A Brand New Year, a Brand New Start.
As I mentioned in the last post, we’ve recently moved home. Having spent a number of years living in Fuzhou, me and my wife both more or less burnt out on the city, not to mention the company we worked for (boy is there a lot that could be said about that place). The final straw for us was discovering that the manager of our department had been making up lies and spreading rumours about our futures with the company to our colleagues. We concluded that our days there were clearly numbered, and so we decided to take a look around and see what other opportunities were available.
It turned out there were quite a few. However, that’s not what I want to talk about right now; the point is we took stock of our options and settled on moving to Shanghai, the largest city in China and a major international metropolis with a large, diverse foreign population and all the cultural accoutrements that come along with that (such as more than one restaurant selling phở in the entire city). As such, we find ourselves in a new year, the first of a new decade, in a new city, with new jobs, and, well, a much smaller, much older apartment, but one with a lot of character that I honestly think we’ll come to love with time.
For a long time, I’d felt like our lives in Fuzhou had begun to stagnate, a situation that has far more to do with our own attitudes than the city we were living in. Nevertheless, I still see this move as a chance to really knuckle down and get ourselves back on track in a new environment, one that lacks the routines of passive living that we’d previously built up.
With that, my unwieldy, long, rambling segue is over and we’ve finally homed in on today's topic. As part of picking ourselves up out of our comfy little rut and renewing the forward progress of learning and improving ourselves that’s so important for lasting human happiness, we decided to write out our goals for the coming year clearly, so that we can remind, encourage, and even badger each other to stick to them. Yup, that’s all this is, a post on New Year’s Resolutions.
So, after I pop out for a quick bowl of breakfast wontons, I’ll start with the staple of all my previous resolutions (until I stopped making them a few years ago): Chinese.
From my very first resolution since arriving in China (I wasn’t actually in China at the time, instead I was standing on a tiny island in Ha Long Bay watching the waves roll up the moonlit beach), that I would end the year able to get the gist of at least some newspaper articles, if not understand all the fiddly details, I have consistently made, and kept, annual New Year’s Resolutions to improve my Chinese level.
The last couple of years I seem to have plateaued somewhat, having failed to find any new targets to work towards and maybe even becoming a bit complacent in my own abilities. As a result, it’s important to me that I get back on the wagon and start making progress once more.
Ultimately, I’ve settled on four goals for the year:
1. Learn to read traditional Chinese:
This one shouldn’t actually be all that difficult as it's not all the characters that differ and many of their components are consistently present across both forms. So when I say learn here, I really think it will be more a case of acclimatising myself to traditional characters through regular reading than actively memorising all the characters that are different.
2. Learn to read classical Chinese:
This one should be much harder, but, in light of that fact I’m only setting myself the goal of working through the two classical Chinese textbooks I was first introduced to while studying at Sichuan University. I finished the first one a few years ago but need to go through it again to refresh my memory and then keep going without pause into the second book. This should set me up nicely for more ambitious targets next year.
3. Resume the regular writing of articles/essays/short stories etc. in Chinese:
For most of my second year in Fuzhou (back when I was still teaching ESL) I would regularly sit down in my spare time and write in Chinese. Sometimes I’d write brief travelogues, occasionally I’d write about Western festivals, and a few times I even wrote extremely short stories. Every week or so I’d publish these on a Jianshu blog I kept (a Chinese blogging platform I found to be really quite good). I think I ended up publishing about 80,000 characters of material on there in the space of a year, with the vast majority of that coming in the first six months alone.
In fact, I probably wrote too much, because I ended up burning out before too long. Another reason for the death of that blog was that I started working as a translator towards the end of that year and could no longer enjoy the abundance of free time that being a foreign English teacher in China bestows.
Anyway, I want to get back to writing in Chinese, albeit in significantly smaller volume. One post of around 2,000 characters per month should be sufficient while also remaining enough of a challenge to push me forward. Each month I’ll endeavour to post what I have on here, because, well, it’s my blog, and I’ll post in whatever language I like.
4. Read more non-fiction in Chinese:
Starting in Guilin (or possibly just before), for three years running I set myself the goal of reading at least one Chinese novel (or in a couple of cases memoirs) every month. And for three years running I achieved that goal. Then, again, I switched from teaching to a regular nine to six office job and although I didn't stop reading completely, I simply didn’t have the time or energy to read at the rate I had before (I’m not a fast reader by any standard you care to use).
Reading has proven to be of massive help to my Chinese level over the years and is certainly part of the reason I managed to write so much (see above), but I feel like novels alone are no longer leading to noticeable improvements, and so I need to start seeking out more difficult, perhaps more specialised, material.
I want to read more history books, or textbooks on specific topics, such as philosophy, literature, and education. More than that I think reading a few scholarly articles might be a manageable and fruitful pursuit. Anyway, you get the gist.
In terms of specific texts for this one I only really have three: Qian Gang’s book on the Great Tangshan earthquake, Mao Zedong’s Yan’an Talks (although I might try to tackle Liu Shaoqi's How to be a Good Communist if I have the time), and a book on modern Chinese literature by David Der-wei Wang, of which I only plan to read the chapter on Shen Congwen this year and possibly one or two more depending on how difficult I find it (I had a look and I'm expecting quite a slog).
My other key language-based goal for this year is to improve my Vietnamese (the wontons were delicious by the way). I want to at least reach a level whereby when we go home for the Lunar New Year in early 2021 I can talk to my in-laws about everyday things without having to resort to English or Chinese and have people translate for me. I don’t expect to do this without a lot of help and patience on their part, but I would like to be able to communicate, however clumsily, anything that I might need to be able to on a brief stay over the festive season.
I have a textbook series already for which I finished the first book in December and have set myself the target of finishing the second, comprising 15 brief lessons, by the end of May (although I’ll still consider it a success if it takes me till the end of June).
I’ll also be trying to write short passages in Vietnamese on a regular basis as a way to put what I’m learning into practice and as a means of expanding my vocabulary, so expect to see an abundance of diacritics and triphthongs turning up on here occasionally too.
Moving away from the subject of language learning there are a few other changes I want to make to my reading habits this year. Chiefly among these is selecting reading material to expand my knowledge of China, the greater East Asian region, and the world as a whole. Despite many years living here and a decent language level, my understanding of Chinese history, culture, and linguistics remains far shallower than I'd like.
From older Chinese classics to works on modern history, there are a number of books I want to finish this year, including:
Frank Dikötter’s People’s Trilogy (I’m a quarter of the way through book three already);
Ben Kiernan’s The Pol Pot Regime (I book I’ve had sitting on my shelf for about 8 years now without having read more than a few pages);
Kid’s versions of the Four Classics (reading the full-length originals would be asking a bit much of myself this year) as well as a few more stories from Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio (the vernacular Chinese version);
At least one decent overview of modern Vietnamese history.
I also have a couple of books on Chinese pedagogy that I’d like to get through (except for the four classics I'll be reading the rest in English).
Other than the specific goals listed above, the rest is mostly trying to be a better version of myself: improving my temper, living more healthily, and doing well at work, as well as supporting my wife, helping her study English, and encouraging her to achieve her own goals as best she can.
I imagine I’ll be writing about these goals in more detail in the months to come, as I either succeed or fail in completing them. For now I think I’ve managed to find a good balance between setting goals that are manageable, while also asking enough of myself that I can feel happy with my own progress should I get to next January having achieved them all.
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