There are three words that strike fear into my heart like no others:
往里走
I hear wang li zou – “move inwards” – every morning on bus 307 from my flat to my school at Tsinghua. It’s the anthem of the bus attendants – typically middle-aged woman – whose job it is to ensure everyone swipes their card to pay for the ride and moves inwards to allow space for the next batch.
So why so fearsome? Because my flat is, so to speak, ‘the wrong side of the tracks’: to get to Tsinghua I have to cross, at rush hour, the railway tracks at Wudaokou – front-runner in my books for the title of ‘most poorly thought-out intersection in China’. Schizophrenic traffic lights, endless tides of pedestrians, and death-wish drivers combine in a perfect storm.
My company during this half hour traffic bottleneck? A fresh elbow at every turn. Five minutes before my stop, I have to start shouting xia che! xia che! – “I’m getting off!” – and jostle through a crowd viscous enough to make Marmite jealous. I have actual bruises from the bus doors closing on me. If an electric clock displays 3:07, I start shaking uncontrollably.
Wudaokou is the centre of Beijing’s student district. As such, it has representatives of every corner of the world: Europe, Latin America, the Slavic world, the US of A – Beijing has attracted young graduates from them all, come to be immersed in a new language and culture. The result, of course, is that if you choose to live in noisy Wudaokou, you end up learning more about international than Chinese culture.
Another result is that for the Chinese student population of the area – students at Beida and Tsinghua, for instance – impressions of certain nationalities invariably form. As a Brit, I strike lucky: it’s common knowledge in China that all English are perfectly mannered gentlemen, refined and polite if a little aloof – in short, Hugh Grant.
Koreans are less fortunate. Even if – or so I’m informed – Chinese girls think Korean guys are ‘cool’, the main impression seems to run: Koreans are noisy, boisterous, drink too much and generally piss Chinese off. It’s certainly true that every Korean guy in a two mile vicinity of Wudaokou intersection wears the same affectedly bended baseball cap and drives the same ‘look at me’ electric bike.
Over dinner with Tony, William and Leonidas the other night, I heard another one which doesn’t come as too big a surprise either: Japanese all keep to themselves. The Japanese student population of Beijing, it seems, are reticent to the point of hermeticism – fixing a stereotype of their nation in this particular corner of China. And here’s another gem from Tony: “all students from a country ending in -stan claim they are a Prince.”
The list goes on – but I won’t, as my laptop is going to run out of battery at any moment. I’ll return to this theme later – if you’re a foreign student in Beijing and have come across the same first response to your nationality time and time again, please post a comment.
å¦‚æžœä½ çœ‹å¾—æ‡‚ä¸æ–‡, here’s a quick link to this Chinese translation of my interview with Daniel A. Bell on the film ‘Confucius’. The translation is by Professor Wu Wanwei of Wuhan University, and appears on the website Confucius 2000 (as if one Confucius wasn’t enough…). My thanks once more to Professors Wu and Bell.
In a desperate, last-bid attempt to offset the destruction inflicted on my body by Beijing air, I swim two or three times a week. In this respect, my move from Beida to Tsinghua campus was welcome: the latter’s swimming pool is where China’s Olympic athletes trained, and I enjoy it’s palacial feel, unnecessarily big clock and actually hot showers.
Sectioned off a the other end from the pool is a diving area, including some terrifyingly high platforms – off which terrifyingly young Olympic divers of the future jump, during their daily training. So my pitiful doggy paddle is to the sound of the (non)splash of 5-year olds hitting the water after perfectly executed backwards-double-tuck-twist-turns.
I took my camera in last time, thinking of sharing this impressive sight with you. But the powers that be thought otherwise: as soon as I took the lens cap off, a friendly if insistent old man emerged from his poolside office to mumble ‘eh! … eh! … eh!’ at me, putting his hand in front of the lens. “You can’t take photos here”, he frowned.
I asked to see where this rule was written down, whereupon he led me out the back-door of his office and down the corridor. I gave up after the third turning when I realised he was likely taking me to the administrative centre of Tsinghua in my swimming trunks, but I’ll take his enthusiasm as a sign that this rule really is written down.
Which begs the question: why is it forbidden to document diving practice? Is it another ‘state secret’? Are these kids in fact simulating dive bombing, for military application? Or did this man simply fear I was going to post a mocking video online with the caption “look at that 5-year-old’s lame third somersault – China sucks ass!”.*
As a petty act of rebellion, I went back later on, with my camera hidden under my swimming cap, and took this quick video before the man could stop me. Rage against the machine! These are older divers, but that first jump still scares me silly:
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* pretty much every foreigner in China has a story about being stopped from taking a picture somewhere or other – it seems ingrained into the psyche of the Chinese security guard that every foreign devil with a camera wants to humiliate China on YouTube.
Jetlag and sleep deprivation are both powerful forces of slumber, but neither could make me sleep through the combination on lantern festival of firecrackers marking the 15th day of the new year, and my cat’s equally loud excitement at my return to Beijing. (My picture of this – the lantern festival, that is – up on China Beat tomorrowtoday.)
Now I’m back in class, and as before I will fill the cracks in my wall of homework with blogging on the Chinese youth on and around the campuses of Peking and Tsinghua universities – following six stories from the generation that will change China.
It seems an appropriate preface on both study and blogging fronts to translate an essay I read recently in my Chinese textbook: “University students’ sense of responsibility” (大å¦ç”Ÿçš„责任感), a 1978 essay by Zhang Yifan, taken from Man and Society (人与社会) magazine.
I’m doing this, to be clear from the outset, because I think it’s a load of utter tosh.
Here’s Zhang’s opening (after a lame apology that his isn’t an “objective” study):
I find that at present many university students lack a sense of responsibility, can’t be certain of their own part to play in society, and consequently lack the strength to make progress.
For the majority of students, he goes on, their “attitude to study is for the most part extremely passive”; those with a positive study attitude are truly rare (凤毛麟角 – as rare as a phoenix feather or unicorn horn). Or to be specific:
They study not because of their own interest, nor to improve themselves, but only to get academic credit and eventually a diploma … their only concern is to find a relatively good career.
That’s a criticism of Chinese students by older generations (this is an assumption – I think a pretty safe one – that Zhang is older) that I also hear today. Students are irresponsible: they don’t care about their studies, they only think about their CV.
That may be well and true for many (and not only in China, by the way). But can we stick with ‘many’, in that case, and leave the pronoun ‘they’ out of it? Please don’t go moaning about the ‘quality’ of Chinese students (their suzhi ç´ è´¨ – a word I’ve never liked), as Zhang does, as if you can sum up a generation in an adjective.
What Zhang does have going for his diatribe is that the system gets an earful too:
education is almost entirely aimed at [getting students through] the two narrow doors of gaokao and zhongkao [middle and high school exams].
The education students receive before college, Zhang writes, is all about ‘cramming’ (å¡«é¸å¼ – a wonderful phrase, literally ‘force-feeding a duck’). And the prevailing atmosphere is of å‡å¦ä¸»ä¹‰ – a more clumsy to translate ‘philosophy of advancing up the education ladder’. Zhang goes on:
Once they’ve gotten into university, there’s no need for another gaokao, all their pressure suddenly eases, and the only goal which attracted them before and encouraged their effort disappears with it.
Students are equally mindless, we gather, when they come out of college:
To many graduates who intend to continue studying abroad, I ask them what their career aims are? Why are they taking graduate study abroad? The majority are at a loss, they don’t know how to answer, they only know they must get a PhD or master’s degree and then think again.
Again, there’s a grain of truth in this. When I showed Tony this essay, he said that the above rings a bell when it comes to many of his classmates. But Tony himself is an example of a soon-to-graduate student with a very clear goal for study abroad. In my experience (albeit at two elite universities), there are as many exceptions as ‘rules’. And … dare I say it … are young people not allowed to be uncertain about their future?
My objection to Zhang isn’t that he’s all wrong: it’s that it’s all too easy to lump Chinese youth into one category, blaming the suzhi of “irresponsible” students without any sympathy, and with only a cursory look at the root education environment. (This said, Zhang does blame schools for neglecting moral education – deyu 德育 – and family heads for only wanting their kids to get into a famous school.)
For me, the final straw was this bitter beauty of a whine:
[Students are] extremely self-centered. You only need to observe carefully, and it isn’t hard to discover that among those chatting loudly in public places, or cutting queues, many are university students. … [they] constantly raise requests, but infrequently express gratitude. … [they] are only concerned with their own interests, and don’t know how to respect and thank others.
Quite frankly, when I read that shopping-list of complaints, my mind leapt to older generations of Chinese: the loud businessman with his mobile on the subway, the taxi-driver spitting out the window, that kind of thing. I also think of the film Grumpy Old Men, and the phrase “kids these days…”. I guess: each to his own stereotype.
Of course, this post is a little spurious: it’s a 1978 essay, after all. (Which begs the question: on what basis what Zhang writing this thing, anyway? Universities only just opened again in 1978, after the college wastelands of the Cultural Revolution.)
So forgive me for falling into the same trap as Zhang did, and mouthing off. But I hear it all too often: Chinese students today only care about themselves. That’s why I enjoyed this reminder that there’s nothing new under the sun – or at least that past generations grumbling about the irresponsible youth of today certainly isn’t.
Exhibit A: here’s a member of more-or-less exactly the generation Zhang is talking about – also, to polish off the irony, surnamed Zhang – who has grown up only to complain in turn about the next generation (for those behind the firewall: Zhang Shihe, 56, quoted calling students today “the stupid generation”), thirty years on.
Before my Journey To The West to spend the Chinese new year in mother Blighty, I saw an odd thing at the South gate of my university, Tsinghua. It was early evening, the same time I always leave the library and board the homewards sardine bus 307, usually by way of a piping hot jianbing from the talkative street-food vendor Hua shifu – Master Flower (her surname).
But this time – standing at the foot of the overpass which leads to 307 – there was a new element to the picture. A fifty/sixty-something lady with sad wrinkles, clutching a wad of sheets, pressing them into the hands of passerbys who would either reject or take and drop into the next bin – or on the street (this is China). It was a sad enough sight that I took one of her without even a jianbing pit-stop.
I glanced over the sheet on the bus, and wished I’d stopped to talk to the sad looking lady. It wasn’t an advert – my assumption – but a petition, a plea for justice for her daughter or granddaughter (hard to guess). I didn’t get more than the gist then – the Chinese was written in a flowery and overly rhetorical style, as you will see – but here I am in my Oxford home, with a dictionary at hand and a free morning.
So here it is. (In quotes, the whole thing is long.)
The plea is entitled “Beida exams are illegal and chaotically marked, we dare to ask which road can a student take?” (北大考试è¿æ³•ä¹±çºªï¼Œæ•¢é—®å¦å路在何方？). And the first sentence gives an idea of the tone in a nutshell:
我们是四å·èµ„阳人，åƒé‡Œè¿¢è¿¢æ¥åŒ—京ä¸ä¸ºåˆ«çš„， åªä¸ºå¥³å„¿è®¨å›žå…¬é“ï¼
We are from Ziyang in Sichuan, we came to Beijing from a thousand miles far away, with the single purpose of demanding justice for our daughter.
The injustice in question is that their daughter Chen Xiaoyan “is a current graduate student at Beijing Foreign Languages College. At the beginning of 2008 she took the examination to a Masters program at Beida.” But the Japanese listening section was missing 20 questions, and even the supervisor was “at a loss for what to do”. As a result, Xiaoyan only got 43 marks in that section (50 is the lowest pass mark). Despite good performance in other sections, Beida didn’t take her.
What followed, they describe succintly as “first, hubbub; second, deceit; third, delay; fourth, ignored” (一哄二骗三拖四ä¸ç®¡). As a family, they appealed to the examiners, to Beida, to local and national authorities – but were given the cold shoulder at every turn. This took its price on them all:
如果北大管ç†å±‚能体会到憨厚的è€ç™¾å§“å女考å¦çš„ä¸æ˜“与疾苦，就ä¸åº”该在执迷ä¸ç®¡ï¼Œæ¤ç§åšæ³•æ˜¯å¯¹å›½äººåŠç¤¾ä¼šå¦å的愚弄与对社会的ä¸è´Ÿè´£ä»»ã€‚
If the management of Beida can [only] appreciate the difficulty and suffering of the exam-taking sons and daughters of the simple, honest common folk [lit. laobaixing, the ‘Old Hundred Names’] there will never again be such obstinate refusal to care. This kind of practice makes a mockery of fellow countrymen and our society’s students, and lacks responsibility to society.
So now the family Chen is resorting to distributing flyers in Beijing – presumably while continuing to petition through formal channels – and hoping their case will attract attention and support. Interestingly, they single out the internet, saying “the materials related to this event which we published online have mostly been ‘blackened’ [deleted/censored]” (网上我们登上去的事件的资料多数都被黑了). Continuing:
I find it telling that a laobaixing family recognises the internet as a tool for getting their case out there in the public eye – though perhaps not mum/grannie, who was clearly sticking with A4, for one. I also sadden to think that they have as much chance of becoming a celebrity cause online as they do handing out flyers to uninterested passerbys at Tsinghua. Perhaps this dramatic ending flourish will help:
Beida in the hearts of students, it can be said, is a ship which has sailed for thousands of hundreds of years, with vast numbers of students as the steady flow of water*. How can this big ship be aloof and superior, when examinees’ feel indignation and dissatisfaction? All the pitiable hearts of parents under heaven [tianxia, a common – if classical – Chinese phrase], all the pitiable suffering lives of students, all the cold windows of twenty years**! Who will back us up? Who will believe the words of the laobaixing? Who will hold up a cloudless sky for our students? Where is the truth? Does justice exist? We must swear to fight on to the end! We will stop only when the demands of justice are met!
The letter is signed of ‘family of Chen Xiaoyan’, and at the bottom it gives the numbers of Beida’s central office (010-62751201) and the National Ministry of Education (010-66096114). Here’s a photo of the original sheet:
I won’t comment except to mention that Beida is plagued by accusations of admissions inequality, of which a missing set of exams questions is I imagine just an anomaly. More pressing, I’d venture, are the wildly imbalanced quotas of students to accept from provinces and municipalities with varying populations – discrimation according to birthplace. But it all shows up the problems in the system, or more to the point here, the indifference in the appeals process. And please no one say ‘but China is so big’.
Finally, good luck to family Chen is the go-get-’em year of the tiger!
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* to Chinese speakers: if there’s a less cumbersome way of translating that, please tell me! And am I right in thinking that this is a really odd metaphor even in the original?
** ditto. Update: other and better translators have suggested for this “a long and arduous period of study” and “burning the midnight oil”.
A little late, but all the heartier for it … happy year of the tigger!
Here’s a little present for this Valentine’s day Chinese new year: Taiwanese soldiers shooting Cupid’s Arrows, and a response from the wannabe recipients of that love. A soft offensive across the straits? Both in Chinese, but non-speakers will get the drift … (hat tip to my friend Zhide for putting me onto these).
