Little Soldiers

by Lenora Chu

  “If you’re standing nicely you can go inside and get some water.” Wang and Li walked up and down the line, observing placement of hands and feet, straightness in the back. For about three minutes, they walked up and down the line, hovering over their little soldiers.

  Try as I might to figure it out, it wasn’t apparent to me what criteria the teachers were using to dismiss children. Nearly all of them were standing nicely with hands by their sides, but the teacher would wait, observe, and then tap a few, wrapping a hand behind a head and giving a firm push. Dismissed: Go get some water. Then they would continue their stroll along the line. Before long, I understood that arbitrariness was the point and identified the exercise for what it was—a demonstration of who was in charge.

  Even so, I observed that the children found little ways to express themselves. One little boy was making the shape of a gun with his hand, shooting imaginary critters, feet all the while planted firmly on the yellow lines. A girl was making small flapping hand movements from the wrist, emitting tiny birdlike noises, while keeping her hands by her sides. One boy had a hand down the front of his pants, fumbling around.

  I looked at this little group and imagined the 1.4 billion people of China. These children didn’t seem unhappy, but they also weren’t bounding with the joy, openness, and curiosity that I’d hoped life would be for my son. It seemed to me that there was just a quiet acceptance of fate, of the system, the terms of which only their teachers fully understood and controlled. It was clear that those who grossly overstepped the bounds would be severely punished. Yet—the little birdlike movements, the fumbling in the pants, the shooting gun—they gave me hope that perhaps these children could find ways to express a bit of individuality and push against boundaries, without drawing undue attention to themselves. Or was I grasping for something reassuring?

  One by one, the children were tapped to go inside for a water break.

  “Wang Wu Ze, do you want water?”

  “Yes, Teacher, I want water,” said Little Pumpkin.

  “Well, you don’t get water. You will stand here,” Master Wang said, shooting him a glance. She entered the classroom and closed the door behind her.

  Little Pumpkin began to cry. His wailing reached depths I’d not yet heard that week, as he stood on the double yellow lines in a cold hallway.

  “Teacher, I will sit, I will sit,” he cried. “Teacher, let me inside the classroom!” But she was gone.

  What to make of a boy like Little Pumpkin? By now he must have known there would be consequences to his actions, yet he was still unable to comply with the rules. In America, such a boy—unbridled energy, passionate purple marker technique—might be labeled as suffering from attention deficit disorder, as having a creative temperament, or perhaps both. He might be called out as a leader: someone who challenges authority, walks to the beat of his own drum, has a way of standing a head above the crowd. But this is China. Would a child like him eventually learn to run within the bounds of the system? Would his individuality continue to make him a target for shame and ridicule? For now, at Harmony Kindergarten, the answer was clear: He would be left alone outside a closed door while his comrades sipped water from metal cups on the other side.

  On the last day of my visit, I found the teachers in the classroom when their students were eating outside in the hallway. I expressed thanks for their time and handed over a Coach tote bag and a wallet, which I’d dug out from the back of my closet. Wang and Li nodded and, without a word, stashed the goods in a cabinet. At Soong Qing Ling, my gifting attempt had been an utter embarrassment, but today Coach was my friend.

  I left the classroom on this final day and ambled down the hallway, toeing the double yellow line. I passed three classrooms and peeked inside each one to find children seated in chairs arranged in a U-shape around a teacher. When I reached the building exit, I turned around for one last glance down the long hallway toward the door of Small Class No. 1.

  Little Pumpkin stood alone, still waiting to be called.

  4

  No Exceptions to the Rule

  We are a Chinese school. You chose to place your child here, and you must conform to our educational style.

  —Teacher Chen

  Rainey is the kid who plays tricks on his family, launches impromptu a cappella sessions, and organizes kids in play. I love that Rainey’s personality sticks in the memory of most people who meet him, and I’ve always welcomed displays of individuality and playfulness. I want my child to understand what it means to color outside the lines.

  Yet Chinese culture promotes conformity: The nail that sticks up would be hammered down, the bird whose head sticks out easily shot, and the tallest tree easily destroyed by the wind, as the proverbs go.

  What I was learning of Chinese teachers’ methods stunned me, and I was shaken by the thought that Rainey might have his tiny spark extinguished at school. At home, our little boy liked to laugh uproariously when Rob or I did something funny, doubling over or slapping the floor with his hands, continuing to chuckle past the point when a joke lost its humor. For our fun-loving boy, the physicality of laughing often became the joke itself.

  Were Rainey’s teachers prone to screaming, shaming, and threat making? Were they embarking on the long march to make Rainey conform to his environment? The qualities I was observing in the teachers I’d met were clearly part of an authoritarian teacher culture, but were there kinder and gentler gradations on that scale?

  “Will the police take me away if I don’t nap?” Rainey asked Rob one Saturday, as he was going down for his afternoon snooze.

  “Why would the police come if you don’t nap?” Rob said, tucking a blanket around his neck. But Rainey didn’t answer.

  The following week, on a lazy weekend afternoon, Rob and I watched as our little boy curled up in a fetal position on the living-room floor. This “baby Rainey” purposefully squeezed his eyes shut, squinting with the effort, as if trying to block out some kind of apparition. After a few seconds, he cracked open his eyes to peer surreptitiously at his environs. He did this several times, until I finally got it: He was trying to escape detection.

  Detection from whom?

  “Baby Rainey” suddenly jumped up to standing and swaggered about the room. Immediately, I realized my son was imitating a teacher.

  “You must sleep! Close your eyes and rest. If you don’t, I’ll call the police,” Teacher Rainey boomed, wagging a finger over the spot where “baby Rainey” had lain.

  It was clear what this meant.

  “Yes! Close your eyes!” Teacher Rainey boomed. “If you don’t, I’ll call the police to take you away!” When I was a child, American culture presented the police officer as a friendly authority figure, a helper of elderly women crossing streets, and a source of fascination for young children. In Chinese culture, the police are often used as the means to an end: coercing children to do what an adult wants.

  “I said close your eyes,” Teacher Rainey boomed again. “If you don’t close your eyes, I’ll send you to tuo ban. You’ll never see your classmates again.”

  Tuo ban was the class level for the two-year-olds. The teachers were threatening to demote our son? Rob and I looked at each other, stunned.

  As my father’s daughter, I’d heard many threats growing up, and my aunts and uncles also thought nothing of tossing off warnings to instigate behavior: “If you don’t study hard, you’ll grow up to be homeless.” “If you eat too much chocolate, you’ll get fat.” “If you don’t become a lawyer, you’ll be poor.” (For my sister, they substituted “doctor” for “lawyer.”)

  The Chinese I know can be very specific about their threats, especially when it comes to naming consequences: They are world-class experts at fear-based motivation.

  At home, I’d explained to Rainey that brushing teeth kept the dentist away, and the following day I overheard our ayi: “If you don’t brush your teeth,” she told Rainey, ominously, “insects will sprout from the filth and devour your face while you
sleep.”

  For the next several nights, Rainey slept in fear of face-eating bugs, and I instructed Ayi to leave oral hygiene to me. The police threat, however, didn’t seem to concern our little boy. Was it because he’d heard this one too many times in the classroom?

  Rainey was either unwilling or unable to confirm the source, so I did what any self-respecting American parent would do.

  I requested a parent-teacher conference.

  * * *

  Teachers Chen and Cai stared at us from their pint-size chairs.

  Their students had been tucked away in another room for nap time, and the homeroom of Small Class No. 4 felt suddenly cavernous and cold, as if its beating heart had been suddenly snatched by a surgeon’s forceps.

  Rob and I were seated in child-size chairs of our own, rears low to the ground and knees propped awkwardly. I got straight to the point.

  “Rainey doesn’t like to come to school,” I said.

  “Ah,” both teachers said, nodding, as if this were no surprise. Teacher Chen spoke first.

  “Before Rainey came here, which school was he attending?” she asked.

  “Happy . . .” I stopped and cringed with embarrassment. “Um—Happy Kids.” The previous year Rainey had attended a nursery in Shanghai owned by a Canadian and run by a Frenchwoman. The Chinese would balk at naming a school for joyful contentment; Wisdom First, Sacrifice Is Golden, and World’s Best Math is more like it.

  “Ah, Happy Kids,” Chen repeated, nodding, as if a hunch had been suddenly confirmed. “Were the classmates foreign or local?”

  “Mostly foreigners.”

  Chen nodded again, diagnosis complete. “We think that Rainey is very smart, enthusiastic, and warm, and willing to learn,” said Teacher Chen. “I think the biggest problem he has is with the guizhi—the rules.”

  “What rules?” I asked.

  “He feels restrained. We think he has a problem with discipline.”

  “Could you give me specific examples?” I asked, a tinge of anger creeping into my voice.

  “Easy,” Rob whispered, under his breath, from his tiny chair, knees nearly up at his shoulders.

  Chen and Cai exchanged words in Shanghainese and finally turned to us again.

  “At . . . Happy Kids,” Chen said, “he experienced a foreign education culture. Western education culture is much more . . . casual than Chinese education culture.”

  I sat. I stared. Chen offered an example. “If Rainey jumps around and falls, the American mom will think, ‘No problem. Kids will be kids.’ But for the Chinese mom, it’s very important that they don’t fall down. Rainey has not learned that school is not fully for enjoyment.”

  “What has he done? Give me an example,” I insisted.

  “He goes down the slide headfirst,” she said.

  “We think going down the slide headfirst is good,” I said. “He’s experimenting, having fun.”

  “Ah!” Chen said knowingly, as if suddenly realizing the mother, not the child, was the problem. “But we have twenty-eight children in the class. If they all do it that way, it will be dangerous,” Chen told me. I recalled that the teachers’ directives in the Child Development Book indicated a world full of danger: “Change clothes often to minimize contamination. Drink cooled, boiled water if possible. Don’t go to public places too often. Wipe floors with a wet towel. Exercise, but not too strenuously.”

  “The first thing is,” Chen said, “you have to observe safety rules. You can’t run too fast, you can’t bump into people. You must finish your lunchtime meal. You must listen to the teacher.” Cai sat next to her, the silent but nodding lieutenant. My relationship with Cai had never recovered from the botched Coach purse delivery, and when she wasn’t chilly toward me, she was dismissive.

  “We understand,” I said, guiding the conversation back to the point at hand. “But Rainey says he was told that the police would take him away if he didn’t nap at nap time. We are concerned about your use of threats as a tactic.”

  Chen and Cai looked at each other for a beat and whispered to each other in Shanghainese. “It’s not allowable to threaten children, no matter at home or abroad,” Chen said, finally. “We have never told children we would call the police.”

  “They’re flat-out denying it?” Rob muttered to me. “Where else would Rainey have heard it?” He took over.

  “Rainey says he’s scared to come to school because he’s told the police will come if he doesn’t sleep,” Rob announced.

  “I’ve never used force,” Chen said, neatly skipping over the police threats.

  “Why do you think Rainey isn’t liking school?” I asked. And gradually, I unfolded all my concerns about the dictatorial classroom environment: forced naps, near-constant lining up, a lack of free expression during art.

  Chen had a functional response—a reason—for everything. Yes, the children must lie ramrod straight during nap time, because the beds are close together and others will be disturbed if anyone fidgets. Yes, the children line up for bathroom breaks, otherwise chaos will ensue. Yes, water is only drunk at designated times, so as not to interfere with instruction time. Yes, the children must learn the fundamentals of drawing before they can experiment. No, the children are not allowed to talk during lunch.

  “Not at all?” I asked, visions of my very lively elementary school lunch table in Houston dancing in my head. “No talking while eating?”

  “Not at all. We’re not like other Western schools where everything is very . . . casual,” Cai said, switching to English for the last word. “We need them to finish eating on time. Also, if they’re talking they might choke on their food.”

  “What about sitting in chairs for a long time?”

  “Yes, they must sit straight in chairs. For music class it makes their voices clearer,” interjected Cai.

  “What about discipline? What if a child does something wrong?”

  “I’ll talk to them and ask them to think about it for a while.”

  “Will you take them to another room and ask them to stay there alone? Or make them stand outside the classroom?”

  “No, never,” Cai said. “I don’t think it’s acceptable to threaten children, whether at home or abroad in the West.”

  “But someone did,” I told her, recounting what I’d seen Rainey re-create at home.

  Perhaps it was the classroom ayi, Teacher Chen said, her tone taking on an edge. “I will talk to her. You know—we are trying to adopt some Western ways.” Chen and Cai informed us that the government is working very hard to reform traditional education.

  Chen turned to me with a question. “We have a problem of our own to bring up,” she said. “Rainey has a habit of straddling other children and pretending that they’re domesticated riding animals.” She brought her hands up to her chest, fingers curled over, and bounced twice in her tiny chair—beng, beng—as if she were riding a bucking donkey. “There is an imaginary bridle and whip,” Chen explained, “and he’ll try to make the other children gallop.”

  “Oh,” I responded, as flatly as I could. Chen looked at me with surprise, as if she’d expected me to recoil with horror. I was concerned, but frankly, I also wanted to laugh at Chen’s pantomiming.

  “The other children complain to me,” Chen added for good measure, with another two bounces. Beng, beng. “When we first noticed the behavior, we’d try to talk to him about it. But now all we can do is yell.”

  “You can’t argue with that,” Rob said to me in English, under his breath. We sat perched in our chairs, two parents of a naughty child, humbled and mute.

  Chen spotted her opportunity. “We are a Chinese school. You chose to place your child here, and you must conform to our educational style.” She seemed to be speaking directly to me, and I suddenly knew Principal Zhang had told her of my attempts to weasel into a classroom for observation.

  I whispered to Rob in English, “Does she think we’re running a jungle at home?”

  “Well, if Rainey is riding his
classmates—then, yes,” Rob muttered back.

  “If you let him run around very casually at home,” Chen admonished, “he comes to school and tells the teacher, ‘Well, Mommy says it’s okay to do this.’”

  I nodded.

  Chen looked at me, specifically, again. “He needs to think that Mommy and teachers are on the same side. You decided to send him here. You need to trust our educational style, and you must do the same at home.”

  I can’t pinpoint exactly how we knew it was time to leave, but Rob and I rose from our chairs at precisely the same time, and Chen and Cai mirrored us. We’d stepped into their classroom expecting an honest conversation, but the rules of mianzi, or face, didn’t allow them to own up to anything. I’d been naive to expect that a direct challenge would be effective.

  I bowed my head. “It’s time for you to have lunch,” I proclaimed.

  Because protocol required them to throw some face our way, to acknowledge my reason for calling the meeting, Chen promised to “look into” the police threats.

  I knew we’d never speak of it again.

  * * *

  At this point in Rainey’s journey, I suspect many of my American friends might have sprinted through the black gates of Soong Qing Ling, kid in tow, without a backward glance. Some might have told off Teachers Chen and Cai while perched in their tiny chairs. Others might have fled to the nearest international school, whose philosophies ranged from Reggio Emilia to Montessori to Waldorf. One friend had recently pulled her child out of Soong Qing Ling after trying on the Chinese option as casually as she might try on a qipao dress on for size at the local fabric market.

  I was certainly incapacitated some days by doubt and fear, but I also wasn’t ready to abandon the mission.

  Many foreigners living in modern Shanghai were brought in by multinationals, law firms, and service agencies eager to tap the immense Chinese market for profit. When these Americans, Brits, French, Germans, and Japanese weren’t toiling inside office towers, they went on trips to Thailand or Bali, took escapades in their chauffeured nine-seater vans, or dined out at European and Mediterranean restaurants. In other words, they tried to insulate themselves from the experience of China as much as they could. A couple of American women I knew rarely left their apartments and villas unless their spouses’ company-appointed drivers waited at the end of their driveways, doors ajar to air-conditioned protective pods as they traversed this megacity.