October 3, 2000
Dear All,
As I’ve tried to choose photos to match my messages, I realized that I didn’t tell you about one interesting aspect at the end of our trip in Shanxi Province. As we left Datong we saw portions of the Great Wall, not the elaborate stone structures that tourists visit near Beijing and that everyone sees on postcards, but something more akin to what the original wall must have looked like. It was packed earth with frequent watchtowers along its length as far as we could see. Even with parts of the wall in ruins after many centuries, I found it impressive to see this massive structure winding over the sides of the mountain. The location was strategic-just where the plains of Inner Mongolia hit the first mountain range.
We were told that this was the inner Great Wall. Apparently in some parts of north China there were two rows of defense to protect the Han people from invasion by the barbarians. If the Mongols got over the first wall they still had to contend with the second. If this wall impressed me as a modern person getting out of an automobile, imagine what it would have signified to a horseman or foot soldier millennia ago.
Part 2:
Chinese people calculate age differently than Americans. When a baby is born, he or she is considered a year old. And many people become a year older on New Year’s rather than the actual anniversary of their birth. However you want to count, I am older now than when I left the States. Or if you use the New Year’s method, I’ve been older since January 1 (or should I count from Chinese New Year?) and the American method has just caught up.
My birthday was last Saturday and I invited my students for an American birthday party with cake and ice cream. I thought they might enjoy a little insight into a common celebration in the U.S. I found out that many of our customs have recently been adopted by Chinese, especially birthday cake, so my celebration was more familiar to them than I had imagined. Even the song Happy Birthday is well known here. In fact I’ve heard it in the most incongruous situations -- as background music in a restaurant, for example, in the bubbly elevator music style that became quite grating as first the English and then the Chinese version was played over and over and over again. But the worst was as the back-up indicator sound on a dump truck. (Is it better to have Happy Birthday telling you that you are about to be run over by a Chinese dump truck, or just to be flattened without warning or music?)
Chinese seem to love double numbers (a major historic event happened on October 10th, hence Double Ten) and so this was my Double Five birthday. In China people talk quite openly about age without the delicacy that the topic arouses in America. I did tell my students that I refused to have 55 candles on the cake -- we might set the Foreign Experts Building on fire! So we had two candles, each the appropriate numeral.
My students informed me that in China you make three wishes as you blow out the candles. Two are revealed to the guests but the third one is kept secret. Well, I hadn’t thought much about birthday wishes at all, much less three, but I came up with two that I hope were both appropriate and diplomatic for the occasion. The third is just mine.
This Chinese cake was remarkably tasty, better than many American birthday cakes I have consumed. Even the flowers on top were palatable, something I wouldn’t say about most frosting flowers I’ve encountered. I also bought ice cream at the supermarket in five flavors-vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, corn, and green tea-a selection that seemed suitably multi-cultural. So while I had invited them for an American birthday party, we ended up having Chinese flavors as well.
Part 3:
While I’m on the topic of my students, let me say a bit more about the course that I am teaching. As I mentioned before, I’m doing issues in contemporary American culture that I think of as context for the literature that they are reading. I brought a lot of books with me, not knowing exactly what the course would be. In the first two classes, I asked my students what topics most interested them and hoped that they would mention topics that I knew something about.
The first topic they identified was the civil rights movement, although they didn’t really call it that. Luckily the New York Times did a very interesting series last summer entitled “How Race is Lived in America.” I clipped all the articles and brought them along; the students found these to be quite contemporary insights into American diversity. It was also revealing to some of them, I think, that it’s not just a black-white situation.
When they said that they didn’t know a lot about American history and wanted me to teach them more, I asked them to narrow that down a bit. Turns out that they are really interested in what they call “the youth movement of the 1960s.” Thanks to several of my faculty colleagues, I had identified two volumes of documents in American history since 1945 so I can provide readings and other resources on contemporary history.
I suspect their interest in the topic operates at several levels. They know that American students played an important role in much of the ferment of the Sixties-and they are envious. I’m guessing that they wish they could have more influence on the direction that China is going. Those who are a bit more sophisticated also know that this was a very idealistic period in our history, while they are living in a period often described as cynical, materialistic, and uninterested in traditional Chinese values. I am hoping that they are willing to talk about explicit comparisons between the U.S. and China, but that may be too risky for them. We’ll see.
So over the semester we will discuss Vietnam, student radicalism, the rise of the feminist movement, and the meaning of feminism in a global context. Some of the students are also interested in American foreign policy, especially Sino-American relations. Here I will have to be very careful since there are political landmines strewn all over. The topics of greatest interest to many Americans and probably to my students are also the topics that I must avoid-literally-Tibet, Taiwan, human rights. I think I’ll get some public documents by Gore and Bush and then talk about foreign policy in the 2000 elections. I hope that will be safe enough for all of us.
As a change of pace, we will read several short stories by Chinese-American authors. I bought the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction plus several volumes of writings by minority authors so I have made several selections for the students. My intention is to leave all these books behind. It’s impossible for them to get such books in China-another realization for me that things we take for granted are not available to people elsewhere.
These students are very dedicated, very smart, and very hard working. The assumptions underlying Chinese education, however, are much different from ours. Let me quote from “Encountering the Chinese” a perceptive guide for teachers and business executives living and working in China. One author is Chinese professor and administrator, the other is an American sociologist/anthropologist. While the book covers some of the basics that I’ve seen elsewhere (how to be a proper guest at a Chinese banquet, for example) it is more subtle and insightful than anything else I’ve read.
“According to the traditional policies and practices of Chinese education, students are taught that they must fit harmoniously into the overall scheme of human relations, a scheme in which awareness of the group takes strong precedence over the desires of the individual and n which emphasis is given to the beneficial aspects of hierarchical relationships. Since any person’s place in the family and community hierarchy is largely determined by age, enormous importance is placed on the way things are done by the oldest people, who in turn revere the way things were done by those already deceased. Given these values, schools operating in the Chinese tradition focus their curriculum heavily on writings from the past, writings treated more or less as sacred texts worthy of being committed to memory. The objectives of this curriculum are moral and normative: to transform the young into people with a highly developed social conscience and to inculcate in them the code for living already accepted by their elders….
“The principal difference noted by American educators…is that the students, even at the university level, are reluctant to make direct contributions of any kind to the proceedings. Chinese students usually present themselves as an attentive, respectful, and above all, passive audience. They arrive, they listen, they take copious notes, they depart. Even when invited to make comments or ask questions, they are reluctant to speak….
“The policies and practices of American education could hardly be more different. Students are encouraged to follow their individual interests and to view themselves as distinct from the various groups to which they belong. It is not accurate to say that American classroom practices undermine community-mindedness or cooperation. But they do emphasize self-expression, self-reliance, self-motivation, individual initiative, and personal achievement. These emphases are grounded in a national educational policy that stresses equal educational opportunity for every person, regardless of background, economic level, or native ability. The basic purpose of American education is to prepare each individual to…thrive and be successful within society as it exists.”
Clearly there is a big educational difference for me teaching in a society that traditionally emphasizes collective values, although I find my students less passive than I was led to expect by this book and others. But I only get questions from a small percentage of the students and only when I specifically ask for questions.
I was originally asked to give a series of lectures to these graduate students. I’ve insisted on a more participatory, American style of teaching but it’s harder for all involved. It’s harder in the U.S., too, to run a seminar as compared with a lecture but in China the cultural assumptions reinforce the tendency of many students to shy away from active engagement with the material.
In the coming weeks I’ve been thinking about having tea with small groups of students to discuss their papers and generally to engage them more actively in a non-classroom setting. It’s a good challenge and lots of fun.
Part 4:
Next week is the National Day holiday, the Chinese equivalent of the Fourth of July. This year the government declared a seven-day holiday, presumably to stimulate the economy, which is currently stagnant, through increased domestic spending. I am doing my part by going to Beijing for five days.
I’ve been to Beijing twice before but only as a member of a group. And as those of you who have been members of tour groups know, the individual is at the mercy of the leader. “We will depart at 6:05 am,” “You have 20 minutes here-the bus will leave the front gate at 4:30,” and so on. I am fascinated by the Forbidden City, the imperial palace at Tiananmen Square, but I’ve only been there on a tour group schedule. So one of my objectives for this visit is to arrive at the Forbidden City when it opens, wander around the back passages and alleyways, and stay as long as I want. If that means all day, fine. The weather should be good in Beijing in October so I’m looking forward to the trip. And sunshine, which I hope I will see, will be a pleasant antidote to the clouds of Chengdu.
I suspect I will have more adventures to share in a week or two.
Cheers,
Kathryn