A hard day's weekend

I am a cheat.

For the past five days, I have been watching my two boys, ages 3 and 6, while their mother was working on an EPA research ship on Lake Ontario. When not cooking, cleaning, begging and pleading, I was reading—or driving. So with the weekend ticking away, I downloaded Joy Luck Club and listened to parts via my mobile telephone. Much like when Peter Sellers reads the Beatles’ A Hard Days Night, the entire experience of the book changed.

There were some advantages. The Chinese words were pronounced correctly, which was extremely helpful during periods of the book set in China—especially in A Pair of Tickets when Jing-Wei Woo explains how different cities are now called by different names, or pronounced slightly differently. Additionally, because different actors read for different characters throughout the book, it was sometimes easier to recall them—though this might partly be due to my unfamiliarity with Chinese names.

For the large part, however, listening to the novel marred its magic, and I felt new, mostly bad things about familiar characters. Chess prodigy Waverly Jong, for instance, grows up to sound like a nasty, sarcastic brat, and the actor puzzlingly plays her with a stereotypical San Fernando Valley accent. (Waverly is a valley girl?) Many of the American/Americanized characters started to sound like fools—crass, clumsy, superficial and soulless. Also, children and teens, unless told from their narrative point of view, came off as artificial and trite.

Sometimes the text became more difficult to follow, but I was driving, so I refused to rewind. Recalling quotes for this blog entry became a lost cause. It was more difficult to recognize shifts in Tan’s writing style, and to uncover symbols and themes. The only themes I could connect with were those that I had previously uncovered by reading. And oh my, listening takes much longer!

Still, the experience gave me something to consider, another tool to use in the classroom. Perhaps I can use audio books to recap material read outside of class for learners who struggle with reading. Or maybe it better demonstrates to learners how differently people perceive and interpret texts. But for my own reading, I’ll stick to the old fashioned way.