In this picture, Matilda is ice-skating on the ‘no name’ lake in Beida (Peking University – Beida is an abbreviation of the Chinese equivalent ‘Beijing Daxue’). She is in her first postgraduate year there, studying Chinese language and linguistics – her ambition is to teach Mandarin. She certainly does a good job correcting my more embarrassing mistakes.
Students at Beida and its neighbour Tsinghua (Hu Jintao’s alma-mater) really are the cream of the crop. The stats change from place to place and time to time, but roughly 1 in 10,000 students in any given province score high enough on their gao kao (the insanely pressured be-all-and-end-all exam at the end of high school) to go there. Terrifying.
Matilda (true to her namesake?) is a big Chomsky fan, and recently recommended to me Kant’s ‘Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime’ (‘Des Suhonen und Erbabenen’), which proposes a theory of climate influencing personality. Also terrifying.
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Pingback from 6 · Matilda’s first class on March 20, 2009 at 11:14 am
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Pingback from 6 · King Leonidas was Chinese on March 1, 2009 at 3:59 pm
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Chomskyites have a habit of assimilating people … they’re like the Borgs in Star Trek.
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ah…….in fact , my teachers , most of them ,who are fans of Chomsky. I just was assimilated by them.
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Alec Ash
I studied Mandarin in Beijing, where I began writing this blog in the Olympic summer of 2008
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