The long read: Our twins spent two years at primary school in Chengdu. Their lessons featured alarming cautionary tales and stories of Chinese superiority, but there was fun and irreverence, too
Our twins spent two years at primary school in Chengdu. Their lessons featured alarming cautionary tales and stories of Chinese superiority, but there was fun and irreverence, too. This organisation is under the auspices of the Chinese Communist party, and members are between the ages of six and 14.
We quickly realised that Teacher Zhang was a remarkable teacher. I couldn’t imagine managing 53 third-graders in a relatively small room, much less adding two more who didn’t even speak the language. But Teacher Zhang took it all in stride. She selected two classmates who spoke some English to shadow the twins in the early days to make sure that they understood the essentials.
The lesson explained that one of the prime resources on the fertile and abundant Spratly Islands was bird poop. Ariel and Natasha found this hilarious – they came home from school quoting the text and laughing about it. People sometimes asked Leslie and me if we felt the need to counteract the propaganda, but the political lessons tended to be so wooden and heavy-handed that it wasn’t necessary.
Even the English textbook was full of horror stories. In that class, the teacher often asked Natasha and Ariel to model pronunciation by reading lessons aloud from the text. The twins loved doing this, especially if the subject matter involved injury, pain and momentary lapses in judgement that resulted in lifelong consequences. One lesson in their English text had been divided into two sections labelled Fun Time and Story Time.
The art of dissociation has a long history in China. The twins’ fourth-grade language text included the story of Liu Yuxi, a poet and government official in the early ninth century, during the Tang dynasty. In the text, Liu takes a principled stance against corruption and is relegated to a remote place called Hezhou, where a petty supervisor repeatedly demotes Liu. With each demotion, the poet’s lodgings become humbler.
Remarkably, other kids didn’t seem to resent the foreigners. In China, childhood criticism is essentially environmental, an element of the natural world. And from an early age, children develop the traditional reverence for education. The best students in a Chinese class also tend to be the most popular, which was part of what motivated Ariel and Natasha.
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