Harry Potter: The Boy Who Transcends Cultures

I think the only people in the industrialized world who don’t know that the final installment of the Harry Potter series of books came out this past weekend were those who were on vacation somewhere else in the solar system. It’s the biggest hype I’ve ever seen for a book release, and it reminded me a bit of accounts of the hoopla that surrounded the ending of some of Dickens’s serialized novels. In those days, people thronged the the docks of New York, screaming out plot questions to the passengers on ships coming into port from England, where the ending had already been released.

Thanks to technology, this weekend all I had to do was to log on to the Internet and look at European sites to find out how the saga ended. I didn’t. I was stoic. I knew my book would be arriving Saturday morning, and I was determined to just read it for myself and experience it. So I did. I admit it, I sat and read the book pretty much all in one sitting, with a few breaks to do some light housework when my eyes burned and my tush was sore from sitting too long.

No spoilers, I promise. But as the world has come to the end of the Potter saga (and oddly enough, though I love the series, I found the ending highly satisfying. It is done. Adding more just wouldn’t work), I’d just like to say a few words about a book that has been in my life for the past eight years.

I first met Harry when I lived in Geneva, Switzerland. A friend of mine at the American Library there had been a children’s librarian and still kept up with the new offerings. Ellen Beunderman offered many suggestions to me and my son, most of which we absolutely loved, but none stuck like Harry. In the spring of 1999, we read the English version—Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

When we read the first book, which had been out for about a year—this was right before the outbreak of Pottermania—Harry was ten years old, and my son was eight. The story had resonance for my son, who at the age of eight had just moved to his third country. In his new school, he felt out of place, different, alien almost. We immediately went to the library to pick up the second volume, and from then on, we were hooked. We waited with bated breath for each new volume. Reading them together was a tradition, and we read no matter what. When Goblet of Fire came out, we were in Ireland, and we got our copy there. I remember sitting with my ten-year-old son in the lobby of an Irish hotel, reading aloud to him of Cedric Diggory’s final moments, both of us with tears rolling down our cheeks.

Harry has always been a bond I share most closely with my son, but Harry bonds me to my students as well. No matter where I’ve taught, there have been droves of students who have read Harry. My Taiwanese students and I still share Potter-related e-mails. When The Half Blood Prince came out, one former student told me that the books had become a measure of one’s English ability. The best test of English comprehension was whether one reads the Potter books in English or in Chinese.

I have bought Swedish versions of Harry, French versions of Harry, and even American versions of Harry and shared Hogwarts lore with people all over the world. Yes, American versions. Of course, the major difference between the books is the name of the first volume. In England, it’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (as it should be). In the US, they changed the title to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, afraid that American children wouldn’t know the legend of the Philosopher’s Stone (like English 10 year olds would?).

Because I have lived in Europe for all these years, I have always read the English editions published by Bloomsbury. For this book, I read the American edition published by Scholastic. At one point, I had to stop reading, lost and confused. Hermione was discussing the Sorcerer’s Stone! That was just wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. That was the most jarring moment for me in the entire book. I know I’m going to have to read the English edition now, to see the differences.

The Harry Potter series has been a phenomenon, there’s no doubt about it. Is the book a literary classic that I will be reading with my grandchildren or grand-nieces and nephews? I don’t know. Some of the books I loved in my childhood bored my son. Some he loved. Only time will tell, and there is no such thing as an instant classic, in spite of what the marketing people tell us. I suspect that my son’s generation will keep the books alive for the next generation, but who can tell? Although I’m a literary critic by training, I don’t want to analyze the books that way here.

I do want to look at how the books have brought joy and happiness to people in countries all over the world. To date, they have been translated into 65 languages (including Hindi, Bengali and Vietnamese—and the first volume is available in Latin and Ancient Greek in case you’re interested) and 320 million copies of the series are in print. On some levels, the series is a simple tale of good versus evil—no different from many of our classic tales. It’s also the story of a boy growing up—when the final book starts, Harry is a mere seven months older than my son. Throughout, all the growing steps that Harry has gone through have been perfectly timed to coincide with the same things happening with my son. Obviously JK Rowling knows kids.

And not just English kids. Harry speaks to so many different cultures that there must be a lesson for us, no? There must be many similarities between children in much of the industrialized world. No, I would say all the world. Sure, there are differences. No one knows that better than I do. But as much as I write about differences, in my life I like to focus on the similarities. Harry has been a bonding experience for so many kids and adults that it gives me hope in a world where there appears to be so few reasons for hope. This summer, my students are a mixed bag of ethnicities, but Friday morning, many of us were united in our fever pitch curiosity about how it would end. Discussing the book (when we should have been doing something else, I admit) made me feel closer to them than I have all summer. But how can we not be close when we share a love?

And that’s one of the reasons that Harry transcends cultures. We all love him and the world created in the books, and where there’s love, there is power, the greatest power imaginable. That’s one lesson Dumbledore would be very happy that I learned. And Voldemort just doesn’t get it.

Cheating drives me nuts!

Sorry I’ve been AWOL again.  I wrote a bunch of stuff and wanted to spread it out, and then I got caught up in this summer’s teaching and lost track.  But here’s something I really have been wanting to sound off about.  So here you go:

I’d like to interrupt these cultural musings with something on cheating.  As long as there have been students, there has been academic cheating, but the Internet has brought cheating up to a whole new level.  It seems that in every course I teach, I find at least one cheater, usually many more.

I can threaten, I can cajole, I can yell, and I can throw the little buggers out of my class, but it doesn’t seem to help.  My department in Sweden makes the students sign a contract that they won’t cheat.  Doesn’t help.  They all know it’s wrong, of course.  How could they miss that fact?

Recently, I had a student who wrote about it.  This is quoted from a paper by Shelly Lin, one of my Taiwanese students from Fu Jen Catholic University:  “According to a  survey, more than 60% of college students have cheated and 72% of them don’t feel bad about cheating, which means that college students have already accepted cheating as a normal phenomenon during exams.  In the mean time, the main problem of cheating is that almost every student regards cheating as a common situation in the colleges; no one  is willing  to expose it. However, according to the campus rules, cheating actually could be punished seriously and the cheaters could even  be expelled from school. But the problem is that no one takes it seriously.  No one believes that they would be really punished by the rules if caught cheating. In other words, the major suspect to foster the cheating behavior is school’s supervisors. They don’t implement the campus rules seriously. As a result, students take it for granted and don’t care about those punishments. So loose control from the supervisors of campus abets the fashion of cheating.”

OK, maybe there are some teachers out there who don’t care about cheating.  But I haven’t met them yet.  All of my colleagues are vigilant about it.  And most of us take it quite personally when we catch someone cheating in our classes.  I always ask, “I’m sorry, but how stupid do you think I am?”  I always see a student cheating as an insult to my intelligence.  Did they think I wouldn’t notice they had copied?

In the past weeks, I’ve been finishing grading for the semester, and I found the experience rather disheartening.  Far too many students had cheated by copying other people’s homework.  When I called them on it, many wrote me quite indignant that I would accuse them of cheating.  Hm, the homework, which called for some imagination on their part, was identical, down to the typos, to that of other students’  on-line work handed in earlier.  How did I know who handed in the work first?  I asked that the engineer check the uploading times.  This is computer technology we’re talking here.  Getting a date  and time stamp is the easiest thing in the world.

How stupid is it to cheat on exercises?  On homework that is solely for their own benefit and is only worth 1 or 2% of their final grade?  I won’t go into the spiel on how cheating only hurts the cheater and yadda yadda yadda.  You all know that.  But it has me wondering.

Why cheat?  Why not cheat is more the question for too many people.  One of my favorite soap boxes is that we’re living in the beginning of the end of Liberal Humanistic Civilization (a mouthful, I know, but the only other option is Western Civilization, and that’s not quite it, either).  The metaphorical Huns are coming.  This doesn’t bother me, per se.  Jerusalem fell, Babylon fell, Greece fell, Rome fell.  Hell, the Soviet Union fell.  That’s what civilizations do after a while.  People move on, life progresses or changes and history keeps going.  That’s natural, and it would be hubris for us to think that our civilization would survive when others could not.   What makes us special?

And change doesn’t have to be for the worse.  Greece supplanted Rome, but both had good points.  Change doesn’t mean decay, it just means change.  But changes happened because people didn’t worry or care about the society’s standards anymore.  One of my favorite quotes that I give to students is a paraphrase of Edith Hamilton, the great scholar of Roman civilization.  I don’t have the exact quote, but she said something like Romans wanted freedom and responsibility, but when they wanted freedom from responsibility, Rome fell.

When people want life to be easy, effortless and fun, and they are over five years old, they are asking for trouble.  I’m not saying life should be miserable.  I love fun!  But I also appreciate challenge and hard work.  There is satisfaction gained in pushing one’s self, on straining, on reaching.  On accomplishing something we never thought we could do through the sweat of our brow, metaphorical or physical.  And far too many people today have forgotten this.

It makes me sad that so many students opt to take the easy path.  And I refuse to lower my standards or stop my vigilance.  Of course, I do feel as if I’m fighting a losing battle, but I also feel that I’m fighting the good fight, doing my bit to keep “Civilization” limping along for a bit longer.  It’s not that I’m not curious about seeing what will come next.  What will become the new dominant civilization in the West?  No, I want to know.  But the sticking point is that the transitional times between great civilizations have never been so great.  Wars, famine, slaughter, confusion, those are the keywords of civilizations clashing.  That’s not so interesting.  It’s like the old chestnut goes: everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die.

All this because some students insulted me by cheating.  Ah, the thoughts they unleash when they do that. I bet they would never guess.

Some random observations while traveling through America

Now that I’ve been in the US for three weeks, I’ve been able to make some further random observations.

• I found the fat people. Yes, there are a lot of them. Huge people like I’ve literally not seen in Europe who come in very odd shapes. It scares me into eating better, and so far I’ve lost six pounds, so this is good.

• A lot of people eat junk I wouldn’t feed my dog. Every time I go into the stores, I’m amazed at what is being sold to Americans as food. Yes, there has been junk food in every country I’ve ever lived in, but I do believe that most of it at least was a real food product. The level of artificial flavor, color and sweeteners in snack food aimed at kids is alarming.

• America is woefully behind Europe in public transportation. Too many places just plain don’t have a transport system, and traveling around the US on train is a total joke. Believe me, I’ve tried it.

• Of course, gas for my car in Sweden is close to $8/gal rather than the $3 here, so I am more than willing to use buses, but Hel-lo??? Bad planning or what? Didn’t the energy crisis of the early 70s teach us anything? We’ve had thirty years to build better public transportation. Dropped the ball on that one.

• I think I have figured out why so many Americans don’t pay attention to what’s going on in this country. They are too busy trying to decide which brand/flavor/variety to buy. I’ve written about choices before, but just trying to find laundry detergent the other day took me about seven minutes! I know I sound like a curmudgeon (or an idiot) here, but I still get overwhelmed when I go to the Walmart or the “Super Center” grocery stores. They are bigger than some of the schools my son has attended! It is literally overwhelming for me. (You can find past columns on choice here and here.)

• Too many people drive gas guzzlers. Not only can they not take a bus if they wanted to, their cars are huge! Why? Everybody over here is talking about global warming, but from what I see, there’s a lot of people talking but not acting.

• Lest I sound like a Euro-snob, let me say this. I was green when I lived in the US to the point of being a shade fanatical. Before my son was born I agonized for months over disposable vs. cloth diapers. I went with cloth after reading that people on the west coast, where there was a lot of drought problem, should use disposable. People on the east coast with landfill problems should use cloth. The environmental impact is about equal, just different. So a lot of the time I let my kid outside in his bare butt. Unfortunately, I seemed to have created a monster who prefers being nekkid. Not a good thing now that he’s 16.

On the road again–via bus

I’ve been furiously grading papers for the end of spring term, so even though I’ve been making lots of observations, I’ve no time to write them down.

But this week I have inadvertently given myself much fodder for the blog. I had been in Tennessee visiting my mother, and I have to be in Schenectady, NY for a summer job. Because I have two large suitcases, no car and little money, I decided to take Greyhound bus from TN to NY. What an education!

I regularly took the bus when I was in college, but that was mostly trips under four hours. This trip is 25 hours in total. I’m on the final leg, NYC’s Port Authority to Albany, right now. I’ve discovered a very different group of people on this bus. For New York City residents, many of whom don’t own cars, the bus is an easy way to get upstate. My fellow passengers are a collection of students and business people, as well as vacationers, I’d guess. The relative wealth is palpable.

But on the two earlier legs of my journey, the lack of wealth was what was palpable. I only saw one other person with a laptop computer, and I pegged him as a student. I never took mine out of my bag. Not only did I not want to call attention to it, there was no room to do so. The bus was packed at all times. I found that pretty surprising.

I don’t know anyone who travels by bus, therefor, bus travel must be uncommon. Stupid assumption, I know.

As travel companions, my fellow bus riders were a very nice group of people, unfailingly polite and friendly. But I realize we just come from very different worlds. All of my middle class buttons about health and nutrition were being pushed. It was killing me seeing women smoking around their babies and giving the little kids HiC drink and PopTarts for breakfast. Or even worse, orange soda and Doritos. I admit that I used to let standards slip when traveling with my young son, but I would make sure I had pure juice for him to drink and fresh fruit or raisins. As a teacher, I know the difference good nutrition makes for children. As much as I love sugar and sweets, I know that pure sugar and artificial flavors and colors are pretty much poison for developing brains.

But better nutrition costs more money, and my guess is that the money wasn’t there. And if money wasn’t the issue, the stops we made for food didn’t really offer the healthiest choices. This morning for breakfast, for instance, we had the choice of Kentucky Fried Chicken, pizza or a little shop that offered varieties of soda, juice drinks, cakes, pastries, chips and cereal bars. I’m feeling a little queasy remembering it. I got milk, but I really had to struggle to find something else I would, or could, eat. My days of pizza breakfasts are sadly far in the past!

Then there was the waiting. As much as I complain about airports, and I do complain about them, let me tell you, they are lovely compared to most bus stations I’ve been in on this trip. Most were dingy looking, smelly, understaffed and crowded. Buses are all open seating, so people line up incredibly early for boarding. In Richmond, Virginia, I stood on line for over an hour just waiting. And what amazed me was how patient the people were, or was that docile? I can not imagine the complaints I’d be listening to if people in airports had to stand at the gate for over an hour before boarding time. No, at airport gates there are chairs and clean carpets and delicious food stalls.

When I was waiting to transfer planes in Chicago a few weeks ago, I was grumpy because I couldn’t find something I wanted to eat. There was a McDonald’s, a Chili’s grill, a Greek diner-type food stand, a bakery/coffee stand and some snack stalls with chips, soda and candy. Am I spoiled? At the bus station there was a coffee stand and a food stand selling soda, ice cream and candy. At inflated prices, I might add. Most of my fellow travelers, veterans of the long-haul bus circuit, I’d guess, had coolers of food with them. Luckily I had brought drinks, fruit, some nuts and some granola bars. Mom offered to make me some sandwiches, but I said no as I had too much to carry. Dumb move. I was thinking of mom’s sandwiches after a while! Next time I know better.

I thought at least I could get some work done on the bus, but then I realized that I couldn’t use the laptop. That was ok, I still had a book. Oops, motion sickness, something that only bothers me in cars, and oh yeah, buses. In the 20 years since I’ve taken the bus, I’d forgotten that. So mostly I slept and listened to a recorded book I’d put on my Mp3. And I was one of the few people with an Mp3 on the trip. Most people had CD players or nothing. One man I traveled with from Tennessee to NY who was going on to Massachusetts had no music, no book, no newspaper even. He just talked to whoever sat next to him or slept. I ended up sleeping a lot, which was good for me and made the trip go faster.

I did talk to one seat mate, a young man of 17 about to go to basic training for the Navy. He was from Johnson City, TN and was returning to a trip to visit his cousin in Nashville. The only other big city he’d been in had been Washington, DC, which he hadn’t liked. He said the people there were mean. When he learned I was from Sweden, sort of, he had a million questions. When he learned I’ve lived in four countries and my son is fluent in three languages because he went to school in those languages, he was envious because he’d only left Tennessee once in his life. I told him my son would envy him his stability. He replied, “Is he crazy? Any time he wants to trade places, I’m ready.” He’s right, of course. My son would be crazy to trade the opportunities and experiences he’s had.

As uncomfortable as parts of it were, I am not ruling out traveling by bus again. It was much cheaper than flying and even cheaper than driving myself. It was certainly the greenest way I could have covered over 1000 miles of road. And now I know what to expect.

It was great to see a side of America I am losing touch with, if I ever was in touch with it. Sometimes I feel sorry for myself because I’m so broke. Last week’s trip was a real eye opener into just how lucky I am.