repetitions like “This is a sheep. That is a sheep. These are all sheep”, substituting sheep with other animals and starting all over again; another half were filled with such a masterpiece like “How Karl Marx Learns Foreign Languages”.

Imagine if you had Socialism Studies and English class in a row, twice a week, and six years in duration. Could Karl Marx have fared any better, I always wonder, if he had gone through what we did?