ASIANetwork

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Dr. Sun has been teaching Mandarin at the college level for ten years and has a particular interest in using authentic materials in her language lessons. Authentic materials, including films and other popular media, allow her to bring Chinese attitudes and values directly to her students in the form of everyday spoken and written language, images and even behaviors (as depicted in films or television programs). In this context, the classic novel Hongloumeng offers almost limitless opportunities to expose students to Chinese culture. 

 

To begin with, Dr. Sun has adapted stories from the original text as a way of building students’ vocabulary of terms and key cultural concepts such as, for example, “qing.” She has found that this complicated idea can be helpfully compared to some fundamental cultural terms in English, such as desire, emotion or feeling (all of which are reasonable translations of qing), as a basis for understanding both commonalities as well as differences between  how Chinese and English speakers understand its role in human life and relationships. Of course, understanding a concept like “qing” would be very difficult without the backdrop of as rich a narrative as the novel offers for students to begin even considering how it is portrayed and understood by Chinese speakers. 

 

Dr. Patterson’s interest in Hongloumeng began when he assigned it to a senior seminar in 2015 as part of their capstone experience in the “Great Books” program at Shimer College (which has since become the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College). Like many great books curriculums, Shimer’s has long been centered more on “western” texts from the civilization that developed around the Mediterranean and thence in Europe and the Americas. But Dr. Patterson’s introduction of Hongloumeng to his seniors signaled an ongoing revision of the Shimer School’s curriculum to include more and more of the literature, art, music and other aspects of the civilizations of Asia and particularly of China, Japan and India. 

 

For Dr. Patterson, the experience of reading Hongloumeng for the first time with his senior seminar was a revelation, not just of the richness of this work in particular, but of the possibilities for introducing abstruse philosophical and religious ideas and related cultural attitudes, values and patterns of behavior that might otherwise remain relatively lifeless. His partnership with Sun Laoshi in researching and teaching Hongloumeng arose from their recognition of the mutual support they could offer each other in developing students’ insights into key Chinese cultural concepts (from her side) through the uniquely broad but finely-grained humanistic appeal of Hongloumeng as a preeminent work of world literature (from his side). 

 

In 2020, Dr. Sun and Dr. Patterson published a short article on their work to date in developing teaching strategies involving Hongloumeng in both language and literature courses based largely on their 2019 grant from ASIANetwork. Currently, they are at work on an popular volume that would help introduce Hongloumeng to general audiences beyond college classrooms. Across the Spring 2021 semester, they are teaching an undergraduate seminar on “Two Chinese Novels” that compares Hongloumeng to another of China’s four “great” classic narratives, namely Xiyouji or Journey to the West, the story of the Monkey King Sun Wu Kong and his pilgrimage to help bring Buddhist scriptures to China in the 9th century. In the summer of 2021, Dr. Sun and Dr. Patterson will extend this work in a STARTALK summer institute designed to train high school teachers of Mandarin in how to use classic Chinese narratives in their own language classrooms.

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