Huh?

Our Administrative Law professor opened class last week with the following statement: "trying to learn Chinese law in English is a little bit like trying to eat Chinese food without chopsticks." It seemed like an inapt metaphor at the time, but today I think I'm beginning to understand what he was getting at.

The catalyst for my burgeoning clarity was one of our professors, who is an extremely intelligent, young, Yale/PKU-educated expert in Chinese jurisprudence. But this professor also has a penchant for producing sexist PowerPoint presentations in the name of teaching us about Chinese Society. And he's been using a recent court case that involved China's "second wife" syndrome to teach us about gender attitudes and family structure--for three weeks. This particular horse is well overdue for the glue factory.

The case, as reported by a television program called "Society Insight," involved the following situation:

This was a case which had shocked Luzhou city. Two parties who stood on the court were two women. The reason why they attended the court was because of a man called Huang Yongbin. The plaintiff Zhang Xueying was a lover of Huang Yongbin when he was alive. The defendant Jiang Lunfang was Huang Yongbin’s wife. The reason of the dispute was Huang Yongbin gave his entire legacy to his lover Zhang Xueying. His wife Jiang Lunfang could hardly believe that her husband would do so.

Yet today our young professor displayed the following slide in class, which I quote without alteration below:

Thought Experiment III (cont.)

Suppose -- you got enough money so that you had the ability to support a second love as well as the original family. There were two choices you're facing: to keep a second wife or to get a hooker (or one night stand), which will you prefer and why?

Viewed in isolation, this slide doesn't seem like a big deal. But when you consider that the slides before this one asked questions like, "would you rather live in a polygamous or a monogamous society if given the choice to do so?", you may begin to wonder what he was driving at. You may also wonder why he refused to explain his purpose in asking us similar questions over the course of the last three weeks.

What followed was an extremely tense, uncomfortable discussion as to the pedagogical value of his teaching methods. One party that shall remain nameless asked, "You see why your questions are sexist, don't you?" Another student inquired, quite simply and honestly, "I don't know why you are asking these questions and where you are going, so could you clarify it?" But he refused. So, class ended with us being somewhat annoyed with ourselves for having wasted two hours.

Granted, this was a class about Chinese Society, and he was obviously using the case to tether out distinctions between foreign jurisdictions and China. We also have to give him some credit for trying to think outside of the box. (That box being reading monotonically from poorly-written slides.) But in the end, all we learned about Chinese society was that either our professor couldn't figure out why his questions were sexist, that he understood that they were sexist and still didn't care, or that there was simply something lost in translation. (After all, this was his first time teaching a class in English.)

Perhaps the most annoying aspect of the lecture, however, was when he tried to assure us that we were somehow learning about why some/most Beijing taxi drivers drive like maniacs, but then failed to elaborate. What good does it do to ask us a bunch of questions, make grandiose statements alluding to some future payoff, and then ask more questions in the same vein?

When questioned as to his motives, our professor grew somewhat defensive. He tried to explain that we simply did not understand Chinese society. But we've been getting a lot of that recently, and we're really trying to figure it out, so it would be nice if he would lend us a hand.

Thankfully, not all of our professors teach in this manner. Most of them are excellent, and are teaching us the things we feel we should be learning about. So we're going to return to class next week and give him another chance, because we really do want to understand Chinese society and not just write it off as "different" from Western thought. But when a professor simply continues to ask pointless questions without revealing why he is asking them, it's a big fat waste of our time and his.