Elves that speak up

My big Christmas present is a stack of about 700 pages of student writing, most of which arrived the day before Christmas Eve. (Fellow writing teachers--don't worry, the hardest part is behind me. I've seen many drafts of these papers. You know what I mean.)

Still! When faced with such an onerous task, I usually find plenty of ways to procrastinate. What better diversion is there than housecleaning?! Or maybe hunting down ingredients to cook something from scratch to feed 30--well, maybe 90--people?

See, last year at this time I was visited by elves. Somehow those elves must have whispered in the ears of some of my current students--because last Tuesday one bright-eyed student spoke up, asking if maybe they could come to my place. They'd heard about some other dinners. So what should I say? They were all so eager, on the edge of their seats. They made clear that the 24th would be a perfect time to come to my apartment, the day of their last class. And so they came. And took a thousand and one pictures.

I'd made a huge pot of pasta with some homemade sauce--with lots of fresh tomatoes, onions, garlic, parsley, mushrooms--and some herbs from Provence sent as a gift. They loved it! That is, once they slipped in a half jar of hot pepper sauce to make it a real Chongqing dish.  A few students paraded around with bowls of it, feeding the rest of us bite by bite with chopsticks.

 Meanwhile, they made dumplings . . .

        And ate them . . .

I've never had Chinese students here who didn't do magic before leaving. Suddenly the dishes were all washed and the floors were mopped. Really. I can't tell you how grateful I am, especially since two other classes looked at me expectantly yesterday, asking with bright expressions when their turn would be. Saturday and next Monday, respectively.

I will get those papers graded, but it may take me a few hours longer than usual.

Wonderful as this Christmas Eve was, it was without Christopher, Ana, Ben, and Nick and other beloved friends and family. I send special greetings to you--and to all of you who peek at this blog now and then.  Now remember, everything in China is BIG, including these holiday good wishes straight from Beibei!

The Screamer

It wasn’t the first time the screamer awakened me. I listened, and her wails crescendoed. If screams have levels, these seemed to have left “begging” behind—they didn’t seem to be pleading to him, but rather to be crying out to the world. They were assertive, letting-it-all-out, hiding-nothing wails. They went on and on. And ON. I listened in the dark. The screamer sounded cornered but not about to let the perpetrator get off lightly. That is, if there was a perpetrator—perhaps she is mentally ill? Or suffering from some wretched physical pain? I don’t know.  I have no idea where she is, which building, although I have a hunch. Our windows are all huge and usually open—and I can indeed hear things from buildings across the way. People practicing the horn or piano. People throwing their vegetables into hot oil. Radio music. And screams.

I certainly don’t know why she was screaming, not for sure. But I’m pretty sure. It just sounded like a case of domestic abuse.

Then a few days ago I heard it at lunchtime, which was unusual. I had come home from school to meet my tutor, but the screams subsided before my tutor arrived. I could see people, mostly older, coming and going slowly on the brick paths far below. They heard. But they kept going about their business. 

I have a Chinese friend who has told me about her history of abuse. She fought back and took action, but the law was not on her side then. Her family did nothing and did not support her. She did leave her husband, the abuser in her case, but not with any support whatsoever from anyone but her daughter. That was a long time ago, but she is still angry. 

Chen Ting Ting writes that “traditionally in China, domestic violence has been considered a private issue that should be kept within the household, with any outside interventions left at the doorstep.” She notes that that situation, including the legal system, is slowly changing but not fast enough. She goes on to quote survey data that suggest that one in four Chinese women are subject to some kind of domestic abuse. An article last May in the China Daily said that half of the respondents in a survey on domestic violence said they abused their wives or girlfriends. Half.

This, of course, is not news. It happens in the US—and I tend to forget that when I was a girl there was very weak legal support for people of any gender reporting abuse. Wikipedia says that before the 1980s, “U.S. law enforcement policies and practices emphasized not using arrest, prosecution or other legal sanctions.” That has changed, officially at least, and most Western countries outlaw abuse. But even with legal, social, and other support networks in place, Soroya Chemaly presents chilling statistics showing that the US has no bragging rights. It’s not much better in Western Europe where, the “order of causes of death for European women ages 16-44” are “domestic violence, cancer, traffic accidents.” Whew.

Of course, attitudes about violence against women varies, region by region and culture by culture, but the UN, among other organizations, points to the historically unequal power relations between men and women around the world and presents even more sobering statistics, particularly about the degree to which women internalize beliefs that they deserve to be beaten.

My students are smart and most of them would not take lightly certain forms of aggression. And yet China is a country where men are still privileged. I was sobered to hear many of my women students express the opinion that they’d rather be male. I was also sobered to hear that most of them would do nothing if they witnessed abuse unless they knew the person. But are they very different from US and Western citizens who have more robust laws and (theoretically) police services on their side?  I don’t know.

Part of the Confucian idea of harmony is a social order in which inferiors submit to superiors, children submit to elders, and wives submit to husbands. It’s an order that is deeply engrained in the culture. Of course, Confucius did not condone abuse—to the contrary—but he did endorse the pecking order.

Things are changing fast in China, but men still outnumber women and not for reasons of nature.

http://www.china.org.cn/china/2013-05/10/content_28781884.htm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/soraya-chemaly/50-actual-facts-about-dom_b_2193904.html
http://asiafoundation.org/in-asia/2013/10/30/breaking-pattern-of-silence-over-domestic-violence-in-china/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence

PS -  I should have said last week that, stressed as my tutor might be, I have no doubt that she'll find a job. She's smart, charming and resourceful. She is beloved by her students and tutees. It might not be her first pick, but a job of some sort will come her way.

Another PS - I send hearty congratulations to Christopher on graduating from his nurse anesthesia program and warm, good wishes to Nicholas on his birthday!

Beyond factories and farming--what?

These days my tutor Xiaodan looks unusually ragged, and I think I know why.

The week after National Day, Xiaodan listened patiently to my story about climbing JinYun mountain before proceeding to tell me about clothes shopping with her roommate. That clothes discussion mushroomed into one that has lasted for weeks. You see, Xiaodan’s roommate was shopping for interview clothes. She was one of hundreds of students climbing the steps each day last month to the impressive building on campus where employers from all over China were interviewing prospective employees. Xiaodan, too, has been taking various exams, hoping for a shot at an interview herself. Competition is tight, as a masterpiece of understatement.

These conversations have left me wondering what “competition” means when resources and jobs really are so finite, so limited. And just what is everyone competing for? Between factories and farming—what kinds of jobs exist?

 Competition ideally is based on merit, and nobody has done more than China to establish a merit-based system to select prospective employees, with an imperial exam system tracing back to the Han Dynasty. And, perhaps, nobody knows better than China what the strengths and perils of such a system are—the exam system has been critiqued throughout the centuries, and occasionally abolished, because of abuses, backwardness, and excessive focus on memorization.

“Bill” comes to visit nearly every week and describes studying for his college entrance exam, the notorious “gaokao.” To give him a chance at doing well, his father had paid for “Bill” to be placed in the B class at his high school of 1300, a class of only 70 students. The A class, allegedly more selective, had only 30 students, while a thousand some students milled around together in various C classes. Whether it was the advantage of being in a slightly selective class, allegedly with better teachers, or because “Bill” studied so hard, he placed 30^th in his whole class on the “gaokao.” But what was the price? He recalls studying until 2:00 every night and getting up at 5:30 in the morning throughout his junior year, the worst, because of the pressure he felt to not shame his parents. He described his crying classmates, the ones who were not among the rich kids who just played video games.

High school students compete mightily to get into good schools, and college graduates compete just as intensively for jobs. But what happens to those who never got a good “gaokao” score, who never go to university? What is there between factories and farming and the most sought-after professional jobs in China?

“Ryan” and “Ann” came to make dumplings one Saturday, and “Ryan” happened to describe a recent trip home and the strange feeling of visiting with old high school classmates, some of those who didn’t make it into college, many of them deep into drugs. Xiaodan’s roommate, the one who had been shopping for clothes, is determined along with her “left-behind” brother to avoid the fate of their parents and uncles who work in a faraway shoe factory, earning too little to come home for the most important event in the year, Spring Festival. No amount of studying was too much in her eyes. In my last conversation with Xiaodan, I learned that her roommate's efforts were rewarded--she did land a high school teaching job.

I hear more stories about east-coast factories, knowing that China has just  witnessed the largest human migration in history, although this internal migration from rural rice paddies to urban jobs hasn’t involved crossing any borders. On one hand, this migration has jolted the economy and, at least indirectly, brought many people out of poverty. On the other hand, the class divide has sharpened, as it has in the US as well. I see poor people working dirt cheap—just today I saw a dozen little men pulling weeds in one of Southwest University’s many celebrated gardens. Surely, for so many to be working in that one little spot, they weren’t being paid much.

And, I’ve come to realize that the job problem in China is partly the lack of service sector jobs, at least relative to those in most developed countries.  I understand that most economies follow a path from agriculture/mining based economies to industrial to post-industrial-or-service based ones. A majority of the jobs in the US are jobs in the service sector, but a much, much smaller fraction of available jobs in China are in the service sector. That is—there isn’t so much to choose from between farming at one end of the spectrum and professional jobs at the other. There are jobs, such as teaching and working for the government, but those jobs are fiercely fought over. Business opportunities are growing, but they are still relatively limited. So what do you do?

You knock yourself out studying, you endure, and you hope that some good will come of it.

Class was canceled for all the seniors in my department one week not long ago so that they could attend a series of lectures on making the most of it in a tight job market. Few of them have secured jobs yet and most of them are worried.

Xiaodan, too, a graduate student in linguistics, is looking paler than usual. She laughed before taking the train to her last exam—why worry? She knew she couldn’t possibly do well enough to secure one of the three government positions that students were competing for. Hundreds had enrolled in the exam. Some exams last for hours, with sub-sections on language, math, physics, and more. She would just randomly circle letters on the multiple-choice questions in some sub-sections—for example the one with 40 questions to complete in 35 minutes.

 As for me, sitting in a Chinese class every day, I find that the frequent quizzing is motivational IF I’m mostly competing against myself. I, too, will be facing exams in a month. Those will be another story. Speed is not my forte. But, really, I have nothing to lose. This is all gravy for me--I've got my degrees and had my job.

Under ideal conditions, a little competition isn’t a bad thing. I itch for it. But. I’m grateful I could  go to school in a time and place when I didn’t have to face such incredibly fierce competition.

I wish my students the best.

Out with a Bang

I just didn't know what the ruckus was the first time I heard all of the fireworks down in the park, fireworks sounding off at all hours of the day and night for several days in a row. I found out soon enough. About once or twice a month since then, I've had an opportunity to witness from a distance  another Chinese funeral.

This funeral was in progress when two Chinese students and I walked by, and "Bill" commented that funerals like this were no longer practiced in his home town, far north of Beijing. However, ancestors are still worshipped, certainly in his own family. The other student listened to the discussion of ancestor worship without showing expression before saying that funerals like this were still very much standard practice in his home town, somewhere in the southeast. Clearly, things are changing fast in China, and many traditional funeral rites are among them.

Given that the park below my apartment is the center of all kinds of community activity, from taijiquan early in the morning to  various group dances most evenings, I didn't at first associate the very loud pop music and fireworks with a funeral. It took only one funeral, though, to realize that the music and fireworks can go through the night--night after night for three days.

In subsequent conversations, friends and students described funerals in their home towns and the importance of filial piety, the continuity of generations, and the transition of the soul from this world to the next.  Bill wasn't the only one who said he believes quite literally that his deceased elders are actively involved in his family's affairs, and that it's important to keep them well stocked with supplies. Accordingly, during a funeral and during another memorial festival held in the seventh month of the lunar calendar, paper replicas of food, houses, cars, maybe even computers and smart phones are burned. Listening to my friends' and students' stories about these rituals, I'm struck by the curious mix of ancient folklore; remnants of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism; and something that borders on entrepreneurial creativity.

One friend, a graduate student, described being the one in her family who was charged with the job of addressing a hundred envelopes to dead relatives during the memorial holiday, each stuffed with paper money, because she was the only one who could read and write, and the postman on the other side needed to know where to deliver the burned paper goods. She was a little girl when she did it the first time, using a calligraphy brush, and it took her hours. Today, she, like Bill, claims no religion and yet she believes in the active presence of her dead ancestors' souls, and she hedged on whether she thought they really do return as ghosts for a week during the memorial holiday. She told me that you just don't know what they might do, and you need to be wary of running into an orphan ghost, a ghost with no family to return to, a ghost who might have special needs.

Other Chinese friends describe rituals still practiced in their home towns, beginning with the required keening and wailing, sometimes guided by a professional hired for the job. The wailing stops, but singing and noise-making continues, often joyfully. I've witnessed in the little park below my apartment a curious blend of ancient Chinese songs and pop music blaring throughout the same funeral. There might be gamblers outside the funeral tent, because the corpse needs to be guarded and gambling might help keep the guards awake.

A friend tells me that cremation is required by law, but that her grandparents, like many older Chinese people, didn't approve of cremation and her family went to great lengths to bury her grandpa secretly at home twenty-some years ago. However, they felt they could not break the law twice, and, when her grandma died ten years ago, she was cremated.

In my own reading, I find accounts of all sorts of rites and ceremonies, many of them seemingly related more closely to folk culture than to either Buddhism or Confucianism. Mixed in with reverence for the dead are all sorts of social hierarchies and do's and don't's and folk logic, but I'm struck by the core themes of reverence for the unity of creation and of celebration of the departed one's life.

For years I was one to scoff at rituals without substance--and I thought I would far rather have my cremains quietly sprinkled into the Current River, without any fuss, but I've come to appreciate the multi-layered catharsis that comes with some funeral drama. The Chinese understand something about fireworks, and I think fireworks, as well as good music, can express layers of layers of emotion all at once--and with a big bang. I want to go out with fireworks.