Chinese Lessons

This article in the Guardian on how smart kids can’t be popular reminded me of this from the New York Times on why more girls don’t do math – particularly at the highest levels where the numerical arts are most creative.

Key quote from the NYT article:

“Kids in high school, where social interactions are really important, think, ‘If I’m not an Asian or a nerd, I’d better not be on the math team.’ Kids are self selecting. For social reasons they’re not even trying.”

And from the Guardian:

One girl told the researchers: “My friends are all really nice people and have [a] really good sense of humour, and they’re all really pretty and stuff, but because they do well in school they’re not popular.”

As far as I can tell  this situation — common in both England and America — does not  apply  in China. I’ve had to explain the negative associations of a ‘teacher’s pet’ to teenagers here and from what they tell me smart kids are the popular ones.

Why hasn’t this caught on in the West? The pinned handkerchief is called a shoupa 手帕 and is mandatory attire for all preschoolers. Surely this is so much better than running around the playground with a handful of snotty tissues?

The other day, after school, in the park Max taught me a new Chinese phrase. He was running around wildly, waving a stick and shouting “wo gei ni sha si le” “我给你杀死了“ . I asked him what he was doing and he told me he was imitating one of his tongxue (classmates) . “Wo gei ni sha si le,” I found out later, means “I give you death.”

A few months ago Max began his superhero phase. It started with spiderman and batman, but the obsession seems to be mutating. Today we spent the day researching the elaborate — and still pretty much incomprehensible — world of East Asia’s favorite superhero: Ultraman.

Though in almost all schoolyard games it is the Japanese that are the enemies, Chinese pop culture is heavily under the influence of Japan – nowhere more so than in the immensely popular realm of cartoons.

So this is what we have to look forward to:

One of the most widely held clichés about China is that it counters American individualism with a deep routed collectivism. Supporting evidence ranges from the dramatic – the great mass gatherings of the Cultural Revolution where oceans of people would hold up the little red book and chant in unison ‘long live Chairman Mao – to the mundane –in Shanghai’s many wonderful parks one is almost never allowed on the grass. This annoyance is justified with an appeal to individual sacrifice in favor of the common good. There wouldn’t be grass if everyone were allowed to tread on it goes the all too common refrain.

The arguments are compelling but – after more than 6 years in China – I am beginning to suspect that the idea of Chinese collectivism is massively misunderstood.

China’s education system is intensely competitive. Overt expressions of favoritism from teachers and even parents and grandparents are commonplace. Students are publicly ranked. Count the number of stripes on a child’s school uniform and the well initiated instantly knows how well he or she has preformed. Every question has only one right answer, precisely because this is the only clear and fair way to determine who is best.

Just inside the gates of the historic French Concession villa where Max’s school is housed is a child sized sink with 4 taps, a bottle of soap beside each. Next to the sink is a large basket of folded white towels. The children enter and wait for a spot. Once their hands are washed and dried they line up for inspection. A woman wearing a white lab coat sits at a table checking the children one by one. She feels their throat to see if there are any swollen glands, places a hand on their foreheads to check for fever, beams a flashlight down their mouths to see if there are blisters and carefully inspects both the front and back of the kids’ hands. Having passed inspection each child is handed a red plastic token which they carry up to the class and place in a little pocket hanging on the door. One day, last year, Max was handed a yellow ticket because his fingernails were too long. There are also blue tickets but we haven’t yet figured out what they are for.

Update: A knowledgeable friend has informed me that the blue tickets are given to kids who need to take medicine. I knew I would learn something from writing this blog.

Another Update: This morning, for the first time, Max was handed a blue ticket. The apparent reason was that he had forgotten his shoupa . Hmmm