by Lenora Chu
Rob and I wanted to be another type of foreigner in China altogether.
Rob’s time in rural China as a twentysomething had acquainted him with the country and its culture. During his time teaching with the Peace Corps, he’d befriended Chinese students who were polite and inquisitive and respected education, and he carried with him a certain comfort with placing his own son in the Chinese system.
Meanwhile, my own heritage made the Chinese and their behaviors immediately familiar; it was as if I looked into Teacher Chen’s eyes—no matter how harsh and authoritarian their glint—and immediately recognized my father’s intentions (sometimes misguided but always well-meaning). Despite all my struggles, I never lost sight of the value in discipline and hard work delivered the Chinese way.
Rob and I ultimately traveled circuitous paths to arrive at the same point: Philosophically, we saw value in the Chinese approach to discipline and academics, and we also wanted our son to experience the same culture we’d grown to appreciate. Today, Rob and I bike in the sweaty tangle of Shanghai street traffic, eat fiery Hunan food, and journey to the far corners of China and Southeast Asia during holidays. We’re Americans, but our holistic identities are not linked to any particular place. “You’re a global citizen,” my aunt Kari told me. The term was overused, but in many ways she was right.
We’d chosen to spend our son’s early years in China, in part because we felt it was important for him to learn another way of life. We wanted a nimble child, a boy who could handle a world that was uncertain and rapidly changing, with the confidence that he could find his place within it. My aunt Liang, a career psychologist with a focus on ethnic culture, challenged my fear and doubt most starkly: “Why are you stressing over this ‘local school’ decision? You live in China. Why would you expect Rainey to attend anything other than a Chinese school?”
Rainey’s Teacher Chen was right. We’d chosen to put Rainey into a local school. We’d elected to immerse our son in the culture, hoping he’d absorb the language and some of that renowned Chinese discipline. The problem came when we expected to cobble together an educational experience as if we were plucking items off a menu. I wanted Rainey to learn Mandarin, but I was uncomfortable with forced nap time or egg eating. We knew he stood out as a foreigner with his brown hair and odd mannerisms, but we’d expected his teachers and classmates to override basic sensory cues and accept him fully as a peer. (I’d once caught a teacher calling him xiao laowai, or little foreigner, which, to my surprise, didn’t seem to bother my son.) I’d exuded arrogance toward Teacher Chen, who had years of experience in China and a master’s degree in education, while I had none.
Why did we expect to gallop into a Chinese school and bend its educational culture toward our pole within months of arriving?
What gave me the right to feel entitled to an exception?
I found comfort in the fact that Rainey’s school was a government-designated “model school” with access to special funding and privileges. (By contrast, Little Pumpkin’s school was average, in a nondescript suburb of Shanghai.) Soong Qing Ling strove for smaller class sizes and teachers with master’s degrees. Seventy percent of its teachers had certificates specifically granted for early childhood education, and they went on frequent trips abroad to study other school systems. The physical education teachers spent time in Australia, that bastion of sun and sports. The school’s parent population was well-to-do, well-traveled internationally, and exposed to the ways of Europe and the United States.
“We believe in a kinder, gentler education,” Principal Zhang had told us during an orientation speech. “We are one family in this school—one united family. Teachers and parents should learn from each other.” Soong Qing Ling was at the forefront of a national effort to change China’s approach to education, the principal told us. The school is a “testing ground for the future of Chinese education, and in recent years our school has influenced all kindergartens in Shanghai as well as across the nation.”
This gave me hope. Anyone with even a casual knowledge of Chinese education knows that academic pressure got very intense during the teenage years, and the news media often published stories of student suicides leading up to important exams. Yet here was evidence the government wasn’t entirely satisfied with its education system. Just as I had questions, so did they.
I also wasn’t convinced Rainey’s teachers were as horrible as my worst fears suspected. On good days, I was captivated by the idea that these government change efforts might offer some upside to the downside of Chinese education and that, indeed, Rainey might come out of his schooling flexible and gritty, as well as some kind of academic superstar to boot. I planned to step up my efforts to find out exactly where Chinese education was headed, and I knew my reporting would better inform our decisions about Rainey’s schooling.
As a safety measure, I placed Rainey’s name on the waiting list at an international kindergarten down the street from our house. These foreign-run bilingual schools were the closest approximation we might get of a public school in America, but they were prohibitively expensive: up to $40,000 a year. International school was an extravagance Rob and I couldn’t afford without making “adjustments,” but exploring a backup plan seemed something a responsible parent should do. Anyway, it would probably take months for a spot to open up.
Meanwhile, Teacher Chen had made clear our mission for the weekday hours of eight a.m. to four p.m.: We’d need to ensure Rainey didn’t mount his classmates like they were horses, inure him to a culture of compliance by threats, and help him adapt to his foreign environment.
* * *
As part of that promise, I hired a Mandarin tutor for Rainey.
It’s commonly said that Chinese is one of the most difficult languages in the world to learn. The Chinese language consists of more than forty thousand distinct characters, with each appearing to be a random assortment of straight and curved strokes squiggled in ink, with no immediately discernible order.
This inscrutability is complicated by the fact that spoken Mandarin has four tones, so that any phonetic sound, such as “ma,” will have a different meaning depending on whether it’s spoken with a steady high tone, a rising tone, a falling then rising tone, or a falling tone. Thus, even if you manage to commit thousands of characters to memory, you still must hit the tones in everyday speech.
“The easy characters to remember are the ones that resemble what they mean,” said Rainey’s tutor, a young preschool teacher I’d found in the neighborhood, who was excited for a little extra cash weekdays after work. She began to break the task down into discrete parts. The character 火 means fire, she told Rainey, and you might say it resembles flames bursting from two sticks of wood. When you extrapolate from there, she said, you’ll see that characters containing the radical 火 might typically have a meaning related to fire. For example, 烧 means “burning,” 烤 means “toast,” 烫 means “something extremely hot.” Such radicals, or root forms, offer clues to sound and meaning.
The tutor would draw little pictures to help. For example, 山 meant mountain, and 上 indicated “up.” Other little tips and tricks assist the learning process, but ultimately, no Chinese teacher will deny that memorization and drilling of thousands of whole characters is ultimately a large part—if not entirely the essence—of learning Chinese. No child can escape that process which has become a “dirty word” in American classrooms: rote memorization.
Learning Chinese takes years. Seven or eight years to learn to read and write three thousand characters, estimated the linguist and Sinologist John DeFrancis, while students of French and Spanish might achieve a comparable level in half the time. Anyone trying to learn Chinese “will always be frustrated by the abysmal ratio of effort to effect,” wrote the linguist David Moser. Moser writes with humor of an incident where he couldn’t conjure up the word “sneeze.” He happened to be dining with three PhD students at Peking University. “Not one of them could correctly produce the character,” Moser wrote. “N
ow, Peking University is usually considered the ‘Harvard of China.’ Can you imagine three PhD students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word ‘sneeze’?”
My own journey learning Chinese had been tortuous. My parents sent me to Sunday Chinese school in Houston, and I absorbed as much as I could, that is, when I wasn’t hoping for a sudden bolt of lightning to strike me dead as I traced out characters in my notebook.
In China, schoolchildren are anything but casual Sunday learners. They drill daily, and they’re required to reach full literacy astonishingly quickly. “A child’s ability to memorize is very good at this stage, and it should be tapped,” a primary school teacher told me during an interview.
China sets rigorous curriculum standards, with no leniency for even the youngest children: First- and second-graders should recognize 1,600 characters and write 800 of them from memory. By fourth grade, the level is 2,500 characters, and by the sixth grade it’s 3,000 characters and writing almost as many, although many schools’ individualized curriculum actually calls for more. Full literacy requires an astonishing 3,500 frequently used characters to be committed to memory, according to the Chinese curriculum standards for full-time compulsory education. That means a typical Chinese first-grader—six years old when they start the school year—attends hours a week of Chinese class, reading, writing, and reciting every day. (The process itself drills rigidity and memorization into a child’s routine; some education watchers say it’s the unforgiving task of learning Chinese itself that lays the groundwork to killing curiosity and creativity in the Chinese schoolchild.)
Ironically, as fearsome as the task seemed to the intellectual mind, Rainey was having more fun memorizing Chinese characters than learning to read in English at this early stage. He’d easily learned his ABCs, but having to remember the phonetic sounds that accompanied each letter, not to mention consonant combinations such as “sh” and “ch” and “ll,” made him throw up his hands in despair.
Some days, his Chinese learning journey was gratifying.
“Carrots are for rabbits—and I am not a rabbit,” he said to me, in Chinese, laughing. I’d coaxed him to eat this vegetable at dinner, and I’m sure Rainey loved being able to reject my nutritional efforts in Chinese as well as English.
Other days were challenging, such as the time Rainey refused to invite Chinese friends to his birthday party.
“I don’t want to speak Chinese on my birthday,” he said.
“Don’t you speak Chinese in school?” I responded.
“Yes, but I’m not at school right now,” he replied. Good point.
Another time, he walked away from Ayi midsentence, leaving her staring after him in puzzlement. He explained to me and Rob, in English. “I’m tired of speaking Chinese,” he said. “Also, paleontologists don’t need to speak Chinese.” Rainey had decided upon turning four that he wanted to get paid to dig for fossils when he grew up.
“Paleontologists do need to speak Chinese,” Rob replied. “They find a lot of dinosaur fossils in China.”
Good point.
* * *
When the factories in the Yangtze Delta work from morning through night, and weather patterns are stagnant, a perfect confluence of factors makes the air a dense, dark, choking fog.
Shanghai is home to a thriving steel-manufacturing sector and a multitude of petrochemical, plastics, rubber, metals, and machining plants. These factories and their bellowing smokestacks infiltrate and encircle Shanghai, and some days, thick blankets of industrial smog obscured the morning sun and shrouded the skyscrapers outside our window in a cloak of gray.
This was China’s pollution problem, which presented a unique challenge for us.
Rainey suffers from coughing fits, which worsen during times of high pollution, and a doctor cautioned us he might be showing early signs of asthma. Many children grow out of it, the doctor told us, but in the meantime, we should keep a rescue inhaler with him at all times. Including, he told us, when our boy is at school.
As part of the doctor’s prescription, we’d have to stay inside on particularly smoggy days. Checking the air quality each day was easy: Each morning, sixteen floors up, I would part our dining-room curtains and gaze north over the red rooftops of the shikumen buildings that sat low to the ground, past high-rise apartment towers, and over Yan’an Highway, already choking up with Baojuns and Buicks on the daily commute.
I was seeking out my personal pollution monitor: Jing’an Temple in all its golden glory. Otherwise known as the Temple of Peace and Tranquility, the temple sits about half a mile from my sixteenth-floor window. Dating back to AD 247, Jing’an Temple was relocated during the Song dynasty, renovated during the Qing, destroyed in 1851 and then rebuilt, and today it’s an imposing structure of gold leaf and layered rooftops that ascends into the sky.
On clearer days, when I could make out the fine detail on the gold-layered knob at the temple’s top, the air-quality index usually notched in below 100. “Safe for most people,” declared my mobile air-quality app.
If the temple’s edges disappeared into a gray-black haze of smog, like a photograph whose borders had been deliberately smudged, the index notched in between 100 and 200, already well outside the level deemed safe by the US Environmental Protection Agency: “Unhealthy. Restrict outdoor exertion.”
If I saw nothing of the temple, much less the buildings the next block over, I knew the index was at least 200, 300, or above: “very unhealthy” or “hazardous.” Time to hunker indoors in our hermetically sealed apartment, mini-refrigerator-size air purifiers cranked to high.
One week in December, I parted the curtains and looked north past Yan’an Highway. No Jing’an Temple. As my eyes began to focus, I realized I couldn’t even see the buildings the next block over but for a faint shadow here and there, phantom outlines of skyscrapers shrouded in smog. I couldn’t make out the sun. The index had surpassed 500: so toxic, it exceeded measurement capabilities. (Los Angeles and London usually hover around 50.)
“Airpocalypse!” screamed a Western newspaper, while Shanghai officials ordered all schools to suspend outdoor activities.
“I can’t breathe, so I’m staying in,” a friend texted me, canceling a planned coffee date. “We’re keeping Rainey home,” Rob told me, teeth gritted. “Windows closed, filters on high.” For days we cowered indoors, taking our stand against World War Smog. The pollution finally lifted after a long, interminable week.
I returned Rainey to school with a newfound determination. Asthma isn’t a medical condition most Chinese are familiar with, and I’d been hesitant to call attention to any feature that would brand my son an exception to the rule. But it was time to talk to Teacher Chen.
“What is that?” Teacher Chen said, glancing at the blue plastic-and-metal contraption in my hand. I’d pulled her aside at pickup time, armed with the Chinese vocabulary for asthma, emergency, and rescue inhaler.
“An inhaler—xiru qiwuji—medication to help Rainey breathe,” I told her. “He has asthma. If you see Rainey having trouble breathing, could you please give him two puffs?”
“We don’t keep any medication here. Take it to the school nurse,” Chen said.
“Buhaoyisi—I find it embarrassing to say,” I said. The Chinese use this nicety to preface anything troublesome, contradictory, or confrontational, and what I was about to say classified as all three. “Buhaoyisi, but a fast response is important, and the nurse’s station is too far away. Could we keep the medication near Rainey?”
“We don’t keep medication in the classroom,” she repeated, and she turned away.
“How about the coatroom next door?” I asked. But Chen shook her head without turning around. A backside in retreat—that summed up my rapport with Teacher Chen.
The nurses’ station sits in the same yellow-and-white stucco building as the guard’s glass house at the school entrance. Stretching along the side of the building is a long trough of opaque, black sinks, exactly waist-height for a ch
ild. Above the sinks sit an array of golden plaques, which together declare Soong Qing Ling a model kindergarten and a “laboratory for infant education.”
This area had a distinct purpose in the mornings: the daily tijian, or health assessment. Children would stream through the gates past the guards, lather and rinse their hands at the low, black sinks, dry off, and then step into one of two long lines that snaked into the nurses’ station. At the head of each line, a pink-uniformed nurse peeked into tiny mouths and turned over palms to check for the red dots that signified hand, foot, and mouth disease.
Depending on her assessment, the nurse would hand each child a thin, colored tab of plastic the size of a USB thumb drive.
“Let’s go, Mom!” Rainey would say, clutching the colored tab as we walked together up to the classrooms. A red tab indicated good health: no action required. Blue signified to the teacher that the student was scheduled to take daily medicine. Pink—the color of Pepto Bismol—indicated stomachache. Yellow meant the child showed signs of cough. Green was a mystery, so I asked Rainey.
“That means bleeding or hurt,” he explained one day, smiling up at me as we traversed the huge grassy lawn in the center of campus, which I came to call Big Green. The daily check-in process was orderly, completely silent, and an effective way to communicate between nurse and teacher: Color-code the missive, and dispatch children as the messenger. Chinese efficiency in processing large crowds always amazed me.
One day Rainey got a yellow card, which meant “cough.” And the day after that, and in fact every day that week. But he was perfectly healthy—he should have been getting red! Something was going on.