High school assembly, Shaanxi Province
Welcome to the Conversation about Chinese and American Education.
First, thanks to all of you who have ordered Educating Young Giants and are talking about it. It’s beginning to stir up great conversations around the differences in Chinese and American schools and how we can take advantage of that.
Junior high school schedule, 7:40 to 5:00 pm
Zheng-Zheng and his friend bent over their first grade homework at the small table in the family apartment, fingers pressed against pencils as they meticulously made each line in the day’s new characters. Their concentration was absolute as they repeated the intricate patterns over and over again placing them neatly into squares on their paper. When they finished they moved on to practice the lesson in their Chinese reading texts until they knew it confidently, and finally moved on to math. When they finished everything, Zheng-Zheng’s sixth birthday party with long noodles could begin.
As usual, my feisty preschool collaborator, Huang Ren Song, startled me as she tried to stuff some Chinese history into my head. She’d been talking about how massive the recent changes in China really are, like the introduction of public universities.
Terracotta Warrior, Xi'an
Somewhat exasperated at my ignorance, she finally said, “We’ve had 2000 years of a feudal system that said, ‘OBEY.’ Now we change a little bit.” We both laughed, but I knew she was making a serious point and it would take me a long time to process it.
I just can’t get it into my American head that a country can be so old. I know there are many countries and civilizations whose written histories date back thousands of years, but having been raised in a world where my U.S. history books began with the Jamestown and Mayflower, I have—from Huang Ren Song’s perspective—a pretty warped and limited view of the world.
I must have slept, but well before dawn I was dressed and peering down at the awakening street from my room at the Foreign Language Institute on the northern outskirts of Shanghai. The soft yellow light of a small shop across the street warmed the morning darkness; a lone truck rolled by, its tires hissing against wet pavement. A man and woman wrapped in dark-blue padded trousers and jackets moved boxes from
Shop workers in the early morning light
It was my first trip to China, twenty years ago. Another mid-career graduate student and I had arrived in Shanghai near midnight from Los Angeles. Met by friends of our Ph.D. advisor we had been taken to this hotel to get some sleep before traveling on to Nanjing by train.
A year before the Beijing Olympics an article in China Daily, China’s English language newspaper, described a war in Beijing against “baffling English translations” sometimes referred to as “Chinglish.” Some of them are, indeed, amusing to monolingual English speakers or possibly to those fluent in both English and Chinese. For example, one quoted in the article, translates a sign warning about a slippery walkway as “Slip carefully.”
Some English speakers have lamented that corrections are being made. One American living in Shanghai said they “take away one of the joys of China.” The signs, however, are often an embarrassment to Chinese fluent in English. A Chinese foreign language consultant said, “We don’t want anyone laughing at us.” He emphasized that correction of the signs was to help foreigners. The English certainly wasn’t meant to benefit Chinese.
I’m an educator and curious person who has been traveling to China since the cold winter of 1989-90. That was an amazing trip, launched by my Ph.D. advisor and the Nanjing University English Department in China. I had just studied Spanish for 10 years, and China was not at the top of my travel and exploration desires. But I’ve been returning regularly ever since.