Bloggers
Forever
Young
10
Aril 2007
“少时好学，壮有为；壮时好学，老不衰；老时好学，死不朽！”
“Study
hard when you are young, so you can be an
achiever when you grow up; study hard when
you’ve grown up, so you can keep young in
old age; study hard when you get old, so you
will never rot even after death. " This
is an online message in a blog run by a
77-year old Shanghai lady.
Blogger
writer Mei and her granddaughter
Granny
E Mei’s (鄂梅) blog is refreshing
like a new-born baby, and hot like a baked
potato, among young people in particular.
Because young people are most eager to learn
and she is most willing to teach.
Mei
is a retired Japanese language teacher and,
teamed with her granddaughter, has been
running a free language program during summer
vacation for the past six years. The course
is popular, but only accessible to a special
few due to the restrictions in time and
space. It was not until quite recently when
Mei realised there is a brave new classroom
out there that can be used day and night, all
year round, with no limitation in student
intake. Yap, that is blog.
According
to the figures revealed by Chinese search
engine Baidu, by the end of 2006, more than
20 million Chinese write blogs, and 75
million Chinese read blogs. That’s a lot,
by any standards.
So
here she is, becoming number 20million+one
Chinese blogger and a four season teacher in
her free online Japanese language classroom
called Sakura House (樱花满屋).
She
writes in her blog everyday, posting the
materials she collected during her teaching
years: the dictionaries, Japanese stories,
Japanese jokes, as well as her past
experiences, her current opinions and her
daily encounters.
The
blog becomes a hit. Just few-month old, it
has already attracted more than 200 viewers a
day with over a thousand feedbacks. Reading
some of these comments, you may wonder if you
have intruded into an intimate family
chatroom. A viewer may say: “Grandma, how
come I can’t understand this article.”
Another viewer would advice: “You need to
learn a bit Japanese before coming here to
read Grandma’s post.”
In
fact, many of her online visitors indeed
become part of her ever expending family,
paying her frequent offline visits as they
would do to their own grannies.
Blogger Mei
and some of her students posing before
Shanghai TV station
With
an age approaching big eight, she is still a
language teacher as she had been for forty
years, and a grandma to many who are yet to
meet her in person. Armed with new
technology, the blog, her life is going
strong than ever. In an era of the Net and
the Web, the conventional dividing line
between working and retirement years may blur
out and even fade away.
Welcome
to a brave new world in which you may stay
forever young.
