I was recently asked to contribute a blog post for enoVate, a Chinese “insights and design firm” based here in Shanghai.  The company’s focus is on the youth of China, the world’s most dynamic demographic, specifically what young Chinese enjoy doing and buying.  It’s a fascinating topic that is in such flux and so misunderstood (even by the Chinese) that you never really know what to say about it.  I am of the opinion that China’s youth are one of the biggest reasons modern day China is so damn exciting (take, for instance, the fact that China has the largest number of internet users in the world yet almost all are under the age of 30).  Right now the enoVate blog is doing a series on how Chinese youth celebrate Christmas.  My entry is about my Christmas last year in Huaihua, Hunan, where I used to teach English.

If you are interested my post written a year ago about Christmas in Huaihua can be found here.

Oh man, I tell ya it felt good to leave work the Friday before Halloween and hope in a cab headed to the airport instead of braving Shanghai’s Metro.  Halloween weekend was my first time leaving Shanghai since I arrived here in August.  As it turned out, a commute from Shanghai to Changsha isn’t all that bad, except for the bad quality and exorbitant prices of airport food in China.

When I exited the airport at Changsha around 10:30 Friday night I inhaled deeply.  After living in Shanghai so long the air… well, it smelled kind of provincial.  Not that Changsha or its airport (many miles outside town) has clean air, but Shanghai’s air feels so adulterated most of the time.  Not only is the city covered in smog but just walking the streets and subway stations you inhale a multitude of fragrances that have nothing to do with the natural world.  Whether it’s the obnoxious construction smells I find in the People’s Square metro station, the sharp cologne burning my nose in the elevator, the smell of refuse on the street or the intoxicating scents of a decadent restaurant – no breath in Shanghai is free of man-made smells.  Of course it wasn’t just the smells that made it clear I wasn’t in Shanghai anymore, there was something pleasantly inland and second-tier about Changsha that set it apart from the sterilized coastal city I share with 20 million other people.

My cab driver from the airport drove at tremendous speeds (what is it with Chinese cabbies driving obscenely fast to and from airports?) and I arrived in downtown Changsha in record time.  First stop was the old hangout, Folk Bar on Jiefang lu (Liberation road).  My friends had thought that my cab would take longer than it had so they had already moved onto a new watering hole, but that was fine with me because I had a nice time drinking a gin and tonic catching up with the bartender Jimmy.  I met Jimmy last year and we instantly became friends, he is from the city of Huaihua in far western Hunan where I spent last year teaching English.  I also got to say hi to the boss of the bar, who last year in a moment of memorable exuberance had bought me and a friend a few free Belgian beers.  It was all very Cheers like, going to that place where everyone know your name and yadda yadda.  While walking the streets I know so well to the next bar someone even recognized me.  It felt like coming home, a feeling I had over and over again during my visit to Changsha.

The rest of that Friday night, my hangover-filled Saturday and the big Halloween party Saturday night don’t really need to be discussed.  It was a blast, but parties like that don’t lend themselves well to blog posts.  On Sunday, exhausted and happy after a weekend of reunions and making new friends, I caught a train back to Shanghai.  Why a train and not a plane you ask?  Well besides the fact that I like taking trains in China, I had to lug home two big suitcases packed with books.  You see, I love books.  Last year as a teacher I had shipped over a box of books before I arrived in Hunan and had continued to add to my collection as the year went on and by the end of it I had a sizable library.  Unlike many expats in China I can’t just give my books away or leave them for future American expats to read, I just can’t let go.  So I left my books with a friend in Changsha and on this trip I just barely got them home to my apartment in Shanghai before my arm fell off.

I had one day back in Shanghai before I was leaving again for Shenzhen on my way to Hong Kong.  I was lucky enough to see my old roommate from my days as a student in Kunming, which was incidentally when this blog was begun.  One highlight of his visit to Shanghai were the mugs (1 liter!) of excellent hefeweizen that we enjoyed at the Bund Brewery, a spot I will certainly be returning to.

The next day I headed back to the Hongqiao airport in Shanghai and flew south to Shenzhen, the special economic zone smack dab next to Hong Kong that is home to 10 million people and is a monument to the positives and negatives of Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening.  The whole city is like one big construction site; yes, that can be said for every Chinese city, but in Shenzhen the land feels even more cut up and unfinished than usual.  Luckily I didn’t have to spend much time walking around Shenzhen, a city that holds onto the adjective “soulless” well.  There is a bus that ferries you from the Shenzhen airport to downtown Kowloon in Hong Kong, though you have to walk through customs yourself.

About the Hong Kong customs: it’s easy.  I tell you it feels wonderful walking into a part of China and getting a 90 day visa just for being an American, such a nice change from the mainland where visas are a real headache.  There’s one thing about entering Hong Kong that always cracks me up.  They have big colorful posters everywhere warning visitors about carrying in drugs, infectious diseases, and animal products.  Naturally, a tiny island city of over 7 million people next to the largest country in the world should be worrying about such things.  The poster explaining that you can’t bring in animal products has this hilarious picture of a rather short portly Chinese woman carrying a cheap plastic tarp bag (the carpet bag of China), and right beside her is this super hot Playboy model of a Hong Kong customs officer literally towering over the peasant woman (who looks mortified) and what is this Angelina Jolie of a Customs officer holding?  Why nothing less than a “black boned chicken” in all is dead raw-meat glory.  You’re probably scratching your head and saying “what?” but believe me, the poster is hilarious.

The bus ride from the border into the city of Hong Kong is short and takes you through bald hills covered in thin layers of concrete, like so many chocolate truffles, and past the tallest skinniest apartment buildings you will ever see.  Many of these skinny towers have a floor smack in the middle that has no rooms, so as to allow the wind to blow through the anorexic building.  The sheer swaying that the people living on the top floor of these places must experience, it’s enough to explain why Fengshui practitioners advocate living on the ground level.

I’m starting to think that Hong Kong is the home of my adult dreams.  In fourth grade a friend of mine and I laid down plans to travel across the Sahara on a Vespa scooter, now (sadly) I dream of living in Hong Kong – wealthy and comfortable.  (Hold on a second, I still want to travel through North Africa on a scooter!  I can move to Hong Kong when I retire.)

The city feels less like a archipelago of islands off the Southern Chinese coast and more like a metropolis placed in the exact middle of every shipping lane that exists on this planet, like the bustling space stations of the never-to-be-realized future that I used to watch on TV as a child.  It is simultaneously a place people go to on their way to another place and a destination in itself.  The way I always notice the city’s oh so inviting internationalness is by going to a Hong Kong supermarket.

As I noticed last time I visited the city, the upscale supermarkets here sell absolutely everything under the sun.  2008 saw Hong Kong abolish all wine duties on imported wine and the city is now certifiably the new center of the wine world.  If you want to auction off your case of 1982 Chateau Petrus, Hong Kong is the place to do it.  So, when I arrived in the city, in the concrete cave of a fantastically large mall (the forum of the modern Asian city), I quickly passed by the Starbucks (somehow nicer than our Shanghai versions, but I can’t put into words why) and hit up the super-deluxe supermarket.  There I perused the extensive wine collection that was, by and large, reasonably priced, unlike in Shanghai where wine prices are often jacked up like an American home before the recession.  I went with an organic Australian Riesling that was a comfortable 99 Hong Kong dollars, a gift to myself in that city of self pampering.  I also ordered a real cheeseburger that was fantastic.

While in Hong Kong I stayed in my company’s private apartment way up near the top of the mid-levels escalator in the land of polished Lamborghinis and private tennis lessons.  I think I’ll let the view speak for itself:

The building was just as luxurious as the view. They even sterilize the elevator buttons hourly:

I managed to make it up to the top of Mount Victoria, which I had skipped on the last visit due to an interminable blanket of fog.  I snapped some photos and walked slowly through the muggy forests and the egregiously expensive apartment complexes back down to the neighborhood I was staying in.

I then did the only natural thing and ordered a heaping pile of Mexican food for one.  This was followed with the purchase of a full pint of Ben & Jerry’s Mint Cookie ice cream (Hong Kong is the part of China that sells Ben & Jerry’s) that I took back to the apartment to chow on while sipping my Australian wine.  I had hoped to save the majority of the ice cream for breakfast (a favorite early morning meal of mine that I learned to love while studying in Burlington, Vermont), but the freezer was one solid block of ice.  I had to bite the bullet and eat the full pint of ice cream and drink the bottle of wine while simultaneously snacking on the leftover chips and salsa from my diabetes-inducing cheese-covered Mexican feast.  I decided to stay in and watch cable TV, so that I could more easily consume my ice cream (isn’t it interesting how TV makes eating forgettable, almost dream like?), before rolling my engorged body to the bedroom.  Lucky for me the master bedroom had such a wonderful view I forget all about the extreme levels of heartburn that were burning apart my digestive system.

And that was my vacation.

General thinking is that for one to celebrate Halloween properly one needs a abundance of Americans.  I mean, who else in the world grew up trick or treating as a kid before moving on to less PC non-candy-related activities.  It binds us in a way.  (If your un-American society also celebrates Halloween, I apologize.  It’s easy to ignore everyone else when you grow up American.)  Here in Shanghai there are not only an abundance of Americans but also a great big crowd of other party-loving folks wanting to get in on this holiday of badly dressed drunks.  The amount of bars and clubs hosting Halloween parties in Shanghai this weekend is downright monstrous, I’ve never seen anything like it in any other Chinese city.  For me though I need to leave town.  I want a more pure American Halloween experience, plus I’ve been here for 3 months without a single trip out of the city.  So I’m headed back to Changsha, capital of Hunan province, where many of my old American teacher colleagues still live and we’re going to throw a bombastic party.  Instead of last year’s Baijiu punch watercooler (that poor machine still pumps out water that tastes like rubbing alcohol) there will be punch in a bowl, I believe.  My costume will also be improved.  Instead of my vile smelling Indian hair extensions and un-shaven bum look from last year I’ve borrowed a tailored Qipao (旗袍) from my Japanese roommate along with her fur scarf and fake pearls.  While I’m still don’t have any heels to wear one of my Chinese colleagues just lent me her small purse, which matches the dress perfectly.  I work with such thoughtful women.  By the way, my coworkers are loving the fact that I’m wearing a dress for a holiday that they will all be sleeping through.  They just don’t understand…

After Changsha I’m off to Hong Kong (via Shenzhen) for work.  Pictures and stories will be posted once I’m back to my normal day-to-day.

Tomorrow I take a bus to Changsha where I will see friends for a couple days before flying back to America. There will be a little break here on the blog until I settle myself back in the States. I have so much I haven’t posted about and thousands of photos I need to upload, which because of computer problems and a slow internet I haven’t been able to do yet. I promise I will get to all of it once I’m back home in Massachusetts. So long until then.

For the past eight weeks or so my weekends have been spent traveling or hosting friends here in Huaihua.  Certainly a fun, though busy, way to spend one’s time.  On top of that my year of being a volunteer teacher in China ended last week.  The weather in Hunan is now at the Summer levels of heat and humidity characteristic of this sub-tropical region and it can only be described as oppressive.  After an extremely long, rainy and cool Spring the weather was a nice change but now doing anything outside of my air conditioned bedroom during the daytime is a sweaty and exhausting chore.  Even writing this post in my stifling office requires a towel to mop up my sweat.  My computer that has been slowly dying all year long seems even more disabled in this weather.

So, after my long absence here are some things that have happened this month.

My trip to Simeng (思蒙)

Almost unknown outside of western Hunan this small “scenic district” is nicknamed Little Guilin for its beautiful carst-like hills that surround a beautiful river and richly forested area full of fascinating plants and birds.  The air was fresh and after a year in a Chinese city being able to breathe deeply and enjoy the smells might just be my favorite memory from this trip.  The hills were made of a stone that is almost exactly like Boston pudding stone, which is all over my neighborhood back home.  I went with two fellow teachers from the grade I teach at my school (senior one).  It was my first time taking an overnight trip with any of my Chinese colleagues and it was a fine time.  My Chinese friends often have the bad habit of trying to help me do anything when I travel with them, even mundane tasks that I can easily handle in Chinese, and this was the case in Simeng too.  But Simeng is a very rural area and the dialect is not easily understood so it wasn’t as annoying as it could have been.  One great reason to travel with Chinese friends is that they open you up to experiences you never would have found on your own and traveling to Simeng, which is located in the Huaihua city Prefecture, was a great example of this for me.  I’ll try and post more pictures online if my computer doesn’t die.

The Gaokao (高考) College Entrance Exam

A little while back I wrote a post about the lack of creativity in the Chinese classroom.  One striking example of the Chinese education system’s disregard for critical thinking, creativity, and outspokenness is the nation college entrance exam known as the Gaokao.  This year it took place on June 7 and 8th in every high school across the country at exactly the same time.  It was my first time seeing the test from the viewpoint of a teacher who works in a Chinese school and there were a few things I noticed.

The school shuts down for the exam.  Anything that would create noise or be a distraction to the students taking the exam is put on hold.  Because of this I had a very nice break from teaching and my students all went home to see their families.  The daily bell system that my school uses to wake everyone up and mark the beginning and end of each class was turned off, the first time ever in over 10 months, and only some calming yoga-like music was played before the students took the exam.  There were about a dozen police officers that joined my school’s security personnel (all of whom were on duty for both days of the exam).  The police officers were mostly there to close down the street in front of the school and make sure there were no outside interferences during the test.  A large section of the campus was cordoned off and only the students taking the test and the test proctors, some of them were not teachers at the school and seemed to be government officials with the education department carrying impressive looking IDs around their necks.  The classroom buildings were decorated with colorful calligraphy to bring good luck to the students.

The students did not wear the school uniform.  I saw them at around seven in the morning and there was a general tenseness in the air that reminded me of my weekend mornings spent taking the SAT.  Unlike the SAT however this test really does determine a large part of their life.  You can only take it up to three times in your life and it decided what university you attend.  You do not pick what school you want to go to in China, you take a test and the government tells you where to go.  Public buses were used to ferry students from other schools and smaller towns to my school so they could take the test.  Some of the kids looked petrified though most were their usual calm selves.  They carried only a small see-through plastic case that held their pencils and what not.  Being found with a cell phone during the test gives you an automatic zero on the section you are taking.  Outside the closed gate anxious parents waited on the sidewalk that was lined with advertisements from private universities.

What was in the test this year?  Danwei did a nice summary of the big essay question found in this year’s test.  In Hunan the students had to write an essay with the title Stand on Tiptoe (踮起脚尖).

At the end of the day the police left, the barricades were lifted and the school looked like it’s old self, just oddly quiet and empty.

My Last Weeks of Teaching

After a year of teaching here in Huaihua this June has been my time to wrap up my year and say goodbye to my students.  During my second to last week of teaching I taught a class on stereotypes, something I have wanted to do all year but somehow put off until now.  Chinese students live in a world where everyone looks the same and because of this and other reasons Chinese students have pretty harsh stereotypes.  I’ve had students often tell me they don’t like so and so because he is black or they think so and so is very beautiful because of her white skin.  When as a teacher in China you admonish a student for saying such things they do not understand why you are angry at them.  Chinese teachers do not help the situation at all.  So I wanted to explain to my students what stereotypes are (they have never heard of the term) and why they can be wrong and harmful.  I think I got through to some of them, but still they can’t really understand the harm of a stereotype.  They’re constantly told all the different minorities of China get along just fine and at the same time they make fun of those same minorities for being different.  Even if they don’t make fun of those who are different there is a strong feeling with the Han Chinese that some people are better than others because of the way they look.

One thing I wanted to bring up was homosexuality.  In the end after talking to some people and thinking about it I did not.  I didn’t want to ask my school if it was okay, I didn’t want to deal with the possible aftermath of such a discussion and I didn’t want to single out the gay students (of which there a few I am aware of).  In the end though I think the biggest reason I didn’t talk about it was because I didn’t want my students to laugh at me and my sexuality.  Having a deep and honest discussion about such a subject is hard with Chinese 15 year olds.

I did however bring up Hitler.  Few Americans know just how loved this man is in China.  Nevermind his empire was a complete failure or that he killed millions and millions of people in mankind’s worst genocide my Chinese students think that he was a great leader and speaker.  A few of my students are fully obsessed with World War II and often show me the books they are reading about the era’s tanks or I find them carefully doodling the Nazi army’s flag in their Engliah textbook.  It’s always disconcerting when you bring up Hitler and a student jumps up and says: “I love him!”  I wanted to teach these kids a thing or two about this monster.  While my students love Hitler they also hold the Jewish people in the highest regard.  When I asked them for stereotypes they had of the Jews I got suggestions like: genius, rich, doctor, beautiful, business leader, and so on.  So I explained Hitler’s hatred of the Jews and how his idiotic stereotypes led to the Holocaust, which my students knew little about.  Still though I don’t it really changed their mind about Hitler’s greatness.  I mean, this is still the country where Mao is idolized after all he did.

My last week of classes was a time to relax and enjoy my last time at the front of the classroom.  Both the students and I took lots of pictures and I will post some of them soon.

The Goddess of Democracy

Tomorrow is the big day.  It is the most sensitive anniversary of this year (so far): June 4th, the 20th anniversary of the Tian’anmen Square Massacre that brought the months long student protest for greater freedom and democracy to a bloody close.

This is actually a much smaller deal in China then you would think.  The reason is largely due to the fact that the younger generations, the high school and college students, have never heard about this dark day in Chinese history.  And if you do know anything about it your gut reaction is probably to be quiet, what with the Harmonious Society kick the government is on these days.  Back in 2004 when I was a outspoken and overzealous high school student in Beijing I brought up the protest with my host brother.  He had never heard of it.  Yet it turned out that he had been there as a toddler.  His parents, like many Beijing residents, went to the Square to give food to the protesting students, many of whom were holding a hunger strike.  My young host brother handed out popsicles.  Still though he had never learned of the protest until an American student had come to live with him 15 years later.

Of course the most lively discussion about the big anniversary is happening online.  Former dissidents have been promoting a campaign to have people wear white clothes on June 4th, white is the color of mourning in the Chinese culture.  There is already talk online that TV presenters are banned from wearing white (or black, or red) for the whole month of June.

A lot the discussion of the anniversary and what people are doing has been happening on Twitter.  So it was probably inevitable that Twitter was blocked yesterday, along with the Flickr photo sharing site and Hotmail (Hotmail is now back).  Many outspoken Chinese bloggers have been using Twitter as a nice uncensored alternative to the options available in China.  It is the first time Twitter was blocked. The New York Times has an article up about the recent wave of censorship in China.

First thing, this sucks.  I use these sites everyday.  All the photos on my blog are uploaded to Flickr, so now the blog looks rather naked from China.  I was getting really into Twitter too, though I must say a break from Twitter isn’t all that bad for my time management.  This recent wave of web site blockings (all in the name of creating a happy harmonious society) comes at the heels of many earlier attempts at censorship in the lead up to the anniversary.  Youtube was blocked over a month ago and as usual searching for websites related to the anniversary shuts down your access to Google and other sites.  In other forms of censorship pages from the International Herald Tribune were taken out of every issue entering the country and the BBC World News channel, which is available to many people in large cities like Beijing and Shanghai, found that it’s signal cut out whenever it brought up the Tian’anmen Square protest.  Geesh!  So much work you guys!  I wonder how many Party members it takes to unscrew the light bulb?

However the government, like a sloppy child hiding a mess from his mother, doesn’t actually manage to hold back the flow of information too well.  For instance this video is still available here in China.  These attempts at blatant censorship have also given the world media a lot to write and talk about and are incredibly noticeable and infuriating over here and not just to us American expats.  It seems to me that this campaign achieves nothing but to diminish the people’s trust in the Party and government.   Tomorrow I will have my own little protest by wearing white, but if anyone at my school asks me why I must lie.  (I have been banned from wearing white by an American.  It’s actually fine by me, giving voice to your political thoughts in China is just plain scary and often stupid (especially for a foreigner).  Ironically enough though it seems that half of the teachers at my school are wearing white.)  No wonder my students always say they love America because of its freedom.  They may not know anything about the Tian’anmen Square Protest and the bloody massacre that ended it but they’re not stupid.

How much does it cost?  I don’t know but more than I would ever pay, that’s for sure.  The sad creature is a stinging reminder that the Chinese often enjoy eating the rare and expensive just because they are that, rare and expensive.  The southern Chinese have reputation for this, one I’m afraid is well deserved (I even ate a viper’s gall bladder once, not to mention muntjac and stone frog).

Is this a sign that Huaihua is becoming a developed city?  I think so.   When you have customers in a landlocked province willing to buy sea turtles for dinner there must some well-heeled people living in the neighborhood.   One of those weird culinary signs that life is changing here.  This can also be seen in the city’s first McDonalds being built and the new French wine bar that just opened.

Dinner?

Same + Sex + Love

As a young American man making a living in China people often think I’m here to nab some hot Chinese woman, have sex with her, and get married so we can have lots of cute half Chinese half Anglo Saxon babies.  Nothing could be farther from the truth (except than half American half Chinese babies are extremely cute).  Chinese people just don’t see a gay man when they look at me and it’s the same for everyone else.  Even super queeny gay guys in China are not seen as gay, very different from America’s old macho-man society.  Every man in China is expected to get married and have children (most gay men seem to do this too) so people never expect you to be gay.  Even still, there is a gay culture and society in China and I need to talk about this culture and how I, as an American liberal from gay-loving Massachusetts, get along in China.  It’s not all Pride parades (not at all actually, at least not until the first Gay Pride in mainland China next month in Shanghai), but it’s also not as horrendous as some might think and not as bad as living in some parts of America.

As I was saying, the old story goes like this: foreign men come to China to find Chinese girlfriends.  Everyone here in China seems to buy into this idea.  I’ve been asked to kiss drunk Chinese girls for people’s cameras, been given random girl’s numbers, been brought to lewd shows where girls in nurse uniforms spread their legs for fat cigarette smoking businessmen, offered heterosexual sex for money, hit on by  woman in internet bars etc etc.  I’m really fed up with it all.  If I could I would tell every person I know in this massive country that I am attracted to men not woman, but alas life is not that easy.  The closet that Chinese society keeps gays in is usually locked tight, barely a glint of light coming in.  My general rule is to keep my mouth shut until it seems it’s okay to say something.

Lately, after almost nine months in Hunan, this is starting to wear on me.  Over Thanksgiving I visited some friends in the small rural city of Ningyuan.  While we ate our meal of blood duck and deep-fried pumpkin balls the conversation turned to what you hate the most about living in China (we were all Americans).  I gave a simplistic answer without really thinking about it, but now I know that one of the worst things about living in China is being forced to stay in the closet.  Back in America I revel in being able to speak about my sexuality openly, here I often fume in silence being unable to do so.

While I’m sounding rather negative here China is not in fact a lost cause for the gay community, in a country of 1.4 billion or so people there are many gay people, tens of millions when you think about it.  In cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and cities outside of China with predominately Chinese populations like Singapore, there are thriving populations of happy gay people that are open about their sexuality.  I’ve met some of them and while they almost all live in the big closet we are all stuffed into they are not full of despair and second guessing their natural feelings.  However, this is not always the case.

In Huaihua, where I live and teach, I have some gay and bisexual male friends.  While they are open enough to tell me about their sexuality they are still stuck in the far back of the closet, just as our city is stuck far behind others in China’s breakneck development.  They are scared and unhappy, like I was once.  They put their hand to my mouth when I mention anything gay around others.  Some of them live dangerous lives that lead to no clear end.  Even my closest gay friend here in Huaihua, who is far more accepting of himself, has well-founded fears and watches what he says closely in the company of most people.  His worries about losing his job, what his parents would think, and losing his straight friends.  Living this way has lots of negative consequencs.  When you know that you can never marry or be open in society with the person you love and that your life will be one long lie you don’t worry about long term goals like maintaining good health and finding a career.  Sadly some gay men in China live such lives.

When Oscar Wilde brought a case of libel against his lover’s father for calling him a “sodomite,” thereby bringing public attention and scorn to his sexuality, people called him an idiot for not running away to Paris to avoid public shame. These days gay men know that a life of running away and hiding, a life of marriage without love, and a life of pretending add up to a life of sadness and despair, just as Mr. Wilde knew – though his fate after leaving this life was sadly tragic.  This is the life that many of gay men in smaller cities like Huaihua and in the countryside have to live.  But wait, this all sounds awful so how do my gay friends still manage to lead generally pleasant lives?  The answer, I think, is that homosexuality while being disliked in China is not altogether forbidden and unheard of.  There is a big difference between China and the world’s worst countries for a homosexual to live in (think Saudi Arabia, Jamaica and the like).

In China because of the religious make up of the country and the State’s suppression of religious growth (especially with the younger generations) homophobia doesn’t come from deeply held religious beliefs like it does in much of America.  Christianity has a growing place in China and Confucianism and Taoism do not support homosexuality, yet still homosexuality is not a hot topic for religious groups here like, again, it is in the United States.  It seems to me it’s mostly due to people not understanding homosexuality (many people still believe that homosexuality doesn’t exist in China) and the fact that the traditional Confucian focus on marriage and having a family are still very strong in China.  You must also remember that homosexuality (especially male homosexuality) has a long and happy history in China.  Even the ultra-famous poet Qu Yuan, whose suicide in honor of his country will be celebrated this week (in English we know this holiday as the Dragon Boat Festival), was believed to be gay. So it would be hard to argue that Chinese society and religion cannot accept homosexuality.  And as it turns out this is the case.

While homosexuality was still considered a mental illness as recently as 2001 in China and sodomy was illegal until 1997 the country seems to be making a lot of progress in my mind.  In large cities there are thriving LGBT communities and organizations that support them.  In Shanghai next month mainland China’s very first Gay Pride will take place. The Chinese State’s English newspaper the China Daily has even been highlighting gay rights lately. Last month the profiled a father who reacted badly to learning that his son is gay (he wanted to kill him with a knife) and then decided to join a volunteer group that helps parents deal with the news that their child is homosexual. The story is titled “Living Free.” Other articles the China Daily has published about homosexuality include one on people helping gay men with AIDS and one on the people ffighting to legitimize gay marriage in China. These articles don’t demonize homosexuals and in fact they seem to predict a future of greater acceptance of homosexuals in China. As one man said to the China Daily about coming out:

“It is not that I am not courageous enough, rather the society is not yet ready for such an open revelation.

“But I can see it is coming.”

I like to believe that that day is coming faster than we think.  More on this subject coming soon.

I’m a big fan of The Atlantic’s former China correspondent James Fallows.  While he may be leaving (already left?) China he still blogs about this country all the time, and always brings up interesting stories and topics.  Recently he’s been writing about the Chinese education system, specifically on the nationwide standardized college entrance examination the Gaokao (高考).  See his collected posts on Chinese education here.  This exam is the only way a Chinese high school student can get into a university, and then only a university chosen by the exam’s controllers (i.e.: the Chinese government).  This is a massive and seriously life altering exam that has a big trickle down effect on how students are taught in high school.  Lately Fallows has been posting the thoughts of both foreigners and Chinese on the exam and it’s effects on the education system.  Very interesting stuff.

By talking about the Gaokao and the ideas of college entrance reform in China Mr. Fallows also brings up the bigger issue of the way Chinese schools educate their students.  This is something I think about everyday while I teach high school students here in Huaihua.  I am a volunteer teacher at my school and this affords me almost no oversight on how I teach.  My classes use no textbook, have no final exam, and almost no one comes in to watch.  This is an odd set up for a foreigner teaching in China and it thankfully lets me teach the way I want to, with due discretion of course.  The thing is still I find myself teaching to students who have very in-the-box (as opposed to outside-the-box) thinking and this affects what I am able to do in the classroom.  There is a clear lack of willingness to be outspoken and creative in the Chinese classroom.

In my class I often have the students group up and work on a project to present to the class.  I always specify that I want creative answers and I try to set the project up so that they have to use critical thinking to complete it.  Yet their final projects usually end up looking the same.

For example this week I’ve been teaching my students about environmental problems the world faces.  While discussing the problems the students answered questions like “where does air pollution come from?” with stock answers they knew: factories (oddly cars never came up until I mentioned them).  Easy stuff.  Then the questions, “why is this bad for the environment?” and “what can we do to help solve this problem?” brought the same by-the-book answers.  They would look in their geography textbook for the right answer and didn’t think through the problems and how they are caused and could be fixed.  Air pollution, my students said every time, could be solved by planting trees and enacting stronger laws against polluting.  The idea that society’s need for cars should be questioned or that we should live with less stuff was rarely brought up.  Every class gave me the same answers, mostly bland simple ones.  Through the week I cheered on the idea of creativity and thinking for themselves but everyone preferred to write the easiest and most basic answers, even my best and brightest English students.  The students wanted to complete the worksheet, the quality of the answers wasn’t a priority.  There were some notably creative answers though, such as moving to Mars or the very Maoist idea of lowering the population through a world war.  While doing the least to achieve a decent grade is the norm for high school students the world over in China there often seems to be no other path taken.  In general my class projects always yield answers that stay well within the lines, and the students are proud and happy with this and don’t quite understand my disapproval with getting the same textbook answer over and over again.

Another example of this was written by a foreign teacher in China and reminds me similar experiences I’ve had with group skits in class.  They write about a class project where the students had to make a radio school skit (check it out here):

My eighth graders had a unit studying the radio, so I asked them to write their own radio shows. I put them in groups and told them to write 3-4 segments, including at least one conversation. Their English is more than good enough for an activity like this, and I did get several good shows, including a show where the news segment had some fake news and ended with the reader telling listeners that “some of this news may be fake, and we are not responsible for what people do after hearing this information”.

I also, however, got an enormous number of segments taken word-for-word from their books or newspapers; news items read directly from something they printed out or a magazine article; etc. Several students attempted to make conversations by having people alternate reading sentences from one of these printouts. The most extreme was when one group took a printout from a radio show and “wrote” it by changing the names. None of this was hidden – they know that I’ve seen the books and newspapers they were quoting from, and sometimes they would show me a magazine article and ask me how to pronounce one of the words. Often they’d understand the very general gist of the story but not the details, and it was very apparent in the way they said the words.

One foreigner teacher wrote on one of Jame’s Fallow’s posts: “I decided that one of the things that stifles creativity in China more than anything else was high school.”  Asking for creativity and critical thinking of my students clearly goes against the grain of the school’s teaching methods.  The textbook is God and us teachers are seemingly just there to whip our students as they plod through every page.  Even the exam essays they have to write for some classes (the best are pasted on the classroom wall) seem to be lifeless arguments they have heard or read elsewhere.  They are given good grades for such work.

I used to teach four classes a week at local elementary schools and one day I saw a teacher admonish a 10 year old student for not making a paper cup music maker exactly as instructed in the textbook.  Unbelievable!  Where I come from teachers usually never even used those stupid textbook projects and certainly never got mad at us over the way we made a class art project.  The same rules apply to English homework.  Never mind that the homework is almost entirely fill-in-the blank multiple choice questions on insignificant minor grammatical points (I can never seem to help my students on these, they want the right answer and I always see the grammar problem as having none), but when they do actually have to write sentences for each chapter’s final “creative” project the instructions have a hold-your-hand attitude that stifles almost any free thinking.

I’m getting a little harsh in my argument.  Chinese students are not uncreative, not at all.  They’re just rarely asked to be so by their teachers and parents.  The goal is always a perfect test score and spending time arguing about a grammatical point or trying out a new self-thought argument in an essay seems wrong when a teacher could just teach the right answer and the student memorize it.  Chinese education has been for a long time and still is a system where students parrot what their teacher teaches them.  At least for the most part.

I should point that due to the Gaokao college entrance examination a students high school grades don’t matter in the end.  If you are a mathematics genius you could fail your math class and still go to a good university.  I know students who have done that, though my students’ parents watch their child’s school grades pretty closely.  The parents even try to bribe us teachers sometimes.  This means that even if a teacher does ask his or her students to think creatively the student doesn’t really need to if they don’t want to.

A few weeks ago one of my classes showed me a video of their class dance routine for a school competition (one of the few times they get out of the classroom).  It was like a bad Backstreet Boys music video, except more lifeless and with everyone wearing matching shirts.  It made a cheerleading routine look like freestyle interpretative dance.  They were extremely proud of their work and had won the competition but I really didn’t see much of any creativity in it.  To them there was a right and a wrong way to do a dance and the line between the two was etched in stone.  Practice and memorization of a strict set of rules seems, to them, the best way to do almost anything.

My students board at the school and fr0m 7:30 AM until 9:30 PM are in a classroom (with short breaks for lunch and dinner).  Their life is incredibly insular and what they learn from us teachers can only be applied to exams in the classroom.  Forget about connecting English to real life (let’s learn about UFOs!) or seeing biology in action outside of reading about it in a textbook.  The fact that their knowledge is only used in getting a test grade severely limits how creative they are in using it.

James Fallows brought up a story in the People’s Daily from this month about the Chinese high school science team that competed at the recent Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.  The Chinese team won some minor honors but failed in to win any big awards.  Mr. Fallows writes:

What’s the problem?  The article discussed some obvious barriers — language, resources — but quoted a number of Chinese authorities saying that the real problem lay in the way Chinese schools taught people to think for themselves — or, didn’t. Too much emphasis on rote, detail, and following procedures; too little encouragement to reflect about the process of discovery.

Yep.

So after months of teaching in this environment of rote memorization and days spent locked in a classroom I was happy to read on Mr. Fallow’s blog that what Chinese students actually want is:

- more of a connection to the real world. They want to have the chance to do community service near their schools, such as tutoring and helping to take care of their elderly, and they also want to take their classes outside of their schools. One of the most impressive examples a student gave me was for an environmental science class being built around an effort to clean up a river, stream, or forest near the school.

- the chance for social development. They want clubs and sports, but they also want things like more free time to spend with their friends, school dances, and for dating to be allowed on campuses. I even had a student say, in full seriousness, that he thought there should be a class teaching students how to interact with the opposite sex.

As an aside, when I was a student at the Jingshan school my American classmates and I tried to start a Friday school dance during lunch.  It lasted all of two weeks before we found ourselves locked out of the gym by the administration, who had never told us that they were against the idea (communication in Chinese schools could be a whole other post).  Dancing and socializing go against the aims of a Chinese school.

I have a lot of hope for the future.  As I see it Chinese education can only get better.  The students I teach don’t make me sad for their future and there are not simply test taking robots, even if that’s the way they are taught.  My days as a student at the Jingshan school in Beijing showed me Chinese teachers (sometimes) making their students think critically and creatively.  While Jingshan is kind of a flagship school for public education in China (and therefore better than most in this respect) I can’t help but think that the pace of development and increasing international competition for Chinese students will bring about change in the way students are taught here.  Here’s hoping!