by Lenora Chu
Winter in Shanghai always dampened my holiday cheer. Self-quarantined in our high-rise on polluted days, entombed in smog, we missed our parents and siblings most intensely during this run-up to Thanksgiving and Christmas. Our family was alone in Shanghai for the holidays. All we had was the Soong Qing Ling Annual Show.
The performance would take place a week before Christmas.
A couple of weeks prior, I slipped into school to pay tuition and stumbled upon Teacher Song lording over an assortment of children in a second-floor coatroom.
“The reason I keep repeating my requirements is so that you can memorize them,” Teacher Song commanded. “Tingxiong! Attention!” A dozen students, facing each other in two opposing lines, stood erect at her command. “All right? If we teachers work this hard, you need to work hard, too,” Song barked, her voice sharp and high. “March with feet up high! Yibei-qi—Begin!”
I spotted Rainey. He’d been wiggling and jumping, but he heeded her command with the straightest spine I’d ever seen on my son.
The two lines of children marched toward each other, knees lifting toward the ceiling, staggered just so. When they merged, precisely one forearm length separated one child’s passing shoulder from the next.
Two weeks later, Rob and I filed into the Soong Qing Ling assembly hall.
It was the kind of performance I’d often endured during Sunday Chinese school in Houston. Every so often, the principal there would decide it was time to “display” the children, so teachers would spend weeks planning performances, sports meets, and speech competitions for us. Apparently that wasn’t enough offspring-gazing time for my own parents, who also ordered up ten years of weekly Chinese dance lessons, which, of course, tracked progress in an annual gala performance replete with silk gowns and fan dances. Generally, I had little enthusiasm for such parades aside from the friendships I made through them (though as I grew older, I cherished the memories and my parents’ attempts to keep their culture alive in America).
As Rob and I filed into the hall at Rainey’s school, my childhood flashbacks began. Whatever the locale or era, the Chinese school performance always brandished three things: a finely dressed adult onstage with a microphone, a hundred costumed children waiting in the wings, and gaggles of parents in the audience with cameras around necks.
Today, Rainey’s twenty-four-year-old associate teacher Tao took the microphone, enveloped in a peacoat the color of imperial red, fake eyelashes fluttering, as an undulating ocean of parents amassed before her. The air was electrified with thoughts of dancing offspring, and Tao lifted her voice into an artificially high register. “The Annual Parent-Child Event . . .” Teacher Tao began, hips swinging with the effort, “WILL . . . NOW . . . BE-GIN! Welcome the children onstage with your applause!”
Instantly, a dozen parents sprung from their chairs and crawled with their cameras to stakeout positions in front, with bird’s-eye views of the stage. The speakers blared music. Three children materialized from the wings and positioned themselves at the top of a rubber-mat runway, which stretched into the audience.
What unfolded was an expertly choreographed, Chinese toddler version of Milan Fashion Week. At the top of the stage, the trio of children struck a pose, middle child thrusting an arm victoriously into the air like a singer who’d just finished an opening act. Her backup Spice Girls snapped into position.
“Freeze! One . . . Two . . .” mouthed a teacher at the end of the runway, starting a countdown. Parents scurried to photograph the immobilized trio, chortling at their cuteness.
“Three . . . Four . . .” Teacher Puppeteer continued, as a bouncy tune blared over the loudspeakers, conjuring up images of syrupy-sweet, animated lollipops.
“Five . . . Six . . . now walk! WALK TOWARD ME!” Teacher Puppeteer signaled.
In this way, the show cycled through several dozen trios of children. From there, the teachers launched into a string of colorful song-and-dance numbers, which began to plod after the first few numbers.
Suddenly, a handful of children gripping ivory-colored plastic recorders assembled on a tiered bleacher. Rob sat up straight.
“Rainey can’t play the recorder,” he whispered, a rare moment of anxiety for my husband. I glanced at the stage. Our son seemed conspicuously absent, as if there were an empty spot on the bleachers that only Rob and I could see. A designated conductor child began swinging his arms stiffly to the tune “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and a cacophony of notes filled our ears. “He’s probably the only kid who doesn’t know how to play,” Rob muttered, remorse creeping into his voice.
We’d passed up on Teacher Song’s offer to help Rainey with the recorder, and our own, deeply dedicated effort to help our son in her stead lasted about three evenings. Meanwhile, Song sent by WeChat relentless, infuriating messages about the recorder: “Oh, the future will be more and more difficult if the family doesn’t practice hard to keep up.”
“We made a choice,” I told Rob, my eyes on the collection of pert, exhaling children onstage. “Let’s live with it.” We survived that melodic reminder of our parental inferiority, and then watched as the show cycled through a reindeer dance and a Santa-and-sleigh musical number, followed by a colorful rendition of “We Are the World.” My stomach began to grumble. Rob and I sat and watched, whispering to each other occasionally, but before long we began to stare blankly, our butts aching against the hard plastic of the chairs
No Rainey sighting.
Finally, Teacher Tao, in her swishing red peacoat, announced “The Xinjiang Dance!”
“Yes! This is it,” I told Rob, confident in my prediction that Rainey would be chosen for anything strange or foreign.
“Yup. Rainey will show up in this one,” Rob agreed.
Located in the far northwest, Xinjiang is commonly referred to as the spot on earth that’s farthest from an ocean in any direction. It’s home to high concentrations of ethnic minorities, particularly Uighurs, Kazakhs, and Tajiks. China’s state-run media prefer to characterize this area as lawless and remote, but in truth such groups bristle under increasingly restrictive central government policies, and the Party has cracked down on Islamic extremism and “separatist activities” there. News reports paint the region as a haven for terrorism and mayhem. A bomb on a bus? Xinjiang. A knife-and-bomb attack at a railway station? Xinjiang. A truck hijacking? Xinjiang. Xinjiang natives who leave and migrate to other places such as Shanghai are often looked down upon by the majority Han Chinese (who comprise about 90 percent of Chinese living in China).
Our Han Chinese teachers could have chosen our foreign son to dance as a reindeer or a jolly Santa. Instead, I spotted Rainey waiting in the wings, dressed in the vest of a Xinjiang minority.
“There he is! Our son the Uighur!” I whispered to Rob.
Someone had cut a curly mustache from black paper and taped it to Rainey’s face, two dark, plump worms that danced on his upper lip. As the song “Raise Your Head Cover, Let Me See How Pretty You Are”—a nod to Muslim headscarves—blared over the loudspeakers, a gaggle of children filed onstage in tiptoes, right arms raised high in salute.
Soong Qing Ling teachers are nothing if not politically wise. There was no hint of ethnic strife, mayhem, or terrorism. Inside this school assembly, the people of Xinjiang were happy, pirouetting minorities, the boys in coal-black vests sewn with golden braids and sequins, the girls in taffeta skirts over white tights. A pounding, rollicking melody kept time, as the children launched a partnered dance, which conjured up nomads dancing around a fire outside their yurts.
The whole shebang was farcical, but I couldn’t deny that the dance was a marvel in instruction, rehearsal, and presentation. Soong Qing Ling teachers had choreographed a routine down to five-second intervals, involving dozens of small children.
Weeks of thought had gone into choreography and practice, and the costumes were made to order.
* * *
Teacher Song’s debriefing unfolded as if China had just defeated Japan in the Olympi
c gold medal match in badminton.
“We spent two and a half weeks preparing for this performance,” said Song, breathless, addressing a group of parents who’d trudged into a fourth-floor conference room as the children dispatched for lunch. “The teachers are very tired. It was very stressful and challenging to gather all one hundred twenty kids in the Middle Class grades. But you see how much progress our kids have made!”
Each practice method had a purpose, Song explained, designed toward a specific payoff: Rehearsing with other classes develops social skills. Rotating teachers requires children to adapt to new styles of instruction. Memorizing positions onstage enhances spatial thinking. “The quickest children can remember their positions after two or three times. They know who’s standing next to them,” Song said. “Others might need five or six times.
“But with effort, all of them got it!” Song proclaimed, with a flourish of her arm.
I thought about the math classes I had observed on the other side of Shanghai: Effort yields results. Here at Soong Qing Ling, those lessons were being imparted early, in kindergartner form. These children had learned to take instruction, rehearse week after week, and demonstrate their progress before a captive audience. The way Teacher Song described it, the Soong Qing Ling Annual Show had been a test, and the children’s efforts had paid off beautifully.
* * *
Darcy was facing down his own effort of a lifetime. The National College Entrance Exam was only a few months away, and my Chinese high school friend had embarked on a study regimen more tightly plotted than a marathon runner’s. He’d passed the “interviews” at Jiaotong University, which gave him a points advantage on the gaokao, but he still needed to score above a certain threshold to be admitted.
“Dandiao,” he told me, when we met for coffee.
“What does that mean?” I asked. Taken individually, the characters meant “single” and “note,” but they pieced together to form no word I recognized.
“My life is dandiao,” he said.
I reached into the recesses of my memory. Nothing. “I don’t know that word,” I repeated.
“If there is a picture with twelve colors,” he says, searching for the right words, “and next to it there’s a photo with only a single color, the single-colored photo would be described as dandiao. That’s how I feel. Life is only one color.”
Darcy was describing monotony.
His days at school were plotted with precision: Six o’clock rise for a seven o’clock school bell. Meals of rice, vegetables, and soup stolen in the time between classes, with fifteen minutes allotted for dinner. A six p.m. prep class held him for four hours, until a ten o’clock evening dismissal, after which he headed to his room for some shut-eye. He would start all over again within just a few hours. Weekends brought more classes.
“When do you sleep late?” I asked.
“Sunday. Sunday is my favorite day, my day of rest. But even then, I think about gaokao. This comes at the expense of everything else.”
For good measure, his parents had ramped up their scare tactics, deploying the stories they’d used to frighten him into study since he was small. A favorite involved the true tale of an older cousin who’d tested poorly, and of course a litany of misfortunes ensued: no job, no girl to marry, parents living in poverty. The boy finally found work through a family connection, but he’s seen as “inferior,” Darcy told me once. “He didn’t work for it.”
What I found most interesting about the cousin story was that the language around the boy’s failure was never, “He wasn’t smart enough.” Instead, his relatives clamored, in a legend that would surely echo down the generations, “He didn’t work hard enough.”
Darcy promised himself he’d forge a different path. Gaokao is a “platform for success—a milestone you must survive so people will recognize your ability to achieve,” he told me.
“You sound wise,” I told him.
“Study arms you with more opportunities,” Darcy responded. “When people jump at the same starting speed, the higher you jump and the longer you stay in the air, the farther you get. Studying diligently provides me with a higher starting point.”
* * *
The Chinese belief system around effort is one of the most important things I’ve learned from my childhood and from my time in China. From the legendary hardiness of the Communists on the Long March—a bitterly difficult, yearlong series of Red Army treks covering roughly six thousand miles, which launched Mao Zedong’s ascension to power—to the fortitude of the average Chinese student today, Chinese culture propagates the idea that anything worth accomplishing takes serious, sustained effort. This isn’t to say the Chinese don’t believe in luck or the fates as assigned by folk religion. Proper homage to ancestors can supposedly bring about a string of blessings, and of course another group of beliefs espouses that birth legacy can be determinant of fate: “A dragon gives birth to a dragon, a chicken to a chicken, and the son of a mouse can only dig a hole.”
Yet overriding this is an intrinsic belief that anything is possible with hard work, with chiku, or “eating bitter.” If there’s a goal worth accomplishing, day-to-day life might be absolutely and miserably unpleasant for a spell. It’s a concept that parents tell their children, teachers ingrain in their students, and China’s leaders use to motivate their populace toward the goal of modernizing China. The concept reverberates in the classroom; studies show that for kids who score poorly, Chinese teachers believe a lack of effort—rather than of smarts—is to blame. “There is little difference in the intelligence of my students,” Teacher Mao, a Chinese language teacher at a Shanghai high school, told me, his voice unwavering in his conviction. “Hard work is the most important thing.”
Conversely, Americans and Europeans are more likely to believe in innate ability. How many times have you heard a parent say, “I was never good at math, so how can I expect John to like it? He doesn’t have the genes for it.” There’s a tendency in Western culture to believe, when it comes to academics, especially something technical such as math or science, that you either have it or you don’t. “Asian and Asian American youth are harder workers because of the cultural beliefs that emphasize the strong connection between effort and achievement . . . white Americans tend to view cognitive abilities as qualities that are inborn,” as a 2014 research study put it, starkly.
Anyone who studies psychology and education will tell you this is a dangerous mind-set. It’s simply not true that a child’s innate abilities explain gaps in achievement. Overemphasizing a belief in talent gives kids a free pass: “Why bother trying if I can’t help it? I simply don’t have what it takes.”
This mind-set profoundly affects the way a person lives a life. Psychologist Carol Dweck has devoted her life’s research to the debate between intelligence and effort, and she says effort wins. “The self-esteem movement said that making children feel smart and talented would help them succeed in school,” Dweck told me, from her office at Stanford University. “But too much emphasis on ‘smart,’ and these kids aren’t motivated. They don’t persevere.”
The winning approach is clear: Instead of telling a kid, “You’re so smart,” we should say, “Good job—you worked hard.”
When I think about the Chinese emphasis on effort, I realize it derives in part from the modern experience. For decades, the nation has witnessed legions of youth study for the gaokao. This nationwide, herculean effort—in and of itself—attests that the Chinese believe a high score is more likely to be the result of sweat and labor rather than some kind of inborn intelligence.
This type of mind-set has special value when it comes to learning math and science. “You have to work hard to achieve,” says Xiaodong Lin. “And the Chinese work hard.”
Small, wiry, and full of energy, Lin is a Chinese émigré and a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York City. In one of Lin’s most widely cited studies, she divided teenagers trying to learn physics into three groups.
One group of students was introduced to some of the greatest scientists of our age—Galileo, Newton, and Einstein—and told of these men’s very intense efforts to develop the theories that made them famous. Newton was presented as a man whose hard-grinding, everyday work ethic led him to develop his gravitational theory. Einstein developed the earth-shattering theory of relativity, but, the teenagers were told, he also tried for the last twenty-five years of his life to establish what’s called a “unified field theory” of electromagnetic and gravitational phenomena. There he failed.
A second group of students was told only of the scientists’ lifetime achievements and nothing of the process in getting there. The control group mainly learned about the physics they were studying.
The results were clear. For certain groups of kids, hearing about the tortuous struggle of the greats increased their confidence and interest in learning physics. It was a “Maybe I can do science, too” moment.
Those kids who heard about effortless genius were de-motivated.
“Those who believe that intelligence is a fixed entity give up or withdraw quickly when facing challenging tasks,” Lin wrote. “People who believe that intelligence is malleable and can be increased incrementally with effort are more likely to hold learning goals in school.”
Westerners could take a page from this playbook, Lin emphasized. “Americans think that if you have to work hard you’re not a genius. You see it in the news headlines all the time: ‘Extreme Success Without Struggle.’”
This attitude creates problems in the classroom, says James Stigler, the UCLA psychology professor.
“In America we try to sell this idea that learning is fun and easy, but real learning is actually very difficult,” said Stigler. “It takes suffering and angst, and if you’re not willing to go through that you’re not going to learn deeply. The downside is that students often give up when something gets hard or when it’s no longer fun.”
The Chinese teacher who wants to present a difficult problem has it easy, Stigler told me. “The Chinese teacher can just say ‘Work on it!’ and the students will suffer, they’ll struggle through it, they’ll be uncomfortable. The Chinese have socialized their kids to put up with suffering and discomfort and all the things that are a really important part of learning.”