A beautiful but disturbing day.

I wrote this in May and sent it to some people, but it seemed pertinent now considering yesterday's post.


This afternoon I had Stone. He is a smart child of eleven and he speaks English very well. Because it was such a beautiful day, and because it is very difficult to get him talking about anything, (we have played monopoly during our two previous classes) and because I was exhausted and didn't want to be boxed up in a room unless I was sleeping in it, I decided we would go for a walk. He strongly resisted this, but as I am his teacher he had little to say. We walked a little way, he complaining all the time. At the underpass of a large road he stopped and refused to continue, so I walked downstairs and waited in the tunnel, figuring he would follow me, and he did, so I led him like this, bit by bit, promising him we could sit as soon as we got to a group of benches in a little corporate park about a five or ten minute walk from the building in which we have class. We sat, and he began to talk, and this was good. We weren't talking about anything in particular, and he, every five minutes or so, brought up the fact that he would much prefer to be inside, but I kept saying wait a little longer, and he did, and we sat, talking and not talking.

He is a boy that loves his freedom, which is rare in China, but freedom to him means the freedom to play games, and little else. We talked about how schools are similar to jails in many respects (an analogy he, not I, made) and about how even inside of a jail one can be entirely free if he is master of himself. I kept poking him with the hints of nature around us, the birds, and the trees, the flowers and the wind, which (in particular) was too pleasant for me to acquiesce to his desire to return to the classroom, a two by two meter room which may or may not have a window on the eighteenth floor of an office building. I stretched out on a bench a few minutes after arriving, my head and arms and legs hanging off of it (it had no back) and he did the same, and I realized something, and asked him, "Stone, you never in your life have a time when you don't have to do anything at all, when you can just sit and enjoy the day, right?" He said "yeah." "Well then," I said, "I am offering you the opportunity to simply sit and feel the breeze and listen to the trees and do nothing, since you already speak English so it's not difficult for you and you want to go back inside? Why?" He said something about having to work during class, about always having to work and study, about not having any time to do anything else, because this was all that was important. I mentioned the irony of his using our class time to play games with me (he didn't bring monopoly this day, I think because his mother brought him, but he did bring a deck of cards, and was, as I said, rather disappointed when I said that we wouldn't be using them) but the conversation died there, more or less.

After he won me over and I'd had my fill of the (relatively) fresh air of spring in Beijing, as we sat in the classroom, I asked an innocuous question about how much he slept every night. Sleep being important to me and apparently impossible for the majority of Chinese students, I was curious. He said he slept usually nine hours, sometimes eight, sometimes ten, and then he said, which made me laugh, "sometimes more than this or less." While laughing I almost missed him say, "sometimes not at all." "Not at all," I said, trying to drag more out of him but not incredulous, as I have more than one student who routinely pulls all-nighters to finish homework and review even though eleven seemed a little young for this and he said "Sometimes my parents don't let me sleep, because I didn't finish my homework." The way he phrased this made me rather aghast, and I asked him how often this happened. In the last year, he said, "only once." I felt a little better. He has mentioned previously and briefly how his mother is always angry at him, and his family life does not seem joyful, to say the very least. I don't remember how this next part came up, it may have been started by some loose questions and comments about his parents, or he may have just started talking, but he then went on to talk about how his parents hit him, about how they beat him in secret, and how they made him not able to scream, and when he said this last part I almost started crying. "Parents don't care about anything," he said a few times, as I told him that western people think that this is wrong, that in America kids would be taken away from parents for this, that in the west we think this is the worst thing that you can possibly do to a child, someone who is entirely defenseless and powerless, the worst thing you can do is hit them. "It's a terrible, terrible thing," I said in the calmest and strongest voice I could, because I couldn't say anything else. "I know," he said, "parents don't care about anything."

There are parents who genuinely love their children, of course, there are a few I can think of in particular whose pure and warm love for their children shines through their every gesture when I see them together, and even these beatings are motivated out of concern for what the parents believe is the welfare of the child, which is what makes them even more twisted. There is a phrase in China that translates roughly into "Use a stick to raise a good son," something akin to our "spare the rod, spoil the child." There's another one that means, "If you don't beat a kid at all for three days, the kids will climb onto the roof of the house and kick the tiles down." Chinese accomplishes this sentiment in only eight syllables, if you can believe this, (it literally says "three days no hit, house on overturn tiles,") but my admiration for this entirely different language is rather besides the point. "Backwards thinking," I said to him in Chinese, so it would have more effect, and so I'd be sure he understood. He nodded and continued looking at the table between us. "Now can we play a game?" he asked me.

I actually might have forgotten about this, busy and tired as I was today, were it not for my last two students of the day, two middle schoolers, Wendy and Joyce, who I teach together. They'd be seventh graders in America. I had only three hours of sleep last night, so I was exhausted, and I had nothing to talk about really. We usually gossip, more or less, and they tell me about their school, and the students (this I could really write a book about, they go to the best middle school in the country, with all that this entails. They are both good students, but there is some serious influence at this school. The President of China gave a speech there this year. That sort of school.)
Today, as I said, I just couldn't keep any line of questioning up, I was way too tired. Eventually for some reason the question popped up in my mind again (again, on topic) "How much do you sleep at night?" Joyce sleeps a healthy amount; Wendy between four and seven hours, a little on the shy side. We then had a long discussion about how lack of sleep hurts students and doesn't allow one's mind to function at one-hundred percent, and then how people need time to themselves during the day or the week or sometime at least when there's nothing that they have to do, which I was comparing to the sleep that the body needs to regenerate, which evolved into a discussion about how people shut parts of themselves off in order to get done what they have to, and how that makes them ultimately weaker and less able to accomplish anything meaningful (my view,) or how this makes one capable for doing what they have to do, to get what they want, and how it is the people who need rest who are actually weak (Wendy's view. Joyce usually disagrees with her when we talk about things like this but I think she feels powerless to do anything about it, she sees the logic and feels what I'm saying but sees no road out.) Without going into the details of the discussion, Wendy, the more talkative but less fluent one said, "we've lost our tomorrows," at one point, which I think is one of the most beautiful English phrases I can remember hearing, and later, when I summed up the conversation by saying, "you're saying to me that in your lives the two of you have no time to just be yourselves," she said, "yes. We have no time in our lives to be ourselves."

This was the connection to my time with Stone. My female student was saying that she can't stop, that she couldn't stop, that she couldn't listen to those parts of herself that she had shut up in order to be able to sleep only four hours a day, in order to be able to study with all of her "free time," in order to go to special classes all weekend etc. etc. I was getting that feeling from Stone as well. Walking outside on a beautiful day, just sitting on a bench in a park watching people walk around made him uncomfortable.

This frightens me deeply, because these are not isolated cases. This is the mindset of the entire society. Every kid is expected, required, and made to do this. One of my older students has a son of five years. He recently went on a trip with his grandparents to Nanjing; she picked them up at the train station the morning of our class. "You let him miss a week of school?" I asked with a teasing disbelief. "How? Why?" "It's Kindergarten," she said. "It's not important." "Would you," I began, knowing the answer, "have let him do that next year, if he were in first grade?" "No!" She said, with a tint of surprise and the same air of obviousness with which I asked the question. "And why not," I asked, "what is the difference between kindergarten and first grade?" "In First Grade," she said, "there have..." she struggled for the word, "kaoshi." She looked at me hopefully. "Tests," I said, "In first grade there are tests." "Yes," she said, "In First Grade have tests."