My dad warned me about the two Cs when I was leaving home for college.
“Beware of chemistry,” he said.
I aced Freshman Chemistry, but that’s not what he meant. I tried to answer that question years later in my blog post on “yuan fen.”
“Respect culture.”
What is culture? We never got to discuss its definition. But we talked about culture all the time.
In our rendezvous in Shanghai in 2002, he showed me the places where he grew up. We savored culture in the refined Shanghainese dishes he ordered, heard it in his native Shanghainese dialect, and experienced it in stories of his family’s escape from Shanghai to Nanking.
Four years earlier, we took the Eurostar train from London to Paris.
With Dad in Paris, 1998
When I taught “Music in World Cultures” last semester, I learned to appreciate different cultures through music. Dad was no longer there to take this musical journey around the world with me, despite the twice-weekly cable TV broadcasts of my lectures.
Now as I read the textbook “Culture” assigned in my cultural anthropology class, I am learning to appreciate different facets of culture and the way anthropologists study it. He would have enjoyed answering the end-of-the-chapter discussion questions with me.
Perhaps he had another C to tell me.
Communication. It’s all about communication — learning to see it from the other’s point of view. What does your reader want to know? For that, I’m taking Journalism 205 – Newswriting. As a scholar of English grammar, he definitely would have a say in my writing.