Young China

by Zak Dychtwald

  “Repeat after me,” I said. “Microscope.” The teaching assistants coaxed the five young students to repeat the word microscope with them.

  To my surprise, a murmur of “microscope” bubbled up from the back of the class. I looked at Jiangguo and his classmates. None of them had so much as opened their mouths.

  The class door at the back of the room shut abruptly, and Jiangguo’s grandmother looked at me guiltily from behind the glass partition. At the back of class an entourage of thirty adults, five or six for each of the students, stood watch over the class, separated from us by the big glass partition, a setup that bore a striking resemblance to a zoo. They shifted noisily. Becky, one of the TAs (they all went by their chosen English names at work), turned and politely reminded the crowd to please let the students answer for themselves. Sherry, the school manager, moved around them with her electric smile and tailored dress, trying to convince the parents to buy larger packages of classes. Many complied. With only one child to spend on, why not?

  Jiangguo’s family was easy to pick out. As Jiangguo munched on his thumb, his mother, father, paternal grandmother, paternal grandfather, maternal grandmother, and an uncle watched anxiously. His grandparents could be seen pointing at him and commenting on his progress, his interaction with other kids, or the way he held a seashell. His mother stood in back, arms folded across her chest, beaming at her son and scribbling on a writing pad she kept with her at all times. His father’s hair was combed back exactly like Jiangguo’s. I suspected the same person had styled both. All his relatives stood throughout the hour-long class, watching intensely as little Jiangguo twiddled a microscope, fiddled with a computer program, played with a robot, or just stood quietly in the middle of the room.

  Through the classroom window we could see the world’s largest LED screen reigning over the most developed part of the city, the gleaming new glass and steel of Suzhou Industrial Park. The district, like many of China’s city centers, had not existed a decade or two earlier. I looked back at this group of little emperors: a class of five students with a three-person teaching team and an entourage of more than thirty adults pressed against the glass in back. I sighed again.

  During a break, Sherry asked what was wrong. I told her I felt like a performer for these little emperors.

  Without missing a beat, Sherry nodded toward the back of the class. “The original little emperors are in the back of the room,” she said, flashing her electric smile. And then, with a no-nonsense look, she told me, “Now get back to class.”

  Stunned, I stood for a moment in a corner of the classroom before doing the math. The Western media had dubbed only children “the little emperors” in the early 1990s. Today, the demographic created by the one-child policy—four grandparents and two parents who focus all their attention on one child—is referred to as the “4:2:1 problem.” I was so used to taking the “little emperor” concept for granted that it had not occurred to me the original one-child generation had already grown up.

  China has been tracking the developmental pitfalls experienced by generations of only children for decades, long before we in the West started paying attention. In 1987, when China’s first only children were turning seven, China released a propaganda film called China’s Little Emperors—a “how-not-to” film about raising the first generation of only children. It plays like a Chinese child-rearing version of Reefer Madness (which claimed the effects of “marijuana cigarettes” were the loss of sanity and committing aggravated assault with an axe). Overindulgence and excessive pressure, the Chinese movie claimed, would lead to societal ruin. The overriding fear was that when these hundreds of millions of spoiled only children grew up, they would unleash their awfulness on the country.

  Many Westerners have asked me, “What kinds of contributors can these little emperors be to society given their excess-oriented foundation?” Hedge fund managers want to know, “What are those little emperors looking to buy, exactly?” Even foreigners who have worked in China for years will often grumble, “Those spoiled little emperors are a pain in my…” as a kid steps on their shoes at Pizza Hut.

  Sherry was right. The first group of these only children had already grown up. They are my friends, classmates, tutors, teachers, bosses, managers (Sherry included), and, technically, clients. As I looked out the window at the new Suzhou Industrial Park, it was tough not to think that if the stereotype of little emperors has not changed in thirty years, it is nearly the only thing in all of China to have remained the same.

  * * *

  The front gates of Suzhou University open up to the part of the city called Suzhou Industrial Park, a mix of new residential apartment buildings and factory headquarters. The city district is the manifestation of Deng Xiaoping’s admiration for Singapore. The Southeast Asian “tiger economy” had achieved large economic success under the leadership of the late Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Lee’s government achieved its economic success without emulating the democratic style of governance in the West, and so became a model for Chinese political minds to study. Deng was impressed with their social order and city planning, and in 1994 Prime Minister Lee and the Chinese vice premier signed an experimental agreement to develop Suzhou Industrial Park together.

  The layout of the city district has a sprawling feel compared with other parts of Suzhou—it is spacious and carefully planned, and the roads are as broad as highways. Along the park’s wide lanes the logos of Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, L’Oréal, and Samsung beckon from the sides of new industrial warehouses.

  On the other side of Suzhou University, across a small river and following paths meandering between trees and red brick school buildings, the back gates of campus opened up to old Suzhou, the Suzhou that earned the moniker “heaven on earth” centuries ago. The university’s back gate opens onto a narrow alley lined with cheap student eats. Come nightfall, college students streamed out the back gate and into Suzhou’s milky bluish-black twilight, splitting off into “fly dives,” bare-bones eateries known for good food and minimal décor.

  Some broke off and formed a line at the Egg Wrap Grandmaster’s stall, the most famous savory crepe wrap stall in Suzhou. Each wrap cost the equivalent of sixty-five cents and could feed two. Often the line was twenty students long, grouped in clusters of two or three. Students looked on in silence as the grandmaster, with an expert flick of his wrist, methodically dropped the mixture in a thin circle on the griddle, cracked an egg on top, and sprinkled it with chopped scallions and spices. A hundred paces from the grandmaster’s stall, the alley converged on an eight-hundred-year-old canal. At dawn and dusk an old man punted a small boat up and down the waterway, ducking beneath the arched bridges and the willow branches. He used a net attached to a long bamboo pole to fish trash out of the canal. Not half a mile away in the other direction, Samsung’s robust semiconductor factory clicked and whirred. At the end of each day, I would make the trip by electric bike from my job at Suzhou Industrial Park, through the university, and out the back gates to eat at Trade Winds.*

  At the time, Trade Winds was the most modern restaurant on the alley. Opened by a graduate of Suzhou University, it featured a long countertop that encircled the griddle and gas ranges, which made talking easy. The owner claimed he modeled it after the late-night tavern on Midnight Canteen, a Japanese TV show that was a mixture of melodrama and food worship; the show had a major cult following in China. Trade Winds’s walls were covered with Polaroid pictures of young people. If you hung out there, each face from the Polaroid wall would eventually squeeze through the sliding door and hunker down at the bar for a bowl of the signature red-cooked pork noodles. The place had a homey feel, and many students treated it as such, eating and chatting there after class. It was a community.

  Xiao Lu was a central part of that community. A particularly sharp bioengineering student, Xiao Lu was a customer-turned-employee who worked at Trade Winds when he wasn’t in class. He washed dishes and talked with the customers after the lunchtime rush. All the while his
biochemistry books were open at eye level on the top shelf over the sink. He often read while he worked. Once, when just the two of us were in the restaurant, he told me that his happiest memories were from Trade Winds. Soon, though, he would graduate, and the pressure of finding a job was beginning to eat at his nerves. I would watch him at the countertop, meticulously filling out countless applications for chemical engineering positions, while the rest of the students talked during their break from class.

  Mostly they talked about school and dating like any group of twentysomethings. But they didn’t shy away from contentious topics—job discrimination, sexism, Taiwan, Tibet, and the recent relaxing and subsequent cancellation of the one-child policy—at some point they talked about everything. Months after the Sandy Hook school shooting in the States, we talked about gun laws and, inevitably, Tiananmen Square. In 2014, a small number of China’s police in Shanghai were, for the first time ever, allowed to carry guns while on patrol, rekindling debates about gun laws and the most famous and violent government crackdown in recent Chinese history. One popular argument was that the Tiananmen Square Incident (or Tiananmen Square Massacre, depending on whose history you’re reading) spiraled out of control not only because of politics but also because of China’s tight gun laws. I listened as an engineering student explained that because China’s police did not carry guns, the military had to step in to stop the students from physically storming the capitol. “In America they’d say they were committing an act of terror against the capitol,” he claimed. Some disagreed. Others nodded. Most just listened.

  One day I walked hurriedly into Trade Winds after work and slammed the door behind me. Xiao Lu raised his eyebrows and looked up from his books. A few regulars sitting at the bar greeted me. “What’s up?” Xiao Lu asked.

  Work had been frustrating. As I peeled off my orange jumpsuit with the school’s logo on the front, I explained to the Trade Winds regulars how excessive it all seemed: one foreign teacher (me), two TAs, the head of the school, my green turtle puppet Cici, and a mass of family members all teaming up to teach these five-year-olds how to say a few words in English.

  My frustration soon degenerated into criticism of my students. “This is why China’s only children have such a bad reputation abroad,” I ranted. “Jiangguo and the rest of my class are all little emperors!”

  My words landed with a thud. People sitting next to me stared quietly into their bowls of noodles.

  Wei Yu, a twenty-year-old economics student, broke the silence. She looked at me sternly and said, “A little outdated with this kind of ‘little emperor’ talk, aren’t we?”

  Gesturing with a pair of chopsticks, Zhang Jing, who was finishing his master’s in mathematics, added, “This is like saying, ‘You know how American youth love their hopscotch and nickel arcades!’”

  Xiao Lu had been quiet behind the counter as he worked on the stack of bowls and chopsticks in the sink. He finished wiping off the metal base of the large rice cooker and put it down on the counter.

  “That term, ‘little emperor,’ is total bullshit.”

  I was taken aback. Xiao Lu doesn’t swear.

  “Why?” I asked.

  Xiao Lu took a deep breath and threw the dish towel over his shoulder. “As a foreigner, you cannot begin to understand the tremendous amount of pressure put on your little students,” Xiao Lu said. “Think about what you’re seeing next time you’re in class: six people standing around watching a five-year-old learn English. Do you think that kid wants to be there? Wants to be studying English on his Saturday instead of playing in the park? Wants all that focused attention? No chance.”

  The students around the countertop stared at Xiao Lu. He had rarely put that many sentences together in a day, let alone a minute or two.

  “But it is the only way a family thinks their kid can get ahead today,” he continued, “so his parents and grandparents watch him, groom him, tutor him meticulously to make sure he will be able to get good grades, get into college, get a job, marry young, buy an apartment, and ultimately help support his parents and grandparents. We get more attention, more food, more resources. In exchange we give up our youth.”

  Taking the dish towel off his shoulder, he turned around, flipped the faucet on, and turned the page of his biochemistry book with the back of his hand.

  “In summary: two characters,” Xiao Lu said, turning around once more and holding up two fingers in the air, “压力, yālì.”

  Pressure.

  * * *

  On the following weekend, back in the classroom, Jiangguo had won me over. He was shy but curious, enthusiastic but well mannered. He played well with the other children and engaged with the lesson material. In spite of my grumpiness the week before, I couldn’t help but like him. On the day we were doing our “Ocean Explorers” unit, the other teachers were hiding seashells around the classroom. As I peered at them from behind the whiteboard, I observed two kneeling TAs as they helped little Jiangguo to enlarge the fragments of a seashell under the microscope. In the background his entourage of family observers nodded approvingly.

  The effects of China’s one-child policy look different all across the country. On the east coast, in the ethnically Han-dominated, wealthier major cities like Suzhou, the government strictly enforced the one-child policy. But it had a host of loopholes, especially for China’s ethnic minorities and many rural families, so poorer inland provinces were often less affected by the policy. As a result, many poorer, less-educated families were able to have more children. An estimated 150 million families have only one child. Only about a third of all households in China were strictly subjected to the one-child policy, but on the east coast and in most cities in China, that statistic feels impossibly conservative.1 The Communist Party ultimately abandoned the policy in part because people with less education and rural families were, in effect, repopulating China. In other words, the Party believed its one-child policy was having a negative effect on the “quality”—the government’s term—of the population.

  Jiangguo stood in the center of the classroom as he learned to program a robotic bumblebee the size of a toy car. Depending on which arrow he pressed on the yellow bee’s back and how many times he pressed it, the bee would whir to life and move in a certain direction. Programmed correctly, the bee could navigate mazes we laid out on the floor for the children.

  The equipment at the training school was state of the art. Each child was provided with an iPad, all the robotic bumblebees and electronic sets of Legos were top shelf, and our “Pre-K Computer Programmers!” games, as well as the computers they used, were first-rate. Also, foreign teachers, aided by one or two local assistants, taught most classes. The school spared no expense. The teacher-student ratio was often 1:2. It was a privileged group, but far from rare in China.

  When the class was dismissed, Jiangguo ran out of the buzzing yellow classroom, through the large glass doors, and into the arms of his grandmother. Soon he had plopped down on her lap to be fed a freshly peeled apple. While I spoke with his mother about his progress, Jiangguo snatched the iPhone out of her hand and navigated to the folder labeled “Kids’ Games,” and began playing an English learning game in which he selected fruit to feed animals at the zoo.

  His mother gestured with a notepad covered in scribbles that caught my attention. From what I could make out from beneath her hand, she had covered the page with notes in both English and Chinese. I caught a glimpse of the word seashell. Slowly, I was able to make out all the words we had learned in the last few weeks of class: microscope, science, seashell, jellyfish, shark, dolphin, amoeba. Jiangguo’s mother had printed them neatly in her notebook, which was now ready to present to Jiangguo like a teacher’s whiteboard, with Chinese pronunciation guides next to the words.*

  His mother, who spoke excellent English, worked for an international company in Shanghai.

  “These notes aren’t for you, are they?” I said, pointing at the full pad. She blushed, but did not withdraw the notebook. I
nstead, she showed me the pages and asked if she had made any mistakes. “It all looks perfect,” I replied. She flashed a proud smile at her husband. English levels, especially among middle-aged and older Chinese, are a reflection of worldliness. Her husband and I could communicate only in Chinese.

  “These notes are for Jiangguo. They will be his homework tonight.”

  I looked at her, confused. “I didn’t assign any homework.”

  She laughed. It was the type of laugh that signals the end of a conversation. She turned back to her husband, and I left to do the rounds speaking with the other parents.

  Suddenly, broken sobs came tumbling out of a corner of the main waiting room of the school. I recognized the timbre of Jiangguo’s little voice. The room full of families turned to look. Just as quickly, they turned away to politely avert their gaze.

  There Jiangguo stood, his chest expanding and contracting visibly with the sobs. His six relatives hovered over him. His grandfather and his paternal grandmother held his arm and patted his back, talking over each other as they tried to soothe him. His maternal grandmother and mother were the only ones who seemed unmoved. They continued to hold a sheet of paper in front of him, repeating something I couldn’t make out as I walked toward them.

  “Mmmmmm. Mmmmmmm. Miiiiiic. Miiiiic. Miiiiic-roooooo.…”

  Looking down, I could see the word MICROSCOPE printed in big block letters on the piece of paper. The Chinese translation, 显微镜, xǐan wēi jìng (“lens to make the very small visible”), was written in tidy Chinese script beneath it. It was the first sheet of paper in a stack of twenty.

  His mother watched my expression change before stating matter-of-factly, “Jiangguo will have to take the gāokǎo [the college entrance exam] only thirteen years from now. He needs to start getting ready. We want to give him a competitive edge.”