The daughters and The Black Thing (aside page 8)
For a time when I was a young teen in Ohio, there was a big piano competition I was entered into, and to prepare me for that my piano teacher increased my lessons from one to two per week. In exchange for the extra classes, my mom cleaned her house during those lessons. I felt enormous responsibility and pressure, and feared performing inadequately in the face of my mom’s labor. As I played the wrong notes, she was upstairs, polishing the silver. We didn’t actually have a piano. So to practice, I went to the local university’s music school, looked for an empty practice room, and pretended I wasn’t out of place. This went on for years. And no one said anything.
My piano teacher, when she was a young pianist in New York City, had shared an apartment with another artistic young woman, Madeleine L’Engel, who would go on to write A Wrinkle in Time, one of my favourite books.
In A Wrinkle in Time, children go on an intergalactic search for their father and fight The Black Thing. On the Belt of Orion, is a Happy Medium with a crystal ball. She doesn’t like to look at sad things with her ball. I also don’t like to look at sad things. But sometimes The Black Thing is there, and then, to look at it clearly, to be realitätsnah reality-near, is… there is a time.
I usually share the Chinese things I love: the art, the language, the tea, the music. Here I’m sharing The Black Thing: video of a Chinese father beating his teenaged daughter on a tennis court in Serbia.
Reminds me of Li Yang, founder of Crazy English, a (for profit) pedagogical method of teaching English as a foreign language by shouting it.
Here is his American wife at the time, Kim Lee, whom he beat.
From NPR:
The faces of American Kim Lee and her Chinese husband, Li Yang, both in their 40s, once graced the covers of books that sold in the millions. He was China's most famous English teacher, the "Crazy English" guru of China, who pioneered his own style of English teaching: pedagogy through shouted language, yelling to halls of thousands of students.
His methods were given official recognition after he was employed by the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee to teach Olympic volunteers.
A fellow teacher, Lee married Li in 2006. They have three daughters. And Lee, who is from Florida, worked alongside her husband to build the Crazy English empire.
[…]
“I thought maybe he just didn't even realize how seriously he hurt me, even though he was sitting on my back, slamming my head in the floor," Lee recalls. "I thought, that will really get his attention. Maybe then he'll come to the realization, 'Oh, I've really seriously injured my wife. I better go home, I better deal with this.' But he didn't.”
[…]
"I hit her sometimes, but I never thought she would make it public since it's not Chinese tradition to expose family conflicts to outsiders," Li told the China Daily.
He blamed their problems on "character and cultural differences, which are difficult to solve through counseling."
It’s not that now he has beaten his daughter, but now there is recording of his beating his daughter, see the South China Morning Post.
Next page Discursive Aside page 9 (What is filial piety exactly? 24 Exemplars to clarify.)