Zheng-Zheng and his friend bent over their first grade homework at the small table in the family apartment, fingers pressed against pencils as they meticulously made each line in the day’s new characters. Their concentration was absolute as they repeated the intricate patterns over and over again placing them neatly into squares on their paper. When they finished they moved on to practice the lesson in their Chinese reading texts until they knew it confidently, and finally moved on to math. When they finished everything, Zheng-Zheng’s sixth birthday party with long noodles could begin.

Xu, Zheng-Zheng’s father, said the transition from preschool to first grade is as hard for parents as for the children. No more relaxed atmosphere like preschool. They must sit tall on backless benches, concentrating on lessons and, when no birthday party awaits, they do at least two hours of homework a night.

“If they don’t begin to study like this now,” Xu said, “they’ll never get into college.”

Junior high school schedule, 7:40 to 5:00 pm

These stories go on and on. Junior high school students need to study four hours a night throughout the school year; most children go to Saturday cram school starting in the primary grades if their parents want them to go to college. Parents insist children excel in their schoolwork so they will score well on all the tests leading to the all-important college entrance exam. A high score is the sole ticket for entering university and getting a desired major.

The last year of senior high school is the worst. Life for friends in Beijing was held hostage during their son’s last year. Time and again they apologized for not inviting me to dinner. Although their son had studied diligently throughout his school career, he still had to spend every single minute for one year cramming. And much of it is memorization.

“Every minute of our lives,” they said, “is aimed at helping him succeed. It is essential. This is the Chinese student’s life.”

“This is the Chinese student’s life,” seems to echo off school walls and down alleys. It’s in the air. Education tradition is long and deep in China, and though it is impossible for a cultural outsider like me to trace all the threads back in time, some are fairly obvious. Many Chinese, while lauding Confucius’s influence for the value placed on education, also attribute both academic pressure and the need for volumes of memorization, in large part, to Confucian tradition.

Despite ups and downs of popularity, Confucianism formed the cornerstone of education and imperial exams for two millennia. A passionate learner and natural teacher, Confucius (551-470 B.C.E.) devoted himself to instructing others on how to follow a virtuous life by arduous study, following the proper alignment of relationships, and learning to respect others. He appears to have been a taskmaster. The Analects, his teachings written down by his disciples, include such comments as –

“The Master said, ‘Only when someone bursts with eagerness of learning do I instruct; only when someone bubbles to speak but fails to express himself, do I enlighten. If I show a man one corner of a subject, and he can not by himself deduce the other three, I will not repeat the lesson.’”

His teaching is peppered with references to diligence and perseverance. His disciples quote him as saying, “I wasn’t born with innate knowledge. By learning from the ancients, I sought it through diligence.” “Pursue study as though you could never reach your goal, and were afraid of losing the ground already gained.’” The pressure to study harder seems to well up from his directives.

Standing room only - Students wait for a guest lecture

Confucian ideas might not have endured if it had not been for the imperial exams. Confucius sought answers for his time by turning to ancient texts that predated him several hundred years and from them compiled what became known as the Confucian classics. The 1^st century B.C.E. Emperor Wu Di decreed Confucianism the official state philosophy, and created five institutes aligned with the Confucian classics—The Book of Songs, The Book of History, The Book of Rites, The Book of Changes, and the Spring and Autumn Annals. From then on, for over 2000 years, these were the fundamental school curriculum memorized by students and also the content of the imperial civil service exams.

In later centuries, as literacy spread, more and more people took these exams, including individuals of humble means. Men (women were not allowed) often began with classical Chinese at age six and continued daily drill and memorizing through their twenties or thirties or even longer, until they were ready to tackle the exams that provided dynasties with civil servants. Families sacrificed to allow one of their own to do this, and a man who failed could disgrace his relatives as well as himself. The fear and pressure of disgracing their families continues to haunt students today.

By middle school, students are well aware of their need to succeed in order to uphold their family honor. Their parents often depend on them to obtain a good job and provide for them in old age. Although school topics are now modern, fierce competition continues and the long history of pressure to do well falls on their shoulders.

As usual, my feisty preschool collaborator, Huang Ren Song, startled me as she tried to stuff some Chinese history into my head. She’d been talking about how massive the recent changes in China really are, like the introduction of public universities.

Somewhat exasperated at my ignorance, she finally said, “We’ve had 2000 years of a feudal system that said, ‘OBEY.’ Now we change a little bit.” We both laughed, but I knew she was making a serious point and it would take me a long time to process it.

I just can’t get it into my American head that a country can be so old. I know there are many countries and civilizations whose written histories date back thousands of years, but having been raised in a world where my U.S. history books began with the Jamestown and Mayflower, I have—from Huang Ren Song’s perspective—a pretty warped and limited view of the world.

Every time I’m in China I comprehend this a little more. Walking through an exhibit in the Nanjing History Museum one day, Qiu Wei stopped to look at some coins.

Terracotta Warrior, Xi'an

“Look,” she said. “These were found on the street I grew up on.” They were ancient. As a kid, growing up in the woods of New Jersey, my friends and I kept our eyes open for the arrowheads of native people we knew had lived there before us. But coins? Terracotta armies? Never.

In Xuzhou, an industrial city south of Beijing, a friend took me to their terracotta army. I was surprised since I assumed the only one in existence was in Xi’an, famous for its exquisite faces and finely crafted horses and often a one-day stop for international tours. In Xuzhou, only the locals go. The soldiers stand two-feet high, all carrying backpacks, their features less fine. Both armies, along with a myriad of other treasures, were found accidentally by farmers digging in their fields. My friend said there are probably lots more to be discovered.

With a high school teacher, I explored a museum in Baoji, a little known city along the early stages of the Silk Road as it heads west from Xi’an. It houses thousands of ancient bronzes from the local area. The teacher pointed at the inscription on the bottom of a wine vessel that dated back millennia. I jokingly asked if he could read it.

Ancient Bronzeware

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I can read about half the characters. They’re similar to ones we use now, but I can’treally tell what the message says.” Even the very first writing found so far, on oracle bones used for divinations and dating back about 3500 years, has recognizable written symbols that, over millennia, have morphed into today’s characters. Many of the originals are identifiable.

China is proud of its long history and I stumble across it in small ways almost every day I’m there. Ancient tales are part of people’s experiences even if they aren’t very literate; pieces of long ago history insert themselves into everyday conversation. Poets from the Tang Dynasty (618-907) are referred to as if they are familiar friends.

The more I try to imagine this reality of China the less I can comprehend what it must be like to dive pell-mell into the 21^st century at breakneck speed while having their feet planted firmly in these ancient roots.

A year before the Beijing Olympics an article in China Daily, China’s English language newspaper, described a war in Beijing against “baffling English translations” sometimes referred to as “Chinglish.” Some of them are, indeed, amusing to monolingual English speakers or possibly to those fluent in both English and Chinese. For example, one quoted in the article, translates a sign warning about a slippery walkway as “Slip carefully.”

Some English speakers have lamented that corrections are being made. One American living in Shanghai said they “take away one of the joys of China.” The signs, however, are often an embarrassment to Chinese fluent in English. A Chinese foreign language consultant said, “We don’t want anyone laughing at us.” He emphasized that correction of the signs was to help foreigners. The English certainly wasn’t meant to benefit Chinese.

Fourth grade writing practice

The longer I spend shuttling back and forth between China and the United States the more I become aware of the unintentional patronizing attitude we Americans have toward portions of Chinese life and toward the difficulties some Chinese have in mastering English even though few American non-Chinese adults try to come to grips with the Chinese language.

It’s so easy to be smug. I found myself smiling recently as I stepped into the shower in a rural hotel and saw a “Slip carefully” warning sign. Even with all my knowledge of the differences between the two languages my instant reaction was amusement at the error.

How easy it is to say — Why didn’t that person spell the word correctly? Why don’t those students get ‘he’ or ’she’ correct? They never use the right verb tense. I can’t understand that person’s accent. Why don’t they speak English better so we can understand it?

Our American impatience and the fact that English has become so widespread internationally have handed a major disadvantage to monolingual English-speakers.

More and more we assume that everyone in the world should speak English. When hotel housekeepers in Beijing or Shanghai can only carry-on simple (and unhelpful) dialogues in English about a missing water bottle or the need for more towels, we become impatient. And when we see signs in English that are not quite right, we are inclined to laugh and point without thinking.

But if we really thought about it, we’d realize these signs, are often written by people who studied English from teachers who have never had the opportunity to talk with a native English speaker. They did their best, but they were only able to achieve 70 or 80 percent perfection, and we Americans expect 98 percent perfection or better. Anything less is quaint or annoying.

The match between English and Chinese is limited in the extreme. I’m amazed when I hear interpreters moving back and forth between the two languages. I wonder how they do it and what processes are flying through their brains.

I have had the advantage to understand this a little. I studied Spanish for 10 years, and then began traveling to China regularly. Spanish certainly didn’t help me in China, and at that point I had no time in my life to learn another language. After a few years, I found an available month to study Chinese in Nanjing. Not enough time to learn much, but I did learn to pronounce the tones. It was also long enough to realize how startlingly different Chinese and English are. A literal translation from English to Chinese or Chinese to English makes no sense. None. There are no tenses in Chinese; time is indicated through the context of the sentence. There are no pronouns. Innuendo is often carried in the visual image of the character, and there is almost no way to translate that portion of the language into English.

What makes me happy or sad.

Learning written Chinese is a complicated adventure for Westerners. One little stroke of a character out of place or made wrong can completely change the meaning of the character. Foreigners have to practice long, long hours to come anywhere near being able to write in a rudimentary fashion. On the other hand, Chinese have to struggle mightily with English language structure, with complex verb tenses, and the use of ‘he’ and ’she’ and where on earth English places ‘the’ and ‘a’ and where they don’t.

So when we Westerners come across errors and mis-translations, it would be useful to ask ourselves how perfectly we would be able to write or say the equivalent Chinese. Humility is hard to learn, but sometimes worth it.

I’m an educator and curious person who has been traveling to China since the cold winter of 1989-90. That was an amazing trip, launched by my Ph.D. advisor and the Nanjing University English Department in China. I had just studied Spanish for 10 years, and China was not at the top of my travel and exploration desires. But I’ve been returning regularly ever since.

I have so much to communicate and so much I want to hear from others. And yet, I’m finding that getting a blog started feels as daunting as when I first contemplated learning to put gas in my car. Having grown up in a world where gas station attendants performed that mysterious task, I balked at learning. Then someone showed me how. I couldn’t believe it. How could I have been intimidated by that process? I had traveled the world, but I was certain that getting gas into my car would involve a complex and technical learning procedure.

Although getting a blog going isn’t quite as simple as pumping gas, where to start is. And yet, I’ve been postponing this first blog entry for months.

A European-American woman—middleclass—I’ve been an educator all my life—working in programs for high school students, teaching in public high school and then elementary school, mentoring beginning teachers, teaching college courses to prospective teachers, consulting, etc. What I have found in China since the moment I went is that, for me at least, it is an exhilarating country. Besides, the culture is so different from my own, it’s like looking at my own world up-side down. Although I’ve walked along the borders of many cultures in the United States, none has been so puzzlingly different as what I meet in China. At the same time, I feel continuously welcome there.

The noise, the crowds, the long history that is hard to fathom, the continuous changes are magnificent to encounter. They bend my mind and ask me to think in new ways. At home in Los Angeles, I covet the quiet of my home. In China, I can’t wait to get off the plane and walk with the throngs of people, soaking up the river of sounds that flow around me.

So, I have started my blog. The next entries, which will come about every two weeks, will dip into some of the multiple thoughts and experiences I’ve had and continue to have there.