by Lenora Chu
I found this revelation confounding. “After the gaokao is over,” I uttered dumbly, in the direction of Darcy’s umbrella, “will your mother and father get remarried?”
We reached the subway, where he faithfully escorted me after each meeting. “See you next time,” Darcy said, his voice growing faint, as if suddenly realizing he’d revealed too much. I stooped to peer underneath the brim of his umbrella, and he tilted his head forward to say good-bye.
* * *
On days I wasn’t feeling empathetic, I would brand the entire system with a single word: fubai—corrupt or rotten. Each time I saw a news report about a principal who’d taken bribes, a teacher enrolling her students in after-school prep for side money, or an elaborate gaokao cheating scheme, I found that word popping into my head. Fubai.
It was the judgment of a Westerner schooled in a different culture.
Over time, I landed upon a simpler truth, one less judgmental and more reflective of the reality of China today: The rules are so rigid and hierarchical, and the game is zero-sum with incredibly high stakes, so that to survive, the Chinese had become accustomed to seeking a work-around. Breaking the law, or a matter of survival?
A schoolchild’s journey is full of assessments and evaluations, which are typically made public—posted on Big Board, say—for all to see. When they’re not broadcast formally, results propagate just as rapidly via the invisible scorecard of gossip: Which child raised his hand most often? Whose recorder play most closely followed rhythm? Who snagged first place on the math exam? Whose gaokao scores topped the district list?
A score would simply be a score, and nothing more, if such assessments were simply a periodic check on progress. In the Chinese school system, a number is much more than that. A relentless churn of testing coughs up scores with real consequences, and the stakes are many, high, and intricately intertwined: A teacher might get a salary bump for cultivating high-scoring students; a principal might be granted a promotion based on his school-wide gaokao average; a student might gain admission to an elite college, while her classmates lose their grip on the ladder to social and economic security. Couple this high-stakes, zero-sum environment with a large population, a scarcity of opportunity, and a cultural propensity to give gifts, and suddenly the education system becomes riddled with houmen, or back doors, through which gifts and money exchange hands.
In today’s China, it would be tempting to brand as fubai the teachers and administrators who dabble in the gray. Certainly, some I’ve met would easily classify as greedy and spiteful, but most are pawns caught up in a system beyond their influence and design. The notorious pride of the Chinese also plays a role; losing face or admitting defeat simply isn’t an option, and taking the moral high ground would mean falling behind. It’s a national game of Keeping Up with the Wangs, and sometimes that requires using every tool in the kit.
There’s an additional problem: Teacher and administrator salaries are relatively low, which means that opportunities to earn extra cash can be critical to keeping afloat in modern China. Educators may have the reverence of Chinese society, but respect is little consolation when it’s the factory owners, entrepreneurs, and professionals who have cashed in on China’s economic growth. Teachers also face the unique pressures of an authoritarian system. For one, they must curry favor with superiors who determine promotions based on assessments. A teacher who oversees evaluations at a Shanghai school explained that he might walk into a music or art class, select students at random, and ask them to sing a song or draw an object on command. “If the child knows the song or draws well, the teacher is doing a good job.” A math teacher might be evaluated based on the test scores of her kids. These assessments are slotted into a file and cracked open whenever teachers apply for raises and promotions.
This places immense power in the hands of the assessor. Teachers can only hope their judge is fair, in the same way a 1980s Chinese farmer might have longed for a local tax collector who resisted embezzlement or unjust, random levies. Not everyone is so lucky. “It’s an open secret that we must offer up to 50,000 RMB to administrators in order to be considered for promotion,” wrote one teacher from Ezhou city, in Hubei province, on an online forum.
Amanda told me her high school math teacher was always looking for back doors. The man sat on a committee that formulated exam questions for a citywide math contest, and this power proved to be a temptation he couldn’t resist. “He distributed the questions to his own students,” Amanda told me, “in advance.”
Armed with this illicit head start, Amanda said, the man’s students performed among the top in the district. The teacher’s own performance evaluation sparkled that year.
“What happened then?” I asked Amanda, imagining the man was found out and fired.
“He got a promotion,” Amanda told me, “and the school got a prize.”
Chinese media have reported many dozens of cases of large-scale fraud around education over the last few years. A high school principal in Guangdong took “fees” from parents to enroll hundreds of kids with entrance scores that fell short of the cutoff. More than three thousand teachers and administrators in Hubei required students to buy school uniforms priced higher than market, then raked in kickbacks from uniform companies. A rash of administrators in Guizhou province were dismissed for taking bribes; an Anhui administrator purchased scientific equipment and used kickbacks to buy an apartment for his son. A Renmin University official confessed to taking more than $3.6 million in exchange for helping students secure spots at the college or for other favors surrounding the admissions process.
Authorities have tried to root out the problems, only to find that policy is one thing and reality quite another. The system’s massive size, and its firmly entrenched education culture make change difficult. Sometimes, ironically, teachers and parents themselves object to anticorruption efforts, comfortable as they are with a system that is clearly flawed but ultimately familiar.
Take government efforts to root out cheating at gaokao. Many shortcuts have been documented for this important exam—crafted by students, parents, and even teachers who benefit when students test well—and they get more clever each year. News reports show photos of microphones hidden inside coins and eyeglasses, receivers shaped like pencil erasers, tiny cheat sheets. Students from one province have been hired to take tests for those in another, a particular problem in rural areas. Consultants can be hired to transmit answers on test day, and paying an official for an advance peek at the test isn’t unheard of. Other times, teachers have been known to sell the answer keys.
In recent years, Beijing officials have proposed extreme punishments, such as a 2015 law that penalizes gaokao cheaters with a three- to seven-year prison sentence. Local education bureaus are also attempting their own measures, such as a ban on watches in the exam room. Guangdong province instituted an ID recognition system to prevent proxy test-takers from sitting in for students. A Jingzhou school administered the test deep inside a forest, where no cell signal could reach, and a photo that went viral shows desks placed more than an arm’s length apart as teacher paced the gaps, presumably to prevent the exchange of answers. The ministry recently decreed that every testing room in the country must be monitored by at least two staffers.
It was a public admission of an epidemic.
Yet, crack down too much, and people get angry: “We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat,” chanted a mob of angry parents, after officials unexpectedly installed metal detectors and outside test proctors at a test site in Hubei province. Cheating is a “nationwide pastime,” this group of more than two thousand parents claimed, as they threw rocks and chanted at test monitors, who took cover inside the building.
Cracking down only on their children puts them at a disadvantage, they said.
* * *
Around this time, I returned to Little Pumpkin’s classroom.
I sauntered down the long hallway to Small Class No. 1 at Harmony Kindergarten
and spotted Master Teacher Wang at a sink in an open restroom. The way she washed her hands brought back all sorts of memories of my first days in her classroom: As she ran her hands under the water, only the butt of the hand and the fingers touched, forming a cavity between her palms as if she cupped a baby mouse. When she rubbed vigorously on those two contact points, it seemed as if she were torturing the tiny rodent with a great amount of determination.
I trailed her into the classroom, and, once inside, we struck up a conversation at the back of the room as the associate teacher launched into a lesson. “Where’s Wang Wu Zhe?” I asked Master Wang, scanning the children’s faces for Little Pumpkin, anxious to see how the little boy was faring six months after I’d first observed him in the classroom.
“Nnnnh—he’s not here. He’s sick. He’s always sick,” Master Wang told me, leaning against a bunk bed. Wang’s face was all angles, sharp features settled into a pointed frown.
“Is he having trouble in school?” I asked her.
“He is a waidiren—outsider,” Wang told me, as if her big-city bigotry would explain a rural boy’s absence. “You want to see another strange child? Take this one,” she said, abruptly stepping forward to grasp a little girl by the shoulders. “Zibizheng—she doesn’t understand anything.” The three characters in zibizheng translated to the words “self,” “shut,” and “illness.” The girl was autistic.
“Her parents refuse to do anything about her,” Wang told me. “She’ll just sit in the back until one day she’ll drop out,” Wang concluded. It was a “do-nothing” approach to special needs, and the girl sat near the back of the classroom, emitting noises that formed no words I could recognize. “Bang hai bao, bang hai bao.”
Teachers Wang and Li had covered much ground since I’d first visited. The kids had memorized a dozen nursery rhymes, learned to count, and sussed out the differences among planes, trains, and cars. Wang surveyed her ordered classroom with pride—tin water cups lined up to attention in a cupboard, folded pajamas atop each pillow, children perched silently in chairs—as if the occasion of my visit had suddenly clarified her success.
“The children are very guai—well behaved,” I affirmed.
“They wailed like ghosts and howled like wolves that first week,” Wang said, “but now—now they listen to me.”
An outlier quickly emerged. As the children worked on a penguin coloring exercise, seated in clusters of eight, little black bodies of flightless birds began to emerge. One little girl inexplicably drew two large, round eyes on the penguin’s left cheek; this was a violation of Wang’s classroom, which could never be mistaken for an exercise in free-form painting or Picasso-style cubist sketching.
The penguin was supposed to be drawn strictly in profile.
In three steps, Wang bounded over to the girl’s table. “What are you doing? You are drawing two eyes on your paper! Two eyes! Look up at me,” Wang commanded.
The girl obeyed. Deliberately, Wang turned to profile, to offer the girl a view of her left-facing silhouette.
“When I turn to the side, do you see one eye or two? ONE eye or TWO?” Wang commanded with that sharp voice that made heads twitch.
The girl parted her lips, but nothing came out.
Wang snapped. “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT THE SIDE OF MY FACE. DO YOU SEE ONE EYE OR TWO?”
“One,” the girl finally uttered.
“That’s right. ONE. ONE EYE!” Wang said, rapping the table. “So why are you drawing TWO EYES on your paper?”
* * *
After lunch, Master Teacher Wang moved in on a golden opportunity.
“Your husband is in America? When will he be back?” Wang asked. I’d mentioned that Rob was away on a business trip.
“Next week,” I said.
Wang’s eyes brightened. “Well, maybe he can bring back something for me,” she said. She turned to Teacher Li and conveyed the news of Rob’s whereabouts with the jollity of a five-year-old on Christmas morning.
Teacher Li knew immediately what this meant, and she motioned for the children to file into their chairs. Li had a softness about her that made her approachable, with her bouncing pixie cut and an aloof grin. At times, she seemed embarrassed by her partner teacher, especially when Wang screamed at the autistic girl or yelled fiercely at a boy who rose for water out of turn.
On the subject of shopping, the two women were perfectly aligned.
“What purses do you buy?” Teacher Li asked, glancing down at the bag at my feet. My chocolate-brown canvas messenger bag was the functional tote of a writer who carries a laptop wherever she goes.
“Um—I don’t really buy purses that much,” I stammered. In the eyes of Wang and Li, I had zero style.
Li continued. “We don’t use Coach anymore. Too many people have Coach now,” she said, raising an eyebrow. Was she trying to send me a message?
Wang chimed in. “Have you heard of Qianbi?”
I sounded out the phonemes in my head, but they strung together to form no brand name I knew. “No,” I admitted, reluctantly. Wang motored over to the classroom computer, typed in a few characters, and up popped the image of a familiar yellow bottle of lotion, displayed before a familiar candy-green-colored box.
“Qianbi!” Teacher Wang repeated.
“Clinique!” I exclaimed.
“Yes!” Wang grew excited. “What about Maike Gaoshi?”
“I don’t know Maike Gaoshi,” I said. A few keyboard strokes, and a purse popped up on the screen, displaying the initials MK.
“Oh! Michael Kors!” I exclaimed.
“Tangli Baiqi?” Wang said, loading a circular symbol comprised of Oriental-looking etchings.
“Tory Burch!” I said.
“Yes!” Wang said, pleased I knew this one right away. “That—this is more exclusive. Too many people have Coach now—about six of ten people on the street have Coach now.” Was that a scientific study?
We worked our way through the Chinese names for Louis Vuitton, Kate Spade, and Marc Jacobs, and finally Wang pranced over to a metal cabinet at the side of the classroom. I’d thought it held art supplies, but it turned out to be a secret repository of luxury goods. Wang triumphantly threw open the doors, nudged aside a box of markers, and produced a black clutch.
“Pulada—this was five thousand RMB,” she said, caressing the patent leather. Prada. Next, she excitedly pulled out a mobile phone and showed me a snapshot of various luxury items positioned against a wall, as if a handbag had committed murder and was ready to be fingered in a lineup of purses. “My sister brought all of these back from France. She also bought four Laolishi.”
“Laolishi?”
She tapped on her keyboard again, and an image popped up: Rolex.
“You know,” Li said suddenly, pointing in my direction with her nose, “Teacher Chu is American. The American brands will be cheaper in America. We’ll buy the European brands in France or Korea.”
My marching orders were clear, and I slowly pulled out my MacBook Air to take notes. I realized I’d made my bed by gifting the Coach purses, and I was uncomfortable in my new role, but I also couldn’t figure out how to extricate myself from this situation.
The children sat silently in their U-shape, awaiting instruction, as Li’s eyes suddenly fixed on my laptop. “How much was that,” she said, tapping the glowing Apple logo.
“I bought this in the United States—for about two thousand American dollars,” I said.
“When is the new iPad coming out?” Teacher Wang said.
“Can you buy us the iPhone 6?” Li chimed in.
Within five minutes, I found myself in a conference room, six teachers peering over my shoulder. Wang had yelled into several open classroom doors as we marched down the hallway, “Teacher Chu is going to buy me a Maike Gaoshi purse!” prompting other teachers to melt into the procession. I’d suddenly become the Pied Piper of luxury goods. The foreigner who’d been, at best, an intrusion in the classroom, suddenly had value: China’s tax system made
foreign-branded items purchased inside China prohibitively expensive. Apple computers might cost a third more, while a Louis Vuitton handbag might be double the price of one purchased in the United States or Europe.
This time, Rob would be their mule. I felt the women’s breath hot over my shoulder as I toggled between the sites of Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s, Macy’s, and Zappos. Where is the principal? Who’s watching the children?
Li wanted a navy blue Michael Kors satchel in a style called the Selma. But only Nordstrom had it, in green.
“I can’t find it,” I said, reluctantly.
“I really . . . want . . . that bag,” Li stated, voice staccato, breath landing on my cheek. “Not in green. In blue.”
“That blue is last season’s, and they’re gone,” I concluded.
“Will they make more? Call them,” Wang ordered, hitting me on the shoulder.
Call Michael Kors? “Let me look again,” I said, nervously. My fingers slipped over the keys, and Nordstrom’s website popped up again.
Wang struck me again, this time on the forearm. “You already looked there,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said, glancing up at her like a chastened schoolgirl.
“Forget about it,” she responded.
After another fifteen minutes, I had my orders. Four teachers settled for Michael Kors wallets, while Wang chose a striped Tory Burch straw bag that cost roughly a month’s teacher salary.
“I like a straw bag, especially in the summertime,” Wang said conclusively, while the women murmured appreciatively. Two generations ago, tens of millions of Chinese starved to death in the countryside due to one of Mao Zedong’s failed policies. Now we were surfing for handbags and matching purse styles to seasons of the year. Starvation to luxury bags in fifty years: If anything encapsulated the speed—and the irony—of China’s transformation, this was it.
I glanced up at the gaggle of teachers huddled over me, pondering how to phrase my next question. “How can you afford all these purses?” I finally asked. The average Shanghai schoolteacher’s salary that year was about 750 American dollars a month, just about the cost of a Tory Burch handbag.