The billboard that won the competition for Greatest Billboard of the Year (Among the International Department Billboards, of Which There are Approximately Thirty).
CHINA IS...
Like any other country, it is hard to encapsulate two billion people and immense geographical diversity in sound bite-sized captions. It is also difficult when all wifi is slow due to the Great Firewall. Maybe I'll wake up one day and realize I can't access Squarespace or my own website without having to turn on a virtual proxy network (VPN). Nevertheless, my life here continues to be a surprise, both pleasant and unpleasant. Below is a list. Then, an honest reflection.
I started writing another blog detailing my life during and after China. The person that I was before arriving in China is not the same person that departed China.
China by the numbers
Number of times someone didn't believe I was from the United States: 20
Number of times someone has told me I have good Chinese for someone with very little formal instruction: 24
Of said twenty-four people, the number of times that it was a taxi driver that made said comment: 4
Number of apartments in my high-rise apartment building: 841
Number of elevators in said high-rise apartment building: 4
Being asked as to when I moved from the 28th to the 31st floor by a woman I've never spoken to in my entire life while in said elevator: mildly horrifying
Waiting time for the elevator when one of them is being repaired for six weeks: enough to waltz into the convenience store located in the building lobby, do a bit of shopping, and stride out just in time to catch said elevator
Number of times I've been to Shanghai: 12
Other places I've traveled to while in China: Xiamen, Hong Kong, Suzhou, Kunming, Shilin, Hangzhou, Kuala Lumpur, Malacca, Siem Reap, Taipei (again), Kaohsiung (somewhat), Tainan (always), and a good swath of Vietnam
What I feel about China in the late evenings: saudade
On international education at Jinling
[This statement was written in June 2017. This is a longer, unedited version of a statement published in a Nanjing publication. This version includes some excised commentary on the difference between Chinese mainland citizens and Chinese-Americans that was irrelevant for the statement, but provides cultural context for the American reader. Translations for the Chinese terms used are provided at the end of the statement.]
As it is my first year in 中美班, I have had less time to make observations than some of my other coworkers, but nevertheless I believe that 中美班 has been a worthwhile time for both me and the students I teach. Like any other worthwhile endeavor, teaching at 中美班 has both its challenges and rewards.
Students coming from a traditional Chinese education system are not prepared so much for how American students are taught to rigorously think and criticize. When I was in eleventh grade, my honors English teacher asked me to write research papers and comment on whether Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman displayed the aspects of a traditional Greek tragedy or not. Here, some students quail at the sheer amount of writing they are required to produce and express their frustration with their social science classes.
Much more will be required from them in university. American universities are focused on producing graduates of a moral and intellectual caliber. It is up to the student, not the university, to prove they have the intellectual strength without resorting to cheating or plagiarism. I have witnessed multiple Chinese international students flounder at UCLA because they could not meet its academic rigor. The worst case was when a student withdrew from the university halfway through her first school year and returned to Beijing because she was on the edge of a psychiatric break. She has since returned to finish her degree, but I believe she learned how grades in American schools are earned, not given. I am not known as the easiest grader, because I believe in signaling to my students how their work would be viewed in an American university.
Nevertheless, I continue to see my students strive to achieve. It is rewarding for students to come to me and display their academic passions, to ask me how they can do better, and occasionally, to even tell me that they are interested in the subject beyond the grade that they must muster to get into a ranked university. Not every student at 中美班 will do this, but it does not diminish the reward of being a mentor to the students who do want to achieve, and of pushing them to greater heights.
The good news is that each year is better than the last: for a program that is but six years old, we are seeing a remarkable increase in the caliber of students even just two years apart. I have faith that I am not just sending students who pay a small fortune to 补习班 and falsify their academic credentials, but also worthy students who expend massive amounts of effort to take standardized exams endlessly and push themselves through rather ambitious curricula to achieve opportunities that would have been denied to them just twenty years ago.
There are some Americans are not fond of Chinese international students because they inflate housing prices and cause disturbances with their flagrant spending wherever they tend to congregate. This tends to be concentrated in the Chinese-American community, where that distaste is magnified because of the negative image those spendthrifts reflect on the rest of us Chinese-Americans; there’s a tendency to think of them as “mainland trash.” I like to think that 中美班 is the exception rather than the norm in this regard, because if my students spent as much money as they spent time working, they would have singlehandedly bought all the goods in 德基广场. What we can do as teachers and parents is to teach our children to be conscious of class and to not abuse their privileges, which may far exceed some of their countrymen in China and future classmates in America.
As I will be bluntly honest, there was a prevailing worry that my family members and I had before I moved to Jinling – that I would be forced to accede to political demands to improve a student’s grades when he or she had not deserved it. I am incredibly protective of my right to free speech. I am therefore very grateful that my right to express how a student has performed has largely been unaffected by my working environment.
Having come from a high school and university environment with strict academic honesty, where I saw subpar students easily fail and where an A actually meant exceptional endeavor, it can be dismaying to see them handed out so freely all over schools in China. That there is a cultural difference between “you get what you earn” and “丢脸” has never been more visible. If we do not maintain the sanctity of educational attainment, if we strive for grade inflation, then there is no point to the entire system of grades. Already, grades are not a good metric of intelligence – someone can be intelligent and lazy, and conversely someone can be of middling intelligence but perform superbly through hard work. Therefore, grades should be a metric of how hard a student has worked. It need not be curved, but it should be an accurate assessment.
The traditional Chinese system has the 高考 to filter underperforming students as grades are a virtual nonentity in the university admissions process, but in 中美班 those grades are an important component of a student’s portfolio. Of course, we can try and inflate those grades to boost our program’s admissions statistics, but the entire goal of education is lost in the process if we lose something of our honesty.
GLOSSARY
中美班 = There are two international programs/curricula that operate in Jinling independently. The Chinese-American department (zhongmeiban, or ZMB) is the one I teach at.
补习班 = Known as "cram school" in English, these after-class schools are infamous for helping students review for exams, assist in doing coursework, and in some unethical cases, even write personal statements for college applications. Overall, they make wealth for the teachers and company administrators who take advantage of students desperate to get into the best possible university.
德基广场 = An incredibly upscale mall down the street from my place of employment, containing stores like Burberry and Louis Vuitton.
普高 = The regular student department, i.e. students undertaking the traditional Chinese curricula.
口语英语 = Conversational English.
丢脸 = Literally, "losing face." As "face" is a crucial concept in Chinese culture, saving face is critical to understanding why certain business decisions are made to cover up business failures or a work superior's incompetence. Losing face is probably one of the greatest faux pas in Chinese culture.
高考 = Gaokao, or China's famously difficult university entrance exam. It actually isn't that difficult: it's like the GRE in that getting a good score numerically is not that hard, but because so many students are capable of good scores, top universities increase their minimum cutoff score every year.