Little Soldiers

by Lenora Chu

  * * *

  As I pondered all of this, Shanghai Victoria awaited our decision, and I considered some of the observations I’d collected along the way.

  Darcy once told me China’s education system was not yet strong, and only if the trunk grows well can the flowers blossom. The need to nurture and develop China’s education system made the day-to-day experience of the individual student inflexible, he insisted. The British Chinese journalist Xinran gave me her own analogy: “China is very much like Picasso’s paintings—we have eyes, a nose, lips, ears, but not in the right position.”

  Yet, with time and patience, those branches were beginning to stretch, and those eyes and ears were starting to find their place.

  One day before I had to call the admissions officer at Shanghai Victoria, I embarked on one last gasp of an investigation. “What happens when a child misbehaves?” I asked a Shanghai Victoria teacher during a site visit I requested.

  “I don’t believe in punishment,” said the English teacher I met with. “I just talk to them a little bit about what they did wrong.” Punishment wasn’t all that Victoria teachers disavowed. They rejected the traditional Chinese curriculum and instead embraced a free-form option where discussions could be designed around any subject a child broached. Free play was built into the daily schedule. Math was taught in a toddler-friendly fashion that shunned rote and embraced using numbers in everyday life. Management actively sought out parents to ask where the school might improve. This all sounded great, but were there any potential problems?

  “Victoria’s pretty good, but these parents concern themselves with things I don’t care about,” said my friend Alex, whose son attended the school. A trained attorney and a PhD with a talent for languages, she has a penchant for cultural affairs and worldly matters and zero tolerance for bullshit. I’d always appreciated her opinion.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “These parents are entitled,” Alex said. Victoria parents hailed mostly from America, Europe, and Australia, and to me, they exemplified Western parenting.

  “At Rainey’s school the parents work very hard to kowtow to the teacher,” I told her.

  “Not at Victoria,” Alex warned me.

  I once got a look at some of the emails circulating in a parent group at the school.

  One mother of the Piglet class had a very distinct wish: “I wondered if we can request class teachers . . . give us simple live activity updates . . . a few pictures, video, et cetera.” I’d always felt Western schools spent time catering to interests that have nothing to do with educating children. Not to mention, how could teachers teach if they were required to be daily documentary filmmakers?

  But it was parental hubbub over the Victoria school’s “shoe rack policy” that gave me the greatest pause. Chinese streets sometimes double as repositories for spit and cigarette butts, and the school had a fix: Children must switch their street shoes for a clean “indoor” pair each morning before entering campus. Before exiting at the end of the day, the children would again slip into their “outdoor” shoes, which had spent the day, germs and all, waiting on a shoe rack by the school entrance.

  It was a worthy goal, but administrators soon called foul; teachers were spending too much time coaxing toddlers into and out of footwear. So the school changed the policy—without informing the parents.

  Piglet class parents were horrified and incensed, and they mobilized by email: “I’m absolutely not happy,” tapped one; the school did not “notify the parents officially,” said another; and “The attitude of the school is quite patronizing in a way.”

  One grassroots Western mom took a poll to gauge support, receiving seven ayes. The mom intended to take this poll to the principal to enact change!

  Perhaps I’d been in China too long, but I was appalled. Teacher Song would never feel compelled to notify Soong Qing Ling parents of anything she felt was strictly “need-to-know,” much less ask permission if the school wanted to so much as remove a shoe rack by a door.

  Once upon a time, I might have imagined mobilizing a parent group, say, to banish forced egg-eating or allow asthma inhalers to be kept near the classroom. I know now what would be in store for me. I’d have been exiled, if not physically, then socially. Other parents would whisper as I passed them on the Big Green. “That’s the mom who tried to introduce democracy at Soong Qing Ling!” they’d say, avoiding eye contact.

  Blaring Bullhorn—the principal who manned the gates with a speakerphone—would tell the security guards to shut the gates before I arrived.

  The Chinese way is to hire good administrators and trust them to do their jobs; parents were to support the system, take responsibility for as much as possible, and keep petty distractions out of the equation.

  I didn’t disagree.

  * * *

  Deciding to stay at Soong Qing Ling wasn’t as much an intellectual decision as a gut feeling. I was growing more and more disenchanted with the system, especially with the political aspects of the classroom and the conundrum presented by gifting and favors. Yet the road out of Chinese education is strictly one-way—it would be impossible to backtrack after that first step out—and I didn’t feel it was the right time to go. Many of the academic benefits granted the Chinese way would come in primary school, and any teacher or parent knows it’s much easier to begin strictly and travel toward leniency than the other way around.

  Thoughts swirling in my head, cheeks pressed against the iron bars, I stood outside the Soong Qing Ling gates to observe morning exercises a few hours before Shanghai Victoria’s deadline.

  A hundred children were out on Big Green.

  “Line up!” Teacher Song called out to her charges, clapping twice, and her students filed into regiments alongside the four other classes of the Middle Grade. Morning exercises were usually a half hour of choreographed routines, performed in neat rows, which transformed Big Green into a field of tiny marching soldiers.

  Today, each child held a pair of plastic rings, and as the music began, I saw that Rainey was no willing participant when the music began. When children extended their rings toward the sun, Rainey’s shot down toward his feet. When some splayed left, and others flew right, Rainey’s stretched skyward, lifted by the enthusiastic arms of an energetic little boy. When his classmates’ bodies lurched toward the turf for the finale, Rainey’s was a body in motion, hurtling across the courtyard to call on friends in Middle Class No. 3. He skipped in the narrow alley between the lines, zigging from one end to another, like a water bug skimming the surface of a pond. Perhaps the teachers were making a concession for an overactive foreigner, or maybe their leniency was a taste of White Bible’s “kinder, gentler” approach filtering into the school. Whatever the reason, I was comforted by his display of individuality.

  “Let’s go!” Teacher Song barked as the music stopped, and the children filed into lines for the orderly walk toward the classroom. When the line began to move, Rainey leapt like a frog, hands jumping forward, feet following shortly thereafter. In this way he hopscotched into the building until his white ankle socks fell out of view.

  “He was just running around, and jumping, and no one was paying attention?” Rob asked later when I recounted the story.

  “That’s right,” I’d said. “I saw a little boy comfortable in his skin,” I told Rob. We exchanged glances.

  In that pregnant pause, Rob and I sped through our thoughts, histories, backgrounds, how we’d arrived at this place in time. Rob had grown up in a Minnesotan town of two thousand residents, with a lake that could be skated in winter and boated in summer, and teachers who were generally friendly and helpful. For his own children, he wanted exposure to a bit more culture, academic discipline, and rigor than he’d had growing up. I was recovering from a pressure-ridden suburban upbringing, but I’d never lost sight of the merits of academic rigor in the way that the Chinese delivered it. Rob and I comprised the perfect confluence of factors to choose a Chinese environment for our son
.

  “So we’re staying,” I said, giving voice to the conclusion we’d already reached independently.

  “We’ve already done the hard behavioral stuff and he’s survived,” Rob said.

  Why leave before the academics begins? In the next year, we knew that teachers would begin exposing the class to basic math concepts and Chinese character learning. I shared news of our decision with my mother-in-law JoAnn, a career American public school teacher, and she wrote, “After you make the decision just know you did the best you could—and look for the good in whichever school you choose.”

  What exactly was the “good” of Chinese education? I would suss this out for the next part of our journey.

  Rob glanced at me. “You know—we have to be okay with the fact that sometimes we’ll doubt our decision, that we’ll feel like outsiders, and that we won’t always like the way they do things.”

  I grasped onto this thread. “My bigger question is: Is he generally happy in class? Is he confident? I think he is.” We would observe closely, and take it day by day, month by month, year by year. Rob looked at me intently, his eyes holding mine.

  “And let’s not be so anxious. Maybe we should relax more,” Rob suggested, gently.

  That directive, I knew, was for me.

  Part III

  Chinese Lessons

  11

  Let’s Do Math!

  Chinese children are superior to US children in every domain: number and operation, geometric shapes, problem solving, and reasoning.

  —A cross-cultural research team, on the math skills of first-graders in New York and Beijing

  Teacher Song has proposed the forbidden at Soong Qing Ling.

  “We’ll be teaching math through tests, in-class activities, and real-life application,” she told a group of parents, assembled for the purpose of understanding her academic goals for the Middle Class year. Even though she’d uttered a violation of ministry reform policies against teaching academics to kindergartners, we fifteen parents huddled over a rosewood table, complicit, faces blushing with desire for toddler arithmetic. No one wanted to “lessen the burden” if it meant our kids would trail a faceless mass of competition, comprised of the roughly eighteen million babies born in China each year.

  “The children will count numbers below twenty and learn about progress relationships, such as ‘five is one step higher than four,’” Teacher Song told us, as we nodded eagerly.

  Rainey was just a touch over five years old at the midway point of the Middle Class year. While I’d launched my frenzied quest to affirm our educational choices, he had quietly morphed into a proper student who happily sat with his Mandarin tutor each day, prepared his own backpack for school, and nodded at teachers as he sailed through the entrance gates.

  After all the difficult cultural and behavioral adjustments we’d made, might we finally taste our reward? A number of upsides were keeping us inside the system, and with the help of educators and experts, I’d narrowed these down to a handful of features.

  Math teaching was one of them.

  Later that week, Rainey brought home a counting exercise, covered in the teacher’s bright red slashes.

  “Did you do this worksheet in class, Rainey?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said looking forlorn.

  On the sheet was a building with six floors, and each floor was subdivided into seven units. Each of the resulting forty-two squares was numbered in sequence—starting with 101 for the first floor, and 201 for the second floor—and blanks awaiting a schoolchild’s pencil were scattered throughout the grid. This required a basic understanding of triple-digit numbers.

  “First 101, 102, then comes what, Rainey?” I asked him, but my inquiry met with silence. Is this too advanced for a child so young? I wondered.

  Clearly, Teacher Song didn’t think so, and she scribbled a prescription for us: “Needs to work harder,” she’d scrawled in red across the top of the page. She also broadcast a grade: six of eight possible points.

  As I pondered this number, my son glanced up at me. Clearly, he felt I should shoulder some blame for those missing two points.

  “Mom, why aren’t you teaching me math and how to read and stuff?” he asked. “Long Long’s mom is teaching him to read English. And Mei Mei’s mom is teaching her how to add.”

  I’d begun working numbers into everyday conversations with Rainey, but such forays usually fell flat, interrupted by inquiries about anything that happened to catch his fancy. Rainey’s attention span needs fixing, as Teacher Song had told me.

  My conversations with Rainey typically went something like this:

  “Your baby brother is one year old, and you are four,” I’d say. “When Landon is two years old, you’ll be five. When Landon is three . . .”

  “When I grow up to be Daddy’s age, will I have a baby?” he’d interrupt.

  “Yes, you can have a baby if you want,” I’d tell him.

  “Who will be my baby?” Rainey would say.

  “You’ll have to find someone to have a baby with.”

  “Baby Landon can’t be my baby?” Rainey would say, pointing to his little brother wiggling nearby on the floor.

  “No, because Landon won’t always be a baby,” I’d say, spotting an opportunity. “You will always be three years older than Landon. So when Landon is seven, you’ll be what?”

  “Will I need to marry someone to have a baby?”

  I’d typically answer that, married or not, it’s best to be in a solid relationship with someone willing to co-parent because raising a child—especially one who’s always asking questions—is utterly exhausting.

  Clearly I was no model parent when it came to teaching math. To make matters worse (for my ego), I came across a report comparing math abilities in Chinese and American kids as young as five. I devoured the study. What advantages would Rainey earn from his time in Chinese kindergarten? Would I be negating those with my laid-back style at home?

  Lead researcher Jenny Zheng Zhou grew up in China and is now a professor in New York City. She and her team focused on students in the two international cities she knew best—New York and Beijing—tapping the children just a month into their first year of elementary school to minimize the influence of formal math classes.

  Their findings were unequivocal: “Chinese children are superior to US children in every domain: number and operation, geometric shapes, problem solving and reasoning,” Zhou and her researchers wrote.

  As young as six years old, there’s already a gap? I delved deeper. Zhou and her team had asked kids to perform a number of tasks. On the easy stuff, such as counting to ten and reading and writing numbers, American and Chinese scores were virtually indistinguishable. The gap became apparent with the more complex tasks. Chinese kids named many more 2-D and 3-D shapes. They scored two times better on addition and subtraction of numbers under ten. They completely trounced the American children on mathematical word problems, such as a question asking children to distribute objects equally among a given number of friends. Altogether, Chinese kids scored 84 to American kids’ 60 points in mathematical knowledge.

  Why was this? The researchers offered a theory. “Mathematics skill is present in all cultures,” they wrote, “but it will develop to a greater extent in those cultures that value it more highly.”

  You’ll see hints of this cultural value strolling through a park in China, said Liu Jian, a mathematician who helped develop China’s national curriculum. “Just this weekend, I saw a grandma take her four-year-old grandchild to the square and collect small stones. They started counting together. In our culture, doing things like this is a part of childhood life. We’ve counted since we were young.”

  Darcy’s parents taught him to memorize mathematical facts from a very young age. “It’s very important for your son to memorize chenfabiao—times tables,” Darcy told me. Head bent over a cup of coffee, he produced a pen and began outlining a nine-by-nine grid on a napkin. “Many children can do this befor
e primary school. And in primary school math examinations—we’ll have five minutes to do fifty questions.”

  As he started populating the grid, finger movements speeding up as he scribbled, I grew anxious. “It’s okay,” Darcy assured me. “Just make sure your son can memorize the basics. It will make the more complex concepts in school easier to learn.”

  Amanda had a simple explanation for Chinese math prowess.

  “We’re not afraid of it,” Amanda told me. “And we start practicing really young.” When Amanda was just three, her mother had started exposing her to math through puzzles:

  A wall is ten meters high. A snail climbs up five meters in a day, but when he sleeps he falls back two meters. How many days does it take to get up the wall?

  While most Westerners are still toddling about in diapers, Amanda was already potty-trained. And she could chirp the answer: The snail reaches the top in three days.

  My parents had always impressed upon me the importance of math, and my sister and I swallowed their mantra and carried it with us to Houston public schools. There, I always found it astonishing that large handfuls of my classmates were happy to trumpet the fact that they struggled in geometry or chemistry. Some even wore it as a badge of honor. In American high school culture, generally, coolness and proficiency at math or science were sometimes mutually exclusive; one particularly keen psychologist dubbed the social costs of academic success the “nerd penalty.”

  I’d clashed with my parents on many ideas, but we were aligned in our belief that math was critically important to learn. It’s not that I was a geek who was cornered at recess or got picked last for dodge ball teams. In reality, I was a dancer with a triple turn, I spoke conversational French, and I became a captain of my drill team senior year, the ultimate crowning inside a Texas high school. But I also found satisfaction in working my way through a complex algebraic equation. I considered it comforting to know an answer existed, and I enjoyed the finality of landing upon it. I was also drawn to English literature and essay writing—which usually launched a journey of emotion and contemplation—but sometimes I simply wanted to solve for x.