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From Maine to China
I was sitting in my ramshackle office at a tiny
college in central Maine one afternoon twelve years ago, talking
to a student from Chengdu, China. I had never heard of Chengdu.
"How big is it?" I asked him.
"About three million people," he said
with a wry smile.
Three million people and I never knew it existed.
"Did you live there all your life?" I asked.
"In 1974 I went to the countryside," he
said.
In all innocence I replied, "Why?"
He was about my age, in his mid-thirties. He smiled and looked
at the floor. "To work," he answered. "A lot of
people had to go."
I did not know what this meant. I was curious, though. China's
vast countryside, its ancient culture. I had traveled in Europe,
but never farther east than Athens. Imagine the ruins that might
be seen in China.
"Here in America, most of us know almost nothing
about China," I said. "I'd like to spend time there.
Not just a couple of weeks. I'd like to live there and learn about
it."
"You can," he said.
His father, it turned out, was a professor in a
technical college, and after a series of letters across the Pacific
I had an invitation to teach English in Chengdu. Judging by the
phrasing in the letters, they needed me.
Soon my wife and I were ready to apply for visas,
but we hit a snag. Home economics. We didn't have enough money
to get ourselves there and back, and the Chinese universities
could provide little more financial help than they can now.
We had to cancel the plan. "But if there's
ever a chance to go to China again," we said, "let's
take it."
Ten years, an overseas teaching job, and one brilliant
son later, I applied for a Fulbright grant to lecture in China
and was selected. I taught for a year at Fudan University in Shanghai,
and for one semester at Xiamen University in Xiamen, just across
the strait from Taiwan.
China is a gigantic place, in population, geography
and history, trying to come to grips with its past by rocketing
full bore into the twenty-first century. Its artifacts, including
its ruins, are disappearing at an alarming rate in favor of high-rise
apartment and office buildings, new roads and bridges, tourist
parks, the gargantuan Three Gorges dam project. The past is now
less visible in China's remaining architecture than in the activities
and dispositions of its people, who contain the incredible energy
of 3,900 years of ancient history and the turmoil of about 150
years of modern history - which has run a course as confusing
and shocking as anything that's happened since 1914 in Sarajevo
or Paris or New York.
It was not clear to me when I talked with my student
years ago what "going to the countryside" actually meant.
But in China, I heard stories of the Cultural Revolution and began
to grasp the incredible impact it had on families and careers,
its disruption of education, the ruins it made of individual lives
by the millions. Perhaps I shirk my responsibility as a teacher
when I say that the Cultural Revolution cannot be understood through
third-hand reports from outsiders like me. Its effects must be
seen to be believed.
Now, only 25 years later, China is struggling mightily to re-create
itself. And my wife, son and I played our small part in it. I
talked to Chinese teachers and students who are eagerly grasping
the unfolding possibilities, and to others who are frankly bewildered
by it all. The Chinese education system, from kindergarten through
graduate school, is rebuilding itself on the fly while political
and economic forces simultaneously encourage and resist the change.
Old Confucian values are re-entering people's lexicons alongside
terms like "deconstruction" and "MBA," and
American instructors - particularly Fulbright instructors, who
are seen as prestigious and reliable authorities - are being asked
to clarify what these things mean and how they should be integrated
into Chinese culture and thought.
The students are voracious for knowledge of Western
culture, and the task is enormous. At Fudan University I taught
courses in which graduate students in literature innocently asked
who Dante, Tolstoy and Sartre were. My wife, Bonnie, was invited
to teach undergraduate composition and a film course in which
she showed American Beauty. At one point she asked the class,
"Why do you think Kevin Spacey's character uses drugs?"
and one student promptly replied, "Because he is a lesbian."
Our work was cut out for us. My son, Jack, learned
many Chinese words and phrases as well as written characters in
his year and a half, but had not become conversational by the
time we departed. This was a little disappointing, as during two
previous years in the Balkans he had learned the local language
fluently and we expected Chinese would soak in similarly. The
shortcoming was not in him, however, but in his context: All the
Chinese people he came in contact with were so intent on practicing
their English that Jack had little opportunity to practice his
Chinese. His quick wit and penchant for sharp phrasing influenced
the spoken English of many eager learners.
His own experience was profoundly enriching. He
learned a bit of the Chinese martial art wushu, had calligraphy
lessons, gained a taste for stir-fried lily petals (eaten with
chopsticks) and walked, after all, on the Great Wall of China,
saw the astonishing terracotta warriors of Emperor Qin in Xi'an,
stood before the imposing stone figure of Lao-tse in Quanzhou,
and grew fond of Hong Kong - "Let's live here next time we
go to China, Dad."
Bonnie brought beautiful paintings and illustrative
stories of China back to her eleventh-grade English classes. Her
students at 17 understand a lot more about the Cultural Revolution
than I did at 37.
New possibilities and realities of literature opened
for me like doorways to outer planets. I claim one of my academic
specialties to be "modern fiction," but before we lived
in China I had never read Lu Xun, who is as important to twentieth-century
literature as Faulkner, Woolf or Camus. I discovered the radically
different Chinese approach to narrative (though I'm still not
sure how to disclose it to Western students) in Journey to the
West, The Dream of Red Mansions, and the strange tales of Pu Songling.
By visiting Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian temples throughout
China, from Shanghai and Xi'an to Kunming in the southwest and
Lanzhou near the edge of the Gobi Desert, I gathered an intuitive
sense of Chinese religious feeling that had not existed for me,
and that has enabled me to grasp meanings in Buddhist writings
which were simply lost on me before.
When we were packing up to leave Xiamen, with phone
call after phone call and visitor after visitor stopping by to
wish us well and express sadness at our leaving, Jack (then 10)
said, "You know, I want to get home to Maine and play in
the snow, but I wish we could stay here the rest of the year."
These were my sentiments exactly, not only because
of the warmth and energy of our Chinese friends, but because it
was dazzlingly clear that after a year and a half we had barely
glimpsed the depth, complexity and richness of China.
For us, the world is not as it was. A whole dimension
unfolded to us, as though a blind eye suddenly opened and glimpsed,
in place of the wall of darkness that was there before, a panoramic
vision of light and teeming space.
The mission of the Fulbright program is to foster
what we now call cross-cultural understanding. In our case, it
succeeded perhaps beyond the wildest hopes of Sen. Fulbright when
he devised the program just after World War II. Most Americans
and Chinese will come into close contact, of one kind or another,
with each other in the coming decades, and hopefully my wife,
son and I will have facilitated and uplifted that interaction
on both sides of the Pacific.
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if you would like to submit your own story and/or photographs.
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