A funny thing happened in my fourth-year seminar. We were discussing Holly Black's young adult vampire romance suspense novel The Coldest Girl in Coldtown (2014), which has been difficult for the students because Black uses plenty of slang (e.g., "asshole") and plenty of idioms (e.g., "she swallowed past the lump in her throat") and a tricky plot (with the main story's progression interrupted by flashback and back story chapters) and some elliptical story-telling where you have to use your imagination to figure out what she leaves out, as when this charismatic and mysterious vampire boy is going to let a teen boy with the Cold vampire infection drink some of his blood, and instead of narrating that in direct words, Black just has the vampire roll up his t-shirt sleeve and say "I won't let him feed on the living, but there's no reason he can't drink from the dead" and ends the chapter. Etc.
So it's a challenging read. So in our class yesterday, a diligent and bright student (and, unusually for our university, a mother of two daughters), thought that Black's protagonist had gone home to take a shower or something. This took me aback, because really the main character, 17-year-old Tana, has driven with the vampire and the other boy away from their homes, and they've stopped at a gas station and 24-hour mart, and she's gone into the places restroom to rest and recover from a trauma and to wash off her arms and face etc. etc. So I asked the student why she thought Tana had gone home, and she said, "Because she is in the bathroom." Then it dawned on me: Japanese bathrooms are separate from their toilet rooms (they never put the bathtub by the toilet in the same room!); Japanese people say, "I have to go to the toilet," not "I have to go to the bathroom"; and Tana in the story has been said to have entered the bathroom... So I laughed and explained that Americans often say "bathroom" when they mean "toilet" (after all, in American houses the bathtub and toilet are in the same room), so that even if some friends go to the cinema, before the movie starts one might say to the other, "I have to go the bathroom" and get up and go to the restroom/toilet. Etc. It's all another example of culture differences hindering communication... I won't go into what happened when another bright student, one who'd spent a year in Canada recently and who had read The Hobbit in English on her own initiative, etc., asked what "she felt about ready to jump out of her own skin" means, asking, "Does it mean that she took off her clothes?" Heh, heh, heh. So I had to explain about jumping out of one's own skin........ I do like the book, really, and I hope the students are mostly finding it interesting (even though it's very difficult).
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
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December 2023
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