I feel at home in China, because I feel that Cookham is somewhere near – ………………………………………………………………………………………..Stanley Spencer
In the playground of a Chinese private school, a very young girl asked a very important question. I could tell it was important by the serious expression on her face and the fact she repeated it several times, obviously unable to understand the ridiculous idea that I spoke no Chinese at all and insisting on a response. I took her to my translator and discovered her question to be “what is that stuff on your face and can I touch it?” Beards are not common China and foreigners of any sort are rare in that particular corner. After receiving permission and conducting a brief, brave exploration, she departed satisfied. As did the gaggle of young boys who followed me to the urinal then gathered again outside for a photograph, flashing the ubiquitous V sign (knuckles inward) and smiling at their own bravery in getting to speak with a strange white person.
There is no privacy in provincial China. Old men can walk up to you in the street, stare and take a photograph of the weird foreigner, without saying a word. But, on the other hand, as I passed though the dining hall I noticed, among the thousand chomping faces, a table set aside for Muslim students. I was just formulating some complex thought about minorities when one of them smiled, waved and shouted “Hello Santa.” The world seemed smaller again. Foreigners are a curiosity to be enjoyed and being one is an education, but children seem fairly similar wherever you meet them. Are issues about citizenship and education also universal? What is specifically Chinese about the place, and what is an ignorant foreigner to make of it?
The customs queue was long. After a tiring flight you find yourself no longer a privileged EU national but stacked behind a surprisingly motley collection of immigrants from the many countries in which China has an economic interest, including full burqas and a majority of Africans. Later, I find they have all gone elsewhere and none of them turns up in my distant province.
Bureaucracy is inevitable anywhere. Over the next few weeks I discovered that changing a few traveller’s cheques in a minor bank could cause major concern, as complex forms were inspected minutely so that no minor clerk would be held accountable for a lapse of protocol. Signatures were inspected closely and had to match exactly. When, on returning, I was asked if I had experienced a police state, my reply focused on form filling rather than any politically inspired restrictions on liberty. You know from newspapers and forums that artists and protesters disappear but you don’t experience that. You only experience pedantic clerks. Their jobs have to be protected and it was no more annoying than opening an ISA or renewing your passport.
There were uniforms everywhere – even car park attendants need one – but within inches of what might have been a police or army official I was boldly asked if I wanted “fine hash” or a “young lady massage”, so they hardly inspired fear, or even close attention among a vigorous proletariat. In the customs hall severe looking men with epaulettes opened an extra desk and then cracked a smile as they moved the queue across with a friendly wave to improve the service.
In three large residential schools, students could only use computers and cell phones without supervision at weekends, in case the temptations of computer games interfered with their studies. An earnest young teacher explained that her charges needed protection from the twin evils of pornography and time-wasting. Many UK teachers would have agreed with her, and a world without mobiles was a pleasant change. They read books instead.
The first thing I saw in the very first school was a queue of young children waiting for their regular eye test. There are exercises for the facial muscles at intervals in the day and, in the hot climate, they retired to bed at noon for a supervised sleep. Intervals are marked by the playing of gentle music and it feels benevolent, causing nostaglia for our own once-optimistic idea of a welfare state. When teachers enter a class with “Good Morning Dear Boys and Girls” they actually mean it. Private emails have explained since that they want their students to love them so they will love the subject and learn more. Many live on site and spend their evenings preparing PowerPoint presentations. They are tired and feel the lack of a social life, but when they say they care most about their students it rings true. But a genuine desire to increase learning creates a pressure to perform that can have the opposite effect.
Several teachers asked insistently for the ‘right answer’ so they could click the Power Point and make it appear on screen, confirming that progress was being made. Anyone offering wrong answers was dismissed as irrelevant, so nobody got to explore their misunderstanding. But when that was pointed out, there was never any question of not responding to the criticism. Suggestions made on Monday would be implemented on Wednesday.
Reading was a group activity, chorusing the words in unison until their auditory memory for lumps of text allowed them to give right answers even to questions they did not fully understand. When it was explained that reading was a private activity, requiring the right to choose your own pace, skim and scan then try to guess meaning from the context, the next lesson implemented a very different regime. The desire to improve was stronger than any notion of self-defence. When I went to observe a class all the other teachers came too, and feedback was also expected to be a group affair. It became hard to unpick the benefits and dangers of such a zealous approach to education.
As the Common Entrance Exam approached, classes ran from 6.30 a.m. to 9 p.m. – a regime that was brutally well-intentioned but, for all I know, also motivated by a desire to maintain pass rates and thus future enrolments and profit. In a class of ten year olds the music during a break is so loud I was amazed nobody asked them to turn it down. Then I realised it was being played through communal speakers by a kindly young teacher who explained that “It keeps them awake”. And when the music stopped and the announcement is made “class begins”, the reaction is immediate. Attention is almost universal until the end of the end of the class is announced with a raucous bugle call.
Physical exercises before the day’s study seem to conform with the best liberal theories. Yes, they march onto the field in lines, but with cheeky and very unmilitary smiles. When, on a Monday, the whole school gathers to raise the flag, everyone wears a uniform that looks like a group of cubs and brownies and statements about respecting the national flag and being proud of your country sound like something from a 1950s street party in Bermondsey, until one of the older students leads the final ceremony. He has ‘improved’ his English by watching too many American films and his intonation is pure Hollywood B movie. I realise that the only time I find such patriotism disturbing is when it come at me with a B movie American accent, and it takes a while to decide what kind of prejudice is at work.
The hotel has very few foreigners, and of the small number most seem to be obese American women whose husbands wear baseball caps over breakfast as they fuss over a brand new Chinese child, condemned to a new life of western democracy and calorific freedoms. Their unctuous Chinese-American guide is probably running an agency – there is certainly an interesting turnover – and you have to hope that some form of state sponsored quality control is being exercised. By the time this groups of exports are old enough to ask about their mother country, it might just be as rich and powerful as their adopted country.
In the buffet-service restaurant I watch an American adopter tapping a knife against his glass to summon skivvy to fetch him more coffee. Later, I am told about the newly rich Chinese who collect expensive red wines and wonder, as they spread though Africa buying up mineral rights, if the new imperialists seem as arrogant to their workforce. Later research throws up strikes against naked exploitation and suggests they might, so that the corroding effects of power are clearly universal. And yes, there are plenty of articles about factories where Chinese locals are worked into suicide making cheap electronic goods with insufficient sleep or dignity. We also know that villages are flooded and residents forcibly resettled to make a new dam, because progress requires efficiency more than democracy. But how much is natural to capitalism and how much is natural to China?
In the late 60s, having been refused entry to Turkey as an obvious undesirable, I was meandering through Eastern Europe when I ran into two Americans. One had just left the army, not necessarily with their permission, but the other, annoyingly named DY, had just left a rich family and was concerned to buy toothpaste to protect his perfect smile. We didn’t know it was a national holiday and that a parade was arranged which all citizens were expected to attend. We found ourselves funnelled towards the city centre and marching below banners that showed a defiant North Vietnamese shaking his fist at a distant B52.
Curiosities, we were welcomed, smiled at and a young girl was ushered towards us to hand over a flower and a badge each, on which the same motif appeared. Denied his toothpaste and distressed at the idea of wearing such a betrayal on his lapel, DY wanted to find his embassy. We tried to explain to him that the crowd probably didn’t care for it any more than he did, that the separation of a people and their government should be automatic, but he was not convinced. Much later, when a Chinese teacher offers to help me learn her language, the second phrase she uses is “I Love China” and I feel sure if she is asked to march beneath a banner she is very likely to agree with whatever it will say. I wonder what it is like to feel so proud of your country.
Confusions multiply. Temples in the park do a lively trade in incense for those wishing to pray for good luck. I assume, but not very confidently, it is no more significant than tossing a coin into a fountain, until a young teacher tells me about her father’s excessive Christian zeal and an email from another contact is signed ‘God Bless’. It doesn’t add up. But how could it when you are just passing through so quickly.
In one school, designed with turrets like some Disneyland fantasy, a visitor is impressed by the front lawns and the statues of deer. Then you go round the back and find students on the balconies of their dormitory block. For safety, presumably, there are wire cages around the balconies. There is washing hung on lines behind the mesh. They wave and call out “Hello foreigner!” It looks like the back end of a state prison but they can come and go as they please, within the grounds. I later see three of them in the toilets having crafty cigarette. The tap doesn’t work and you have to bring your own paper. For this parents pay high fees. You have to learn, to get on.
http://nnwb.nnnews.net:9999/epaper/nnwb/html/2011/03/14/29/29_31.htm
