Little Soldiers

by Lenora Chu

  In short, the exchange had to happen smoothly.

  How would I accomplish this? I envisioned excited teachers accepting my bounty with open arms and broad smiles, but I wasn’t sure how to arrive at that vision. A Chinese friend said I should be discreet, so I thought about slipping into the classroom at pickup time and leaving wrapped boxes in their cupboards, but I wasn’t sure what to write in a note. Another friend suggested I casually hand each teacher a slip of paper with an address. “They’ll know to arrive at the address and expect a box to be handed to them.” That was the Chinese way, she told me. But that seemed too Mafia, too Triad.

  Finally, I decided to play messenger. I placed each purse in a box emblazoned with the Coach logo and tossed them in a plastic bag. When I arrived at the classroom door, I addressed Teacher Cai in earshot of a Shanghainese man who was collecting his granddaughter’s things. But, as I approached Teacher Cai, the bag broke and the logo-imprinted boxes spilled into plain view.

  “We have gifts for you from America,” I said, uncertainly, head bowed as I approached Cai holding a box I’d retrieved from the floor. The head bow, I thought, was a “respectful nonverbal behavior” indicating her status.

  Teacher Cai’s reaction was emphatic and immediate.

  “Bu yong, bu yong—no need, no need,” she exclaimed, hands raised with palms out as she backed away from me. She glanced at the grandfather, who retreated quickly from the scene. After Teacher Cai moved a safe distance away, she pivoted and walked rapidly in the opposite direction, leaving me at the door.

  “Bu yong, bu yong,” she repeated, over her shoulder.

  I had received both verbal and nonverbal rejections of my gift, and I stood there like an idiot. Thinking through what I knew of Chinese gift-giving practices, I knew this type of reaction in an asymmetrical power relationship would call for more “reoffer-decline exchanges.”

  In other words, the recipient is supposed to decline a gift the first few times, and the giver is expected to try again. I’d watched this custom unfold when my parents met with a Chinese friend for dinner. Even if the occasion clearly called for my father to pick up the check, his guest would decline the first, second, and third times my father insisted. This usually resulted in a verbal—if not physical—tussle over the check.

  “No need!” the guest would say, putting up a hand.

  “You treated last time!” my father would say.

  “Really, it’s my pleasure to spend time with you, your presence is your gift to me,” the guest would urge.

  “You must let me pay . . .” my father countered.

  The Chinese server would stand by, waiting for the circus to right its top. Once I watched a guest chase my father around a restaurant table three times in pursuit of the bill.

  I had no such tolerance for melodrama, and Teacher Cai’s reaction mortified me. I didn’t care to participate in any kind of “reoffer-decline exchange,” and I biked home with heart sunken into the toes of my shoes, the damned Coach purses bouncing in the basket of my bicycle. There was a distinct drive underlying the existence of the Chinese family—whether it was the migrant ayis working big-city jobs to send money home, urban dads sitting in math cram school waiting rooms, or the Soong Qing Ling moms scrambling to post on WeChat—and I was trying to play my part as the right kind of Chinese mother.

  Once home, I shoved the boxes deep into the closet, behind our coats.

  Clearly, I still had much to learn.

  3

  Obey the Teacher

  Sit DOWN or your mommies won’t come pick you up after school today!

  —Teacher Wang

  The Chinese traditionally have little respect for animals, as they historically served one of two purposes: They are for eating or for pulling equipment.

  One Saturday that fall, Rob, Rainey, and I spent an afternoon at the Shanghai Zoo, where I saw that crowds were rowdy and disrespectful toward the animals, while zookeepers looked the other way. We visited a ferret housed in a glass box that appeared to be designed for a snake. As Rob recounted the time, in rural Sichuan, that zookeepers let random visitors throw live chickens to tigers at lunchtime, I watched a man hurl a glass bottle at an orangutan while his friends cackled with laughter. Inside Shanghai Zoo’s primate building, Rob, Rainey, and I gazed upon its resident gorilla, trapped inside a concrete cell the size of my living room, with a low ceiling, no foliage, and a wall of windows behind which human visitors stood to gape.

  As we prepared for dinner that night, Rainey began leaping around our living room on long arms. “Rainey Gorilla, Rainey Gorilla,” he announced. “Gorilla sad.”

  “Why, Rainey?” I asked him. “Why Gorilla sad?”

  “Gorilla all alone. Mommy, Daddy away in jungle,” he said. “Gorilla at school.”

  My heart jumped. “Gorilla at school?” I asked, thinking of the gorilla’s bare, solitary cell. “Does Gorilla have friends?”

  Rainey didn’t answer.

  The following week, the complaining began in earnest. “I hate school. I haaaaate school,” Rainey would whine, a low, constant, dull moan that got right into that register where it seemed to bounce off the eardrum and echo for a few seconds before it finally dissipated. Which was exactly the moment Rainey would start all over again.

  “I haaaaate school.”

  I never believed that an education should be 100 percent fun, but I didn’t remember hating school to the point that I whined over my breakfast oats. “Why, Rainey?” I asked him. “Why don’t you like school?”

  “Every day school,” Rainey said. “Next day school. After that, school. Always school, school, school.”

  I thought of the times I’d lower my head into my pillow at night, relieved to shutter my eyes on a vexing day. It was natural to experience an adjustment period to anything, especially to living in a foreign country and attending school with Chinese classmates. Was Rainey simply going through his own adjustment process?

  I began listening to his whining, hoping for clues. One day, he got specific.

  “I was sitting very well but the teacher still got mad at me,” Rainey said. “I don’t know why.” Another time, he blurted, “The teachers are always loud. I don’t want to go to school. They yell. It makes my heart hurt.”

  They yell? Loud? I thought. How loud, and what did that mean, exactly?

  “How do they yell?” I’d ask Rainey.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he’d always answer. The Chinese generally have the loudest voices of anyone I’ve ever met (my own father’s voice could, it seemed, project from one side of the Grand Canyon to the other). Was it possible that Rainey’s three-year-old ears were simply sensitive? I’d come to terms with the force-fed eggs, and some days he seemed to like school, especially the times he came home with a shiny star sticker on his forehead, which he paraded around proudly. Even so, these new clues were disturbing. What was going on inside Teacher Chen’s classroom? Was there reason for concern?

  My only real glimpse inside Rainey’s day came via the three-ring yellow binder Teacher Chen sent home each week officially entitled the “Child Development Book.” It showed snapshots of the children in various parts of the classroom: posing as chefs near the play kitchen, lined up in rows with mouths open for singing class, or standing single file with playground equipment in the background.

  One photo showed Rainey, his face unmistakably sullen, propped in the lap of an older boy, whose arms encircled Rainey’s waist. The caption alluded to a mentor program: “Sisters and Brothers of the Big Class Take Care of Small Class. The Small Class no longer miss their mothers and fathers during the daytime—they are becoming independent and brave.” I’d never seen Rainey looking more miserable.

  The binder also contained instruction sheets for parents. One advised how parents could work to improve a child’s “bad habit” of “poor concentration.” Another advised that “children should be taught to greet fathers after work with a cup of water and slippers.” A tip sheet apprised
women of their maternal duties: “The mother’s major task in autumn is to protect kids from dryness-heat. Make brown rice or pear porridge to prevent dry throats, dry lips, nosebleeds, and dry skin.” Apparently, the ideal Chinese father was away toiling at work, mothers were installed in the kitchen, and children existed to serve the paternal head of household.

  Other than what I read in the Child Development Book, I knew very little about the teachers’ classroom style or educational philosophies. There were hundreds of WeChat messages but little meaningful communication from them. I gathered that some other Soong Qing Ling parents were as frustrated as I was, particularly the few foreign parents whose children were sprinkled throughout the five classes of Small Class grade. We foreign parents—from America, Australia, France, and Japan—began quizzing our children and sharing the results.

  One woman told me her son had simply stated, “We sit there.”

  “Sit? Do you also read books? Sing songs?” she’d asked.

  “No, we just sit there.”

  “And do what?”

  “We sit there and do nothing,” the little boy had said.

  Another mom told me her son said they go outside and balance sandbags on their heads, and that “he seems happy with this activity.”

  I’d begun throwing questions at Rainey during dinnertime: “What do the teachers say to you? What does the school ayi say to you? What do you do during school?”

  Rainey would not respond. But as the days passed, my son began to use my desperation as leverage:

  “I’ll tell you about school if you don’t make me go to bed tonight.”

  “Buy me some gummy bears and I’ll tell you about school.”

  And finally, “I’ll tell you about school—if you let me stay home from school.”

  I began creating excuses to visit Soong Qing Ling during the school day, showing up just before lunchtime to drop off an extra shirt for Rainey (making sure children were toasty warm was of supreme importance to Chinese parents), or paying school fees in person rather than by bank transfer. (Public elementary and middle schools are typically free under the government’s compulsory education plan for grades 1 through 9, but kindergartens—which take children as young as three—aren’t yet compulsory and charge tuition.) Each time I oh-so-casually sauntered past the door of Small Class No. 4, looked around to ensure no adult was nearby, and tiptoed over to place an ear at the door. I could never hear anything. I felt like a crazy person.

  Soong Qing Ling was impenetrable. One day I tracked down Principal Zhang after school, hoping to get permission to stand in back of a classroom—any classroom—for a few hours. At pickup time, Zhang was standing at the edge of the green lawn, watching families stream out of the school gates, and I stepped up carefully, making sure I didn’t block her field of vision.

  “Hello, Zhang Yuanzhang, I’m Rainey’s mother. Thanks for allowing us into the school,” I told her. “We are very excited to be here.”

  “Hao, hao,” she said. Good, good. I told her I thought the playground equipment was impressive and also made some comments about the weather. Then I took a deep breath and plunged in.

  “I’m wondering, would I be able to observe a class someday?”

  “We don’t allow people to watch classes,” she said, glancing at my face and then back to the families leaving the school grounds. I launched the flattery technique.

  “Well, I hope to learn about China’s educational style,” I said. “In the West, we think the Chinese education system is so impressive!”

  “We don’t allow observations by non-teachers,” she said, looking over my shoulder and then carving a hasty exit. “Excuse me.”

  I became determined to see the inside of a Chinese classroom. I decided to try the next best thing in my reporting mission: another Shanghai kindergarten. Exactly what kind of environment was I throwing my son into? Rainey mentioned sitting—why was this so important? Is Chinese education about conformity and concentration? Were the teachers’ methods as harsh as I feared?

  I asked some Chinese acquaintances to pull on their guanxi, and I finally received an invitation to sit in on a classroom at Renhe, or Harmony, Kindergarten. It wouldn’t come until about six months from now, at the start of the first week of school the following academic year, but I knew it would be an important opportunity. Shanghai had more than fourteen hundred public kindergartens, all governed by central Ministry of Education guidelines, with oversight by the local education bureau, and I was certain I’d learn something about Rainey’s environment through a peek inside this classroom.

  My domain for observation would be a class of the youngest children, most of whom were three, like Rainey. Because it was their first time away from home, here was a unique chance to observe teachers managing behavior in the most challenging of circumstances.

  Access came as a favor for the friend who’d asked. My friend made clear what the “unspoken” terms were.

  “A gift for the teacher would be expected.”

  “Okay—what would be an appropriate value?”

  “Say, one thousand kuai?”* That was $160, and about a quarter of a teacher’s monthly salary. In China, when you needed something to happen, tactical prowess was never as effective as a main course of guanxi with a side of gift.

  “Would a Coach purse work?” I countered. “I have a few handy.”

  “Yes. Coach is good.”

  * * *

  I arrived at Harmony Kindergarten at 8:32 a.m. and knocked on the door of Small Class No. 1, the sounds of wailing wafting through the locked door.

  Teacher Li answered, a slender thirtysomething with a pixie cut and eyebrows drawn in thick, black pencil. “Today’s going to be luan—chaotic,” Li said as she ushered me inside, locking the door behind us with a click.

  It was the first day of school at Harmony Kindergarten, and I found twenty-eight tiny, wandering children in various stages of distress. Most were crying, and some were uttering variations of the refrain: Mama! Mama! I want to go home! They’d spent their first three years of life in the coddled comfort of home, with parents and grandparents lording nearby. That had ended abruptly with their enrollment in kindergarten and the commencement of the long, narrow road that is a formal Chinese education.

  Fittingly, that road started with an order. Master Teacher Wang was in charge of today’s lesson, a fearsome woman with long black hair that seemed to pull down with it all of her facial features as the strands fell toward the floor. Wang had sharp, focused eyes, a downturned mouth, a chin that seemed to point and jut, and a staccato voice that made you jump, since she liked to use sound as a weapon of surprise.

  “Sit . . . sit . . . sit down . . . sit DOWN! Sit DOWN or your mommies won’t come pick you up after school today!” thundered Master Wang.

  The children were meandering about, weaving between tables and chairs, as if some giant had taken a handful of roly-poly Weeble figures and tossed them into a shoe box. Some had come to rest, while others were wobbling around the room in search of something familiar. All looked confused. Mama! Mama! I want to go home!

  Teachers Wang and Li were the masters of this classroom, and their goal this first morning was twenty-eight little behinds planted in twenty-eight tiny chairs. The wooden chairs were arranged in U-shaped formation to face the front of the classroom, which measured the size of a two-car garage. The room was packed with the trappings of a Chinese education: bunk beds stacked high against three walls, a dark chalkboard, two porcelain chamber pots already filled a few inches deep with yellow pee. (Rainey’s school was a touch more modern, although some bathrooms there contained squat toilets.)

  “Sit down!” Wang and Li marched around the room, eyeing the whimpering children. With nearly every step they would encounter a small child, and with a swift motion they’d grasp an upper arm and maneuver a tiny body into the nearest chair. Both teachers moved deliberately, but Wang in particular had a way of sucking all the air from the room as she traveled, like a robotic vacuu
m cleaner that lacked an off switch.

  “Sit DOWN!” Master Wang said. “Sit DOWN or your mother won’t come get you today. Sit DOWN or your grandmother won’t come get you today! Sit DOWN or I won’t let you go home after nap time.”

  The children cried harder. Mama! Mama! I want to go home!

  The din was phenomenal. The teachers were screeching over the noise. Wang was tall and thin, all angles in her face. She had a sharp voice that could turn from sugary sweet (Hello, Miss Chu) to machete sharp (Stand still!) in quick succession. Her movements were also abrupt: pointing toward a vacant seat; rapping on a table three times; squatting suddenly to lift a child by the armpits and put her in place. I thought about Rainey’s first day, and wondered how Teacher Chen had conducted herself with my child.

  Once most bodies were in position, the refinement of sitting began.

  “Little hands on your legs! Backs straight! Little feet side by side on the floor!” Wang backed up verbal orders with physical action, a potent combination. She would kick a misplaced foot into place, grab flailing hands and crush them flat against thighs, nudge backs straight with a knock against the shoulder blades.

  After watching for about five minutes, I spotted an empty chair and sat down, feet side by side.

  I could already pick out the troublemakers. One boy simply couldn’t still his body upon command. He was big for his age, with a head nearly the size of a pumpkin and a broad body to match; he wandered about the classroom aimlessly. In America, physical size might draw predictions of athletic achievement—“he’s a future linebacker”—but in China it only made you easier to spot when misbehaving.

  “Wang Wu Ze, sit down! What is wrong with you? Come and sit down in this chair right now!”

  Little Pumpkin sat for a few moments, only to pop back up.

  Master Wang put him back in place with a push of a shoulder. Pop up, push down, pop up, push down. This whack-a-mole game would continue all day long.