One more time… One more time… One more time… One more t…

I’m currently in Thailand but way behind on my posting, so I’m still talking about China. Not to worry, I will definitely tell you all about Thailand, but probably not until I make it back to America and have a chance to upload my photos (seriously, Thailand without photos? That just wouldn’t be any fun at all). One of the things that I find very interesting about Chinese culture is how deeply engrained the concept of repetition is. Everything is repetition. Any kind of physical or mental exercise is centered around repetition. For example, there was a little park by my apartment complex and every morning when I woke up, I could hear the Chinese version of “Livin’ la Vida Loca.” And I do mean every morning; not a day went by without being graced by a Chinese Ricky Martin. The same people were doing the same dance to the same song every single morning. At the gym I went to, there existed a similar phenomenon. For all the exercise classes, they listened to the same music and repeated the same moves over and over again. I remember this one particular hip-hop routine – I think the instructor even wore the same silly clothes to all of the classes (you know, red warm-up suit, some bling hanging around his neck, one pant leg rolled up, baseball cap worn at a 45-degree angle; all this and he was still a terrible choreographer). In any case, they would play the same song over and over and over again and do the same dance. If the class was lucky, some moves might be added on to the routine they had already learned. It was interesting, though – they never would work on specific parts of the routine. It was just the whole thing, again and again. Another example is how all my Chinese classes have been structured. Class can be a bit boring because of the mind-numbing amount of repetition. We read the vocabulary out loud, twice for each vocab word; we read the whole dialogue out loud two times; we do similar exercises for every chapter; we write out each new character at least five times so we memorize it. The focus is on reading and writing. Oral speaking tends to be kept to a minimum (which has always bothered me). Every once in a while we’ll go around the room and come up with examples using some particular grammatical structure. Mostly, though, we focus on what is on the page in front of us – which requires no independent thought at all. It gets you thinking. First of all, if those dance classes were happening in America – well, they just wouldn’t. All of the dancers would be bored out of their minds. Dance is by nature a creative process and so each week you listen to different music and do different exercises than you did the week before. But then education in America is largely about learning how to be creative and thinking for yourself, whereas in China I feel like you’re learning to be just like everyone else. It seems to me that the Chinese educational system does not encourage creativity. I suppose with such heavy governmental censoring, that’s a necessary by-product. It’s hard to feel free to think for yourself if you’re constantly afraid the government is going to exile you for it. So anyway, my theory is that the reason there’s so much repetition in everything people do in China is that that’s the way the educational system is structured. In a sense it has to be; the writing system is so complicated that if you don’t practice the characters over and over again until you want to lose your mind, you won’t be literate. So repetition is the heart and soul of everything. I have heard previously that all of the well-known Chinese-speaking pop stars are Taiwanese – from what I’ve seen of China, I believe it.