Heroine

Every week we have to write a 报告，or report, on that week’s topic and present it to the class from memory on Friday. It counts as our oral exam. We are allowed to have papers with notes jotted on them in case we forget a point when we give our presentations, but we are not allowed to read our reports line for line.

The main purpose of these reports is to obviously practice new grammar structures and vocabulary orally within a contextual structure that is not that of our textbook. In other words, this is our chance to show that we have actually learned the 语法 beyond memorizing sentences from the book. There is a rubric which considers new vocab used, grammar, pronunciation, and content. I think my strongest point usually is content, and my weakest grammar, which is the inverse of what I should be focusing on. There really is not point about crafting a well argued presentation, given that the audience is eight students and three teachers, but I think learning how to argue persuasively in Chinese is a skill which will not only raise my 中文水平but also improve my reasoning skills (on a complete side note, I have gotten to the point where I can think of the word I want in Chinese, but for a split second not remember its English counterpart. I think this phenomenon and that of dreaming in a language points to some sort of progress).

This week we went to a museum of contemporary Chinese writers and the topic is to write a brief explanation of one of these authors. Unfortunately, the museum was pretty unhelpful in providing anything but the most basic of information (they did have lots of desks and lamps). I decided to write about 秋瑾，the feminist revolutionary, because she can be considered an author although she is better known for her political activities. Since I didn’t learn anything about her from the museum, I did a slow Google search (wikipedia was blocked through and through) and eventually found a book which did a nice little analysis on her writing.

What was disappointing was that after reading for five minutes I knew there was no way I could possibly do秋瑾 justice in any sense of the word given the great complexity and depth of her life. This is something which has lately fallen latent, the phenomenon of wanting to say so much more than your language level will allow. I am comfortable enough to argue in simplistic terms about political issues and topics which interest me, and my language skills have not presented a very obvious barrier lately. Until I read this well written excerpt by Lingzhen Wang in English and realized that I could not capture the eloquence and lilt with which this author described Qiu Jin’s life and writing.