EDUCATION IS THE BEATING HEART OF SHAOXING: A PERSONAL REFLECTION
I was born on a Virginia farm in 1937 and loved that life of raising cattle and playing baseball. In 1959, I entered the American University School of International Service where I received a Masters Degree. The University is in Washington, D.C., John F. Kennedy became President and I had the opportunity to live in the International Student House. It was bliss and that period set the template of my life: to travel, study and learn about the world.
My introduction for China was at Diao Yu Tai in 1988 with a United Nations Development Program (UNDP) delegation to a conference on “privatisation.” In 1996, I had the opportunity to view 250 objects from the Imperial Collection of China in a “blockbuster” show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I was 60 years old, had worked or traveled in 40 countries, was still curious and believed that art was the truest indicator of the qualities of a civilization. Walking out of the exhibit I thought, “It is my duty to myself to learn about Chinese civilisation.”
In 2001, I was invited to teach American and British literature and culture at Shaoxing College of Arts and Sciences. I accepted with alacrity and took the first flight out of New York when airports were reopened after 9/11. The first weeks in Shaoxing I watched American B-52s bomb Afghanistan on CCTV news. I was surprised and pleased to learn that some of my students were collecting money to donate to the children of Afghanistan who were subject to the bombing. There it was: empathy for other people; a vital mark of civilisation.
I taught about 150 students, most about 20 years old and about half who identified themselves as peasants or villagers. They were average students, unassuming, focused on their studies which, I believe, they understood as the great opportunity of their lives. They lived six to a room and there were not a lot of frills on campus. One of the few “issues” among students was female fashion. Most of the students wore plain, loose-fitting clothing. For many, I think it was their first time living in a city. After the bitter winter, (no heat south of the Yangtze River), flowers, color and more fashionable clothing appeared on a number of students. It appeared to me to be a cultural issue; the newer styles were not worn by young women in the villages. Some were offended.
For other teachers coming to Shaoxing College, it was also a new experience. I met R. my first week in Shaoxing but it was only in July of this year (2019) that she shared the following: “My family lived in a cave in the mountains. We did not have furniture and slept together on a khang. I was a child during the Cultural Revolution. It was fun; we played, had little to do, but when school opened again I did well. After high school I qualified for a teachers college and after I graduated I was sent back to the village to teach. I was promoted and in 2001 was offered a job in the Foreign Languages Department at Shaoxing College. The first cup of coffee I had was when we went to the new Starbucks a few years ago. Education made the difference for me. I was a teenager when I was first invited into a house with furniture. I told myself then: ‘I want that.’ Education made that possible for me.”
A student (2001): “My grandmother was a teenager during the Sino-Japanese and CCP-Nationalist wars. I was told she ‘disappeared’ in Shanghai at that time but was brought back to the village after the fighting ceased. She married and one of her daughters was my mother. Both my mother and father were illiterate but they insisted that I rather than my brother be sent to college.” The daughter now works as a marketing manager for a company that manufactures and exports cable and textiles. Her daughter, first in her sixth grade class this year, has taken piano lessons since she was five. I go with her to her weekly piano class when I’m in Shaoxing. It's the highlight of my visit. Her teacher, the best I’ve ever seen, is completely engaged. He has two pianos in his studio. Often they both play at the same time as he gives instructions. The great classics, played with a lot of energy, like a young Yuja Wang. How she can play all the notes of dense classical pieces while absorbing his comments is a bit miraculous. Each of these four generations, all living and active, have had dramatically different lives, the two most recent fully modern, but all four rooted in their village just outside Shaoxing.
Education is the beating heart of Shaoxing. Most friends are former teaching colleagues or students. Most were single in 2001, almost all are now 3 person families. These parents struggle, sometimes desperately, for the best education, the best schools and the best teachers for their children. Most of the students, in addition to their long school days which typically begin by 8 AM at the latest, continue their studies into early evening, followed by homework until 11 or midnight. In addition, most take private classes on weekends in the hopes it will improve their chances to move up into better schools in this fiercely competitive world of education.
“Hell,” calmly replied the athletic looking high school junior when I asked him how his school life felt. “Everyday we work long hours with little time for ourselves.” M., a vivacious, talented middle school student slashed her wrists three times but survived to enroll in a private art-specialized high school in a nearby city. She looked exhausted as she described her schedule but said she always looked forward to four hours every weekday evening with an outstanding instructor in Chinese and Japanese classical art as well as manga. “I may have a chance to study in Japan,” she said enthusiastically, between yawns.
Was the old imperial civil service exam system ever so serious? Or did it ever offer such undreamed of possibilities as the present?
When I taught in 2001-2, a colleague who taught wushu/tai chi generously met me at 6 AM on weekday mornings for lessons. She had a three year old daughter who was very visible on campus. We sang Christmas songs together in that years college celebration. She excelled in that rigorous system and scored first in English in her last year of middle school. Her mother had told her she would take her to America if she did so. J. wrote me before coming she wanted to visit Columbia University, Harvard University and the Harry Potter theme park. Later she wrote, “Skip the theme park, a friend visited and said its not worth it.”
At Columbia we first went to the School of International Affairs and the School of Journalism. After some time I asked: “What do you think?” She did think and said quietly: “I think this is a paradise for learning.” This month (August 2019) she will enroll in graduate school at Columbia University.
Almost every year since 2002, I have returned to Shaoxing for 3 to 5 weeks to visit my Shaoxing “families.” I have always stayed at Haigang hotel in Yuecheng District, near the University and in walking distance of the apartments of former colleagues and students. Not this time. The hotel and its nearby employee housing was sold. But serendipitously for me, the old employee facility was purchased by a hands-on developer who has converted the site into a spacious compound, “Kunting”, that houses a number of new entrepreneurial enterprises around a courtyard: one wing for “Bookworm Culture”, young educators who create online programs as well as teach and offer student trips; “Bookspace” the booklined office and reading space of a “self-service hostel”; a specialty foods delivery service; even a microbrewery; and “True Pilates Shaoxing” introducing a new method of physical learning and exercise to the city. This is typical of Yuecheng, the old center of classic Shaoxing, home and museum of Lu Xun and Qiu JIn, Hang Shen hotel etc. Its old buildings are renovated, reconfigured and repurposed. What had begun to look worn has a more modern aesthetic and offers entrepreneurial opportunities for younger people.
At sunup every morning in July, I walked across the street from Kunting to climb the stone steps of Ta Shan. At that time the “birdmen” begin to arrive: men bringing their birdcages up the hill to hang them in trees and listen to the shrill trills and tweets of their pets as the early morning sun shines through the trees. I then circumambulate the narrow stone paths of the hill, carefully avoiding the energetic people of all ages getting their morning exercises. Near the top is a large pavilion and a flat space that invariably hosts 15 or so people slowly, gracefully and expertly doing a variety of versions of tai chi or wu shu. A little later ballroom dancers may appear. And all over the little “mountain” individual practitioners find their own small spaces for fan or sword tai chi, kicking trees or simply singing to the sky. This is a society, and perhaps one might infer, a civilization at peace with itself.
But change is constant. At the foot of Ta Shan a new subway stop that will get you all the way to Hangzhou in less than 30 minutes is under construction. And a modern economy buttresses the center city. Keqiao, a village when my student was in high school has been the largest textile market in Asia for some years. A very modern looking mother told me: “My newest customers are Marks and Spencer and Walmart.” Keqiao also hosts a large modern campus that thousands of members of the Communist Party to attend. Moreover, nearby Yiwu hosts not only another ‘largest market’ but is also the railhead for the new rapid train that crossed into Kazakhstan a few years ago and now, along with tens of thousands of miles of new train lines. constitutes the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that crosses Central Asia and reaches deep into Europe.
Shaoxing is a small city of 700,000 people. They tend to be modest as well as kind. “I'm just a small potato,” a college teacher said to me. And when I asked a second grade teacher what he was most proud of about contemporary China, he replied: “We have brought 800 million people out of poverty and we plan to bring the rest out quickly.” A divorced mother said, “I have to be mother and father to my son and I want him to be like his grandfather who always gave to the community. Of course I want him to do well but I want him to be a person who also thinks of the community.”
Education for all, bringing everyone out of poverty and the Belt and Road Initiative are major national programs which could have a profound and positive impact on the world as well as Shaoxing itself. Education itself “the beating heart of Shaoxing,” is a profound and beautiful phenomenon. Parents, students, teachers, “bushels of small potatoes,” are the heroines and heroes at the heart of this story.
As the city celebrates the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution this year many might ask: Whither Shaoxing? Whatever whither becomes it would seem the city will endure for millenia, and with its passion for education maybe even help produce a harmonious “New World Symphony.”