[A fun little conversation I'm having with Laura in this comment thread includes her question about differences between Chinese literary types and Western ones. It reminded me of this post I wrote last year on Change.org, and planned to cross-post here eventually anyway. I hope you agree that its quotes are lovely things.]

~     ~     ~

I just read a passage so striking I have to share it. It’s from Lin Yutang‘s 1936 book on China called My Country and My People, and is quoted in Richard E. Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why (another keeper):

In Chinese literary criticism there are different methods of writing called “the method of watching a fire across the river” (detachment of style), “the method of dragonflies skimming across the water surface” (lightness of touch), “the method of painting a dragon and dotting its eyes” (bringing out the salient points). (p. 18)

Nisbett’s whole point in this book of “cultural psychology” is to show that modes of thought differ from culture to culture, that Enlightenment universalism is belied by the evidence, etc, etc. The point of the passage itself is to illustrate how unlike our abstract and essentialist Greek way of thinking is the Chinese, which resists hard categories and prefers, as Nisbett puts it, “expressive, metaphoric language.”

I’m going to follow the dragonfly method and leave it to you to watch the ripples of that quote, or not. Just two quick impressions before I go:

First, it somehow ties to the notion of Core Knowledge, and underscores to me the need for that “Core” to be wordly, and not ethnocentric, in order to avoid a sort of in-bred genetic shallowness. We can learn much by trying to see through Chinese eyes, for example, and see our own cultural “core” differently, and surely often benefit from that. (Hell, the Greeks learned from traveling to Egypt, Crete, Asia Minor and the Levant, and North Africa anyway. Their knowledge came less from the core than that far-flung periphery, and it’s the synthesis they performed with it all that was the thing.)

Second, as a writing teacher, I cannot wait to share the above with students. Our Western language for teaching writing does seem, as Nisbett claims, abstract and categorical and, when you think about it from the Chinese angle, mind-numbingly dull: “expository,” “persuasive,” “argumentative,” “analytical,” and so forth are not words to inflame a young mind. But “watching the fire from across the river”? “Skimming the water like a dragonfly”? “Dotting the dragon’s eyes”? Oh, yes.

(Third: point two illustrates point one.)

Image by I’mBatman

Originally posted 4/12/09 on Change.org’s Education blog.

12 Comments

• At July 3, 2010, Sui Fai John Mak wrote:

  Thanks Clay for this very interesting post. We learn those metaphors when young, in fact in Grade 6 (around 12 years old).

  May I clarify a bit on the “watching the fire from across the river”? “Skimming the water like a dragonfly”? “Dotting the dragon’s eyes”?

  1. Watching the fire from across the river means to be detached from the problem, and be an observer. There are subtle meaning here, but when used in in real life setting, it means that you need to ensure your safety, and so don't get yourself into trouble, in case of conflict.

  2. Skimming the water like a dragonfly refers to light touch on a subject, and has a philosophical tone - especially when giving a speech, where one wants to briefly mention about a topic, but not in depth. Another use would be its application in dancing, where one is dancing with such lightness who seems to float.

  3. Dotting the dragon’s eyes - This relates to an old Chinese story. It was about an artist who drew a dragon, but then when the eyes were dotted, the dragon actually flied away. In the dragon dance, the dragon won't have her life unless the eyes are dotted, which is also part of the ceremony at the start of dragon dance. I think people might have then interpreted such dotted of the eyes as the symbolic meaning of drawing out of salient points in an artifact.

  There have been lots of "interpretations" of those metaphors, analogies in Chinese stories, and sometimes, due to the translation from ancient Chinese colloqualism to English, the meaning might have been shifted, exaggerated, or used with a new context.

  There are many versions of these translations, and I don't think there are universal versions which could provide unique explanation. The Lin Yutang Wikipedia entry is reliable.

  As I learnt these at a young age, so it was based on my memory and interpretation.

  Cheers.

  John

• At July 3, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Wonderful comment, John. If I can persuade you to write about where you were when you learned these as a child, and go more deeply into it, skimming-like, in a memoir piece on your blog, and then to drop a link here so I and others can read it, I'll be a happy man.

  I just bought Lin's book, so I'll be looking into it soon enough.

  Thanks for dropping in,

  Clay

• At July 3, 2010, Laura Gibbs wrote:

  Oh oh oh, you are ringing my bells here... this is exactly the kind of thing I was trying to get at with the ability to let the metaphorical expression of a proverb and its analytical interpretation sit side by side in your mind, not just decoding the form in order to extract the abstract interpretation (and banish the image), but letting them both stand in your mind together and resonate - not forcing the firefly skimming the water to be "only" a firefly but at the same time not losing the firefly even as you let it lead your mind somewhere beyond to other ideas.

  I think you are spot on to identify the Greeks as a crucial turning point in the abstracting and essentializing of things. The word "idea" itself is a great example: Greek eidos and the related word eidolon (whence "idol") were originally words from the realm of the visual, from the seeing of things ("idea" is related linguistically to the "video" we borrowed from Latin). But as the philosophical tradition worked its powers of abstraction and essentializing on the "ideas" they lost their sense of vision and became invisible. Poof: they're gone! Abstracted from the world into the uncertain terrain of our minds.

  Have you read The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image by Leonard Shlain…? Fabulous stuff, I think - very provocative and useful whether you agree or disagree with the directions he goes with that. I learned recently that Shlain has died (http://leonardshlain.com/blog/?p=101)… very sad! I think he still must have had a lot of good books in him that he did not have time to leave behind for us to enjoy and learn from!

• At July 4, 2010, Joan Vinall-Cox wrote:

  Fascinating. I was lucky enough to write an Arts-Based Narrative Inquiry thesis and, although I like theory, that approach allowed me to be metaphorical, poetical, and visual, which was the only way I could truly dot (my) dragon's eye. I guess that's why I thoroughly enjoyed writing it.

• At July 4, 2010, Sui Fai John Mak wrote:

  Thanks Clay for your response. I was educated in Hong Kong and learned these in La Salle Primary School. I could elaborate these in my blog at a later stage, if you wish to know more about Chinese philosophy and how it is applied in our life.

  I liked writings very much and you could find some of my writings here http://suifaijohnmak.wordpress.com and Ning Community Network http://connectivismeducationlearning.ning.com plus my postings on Facebook.

  I like to write about different topics in my blog, and some of my posts relate to Chinese philosophy in education and learning.

  If you are interested in Chinese philosophies, then may I suggest you check these topics out? I Ching, Tao Te Ching, and the Sun Tze 36 military strategies. There are plenty of artifacts on these on wikipedia, Google, Google scholar links, etc. I could also refer you to the officical website from Chinese education authorities if that is of intersts to you. Let me know if you would like to have them.

  You could forward me with an email or via your blog post or mine for further connections. You could check out my other details on Facebook and Twitter too (under suifaijohnmak)

  There are huge potentials in the use of Chinese metaphors - Yin/Yang that is part of Tao Te Ching in understanding nature (see the metaphors on my blogs - with tags of metaphors), in writings, or in education and learning.

  Please note that I am a Catholic and so my belief stems strongly with a Christian belief. However, you may find many Chinese teachings and philosophies align with the teachings of Christ - in passion, in love, in personal integrity (trustworthiness, honesty), and altruism etc.

  Finally, I have read a few of posts before and found them very intersting and inspiring.

  John

• At July 4, 2010, Sui Fai John Mak wrote:

  Here is my combined response post with some links to site http://suifaijohnmak.wordpress.com/2010/07/04/a-response-to-what-china-can-teach-writing-teachers/

  Cheers.

  John

• At July 4, 2010, Lewis wrote:

  As an American writing teacher in China I can and cannot agree with the title of this post. My college students in Beijing must learn academic writing .While these academic styles may not be "words to inflame a young mind" it is a necessary style to learn for academic writing. For other writing styles such as creative writing or personal narratives, or novel writing , or children's books, etc, the above post title can fit and I will agree with the premise.

• At July 4, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi again and thanks for the reply, JSF.

  I'm pretty good on Chinese philosophy and history - I taught it in Shanghai, where I lived for six years, and I'm teaching it here in Singapore. I'm currently in the middle of quite a few books -- Oxford History of Ancient China (1180 pages!), Brooks and Brooks' Original Analects, Fung Yu-Lan's History of Chinese Philosophy, plus the Book of Documents, Book of Songs, Zuo Chronicles, and Sima Qian's works; and I hope to read the Three Kingdoms, Monkey, Plum in the Golden Vase, and Dream of the Red Chamber and other literary classics before the end of the year -- to dig deeper.

  And while I'm not an adherent of any institutional religion -- I'm an ex-Christian who still has much respect for the teachings of Jesus, but few for the dogmas that Rome and the Protestant Church (not much different in terms of the basic creed) attached to his story -- I do find Zhuangzi and Confucius combined about as rich and credible as any ethical-metaphysical system has been on this planet.

  So I guess we balance each other ;-)

  Anyway, the broad strokes, and many of the finer ones, in Chinese history and culture I get. But the little peeks at such things as its rhetorical tradition and approaches that Lin points to above? These don't find their way into most historical writings. Thus the delight at bumbling across them in a book and wanting to know more.

  All for now and take care.

• At July 4, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Um, Lewis, I can't find any assertion in the post that college students shouldn't learn academic writing.

  But the second half of your comment gets closer to what I did mean to imply.

  Thanks for dropping in,

  Clay

• At July 4, 2010, Sui Fai John Mak wrote:

  Thanks Clay for sharing your background experience. I greatly appreciate your intersts in the literary classis. When I was in my high school, we were free to study to Three Kingdoms, Monkey, and Dream of the Red Chamber. However, in our lessons, there were only selected chapters from these three classics, and since they were written in colloquialism, we needed more elaboration from other literature review and teacher's guidance to understand the genre, syntax, semiotics and pragmatics of such colloquialism. There were other rich themes in ancient poets (the 5 and 7 "narrative" poets).

  Relating the Chinese literature, it was divided into the ancient and modern ones, which are based on the modern prose, which is more pragmatic and comprehensible. Nowadays, most communication in Chinese are based on plain simple Chinese syntax, that was all originated from the "evolution" of modernisation of Chinese language.

  I think you could trace back lots of traditional metaphors, though the modern interpretation might be a bit difficult to comprehend, as one must consider the historical context, and why those metaphors were used.

  Relating to religious belief, thanks for the great sharing. I respect your belief, and so I am delighted to see its significance in one's writings too.

  Take care and best wishes from John

• At July 28, 2010, Cristy wrote:

  An interesting post. The native americans in our area describe their language as representative of their religion. I think that is often the case in other cultures. Ours represents the “expository,” “persuasive,” “argumentative,” “analytical,” because of our Judaeo/

  christian heritage. Cristy

• At July 30, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Cristy,

  Sorry to be so late on this, but I'd say those categories are far more Greek than Hebrew. Know what I mean?

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.

.(h/t Hullaballoo)

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At issue is Brooks’ argument that deficit spending during periods of debt crisis makes consumers insecure, and thus deficit spending at such times is bad.

After quoting a paragraph from Brooks, Klein gives students a textbook case of two essential acts of critical reading-and-thinking:

First, he concedes that Brooks’ argument is not entirely wrong by following his quote from Brooks with a paragraph beginning with a simple “That’s true, in a sense,” and moving on to explain why. Concessions are important when reading. They signal the application of a maxim I read somewhere long ago stating, “Before you can say, ‘I disagree,’ you must first  be able to say, ‘I understand’.” Students often try to avoid granting that views opposing their own have any merit, because they don’t want to “lose” their argument by “giving points away.” It’s a widespread and understandable move on their part, but also a dishonest and mentally feeble one, so Klein’s move here, though common and pretty unremarkable to adult readers, is one teachers should show to those developing readers called teenagers.

Klein’s second move takes place in his next paragraph, and is less common and more remarkable even for adults: he “reads” what is absent in Brooks’ argument. A nicely written transition sentence from his prior concession — “That said, . . . ” — pivots smoothly to his criticism of what Brooks does not say:

“. . . Brooks walks by some of the difficult tradeoffs here without even stopping to look.”

Klein’s argument about deficit spending, by the way, is worth thinking about in the midst of all the media noise (normally in sound-bites too brief for argument and thought) about government spending not just in the US, but in Europe and increasingly around the “austerity-obsessed” world. For writing teachers, it also happens to be a nice model of compare/contrast organization and sentence construction (note the parallelism from sentence to sentence, and how clear it makes the argument):

Small businesspeople might be unnerved by deficits, but they‘re also unnerved by GDP contraction. A small coffee shop might not like government spending in the abstract, but they really don’t like closing because there are no more construction workers around to buy coffee, and so they may quite like the effect of deficit-financed tax credits for home buyers. Consumers might not like the idea of deficits, but nor do they like hearing that their kid is in a class that’s twice as large this year, or that the construction on the road they take to work is going to simply stop for a while while the local government waits out the recession.

Added bonus: after this paragraph, he performs a good move on the levels of both reading and writing:

The question, in other words, is not whether anyone likes deficits. it’s whether they like what would happen in the absence of countercyclical deficit spending even less.

–on the level of reading, Klein rejects the way Brooks’ text frames the entire issue, and suggests a more correct frame. On the level of writing, he uses this same sentence as pretty much his “thesis sentence,” delayed far into his piece and delivered after the arguments, not before it.

Probably more than most people cared to read, but again, little pieces like this can do worlds for talking about reading, writing, and thinking. In this case, the simple fact that Klein’s piece is a current events blog post gives students a window onto the reality that real writers don’t — as our textbooks so often imply — have to spend weeks revising drafts before the work is good enough, but on the contrary can bang out several not just publishable, but considerably polished, pieces in a single day’s news cycle. Add to that the immediacy of the post, and thus the real-world relevance, and you’ve got another advantage to using authentic stuff like this instead of the stuff from textbooks published in, say, the Clinton era.

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Dear President Bush,

Don’t let that liberal media get you down with their polls. As one of the 17% of Americans who knows you were a great president – history (and your heavenly reward!) will prove the “Negative Nellies” wrong – I just want to say “Thank you!” for all the great work.

Because of your support for abstinence-only sex education, my teenage daughter and son are still virgins. As for the mean-spirited gossip around town that they’ve been playing games with their non-virginal zones in ways that make Sodom seem like Sunday School, well, let me tell you that they’re just not true – my daughter’s walk is that way from too much horseback-riding. She swore to that while we slow-danced at our Purity Ball last week. (And I double-darn guarantee you that Ball was a heck of a lot more fun than Barack Hussein Obama’s inaugural ball will be. You should come next year, and bring your own lovely daughters!)  Likewise, those little blemishes on their mouths and other parts of their pure bodies are just cold sores and pimples. That school nurse who said otherwise, and who showed me that study about how abstinence-only education is causing kids to increase in both sin and sickness? She can stick her liberal science where the sun don’t shine.

Speaking of “science,” I also want to thank you for putting those pesky, elitist, know-it-all “scientists” in their place over the last eight years. You and me both know that evolution is just a “theory,” and that no matter how much some of us may look like monkeys, the Good Book says otherwise right there on page 2 of “Genesis” in God’s own red, white, and blue English. Same with that so-called “global warming.” You were right to silence those government scientists who drank the Al Gore kool-aid. Heck, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that it’s hotter these days because of the population boom down in Hell. (More sinners, more fires. Heat rises. Boom: global warming. It’s basic physics.)  Anyway, thanks to you, my children know better than to believe all this “scientific research.”

(You should see my kids, whenever “global warming” comes up, imitate your “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter!” joke at your last G8 Summit. They do the fist-jab as they say it as perfectly as you did in front of all those world leaders. Thank you for setting that example for the young, Sir!)

Finally, I want to thank you for improving my children’s reading and math skills. I can’t believe how good they have become at choosing the right bubbles on all those state tests they’ve been taking. Those Nellies who say that those reading tests don’t measure literacy should come to my house and watch my son and daughter read classics like Answers in Genesis, The Bell Curve, and Mein Kampf. I grill them after every chapter with comprehension questions, and they’re 100% right every time. They understand the genius of these great works and argue their points against liberals who try to debate them with a force that makes this father proud.  (As for math, they’re better at calculating how much my savings have shrunk than I am!)

Mr. President, I could say much more, but I think I’ll stop here. God bless you, Sir, for all you’ve done in your service to America – and God save us from the years of liberal tyranny we face when you’re gone.

Sincerely,

Wilber D. Snipes III
Crawford, Texas

P.S. Congratulations on the postage stamp! I was in a fraternity too, and let me tell you, I surely appreciate your whacky way of telling the liberals where to get off!!!

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But this post is as much about that brilliant young speaker, and how he and the other young prodigies at that event need to learn to showcase their brilliance by harnessing the power of the web. So, first, that Korean kid.

The Spoken

Slouched in the back rows of the auditorium, high above the stage, I looked down on this kid approaching the podium with a bit of amusement. Straight bangs down to his mad scientist glasses, thin and slightly hunched frame, he didn’t inspire a lot of confidence. Even less when he took a few beats too many, it seemed to me, to adjust the microphone, pause, survey his audience left, center, right. Had he forgotten his lines? Finally, he hunches forward into the microphone and peers out at the audience from beneath those low-hanging bangs:

To the left: “Tick.”  To the center: “Tick.” To the right. “Tick.” Pause. “Time is passing, and you’ll never get a moment back.”

My cliche-meter activated, I’m already plotting a path to the most discreet exit. But he keeps going: “And that’s why I want to talk to you today about what we’re told is one of the great evils of student life: Procrastination.”

He belts that last word out with such surprising flair, both vocally and physically, wheeling his body in such a way that he takes in the whole audience with his eyes, that I’m inclined to nibble at his bait. I’ll give him a few more seconds.

“You’ve all heard it a million times from a million teachers: ‘Don’t wait until the last minute to start your essay. You’ve got a week: start drafting now.’ Or, ‘Don’t put off studying for that test until the last night.’ ” Pause. “But I’m here to tell you: the teachers are wrong. Procrastination is one of the wisest strategies for living the Good Life.”

The pleasure of the hook piercing the cheek. I relax into my seat to enjoy being reeled in.

The Heard

The student went on to marshal all sorts of evidence that real people often wait until the deadline to do their work, and they do just fine. He’s got me thinking of how I teach writing — the Six Traits of Effective Writing, using the Writing Process to revise, trait by trait, over a number of days — versus how I do it, and have always done it: in one sustained outpouring of words that normally begins around 10 pm with a full pot of coffee, and ends around dawn the next day at the bottom of the second pot. And yes, that day is the day of the deadline.

It worked for me in college, where my professors almost always praised my writing. And it has worked for me since, in all the (admittedly modest) ways my writing has been successful.

So why was I making my students practice a model I myself didn’t practice, had never practiced? Why was I forcing them to sacrifice on its altar so many irrecoverable ticks of the clock, and forcing myself to sacrifice hours as well to assess each of those revisions?

Pitchforks down, readers. I’m a strong advocate of the Six Traits, and sing its praises whenever the topic comes up. It’s a beautifully focused model for zeroing in on the fine points of the writer’s craft, and its internal logic makes it a baby worth keeping. My way of teaching it, though? That’s the bathwater this kid was making me think should be thrown out. (And that points toward my first gut answer to Scot: assessing wikis shouldn’t excessively weight the number of edits. It’s the quality of the final piece that should be assessed. For some writers, excellent quality will take many edits, and for others, none at all. The proof is in the pudding. If the final product lacks polish, the student should be able to show edits as proof of effort. Otherwise, ignore them.)

The Echoes

Then came the moment of the speech that lifted me powerless onto the deck, happily flapping at this young speaker’s feet: “And now let me close by warning you of your fate if you don’t procrastinate: you become that most unhealthy of things in modern civilization” — and he wheels on the next phrase, and spits it out with fire-and-brimstone perfection — “a workaholic!”

Laughter and applause all around as he speeds through the details of a life lost to obsessive perfectionism and a work ethic gone berserk, before putting on the brakes, slowing to a pause, and closing where he started, with the “Tick, tick, tick” of that precious clock that, unless we rule it, rules us: a healthy reminder that some cliches earn their status for good reason.

Toward a Bigger Stage

I left that Original Oratory event the way I had left so many others — the Impromptu Speaking, the Oral Interpretation, the Extemporaneous Speaking — at that Convention: amazed by the talent of the students, and depressed at how boxed-in it all was. That Korean student (Sung Jin J. of Jakarta International School) struck me as nothing less than a young, Asian David Sedaris, able to use his wit and verbal skills to turn his quirky physical package to his great advantage; another student, a Pakistani young man named Raheem of the International School of Manila, spoke in multiple events with such polish and intelligence I would have paid admission to see more; likewise Zach at my own school, with his Original Oratory speech about the degeneration of high school into a breeding ground for “fakes, hypocrites, and cheaters,” an institution devoted no longer to “college preparation,” but to mere “college application preparation”; and an Australian young man whose name I forget but whose speeches I never will: all of these students showed nothing less than genius. And while IASAS deserves kudos for celebrating these prodigies on the same level that we usually (and depressingly) reserve for people skilled at getting a rubber ball through a hoop, across a line, or over a fence, it still falls short of promoting them on a far broader, and at the same time far less labor-intensive scale.

You know what I’m getting at: all that genius disappears into silence or, only slightly better, onto some school website that gets ten visits a month. If they truly had the savvy popular wisdom suggests these “digital natives” do, they could be getting thousands, tens of thousands of viewers a month. And that could lead places for them.

The missed opportunity to showcase them as they deserve killed me. I approached many of them, gave them my card, told them they deserved a wider audience than the auditorium, and I wanted to help them reach it. It was all unplanned, so I cast about in my mind for possibilities: I could propose to my old colleagues at Change.org that they publish these students as guest-writers. I could see about interesting them in reviving Students 2.0. I could feature them on this blog.

But all of those ideas are more complicated, it seems to me now, than necessary. It seems to me that all those students need to do is start their own blog, or YouTube channel for their orations, and share their talents with the world that easily. When they launch, they can tell me, I can tell you, and we can all promote them and send viewers their way. And then the unpredictable possibilities of “Open Living,” to quote Alan Levine — the possible job offers, interviews, feature articles, and the million other serendipities — are given their opening. And maybe these young geniuses can be discovered before they graduate high school.

Image by zoutedrop

5 Comments

• At March 23, 2010, Lynne wrote:

  Wow, I would have loved to have heard those students speeches. I don't suppose there's a recording of it? Speaking of procrastination... I know very few people (in college and at work) who actually follow the writing model. In my case, I need to write a 7-9 pager for my religion and science class. (It's on how we've viewed the universe from Aristotle to Newton, and evaluating if Kuhn's paradigm shifts adequately describe the changes in the scientific thought.) I'll be up late tonight, but I'm confident I'll have a good (if not great) paper by the end of it.

• At March 24, 2010, Diane Cordell wrote:

  I MISS Students 2.0 and still maintain contact with a number of the contributors.

  Please share the links to these young people's blogs, if they ever start writing posts.

  Now that I'm retired, I need to find other ways to stay attuned to student voice.

• At March 24, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Lynne,

  I'm putting out a full-court press to find and persuade those students to do as I propose above. More soon if they take the bait (and a fund-raising drive to pay for their head examinations if they don't--they were so good my head exploded).

  Sounds like a fun paper. Don't procrastinate ;-)

• At March 24, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Working on it, Diane. I've been too preoccupied with the classroom to be active on the network these days, so I wonder if any of the s2oh founders are wanting to revive it?

  After the Change.org experience--writing to the point of burnout--I understand more why they petered out. But between a complete cessation and an arbitrary "write daily" policy, there's got to be a middle way.

  Glad to hear the upbeat tone's still there. I'm dying of the humidity down here and generally droopy as a result :(

• At April 22, 2010, Laura Bridgeman wrote:

  Clay,

  I got completely hooked whilst reading your postings, you have a style of writing that just makes me want to read more - I am very jealous! I'm studying to be a Maths teacher (hence the poor writing skills - more a logical brain), and loved your sentence "Why was I making my students practice a model I myself didn't practice, had never practiced?". This is a concern of mine in the area of Mathematics, where I feel we are losing contact with what students really need Maths for in todays world. I enjoyed Maths at school but mostly because I was good at it - it's going to be a real challenge to keep students engaged in a subject they may only use 10% of in their entire life. Thanks for inspiring me to challenge the current system and to see if I too, like you can teach outside the norm and get away with it!!

  Cheers, Laura

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Pride and Prejudice, Revisited

He was lower-middle class economically, above most of the “upper” class culturally, and long past much belief in, or need for, most things church-related.

But he was engaged now, and meeting his future family-in-law for the first time. They were opposite him in almost every way, but in two ways, above all, that made him nervous: they were unimaginably wealthy, and they were regular church-goers.

During their first meeting the day before, through several subtle signs — their exchange of glances when he told them he’d never golfed, and when he had to ask how to mount that horse at their estate; his future mother-in-law’s quick scold of her husband’s questions about his (non-existent) investment portfolio, followed by her pained change of subject — he had gathered that he had little hope of overcoming their disappointment in his lack of silver-spooned pedigree.

(Truth be told, he wished his girl lacked it too, so that they could leave this Jane Austen re-run, dispense with the class difference dramas, rely on their own talents and hard work for any future success, and just live and love more simply — as, when they were on neutral turf, they did. Like that day at the river the week before, when she was just her, and he was more than enough for her. She’d dropped her gold ring and watch, heirlooms both, off the rocks and into the river, and given them up for lost beneath the rapids. He told her to keep the faith, found a long branch in the forest, and told her to hold it straight down from the rock to the river-bottom. He dove in, followed the branch down, and felt his way along the silt in the dark, then rose fist-first from the depths, exultant and beaming, jewels in hand and glowing gold in the sun.

They’d told that story to her family later that day, but none of them seemed to think it mattered. He knew it didn’t either, but also knew it very much did.)

His friends didn’t believe him, but he really did regret that she came from wealth.

But if the wealth gap was spilt milk, he still had a fighting chance, he knew, to overcome that other difference. He told himself he would be a good sport about his in-laws’ faith, and go to their Sunday morning service with the open mind he prided himself on, and with his own version of faith: “good faith.” He would withhold judgment, and give their church the benefit of the doubt.

At the same time, he was honest enough with himself to recognize that he fully expected the service to be a pained, “smile until your lips bleed” affair.

Sunday

The colonial red-brick church was exclusive, for Virginia’s bluest bloods. Several of America’s Founding Fathers, who had lived in the neighborhood over two centuries earlier, had worshiped in these very pews. The Sunday morning parking lot was filled with the Saabs of the Old Money families, the Lexuses and Mercedes of the less secure and more self-conscious nouveau riche. His clothes and shoes were a couple of notches below the apparent Sunday standard here. He smiled through the doorway handshakes, the class inspections posing as introductions; then he smiled down the aisle and into the pew. His mother-in-law’s perfume seemed a thing made in heaven. He never knew perfume could so intoxicate, and could only imagine how dear the price tag.

To the podium came the pastor, a powerfully-built but kind-faced old man. He liked the old man instantly — naturally mild and at ease, much the mold of old man into which he hoped he’d ripen himself.

The opening remarks told him he’d come on a special day for this church: it was the old man’s last sermon. He’d given his first one in this church a full four decades ago, a much younger man with a long future ahead of him. The old man spoke of his imminent departure, and of the passage it marked to his life’s Final Stage, and all the while spoke like a man at peace with life’s impermanence, with the natural cycle of life and death that spins us all. Only the slightest sadness could be sensed; more palpable was the old man’s obvious concern that he’d chosen a suitable topic for his final performance on this sunny morn.

The Sermon

He’d chosen, the old man announced, to speak of a story surely known to all the faithful in the house, a story that had surely gripped them all in childhood, such were its wonders and beauties, such its gifts of wisdom and hope.

And that story, he said, was this: the Tale of the Frog and the Princess.

The groom-to-be scanned the faces of his in-laws-to-be and others in nearby pews for signs of scandal. Surely the congregation would find this choice inappropriate — it wasn’t from the Bible at all, and worse yet, it was a childish fairy tale! But all he saw on the all those faces was soft smiles and eyes aglow with an anticipation both childlike and mature. He smiled too, and with no lip-bleeding grit. While he fully expected the old man to somehow, by the end of the sermon, tie the fairy tale to the predictable narrative he’d heard so often when small, he nonetheless adored the idea of letting the old man lead him, along with the rest, back to those days of childhood.

In this return to the “teachings of childhood” — his favorite line from Gone With the Wind, and his favorite silver moment in all of Clark Gable’s celluloid immortality — what meanings would he hear in this story now, as an adult, that he couldn’t hear as a child? He’d forgotten much of the story. What were the details?

He was ready to listen to the old man with the best of his own “good faith.”

The old man eased into his tale. “You remember the story,” he said. “How the Princess had a golden ball she loved to throw into the air and catch — how it so glowed in the sky she imagined she was catching the very sun.

“And you remember,” he continued, “how her parents told her never to go beyond the palace walls into the forest. It was full of dirt and, worse than dirt, of the lowly people of the realm — the ‘commoners.’

“But we know how the old tales work,” he went on. “Of course the Princess was fated to transgress her parents’ boundaries.

“One day, she threw the ball too high, and over the palace wall it went, with her in hot pursuit. She exited the gate just in time to see her golden ball bounce down the hill, bounce high once, and again, and then plop into a deep, dark well. Of course that well was dirty — too dirty for our Princess. All she could do was kneel there by the well, the silly bird, crying and crying over that stupid golden ball.

“She was at least lucky in one respect,” he added with a pause long enough to look a good half of the congregation in the eye: “There were no dirty poor people around.”

A faint laugh came from the faithful.

“You remember too, I’m sure, that the Princess stopped her blubbering when a frog approached her, all slimy and wet and, in a word, dirty — and she recoiled from it in disgust that soon turned to wonder. Because it spoke to her.

” ‘What are you crying about, Princess?’,” it croaked.

“She answered it the way a Princess should answer a dirty thing: dripping with disdain. ‘I’m crying because my golden ball fell into the well, you dirty frog.’

“But the frog’s next croak caught her attention: ‘What if I can get your ball for you? What will you give me?’

“The Princess’ life was so stuffed with gold, she knew she could give him a small fortune without noticing its absence. ‘I’ll give you my golden crown,’ she said.

“Now it was the frog’s turn for disdain. ‘What would I do with a golden crown? All it would do is drag me to the bottom of the pond and drown me.’

“The King’s little girl was dense enough to follow with an offer of a perfect pearl necklace — she surely had dozens of them, so no worries there,” he added. “But the frog explained they’d just tangle around his legs and, again, cause him to drown. No thanks, said he.

“The Princess huffed and, like our friend Mr. Pooh — Of Very Little Brain — said, ‘What about my ruby ring, then?’ And again the frog croaked out a snort: ‘It would fall off my finger and I’d be left with nothing at all.’

The old man stopped the story to observe that so far, the girl had failed to recognize the frog as a “person” at all. It was just a thing to be bought off, a laborer to do the dirty-work and get her back her gold. It never occurred to her to ask the frog what he needed; never occurred to her to think of the frog as another living “person” at all. He sighed and shook his head, and as he took a breath to continue, the groom thought, “Here comes the pivot to the preaching.”

He was wrong.

“But in the classic ‘Rule of Threes’ pattern so common in stories, it seems our Princess, after hearing the frog three times try to tell her that what she valued for him had no value, finally — though probably dimly, for our dear princess is a dimwit  — finally, I say, she begins to catch on: she’s talking to another living soul. How do I know? Because her next offer is different: ‘I’ll give you one of my silk slippers,’ she says — wait for it, now….ready? — ‘so that you may sleep in it and keep warm.’”

Another gaze into the pews, then: “That’s more like it,” he said. “There’s always hope. A warm place to sleep is something we all need. It’s a lot more important than jewels to our cold, clammy frog. Our Princess is waking up.” His eyebrows arched above his bifocals, and he smiled.

The groom smiled back.

“Mr. Frog still wasn’t sold, though, but — if you’ll pardon this old man for saying so — the offer seemed to bring out his kinky side: ‘I don’t want your slipper,’ he says. ‘But it gives me an idea. What I do want,’ Frog continued, ‘is…’ — and pardon me, ladies — ‘to sleep in your bed. With you.’”

[I hate to do this to you, but it's late, so: to be continued. Soon.]

1 Comments

• At April 15, 2010, Sylvia wrote:

  Please continue!!!! I need to know the end.... (even if I think I can guess it).

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From the excellent China Digital Times, with emphasis added:

Han Han was named as the ‘Person of the Year” in 2009 by two influential publications: Guangzhou-based newspaper Southern Weekend（南方周末) and Hong Kong-based magazine Asia Weekly (亚洲周刊). Here are some excerpts of the relevant articles in both publications, translated by CDT:

By Asia Weekly: Han Han: Youthful Citizen vs Power 亚洲周刊二零零九年度风云人物韩寒——青春公民VS权力.

Han Han is a 27-year-old author and race car driver, and his blog has generated nearly 300 million visits since 2006. He follows and is concerned with public rights defending events. On the Shanghai “Fishing” incident, Hangzhou “70 yards” incident, forced eviction incident and other events his clear and powerful writing has generated an enormous influence on public opinion. As a member of the post-80s generation, he lives authentically and freely, and demonstrates the energy of China’s youthful citizens and the hope of civil society in China.

韩寒，二十七岁的作家和赛车手，博客浏览量近三亿，他关注、跟进公共维权事件，在上海「钓鱼」事件、杭州「七十码」、强拆民居事件中，言论清醒、有力，产生巨大舆论影响力；作为「八零后」一代，他活得真实、自由，展示中国青春公民的能量和中国公民社会的希望。

From Southern Weekend: The Name of Han Han Means to Offend [the Establishment]

In the public eyes for ten years, he is now a household name, and still young, he is called by his supporters “Young Master Han.” This nickname is flattering and lighthearted, saying that he has style and quality, and is not a boring person. Young Master Han is an author, the only National Champion of in both field and rally car race, is an idol, and owns a blog which has the highest traffic in the world. He is so famous, that people often forget how extraordinary it is that one person has all these different titles. But Young Master Han became the Han Han that is now widely respected after he started a blog, and began writing social commentary which resonates with our time. His self-styled commentaries caused controversy, but were also widely popular. One day, even the most conservative people started to realize that this young man was not full of nonsense. Behind the 300 million clicks on his blog posts was a fresh humanist radiating the wave of freedom. [read the rest]

Regular readers will know I’ve become somewhat of an elitist when it comes to urging the young to blog, only wanting to “attract” those rare students who have the gifts but don’t seem to understand the tools we now have to manifest those gifts to the world — and this example is a case in point: Han can write well and think critically, “follows” (surely via RSS?) issues he “is concerned with” and writes about them. In other words, he’s got the gifts of curiosity, passion, a drive for socio-political engagement and reform, and an apparently wicked mind and pen. And a “humanist” to boot.

The most delicious detail in this young man’s delicious life? His secondary school held him back a year, and he dropped out of school without graduating.

Han Han was born on September 23, 1982. He won the first class award in the first “New Concept” writing contest in 1999, and was held back in his first year in the Songjian Number 2 High School in Shanghai the same year. He dropped out of high school in 2000, and published his first novel “Three Gates.” This book has sold 2,030,000 copies since then.

{…}

In 2008, he published a selected collection of his blog posts, “Random Texts.” In 2009, he published a novel, “His Nation,” a collection of essays, “Grass,” and a collection of blog posts, “Lovely Predators”…. Also in 2009, he announced he would publish a magazine “A Chorus of Solos.” [Han Han originally planned to name the magazine Renaissance, but the name was not approved by authorities.]

P.S.–To any students at my school: if you think you have this kind of talent, and want me to help you learn the simple blogging tools, come see me. I’ll work overtime with you, and it will have nothing to do with grades, homework, or GPA’s.

2 Comments

• At January 13, 2010, Jenny wrote:

  The idea of Voltaire blogging has made my evening. Thanks!

  .-= Jenny´s last blog ..Confession =-.

• At January 13, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  I <3 people who read footnotes.

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