Way back in junior high school, I had read an article which profiled the skill sets of students admitted into Ivy League universities, most notably Harvard and Yale. It was determined that a significant number of Ivy bound American kids had learned Mandarin, a language that was, as the article conveyed, reserved for only the smartest of youngsters, those shining stars who had been destined for academic elitism since birth. As I had perceived it, Mandarin- like Harvard or Yale- was definitely not in the cards for people like me.

But, truth be told, my preteen life was showing signs of hope. I’d moved up in the world, no longer confined to the “retard room” with a thick stack of gray tracing paper, a gum-slapping aide and a hydroencephalitic boy who drooled constantly. In fact, I’d been placed into a gifted program, where I was instead encouraged to dream up inventions, classify rocks, and attempt socializing with a few other “special” youngsters. I was also scribbling poems, reams of them, for in-class recitation. Still, I was a gangly, left-handed thumb-sucker and a behavioral nightmare from a broken, chaotic home in an isolated town. I was also attempting to compensate, in the worst ways possible, for a learning hurdle which was initially known as “she can’t write” and much later revealed to me as “a form of dyslexia.” No way would I ever go to college. No way would I learn Chinese.

In 2010, most of us hopefully know that those who are labeled learning-disabled or behaviorally challenged- whether it be autism, ADHD, dyslexia, OCD, etc.- aren’t necessarily “dummies” or “disabled” at all. In many cases, it’s just the opposite. For instance, one family relative of mine has Aspergers, and while he may not be able to hold down a good job or lengthy conversation at this point in his life (although I believe otherwise), he can take apart your entire computer and put it back together again with incredible speed. He is, by some measures, a genius. So, it is 2010, and we are evolved, aware human beings now, right? Back in the late 1980s, not so much.

High school, as the saying goes, was torture. By eleventh grade I was batting straight Fs, earned the most in-school suspensions in my class, and had already enjoyed a vacation at a boot camp for troubled youth. Things quickly went from bad to worse. By senior year, I’d been kicked out of my father’s house and was informed quite directly that I would likely not graduate with my class- or at all…
It took one random person to believe otherwise- a retired teacher who single-handedly pulled me toward that diploma- and my life began to turn around. Under his tutelage, I developed new systems of learning in the quiet of a library while being encouraged to focus less on my shortcomings and more on my strengths. Against the odds, I graduated with my high school class while living independent of my parents and working full-time. Still, college was definitely not happening. And Chinese? I’d probably have better luck digging a hole to Beijing.

As life would have it, I made it to college- albeit a few years later than some of my peers and not without bumps along the way- excelling across the board while working as a bartender and writing tutor in Manhattan. The irony. It was in college, at a public university, that I decided to give the “Ivy-league only” Mandarin Chinese a try- a language that had appealed to me as kaleidoscopic symphony, an opera of angles and lines. And, much like the poetry I had grown up reading and reciting, Mandarin felt instantly right. It calmed anxieties, fueled curiosity and, within my personal framework of learning, made perfect sense. Sure, Mandarin was very difficult for me- I’m still struggling to learn it. But, I could never say the same about French. French was impossible. Eventually, I made the move to China and then, to grad school. In Mandarin, as in poetry, I had finally found my own path through memory, cadence and tone. Through the rhythm of a character.

Much like other common learning disabilities, dyslexics are visual thinkers who have a unique relationship to sound and an ability to perceive using all of the senses. Right-brained people in general are known to be visual-spatial learners- unfortunately, they are also the ones who most frequently live with negative labels attached to their minds. It is also often said that dyslexics have great difficulty processing language. But, if you consider it another way, that assumption would have to depend solely on the context in which “language” is defined. For instance, if language is conveyed in rhythm and metaphor- like it is in Dickinson’s “Hope is a Thing of Feathers,”- a dyslexic or other learning-disabled person may come away with a very rich and uncommon understanding of the poem itself. I would also argue that the same applies with Chinese- a language revealed in a series of logographs, delivered like a poem or a song.

If it wasn’t for that retired high-school teacher who had encouraged the exploration of possibility instead of insisting that I be and do like everyone else, I probably never would have made it to college. Come to think of it, I probably wouldn’t have made it to thirty. And, if it wasn’t for gravitating toward two unlikely subjects- Mandarin and poetry- I certainly wouldn’t have continued on to China, to grad school and… at some point in the future… hopefully…a doctorate. I love learning now. Lately, I’ve been thinking about this narrative a lot- it is one that has managed to define my life before, now, and after. In doing so, I often find myself considering the kids out there today who, even in 2010, may find themselves living under names like “learning disabled” or “special” or “dumb” or “crazy” or “hopeless.” Where will they end up? Will they all be as fortunate as I have been?

It is more than apparent that we need to boost our Mandarin programs in this country. But, who are the BEST candidates to actually grasp the language and stick with it? Is it the so-called Ivy League-bound Einsteins hidden away at $40,000 a year prep schools? Or, the overachieving math whizzes in Sucktown, USA? Or, could it be the kid with Aspergers or dyslexia or autism- the kid who thinks in pictures and remembers in pitch? I don’t have the answer, nor could I find a single study examining the correlation between right-brained, so-called learning disabled individuals and their ability to comprehend Mandarin or at least, their ability to like studying it (the second point- to like Mandarin- is very important). What if we threw those kids a few Chinese characters instead of simplifying their options both in school and in life? What if we gave it a shot, the old college try? What if we’re confusing ineptitude with aptitude?

Who knows what’s possible?

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Update 2/2/10

There appears to be some promise to my tentative conclusion. Check out this study from 1971, “American Children with Reading Problems Can Easily Learn to Read English Represented by Chinese Characters”. It is, however, the only concrete research that I’ve been able to find so far. Dissertation, anyone?

Commentary Aspergers, autism, Chinese, dyslexia, high school, Language, learning, learning disability, Mandarin

Saul Gitlin (冀碩臨)- Executive Vice-President of top rated Asia-focused multicultural advertising agency Kang & Lee, founder of a popular LinkedIn group for Chinese-speaking professionals, mentor to budding Sinophiles, gifted storyteller and a scholar in his own right- is approaching thirty years of connection to China. I sat down with Mr. Gitlin, who is currently working on a memoir about his early years in China, to learn more about a life transformed beginning with a Mandarin class. Part II of this two-part interview details his career in domestic Asia-focused multicultural marketing, his LinkedIn group Chinese-Speaking and China-Experienced Business Executives, the similarities between learning Chinese and American Sign Language, and what it means to shape one’s profession around a particular theme- China. Part I highlights Saul Gitlin’s initial ties to the Middle Kingdom. To learn more about Mr. Gitlin’s journey and a life transformed by China, read on…

Career Roots…
“[Following seven years in China] I was accepted at Columbia for my MBA, but deferred for a year to spend more time with a woman I had met in Israel, who later became my wife. I said to her, “I’ll come back to Israel and hang out with you while you finish your degree as long as you come back to the US with me so that I can do my MBA,” and that’s exactly what happened. I went to Columbia and did my MBA full-time while my wife worked on her doctorate in psychology here, and then I spent a couple of years doing freelance consulting work. At that time, I knew that I had to put down some career roots and that we needed to be in New York. The year before I came to Kang & Lee, I said to myself, “I’ve spent my whole career in marketing to Asians and I’ve just done an MBA focused on marketing and I love this career path but how can I do it without moving back to China?” At that point, I was married, my wife was doing her degree, and I had a son. That led me directly into discovering this world of domestic multicultural marketing and once I identified that as a career possibility, I made a beeline for both the agencies and the clients that were focused on marketing to Asian-Americans. At a certain point, I made contact with Eliot Kang, the man who founded Kang & Lee. He didn’t respond to me immediately, but quite a few months after I initially reached out to him, I received a phone message from him which led to several conversations and eventually an offer to join him as a member of the executive management at Kang & Lee to run strategic planning and corporate communications for the agency. That was in 1997. I then went on to build my career as a multicultural marketing strategist. Kang & Lee is the number one ranked Asian multicultural marketing, consulting and communications agency in the United States, ranked #1 by “Advertising Age” among all Asian multicultural agencies.”

Chinese-Speaking and China-Experienced Business Executives…
“About a year ago, I decided to get active on LinkedIn. My first thought was that using the site might ultimately bring other opportunities. But, I rapidly discovered that LinkedIn was a very useful tool for other things, like learning more about a potential business client and preparing better for meetings. So, increasingly I started to use LinkedIn during my daytime work. In the spirit of getting active, I looked into joining some of their networking groups. I noticed that there were a lot of “China” groups- there’s “Overseas Chinese Group,” “Chinese Investment Group,” lots of China finance groups… There were many China specialty groups. But, I was searching for something else based on the way I define my career and the way I work with clients across many disciplines. I was searching for a group that I couldn’t find. So, I wanted to build a group of people who really value an important definition of who they are professionally as being “China people” versus people of a specific industry or function. There is not a small number of people like me in the world. The common thread for the group had to be superior Chinese language skills and China work experience. I thought that such a community would allow a very vibrant discussion about China while providing fertile territory for career opportunities. [I imagined] that we could have open discussions on politics, Chinese poetry, current events, Chinese economy, finance, marketing, whatever. But, the group would be a way to embrace everybody who sees themselves as a “China person” regardless of what their functional expertise is. I could not find a group that already did that, so I established one.
I established this group called “Chinese-Speaking and China-Experienced Business Executives” in July 2008. I gave it a Chinese name (中国通) because I felt like the use of the Chinese language was something that I wanted to promote in the group. I assumed that I would attract non-Asian people, but I also hoped and expected that I would attract a lot of ethnic Chinese professionals both from China and from all over the world. The name 中国通 is typically a designation applied to non-Chinese who have exhibited some mastery of Chinese language and culture, although in my group 中国通 are also Chinese business executives; at least half of my members are Chinese nationals themselves.
Once we had critical mass, I could start to see the group taking off on its own; I was getting 15-20 people interested in membership per day. I take the management of the group very seriously. It is designed for people who have the skills expressed in the title. Today the group now has almost 3,400 members; it is the largest group on LinkedIn using the keyword “Chinese” in the title. In my group, all the members are qualified to be there and come from all over the world. They’ve all been screened by me. There are two exceptions I make for accepting new members. The first is that I will allow students to join the group if they already have China experience or if they write to me to say that they are pursuing a career in China. As part of my own offline career, I take the mentoring of students very seriously and I want to encourage people starting out to get bitten by the China bug. The second exception is recruiters. I will admit any corporate recruiter sitting inside a major company because they are interested in getting China-capable talent. It’s all about opportunities for the core group members.”

Mandarin and American Sign Language…
“I’m currently studying American Sign Language (ASL). There are a lot of similarities between ASL and Chinese. ASL is not English done with hand signs; it has its own grammar with its own rules and a lot of the question formation structures and overall syntax are very similar to ways of saying things in Chinese. As I’m trying to learn ASL, I find that my brain is naturally going into Chinese mode as I form sentences in sign language. Whether its the use of particles at the end of phrases that express questions or the way you use prepositions, there are a lot of things that feel very familiar to Chinese. The second thing is that learning signs for ASL is like learning Chinese characters. Some of them are very iconic and look like what they mean- which is the case with some Chinese characters- but most are more stylized and originally had pictographic roots but evolved into something more abstract which must be learned by rote memorization. Seeing a sign, practicing it and committing it to memory- this is the exact process of learning Chinese characters. You can naturally apply that process to learning signs, except that you are doing it with your hands instead of taking pen to paper. So, in terms of the grammatical aspects as well as the process for acquiring abstract signs, I feel very predisposed for learning ASL. That was an insight that I came into on my own, but when I started asking educators in the ASL community about my observation, several have said that this is known and has been discussed among academic circles. People who know Chinese have an easier time acquiring American sign language.”

China as a Career…
“It’s been twenty-nine years since I first started studying Chinese; [I just turned 47]. People often say to me, “how did you have that vision?” One side of me wants to say, “I’m just a smart guy.” But really, I came into it because of my love for language and it just so happened that I focused on Mandarin, the hot country, the big business opportunity. My language skills and my knowledge of China have opened almost every door that I’ve knocked on. If you look at my resume, you’ll see that I was involved in all kind of things. Some people think that I’ve really jumped all over the place- from the hospitality industry to plastics production to telecommunications to advertising. They ask, “where’s the thread here?” Maybe most people define their career in terms of, “I’m a banker,” or “I’m an insurance agent,” or “I’m a telecom guy.” I define my career another way. My career is defined by China, by Chinese, by Asia. For me, the industries are quite incidental. One of the things that I really enjoy about the marketing communications industry and more specifically, the role that I’m in now, is that I get to develop strong competencies in a variety of industries. I’m sitting on strategic issues for my insurance clients, my telecom clients, my automotive clients… When you work with some of these [diverse types of] clients over a period of years, you really learn a lot.
I am part of a generation of people- and I think it’s growing- who are not defining their careers based on a specific industry but rather on a strong and very important competency that can cross industries and disciplines.”

This concludes Part II of a two-part interview with Saul Gitlin (冀碩臨). If you’ve missed Part I, click here. Mr. Gitlin is Executive Vice-President of Kang & Lee Advertising and Founder of the LinkedIn group, “Chinese-Speaking and China-Experienced Business Executives.” To learn more about his professional background, please visit his LinkedIn profile.

Interviews American Sign Language, china, Interviews, Kang & Lee, Mandarin, saul gitlin