7:30 am: It starts. Tennis shoe and Mary Jane clad feet come stomping up the concrete staircase. High-pitch adolescent screams pierce the once quiet morning air. I’m jerked from my dreams and peaceful slumber into the reality of the fourth grade masses of Chinese children. In a couple of hours I will put on my best teacher face and tackle the task of teaching 50 fourth grade Chinese students how to speak English even though they barely understand me. But before teacher face comes, I am just a person in her apartment who just wants to wake up and eat breakfast without screaming children killing her cherished morning time before class. They really take teacher involvement to a whole new level here in China, and put you literally in the middle of the school’s action.
I knew it would eventually come—the retraction of my statement in an earlier blog about how all Chinese children are so cute. And here it is. All Chinese children are not cute and innocent.
For my introduction class, I had the students make name tags and draw three pictures of their favorite things on the back. One fifth grade boy—small, glasses, buzz-cut hair—proudly showed me his pictures as I walked by his desk. Hand grenade, check. AK-47 assault rifle, check. Knife, check. A little shocked, I handed him back his drawings and told him that those were not nice things to draw. He laughed. Great, I thought, Columbine is coming to China. My only comfort is that civilian guns are illegal here.
Another day, I was talking with some of the other English teachers. They told me about a couple of their juniors’ obsessions with Hitler, Swastikas, and naming themselves Friedrich after nihilist philosophers. Let’s just hope this a phase or a small minority. A Chinese scale Holocaust is something I never want to see.
These are extreme examples, but disturbing nonetheless. I might have expected this and more in inner city New York, but I didn’t expect it from a little Chinese boy with glasses.
Most of the time, the cute factor isn’t completely destroyed like in the AK-47 example, but rather it is just diminished by the running, screaming, hitting, chasing, and throwing that goes on during the ten minute break between classes. The day I watched the kids burst through the school’s front gate after lunch, each one hitting the guard, and another one ripping off his tie, the cute factor may have diminished one more level. But, this was still on the “kids will be kids” level of behavior, so all cuteness was not completely lost.
What is scarily lost, however, is my memory of which student is the AK-47 kid. I thought I could remember, but after teaching 600 kids that week, I couldn’t pick him out no matter how many times I pictured his glasses and buzz-cut. Lost in the sea of students, this disturbed child will probably never get the psychological attention he needs. So, thank you China for not allowing civilians to have guns, and hopefully AK-47 kid will keep his ammunition fantasies to his video games.
2 comments:
I wouldn't worry too much about the AK kid. He probably doesn't suffer from any psychological problem - in fact, those drawings are probably evidence that he's a healthy member of the society. Just look at the TV and the comic books and the options at the movie theatre: there is violence everywhere, just like in our culture. I know I use to draw tons of shit like that as a boy and it would upset my mother. But hey, I never shot anyone.
Perhaps it is the culture that is psychologically troubled...
Good point. It probably is just video games and such. I was never into that as a kid, so it was more unexpected for me.
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