Today, they caught my attention with a story about Vivian Malone who was the first African American woman (alongside James Hood, first African American male) to attend the University of Alabama. The story was on today, because Vivian Malone died today.
Shortly after that story ended, there was a report on an interesting finding in China recently. In an archeological dig in a small village in China (or maybe they discovered the whole village), that had been covered up thousands of years ago (4,000 I believe), something really old, they found a bowl of noodles! The bowl had been turned upside down and along with the earthquake that destroyed the village came a flood and together they created an airtight seal on the bowl of noodles. Anyhow, this proves that they had pretty sophisticated cooking techniques even way back then, and it also lends support to the arguement that the Chinese created noodles, which was the fun little spin on the whole report.
This was also interesting to me, in part, because the CBL (commuity based learning) I'm doing in school involves meeting with a kid named Dan twice a week. How does that relate you wonder? Well Dan moved here two years ago from China (I would write out his whole name that sounds a little more Chinese than "Dan", but I'd rather not risk embarassing myself with spelling mistakes). We mainly discuss the stories he's reading for his English class, but tied into those stories are a lot of cultural topics. So we discuss the differences between here and China. And I learned something interesting today that I thought I'd share. According to Dan, there are 56 different "types of people" in China. When I asked him to elaborate further he explained that they speak different languages (he speaks two himself), wear different types of clothing and celebrate different holidays. In the ignorance that comes from living in one place your whole life, I had always assumed that if you were Chinese, you were Chinese. So this was a little earth shattering to me. I asked him if an average American would be able to tell the difference between the different groups of people and he said they would not. So, comparing it to the U.S., a place I know very well, I decided it must be similar to the different cultural groups we have here, probably most similar to the Native Americans. Because China was never colonized by anyone (as far as I know), it must be what North America, or both America's, would have been like had they not been colonized; meaning if the Native American populations hadn't been oppressed and killed and had been allowed to grow. So that's how I made sense of this new, exciting information about China.
Posted by lib at October 13, 2005 05:46 PM