Category Archives: education

by | 9 November 2008 · 11:25 am

Gandhi: Too Saintly for the Good of Others?

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 40-41:

Few political figures have been so widely misunderstood as Gandhi, in his own time or today. He emerged at a time when monarchies were falling and communism loomed; he was contemporary with Lenin. To many listeners, aware of the march of events in Russia, Gandhi’s speech sounded like a rallying cry to Indian socialism, with its talk of the casting off of jewels and the power of the workers. This was, indeed, the reason that young radicals like Jawahar [Nehru] were so attracted to him. But a closer examination of Gandhi’s words reveals something different, and much more profoundly religious. He had confronted the moral behavior of society, not its structure. Gandhi called for the princes to stop wearing their finery and instead “hold it in trust” for their subjects. This is not the same thing at all as telling the masses to rise up and seize it. Gandhi was not challenging the princes’ right to hold wealth, nor even their right to reign. He was asking for a change of heart.

Gandhi’s condemnation of princely luxury was part of a much broader preoccupation with returning India to what he supposed had been a prehistoric “golden age” of godliness, simplicity and humility. He had begun to reject Western ideals of progress and technology, and insisted that India’s future lay in a return to simple village life, not industrialization. As a symbol of this, he adopted hand-spinning on a wooden wheel and used only khadi—hand-spun—textiles. He developed a distaste for the synthesized drugs and surgery which he associated with Western medicine, describing them as “black magic.” Doctors, he believed, “violate our religious instinct” by prioritizing the body over the mind and curing diseases that people had deserved by their conduct. Lawyers, meanwhile, had propped up British rule by espousing British law and were like “leeches” on the people, their profession “just as degrading as prostitution.”

This position had fueled continual conflict in his own family life. Unsurprisingly, he was far from supportive of his sons’ ambitions to pursue careers in medicine or law. “I know too that you have sometimes felt that your education was being neglected,” Mohandas wrote to his third son, Manilal. But, he contended, “education does not mean a knowledge of letters but it means character building. It means a knowledge of duty.” His eldest son, Harilal, fared worse. After Mohandas denied him a legal scholarship to London, he ran away from home, married a woman without his father’s consent, was disinherited and ended up unemployed, destitute and bitter. When Manilal tried to lend Harilal money, Mohandas was so furious that he banished Manilal from his presence for a year. Manilal ended up homeless, sleeping on a beach.

It is not easy being a saint, and it is perhaps even less so to live with one. “All of us brothers have been treated as a ringmaster would treat his trained animals,” Harilal wrote to his father in the course of a twelve-page letter deploring Mohandas’s treatment of his wife and sons. And yet, to a wider audience beyond his immediate family, Gandhi’s charisma, determination and fearlessness were inspiring.

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by | 31 October 2008 · 5:37 pm

Japanese Temple Moves to South Carolina

Thursday’s International Herald Tribune has a story about a Japanese temple that migrated from Nagoya to South Carolina.

The former Buddhist temple sits opposite a waterfall on the campus of Furman University, with vistas of the Blue Ridge Mountains when the trees are bare….

Believed to be the only temple moved from Japan to the U.S., the so-called Place of Peace was shipped in 2,400 pieces and reassembled by 13 specialized temple artisans from Japan.

After three years of fundraising and 2 1/2 months of construction, the building is serving as a classroom and a centerpiece of an Asian studies program that graduated 60 students last spring — three times the number it did five years ago.

Shaner’s ties to a Japanese family that moved to Greenville in the 1960s helped bring the temple to campus. TNS Mills, which stood for Tsuzuki New Spinning, supplied spools of thread to the textile mills that were the heart of Greenville’s economy. Sister and brother Yuri and Seiji Tsuzuki — chairman of what is now Wellstone Mills — grew up in Greenville, but the family maintained its home in Japan.

The temple was built on Tsuzuki land in Nagoya in 1984 as the family’s private worship place.

When they sold to developers, the siblings in November 2004 proposed a way to save the temple from destruction: Offer it to Furman. The family has a long-standing friendship with Shaner, a world-renowned aikido instructor and sensei, or teacher, to Yuri and Seiji Tsuzuki’s mother, Chigusa, who died in 1995.

But the school had to move quickly. The temple had to be off the family’s property by January 2005.

“The reason why this is so rare, had this temple ever served a lay community and had an assigned priest, then you would never, ever, ever move it from Japan,” Shaner said. “It would be like bad karma.”

The temple was disassembled and shipped overseas in four 40-foot containers, with each piece labeled and its beams secured by wood braces to prevent warping. It sat in the Tsuzukis’ storage in Gaffney, South Carolina, as the school raised $400,0000 for the temple’s reconstruction and maintenance.

I would bet that a good bit of that money was raised from people who had already been donating to support Southern Baptist missionaries in Japan. This is a nice turnabout. A Japanese temple overlooking the Blue Ridge certainly appeals to me.

via Japundit

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by | 24 October 2008 · 6:08 pm

India’s Diverse Diasporas

From India: The Rise of an Asian Giant, by Dietmar Rothermund (Yale U. Press, 2008), pp. 233-235:

The cultivation of sugar-cane in colonies such as Mauritius and the Natal province of South Africa, in Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam in the Caribbean and Fiji in the Pacific Ocean created settlements of Indian labourers as many stayed on as free labourers after their contracts had expired. In some of these places the Indians emerged as the majority of the population, but with few exceptions they did not rise above the position of labourers. Therefore the diaspora in the ex-sugar colonies is not much of an economic asset to India. Mauritius is an exception to this rule. It has shown encouraging signs of economic growth and its Indian majority dominates the politics of the island but has maintained equitable relations with the other ethnic groups. Mauritius has become a major offshore banking centre for investors who channel their investments in India through the island. This has led to the strange phenomenon whereby tiny Mauritius ranks high among the nations investing in India. Being well aware of the benefits of good relations with Mauritius, India is even prepared to protect the maritime economic zone of the island with the help of its navy….

The era of decolonization did not provide much scope for re-migration from the diaspora to India. Nor did the erstwhile colonial powers invite people of Indian origin to settle in their home countries. There were only two striking exceptions to this rule. The Netherlands became the target of a mass exodus of Indians from Surinam after that colony gained independence in 1975. This was due to the fact that the Dutch had granted citizenship to the people of Surinam and since the Indians did not get along with the Afro-American majority, they left for the Netherlands before their right of citizenship could be revoked. A similar exodus of Indians from Uganda to Great Britain had taken place after Idi Amin had established his tyrannical rule in 1971. The Indians of Uganda were not the offspring of indentured servants but had followed the Uganda railroad. The workers who built that railroad had also come from India, but almost all of them had returned to their homes in the Punjab. The subsequent immigrants from India were for the most part literate Gujaratis who manned the administrative posts of the railway or set up shops in the hinterland which had been opened up by the railway. When these people were persecuted by Idi Amin and shifted to Great Britain they did very well there as a result of their business acumen. This group of the Indian diaspora is of considerable importance for India. But, of course, the Indians who came from East Africa are only part of the Indian diaspora in Great Britain, which also consists of Indian professionals and businessmen who migrated from India to the ex-imperial country in search of greener pastures.

Another post-colonial migration which had some similarity to the export of Indian manpower in colonial times was the recruitment of Indian labour by the countries along the Persian Gulf when those countries earned millions of petro-dollars. This recruitment benefited all South Asian countries. Most of them sent unskilled labourers to the Gulf; India had the lion’s share of skilled administrative jobs. For quite some time the ample remittances of these skilled personnel filled the gap in India’s balance of payments which was usually affected by a negative balance of trade. When the first Gulf War of 1991 disrupted this profitable connection, India was hit very hard, the more so as the disaster was sudden and unexpected. When Indira Gandhi was asked in 1981 whether she could envision an Indian exodus from the Gulf similar to that from East Africa precipitated by Idi Amin, she jauntily replied: ‘The Arabs need US.’ Her successors also took this for granted and were rudely awakened by the Gulf War.

The Indian diaspora in the countries along the Persian Gulf was very different from that everywhere else. First of all it was of very recent origin. This diaspora had no second or third generation members born in the country of residence. Moreover, the Indians who came to the Gulf did not intend to settle there for any length of time. There were many educated people from Kerala among them who simply wanted to earn enough money to build a house back home. Busy construction work in the villages of Kerala provided striking evidence of this trend in the 1980s. Under such conditions there was hardly any incentive to establish Indian community centres in the Gulf countries. The Indian diaspora was not concentrated in anyone place and its members fluctuated. Nevertheless, this was the diaspora which was most important for India, due to the economic effect of its remittances. Other Indian diasporas would be less inclined to send money to India as they would rather invest it where they lived. The occasional support of poor relatives in India did not give rise to substantial remittances.

Today’s Wall Street Journal weighs in on one of the barriers to the expansion of India’s diaspora in the U.S., where “the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin which was founded in 1984 has 42,000 members” (Rothermund, p. 235):

The Chandrayaan-I blasted off about dawn from the Satish Dhawan Space Center. It is expected to reach lunar orbit by November 8. The probe, whose principal goal is to “conduct mineralogical and chemical mapping of the lunar service,” carries five scientific payloads from India and others from NASA and the European Space Agency. With this achievement, India joins the U.S., Japan, Europe, Russia and China in the lunar club.

India deserves congratulations for the Chandrayaan-I, which attests further to that nation’s remarkable strides as an economic and scientific power. That said, we cannot fail to draw attention to how this event bears on the continuing lunacy of Congress in limiting visa quotas for highly skilled immigrants.

American universities are filled with foreign students, not least from India, getting degrees in engineering and science. Many dearly wish to stay and work in the U.S. Instead, we basically kick them out after training them, owing to the Congressional limit of 65,000 H-1B visas, which are used up the day they are released in March.

Would calling this the “pre-emptive export of jobs overseas” make it any less attractive to economic protectionists?

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Filed under anglosphere, Caribbean, economics, education, Fiji, India, migration, South Africa, U.K., U.S., Uganda

by | 11 October 2008 · 10:18 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Susokman

From Village on the Edge: Changing Times in Papua New Guinea, by Michael French Smith (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. 164-165:

In the mid-1990s, Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington interviewed dozens of Wewak’s more affluent Papua New Guinean residents, including “lawyers, doctors, nurses, bankers, clergy, teachers, managers, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, army personnel [and] civil servants,” both male and female. They also mingled with them at Rotary Club events, the Yacht Club, and the Wewak Resort and Country Club where these business and professional people went to socialize and network….

[I]n order to take part in the life of the urban elite, Papua New Guineans generally have to weaken their ties to their village kin. In villagers’ eyes, attending the university, working for the government, or habitually wearing shoes and socks should not dissolve the bonds of kinship. But the wearers of shoes and socks (the susokman, as they are called in Tok Pisin) find that it is difficult to live up to village definitions of their kinship obligations and simultaneously provide for the basics of urban life—housing, food, business clothing—and take part in urban elite social life, including the professional networking that goes on in restaurants, in clubs, and on the golf course. Gewertz and Errington argue that villagers tend to define success as meeting a wide variety of kinship obligations; but for the urban elite, success means providing an affluent life for one’s immediate family, and that usually means putting strict limits on generosity to more distant kin.

Village kin may see this as lack of generosity, but they are judging by the moral ideals of village society. In terms of those ideals, material wealth is for creating and maintaining social bonds, and wealth gained at the expense of social ties is tainted. But what looks like antisocial greed to the village is necessity and prudence to the urban elite. If they fall on hard times because they have given unstintingly to their village kin, their urban peers will not praise their generosity; they will criticize their moral weakness. To join the elite, then, Papua New Guineans have had to work hard; but they have also needed good luck, and they have had to enter a different world of morality.

When I arrived in Papua New Guinea in 1976 to start linguistic fieldwork, the first thing I did was to throw away the worn-out tennis shoes I had traveled in. All during my student years in Hawai‘i during the 1970s, I rarely wore any footwear but Japanese zori (rubber slippers). When Hawai‘i Loa College required caps and gowns when I graduated in 1973, I went barefoot beneath my gown.

The second whimsical thing I did in PNG, on the taxi ride in from the airport to Port Moresby, was to stop by Koki Market to buy betel nut. (I got some for the taxi driver, too.) It was my first chance to use the Tok Pisin I had studied in grad school to prepare for fieldwork.

I arrived from Australia during Easter holidays and had trouble reaching my contact at UPNG, so I spent the first night at a downtown hotel, where I discovered that the dining room required shoes and socks. That was a new way to distinguish the elites from the hoi polloi in the newly independent nation, since discrimination on the basis of race was now prohibited. That evening I decided to order supper to my room.

Betel chewing was also prohibited inside the hotel, so before dinner I took the makings of several betel quids—areca nuts, betel pepper catkins, and slake-lime powder—outside onto the near-empty holiday streets. A young Papua New Guinea man soon came up to chat and I offered him a chew. It was my second chance to practice Tok Pisin in country, but it ended soon after I figured out what my new acquaintance meant when he asked me, “Masta, yu laik takim kok o nogat?” His native language must have been one in which [t] and [s] are allophones of a single phoneme, which sounds like [s] in front of /i/ (as in Kiribati) but sounds like [t] elsewhere. When I belatedly deciphered his accent and understood his intent, I laughed it off with “Ah, nogat ya!” and turned my unshod feet back toward the haven of the shod and socked.

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by | 7 October 2008 · 8:40 pm

Surprising Correlates of Birth Rates in South India

From India: The Rise of an Asian Giant, by Dietmar Rothermund (Yale U. Press, 2008), p. 181:

The National Population Policy for the year 2000 had once more set a target for the achievement of the replacement level of the Indian population. The replacement level is defined in terms of the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 2.1 births per woman in the course of her life and should be reached by 2010. Demographic projections would prefer to assume 2016 as a more realistic date. The average Indian TFR had come down from 6 in 1951 to 3 in 2001. To the great surprise of planners and demographers, several south Indian states have proved to be way ahead of the National Population Policy. Kerala registered a TFR of 1.71 in 2001, and Tamil Nadu was at almost the same level with 1.76, closely followed by Andhra Pradesh at 1.94. Karnataka was still above the replacement level, at 2.24; it was estimated that it would reach that level within a few years. Andhra Pradesh was the greatest surprise of them all: its TFR had dropped from 2.39 in 1997 to 1.94 in 2001. It has a high rate of female illiteracy and there has been no significant economic progress in this state. The major assumption of demographers that female education and economic progress would lead to a lower TFR was therefore contradicted by the experience of Andhra Pradesh. Moreover, the decline in the TFR usually takes time and does not happen in such a dramatic fashion as it did in Andhra Pradesh. Perhaps it was an awareness of future deprivation rather than of economic progress which prompted even illiterate women to resort to birth control. This goes against all normal demographic assumptions, but there was a striking parallel to this development in Andhra Pradesh in East Germany at the time of German reunification. The number of East German births dropped by 40 per cent at that time, which must have been due to apprehension of an uncertain future on the part of young East German women. This shows that perceptions of the future rather than long-term social and economic trends may influence the decisions of women. This is, of course, only one aspect of the rapid spread of birth control. Knowledge of the methods of contraception and the will to adopt them are also of great importance. Demographers who have studied the spread of adoption of contraceptives have noticed a snowball effect. After an initial phase when only a few women practise birth control, the demonstration effect catches on and others follow their example. In a strange reversal of the assumption that female education leads to birth control, it has been found that birth control may foster female education. Among illiterate women who adopted contraception there were many who would send their girls to school. The correlation seems to be significant, but of course it does not necessarily indicate a causal relation.

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by | 4 October 2008 · 12:25 pm

Affirmative Action Dilemmas in India

From India: The Rise of an Asian Giant, by Dietmar Rothermund (Yale U. Press, 2008), pp. 168-170:

Before [V. P.] Singh was toppled, his government had introduced the 27 per cent reservations for the backward castes in August 1990. The Congress government under Prime Minister Narasimha Rao had to live with this new rule and made no attempt to reverse it. It was soon faced with a landmark judgment of the Supreme Court in November 1992, which forced the government to establish a National Backward Classes Commission with quasi-judicial powers to determine the claims of castes for the recognition of their ‘backwardness’. The judgment of the Supreme Court was due to a lawsuit initiated by some members of backward castes. The judges feared that they would be inundated with such suits and realized that they had no criteria by which to determine such cases. Moreover, they felt that litigants who were not at all backward as far as their economic situation was concerned would nevertheless try to obtain the benefits of affirmative action. The judgment of 1992 therefore included an injunction which obliged the government to define the criteria by which the ‘creamy layer’ of the backward castes would be excluded from such benefits.

The debate concerning the ‘creamy layer’ highlighted the problem created by the synonymous use of the terms ‘caste’ and ‘class’. All official statements referred to ‘backward classes’ when they really meant backward castes, the term ‘caste’ being deliberately avoided as it referred to an undesirable aspect of Indian social life. However, caste and class are not at all identical. Many members of the high castes are poor labourers, whereas there are many rich people of low caste origin. Since speaking of a rich class among the members of the backward classes seemed to be incongruous, the term ‘creamy layer’ had to be used.

The National Backward Classes Commission was established by an act of Parliament (Lok Sabha) in 1993. Even before it was constituted, a special commission had reported on the problem of the ‘creamy layer’. It was decided that the children of high government officials or of persons with an annual income above Rs 100,000 would not be entitled to the benefits of affirmative action. In 2004 this limit was raised to Rs 250,000 (approximately US$ 5,000). But whereas the ‘creamy layer’ could be defined in this way, it was much more difficult to fix the basic criteria for defining ‘backwardness’. Of altogether 1,133 applications received from various communities during the period from 1993 to 2003, the commission accepted 682 for inclusion in the list of backward classes and rejected 451. In its report submitted in 2004, the commission admitted that it had to base its decisions on inadequate data and often had to fall back on the census of 1931 as it was the last one which contained information on castes. The commission therefore recommended that future census operations should once more provide data on caste affiliations as it would otherwise be impossible to base affirmative action on reliable social data. It is doubtful whether the Indian government will follow this recommendation concerning census operations in view of the political trouble it might cause. Moreover, once it is known why such questions about caste are asked, interested parties would see to it that the respondents answered them in a suitable manner.

The problem of defining the criteria of ‘backwardness’ came up once more in 2006 when the Congress-led coalition government decided to extend the reservation for OBCs to educational institutions. The reservation of government jobs was controversial enough, but educational reservations cut even deeper as far as the career prospects of students from higher castes were concerned. Due to India’s rapid economic growth, many students look for jobs in the private sector rather than for government posts. But whatever job one wants to get, access to higher education is the necessary precondition. Once more the Supreme Court played a decisive role. It asked the government to specify the criteria for OBC reservations. In addition, doctors launched a nationwide strike against this new policy since they are the only group of educated people whose strike really matters. The government stuck to its policy. The political equation is obvious: there are probably about 400 million OBCs in India and their vote will decide the outcome of the national elections which are due in 2009.

In the absence of census data, the National Sample Survey Organization finally supplied some relevant data in 2006 which were based on a sample survey of 125,000 households. According to this, the proportion of OBCs in the Indian population amounts to 41 per cent whereas the Scheduled Castes account for 20 per cent and the Scheduled Tribes for 8 per cent. As far as household expenditure was concerned, the survey showed that in the rural areas the OBCs attained about the same level as the ‘forward communities’ in this respect, whereas in the urban areas these communities were far ahead of the OBCs. Of the members of urban ‘forward communities’ 52 per cent spent Rs 1,100 per month whereas among the OBCs only 28 per cent reached that level.

The politics of affirmative action has certainly strengthened the solidarity of the Other Backward Castes…. The ‘social federalism’ of a caste-based society is also reflected in the pattern of regional parties whose rise was discussed in an earlier chapter. The notions of hierarchy associated with a caste system have vanished from political life where the manifold patchwork of regionally dominant peasant castes is much more important than notions of hierarchy and hegemony. But one particular element of stratification has survived in spite of all affirmative action: the stigma of ‘untouchability’.

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by | 29 September 2008 · 10:35 pm

Anthropologist Rethinks Missionaries, PNG

From Village on the Edge: Changing Times in Papua New Guinea, by Michael French Smith (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. 16-17, 20-21:

My desire to avoid areas of strong Catholic Mission influence was rather misguided, because Christianity was ubiquitous in Papua New Guinea and an integral part of the social and cultural change I intended to study. Just a few years later, in 1980, the Pacific Council of Churches would report that 85 percent of all Papua New Guineans considered themselves Christians. Catholicism was the dominant denomination in the East Sepik. German Catholic missionaries of the Society of the Divine Word entered the Sepik region in 1896, just a dozen years after the German New Guinea Company began the first sustained European effort to establish a commercial presence in the region. In Wewak itself, the mission headquarters at Wirui was a local landmark. It was the seat of the bishop of Wewak and headquarters of a diocese that covered most of the province and was staffed by approximately 227 priests, brothers, sisters, and lay personnel. Most of these mission staff were from overseas. Nevertheless, Catholicism was clearly a significant part of the local scene.

Many anthropologists have seriously neglected the importance of Christianity in Melanesia. Perhaps, like some tourists, they have been looking for “the last unknown” and have found Christianity insufficiently exotic. Whatever the reason, they have often failed to recognize the extent to which Melanesians have made Christianity their own. I harbored some personal prejudices against Christian missionary activity. Raised in a liberal, church-going Protestant family, I acquired a stern Protestant Christian conscience—enough in itself to account for an aversion to churches—but I failed in my efforts to believe in God in more than a terminally abstract sense. I also found the idea of going around the world denouncing indigenous beliefs and raising the specter of eternal damnation—as many Christian missionaries have done in Papua New Guinea and elsewhere—extremely distasteful.

I had little firsthand knowledge of Christian missionaries in the Pacific. One of my uncles, however, had been sent to Australia as a Mormon missionary in the first decade of the twentieth century, when he was only seventeen years old. He had left school before he was ten to help support his neglected branch of a polygamous family and, as he told the story, he set off on his mission ignorant, illiterate, and reluctant. He left the Mormon Church long before I came to know him, and the stories he told of his misadventures in Australia were very funny and portrayed the missionary endeavor in a most unflattering light. Told that God would put words in his mouth, he had received no such assistance and had, he claimed, turned more people against Mormonism than any missionary before or since.

Fortunately, despite such prejudices and influences I managed to keep a somewhat open mind. This allowed me to learn as the year progressed that Catholicism was very much apart of the local culture in Kragur and that there was no simple way to describe or evaluate its contribution. Kragur villagers’ own understanding of Catholicism tended to encourage the kind of painful self-doubts colonialism often sows. Kragur people also, however, had found ways to use Catholicism to assert their independence and moral worth. Looking too sharply askance at Catholicism in Kragur would have made it very difficult for me to understand life there in general.

Keeping my anti-mission bias in check also let me accept, without feeling too hypocritical, the considerable assistance and hospitality that mission personnel offered me. This began with a free passage to Kairiru on the St. John’s Seminary boat, a small, hard-used inboard with an ungainly open wheelhouse. We arrived late in the day at St. John’s, where the staff offered me a hot shower, a clean-sheeted bed for the night, a cold bottle of good homemade beer, and a seat at the dinner table. Such hospitality took some of the edge off my prejudices….

I also saw that many of the St. Xavier’s [school] staff had no interest in imposing their own religious beliefs on their students. Largely members of Catholic orders, principally the Society of Mary, they took their religion very seriously; but they did not seem alarmed that some of their students, themselves raised in Catholic villages, asked pointed and skeptical questions about the faith.

Had I known more of either Catholicism or the mission in Papua New Guinea I would have been aware that both had changed significantly since the early years of the twentieth century. In those days, missionaries conducted mass baptisms of the living and sometimes baptized the dying by stealth and tallied the souls they thus saved. Since then, the Catholic Church and the Catholic Mission in Papua New Guinea had been moving away from emphasizing individual conversion, religious ritual, and the veneration of religious artifacts toward what some of my mission acquaintances in the East Sepik called “building Christian communities.” And the daily business of many Catholic Mission personnel I met in and around Wewak was not gaining converts but running health and education programs.

I was to find that some Kragur people were not comfortable with the mission’s diminishing emphasis on religious rites and were themselves rather intense in their devotion to Catholic ritual. Had I first come to Kragur only six months later I would have encountered along the way rather dramatic evidence of many villagers’ deep involvement with Catholic rites and symbols: the statue of the Virgin Mary that Kragur people would erect in a broad clearing at the top of the trail over the mountain in April 1976. Villagers passing the statue on their travels often paused to stand reverently in front of it and recite the rosary.

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by | 18 September 2008 · 6:55 am

South Korean “Foreigners of Convenience”

A few days ago, The Marmot’s Hole posted a translated summary of a Korean newspaper article about one way that South Korean parents are getting their children into local international schools, which are a conduit to higher education abroad. They purchase foreign residency permits from embassies of Ecuador or Mali in order to qualify their Korea-resident kids as “overseas Koreans” qualified to attend international schools.

In the case of Ecuador, all you need do is visit for a week to qualify, while Mali’s embassy in Japan can issue permanent residency visas. Both options will usually cost you about 30 million won.

As a result, some people estimate that as many as 80% of the kids enrolled in international schools are South Koreans, while the official Ministry of Education figure is 13%, because dual citizens and those with official residency overseas are counted as foreigners.

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by | 4 July 2008 · 1:01 pm

Baciu’s Memories of Brasov: Hobbies

From Praful de pe Tobă: Memorii 1918-1946, by Stefan Baciu (Editura Mele, 1980), p. 10 (my translation):

I don’t think that I would have been more than 6 or 7 when I began to use scissors to cut caricatures of politicians out of the newspapers, saving them in different shoeboxes. I recognized from “the lines” and signature the most important caricaturists of the era: Sell, Ross, Dragoş, Anestin, Dralex. Thus I learned, without yet being able to read very well, such figures as Trancu-Iaşi, Tancred Constantinescu, Jean Th. (Tehaş) Florescu, Mihail Oromolu, Marshal Averescu, Iuliu Maniu, Vaida Voievod, I. G. Duca, Nichifor Robu, Leonte Moldovanu, Ştefan Ciceo Pop, and all the Bratianu family, not to mention Argetoianu, Iorga, A. C. Cuza, and Octavian Goga. At about the same time, I “organized” a collection of automotive insignia that, with the aid of a pin on the back of little metal plaques, could be worn on the chest like a kind of brooch. I kept them in boxes lined with wadding and can still see before me the various insignia: NSU, Alfa Romeo, Hispano Suiza, BMW, Austro Daimler, Lancia, Ford, Chevrolet, Puch.

After that came an era of postage stamps, stuck in a Schaubeck album, but philately didn’t last long. One fine day I began to sell them to Old Man Gebauer, who owned a toy shop in front of the Council House, in a style that today reminds me of certain surrealist photographs. I sold him row upon row of my hard-won collection, and with the money I bought pamphlets and magazines at Staicu’s kiosk facing Military Circle on the Promenade. I would have been 10 or 11 when one day I asked, “Who is Stelian Popescu” and “the hundred millions of Romulus Boila.” A man who at just that moment was buying a pack of cigarettes looked me up and down, then said, “Well, now, my boy, is that what you’re reading about?” Yes, it was true, that is what I was reading, and I remember how avidly I bought articles signed X.X.X., which were said to have been written by Marshal Averescu himself.

Speaking of collections, I also remember my autograph collection, about which more will be said later, and my collection of political posters, probably an extension of … the caricatures. I remember that one day Father found me, probably rather surprised, stringing up as if for exhibit large posters of the Iron Guards, and other little red ones with stickers on the back, of the Workers and Peasants Bloc, communists, which I had obtained from their respective leaders (the lawyer Trifan and the doctor Kahane), presenting myself as “the son of Prof. Dr. Ion Baciu.” I think both were amused, each in his own way, by the unexpected visit, but they both gave me “rich material” that I placed in respectable enough bundles classified by party: liberals, socialists, peasant parties, factions loyal to Lupu, Iunian, Cuza, Iorga, or even Ghelerter, because I had discovered at Dealul Zorilor [Dawn Hill] tavern, where they sold wines from liberal vineyards, the old “agitator” Iuliu Neagu Negulescu, who had become an innkeeper in Brasov.

NOTES: ‘Old Man’ renders Moş.

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by | 30 June 2008 · 8:55 pm

Baciu’s Memories of Brasov: “Four Eyes”

From Praful de pe Tobă: Memorii 1918-1946, by Stefan Baciu (Editura Mele, 1980), pp. 9-10 (my translation):

My first two years of primary school I did at the Saxon school, with Tante Dora Teutsch as my teacher, a kind and gentle soul. I remember that she was the one who observed, while checking my calligraphy in a double-lined notebook for gothic letters, that I had begun to write above and below the lines. That is why I was taken to Doctor Pildner von Steinburg, who diagnosed “juvenile cataracts” in both eyes. Because an operation would follow, we planned to seek consultation in Vienna, which in those days had well-known ophthalmologists, but just then there chanced to arrive in Brasov an ophthalmologist, a professor from Vienna who, being informed of my illness, agreed to see me. He was, I remember, a tall man with a goatee, dressed in black, who examined me at length in a room plunged into darkness in which burned a candle, after which he sat me down before various devices with colored lights. In his opinion, I could be operated on in Brasov, by Doctor Pildner von Steinburg. Thus it was that, at the age of 7 or 8, I was put through two operations and, as one of them failed to produce the results desired, my left eye was operated on once again, in the private sanatorium on Castle Street. Its garden was on the slope of Mt. Tâmpa, in that respect resembling the garden in my home in Honolulu, which I see before me as I write. I remember the devices for testing vision, with moving spots of light, the operating room, the chloroform anesthesia, after which I vomited, full of fear, even though Mother, Father, and the doctor were at the head of my bed. Afterwards I lay in bed, completely immobile, with bandaged eyes, for several days that seemed endless to me. The lights dazzled me once the bandages were removed, but the objects around me had precise contours, as if they were in relief.

I wore glasses with thick lenses, and later on my playmates and my classmates at the Andre Muresianu mixed primary school would shout after me, “four eyes,” “bicycle,” or patroski (‘four eyes’), which didn’t particularly hurt me but did separate me from them and, without my realizing it, drew me toward my world of books, of art albums, of various collections that I spent time on, dedicated body and soul to those early passions of my childhood.

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