My Teacher Alexis Rygaloff.
Some time ago, as I had studied about
PRC for some time before really even trying at Mandarin and then even
taking a class at it, I met with Alexis Rygaloff on a winter morning
during a time at which China had, and this through the papers,
started having a more important industrial base that produced more
quality products, though this had nothing to do with our talk at the
time. We neither met as colleagues as Rygaloff was much older and an
experienced teacher at the time, but insofar as I had dropped in on
his class several times and was learning, we both expressed an
interest in this process given my situation at the time. It had been
a custom at the time for many instructors when meeting with students
to actually say very little, and I have no idea how such “mentoring”
sessions take place today nor the protocols involved, nor what people
really say to each other, but we did have some exchange of political
language and some dialogue about his very interesting and informative
mandarin grammar book.
His point to me was that he worked hard
at his articles and books originally, and as a result had plenty of
moneys and some creature comforts, indeed more than the average
senior instructor at the time; I could have his tobacco if I believed
I needed that, his jacket to keep warm in the weather, access to the
books in his library – as all these were considered replaceable and
fungible and he wanted to encourage me in my studies to the extent
possible while persuading me his system of economic provision,
academics, and other statuses would be of great help to me in
continuance of any pursuit of the subject matter at hand. The way in
which this was presented was greatly sophisticated and not without
the proviso that I do work and according to accepted methods, etc. I
was reminded during this quite important conversation that many of
his colleagues, if not he himself had been at Cambridge in U.K., and
extremely liked and admired the situation there and this for me
proposed the danger of being blind to some circumstances and issues
as many of them are: Mr. Rygaloff, while a gifted teacher and so
forth, probably was indeed hardly aware of the economic terms, actual
economics / commerce / business reasons about how he had his position
and salary, of how he was able to afford his travels and worldly
goods, and despite his outstanding grammar publication that I read
through several times for its overall simplicity and heavy impact on
Western speakers of mandarin (as an official language in PRC only,
might I add here), the way he could maintain his teaching without
much effort, maintain a following quite easily and so forth, again.
When this topic entered my mind, in our brief meeting together early
that winter afternoon, I raised my voice in mentioning my impression
of this and how it was inappropriate and irresponsible for he and his
colleagues to have accepted things on a political basis only, and
then to have more or less lain in wait for 'tourists' such as myself
to arrive while making all attempts to learn, and with all our
efforts gleaning maybe about as much mandarin language and culture as
was in the cuticle of his left – hand small finger. This is not an
understatement, nor is nor was in our conversation the tone of
forgetting about themes such as the hundred flowers, Great Leap
Forward, and other ideas presumably designed in Moscow (1958 –
1971) that cast so many lives at least adrift if not into an abyss,
of which an objection to his lessons I raised at the time. The reply
was more or less, “what I have is yours as well”. To this day, I
consider this sort of assertion by anyone as that of a confused and
unfortunate party under the circumstances who held very tight, in
fact after at one time probably having met people in the Kremlin if
not Khruschchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Tchernenko themselves – so
many of them travel to Russia in the course of their careers even
today – to these sorts of things very unsure and unclear, and again
about what things like property rights, other rights, and everything
from personal autonomy of the reasonable and prudent person to
territorial sovereignty actually are. Given the great losses they
suffered at the time in the old countries, in fact with the open
refusal of a part of the young intelligenstia to follow these
socialistic ideas and principles, eventually were mostly due to these
very well – trained and smart people having spent academic and
other currency, all socially oriented, toward persuading the youth at
the time and giving the overall impression that capital production
and Western economics and systemic institutions such as common law,
supply and demand including laissez - faire, Christianism and other
'isms' of the great Western powers, the establishment of the family
and institution of marriage, commercial enterprise, multi – party
politics and all this comprised the exploitative evil that caused
systemic problems everywhere, and that essentially capitalism and its
character are responsible for the world's ills and had been for a
long time. The dismissive attitude that “J.P.” and everyone in
the educational system where I attended college of the crimes of
Stalin, Mao, and lesser autocrats in my view, and with respect to
what Rygaloff would mention even today, gave direct cause for this
insofar as survival of any elite or governance in the near abroad of
Eastern Europe, Eurasia and Asia (including especially East Asia).
Evidence of this had been a small, well – funded and extremely
unpopular status of the communists' political parties for years in
European and Western countries. The influence of Josef Stalin in his
day on our instructors like Rygaloff, that of Mao Zedong, and of
those who held these monumental figures as a model, for a long time
has been that of the exercise of raw – power politically, however
stilted, biased and misguided – oriented to the benefit of quite
narrow and drunken elites who had seized governments and worked to
preserve a systemic tone that had to do with making the world “new”
again and casting aside much of what makes the character of thinking
and being of most all people, regardless of whether they are
intellectually aware of themselves, in the name of social progress.
As much I have been able to tell people like Rygaloff eventually
passed trying to resolve these sorts of dilemmas brought about by
bloody leaders in those places.
The point of this is recently I
attended an event where mandarin is all the rage and remembered
Rygaloff's book on grammar that proposes most if not all people in
PRC get along with about fifty phrases, the rest of the language is
built on those fundamental sentential images. Mandarin overall is a
language with lots of range and difficult to handle in the minutae
that people like him studied, and this probably because many Chinese
speakers have no idea grammatically of this important idea about the
narrowness of their spoken word. Most people for their use of
language are stuck in their proper castes in these regimes where
party ties and the governance itself in many respects depends upon
many mysteries in the workings of the ruling elite. People in this
environment are raised to live with this, and the interpretation of
Western systems as crazy, elitist, exploitative and so on, as part of
the controls on the politics of the things where they carry on their
lives everyday which smacks of a kind of guiding and ruling principle
of parasitism by one's elite on the rest of society along with the
purposeful demonizing of any regional exterior. This overall trust
as established by the ruling party, and the kind of cultural monopoly
it has with respect to the populace in places like PRC, leaves little
room for personal freedoms, much less for the free flows of capital,
goods and services, making for magical and mysterious, and though
recently extremely well – managed, effects on society that are of
marginal benefit only to the common – sense individual in those
countries. Mandarin itself is a language that has great imagery and
descriptive qualities including actually great linguistic range, and
while its influence at least gets necessary attention from more and
more people, needs be regarded with the present fervor about it not
as a key to life as some would have it, but ascribed the proper
requirements and character of something indeed as
increasingly expensive and magical culturally along a learning path:
That would render it ancillary or secondary to the purposes for which
it is sometimes used, for example, to make one understand and use
communist dialectics, or to have one reason in the West that commonly
voting socialist or communist is valuable for one and for others, or
other such critical themes within the purposes themselves of those
attending social and / or professional events with such ideas as an
avocation, or that are used again for instance along with civil
rights (in this to the neglect of civil obligations themselves) in
the banter and casual dialogue of the collectivity given the
occasion. As much in part, along with the lessons of political survival in view of monumental political adversaries and their vassals and various pawns, this instructor indirectly imparted in his provincial, almost Romanian, yet extremely serious and meticulous approach to the language and culture. Enough, already.
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