Fathers and children

This month, Renlai/eRenlai focuses on family, education and more precisely, on fatherhood.

Here is a special thanks to two English teachers in Taipei: Natalia and Darren. The first helped me to record some of the kids she's teaching, the second kindly answered my questions... Listen to children words about their daddy and discover how Darren educates children with martial arts...

Or read my own reflection about fatherhood:

Fathers, where are you?

With the multiplication of single-parent families, it is more and more common to see children being raised by their mother. In fact, after a divorce or a separation, children are most of the time left to their mother’s care. Among my friends, I know only one who lived with her father instead of her mother after they got divorced. I was myself raised by my mother, only seeing my father from time to time. I think I got used to living with an absent father as well as most of my friends. That didn’t mean that they were not seeing their fathers or didn’t have a good relationship with them, it is just that the father could be less present without maybe disrupting drastically the run of events… It seems like the absence or the disinvolvement of fathers is a common representation of fatherhood.

Do fathers have a different linkage to their offspring than mothers? It is true that for biological evidences, the mother is more able to develop an intuitive relationship to her child. But for the father? As the father is first deprived from the feeling of osmosis felt by some women, how can he become “aware” of his fatherhood? How does the feeling of being a father grow and be nurtured inside him?

The mysterious link of fatherhood, and sometimes motherhood, is less obvious than what it would seem. In 2005, Belgian directors the Dardennes brothers, shot a movie entitled The Child where they try to capture this link, especially the one of fatherhood. Sonia and Bruno are twenty and they just come to have a child. They have no money, Bruno makes a living from small thieving and swindling. The beginning of the movie is already emblematical of the father’s absence: Sonia goes out of the maternity hospital holding her baby in her arms but Bruno is not there and she starts to look after him. Finally, when they meet, Jimmy, the baby, is a “strange thing” to Bruno who doesn’t show any special care or concern. At this stage of the movie, the main question that the directors also asked themselves was: would Sonia’s great love and affection be enough to make Bruno be aware of his son’s existence? And the answer was “no”. The movie reaches its acme when Bruno tells Sonia he has sold their 9 days-old child. Bruno then justifies himself by saying “We’ll make another one”, relegating his gesture to the most ordinary ones. To Bruno indeed, it doesn’t mean anything to have sold his own child as, to him, having a child didn’t mean anything more than having a baby carriage… The second part of the movie is dedicated to the redemption of Bruno to whom the buying back of the child is just the first step. And he actually has to save another boy in order to also achieve his own redemption.

Enter the focus to read other testimonies

Migrant workers in China

Their current number is estimated at 150 million, or 11.5 per cent of the population, nearly double that of 10 years ago. Many of them come from ethnic minorities areas.

In October, eRenlai magazine featured a special Focus about the life of Yi migrants in China's big cities: voice records, interviews and photo reportages compose the precious testimonies of this neglected population.

Here is a bouquet of articles, flash animations and voices records to know more and understand better this phenomenon in China:

Yi Migrant Workers in Chengdu by Liang Zhun

"The Yi workers range in age from 20 to 40 years old, so they are carrying the twin burdens of supporting their elders and caring for their children, who sometimes number three or four.They still have to send money back home (around 500 Yuan per month) in order to satisfy the demanding expectations and wishes of their families in their hometowns. To save money, several workers rent a single room together so each one only pays 50 to 60 Yuan per month. The living conditions are barely adequate and the hygiene extremely poor..."

read more

Migrant Workers and Local Development by Bertrand Cristau

"The migration of young people from the Chinese countryside to cities raises a number of questions about the future of rural and mountainous areas. Will this exodus create deserted areas, without working force and creativity, or will these youth come back to transform and energize their place of origins?"

read more

From Liangshan to Shenzhen by Hua Li (voice in Chinese)

"I am just back from Shenzhen where I worked for three months in a plant doing cell phones, assembling parts. My formation lasted for 3 or 4 days, and afterwards I worked. The salary was 1,000 RMB, but once all the fees were deducted we were earning 700 RMB a month. We were 23 to leave together. The others still work in this factory. I came back because I heard about this opportunity in Shanghai.In this factory, after one year you can sign a contract. Before that, you are just a temporary worker.I’d like to study a technique, a trade, whatever which. I’d like to help the poorer people around here. I think we should plant more vegetables. I am interested in the greenhouse project."

Ethnic migrant workers in China today by B. Vermander
"The needs and difficulties faced by ethnic minority migrant workers are multi faceted: they comprise (a) the lack or the very poor quality of the formal education received before they have left; (b) the general problems met by migrant workers all over China (housing, working conditions, lack of work contracts, healthcare…); (c) additional difficulties linked to their cultural and linguistic estrangement; (d) lack of sustainable community projects at home, which also means (e) lack of long-term perspectives and subsequent difficulty in formulating a personal project.. ."
read more

And plenty other testimonies, studies and articles on eRenlai.com

Free Hug

This is a picture taken during the annual gaypride of Taipei... I wonder if sometimes we do not exagerate the power of words (most of all of written words - cf. Do not let your t-shirt do the talking for you). I could observe that during 20 minutes the poor boy didn't get the chance to give even one free hug...

By the way, "Free Hugs" is also the name of a cafe located in the "Wall", a famous concert place in Taipei. I recommend both of them of course...

THE WALL-
ADDRESS B1F., No.200, Sec. 4, Roosevelt Rd., Wenshan District, Taipei City 116,Taiwan
地址 台北市文山區羅斯福路四段200號B1
http://www.the-wall.com.tw/

My Teacher the Ostrich

My present teacher of Chinese is a fine woman, she’s smiling all the time and she likes to go off track during the class. But there is still something that annoys me with her… I have already mentioned the “tofu generation” phenomenon in one of my previous posts, that is to say the fact that Taiwanese youngsters don’t feel any concern about politics, neither about the environment they’re living in, and are mostly obsessed with a successful career which would give them an enviable position in the society and the salary that goes with it.

One of my previous teachers of Chinese once told me that foreign students were more active, more independent than Taiwanese students who encounter big problems of adaptation when they enter the university. I think this time of adaptation is normal and most of my friends studying at the university seem perfectly happy and autonomous, as a majority of them live away from their family. In fact when I attended some second year classes as an auditor, what struck me more was the way students are taught. It was a class of social work in Taida (the National Taiwan University) and the teacher seemed to me incredibly motherly for a college teacher: she would first ask the students if they had read the papers (I don’t remember any of my teachers asking me that, they would just assume I had read it and if not… too bad for me!), if it was not too hard, if they were tired… I may be wrong but it appears to me that her teaching method was leaning towards treating the students like children. My experience in Taida was not that bad and, in fact, it can be quite nice to have a professor who does not simply enter the classroom to give her speech and then leave but encourages interaction with the students. But the other side of the coin is that sometimes it can be really boring and annoying, most of all when you wonder if the teacher is not thinking you're an idiot!

Like I said before, my actual teacher of Chinese likes to digress, her favorite subjects being her son when he was 4 years old – he is now 20 – and food or physiognomy. She believes for example that when your index is longer than your ring-finger, then you have an artistic nature, that if you have a mono-eyebrow, then you might be an obtuse person. When my classmate said these are superstitions, my teacher just very firmly replied that these come from a precise observation of nature and people… For having already heard these sayings I just accept them as part of the local folklore but it worsened when she started explaining us once that there are four seasons of three months each because the Earth is tilted etc… It is interesting indeed… for an 8 year old kid!
Well, as we seemed to have definitively put aside the short story of Bai Xian-yong that we were reading, we started talking about the situation of Tibet which lead us to Taiwan . As our teacher just remained silent all the time, we asked her about her opinion which was: “you know, it is so complicated that we’d better leave it to future generations.” No comment.

Once, my teacher described herself as being an ostrich for joking: a door had just violently slammed in the hallway and her first reflex had been hiding her face in her hands. My teacher is also extremely conservative: she only eats Chinese food, and thinks that taking a shower in the morning after waking up can endanger one’s life. In a time when Taiwan is promoting its cultural diversity, I’d rather ride a tiger than an ostrich…

"Tofu generation"?

Not long ago, I ran into a friend of mine, an English teacher in Taipei with whom I studied Chinese at The Language Center of the NTU. We did the usual greetings and I asked him about his job, how he was doing. His comments about the kids he’s teaching startled me:

I still don’t know if I should laugh or cry. He told me that what he deplores most is that the kids he’s teaching look like “tofu”! That is to say, not energetic, very passive. According to him, the main cause is probably the lack of sport and most of all the lack of motivation. Even if his remark is excessive, I agree with him, on a certain point.

The Taiwanese kids I know are very nice kids but excessively shy and don’t seem to have any demonstrative interest to things around. It is the same for some youngsters of my age: when I arrived in Taipei, I would often offer my cousin to go out, visit museums, go for a walk (maybe not the best idea on a hot day of August) or just go to a bar to have a drink with friends. She would always politely refuse, saying that she was not interested. Even going to a bar seemed to her very boring! And no speaking of political issues either. My cousin just showed disinterest in anything not closely or directed related to her such as her work or our family. I believe she’s not representative of all Taiwanese youth but she’s also one of many Taiwanese youth. On the other hand, there is the merging of a “We” generation, expression invented by Newsweek last year to describe a part of Asian youth getting involved in public actions, NPOs, etc. Even if that “We” generation tendency seems only a little twitching, there are already real demonstrations of its rise, among Chinese students also!

Today’s favourites

Internet and Asia’s “We” generation by Li-chun Lee (June), editor.
Asian Children are bored… by Kailing Wang, editor.
Encounter at Shanghai International University by Benoit Vermander, chief editor.