October 24, 2000
Dear All,
I am fascinated by walls -- actual and symbolic -- in China. First, every educational institution that I have seen has a wall around it. Sichuan University, for example, has a substantial wall with four main gates (north, east, south, and west, of course, as befitting a country directed by geomancy) and several smaller ones. When you describe a shop or a restaurant, you first tell the listener whether it's inside or outside. Recently a teacher was hoping to have a particular kind of noodle for lunch, but the cafeteria at the Foreign Experts Building didn't have it that day. "Guess I'll have to go outside," was the reaction of the disappointed diner.
The university walls are staffed with security guards but I didn't think are just for safety. To me the walls symbolize a sense of separation from society, a statement that intellectuals are different from the hoi polloi. (What is hoi polloi in Chinese? Old Hundred Names. That is the phrase meaning common people because there are about 100 family names in regular use in China.) The competition for entrance into the university is intense because higher education is the ticket to a different status in life than that available to middle school or high school graduates. So if you are bright enough and ambitious enough -- and now with the new plan for financing higher education, rich enough -- to go to college, you become different from the rest of society. Certainly the tradition has been that of scholars as the most prestigious category of persons in China. They were revered for their learning but also for their role as the leaders who administered civil society under the emperors. That may be one reason why China has remained a unified country despite dynastic changes; the mandarins held things together no matter who was on the throne.
Back to walls. Within the university there are other walls. The kindergartens and primary schools for the children of university employees also have walls around them. As I go to and from class, I see parents and grandparents dropping off and picking up their children at the gates of these schools. The Foreign Experts Building has a wall with a security officer at the gate; non-residents have to state their reasons for coming in. Interesting. Is this to protect us or to reduce contact? Do the powers that be not want Chinese students and faculty to see how much better the living conditions are for foreigners? Or is it simply good management on the part of the university administration, knowing that there would be a big stink if someone got into the building and caused physical or property damage to foreigners? Interestingly, at Peking University I did not see a wall around the comparable building for foreigners, although there certainly was a wall around the perimeter of the campus.
The physical wall around the Foreign Experts Building is also a barrier of another sort. This dormitory houses the international students who are studying Chinese language in a special program (not the international students who are enrolled in regular subjects in the university). These foreign students probably spend at least three hours a day in Chinese class and then whatever time doing homework. That means that they are eager to speak a more familiar language when not in class. And, since the students come from everywhere from Laos to Yemen to Sri Lanka to the Czech Republic, the language they all have in common is English. ALL of them. So in the hallways, in the cafeteria, and for all I know in the bathrooms, students speak English to one another. That means there is little impetus for me to speak Chinese to do daily tasks. I have arranged for private Chinese classes twice a week and I'm delighted with my teacher, but it's not the same as needing the language simply for the necessities of life.
I was shocked the first week when I met one of the Americans who teaches basic conversational English to undergraduates. She has taught at several schools in China over the last five years yet I can speak more Chinese than she can. I was appalled, and still am, but I understand now why she doesn't make the effort. Her work responsibilities, like mine, require her to speak in English and the students to do the same. There are lots of Chinese here who are comfortable in English and want to spend time with English speakers so it's easy to find people to go to dinner or show you the antique market or whatever. Thus there is little practical motivation to learn Chinese well, but in some ways I think there is a moral obligation to speak the language of a country you are living in, especially after five years. But this living situation with its protected environment is a kind of language wall. I've always thought that study abroad programs were most effective when they included a home stay with a local family, but now I am even more persuaded of the value for students of daily interaction with the people of the country.
There is a related barrier that is created by the incredible hospitality expected in Chinese culture. People make sure that someone who is comfortable in both English and Chinese accompanies me on various adventures outside. Notice my easy use of the term? Once again, that means I don't need to struggle to use my Chinese and thus to improve. For example, I have had an interpreter at my painting classes since my teacher does not speak much English. Recently the interpreter could not go so I was looking forward to trying to bridge the communications barrier myself. I did not expect to have a philosophical discussion of aesthetics but I did think we might be able to talk about simple things. I even prepared a cheat sheet with some of the terms she had been using, writing them out in both languages. But when I arrived, I discovered she had asked a third person who spoke English to join us.
It made good sense. She would be more comfortable, and I would learn a great deal more, with someone conveying our ideas and questions back and forth. Although I told him that I had hoped to practice my Chinese, and he said he would sit back and let me try to speak, in a short time he was right in there translating for both of us. I did learn a lot more thanks to him, but the lesson provided no language practice. I have come to think of it as an unintentional conspiracy of kindness.
I feel another kind of wall, the wall of information, or more accurately the lack of information. The International Herald Tribune is available at a few big hotels downtown and I am lucky if I get downtown once a week. The only English language newspaper easily accessible is the China Daily published by the government. It has one page of international news at best and of course I am suspicious of the selection bias of the official news bureau. Television news, I am told by Chinese speakers, rarely gives international news. CNN is blocked. Most of my students use the Internet for news. I find that source difficult since on some days transmission is very slow and the news sites are huge. I have been able to connect to ABCnews and Yahoo but not New York Times. It may be blocked like CNN. So I am blissfully unaware of what is happening in the world. It's actually quite nice to contemplate voting in the upcoming elections without having to subject myself to the daily slugfest of the campaign and the yammering of the pundits. I wonder if Chinese people, even intellectuals, realize how huge the information wall is, even with the internet.
Walls work in other ways, too. Historically, most all cities in China had walls around them for security. Apparently many cities pulled down their walls after 1949 for various reasons. In Beijing it occurred in the 1960s in order to construct the subway and the first ring road. In some places people used the bricks for other building projects. I suspect there was also a sense that city walls were old-fashioned, even feudal, so modernization included demolition just as urban renewal in the 1960s in many cities in the U.S. led to the destruction of lovely old buildings. And of course the ultimate city wall is the Great Wall, dividing Han China, the Middle Kingdom, the center of the universe, from the barbarians.
I found it interesting, in my travels around Beijing, to study street names carefully. Actually that was not just interest but self-preservation. I noticed that street names frequently include a direction, such as Dongzhimen Dajie (East Straight Big Avenue). When the streets go outside the existing city moat, and thus outside the old city walls, many of the street names then include the appendage "wai" meaning "outside, foreign, stranger, unofficial." I infer from this fact that if you are a Beijinger inside the walls you belong, but beyond the walls you come from alien territory and alien people. (To the China scholars receiving this message, please feel free to correct or augment my amateur analysis on this inference or anything else I say, for that matter.)
Last summer I discovered a website for people teaching English in China. It is a useful resource on everything from what to wear to what computer to bring to tips on teaching English, since most people who take these jobs have no training in teaching. Their only claim is that they grew up speaking English. By the way, any student who is brave enough to come to China can get a job almost immediately as an English teacher. The most fascinating thing to me on this website, however, was the exchange among the teachers on whether they could ever get "inside the wall," by which they meant overcome their foreignness and be accepted as an individual. One camp said that yes, it is difficult to get inside the wall but it is possible. Another camp said, don't kid yourself, you will always be a foreigner in a country known as the Middle Kingdom. All non-Chinese are barbarians no matter what.
Here are some quotations from that exchange:
* I have colleagues who see me as a colleague first and only secondarily as a foreigner. Recently some of my students told another person, about me, X is not a foreign teacher, she's a Chinese teacher. Of course, they knew that was not literally true, but it was their way of saying that they experienced me as an ordinary teacher rather than a foreign teacher.
* A student from Guangzhou recently told me that when she came to Nanjing to study, she was treated like an outsider. People had stereotyped ideas about how she talked, what she ate, what her character was, etc. all based on the fact that she was from "not here."
* Be careful and skeptical of flattery from Chinese concerning being "inside the wall." As you learn Chinese and get closer to Chinese this is a common way to flatter foreigners. You really do not get inside with a few years of "Introduction to China 101." Many westerners who have lived in China for many years and speak good if not excellent Chinese describe getting on the inside as having a half-life. You may get closer but you never really get "inside."
* Americans also treat others as outside the wall. The difference, it seems to me, is that it is easier to get inside the wall. The stereotypes are not held so tenaciously. I don't think that a Californian would assume that, as an easterner, I know nothing about California after living there for several years. The biggest exception to the relative permeability of the wall in the U.S. is on the issue of race. There the boundary is thick and hard to cross.
* As a WASP I especially appreciate the experience of being outside the wall. It has certainly has increased my sensitivity to "the other." I think of it as living on the margins. Everything is always tentative. I find my cherished viewpoints and values always confronted with alternative ways of seeing the world and responding to it. I can see things better from multiple angles. Living outside one's homeland for a few years moves you to the margins of your home culture, too. That is a loss because that easy sense of belonging is gone forever. Emotionally you can't go home again. Maybe I could adapt to living in the U.S. again but I doubt that I will ever regain that sense of being at the center.
* Walls are a natural part of human life. Where walls don't exist, we'll hang curtains! We all want our privacy. We all psychologically subscribe to different groups of member ship in order to anchor our solidarity, intimacy and pride. Ethnic walls, religious walls, racial walls, are sometimes better left intact. They normally are insurmountable if we want to break them or climb them. But that doesn't mean there are not doors to go through. Some of those doors most include mutual respect, empathetic understanding, and most important of all, unbiased knowledge about the other side of the wall.
* I didn't mind being an outsider in China. My status brought me some privileges and some disadvantages. I wanted to learn something about China, including cultural values that I didn't share and often didn't like. If being accepted means also accepting some of those values, I preferred to stay an outsider.
Well, I know I am definitely outside the wall in the sense that these teachers are using the term, in part because I am inside other walls. It's all very interesting although perhaps quite predictable to those of you who have significant international experience. These kinds of reflections, I hope, also occur to CC students who travel abroad. It's one of the reasons I support direct exposure to other cultures for our students.
Cheers,
Kathryn
