How Do I Get Two Combat Action Badges?

sees Visiting a translator

Gabriele Goettle out for the taz in a series of foreigners in Germany as a conversation with Ning, a Chinese woman living in Munich, who works as a translator. The conversation in the typical Goettle kind of a mixture of impressions of the journalist and long narratives of the other party offers many insights into life in China into the late fifties until the early eighties, where a small sample:

, the school I visited at that time was of the quality of her not very good. In the third school year the teacher told us there is the opportunity to move through an entrance examination for the Foreign Language School Beijing. Our Prime Minister Chou En-lai was abroad a lot - he was as a student in Germany - and he has said a foreign language should be learned as early as possible. And that's why we have created this Beijing Foreign Language School. So I went home and my parents have asked: Should I do this? They said: Why not? But as I said, I would like to learn English, they said, want the all. How about German? I asked: Why German? And my parents said, Germany has a very great literary tradition, there are Goethe, Schiller and many others because you are interested in literature, this is probably something for you. Furthermore, Germany is also very technical and industrial highly developed. I thought, well, I'll do that, and did the test.

said in a brief passage Da Ning about her time as a young teacher, just me to the conclusion of the foreign language high school in his pocket, had before so started a Germanic studies in general, one of the many paradoxes in the Cultural Revolution:

was that time I also have a teacher of German, and my students asked, 'Tell us sometimes what we learn German? If we were to learn English, we could at least read the promotional text on the can. But German? Time of our lives we will not meet a single German! " What should I do? They were not motivated. Among my 54 students were about ten from intellectual families who have learned hard. All others have just played. They have hardly learned. In German only: Here's the table, here is the issue, etc. at the school about 300 students were at that time, learned German. From which there are two or three, who later had to be done once to do with German. The others have not learned nothing.

I find it interesting that the taz reproduces the present day of this interview, and thus a different but just told a Chinese story. For sure it's off more recommended here!