Students on Life

Students on Life

For the first writing assignments, I had students write a journal and then an essay on the topic “A Theme in My Life.” Without much luck I first had a discussion on Erich Fromm's idea of being and having to get them away from seeing their lives just in terms of a job. It was a failure. Without a single exception all 360 of them produced “journals” that were in fact canned essays on the jobs they wanted. A number noted that they had never been asked to think about their lives in this way, so maybe that was part of the problem, but mostly it was just the default mode kicking in. When it was time to turn the journals into essays, I remained very insistent that they go beyond the idea of describing a job to a reflection on what meaning or significance they hoped to give to their lives. They were free to bring in the jobs they hoped to get, but the jobs had to be a part of a larger theme.

I had some mild success. There were a number of common themes, which said some things about life in contemporary China for these students. First, it must be recalled that this is a provincial teachers college of 20,000 students, who are overwhelmingly first generation college. Maybe half are from small rural villages around the province; many others are the children of factory workers in some medium size cities with a minority being the children of K-12 teachers following in their parents' footsteps. What they had to say strongly reflects these conditions.

One theme, frequent but not the most common, was to get rich. Make lots of money by setting up your own export company or whatever, and then buy lots of nice stuff—cars, villas, clothes, travel, etc. Then the background kicks in. After you've made lots of money, indulge your parents, who maybe now go to work in the city after the planting or harvest to keep you in school. Buy them a nice villa too and take them around in your car and overseas with you on your trips. The next use for the money was to do something for the village—build a school, a road or a factory to give people good jobs. I was sometimes indelicate enough to write responses on journals wondering how the CEOs they want to emulate got so rich themselves. Was it not in fact by starting up factories employing rural school drop outs and paying them very little? I never got any answers. Maybe they took my questions to be rhetorical.

Another very common theme was to be a teacher at some level along the K-12 continuum. Clearly lots of students find the calling to be a teacher a noble one and look forward to being the kind of teacher that many of them were affected by—someone who went the extra mile to encourage them to hang in another year and take the college entrance exams again or whatever. They want to be the students' friends and confidants and advocates. Within this context and even in the one above, spending some years teaching in one the China's poor and remote provinces or in Africa as a volunteer was often mentioned. These aspirations were often part of a larger theme of wanting to become a person who is useful to society. While the way these goals were expressed often struck me as naïve or incredibly idealistic, I cannot say that they did not also remind me of some younger days when I had very similar and equally naïve hopes.

A desire for a simple, peaceful or "ordinary" life was a third rather common theme. Give me any kind of job that puts food on the table—I don't care what—but let me live in a natural remote place or do something that removes me from the competitive grasp of the new society, the corrupt politics, the smiling at people I don't respect and the constant looking over my shoulder. I think this feeling might come from the fact that many of them have already seen too much of what they don't like just from the struggle of getting a seat in college.

Other themes included descriptions of lives that would be interesting, challenging, colorful, varied, independent, happy, full of travel, etc. Using their English to be an interpreter for some jet-setting CEO or high official was often seen as a way of accomplishing these other goals. Some of the more career-minded writers mentioned graduate school, which is apparently all the rage now. "Everyone" wants a graduate degree, and a number of my students voiced interest in that as a way of getting a job teaching in college—good pay, job security and long vacations. Talk about naïvete. Well, maybe not if you can get some fat tenure track cake job.

Family was at the center of virtually all of these themes. Family in terms of parents and care for them was equally important as spousal relationships to these still single (mostly) women. Not a few of them began these conversations with phrases like "Because I'm a girl/daughter..." Many made comments about wanting to find a "lover" (爱人, airen, the term for 'spouse' that has been used in post-1949 China) who need not be handsome or rich but is a kind person, devoted and faithful to them. Children—one or two—were in all the pictures. Not one of the male students made a similar comment about trying to find such a woman.

I've heard people talk about how this generation of students feels terribly pressured and for this reason prone to some instability. I certainly see the pressure, but can't say I've yet seen evidence of any obvious instability. The school here has recently set up a counseling center and the challenge is to get students to use it because there is an assumption that people who get counseling are mentally ill, and there is considerable social stigma in China about mental illness, maybe like the US in the 50s. Another issue is that so many of these students are literally just off the farm. They have come on dirt paths to blinking neon and western style department stores. They have lots of adjustments to make beyond academic ones. As noted above, they feel incredibly indebted to parents and family, who are putting all their hopes on them, and some of them are indebted to banks as well. To make matters worse, most of them were overprotected as younger children so the adjustment is all the more challenging. I heard of a fairly recent incident in which some young student of rural origin on a large urban campus in another province hammered a couple fellow students to death because he felt he was being ridiculed as a bumpkin who didn't know how to dance or dress or talk like the city folk. Supposedly he was found not to be criminally insane or pathologically anti-social—just full of hatred for the city people, who he felt had wronged him. (The common word for bumpkin is 土包子, tubaozi, which means something like 'wrapped in mud' or 'mud ball,' very descriptive but not very nice.)

Much more remains to be said about "higher" education here in China and certainly in the US. No one can teach anything well to 400 students, let alone writing and logical thinking with a touch of creative expression in a second language to boot. What the hell am I doing here anyway?