by Lenora Chu
It was a popular school, a magnet for foreigners as well as elite Chinese who wanted something kinder and gentler than the local Chinese option. The school’s marketing department knew this, and it was as smug as its waiting list was long. “We have an innovative learning and teaching style that helps children reach their full potential,” the school’s brochures trumpeted.
A Victoria parent I’d met was similarly self-assured. “Classrooms are child-led and the learning style is inquiry-based,” she told me, drawing out the word “child” as if it were a strip of candy taffy that stretched and flattened without breaking in two.
“If a child has an interest in something, anything, they can broach it in class, and the class talks about it. Child-centered,” she repeated.
“Not like what they do in Chinese school,” she told me.
Victoria was as close to a Western-style education as we would get, and it was our escape hatch from Chinese education. For some reason, Rob and I hesitated.
“Overall, has Chinese school been good for Rainey?” I wondered out loud.
“I think so,” Rob said, a pinched look suddenly crossing his face.
The Chinese way has been good in at least one aspect.
“When I grow up, you’re going to be old,” Rainey said, as he crawled into bed with us one morning. We three stared up at the ceiling, blinking the sleep from our eyes.
“That’s right,” I said, laughing.
“Who will take care of you?” Rainey asked, turning sideways to look at me.
“Funny you should ask, Rainey!” I responded, laughing.
“How about me?” my son said in a singsongy voice. He’d absorbed a little Chinese-style filial piety, and I liked imagining that he’d never deign to let me spend a day in a nursing home.
We had three days to figure out what we wanted to do. Three days was Shanghai Victoria’s upper limit for indecisive parents, and I pondered Rainey’s educational future in a last, desperate effort to discern how he was doing at this juncture.
I still hadn’t detected any worrisome behaviors, and I’d actually noticed a development I felt good about: critical thinking skills. Last month, Rainey had come to a frank realization about the Chinese teachers who control his environment: “Sometimes, my teachers tell lies.”
I’d discovered Rainey’s enlightenment during one of our bedtime pillow talks.
“Are you sometimes bad at work?” Rainey had asked me that evening, as we lay side by side in his bottom bunk, staring up at the wooden slats overhead.
“Well—sometimes I don’t feel like doing something, and I don’t do it right,” I responded.
“What does your teacher say?” Rainey asked, looking small with his brown-haired head peeking out from underneath the covers.
“I have a boss. My boss will say, ‘Do it over again and fix it.’” I answered. Rainey stared up at the bottom of the top bunk, and I continued gently. “What does your teacher do when you’re bad?”
But Rainey didn’t respond.
“I won’t be mad at you, Rainey,” I said. “Please talk to me.”
My son’s words came out tentatively at first. “Sometimes the teachers tell me I have to stay in the classroom, and everyone else goes downstairs to play,” he said, gazing at the top bunk. “Sometimes they take me to look at the lower-class grades, and they say they’ll put me here, and I’ll never see my classmates again.”
My pulse quickened. “Who else is with you when the teachers say that?” I asked.
“Last time, Li Fa Rong and Mei Mei and Wei Wei,” he said, naming three other students. “They cry, but I don’t cry.” Rainey described their crying as thick, jolting sobs that rollicked throughout their bodies as if they were abandoned tiger cubs.
“Why do they cry?” I asked.
“Li Fa Rong believes that we’ll never get to see our classmates again. But I know the teachers are faking it. I tell my classmates, ‘It’s jiade—fake!’” Rainey said, flatly, with little emotion.
“You know it’s fake?” I exclaimed, glancing over at him.
“Yes, I know. I know they’re lying,” Rainey said, energized by my interest. “They also say I’ll never see Mommy again, but I know they’re lying, too.” Rainey seemed particularly assured by this statement. After all, I am here, aren’t I?
Most Chinese I know have a relationship with truth that’s slightly different from my own. The Chinese are more likely to sacrifice the truth for a number of reasons, whether it’s to pursue a goal, to protect the pride of an authority figure, to project modesty, or to preserve harmony. Studies comparing Chinese and Western culture back up this idea. Chinese doctors are less likely to tell a cancer patient the truth about a diagnosis, while Western doctors are more apt to reveal a grim prognosis. Chinese students look more positively upon a fellow classmate who told a small lie and more negatively upon one who told a truth that is boastful. A Chinese friend was told by her parents, “I found you in the garbage,” to avoid having a frank talk about sex and procreation. In other words, the truth is not a worthy goal in and of itself, in part because the Chinese emphasize community over the needs of the individual.
In the case of Rainey’s teachers, the women were bending the truth in pursuit of a goal that was good for the collective: children who behaved.
I knew somewhere, deep inside, that I should have been outraged, but I wasn’t. I think I’d long ago realized the futility of anger about something that had happened in the past. Or, perhaps, I’d become inured to the extremes of the Chinese system, since my overriding feeling was one of celebration and relief that Rainey had recognized the threat as fake. He was questioning. Whether this was due to his home environment, or a quality of his personality, I didn’t care. I simply wanted to celebrate: My son was thinking critically about his environment.
The tunnel of information between us was rarely this open, and I pressed as Rainey continued to stare up at the slats of the upper bunk. I gathered that Li Fa Rong—the “King of the Naughty Kids”—had been punished by isolation at least half a dozen times this year. Rainey had been sent away only twice, for infractions that included goofing around during lunchtime.
“Do you like school, Rainey?” I asked.
“I like school, but sometimes I’d rather be at home with you,” he answered. Most days after pickup, he would run ahead of me, hand in hand with his classmates as they spilled out onto Big Green. He’d clamber over the playground equipment as I chatted with fellow parents and grandparents before we headed home. Rainey liked his friends, and I was also starting to find cohorts among the parents.
“That’s normal, Rainey,” I said. “I like work just fine, but most of the time I’d rather be home with you.” As we lay there, a peculiar feeling moved into my chest, a swirling mix of uncertainty and guilt and love. It overwhelmed me, and a few tears emerged in the corners of my eyes.
“You know, Rainey,” I started, “sometimes . . . many times, I don’t agree with how the teachers do things.”
“Okay,” he said.
“But you have to remember—Mommy and Daddy love you for exactly who you are. We want you to feel like you can tell us anything.”
“Okay,” Rainey responded. We lay there for a beat. “Now what?” he asked, looking over at me.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Should we go to sleep now?” Rainey said.
“Okay,” I said, laughing, rubbing the tears from my eyes. “Let’s go to sleep.”
With that, my little boy turned to face the wall and his head relaxed into his pillow. I watched as he dozed off, his chest expanding with each intake of breath, and I found that my own breathing began to match the rhythm of his.
He’d been a comfort to the sobbing “King of the Naughty Kids,” and he’d also become a comfort to me.
* * *
While Rainey was well into his journey of tiny adjustments, my aspiring Communist friend Darcy was showing mastery of the system.
“I had an interv
iew at Jiaotong University,” Darcy told me at our next meeting, naming one of China’s top four colleges.
“An interview?” I asked Darcy. “I thought everything was decided by gaokao. By testing.”
He grinned, gelled bangs bouncing as his head bobbed. “Some students have another way in.”
The ministry was continuing to experiment with “quality education” and other reforms, and partly that meant chipping away at the importance of gaokao for certain groups of students. Make exams less important, the theory goes, and childhood becomes a little more palatable. Jiaotong University was one of about seventy colleges allowed to participate in “independent recruitment” that year, and the university had invited hundreds of students from all over China to “interview.” Students who pass the interview may be awarded bonus gaokao points or be allowed to score at a lower threshold than normally required for admission.
I looked over at Darcy. “You were invited to interview?”
“Yes,” Darcy said.
“Who chose you?”
“My school principal. I’m the only one representing my school. I’m jijifenzi—an enthusiast. They like me.” He grinned, again. Jijifenzi literally meant “fanatic” and “opportunist” all rolled up into one. It wasn’t necessarily a positive term, and in using it, Darcy was giving a nod to his own duplicity. But he was a Youth League member favored by school administrators. Darcy was well on the way toward accomplishing his goal, and in a Chinese student’s life, the end often justifies the means.
“What did you talk about in the interview?” I asked him. He glanced down for a brief moment, shyly, before looking up again.
“I told them about you,” he said. “I told them I was learning a lot about the Western way of thinking.” I wasn’t bothered. We each had our reasons for befriending the other.
Darcy sat before the Jiaotong professors, who had asked him to describe memorable moments and people in his lifetime. Darcy’s carefully scripted answers revealed an accomplished young man who also had an understanding of humility and group welfare. It was textbook Communist humblebrag: Besides talking about his new foreign friend, he’d told the professors he revered the computer genius Alan Turing, but that “I’m too modest to have similar ambitions”; he’d gifted his mother a watch on Mother’s Day, but it was purchased through barter, not cash; he’d rebutted his uncle—who’d lamented that China’s standing in the world was tai ruo, or very weak—by insisting that China’s “efforts to protect the country’s interests and encourage growth are impressive, indeed.”
I looked into the eyes of my jijifenzi friend. “Were you nervous?” I asked him.
“It wasn’t difficult,” Darcy said. “I answered some questions based on the truth, and others based on what I thought they wanted to hear.”
This reminded me of his bone marrow story. Last year, administrators at Darcy’s high school mandated that students should give blood for bone marrow typing when they turned eighteen. Administrators earned fame and recognition from government elders for creating a registry—at the time a novelty for a public school—but a handful of students rebelled. They were angry that their bodies were being used for public show.
Darcy thought the protests were silly. “For me, it’s a must to be typed, because I will eventually join the Party. The school won’t think I’m good if I don’t participate.” For Darcy, working inside the system would yield the best individual result.
So, he rolled up his sleeve for the nurse, and he didn’t flinch when the needle slipped under his skin.
* * *
Unlike Darcy, Amanda didn’t care to rationalize anything.
She wanted out of the system. “I feel I have shackles on,” Amanda told me. “I feel like I’m not allowed to think for myself.”
“Can you be more specific?” I asked. Amanda thought for a moment before nodding.
“The Merchant of Venice,” she said.
Amanda had studied Shakespeare’s play in classrooms in both China and America. In it, the merchant Antonio borrows a large sum of money from the rich Jewish moneylender Shylock, seeking to help a friend in need. Unfortunately, the merchant’s ships don’t return from sea, and when the loan comes due, he doesn’t have the money to pay. Shylock then demands a pound of flesh from the merchant per a contract clause, which is no simple matter: In sixteenth-century Venice, the surgeon’s knife would take the merchant’s life.
The action was straightforward. For Amanda, the drama came in the interpretations.
“Boy, were there differences,” Amanda told me.
The Chinese verdict on the flesh-demanding Shylock is clear: The Jewish moneylender is the evil incarnate, greedy, and cruel. “The teacher always presented Shylock as a heartless and merciless capitalist,” Amanda says.
Sitting in uniform inside her Shanghai classroom, Amanda never questioned this interpretation. She couldn’t present evidence to the contrary even if she’d wanted to. In China, works of literature are presented only in snippets or even rewritten, then carefully selected for its message and pasted into a textbook.
Amanda’s enlightenment had come in America, during her junior year abroad. There, she was assigned to read the full, unabridged version of the play. Immediately, she teased out the bigger picture: Shylock’s peers ostracized and provoked him, a fact neatly excised from the Chinese textbooks.
“Shylock’s behavior is repulsive, but everyone in society rejected him! Society created the ‘hateful Jew,’” Amanda exclaimed, still astounded by this revelation a year after she’d stumbled upon it. “He’s not the only party that is in the wrong.” Inspired, Amanda promptly penned a high school thesis on how evil characters are partly shaped by the environment in which they live. Most classrooms in America will include at least some discussion of this sympathetic approach to Shylock.
“You could not have presented this viewpoint in school in China?” I asked her.
“No,” Amanda said.
“Why not?”
“It deviates from the official interpretation.”
“Well, then, how would you discuss themes in the play?” I asked.
“Discuss?” Amanda asked.
“Discuss, debate in class, talk about the different points of view,” I said.
Amanda chuckled, a quick laugh that emanated from her belly. It was the first truly spontaneous expression I’d seen from her, and it was prompted by my naïveté. “There’s no discussion,” she said. “The teacher would just read an excerpt from the play line by line, tell us what each phrase means, and what we’re supposed to memorize for tests.”
“What about essays?” I asked. “Could you present your ideas in writing?”
Amanda shook her head. “There’s no point in an alternative way of thinking. To get credit on any test, you have to write the ‘official answer.’”
“What’s the ‘official’ interpretation of Shylock?”
“That Shylock’s evil comes from the lust for money, and lusting after money is bad,” Amanda said. This made sense. The official Party line trumpets that money is acquired only for individual pursuits. The good Chinese puts country, community, and society before self, and the Party still held fast to that propaganda, despite the rampant capitalism and pursuit of money the Chinese witness all around them.
For Amanda, going to America had been like ripping the door off her birdcage. After she returned to Shanghai, armed with a penchant for caffeine and the indelible experience of a year in a US high school, she couldn’t stop thinking about the “lightness” she’d experienced in the United States from being able to walk from math to English or from gym to world history at the bell. In China, students sit with the same classmates in a single room, all day long, for six years in primary, and three years each in middle and high school. Only the teacher at the front changes. America gave her a freedom to be different, and a certain liberty came from changing the faces around her every hour. There were also Kant and Schopenhauer, which she could read in all their unabridged g
lory. Amanda had tested a “couple years ahead” of her American classmates in math, so she could opt out of core classes that she found “easy,” she told me. It was a statement free of arrogance; it was simply fact. She spent her newfound free hours immersed in Western philosophy: Nietzsche, Hume, Camus, Sartre.
“I no longer believed in Chinese morality,” she told me. “I’d been thinking in a way dictated to me by my parents and teachers, but it’s not the only way, and it’s definitely not the right way.”
The Chinese classroom began feeling like a “chamber of stagnation,” with the walls closing in on her, inch by inch. Amanda began getting into trouble with her teachers.
Once back in Shanghai, Amanda was assigned to write an essay about the topic “The Unknown.” She let her thoughts flow and her pen move freely, and out sprang the idea that people should respect what they don’t know.
“I also wrote that people should challenge authority,” Amanda told me. It was her alternative worldview making its grand entrance in her Shanghai classroom.
In China, the teacher crisscrossed her essay with red pen and scrawled a flunking grade across the top. A classmate adopted a system-approved template and received praise for “words that shine,” as the teacher put it, which deepened Amanda’s humiliation. “My classmate wrote beautiful sentences but empty sentiments, and she didn’t challenge anything,” Amanda told me. The Chinese judge good writing on emotional exaggerations and richness of language; by contrast, the American essay is valued more for stark language and clarity of argument.
The experience was painful, but formative. “I was really, really sad after that,” Amanda said. The Chinese worldview no longer settled into her bones and instead sat on top of her skin like an ill-fitting uniform.
So, Amanda set her eyes on a new test. The SAT would lead her out of China and, if all went according to plan, into an American university. She’d had a taste, and she was all too keen to join a small but steady procession of Chinese marching out of the education system they’d been born into.