Foreign students protest working conditions at PA McDonald's.

Via the Wall Street Journal and others comes news of foreign student workers protesting conditions at the Harrisburg McDonald's at which they were placed through agencies under the auspices of the Exchange Visitor Program:

This week, [Argentine college student Jorge] and 14 other foreign students demonstrated outside a McDonald's after filing complaints with the State Department and Labor Department saying they were exploited at fast-food outlets in the Harrisburg, Penn., area and housed in substandard conditions. The students were on a three-month J-1 visa for work and travel.

. . .

The students in Harrisburg, including those from Malaysia, China, Peru and Chile, said they were attracted by ads on their university bulletin boards and websites, such as one by a company called Out of the Box Personal Development in Kuala Lumpur, touting "a unique opportunity to live life in the USA—up close and personal!"

Lee Siew Yeen, a director for Out of the Box, said she was surprised by the complaints and would reach out to the students. "There was a housing issue. Other than that they weren't going through anything that was different from other students," she said. "They were pretty happy."

On arrival, the university students were assigned to one of three McDonald's in the Harrisburg area. Some said they were given so few hours that they hardly earned any money after their boss and landlord deducted rent from their paychecks. Others said they were forced to work shifts as long as 25 hours straight without being paid for overtime.

"Since I got to the States, I have been working just to pay to live in a basement," says Mr. Rios, who arrived in mid-December and shares the one-room space with five other foreigners who work at the same outlet. He said he worked about 25 hours a week earning $7.25 an hour and Mr. Cheung, his boss, deducted weekly rent of $75 from his pay.

Let the Bullets Fly (让子弹飞) at IUP, March 13.

The second installment of Indiana University of Pennsylvania's Asian Studies Club Film Festival is the Chinese movie Let the Bullets Fly (让子弹飞, Ràng Zǐ Dàn Fēi) on March 13. The Harris Theater summarized, when it was in Pittsburgh last summer:

Since its release this action-comedy-thriller has been lauded for its stunning mix of dark humor and eye-popping violence. Starring Chow Yun-Fat, it's become the highest-grossing film of all time in China. Set in 1920s Sichuan, it tells the tale of the bandit "Pocky" Zhang Mazi, who poses as a local governor in a dusty town, but finds himself at odds with the local mobster, who is not eager to share his turf with another drifter. A complex and deadly series of mind-games ensues between the two crooks, which are as violent as they are hilarious.

It will be shown in room 233 Keith Hall (campus map) at 7:00 pm, and is free and open to the public.

Chatham College students posing in Japanese costumes, 1923, for a May Day performance. From the Chatham University Archives Image Collection:

The Japanese dance group poses in their costumes and their performance hair and make-up. The 1923 May Day pageant featured a number of episodes from varying cultures and historical traditions. Part I, titled the "Birth of May Day" included dances by the allegorical figures of Night, Dawn, the Sun, and Spring among others. Part II centered on the "Coronation of the May Queen," senior Marion Jobson, and Part III, titled "Entertainment of the Queen," featured a wizard, a Roman Spring procession, an Egyptian episode, a Grecian episode, a Normandy folk dance, an English folk dance, a Japanese episode, “poses from old prints,” and a cherry blossom dance.

Emperor opens March 8 at Squirrel Hill's Manor Theater.

The movie Emperor, starring Tommy Lee Jones as Douglas MacArthur and dealing with the question of trying Emperor Hirohito as a war criminal following World War II, opens nationwide tomorrow and will be in Pittsburgh at Squirrel Hill's Manor Theater.

As General Douglas MacArthur (Jones) suddenly finds himself the de facto ruler of a foreign nation, he assigns an expert in Japanese culture - General Bonner Fellers (Fox), to covertly investigate the looming question hanging over the country: should the Japanese Emperor, worshiped by his people but accused of war crimes, be punished or saved?

The City Paper didn't really care for it--[it] "might have been informative and even provocative, but winds up being a lackluster, unsatisfying affair."---and it's doubtful 100 minutes of pop history will do justice to a question with lingering implications today.

The Manor Theater's page has showtimes for Friday and the weekend.

City Paper on Pittsburghers teaching English in Korea.

This week's Pittsburgh City Paper looks at locals who have gone overseas to teach English as a Foreign Language in South Korea.

Applicants do not have to have any teaching experience, but they must have earned a bachelor's degree in some field from an accredited university.

Monthly salaries vary by Korean province and the metropolitan area teachers are placed in. [English Program in Korea]'s site shows the minimum salary is about $1,700 per month. Salaries rise for applicants with teaching experience and for those with advanced degrees.

"The benefits of coming here are great. You make a good salary and have good vacation time. EPIK also pays for your plane ticket, gives you starting money and a furnished apartment that is rent-free," [Megan] Rees [of McKees Rocks] wrote in an email interview. "Americans living in Korea pay no taxes for two years and get the pension deductions from their paycheck back when they leave Korea."

. . .

EPIK teachers sign a one-year contract and have the option to renew. Giegel [of Observatory Hill] is considering signing on for another year. After two years in South Korea, Rees says she has decided to take a job to teach English in Japan beginning in May.

"My dream in life is to travel the world and experience living in different cultures," says Rees. "It gives you the [confidence to start] a new life from scratch, and it teaches you the world is bigger than what you have known growing up."

Even before the "Great Recession", teaching English in Asia has been an attractive option for recent college graduates. There are local chapters of the Japan Exchange and Teaching [JET] Programme, and there are numerous blogs by Pittsburghers in South Korea, including Brian in Jeollanam-do (teacher-turned-columnist) and Good for Man's Health (teacher-turned-bar-owner).

Teaching overseas is a viable short-term option, but in recent years the market has soured for older, experienced teachers who price themselves out of jobs because schools only want to pay young, cheap ones. Conveniently enough, the Korea Herald today has part one of a two-part series on the phasing-out of native-speaker English teachers in South Korea, cuts and shifting priorities that started several years ago.

[Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education] and [Gyeonggi Provincial Office of Education] emphasized that their programs, both started in 2005, were never meant to last.

The English Program in Korea ― similar to the programs run by Seoul and Gyeonggi and South Jeolla provinces, but run in the rest of Korea ― was started in 1995 to enhance English education, and promote cultural understanding. The NETs would work alongside and train English-proficient Korean teachers, who would eventually replace them.

Seoul said the phaseout was ahead of schedule. It placed NETs in all public schools by 2010, two years earlier than planned, and says its Korean staff’s skills have improved dramatically.

SMOE claimed that 95.6 percent of Korean English teachers had “teaching English in English capacity” by the end of 2011, and began to phase out NETs last year.

GEPIK officials said that while the reductions were planned out, the timing was not. However, they said it was entering the next phase ― handing the classes over to English-proficient Korean teachers.

Taiwanese film Three Times (最好的時光) at Maridon Museum, March 25.

Butler's Maridon Museum will show the 2005 Taiwanese film Three Times (最好的時光) on March 25 as part of this year's Spring Film Series. Wikipedia says:

[Three Times] features three chronologically separate stories of love between May and Chen, set in 1911, 1966 and 2005, using the same lead actors, Shu Qi and Chang Chen.

The Maridon is an Asian art museum at 322 N. McKean St. in downtown Butler (map) that presents Asian films from particular countries as part of its spring and fall series. Last year it was China and Vietnam. The show starts at 6:30 and is presented by Dr. William Covey of Slippery Rock University.

Multicultural Night at O'Hara Elementary School, March 14.

If there are children in your family they might enjoy visiting O'Hara Elementary School (map) in the Fox Chapel Area School District for its Multicultural Night on March 14. There will 20 culture booths including Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, and China; a bunch of local performers; and vendors with Turkish, Korean, and Argentinian food. It will run from 5:30 to 8:00 pm at the School Commons Area.

IUP Asian Studies Club Film Festival starts March 6.

On March 3rd the Indiana University of Pennsylvania's Asian Studies Program announced its spring film festival, which will have five movies from March 6 through May 1. The first is Spirited Away (千と千尋の神隠し), a 2001 Japanese animated film playing tomorrow, March 6. Wikipedia sums up its reception:

When released, Spirited Away became the most successful film in Japanese history, grossing over $274 million worldwide. The film overtook Titanic (at the time the top grossing film worldwide) in the Japanese box office to become the highest-grossing film in Japanese history with a $229,607,878 total. Acclaimed by international critics, the film is often considered one of the greatest animated films of all-time [and it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards, the Golden Bear at the 2002 Berlin International Film Festival (tied with Bloody Sunday) and is among the top ten in the BFI list of the 50 films you should see by the age of 14.

Other films include the Chinese action comedy film set in the 20s Let the Bullets Fly (让子弹飞) and the Korean historical drama Hwang Jin Yi (황진이). The movies will be shown in room 233 Keith Hall (campus map) at 7:00 pm, and all are free and open to the public.

As I wrote three weeks ago about the Foreign Film and Music Festival running now, IUP puts on good foreign film series. The best I've seen in western PA was a Korean film festival nearly a decade ago.

CMU International Film Festival tickets now on sale.

A couple days ago tickets for the Carnegie Mellon University International Film Festival: Faces of Media went on sale. It runs from March 21 through April 13, and this year there are 16 films plus a short film competition. Relevant to this site is Crocodile on the Yangtze and Sushi: A Global Catch.

"A Critical Discourse Analysis of Li Yang's 'Crazy English': A Look at the English Movement in Mainland China" at Pitt, March 6.

Those on or around the University of Pittsburgh's campus, and with an interest in Asian English as a Foreign Language [EFL] studies, might be interested in Rachel McTernan's March 6 presentation "A Critical Discourse Analysis of Li Yang's 'Crazy English': A Look at the English Movement in Mainland China". McTernan is an MA Candidate in East Asian Studies, and "Crazy English" is a variety of EFL education in China designed by Li Yang in which "students practice his technique by going behind buildings or on rooftops and shouting English" as an alternative to the rigidity of rote memorization and teaching-for-tests. It got some exposure around here during the Beijing Olympics; here's a bit of one of his gatherings:



Personally I've never been a fan of it as a serious educational tool. English is rendered ridiculous in a lot of Asian EFL contexts already, and encouraging students to shout it and divorce it further from reality only amplifies the gulf between English as a subject and English as a language. One of the shortcomings of conversation courses in many East Asian classrooms is the lack of authentic models: whether it's awkward textbook dialogues, or teachers overexaggerating cadence and pronunciation, or classes reciting single lines out of context. "Crazy English" does nothing to alleviate these three, and while it's amusing as a novelty act, I don't think it will ever gain much traction with serious students.

Ms. McTernan's presentation is at 2:00 pm, says the University Center for International Studies, in room 4217 of Posvar Hall (campus map).