Ingrained Acculturation

At school today, I came to an odd realization while drawing a window.

See, our lesson this week is about modes of transportation; the main question we ask is "How do you get to school?" Kids answer with the sentence form "I go to school by..."

This of course, naturally lends itself to the board game-like set-up I described yesterday, in which kids go from home to school by answering our questions. This, in turn, means that every class period I get to draw the game path on the blackboard, beginning at a drawing of home and leading towards one of school.

The board looks something like this...

And today, while drawing the "home," I realized something: I can no longer draw houses--or, more specifically, windows--in the American way. Instead, I'm ruled by Chinese rules of stroke order. See, here's a rough approximation of the house I would draw:

Image apologetically stolen from Google and some 5-year-old somewhere

See the window? It's a pretty standard Western-style window, one of those things which, for whatever reason, has bars on it (if I were a child psychologist perhaps I'd say something about feeling trapped or something?). Just a box with an up-and-down cross. Pretty simple. American five-year-olds draw it all the time.

But how?

See, today, I drew it like this:

Purple = the new strokes; all strokes start at the top/left and move down/right

 

I drew it like this without even thinking. It seemed natural. It seemed normal. It also happens to be exactly how you would draw a window if you were writing it as a Chinese character.

Which, I discovered, it is. And it is drawn this way. Seriously, go to that link. It's "田," pronounced "tian?" and it means farm or field, as Alison later told me.

And I cannot, for the life of me, think of how I used to draw these windows. Was it the box in one stroke, then add the middle? Where did it start? The bottom left? The top?

Seriously, if anyone reading this can tell me, please do. How did I use to draw this picture??? I know it wasn't in the Chinese style, but I absolutely can't think of another way.

In other news, a few days ago I was lost in an odd daydream about making a new recipe. And, at the end of the daydream, I ate my recipe--using chopsticks.

You know, it's odd how acculturation seeps into you unnoticed, subtly shifting your worldview and changing the parts of your consciousness that tell you how to draw simple shapes or how to properly eat a meal. I've only been here about 5 months, and I've already forgotten how to draw a window.