Black in China

by Vessup, Aaron A. ;

  But there were challenges beyond my control. Not having reliable electricity to use media equipment, brittle chalk sticks that would constantly break when writing on the stubborn slate boards, or being given dried-out markers to write on newly-installed white boards. In the winter, the classrooms were extremely cold, wet and drafty. Yet I knew that inside the classroom, I could survive. I had done this for years in America. It was outside the formal learning arena that I faced the most critical challenges. My philosophy in terms of the student-teacher relationship is in line with the observations of Frank McCourt, a prominent American teacher, who once said: “The classroom can be your battleground or your playground. And you have to know who you are. You are a warrior teacher.”

  In Chinese college classrooms, things could easily regress to the Junior High school level if students did not get the message that you are there for business. I was not about to assume the role of baby-sitter disciplinarian, but there were times when even my upper-level students would need reminding that they were expected to be mature young adults.

  7

  Other Schools

  In the 1950s, we children in the USA all knew who the enemy was. Our teachers told us the “Drop Drills” were to prepare for if the Russians dropped bombs on America. “The Russians are coming! Russians are coming!” our teachers declared as we huddled beneath our desks. In utter terror, we tried to march in an orderly fashion to the air raid shelters, anticipating the ultimate doom from the great Red enemy outside our country’s borders. We had to place our faith in General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then the president of the United States. We all screwed up our faces with disgust at the mere mention of Nikita Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union. And when in 1960, this Russian brandished his shoe disrespectfully at the United Nations, we knew for certain that he was the enemy of all people who sought dignity, respect and freedom. There was no doubt in our minds that the Russians were on their way. How could our teachers be wrong? So we raced to the air raid shelters sometimes twice daily.

  These same teachers, all but two of them Black Americans, also taught us about academic excellence, achievement and self-respect, and that even we, listed in the Non-White or Other census columns, could possibly one day become President of the United States. We would never again live like the slaves of the old American South. We were taught that success brought respect, and that there was dignity in hard work. These were our dreams, the undeniable results of full and unfettered citizenship.

  Mark Twain Elementary School was an experimental school in Los Angeles with special accelerated classes and a healthy cross-cultural mix of teachers, administrators and students with parents from professional families. (The school closed in 1964 or ’65, about ten years after my graduation). It had the best of Black and White teachers, all positive and caring. You knew it, felt it. Education was a real and positive mission. Our parents attended every Parents’ Day and most PTA meetings. In grade four through six, I was in an “accelerated” class. We went as fast as we could and were never bored. Instruction individualized. It was “Experimental” education long before “open classrooms” and “satellite” classes were embraced by mainstream teaching. I was one of the top kids in my classes, perhaps because my brother was two years ahead of me and I was always curious about the school work he brought home. Plus I was an avid reader. I was the first in our class to get the Library Club of America reader gold pin. Our class was competitive, and also attractive. Most of the student’s parents must have been professionals. Two from our class were already in the movies during the sixth grade. I won a state award for writing a poem, “The Myna Bird.” I had been writing poetry as early as second grade. We were the cream of the school and knew it.

  I attended two different Junior High Schools in Los Angeles and my learning actually stopped because the environments and system were different from what I had experienced in elementary school. Neither the teachers nor the students seemed to care about learning. My first Junior High School was Enterprise, in Compton, close to Watts, famous now for the race riots that occurred there years later. Police squad cars were parked outside the school at the end of each school day. School administrators made it known they were not responsible for our safety once students left the school grounds. Kidnappings were common. Missing kids. Gangs were a real danger. My name was on a Shit List of sorts for supporting an accusation against a rich Black kid who had placed a large thumb-tack on the stool of a new student who had just arrived from Mexico and spoke no English. I had seen Jason do it, victimize a defenseless newcomer. His gang “accidentally” knocked me to ground, dirtying my white shirt, and I vowed to retaliate, caught them one by one and clarified the situation. Seeing I was unafraid, they backed off. Cowards are only brave when in their group. I held to my principle of fighting for the underdogs, a philosophy which underpinned my decision many years later to work in Illinois for the rights of Blacks, poor, gays, and women.

  Things got worse when we moved closer to LA Central, and then on to San Bernardino, sixty-five miles east of Los Angeles and home to the McDonald’s hamburger franchise. In LA Central, I went to Thomas Edison Jr. High, an “inner-city” school. It was not good, nothing like the suburbs. The students were out of control, fights everyday everywhere. Blacks, Mexicans, Whites. I was first amazed and then irritated by student attitudes. Did they not know education was important? But one teacher, Mr McDavid, cared. I initially thought he was lazy, because instead of teaching us the required Math, he daily preached to our class about “character” and setting personal goals that would give us a chance to enter a top university like Harvard or Yale, places totally foreign to me.

  My math skills didn’t make much progress, but my poetry writing took a bolder turn. One year later, at my next school, a poem I wrote became the basis for my entry in a speech competition in the ninth grade. It was called “Wyatt Earp”, who was my favorite gun-toting cowboy. Strange, because I had never seen more than two TV episodes when our parents took us to our Grandmother’s house. We had no television at home. I was fascinated by guns.

  In San Bernardino, our home was a brand-new four-bedroom house, in a neighborhood of well-manicured yards, carpeted lawns, shrubs and flower beds. A comfortable environment we simply took for granted. But at Franklin Jr. High, my classes were a complete waste of time. Coming as I was from the Los Angeles school system, administrators in the new school threw me straight into the “D” tracking stream. A whole academic year wasted. But I did learn how to relate to those who were not so school-minded. I tutored and coached and sold answers to classmates. I won a few awards in speech competitions with the “Wyatt Earp” cowboy poem.

  The first two years at San Bernardino High School were a coasting experience. Boredom. I wanted to be involved in organized sports, but my parents resisted. Had I forgotten that Jesus is coming? But I did it anyway. Our family was ballooning, and everyone was spending more and more time at church. But I was making friendships across racial lines, and putting up with sometimes being called a “Tom”.

  On bus rides home from school I kept a look-out for lawns that needed mowing. Cutting grass, trimming hedges and pulling weeds, were sure ways to earn money on weekends. I prayed for homes headed by lazy husbands. By the time I reached fourteen years of age my mother stopped buying me clothes. Anyway, I did not like her choices and I insisted on buying my own shirts, shoes and socks.

  At SBHS, for me only a few teachers stood out. The young chain-smoking male geometry teacher rekindled my interest in math with his humor. My Latin teacher, an Italian named Anthony Federico who addressed all students by their names, and smiled when talking to you. Finally, the German music director, Mr. O.V. Hauschidt. No one dared try say his last name. Everyone feared and loved him. His English was a stream of brutal grunts and barks, yet beneath his crude exterior was a kind man. Each year his choral groups won California state music competitions. He demanded respect and excellence and he got it.

 
Some years later, in 1967, as a student at San Bernardino Valley College, I had the honor of being introduced to and interviewing Louis Lomax, a Black journalist and writer who was the first Black journalist on US national television. He authored the books The Reluctant African and The Negro Revolt. I remember him repeatedly saying that “America was like an A+ student who continually only earns C’s and D’s.” At that time, I had no idea what he meant, but I was impressed by his ability to articulate his ideas and talk from a historically global perspective. When Lomax died in a suspicious automobile accident on a lonely highway in New Mexico, I was deeply saddened. It was later reported that he had been working on a book about the death of Malcolm X and a documentary about the history of Blacks in America. That gave me pause.

  8

  Race in the Classroom

  Myron was a tall, heavyset quiet-voiced Mongolian, with a ready smile that accompanied his pleasant features, a full head of spiked black hair, and dark skin. His smile revealed a fine set of even teeth. It was obvious from his protective manner towards his girlfriend, Celia, that he was also in love. He was a Muslim and was most respectful toward me as a teacher, whether Celia was with him or not. She was such a tiny huihui Chinese girl, also a Muslim, with skin so pale it verged on albino. Together they looked rather comical: a giant and his tiny fairy. Celia, however, was not from Mongolia. She had mentioned a small village in the Xinjiang region to the northwest. There seemed to be some unwritten code that mandated they never be apart. Except for the 10pm curfew regulating sleeping in separate dorms, these two were like one unit. I wondered if they were eternally paired because they were both outsiders, Muslims from the border regions. Whatever the case, they were happy in class where they sat side-by-side, in the back. Occasionally I would see them on walks, meandering around the campus. A few meal times, we ate together and chatted in the cafeteria.

  I began to suspect that in all of my classes at the Hunan Mass Media Technical College there must be some sort of caste system operating. Class monitors had the authority to organize seating. If a student sat in the front row, or at the back, it was often due to parental influence. Some teachers received gifts, which allowed students to gain in social status. Parents who were in community leadership positions outside the school could make their influence felt inside the classroom. At this vocational school, in some classes, seating positions were rotated so that everyone had an equal opportunity to sit at or near the front. This never happened with Myron and Celia. They always sat in the rear. It seemed odd that no one in class ever spoke to them. Their status seemed to be that of outcasts.

  Each morning calling the roll was a time for entertainment. In my botched way, I attempted to pronounce the students’ Chinese names. They seemed to get a kick out of my not insisting on them having an English name. As I wrestled with the pronunciation of each syllable in each name, the laughter levels rose and fell. But along the way, I also learned about each person’s home town or family. For the student’s English names, the typical choices were so shocking that I felt compelled to assert my value judgements. Names like “Fire”, “Water” and “Tree” simply were not going to pass muster with me.

  The names of two girls allowed deeper issues to surface. “Potato” and “Coco,” both Han Chinese from Inner Mongolia, responded to my curiosity with total candor. One girl was small and chunky, the other petite and attractive. Despite her dark mulatto complexion, Coco seemed accustomed to having her own way. Outspoken and operating with a flair for theatrics, she had an effusive take-no-shit attitude. During most of the term she sat in the middle of the classroom and sometimes in the front row. This was not the case with Potato, whose broad, puffy bread-loaf face, and extra-large head sat on a small baby-fat body. She had the same dark skin tone as Coco, but she never made it to even close to a front-row seat. Yet she was always happy and jovial, self-deprecating and comfortable with the role of classroom clown.

  “Why do you call yourself Potato?”

  “Well, my classmates gave me this name. They said this is what I look like so, I don’t care. I like it. It’s funny.”

  When I asked Coco the same question, she was completely nonplussed and matter-of-fact about it.

  “I’m pretty, and I like my skin color, and I also like chocolate candy. My name is cool.”

  As the class murmur of approval subsided, I moved on. These girls seemed satisfied with their labels, so what could I say?

  As the semester progressed, it became clear that class name assignments and seating arrangements were related to status and that skin color seemed to have something to do with status.

  The Chinese color fixation is interesting. Generally speaking, most Chinese women prefer light skin over dark due to deep traditions regarding beauty and status. In my shopping forays, I noticed that the cosmetic sections in stores carried a wide assortment of skin whiteners. I began taking closer note of this phenomenon and when I asked my Chinese acquaintances about it, their answers pointed to something I had overlooked—there are very few tanning salons in China. An older female friend said, “For Chinese, the most important factor of beauty is having skin that is white and smooth. There is an ancient saying, ‘A white complexion is powerful enough to hide many faults’.”

  One young Chinese friend put it this way: “Most Westerners that Chinese people see are white-skinned. So Chinese want to be White, not Yellow.”

  But back to class. I once asked a class in which seat rotations were obvious, how assignments were made. The answer was too complex to understand. But the case of one student, Marina, helped to make things clearer.

  Marina was also Han Chinese from Inner Mongolia. She had medium-light brown skin and was abnormally shy. Her features bordered on plain, but Marina was taller than most of the others in the class. Almost always sitting in the last row, I only became aware of her because of her infrequent attendance. The class was generally unresponsive to my queries about her. I found out this was because they really did not know her name, beyond “that girl from Mongolia.”

  But on one particular day, Marina, “that girl from Mongolia,” was in class and answered the roll call. The class informed me that Marina had performed the evening before in a singing contest. The Media College frequently held singing and acting performances with the contenders eagerly vying for auditions to appear on state television shows. An unidentified voice loudly campaigned for her to sing.

  “Marina,” I said, “would you like to sing for us?”

  The girl from Mongolia was silent and sank lower into her seat. But the class began to chant, “Sing! Sing! Sing! Sing!” Marina’s face turned shiny with sweat and dark beet-red with embarrassment. She squirmed in her seat, her head down, staring at the desk.

  “Jia you! Jia you! Come on! You can do it! Jia you!”

  Marina slowly stood up by her seat, paused as the noise quieted and cleared her throat. When she started singing the world seemed to change. The melodious sounds coming from this shy girl were in radical contrast to the image she had presented of herself in class. Was this girl an angel in disguise? The entire class, including myself, were enraptured by her singing. It was truly amazing and our applause lasted for quite a while after her performance.

  Afterwards, her attendance was regular for one or two weeks, and her seat was reassigned to the front row. I was again being educated about classroom management, caste, and entitlement. But suddenly “the girl from Mongolia” stopped coming to class. I asked the class about her absence.

  “Oh, she’s not coming back,” someone informed me.

  “Yeah,” someone else said. “She dropped out of school. She went back to Inner Mongolia. She said she was not comfortable being here.”

  Nothing more was said. All I knew was that we had witnessed a special event, this girl clearly had singing talent and now she was gone. For a moment the class had allowed her special status, but apparently either this had not been enough, or
she had issues that were deeper than would be known to us.

  This episode was a little about how young Chinese treat one another. The classroom is actually part of their playing field. These student ages were around nineteen and twenty years old and yet the behavior reminded me of the Junior High schoolers I had faced as a substitute teacher in Indiana and Pennsylvania.

  9

  Teaching Troubles

  “What’s this?”

  The young, Chinese female teacher reached across the desk and picked up my Styrofoam coffee cup to examine it more closely. About thirty years my junior, she seemed to be the one in charge of the office when the older department chairman, the same age as myself, was absent. She had short-cropped black hair, a narrow hatchet face with alert beady eyes, and a sharp beak of a nose. She strode about with loud, authoritative steps against the hardwood floors or cement hallways outside. Her short, two-inch black thick square heels thudded with military precision, announcing her presence.

  Our English department office, one of two, housed nine battered wooden desks, each arranged in rows of three facing one another. I have not shared an office since Grad School over thirty years ago. In China, I had no real status compared to teaching in America. I was the only foreigner in the department.

  Hatchet Face was talking to me. Her voice swelled, bordering on shrill as she again repeated a question to me, standing beside my desk, staring solemn and serious.

  “Really, what is this?”

  “That’s my cup, on my desk right where I placed it.”

  “I mean... what are these on your cup?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She moved the cup closer to her face, turning it while examining the small international flags that were held in place with a tight rubber-band around the cup. For me, to even answer such a question seemed a bit ridiculous. But I was curious about her interest in the flags. I was silent.