The Chinese "Thesis" Paper

Last season I waded through two 5,000+ word research papers, both on completely different topics. Little did I know then that I wasn't only helping my friends, but I was also preparing myself to enter into a career of editing. Though, if I really look back on the past ten years, I have long been gaining experience in this arena. But I digress.

Seniors here do not have classes their last semester. Many find internships or jobs and/or study for their final tests. Each senior is required to write a research paper which is referred to as a "thesis." The topic is open and does not have to relate to their major. While I find this strange, I actually think it encourages creativity and individuality and makes total plagiarism much harder. (I am sure if I think longer about it, I will see all the ways in which plagiarism could be used to write the entire paper. But I digress again.) Seniors work with a teacher through the process, first getting approval for their topic, then getting feedback on it in its various stages of development.

At this point, students have about one month left to finish, and this is about the time they start looking for editors. What you have to keep in mind is that the students I am working with are writing in a second language. Much of what they are trying to express is being translated from resources and from their minds into English from Chinese. So you can imagine the interesting word choices and idioms that get used. There is a lot of dialogue that happens after the first read through about actual meaning, and I have enjoyed being a living thesaurus, though I used an actual dictionary and thesaurus more than once.

About three pages into the paper, though I was really focused on editing, I did try to think about what she must be thinking and feeling. I mean, she started learning English long before I could even verbally put one sentence together in another language, and she has been working for years to master English in its various forms. This paper should help showcase that, and in every way she has tried to successfully express her intelligent self both linguistically and stylistically. With this mindset, she brought her long labored over paper to me, a true wizard in comparison, to watch it get cut up before her eyes and not only worked steadily to understand and fix my edits, but also never sighed or complained!

I would like to take three lessons from this:
1) I want to never be so emotionally invested in future papers that I can't do the same thing without sighing, crying or complaining.
2) I will try to always look at criticism from a professional or aspiring professional as constructive - the sole intent of the editor is to help me improve, not to cut me down as a person. (I reserve the right to be discerning, of course.)
3) I will try to always be positive, affirming and empathetic as an editor.

Thankfully, we are friends. And my investment of time shows her that I love her and want her to succeed. Amusingly, she confessed that she did not want to bring me her paper. A fellow classmate told her that she was very brave to bring it to me. The last time she took it to her teacher, he told her that she had so many grammar mistakes that she needed help... at that point, she could not put it off any longer and asked to meet this afternoon. And, so, almost 6 hours later (with a meeting, a dinner break and a short walk in between), we finished the first round of editing. And while I am extremely tired, I feel very satisfied.

Smells Like...

Pesticide. Well, that's what my friend and I thought it was as we walked 10 minutes out to the north part of campus for our first round of observations at 8:00 this morning. It was sickeningly pervasive, a formless cloud of toxic air engulfing our school and, apparently, a part of the city. And even after a breeze came late in the morning and blew most of it away outside, it lingered inside classroom buildings and Peter Hall. 

A gas line broke somewhere - at least that's what one colleague told me. And it must have been a big gas line for it to have such an effect. By the time we got to our destination this morning, I felt sick in my stomach and my lungs burned slightly. I was thankful that most of it was gone by the time we headed toward the east part of campus for our second round of observations at 10:00AM.

I reflected a little about how we would handle something like this in the West, and I feel pretty confident that warnings would have gone out. People would have been encouraged to stay indoors, and schools may have even canceled classes. Undoubtedly, someone would have sued the gas company and those responsible for the tremendous leak, claiming terrible health related issues as the reason. But not here. Common sense dictates a lot of things here, and people cannot draw up law suits as easily, though I have always perceived that there is an attitude of "bearing all things" in this culture. This may be attributed in part to people feeling a lack of power, because they really don't have any - so why fight if you can't win? Another may be attributed to their overwhelming desire to thrive. Students put themselves through an incredible amount of stress to just get into college. And if they don't score well on the college entrance exam (compared to all the other students in their province), they end up paying a lot to go to college, which many really cannot afford. They and their families sacrifice so much to even have the opportunity to build a better life. In the West, we are demanding it as our right. So what's a little gas or smoke, for that matter, when the future is weighing in the balance?