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Good news from China 28 November 2009 I have just come from a skype dialogue with an ex-student of mine from China, whom I've mentioned on this site, and in letters to many over the years. Li T. is one of the bravest and most courageous young women I met in China, and that really is saying something. She wasn't allowed to study English as her principal subject at Guyuan, but was scheduled instead to do a Maths teacher-training course. Li T. didn't want to, but it was what she had to do. So what did she do? Sat up at night in the dorms, using candles she could ill afford, studying English. She was going to do English and nothing was going to stop her. And it didn't. She wrote a diary everyday in English - indeed had been doing that for years, ever since she started learning English. She would write anything because, as she said, it was magical for her. One day she turned up at my flat - common in China and took a bit of getting used to. I’d met her at a colleague’s flat, and we talked and got on well. Anyway, she turned up and, apparently – according to her just now – I gave her a bear hug. She’d just learned the phrase, she told me, and wanted to use it. “It impressed me a lot,” she said in typical Chinese style. By that, I mean there’s a certain English vocabulary used in China sometimes by teachers there, which isn’t quite the meanings we would attribute them to them here. Perhaps ‘meanings’ isn’t the right word. It’s connotations. Anyway, apparently I hugged her. I am surprised I did, because in China touching, hugging, anything like that, doesn’t tend to happen in public and I knew that. Obviously this moment felt right for both of us. And I love that. Sometimes you could just cut through culture and be human beings together in the warmest sense of the word. That’s something I miss from China, that generosity of spirit, openness, enthusiasm as default positions.
She started popping round, and once came late at night, and I was a bit snippy with her (she remembers that too; I, on the other hand, was snippy rather a lot with latecomers, so I don’t remember that either). The next day under my door was an envelope with a single side of paper – scrappy paper, all torn at the edges and grubby – it was all she had – she wrote me an abject letter of apology. I felt like a right heel, I can tell you. It wasn’t a violation of their cultural norms, it was something I was annoyed at because my culture is different. Anyway, we ‘made it up’ and I’ve been very careful indeed since then, to reflect on what it is that is going on in the background before jumping to my usual crabbiness when people interrupt my own norms.
On one of her visits, she showed me a diary she had written when she graduated from Junior to Senior High school. Around that time anyway. She would have been about fourteen. Her diary was full of all sorts of longings about a future life and how she believed that things would be fine for her when she was studying English full time. Life, then, would be perfect. To say the reality and this dream were far apart is an understatement. Almost every dream she related in there was tramped underfoot already. And she was 19.
During the summer holidays just before I left Guyuan, I tried to ensure, with the help of another volunteer and Dean Tian, the best boss in the world, for her to join a summer-school with visiting American university students. She was the youngest person to be accepted, and the only one too not studying English as her major. That activity was telling for her. She wrote about it in her diary and sent me copies. When she originally showed me her diary, I tried not to cry, because it’s so patronising, but I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t explain to her why I found it so poignant as she couldn’t explain to me why she wasn’t bitter or wanting to complain.
Anyway, on Thursday I saw she was online. It would have been midnight there, I found her in a really sad state. She was crying, everything was getting on top of her. She had been doing a primary teacher’s job, although she is senior trained, and finding it extremely unrewarding. No one seemed to want to help her, and she wasn’t always being paid either, which isn’t unusual. She was clearly very tired and I had caught her at a bad time. It was hard to be 6000 miles away from her and not be able to hug her. I stayed with her a while, and then realised that it wasn’t helping her and she needed her sleep.
Yesterday someone got in touch with her parents – she lives with them – to say a job was going for an English teacher in a secondary private school in Tongxin where she lives. She went for an interview and was accepted. To see her today – we’d arranged another conversation – was just the best present anyone could have. She was beaming from ear to ear, and couldn’t believe that this had happened. Being the capable and reasonable young woman she is, she is taking a few days to think about the offer. She wants to find out more about the people who work there and what the school is like, from its reputation and teaching values.
I haven’t been able to stop thinking about her since Thursday when we had our last talk. If anyone deserves a break…
What a lovely way to begin the weekend! I hope you are all well. Take care, love from Moira x
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