To Be or Not To Be (a Teacher)

Sometimes a student on a teaching scholarship tells me that she (or he) does not want to teach English—what she really wants to do is design electronic gadgets or train horses or run a bicycle shop. It’s sad, to some degree, because the exam system coupled with economic pressures often leave students with very little choice. And yet what do we really know about what we want and who we are?

I remember at one point in my life having no clue what I DID want to do but being absolutely certain that I did NOT want to be a teacher or a nurse. I thought those were expected of me and other young women, and I didn’t want to be forced to make those choices.  Write, yes, I’d like to do that, but I’d never be able to make a living doing it, and, anyway, no thank you to teaching.

Obviously, I eventually decided otherwise and have had no regrets. And I wouldn’t be surprised if my would-be-bike-shop-owners change their tunes later on. But I didn’t change my mind all at once.

My own circuitous path to English teaching happened to wind through strawberry fields and nursing homes and medical research laboratories. In the basement of a veteran’s hospital, I was a lab tech running assays on human growth hormone and assisting in studies on the effects of magnesium on the metabolism of vitamin D. I would stand next to my lab partner, marveling at all the glittering glassware, debating the merits of nuclear energy and our own radioactive-tracers for the vitamin D as we carefully set up the liquid chromatography columns. The endocrinologist for whom we worked might burst in to the lab, opining on anything from Vitamin D to Dostoevsky to the delivery of the next container of liquid nitrogen. Who knew that I would so enjoy running experiments that sometimes lasted until two in the morning, whenever the liquid chromatography had run its course? 

If I had a passion, it was for the pen, but I later found ways to work with both science and writing—strange things happened that I could not have predicted when I was 18.

Luck and circumstance played a strong hand in my destiny, suggesting that my conscious thinking about who I was and what I wanted wasn’t entirely in charge. But, to the degree it was, part of my decision-making happened by leaning away from things as much as by leaning toward things. I see in one son or another a position held, maybe not so much from conviction as from it being NOT my position. And I see that as natural.  Isn’t that part of growing up—of becoming independent, of defining the boundaries of one’s own identity? I am not you. There is space for both of us, and besides, we will eventually mature enough to see ways in which we’re more alike than different.

Isn’t that what developmental psychology tells us? Doesn’t maturity follow some stage of titling away from home base enough to establish one’s own identity before going on?

And yet it is interesting to ponder that here in China. Is that what I’m witnessing? Is there a push to define one’s own identity, apart and separate, at least at one stage of development? How does it happen here . . . where uncles and grandmothers join in the family debate about where you should go to school, where parents have the last word, where whole university classes are heard reciting passages aloud together, where the sense of duty to uphold the culture is thousands of years old, where millions of people travel under extraordinarily uncomfortable conditions to get back to the family for New Years? What does developmental psychology tell us about maturity in collectivist societies?

Of course, there have been dizzying changes from one generation to the next here in China. There were dramatic historical forces that put some people on collective farms, other people behind the horns in their Mercedes Benzes, and still others behind fashionable glasses, cramming night and day to pass their gaokao university entrance exams. There are dramatic generational differences—due to dramatic historical forces.

And yet—do I witness students defining themselves differently, separately from their parents—at some stage of development?

Those of my students who are here on teaching scholarships must return to their home provinces, some thousands of miles away, to teach for ten years. Does that constraint on employment bother them? Who knows how representative my students are, but most of them can’t imagine doing otherwise—where else would they go? Why would they do anything else but go home?

I sometimes get weary of the stereotyping of Westerners as individualistic and Easterners as collectivists—of course, it’s not so simple. And yet the differences are profound enough that I find myself re-thinking some developmental theories I’d once been taught, wondering how tacitly Western they might be. 

Is it possible that differences between and among generations here in China were motivated far less by defining oneself differently, far less by carving out a space of one’s own, than by external forces? Perhaps it’s always true that we’re less in charge of our destinies and identities than we think—but is it possible that that’s even more true in China? 

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(Having reflected on identity and independence, I want to acknowledge the many-layered critiques of developmental and stage-based theories, even in the West, and I want to make clear that I’m in no position to generalize what I think I’m seeing here in China. Who knows how well I understand my own students, and who knows how representative they are, even if I do know them well. I’m simply musing, speculating.)