Soju

Soju is a Korean drink. It was traditionally made from rice, but more recently it has been made in other ways. It has about 20% alcohol, which makes it stronger than wine (which is usually about 10-12%), but not as strong as whiskey (which is usually about 40%). It is not very expensive, so it tends to be a favorite drink for students. You drink it cold, not warm like the Japanese rice wine, sake (soju is usually stronger, anyway). Ho Jeong says that now younger people – well, her friends at least – will keep it in the freezer. You might pay 90 cents or 1 dollar for a bottle (300 + ml) in Korea, $3 a bottle in a restaurant; here in Canada, you can pay $9 a bottle in a store, and $15 bottle in a restaurant. In addition, since there are just 7 shots in a bottle, you usually have to buy two bottles . . .

The most important thing to know about soju is the etiquette. You have to learn the rules from your father or grandfather. First, you should never pour your own drink! People say that, when someone pours their own drink, it is very unlucky to be sitting in front of them. Next, when you drink it, if you are facing someone older than you, you must turn to the side and hide the drink with your hand. It is disrespectful to drink while you are facing someone older directly. Third, you should always use two hands when you pour a drink for an older person. And you should always pour it for the older person!

Recent social changes in Korea have meant that more women are drinking soju now. They have to, because drinking soju according to the rules of etiquette is an important part of business communication in Korea, and now women are in business more often. It is possible now to buy weaker soju because of this.

Parents sometimes teach their children how to drink soju when they are in middle school. This may sound surprising, but it makes sense if you understand that one of the rules of soju etiquette is that, if an older person offers you a drink, you may not refuse. As you may imagine, this rule can make things interesting in high school.

In general, age is important in Korean society. It can be a delicate social situation when an employee is older than his boss, since the boss is supposed to be treated as an elder. Daniel says that a good guy boss will not insist on being treated as an elder outside of the office. There is a movie in the Nexus, Paul Weitz’z 2004 In Good Company, which might be interesting to watch because it is about this issue (but in America).

A poktanju is a drink that is made by dropping a shot of soju into a pint of beer. This is the same as the drink that we call a depth charge (which is a kind of boilermaker) here, but we use whiskey instead of soju. But Daniel says that soju is less expensive.

So, when students drink soju, or other things, they have drinking games, of course. In China, they will count off numbers in their group, and each time the number reaches 7, or 14, or 17, or 21 – that is, any number with 7 in it or a number that is a multiple of 7, you have to stand up or clap, and if you forget, you have to drink, or they can ask you to do things, or you have to tell the truth about something. In Korea, they do the same with the numbers 3, 6, 9, etc., and when you get to 33, you have to clap twice. Don remembered a drinking game from his time in university called “Zoom Schwartz Profigliano,” which is a little strange and not so easy to play.

by Koo Bong Hwoi

School in China

In China, the schools are very centralized. You can see a complex of buildings, all in one place, with primary and secondary schools, and even university, at the same location. The classes may have about 60 students each. The students wear uniforms – but as we all know, there are lots of different ways to wear a school uniform!

Students stay in the same classroom, with the same group of fellow students, through the whole school year in high school. They have classes that take about 45 minutes and 8 or 9 classes per day. School starts at 7:00 a.m., and can go until 5:00 p.m. Teachers can add classes to the end of the day, especially for exam preparation, so that you may be in school until 7:00 p.m. The teachers can even add classes on Sundays.

You can choose your program – well, with some other considerations. Your test scores make a difference to which program you will be able to get into; also, teachers can pick students whom they like for their classes. There are science programs and humanities programs. Most students choose the science programs because they think the subjects will be more practical – and also because in the humanities programs require a lot of memorization, and they don’t want to have to do that. Carol’s high school had 23 classes, with 21 of them science program classes, and 2 of them humanities program classes.

The classes are all ranked for the next year by the big examinations at the end of each year. They don’t call the class numbers “levels,” and the classes will use the same textbooks in the same year, most of the time, but some classes will move faster through the books and cover more material. So, classes are in competition with each other. This means that the students in the same class will probably help each other a lot when they have to take exams – although there are sometimes super-smart kids who don’t become very social with the rest of their classmates, and don’t help much.

School is very different in China from the way it is here in Canada. Here you can find some very elite, difficult, and very expensive private schools, like Upper Canada College (for boys), the Bishop Strachan School (for girls), and St. Andrew's College School (for boys). Most of the English-speaking Prime Ministers of Canada went to U.C.C. If you want to see a movie about this kind of school, look at Peter Weir’s 1989 Dead Poets Society, which stars Robin Williams. (It’s in the Nexus on VHS). Here is the last scene of the movie (don’t watch if you don’t want to know the end!)

by Zhao Xun

Introduction to Psychology

We visited a lecture of the course called Introduction to Psychology on Tuesday, July 22. The topic of the lectures was Types of Psychotherapy. The professor is Tifrah Warner, and she is from Israel.

When she started her lecture, she asked a student to choose a proverb from a small book that she gave to the student. The proverb was this one: “It is not necessary to blow out the other person’s lantern to let yours shine.” (Swahili, East Africa) We thought she did this partly to make people relax, but also to get them ready to think. Professor Warner seemed quite relaxed and friendly, and also concerned about her students. She spoke to them in a very kind way but also seriously about their ideas.

For the first few minutes of the lecture, students came in the lecture hall and put essays on the table in the front of the hall while she was talking. They had to walk right behind her to do that. She didn’t get angry at that; in fact, one student came in, dropped off an essay, and left, and she laughed about it. We wondered if professors should tolerate this kind of disrespect. In some other countries, many of them don't. A lot of students were eating and drinking in the lecture, also. There was a lot of typing noise from students taking notes on their laptops (or looking at facebook). One student was reading a graphic novel. For some students, it looked as if they were at a movie theatre, or watching TV.

Even though we studied the chapter of the textbook assigned for the lecture in our class before going, Professor Warner didn’t talk a lot about what was in the book. Daniel says that in Korea, for some subjects, like psychology and business, the professor will use lecture time to talk about examples in detail, and not go over the textbook material very much. However, in hard science or engineering courses, professors may stay closer to the textbook.

In Korea, students also hear rumors that if you fail a course, you will get a refund – but that is not true.

In China, Shang says, some professors will teach from the textbook, and some won’t, depending on the professor. In addition, some professors will focus on the textbook before the exam (to help students prepare for specific questions), but others won’t even do that.

In Saudi Arabia, Ahmed says, sometimes professors will say to students that they should read the textbook on their own, and the professors will want to lecture on other things. However, three or four weeks later they will find that the students have not done any of the reading, and they will be forced to lecture on the textbook – and therefore to force the students to study it.

In the Saudi system, professors have a lot of freedom to decide what to teach, and even when to teach. They can go to a class at the first meeting and say, “I am not available at this time,” and reschedule the whole class, so that they only have to be on campus a couple of days a week. This can be a big problem for students’ schedules.

Instead of lecturing on the textbook chapter directly, Professor Warner made her lecture and discussion focus on one interesting issue in the chapter: when should psychotherapists prescribe drugs and when shouldn’t they prescribe drugs? Most of the students in the lecture seemed to be against the idea of using drugs too quickly in psychotherapy, but when the professor gave them a list of kinds of cases, most said they would prescribe drugs more quickly than her. She described the way many doctors think: “the medical model.” First, doctors think of psychological illness as being like physical illness. Therefore, they assume there must be a physical cause for a psychological illness. Therefore, this cause should be chemical, and should be fixable by drugs. But she said that just because there are chemical changes in the brain doesn’t mean you need drugs. You can change someone’s brain chemistry by giving them a hug. And she described the work of Milton H. Erickson, a therapist who she admires a lot, to show that you don’t need drugs as often as most people today think.

But when students asked, she had to say that her view is not the majority opinion in psychology today. Today, drugs are being used more and more anyway.

If you want to visit this course, you can find the syllabus online through the York University website, and you can get the textbook at the Reserve Desk in Scott Library. “On reserve” means you can only borrow it for two hours, and you can’t take it out of the library. That means you basically photocopy what you need. The textbook is Psychology: Themes and Variations by Wayne Weiten. The call number is BF 121 W38 2007.

Dim Sum

Dim Sum is a way to have breakfast in China. You can go to the restaurant and order a lot of little dishes to have with tea. In some places you can just point at what you want, when they bring it by on a cart. Then the waiter gives it to you and marks down what you got on a sheet of paper that you have. The dishes are different kinds of food, kinds of dumplings, rolls, seafood, buns, etc. Some of them are sweet, and some are not. This has been a custom in China for a few hundred years, so it is old, but not one of the oldest parts of Chinese culture. The custom is a bigger thing in the south; in the north, it is more like just a dessert.

In the past, people believed that drinking tea and eating at the same time was bad for you; however, people later found out that tea is actually good for your digestion, so dim sum was enabled to be popular. Yoyo says that it was a tea house owner who popularized the idea that tea is good with food, which isn’t a big surprise.

Before 7:00 in the morning, the tea is free, so the older people go at 6:00 a.m. They gather and spend hours there with newspapers and conversation with everyone who comes in. Then they go to tai chi at 9:00. The younger people usually don’t come until about 10 a.m., so they have to pay for tea.

We’re not sure what Canadian food is, really. Don says that if you want to look for an American breakfast or brunch, you might try any of these places:

Flo's Diner

Fran's

Grapefruit Moon

Sunset Grill

Over Easy

The Rosedale Diner

Or if you’re looking for other kinds of food, you might try one of these places:

Grazie (Italian)
Milagro (Mexican)
Edo (Japanese)
Mezes (Greek)
The Rebel House (English)
Allen’s (Irish)

Does anybody have any other suggestions? Where is a good place to go in Toronto for Dim Sum?

by Yang Ying

guo xiao jiao

One thing that comes from Chinese culture is guo xiao jiao, or the old practice of foot-binding for women. This may be unique to China. In the old days, they started to bind a girl’s feet when she was four years old, and they started in the fall and winter so her feet would not feel it so much because of the cold. This practice, of course, broke the bones in the girl’s feet, since they were trying to make her feet stay very small – maybe four inches long. Foot-binding was banned officially after the 1911 revolution of Sun Zhongshan (his name is usually written Sun Yat-sen by the English), but it had to be banned again after the 1949 revolution of Mao Zedong as well. Today there might still be a few very old women who are living who had it when they were younger. Eason’s great-grandmother had it; he saw it when he was very young.

If you look at Beijing Opera, you can see the characters called Dan. These are the girl roles. At York University, a performer named William Lau knows how to play those roles. His group, which is called the Little Pear Garden Collective, gives performances and demonstration of Beijing Opera on the York campus and in lots of other places. In his demonstrations, he shows the audience the special shoes a dan performer wears to make the girl’s feet appear to be very small. They make the performer walk with very small steps.

Foot-binding may seem quite strange to people from other countries, but it is not true that this is the only beauty practice in the world that is not good for the women’s health. In the west, in the past, women often wore corsets that were very tight. A corset is a garment that makes a woman’s waist smaller. Sometimes women were supposed to have very small waists – maybe 48-50 centimetres (or 18-19 inches). These corsets could rearrange their internal organs in bad ways. Here is a link to a fashion magazine’s advice column from 1903 about how to get a girl to start wearing corsets.

After we heard about foot-binding, we talked some more about definitions of beauty. Why did people in China think that very, very small feet were beautiful? What is beautiful in any culture? Some scientists say that beauty is usually about looking young. Maybe that explains foot-binding a little. There is a science writer in English named Steven Jay Gould. He wrote an essay called “A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse,” in a 1980 book called The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History. Here is the York library call number for this book: QH 366.2 G666 1982. This essay explains the concept of “neoteny,” which says partly that people find youth attractive.


by Zhang Weifeng