Do You Measure Up?

I wish I had more time for blogging; every week Asia Weekly has at least four or five stories that I'd like to quote from. This is one of those stories.

The search is on for ideal females to present medals at the Olympics, says the South China Morning Post. Citing a Xinmin Evening News story that offered a "glimpse of what the government defines as the ideal beauty," it reported on criteria used by judges combing through Shanghai's top universities to fill the 40 slots reserved for local beauties. Presenters must be between 18 and 24 and meet 15 body-type requirements, including:

"The whole body should not be clumsy, too fat or slender, unbalanced or an abnormal shape."

"The distance from the forehead to the base of the nose, from base to tip of the nose, and from tip of the nose to chin should be equal."

"The length of the eyes should be three-tenths the length of the face."

Shoulders must be "full and even . . . not drooping or shrugging."

"Soft and smooth" thighs, with "slightly protruding calves."

While I've read articles about people trying to "quantitize" beauty before, the fact that the Chinese are using such a system strikes me as being rather Asian. When companies may literally have thousands of qualified candidates for a job, Asian companies often use unusual criteria to weed out some of the competition. Height requirements are a very commonly used criteria whereby short people (occasionally men, but more often than not women) are excluded from a job, even though height may have no role in the person's ability to do that job. I've read several stories about women, desperate for jobs, who have gone through painful bone-lengthening surgeries in China that sometimes create unintended deformities. This type of surgery is, under normal circumstances, perfectly acceptable, being used primarily for people who have one leg longer than the other - an aunt of mine could have benefited from such a surgery had she been younger when the surgery was first developed. However, it's sometimes done here in Asia as an elective surgery on people who normally have no need for such a surgery.

Likewise, it was quite common for Korean companies, when I lived there, to discriminate against potential employees on the basis of their English skills. Once again, more often than not, there was frequently no need to use this criteria because the company didn't necessarily need anyone to communicate in English on the job; however, to whittle down the number of acceptable resumes, young Koreans often had to score above a certain number on one of several standardized tests (which most of my students took once every month, even before knowing how they had done on previous months' tests).

So I'm not surprised that the judges would use so many requirements to select forty women for a two-week job at the Olympics. I wouldn't be surprised, either, if several thousand women tried out for the forty slots. Perhaps for the 2012 London Olympics, some enterprising TV producer will create a reality-TV show, perhaps along the lines of "American Idol," where the London presenters will be chosen publicly.

Kyle Rothstein and the Benefits of Fluency in a Second Language

For several years, I've been promoting the need for foreign language education in the United States, not just for children to learn a second language haphazardly and in their teenage years as the American educational system often does, but for kids to become fluent in another language, preferably an Asian language like Chinese, as the heart of the world's economy shifts more and more to the Far East. I first read about Kyle Rothstein in the Hong Kong-based periodical, Asia Weekly, which has a brief excerpt from a Los Angeles Times article. Rothstein, an American teenager, has greatly benefited from having learned Mandarin, beginning at the age of five, despite growing up in a monolingual household (as most of us Americans do). He is now appearing in his second movie, Milk and Fashion; his first movie, The White Countess, features Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, and Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave. The following are excerpts from the L.A. Times article:

Kyle Rothstein stands out in a sea of Chinese faces not because he is an American teenager with curly red hair and clear blue eyes, but because he speaks Chinese. Fluent Chinese.

The visual and verbal double take is the handiwork of his father, Jay Rothstein, a prescient American businessman who put Kyle in a bilingual English-Mandarin school in San Francisco when he was 5. The elder Rothstein had read that if you don't learn to speak a foreign language by that age, you never really get it.

"I knew it wasn't going to be easy," said Rothstein, who at the time was traveling to China on business several times a year. "There were times when he was crying every day, asking, 'I am not Chinese -- why do I have to learn Chinese?' "

But the benefits soon became obvious. By the time he was 12, Kyle had met two American presidents, hobnobbed with countless Chinese dignitaries and appeared on four Chinese TV shows. Now 17, Kyle is living in China's most cosmopolitan city, finishing school and starring in a soon-to-be-released feature film, "Milk and Fashion," about an American kid growing up in China. His father is the producer.

"I rebelled at first, but now I am grateful that my dad pushed me," Kyle, a reedy teenager with Shirley Temple locks and a relatively reserved temperament more befitting an honor student than a budding actor, said as he sat in the cafeteria of his Shanghai high school. "Everything about me has changed because of the Chinese language. It's opened up so many doors that other people don't have."

...

"I wanted to give him a good life, to do distinguished things," said Rothstein, who gained custody of his son after he and his wife divorced when Kyle was 6; she visits about twice a year. "Now college admissions officers are interested in him and saying, 'He has such an exotic resume -- we want him.' They want international kids. It's a global world."

More Americans than ever are waking up to the possibility that Chinese is the language of the future. With China's fast rise as an economic powerhouse, the language, once considered obscure and difficult to learn, is being embraced by parents looking to give their children a leg up in the global economy.

In 2000, about 5,000 American elementary and secondary schoolchildren studied Chinese. Today, the number is as much as 10 times that, according to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. The College Board offered Advanced Placement exams in Mandarin Chinese for the first time last year, and more than 3,000 high school students took the test.

When Kyle enrolled in San Francisco's Chinese American International School, the oldest Chinese bilingual elementary school in the country, there were few others like him.

Rothstein, not a Chinese speaker himself, was unable to offer many after-school opportunities for his son to practice his conversation skills, so he found a way to turn strangers into teachers.

"We would go to tourist sites like Fisherman's Wharf or Golden Gate Bridge and have a race to look for visiting Chinese delegations," Rothstein said, referring to group tours from China. "When we found them, I would walk up to them and say, 'Hey, I found this kid on the street. He only speaks Chinese. Can you talk to him? Find out what he likes to eat? Can you take him back to China?' "

The reaction was usually the same: "What? How? Wow!" Then everybody would have a good laugh as the visitors marveled at the little redheaded American boy speaking their mother tongue.

Word spread, and soon Kyle became a kind of unofficial cultural ambassador and a must-see personality.

When the first President Bush visited San Francisco's Chinatown, organizers made sure he met Kyle. " 'So this is the kid everybody's talking about,' " Rothstein recalled the elder Bush saying. In 1998, the Rothsteins joined the delegation accompanying President Clinton on his trip to China.

Kyle and his father, a consultant who helped U.S. businesses set up shop in China and then switched mostly to the movie business, moved to Shanghai in 2003.

...

To his teachers in China, Kyle is not only an anomaly but also a role model, and not just for foreigners.

"He's the first typical American high school student we put into the normal Chinese class," said Sally Zhang, the vice principal of Jin Cai High School. "The Chinese students feel amazed. Most Chinese parents think learning English is very important. Now they see even foreign students can speak such good Chinese. So they know we should pay more attention to the Chinese language."

Although the popularity of Chinese is growing among nonnative speakers, the number learning it pales in comparison with the number studying English, now being learned by an estimated 200 million Chinese. To these Chinese, English is a tougher nut to crack. That's why they appreciate making friends with foreigners such as Kyle and hope there will be more of them in the future.

"We tried to speak English to him, but our English is so bad," said Shi Jun, 17, one of Kyle's pals. "Then we realized his Chinese was so good. We could communicate so much better."

For another article on Kyle, published in 2002 when Kyle was 11-years-old, see: Little American Emperor (Shanghai Star)

For articles on Jay and Kyle Rothstein with regard to the movie Milk and Fashion, see:
Q&A With 'Milk and Fashion' Movie Producer Jay Rothstein (Emerging China)
Caucasians Speak Fluent Mandarin in Chinese Film (Shanghai Daily)

Odd Stories from Asia

I picked up a copy of Asia Weekly yesterday; this is a small magazine published in Hong Kong, made up primarily of news stories about Asia from newspapers and magazines worldwide. In a recent issue (#40; December 10th-16th), there were a number of short but very odd stories that are worth sharing.

First, in the "Would You Believe It?" section, a couple of stories from China:

Health requirements are so strict for women hoping to enter the People's Liberation Army that some recruits try to make up for deficient oral health by replacing their rotten gnashers with dog teeth, reports China's Shenyang Evening News. According to an "unnamed military expert," one recruit from a recent class of 268 young women in Shenyang "failed her physical check last week because she had canine [dog's] teeth."

Doctors in China admit they are baffled after a man began to perspire green sweat. Cheng Shunguo, 52, of Wuhan, says his sweat turned green in the middle of November. "I noticed that my underwear and bed sheets were all green," he said, reports Ananova. Doctors carried out blood tests on Cheng, but found everything to be normal. "We cannot find the cause," admitted a spokesman for the hospital, which reported the case to media in the hope of finding a solution. In 2004, a similar case was reported in China's Guangdong province.

A migrant worker from Chengdu has suffered from a "strange affliction" since 1996, reports China Daily. When suddenly gripped by bouts of the unknown illness, the middle-aged woman is only able to walk backwards. Doctors have been unable to find the cause.

The next story comes from a two-page feature, "My Own Private Korea," which is a selection of excerpts from the writings of George Clayton Foulk, an American naval officer who was an intelligence officer attached to the US Embassy in Korea in the early 1880s (and who was fluent in Korean). The following excerpt comes from the forthcoming book, Inside the Hermit Kingdom: The 1884 Korea Travel Diary of George Clayton Foulk (which sounds fascinating):

A private encounter with two female entertainers:
At one place, two rather pretty girls came in. As usual at first, they were scared out of their wits at the sight of a man with short hair, and "red" (brown) at that. But after I had showed them a mirror, some photographs, &c., and had talked a while, they became quite at home. They sang for me, and told me stories. Suddenly one of them, the prettiest too, reached behind her and brought out a brass bowl, the Korean chamber pot, which girls of caste and officers always carry with them (by a servant) when they go away from home. Without moving an inch from her position, three feet from me, she put this under her clothes, and while she made the pot ring, went on with her conversation as if nothing at all unusual was going on! Great Caesar! I have been to strange lands, but I never experienced anything like this!

Finally, an obituary for a Malaysian policeman who had plenty of chances to die while on duty but finally passed away at home:

To most of his colleagues, as well as the criminals he was chasing, Kulasingam Sabaratnam, or "Kula," might have well been the toughest person they knew on the Royal Malaysian Police Force, says The New Straits Times. He was known for taking risks and surviving them. "Since you all have wives and families, let me go first," he usually told his officers before an action. "I'm not married." Kulasingam's fierce dedication to his work helped to bring about the demise of 25 secret societies and several of the most notorious criminals active in Malaysia during the 1970s, such as the "infamous" robber Botak Chin. In his 35 years on the fource, Kula was spashed with acid, shot, attacked by an axe-wielding psychopath and nearly crushed by a falling tree. In the end, he died after slipping in his bathroom and fracturing a hip. He was bedridden after hip-replacement surgery and died November 29 at the age of 77 after contracting pneumonia. Over 200 people paid their last respects to the former Johor Criminal Investigation Department chief at his funeral.

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raje'un.