WorldTeach China Summer: Quotes

Defamiliarization

- Yi Chen

During freshman year of college, I took a class called "Bilingual Aesthestics," which investigated the bilingual mind and the bilingual individual in order to consider what the benefits were, if any, of bilingualism. In this class, we often discussed "defamiliarization," a term introduced by Russian Formalist critic, Victor Shklovsky. Defamiliarization refers to what an individual experiences when approaching something new and different which she or he does not fully grasp, but in a Kantian acknowledgment of the sublime, is able to appreciate the estrangement and in doing so, see aspects of a situation that someone familiarized would miss. Essentially, Shklovsky's point is that it is crucial for people to be defamiliarized from situations or else they would be numb to experiences and only live life as automatons. For example, the bilingual individual is able to appreciate different aspects of a first language by studying or speaking a second language and realizing the curiosities of both languages. The notion of defamiliarization extends into many different realms of experience.

I don't think I ever fully understood the concept of defamiliarization until coming to China with WorldTeach, where I was thrown into many unfamiliar and often difficult situations. I realize in retrospect that this opportunity to experience these situations with fresh eyes is what ultimately made them so meaningful for me. No experience illustrates better how defamiliarized I often felt in China than when I participated in a homestay at one of my student's homes in Wulingyuan.

When Collin, a student in one of my classes during the second session of camp at Wulingyuan, learned that the foreign teachers would be doing homestays at students' homes, he asked Rhonda, Claudia, Christina and me to his home immediately, and we of course accepted, not knowing at all what we were in for. I remember how in halting English, he shyly but excitedly asked us to come stay with him, and apologized prematurely for the size of his house and the economic background of his family. I remember feeling a little embarrassed during the conversation, mainly because Americans are not really accustomed to discussing and apologizing for their family's economic backgrounds. We really did not care and were just psyched that we would have the chance to see how one of our kids lived and excited by the prospect of being able to experience that lifestyle as well.

When Collin met us at the school gate the next day, he brought three friends in tow, two girls and one boy who was actually his neighbor. From day one of my time in China, I’ve been amazed by how affectionate children in China can be, and how many of them from the countryside essentially grew up together and treat each other like siblings. The bonds that these students shared were apparent to us throughout the homestay. We knew Collin lived on a farm of some sort, but I don't think we could have been prepared for just how rural and how large of a farm area we were about to visit. We took a mini-bus to the foot of a mountain and then began to hike towards his house. It turned out we were actually still a twenty minute walk and a few caves away from his house. We walked along the side of a river on a little path and ducked into a few caves. The kids, always affectionate and concerned for their foreign teachers' safety, grabbed our hands when we walked into the dark caves. We finally passed a bridge and then arrived at a small farmhouse literally in the middle of nowhere, surrounded on all sides by green. There were cornstalks and pear bushes everywhere we looked. Born and raised in New York City, it struck me then that I had never been anywhere like this before. Despite being surrounded by kids and fellow teachers, I got a sense of how peaceful it was and how alone one could feel on a farm. We walked into the house and the first thing we saw was a huge picture of Mao Zedong, in all his glory, on the wall. Collin walked into a backroom and emerged a few seconds later with baskets. Collin had said he wanted to show us what a farmer's lifestyle was, and I realized he wasn't kidding at all.

Learning how to choose which ears of corn were ripe enough to pick and which were rotted was a surreal experience as I don’t think I had ever imagined I would be schooled in such a task in China, or ever, for that matter. After filling our baskets, we returned to the house and peeled pears on his front steps, sitting and joking with the kids for a while. Then, we went to his backyard, where the neighbors had prepared some dinner for us and we all just ate together around a small card table, out in the open air. The neighbors and students wouldn’t eat until the American teachers had finished eating, which was such a strange experience because they just sat there and smiled and watched us eat and told us that we should just stab the baby potatoes rather than pick them up with chopsticks, which was pretty funny seeing as how I have used chopsticks my whole life, but to them, I was just a plain American who could not possibly know how to use chopsticks. After dinner, we gave the grandfather a thank you gift basket of fruits for having us. One of the fruits was a pineapple. I will always remember how puzzled and excited he was when we gave it to him because it turned out that he’d never seen a pineapple before. We showed him how to cut it and then he ate a piece and smiled immediately at the delicious sweetness of the fruit’s flesh. I thought it was interesting that even though we’d seen many pineapples during our time in Wulingyuan, his grandfather, living 45 minutes away in the countryside, had never seen a pineapple before, and I was glad we were able to introduce him to the fruit.

After this curious and delightful incident, we and the students watched music videos and sat on the roof talking to Collin about his family. Collin lived with only his grandfather because his parents were laborers in some distant city, and he explained that his father had built the house for his grandfather before leaving. Then, the students all taught us how to play mahjong, and finally, we headed to bed.

After breakfast the next morning, since there was no bus to take the teachers back to school in time for our Mandarin classes, one of the female students called her uncle who was a policeman to pick us up. Another thing I’ve noticed about China is how willing family members are to do anything at all to help out another family member, no matter the time or the inconvenience. It was a rather fun and hilarious experience to be sent back to Wulingyuan Middle School in a police car. After arriving back at school, I had a chance to think about the whirlwind events that had just transpired over the past day, and I realized that by throwing me into a situation I could never have imagined or expected, Collin did one of the best things anyone has ever done for me in China. I was defamiliarized to the fullest extent of the word, and as a result, I was able to reflect on my own lifestyle in America and consider what many of my students must experience and deal with on a daily basis. For Collin and the other kids, it wasn’t strange to hike through caves and along a precarious river path to get home everyday, nor was it strange to freshly pick your dinner every night. For his grandfather, pineapples were completely unfamiliar What was routine to them was novel for me, and this enriched my experience. I do not think now that I will ever forget the night I spent on that roof with those kids, just talking about their lives and then playing mahjong. I understand now, in the vernacular, what Shklovsky was saying: it’s important to stir things up a bit every once in a while—you’ll never know what new perspective it will give you on your own life, or at least what window it will open into another person’s life. I can only marvel at how so many unfamiliar things in China, from eating night snacks on the street to using squat toilets, have become normal and familiar as the initial joys of defamiliarization have transformed into the comfort associated with the normal and routine, though without the negative connotations that Shklovsky attached to the familiar. Throughout my time with WorldTeach, what China is to me has changed, and the homestay with Collin definitely played a large part in that change.