Black in China

by Vessup, Aaron A. ;

  “Where did you get these?” She asked in the tone of an interrogator.

  I looked again at the miniature British, Canadian, and American flags that had been hand-made with small bits of paper, and affixed to separate wooden toothpicks.

  “Oh, one of my students made those and gave them to me,” I answered nonchalantly.

  “Was this a class assignment? Which student gave these to you? What is his or her name or student number? Which class hour was this from?”

  My mouth hung open in astonishment. I thought, she must be kidding. But making a joke out of this she was not. Her eyes narrowed into serious slits and her mouth tightened. I fished for polite words and finally said: “Well, actually, I really don’t recall which student or what class these flags came from, but they are rather cute don’t you think?”

  Her response was silence. Then she stood up, pushing her chair away from her desk with gusto then, holding my cup up, she walked to the door of our office where a round metal waste bin sat partly full with the morning litter of torn paper, envelopes, wet tea bags, and yesterday’s cold coffee, and slowly and methodically pulled each flag from the tight rubber band, dropping them one by one into the trash. With a final flourish, I watched her empty the coffee remains from the Styrofoam cup into the metal bin then dropped that in as well. Then without so much as a glance at me, she briskly returned to her desk and settled quickly into marking her class record books.

  Such rudeness. Such coldness. I was astonished. I quickly collected myself. Be calm, man, be calm. This is childish antagonistic nonsense.

  “Hello? Hello?” I asked. “What did you just do?”

  Without even looking up she replied: “We should not have anything like that around here.”

  “What do you mean? That was my cup. You mean people around here just take one another’s property without asking and do whatever they please with it?”

  The teacher’s eyes pulled away from her grade book with irritation, an incredulous look on her face.

  “Oh, you really want that? I didn’t know you wanted to keep them.”

  She made a huffing sound, abruptly rising from her chair, then went back to the waste bin to retrieve the three flags. She walked up to my desk and dropped the soggy objects with a soft plopping sound, dripping dark brown coffee all over my desktop. To me, this was a declaration of war.

  “Well, there you go,” she said. “I hope these little things will make you happy now.”

  Her behavior was unbelievably rude. In my mind, this person must be mentally off. Engaging her would be futile, so I kept calm even though I was furious. She had taken my cup, my coffee, and the little sentimental flags without permission and tossed them into the garbage. What’s with that? Stupidity? Nationalistic extremism? But I also reminded me of the kind of behavior I had frequently seen at home from my own mother. Strange, off-the-wall acts and verbal remarks geared to rattle me.

  It was really too trifling to get upset over. I decided to just roll with it. Still, I was amazed that she has had the gall to do what she’d done. She had given no reason why international flags were bad for the office, nor had she stated that students should not be internationally-minded, although that was clearly the implication. I was glad that I had not reacted on first impulse. Also, I was glad I had not identified the generous student. The teacher would have probably severely chastised or punished him.

  My students all had bright, eager young minds, and were clearly happy to have an outsider, especially an American foreigner, as their teacher. They appreciated how I made special materials for each of them. I also insisted on using high quality white photocopy paper, as opposed to the dull brown rough newspaper-quality paper common at the school. In the past, reproduced reading materials had been a joke.

  My class members also approved of the small space heater I had purchased. Inside the classroom in winter, it was unbearably cold, with water puddles spread on the floors and rain water dripping from the ceiling. There was no inside heating or air conditioning. We were all wearing thick gloves to prevent fingertips from freezing. My heart ached to see frost on their breath as they recited English phrases.

  Teaching inspired me even more than it had in the past. I was constantly seeking alternative ways to make the student learning experience meaningful and enjoyable. I felt uplifted by their presence and also challenged, aware that this situation was in its way hell for the students as well as for myself.

  Outside of the classroom, new problems emerged of a different stripe. New characters entered to confuse and complicate my world. First was Amber, the coordinator of classes and special programs. One afternoon after my classes were over, she presented me with a new assignment.

  “Aaron,” she announced, “you’ll need to stay this evening for the English Corner at 7pm. Sorry to not have given you an earlier notice.”

  This meant that I would have to either endure the horribly spicy cafeteria food and nap a few hours in an empty classroom or take a bus into town. I chose the latter option, and it became my routine: town restaurant, mall walk and a nap in a local tea shop, then English Corner. Months later, I discovered that all other teachers had been assigned sleeping quarters where they could nap on campus after lunch or before evening classes. This benefit had not been extended to me.

  On the evening of the suddenly-assigned student English Corner, no one showed up at the darkened classroom where I had been told to wait. There were no lights on in the entire building and no students appeared. I could do nothing but wait until 9pm for my car and driver to appear to take me home, fifteen miles away. When I informed Amber of this mishap, her response was blithe.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, maybe someone forget to post the notices out in time. It won’t happen again.”

  But it did.

  10

  Black Americans in China

  The idea of Black people in China is not as strange as it may sound. The story really starts, amazingly, with Black seamen in the early 19th century, a handful of lowly sailors on the trading ships sailing across the Pacific, some of the ships American, but also some British. It was another century or more before Black people from Africa found their way to China.

  In the decades after the establishment of the foreign settlements in Shanghai following the Opium War in 1842-43, some of these Black sailors, a tiny minority of the ships’ crews of course, spent some of their time ashore in the bars and dives of the city. And so began people-to-people relationships.

  There were some Black soldiers in the US army contingents posted to China in the early 20th century to protect US commercial interests, and then there were the Black jazz musicians who came over to Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s, some of whom became local stars. More Black US servicemen were in Shanghai after the defeat of Japan in 1945 and before the communist victory in 1949.

  World War II fundamentally changed the standing of the Black man in terms of the US armed forces, and the number of Black enlisted men increased dramatically. Before this war, Black American men were held under suspicion, their loyalties questioned. But now they could demonstrate a willingness to support their own oppressors.

  Conflicting cross-cultural sympathies and interactions began to emerge after the Chinese communist victory in 1949. For some American Blacks, the Korean War between 1950 and 1953 offered a dilemma: would they accept that the communists were the “enemy” just because their White superiors made this claim? Huge numbers of US troops were thrown into the war, and a significant proportion of them were Black men. The casualties on both sides were high—estimates indicate probably 300,000 Chinese dead and 30,000 Americans—and there were many prisoners of war taken on both sides. Most of them were eventually exchanged back to their own countries, but twenty-three US servicemen declined the offer, choosing to go live in China. Quite a number of them were black. This caused a storm of controversy back in the United States, still in the grip of McCa
rthyism.

  One of those Black men was Charles Adams, who created a new life for himself in Beijing and later in the city of Wuhan, where he married a Chinese woman and had two children. Then in 1966, he contacted the British embassy in Beijing (there was no US embassy there) and said he wanted to go home. He and his family left China in May of 1966, just as the Cultural Revolution was beginning, and walked across the border into Hong Kong, then a British colony. He was taken straight to a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club where he was questioned about becoming a Commie. He denied the charge, and robustly defended himself, saying he had fought for his country and had not joined the Communist Party in China. The key point for us is that during his time in China, he said he felt the blanket of racism he had lived with in America lifted.

  “For the first time in my life, I felt I was being treated as an equal rather than as an outcast,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I might not have known what China was really like before going there, but I certainly knew what life was like for blacks in America and especially in Memphis. I decided to go to China because I was looking for freedom and a way out of poverty and I wanted to be treated like a human being.”

  This resonates within me deeply. It is at the heart of my own decision to live in China and not the United States.

  In the late 1950s, China’s experience was Blacks shifted from Americans to Africans. China decided to compete with the Soviet Union for the title of “Best Foreign Friend” (BFF) to poor African countries, and African students started coming to China. It was a huge cultural shock for both sides. In the 1970s and the 1980s, it was common for Chinese people to ask Africans if they lived in trees. The monkey connotations were sometimes overt. A man from Senegal who studied at Peking University in the mid-1980s told of how he had an argument with his Chinese lecturer who, in frustration declared: “We may not be as good as the Whites, but at least we’re better than you Blacks.” Such was, and in many ways still is, the hierarchical culture of China.

  Then came the death of Mao, Deng Xiaoping, diplomatic relations with the United States in 1979, the opening of China, and from the early 1990s a massive influx of foreigners into mainland China. Particularly since the early 2000s, Nigerians and many other Africans have tended to congregate in Guangzhou city in the south of China, not far from Hong Kong, where they work mostly as traders.

  My father was in the US military and after World War II he received an Honorable Naval discharge. He returned home to continue experiencing, perhaps, the same and maybe even more social indignities and insidious on-the-job discrimination. It is no wonder that he took to fundamentalist Christianity, and as the years went by, he became increasingly fanatical in his embrace of his faith.

  I also found myself continually facing social indignities and discriminatory practices, regardless of my achievements. At first, I covered my anger behind the cloak of Christianity. But in the end, I decided that living in lock-step with my parents and countless other Black American citizens was a cyclical path of futility. Maintaining personal self-worth is an individual’s responsibility, sometimes far away from home.

  11

  Struggling for Mental Survival

  I was wrestling with episodes of cultural reality clashes. I sought relief in massage parlors, hospital clinics, and the ever-present foot massage salons. I was beginning to wonder what planet I was on. One day, I got onto a public bus and stood in the aisle near her a woman, who began frantically to open the window. She kept looking at me as she struggled with the catch, muttering loudly and trying to hold her nose. To me the scene was more than pathetic, it was comical. People around her mostly laughed, but some also placed their hands over nose and mouth. But such incidents were interlaced with many pleasant interactions with the student population. I am well aware that isolated negative experiences are not representative of the Chinese population as a whole.

  I had been forced to unplug my apartment telephone due to a growing number nuisance calls. Callers were asking in Chinese about some college office. I was told the only solution would be to remove my telephone completely because the phone number had been published in college brochures. My facilitator did not think it a good idea for me to have a phone in my apartment in the first place, but I had insisted.

  I was also freezing to death. I sent word to the Assistant Housing Director about my non-functional air-conditioner, and he said that he would look into it. Days later, I saw him on the campus bus and as he walked past my seat, he said, “Oh, your air conditioner is now working...” Arriving at my apartment, I found all the lights on, but the air conditioner would still deliver neither hot nor cold air. In desperation, I went looking for a maintenance worker who braved the cold December night wearing his house slippers, and wrestled with the device for almost an hour before it worked properly. I could do nothing but watch.

  At Christmas, the Chinese staff assumed that I would also embrace this celebration like most Americans, and my heart sunk when I was told there would be a surprise waiting for me at my apartment. I had to vacate it for most of the day, a great inconvenience given the sharp cold, and returned to find a Christmas tree standing in the living room corner. I had given a speech indicating that I did not celebrate Christmas, but who listens?

  Wang Tang, the liaison responsible for coordinating my affairs, did not make things easier. He told me that I should personally fix my backed-up toilet. In his words, I would need to “become accustomed to doing my own repairs” when residing in the school-owned apartment.

  He said there were no golf or tennis clubs around, because “Chinese do not have the time to play these things.” He ended most of our dialogues by chirping, “You see, China is only a developing country!”

  There were other problems, one being that my cash was still openly flashed around each payday, slowly counted out on the desk by the coordinator of my affairs. I was being paid a lot more than my fellow Chinese teachers, but foreign teachers in other places in China were earning much more than I was. This was especially hard to take working under the demands that accompanied being the lone Western foreigner on campus.

  Finding shoes that would fit my big feet was an issue. In this city, and subsequently many others, I tried many stores hoping to wear those attractive shoes on display. I ended up having a cobbler make a customized pair of shoes for me.

  In my search for dining alternatives to the spice-laden food in the campus dining hall, I lost a mobile phone one month and a digital camera another month thanks to pick-pocket professionals on the eternally overcrowded buses. The stress took its toll on me.

  “Where are you going?” was the most common greeting that I faced from anyone at the school. There was no “Hello” or “How are you doing today?” greeting. I bristled at the notion of being some sort of prisoner on an invisible leash, but later learned that this inquiry is simply the Chinese tradition for greeting someone. I am also advised that no one tells the exact truth in response because any answer will do.

  But I loved the classroom, the positive energy from my students, and there was my commitment to doing something positive toward building cultural bridges.

  There was one Japanese teacher in our language department, the only other foreigner on campus. We only exchanged a few words during the short class breaks when people smoked or went to the bathroom. He seemed to be a nervous chain-smoker. Teachers forever seemed to be in a hurry. The classrooms were cold and damp, as were the offices. The wet rain collected in puddles and slicked the stairway steps. Students left trash in and on desks, and on the floor. The garbage included food and wet wads of chewed betel nut. There are claims that when the betel nut is chewed, the woody flesh has a spicy-sweet taste producing a mild, semi-narcotic effect. It was a favorite in most classes.

  In the beginning, my teaching rooms reflected this same lack of dignity and respect toward campus facilities. Trash inside and beneath desks which were like smelly garbage bins. Nas
ty. When I could tolerate this no longer, my classroom solution was to shout “I see R-u-b-b-i-s-h!” and stop the lesson if the floors and desk were not clean.

  “If you accept sitting in garbage, you are saying that you really do not care about being here to learn,” I told them. Quickly the message took hold. The rooms were cleaned by the students daily. Now, lessons did not start unless the classroom is tidy.

  My classes became wonderful places where we chatted and became friends. It was obvious the students felt safe. Our group singing while doing articulation exercises which also gained positive comments from other teachers. If my classes had not been so rewarding, I would not have been able to survive. Some days I was even moved inexplicably to tears. My commitment to teach well made me stronger. In return, my students gave me gifts in many forms.

  One highlight of my stay in Changsha was my participation on a state television program with Chinese female celebrity, Yang Lan. Meeting and briefly chatting with this legendary talk show host was a pleasure. There were also a few solo singing appearances on provincial TV shows and shows on-campus. Including me as an entertainer served the purpose of introducing me to the campus and community. Yet beneath that seemed to be the need to have a funny man on air, a stereotyped black buffoon. So I didn’t take up too many such opportunities. I did not want to be type-casted. I came to China as an educator, not a minstrel act.

  Another singing experience was on the “I Love Changsha” TV program which showcased teaching “Foreign Experts” from various campuses. My contribution was to sing a Chinese version of the song “Rang Wo Ai” of which I had a recording by the great Italian tenor Pavarotti. It was fun, but trying to memorize the Chinese lyrics practically drove me crazy. I practiced for two weeks. I felt a bit strange seeing myself singing on local television weeks later and being recognized by local people. “Hey! Did I see you on television the other day?” Of course, it’s not that easy to hide when you are black in China, so it was just a matter of the degree of lack of invisibility.