Going Down

This winter I read a Detective Dee book. Detective Dee stories are about a Chinese magistrate who uses wisdom, cunning, and logic to solve mysteries. They got their start over 500 years ago and are based on an actual Detective Dee.

In the book, one of the murders took place in an apartment that the narrator kept explaining was next to a godown. I had no idea what a godown was. Finally, I couldn’t take it any longer and looked it up on the internet.

A godown is simply a warehouse.

The cool thing about this Hong Kong word is that it is not simply a British English word that has stuck around like “lift” for elevator or “flat” for apartment. Godown came into Hong Kong English from the Malay word godong. The word godown is shared among Hong Kong, Malaysia, India and other Southeast Asia countries.

If you are taking the 682 bus back from Hong Kong Island, just after you come out of the East Harbor Tunnel and you are on the Kwon Tung Bypass, you will pass a big warehouse next to the old abandon Kai Tak Airport that has “Kowloon Godown” painted on the side in large letters.

Godown joins shroff (payment office) and nullah (river) as one of those cool Hong Kong English words that did not originate from the English language.

Let the word hunting continue.

Untold Stories part 2 of 2

But alas, that seems to be the trend.

If we are fortunate, non-Holocaust genocides get one movie. Cambodia: The Killing Fields; Rwanda: Hotel Rwanda; Sierra Leone Civil War: Blood Diamond.

But sadly, Hollywood you have inexplicably chosen to ignore critical chapters in history. Twenty million dead during Stalin’s communist reign of terror: nothing. Communist oppression of democratic yearnings in Tiananmen Square: nothing.

Now please, please, please don’t get me wrong. Hollywood, I’m not saying that you don’t need to make any more Holocaust movies. To the contrary, in the spirit of Never Forget, Never Again, you need to keep making them.

But you also need to diversify. Why is it Hollywood, that you seem so committed to chronicling the fascist horrors of mid-century Europe in ever-greater detail, yet you are willing to let the longer-lasting and arguably more-devastating tragedies under communism slip into the realm of the forgotten?

There are important lesson here that I would like to help my students and my daughters learn. Thank you for the movies you have given us. They are invaluable tools that teach important lessons.

But they are not enough.

It’s time to broaden your scope.

-Jack

Earlier this year I read a phenomenal page-turner called “Mao’s Last Dancer” about a boy who grows up in abject poverty in rural China, is plucked from obscurity, and rises to become one of the top ballet dancers in the world. He defects from China to the US and eventually settles in Australia. It is a story of hope, determination, and a mother’s love. And of course, it is set against the larger political backdrop of turmoil that was the Cultural Revolution.

The whole time I was reading it, I kept thinking: this would make an awesome movie, this would make an awesome movie. This fall, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that “Mao’s Last Dancer” has -in fact- been made into a movie . . . but not by Hollywood. It was made by an Australian movie company. It had a limited release in the U.S.

Untold Stories part 1 of 2

-Defiance
-The Reader
-The Hiding Place
-Sophie’s Choice
-Music Box
-Europa, Europa
-Schindler’s List
-Devil’s Arithmetic
-Jakob, the Liar
-The Pianist
-Enemies, a Love Story
-Triumph of the Spirit
-Judgment at Nuremberg
-Everything is Illuminated
-Adam Resurrected
-The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

As part of my students’ education, we have been studying World War II and the Holocaust. If I wanted to show a movie clip depicting the Holocaust, I would certainly have no shortage of English-language movies to pick from. The Anne Frank story alone has been turned into a movie no less than five times.

Likewise, I consider our time in Asia to be part of my daughters on-going education. Our time here has been filled with travel, books, and lots of dinner-table discussions about China past and present. China has been home to some of the Twentieth Century’s most seminal events such as the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square.

The books and discussions have been great, but what I would really like to do is show my daughters some English-language movies that dramatize these key moments in Chinese history. The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was a period every bit as horrific and devastating as the German Holocaust -20 million dead in one year. The Cultural Revolution was a time of acute political oppression and fear. Neighbor turned against neighbor; children against parents; teacher against student. Individuals were forced to decide whether or not to betray the ones they loved in the name of self-preservation. It was a cruel era filled with the most regretful acts of human despicability. But it was also a time filled with individual acts of defiance, courage, and self-sacrifice. The era had political turmoil, human drama, and personal conflict.

Ditto for Tiananmen Square: revolution, man-versus-the-state, courage, resistance, violence, hope, tragedy.

In other words, these events have all of the ingredients necessary for a successful Hollywood Oscar winner. But, when I look for these English-language movies about the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square, I walk away empty-handed. They are nowhere to be found because they don’t exist. Hollywood hasn’t made them.

Okay, that’s not completely true. They made “The Last Emperor” half of which is about the communist purges. A decade of political chaos, tens of millions dead, and we get half a movie.

On second though, don't answer that

I love the school I teach in. It’s awesome. I love my students. They’re great.

A while back my students and I wrapped up our unit on the 1920s and the Jazz Age. As a culminating project they worked in small groups to design a CD case. They had to write liner notes, include pictures, and do the design work. The idea was to make it look like a modern-day CD of greatest hits from the 1920s.

But the twist was, the song titles they included were not supposed to be actual songs. Students were to make up ten titles that reflect the era. “Just Monkeying Around” by J. Scopes and the Courtroom Rascals. That sort of thing.

After working for a few minutes, one group of three boys came up to me to see what I thought of their song titles so far. The way the four boys were huddle together and jostling one another, I should have known something was up.

They showed me the first title: “Triple K.” Okay. Good. I see what you got going there.

Next: “Beautiful Booz.” Prohibition. I get it. But I’m a little uncomfortable with that. We’ll come back to it. What else have you got?

“Jazz in My Pants”

What!? “Jazz in . . . ” What does that even mean . . .? Never mind, don’t answer that. No! No. No, you can’t include a song called “Jazz in my Pants.” Now go sit down and come up with some more song titles.

Oh man, oh man.

Jazz in my pants.

What were they thinking?

Sometimes I think that my students come to school every morning and ask themselves “What can we do today to yank Mr. VanNoord’s chain?”

Oh, the joys of teaching eighth-grade boys.

The Family that Hypothesizes together...

"Dear Grandma:

I finally got my science project up and running late last night with a little help from mom and dad. I think it’s going to work out really well. I’m pretty sure I’ll earn a blue ribbon. I might even win first prize.

The bad news is, I’m not sure my mom and dad’s marriage will ever recover. It’s like the Christmas tree incident of 2003 all over again.

Love,

Your granddaughter.”

Just kidding.

But isn’t it crazy how elementary school science projects end up being family endeavors?

Elise has a really cool topic. There is a myth out there that when set on an open shelf, a McDonalds hamburger will last a freakishly long time before it starts to mold or rot. The assumption is that this is because of additives and preservatives that McDonalds puts in its burgers.

Elise is trying to bust or confirm that myth.

Living in the MTR

The MTR stations in Hong Kong are never just an MTR station. Often, they are part of a much larger mega-mall complex. Or they might have a 40-story housing complex built above them. In the very least, every MTR station has several shops inside.

Our Shek Mun station is just such an MTR station. No mega-mall. No high-rise. Just a 7-Eleven (of course), a couple of ATMs, and a mom-and-pop gift engraving store. Etch your name and anniversary date on a silver plate -that type of thing.

I know it’s a mom-and-pop shop because every time we walk past, we see the mom or the pop or both in the store. We have also deduced that they have one middle-school-aged daughter. How do we know? Because just about every time we walk through the station she is sitting at a computer on the opposite side of the table from her dad. Weekday. Weekend. Afternoon. Evening. It doesn’t seem to matter.

One day, I pointed out to my daughters that this girl is always sitting at her desk in the shop in the MTR. With an eleven-year-old’s penchant for logic and exactitude, Elise called me out and protested “Dad, she isn’t always there.”

I, of course, don’t like being challenged or proven wrong –in particular by eleven-year-olds I’ve spawned.

So now every time we walk through the Shek Mun MTR, I walk a few paces ahead of my family, turn to face them, and as we round the corner I declare slightly louder than necessary “Aaaaaaand, there she is.” I of course can’t actually see whether or not she is there until the moment I announce it, but I have yet to be wrong. She is always there.

I’ve been doing this about once a week for two months now and it's getting pretty obnoxious even by my standards. But no matter how many times my daughters say “Okay, okay, Dad, you are right. She is always there. We should have never contradicted you. Now please stop.” I can’t.

Your mother gets to be right all the time. I get to be right so infrequently. On the rare occasion that I do get to be right, I have to milk it for all its worth.

Girl at the Desk in the Engraving Store: We only have four months left in Hong Kong. Don’t fail me now. If one day, you are not at your little desk and I am proven wrong, I don’t think that I could eat that much crow. Is four more months so much to ask? Could you just stay put until we leave? Thanks.

-Jack

P.S. After all this endless studying, I hope you make valedictorian of your class.