Little Soldiers

by Lenora Chu

  “Why did you eat the egg?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to talk anymore.”

  Later, I texted an American girlfriend, thumbs flying over my phone. “I think Rainey was force-fed eggs in school.”

  My friend responded without missing a beat. “I think the severe discipline of the Chinese teaching style is oppressive. . . . You are not going to find Mary Poppins here. But forcing a smart, freethinking child to eat an egg is disturbing.” Her children attended an international school in Shanghai.

  I resolved to ask Teacher Chen about it at pickup time. I didn’t entirely trust my three-year-old’s account of what happened, and I thought it would be a great time to introduce myself as an engaged and involved parent. The next day, I lined up with the crowd—mostly mothers and grandparents—outside the classroom door and strained to lift my head above the throng. I got a glimpse of thirty children sitting in pint-size chairs in a perfect U-shaped formation around the teacher. Rainey was sitting—sitting!—in the third chair from one end. He rarely sat at home, and I saw here that it wasn’t easy for him. Every appendage was in motion: elbows, hands, legs, feet. He looked like a wiggly caterpillar with its middle nailed down and the rest flailing wildly, but still he kept his seat. Craning his neck toward the door, along with every other child awaiting pickup, Rainey finally spotted me. The teacher saw me also and called his name. Rainey sprang from his seat and ran over to me. One by one the other children’s names were called, parents peeled away, and finally I could step over to Teacher Chen. Rainey clutched my hand.

  “Good afternoon, Teacher Chen,” I said. “We’re excited to start the new year.”

  “Good, good,” Chen responded.

  “How’s Rainey doing?”

  “Good,” Chen said, nodding.

  “I wanted to ask something. Rainey doesn’t eat eggs at home, but he told me he ate them at school. Did someone put eggs in Rainey’s mouth?”

  “Yes,” she answered, without a smidgen of defensiveness. My heart jumped, and any plan to ease into this conversation evaporated. I forged ahead.

  “Really? Who?”

  “I did,” Chen said.

  “Oh! Ah! We prefer you don’t make Rainey eat foods he doesn’t like. We foreigners don’t . . . use these methods,” I said, as Teacher Chen tapped her foot and glanced past me. “We don’t use such methods of force in America,” I repeated.

  “Oh? How do you do it?” she clucked, looking down at Rainey.

  “We explain that eating egg is good for them, that the nutrients help build strong bones and teeth and helps with eyesight,” I said, words speeding up as I tried to sound authoritative. “We motivate them to choose to eat eggs. We trust them with the decision.”

  “Does it work?” Chen said.

  An image of Rainey’s chipped tooth flashed before my eyes. “Well . . . not always,” I admitted.

  Chen nodded. “Rainey needs to eat eggs. We think eggs are good nutrition, and all young children must eat them.” She took one last look at Rainey and then clicked away.

  * * *

  There’s a little man who resides inside the head of every Chinese man and woman, whether they know it or not. He governs how they find their mates, what they look for in jobs, how they treat their parents, and how they educate their children.

  His name is Confucius and he lived 2,500 years ago. He was both a teacher and a philosopher. You mention his name—Kong zi—to most ordinary Chinese, and they nod in respect and then change the subject, as if he’s some great-great-granduncle they know they’re supposed to revere but don’t have much to say about.

  Confucius believed that the purpose of education was to shape every person into a “harmonious” member of society, and harmony was more easily maintained if everyone knew his proper place. So Confucius spent a lot of time and attention delineating relationships. In Confucius’s world, a wife always obeys her husband, a subject never challenges his emperor, a young brother heeds the older brother, and a son does what his father requires on a daily basis. “Let the ruler be a ruler, the subject a subject, the father a father, the son a son,” Confucius said, according to the Analects, a classic collection of ideas attributed to him and his followers. Confucius staked his entire philosophical pantheon on the concept of top-down authority and bottom-up obedience.

  I remember these lessons from my own upbringing. My father grew up in Asia and brought his Chinese ways to America, where he met and married my mother—like him a fellow Chinese immigrant—and raised my sister and me. My father was nothing if not authoritarian, and I had a rebellious streak, setting the stage for many clashes during my childhood. In our suburban Houston mid-century house sat a preserved portion of a tree that had grown in the yard of my father’s childhood home in Taiwan. Knotted where branches used to grow and slicked over with polyurethane, the section of trunk served as a gnarled, daily reminder of ancient traditions.

  I was constantly overstepping boundaries. “I don’t want to do homework tonight, I’m tired of chemistry. You make me study too hard,” I’d say to my father, whom I called Ba, the Chinese word for father.

  “A daughter is not supposed to talk to her father like that,” he’d retort, lips quivering with rage.

  As a teenager, I never knew who had told him daughters don’t talk like that, but now I know it was Confucius whispering his wisdom across the generations and reaching down into our lives. Another time, I coolly informed my father that I was plotting to audition for the drill team, a venerable institution at a top high school—Texas state champs in ’78—inside a state that worships football. Unfortunately, football and dance don’t register as a worthy pastime on the Chinese scale.

  “Dance is not an honors elective,” Ba said. “It will bring down your grade point average.”

  “I don’t care. I’m going for it anyway,” I told him.

  “Oh?” Ba said. “You can just decide like that?”

  “Yeah. I’m going to do it, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” I remember there was nothing more satisfying—and terrifying—than challenging my father’s authority. That was also me butting up against Confucius.

  Every year, my mother and aunt—my father’s sister—would spend days preparing dishes for our annual Chinese New Year feast. They’d shell shrimp, chop pork, braise mushrooms, boil winter melons for soup, roast ducks, wrap dumplings, and on and on. At the end of the long labor, we would place the dishes—sometimes two dozen in all—on a table alongside burning incense as a way to honor our ancestors. After an hour or two, the smoky, sweet smell of incense would pervade the house, while the food turned limp, with stir-fry oil forming shiny pools on the plates. We’d have to reheat each dish one by one in the microwave before we could finally sit down to enjoy our feast. The year I was ten, I announced that this ritual not only seemed inefficient but was a grand waste of feminine labor.

  “We must honor our ancestors,” my father countered, launching into a speech about tradition. The lecture, a familiar one by this time, would take fifteen minutes but boiled down to the promise that misfortune would befall those who didn’t honor their ancestors properly. According to the Confucian canon, an event that seemed like bad luck—an accident, a lost job—was really an ancestor’s revenge. And so the women of the family continued the annual shell-chop-braise-boil-roast-wrap marathon, and we continued to let the food sit on a table for hours afterward.

  I was a terrible practitioner of filial piety. This is one of the concepts Confucius espoused most heavily, and it called for children to respect their elders as well as folks who’d given rise to their bloodline but were long gone from this earth. While in the West, elders often retire to nursing homes when health turns frail, the Chinese buy homes with a spare bedroom for Grandma and spend days preparing feasts to honor her after she’s gone.

  Ancient paintings and verse illustrate how the virtue of filial piety knows no bounds: A young boy encourages mosquitoes to suck his blood so that his parents will remain undisturbed
while they slept; a man buries his infant son alive to free up scarce foodstuffs for his ailing mother; a man tastes his father’s stool to diagnose a terminal illness and then offers up his life in exchange. My favorite is about a woman and her mother-in-law, a figure much maligned in Western culture. Not so in China: In one tale, a woman cut out a piece of her own liver to boil as a base for broth to cure her severely ill mother-in-law.

  In today’s China, filial piety often manifests itself in the form of educational achievement. Performing well in school is the ultimate way to respect your parents, since good grades and test scores are the path to financial stability, and the ability to provide for your parents and buy a bigger house—with a room for Grandma. The principle of obedience and respect extends naturally to teachers, of course, as children are “required to respect the teacher’s authority without preconditions,” wrote two Western academics in a 1996 study of Chinese kindergarten curricula.

  Parents are also required to fall into step. And so, I had crossed a line with Teacher Chen. I had failed yet again to be a proper practitioner of Confucianism.

  I sensed it the moment she chose to end our conversation about eggs with a simple maneuver: She walked away from me.

  Over the following weeks she no longer engaged me, although I could see her glancing my way amid the scrum of parents at pickup. On the day she asked me to step into the coatroom, I realized she’d been waiting for an opportunity to talk privately.

  “Let me bother you for a second,” Chen said, using a common nicety.

  “Sure, is there a problem?”

  “No problem, but . . . I want you to refrain from questioning my methods in front of Rainey,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Yes, it is better that the children think we are in agreement about everything,” she said.

  “Oh!” I said.

  “If you have a different opinion from me, then you can talk to me privately,” she said. “But in front of the children you should say ‘Teacher is right, and Mom will do things the same way,’ okay?” she said.

  “Oh . . . okay,” I stammered. “I didn’t mean . . . I just want him to be happy in school.”

  “Happy? He is happy,” she said, with a firm nod. “And at home it’s best also if you don’t talk about the teachers when Rainey’s in the room.” Teacher Chen’s mouth was upturned, in a taut smile of forced courtesy.

  Before I could reply, she admonished me once more. “Don’t make the children feel Mom’s opinion conflicts with the teacher’s.”

  I nodded and quickly stepped out of the coatroom. I’d been scolded by Teacher Chen!

  On my way home with Rainey, my mind raced to process the exchange. What I’d viewed as a simple request of Teacher Chen had been taken as an affront to her authority. The glimpse I’d had of Rainey sitting in a chair at pickup time, waiting for a teacher’s permission to rise, suddenly seemed foreboding.

  Snippets of conversations I’d had with other Chinese parents filtered into my head—they suddenly had context. A Chinese mother had told me once she was afraid to ask her son’s teacher about anything, for fear her child would suffer consequences in the classroom. Poor woman, I’d thought back then. Imagine that! Another parent had told me she spent weeks planning the gifts she’d bestow on her daughter’s master teacher. Western skin-care or luxury items were great, she said, enthusiastically ticking off brand names with a Chinese accent: Louis Vuitton, Prada, L’Occitane, Clinique, Godiva. She’d been tipping me off, I now realized. I’d failed these tests, and to top that off I’d challenged a teacher in front of a child. A Chinese early childhood education professor would later tell me that the worst thing for a teacher is to lose face in front of children. “Westerners may feel happy when children challenge them, but in our traditional culture we don’t think life is supposed to be like this,” he said.

  The following weeks Chen avoided me as much as possible. When I approached she was always engaged with another parent or leaning over to talk to a child. Shanghai built its subways in just a few years, and a new building seemed to pop up in our neighborhood every month. Shanghai Tower was rising on the horizon, steel piece by steel piece, and when completed it would be the world’s tallest skyscraper, boasting the fastest elevator in existence. The country’s economy was growing at unparalleled rates. But amid all that change, some traditions were too ingrained to shift even an inch: You must be devoted to your elders, and you never questioned your teachers to their face. Today’s rules of societal conduct had been cemented two and a half millennia ago, and I had done the unthinkable.

  Rainey and I were in trouble.

  Over the next week, I began to watch others in the pickup line, keeping my head down as I approached the classroom door. Some yapped with Teacher Chen and Associate Teacher Cai in their native Shanghainese—a language I didn’t understand or speak—and others spoke in Mandarin about the children’s artwork or after-school activities. The parents never seemed to voice any concerns or brave any inquiries about what the children were doing in school. The only questions I heard were open-ended and nonconfrontational, innocuous: Did Nong Nong fall asleep quickly today at nap time? Did Mei Mei eat her lunch?

  All exchanges ended in some sort of nicety by the parents: “Laoshi, Xinku le!” Teacher, you work too hard! What a great job you’re doing! “Taibang!” Too amazing! Excellent!

  Okay, I get it, I told myself. Keep it light. Offer compliments.

  One day at pickup, Teacher Chen spoke to me: “Rainey eats eggs.” Her delivery was flat, as if she were ticking off a grade on a list of subjects. Her tone of voice clearly denoted B-minus, as in, “The process was labored, but the goal was eventually reached.”

  “Taibang le!” I cried. “Excellent!” Inside, my stomach was inside my throat. Eggs had taken on a new meaning in my life; they were no longer simply a good source of protein. I was anxious about eggs, and fearful of the methodology employed to get my son to swallow them.

  Safe inside our apartment walls, Rainey continued to refuse eggs, whether scrambled, fried, poached, or boiled. How did Chen manage it? And did he eat them willingly? By his own hand? These thoughts kept rolling over in my head, until I decided I needed to see Rainey eat an egg for myself. One weekend morning, I cajoled Rainey to have an egg, tossing in a helping of carbs and offering a bribe for good measure.

  “Rainey, if you eat this French toast you can watch Kungfu Panda after breakfast,” I said.

  “What’s French toast? Does it have egg in it?” Egg clearly had special meaning for Rainey, too.

  “Well . . . French toast is bread. With a little egg,” I ventured. “But . . . mostly bread.”

  Rainey glanced at the egg-coated creation I’d placed on a plate, thought about kungfu-kicking pandas, and nodded. He asked for a cup of water, and I installed myself in a chair about ten feet away, pretending to read a book.

  Rainey placed the plastic water cup at the two o’clock position, next to his plate. He looked at the arrangement for about half a minute. Then, deliberately, he started. His little fingers tore the French toast into small pieces, which he scattered about the plate. He eyed the pieces. He took a deep breath. He chose one and placed it in his mouth.

  Morsel in, he moved quickly, scooping up the cup of water and tipping it into his mouth, flushing the bit of French toast down his throat like a dinghy pressed through a tunnel by a tidal wave. He paused, took another breath, and repeated the process. I refilled his cup when empty. He was determined, and he didn’t pause to speak or smile. Fifteen minutes and three cups of water later, the French toast had disappeared.

  I heard the voice of every American pediatric and nutritional expert from Mayo Clinic to Dr. Sears: Don’t ignite food battles. Don’t force food on children. Don’t let mealtime become a source of anxiety. Food should be enjoyed, lest disordered eating develop in later life.

  It was safe to say I had accomplished all those no-no’s in magnificent form. My promise of Kungfu Panda was also a Weste
rn no-no—never reward food consumption. Yet I was amazed. I’d never suspected my three-year-old was capable of such a display of resolve. I barely recognized my tantrum-throwing, food-tossing, chipped-tooth little boy in this creature who’d willed himself to complete a task he did not enjoy. The culture reinforced the notion that teacher knows best, but did the end justify the means?

  After the plate was empty Rainey settled in front of the television, Kungfu Panda cartwheeling across the screen.

  “Do the teachers watch you eat?” I asked. Rainey paused, considering my query.

  “I’ll tell you if you let me watch Thomas the Train, too.”

  2

  A Family Affair

  We don’t pick children—we pick parents. Yesterday, I met a parent who purchased two flutes. One flute for herself, so she could practice alongside her child. I like that kind of parent.

  —Principal Zhang

  A few months into Rainey’s first year of kindergarten, my Chinese acquaintance Wu Ming Wei brought her son Little Hao over for a playdate.

  “You are very free in allowing your son to play,” Ming told me. It was an insult, delivered the euphemistic Chinese way. She watched Rainey chase after a ball that had rolled under a table. On the way, my son hopped on a chair and leaped off the armrest with arms flapping, as if celebrating that something had gone awry in his little world.

  Ming had all the accouterments of a middle-class city parent: a stable job as a doctor; two sons birthed legally through an exception to China’s one-child policy; an apartment with a room for Grandma, who did indeed live in the room; an address a block away from a well-regarded public kindergarten; and plans for her children.

  I considered Ming something of an informal education expert. Clearly, she didn’t think the same of me.

  I glanced over at her boy, sitting cross-legged in front of a pile of Legos. Ming had arranged everything for him, pulling out the pieces, organizing them on the floor, and even handing him the Lego he should start building with.