From urbanatomy.com’s increasingly interesting series Why I Write? Peter Hessler on Chinese education and contemporary writers:
Mostly, though, if you spend time in a Chinese school you wonder how any writer could come out of that system. As a kid growing up in America, I really hated school. I hated the structure; I hated the group activities; I hated the stupid worksheets with set questions. I liked learning, but I had a strong independent streak and I wanted to have more control over what I was doing. And I didn’t see any point in working with other kids. If you’re creating something, you want to do it alone. My mother still has report cards from the second grade that say “Peter refuses to work with a group, even a group of two.” Fortunately, a few of my teachers were somewhat accommodating, although it wasn’t until high school that they really allowed me to do my own thing. The point is, the American education system had enough flexibility that I was able to survive. There was a lot of anger and frustration along the way, but eventually I found open-minded teachers and they pointed me in the right direction.
In Chinese education, though, the group mentality tends to be relentless. Most writers are individuals, but that instinct usually gets to be broken in a Chinese classroom. And when they teach writing, it’s not through an emphasis on voice, perspective, narrative, character. Instead, they have the kids copy poetic phrases over and over. They are taught to spout off set opinions instead of coming up with anything unexpected. And they do a lot of handwriting. Lots and lots of handwriting. It’s incredibly deadening. In the village outside of Beijing where I have a home, I was once helping a neighbor kid with his homework, and his assignment was: “Write an essay about your lamp.” He wrote “My lamp is very bright,” and then he got stuck. Well, that’s another bright kid who probably won’t be writing novels in 20 years. Or if he does, it’ll be a 600-page allegory about a lightbulb.
I’ve always believed this cultural issue is more significant than political censorship. Look at Taiwan – where are the great novels about Taiwan? It’s an amazing place: you have a class of elites who lost a terrible war, fled to exile on a strange island, brutalized the natives, built toy factories, went abroad to study, developed a repressive regime and then opened it up, and eventually lost their ruling status. There’s no Communist Party to censor writers. Where’s the epic that captures this half-century? Why hasn’t this environment produced a Tolstoy or a Conrad? It’s because writers do not develop simply because they live in interesting times. The environment does not create a writer, sui generis. People need to be educated to write, and they need to be educated to think as writers. Traditional Chinese education tends to focus on other skills and values.
My question, though, is this: China has produced many great writers in the past. 1930s Shanghai – to take just one example – had an incredibly vibrant culture of excellent writers (Lu Xun, Ding Ling, Mao Dun etc…). How did these people escape the constraints of Chinese traditional education? What was the key difference between then and now? Is it the pressure that accompanies the one child policy, something in the modern (post cultural revolution) education system, or is there something else in the politics, culture or economy of contemporary China that is stifling creativity?
Thanks for posting this. I have many Chinese pen friends who complain to me about their educational system. They know it isn’t the way it should be, but they don’t really know how it should be either. I try to explain our Western system without bragging or trying to sound superior, but this article is great. I like Peter Hessler’s work, and I’ll read his new book as soon as I get a chance.