Wednesday, June 24, 2015

China the Onion

China: the oldest continuous society in existence.  So much history.  So different than America. Though I studied the various dynasties end in “ang” and “ing” during high school and lived in the infamous Chinese-American city of San Francisco for several years, I knew very little about China before I started working at Quest in 2010. In my day-to-day life at Quest, I seem to learn something new about China and Chinese students every week.  Heck, it might even be everyday. Full disclosure: I don’t speak Mandarin, so my insights are heavily reliant on my smarter, Chinese-speaking colleagues or when our Chinese students quickly realize that I know next-to-nothing about China and take a few moments to explain something to me.  I’ve also learned a thing or two while helping some Chinese students and American host families to resolve certain issues, mainly related to our Chinese students’ extreme focus on studying above anything else.

I have had the good fortune of traveling to Beijing twice since joining Quest.  The first time was a quick trip for a conference. Because of a wedding, I had to quickly depart China once the conference ended, leaving little time to experience much outside of the conference room of the internationally branded hotel. However, I did briefly enter the Forbidden City, and my mind was completely blown by something so incredibly old, ornate, huge, and intact. I now know that my initial reaction to the Forbidden City on that trip is not much different than my overall conclusions about China: it is enormous, filled with infinite nuances, diverse beyond description, precise, and ever-evolving so that once I understand something about China, I should let go of it because it has probably changed already.

I want to share my most recent experience, in which I traveled with Quest’s Operations Manager, Tara Charles, to Beijing in March 2015. Besides realizing (again) that I have so much more to learn about China and probably won’t be able to successfully learn Mandarin in this lifetime, I was reminded of the incredible awe that one must have for Chinese society and Chinese people; their values, their commitment, their order.

Upon arrival Tara and I were met by our partner, Beijing International Center, OULU, and were swept off to a dinner fit for a king.  This is typical; if you are lucky enough to be received by Chinese people when you arrive to China, you must be prepared to eat your face off.



The next day, Tara and I started our adventure with a little tourism and headed to The Great Wall of China. Sure, I knew that The Great Wall was big – you can see it from space, right? (That is a myth, by the way). But to truly comprehend how mankind could have built a structure that covers so much ground…….well, truth be told, I don’t truly comprehend how this was constructed by man, so I won’t dole out advise here.  The Great Wall is not terribly high; I think the average height from the ground is about 16-18 feet.  However, the Great Wall of China covers over 13,000 miles.  Think about that: thirteen THOUSAND miles.  The entire equator is about 25,0000 miles which means that the total distance of the Great Wall of China is more than one half the distance of the equator.  (I will leave your brain to process that for a few minutes, but just keep in mind that the equator was not built by man). If you are reading this and you are a teacher, think about how difficult it is to coordinate and control a classroom of, say, 15-20 students (of any age really).  Now think about coordinating efforts and controlling millions of soldiers, prisoners, peasants and common people to construct something more than half the circumference of the planet.



The Great Wall was constructed by army units to protect the Chinese dynasties, headquartered in the Forbidden City in what is now Beijing, from Mongolians to the north.  My favorite fact is that they used sticky rice to bind the bricks together.  


My other favorite fact is that it is half the length of the equator.  (Did you catch that?)  The big point I am trying to make here is that not every society could have constructed something like the Great Wall of China.  Not every culture has the discipline, the perseverance, the unity, the humility, or the ability to serve what is perceived as the greater good in exchange for one’s own self-interest.  I am obviously omitting a million intricacies about Chinese history and society during the hundreds of years that it took to undertake this project.  However the simple fact that so many people could be mobilized to risk their lives and construct something so enormous will always astound me. And I think the miracle that is the construction of the Great Wall gives us, foreigners, deeper insight into the dedication and commitment that is at the root of Chinese civilization.

At Quest, we see this intense level of dedication from Chinese parents who, perhaps, are entirely devoted to the education of their children. Sure, as Americans, we go to school too, and our parents often force us to do homework. But the baseline assumption of how much one should be educated and how seriously one should pursue academic endeavors in China is something that is truly unparalled to any other culture I have known. This is not to say that the Chinese’s emphasis on education - above all and at all costs - is necessarily a positive feature in all cases.  This is to say that, maybe because of its Confucian roots (I’ll leave that for an anthropologist and a historian to explore), the value that Chinese people place on education is greater than the cumulative value of all of Donald Trump properties and probably greater than the cumulative number of bricks contained in the Great Wall, which spans more than half of the distance of the equator.

Tara and I spent much of the rest of the week visiting our partners, who recruit Chinese students for our inbound programs. We were wined and dined, and we even had the good fortune of meeting with some of the students that are joining our program this coming year. 
We chatted with parents, our Chinese partners, and even several American and British expatriates living in Beijing. There were some features of the education system in China that we already understood, and our conversations and experiences further underscored these points.


  •  Chinese parents will spend every single disposable dollar on their child’s education and will hire private tutors galore to further train their kids to perfect everything from playing the piano to acing the SATS.
  • Once a student leaves the Chinese education system, there is no going back.  So the decision to go to an international school or to go abroad is a long-term decision that will affect a child’s educational career path. It is not a decision that should be taken lightly.
  • A Chinese student can get straight As in all classes from the time they are in elementary school (yes they are graded in elementary school) through high school.  But, if they don’t do well on the gaokao, the one test that all students must take to enter university, they will not be admitted to college.  The gaokao is EVERYTHING for a student in China who wishes to pursue higher education, and I think it’s safe to say that every family wants their kid to go to university. In other words, the gaokao is the most important thing on a Chinese student’s life.
  •  If you ask a Chinese student what he/she likes to do in his/her free time, then the student will look at you like you have monkeys growing out of your shoulders.  There is no such thing as free time.  Chinese kids just study.
  • Though the Chinese government passed a series of reforms in 2013 to try and reduce anxiety in younger students, schools simply do not comply.  These reforms included a ban on homework for first graders and limits on homework for older, primary school students.  On a Friday, we met with a 7th grader who told us she probably had 8 hours worth of homework that was due on Monday, and, in addition was expected to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and another book I don’t remember. She pulled the books out of her HUGE backpack and showed me.  I felt so grateful to not be her, and I instantly recanted all my complaints about how much reading I had in college.
  • International schools are starting to pop up in China as an alternative to the Chinese system, which is known for its rigor and rigidity.  Chinese parents are starting to realize that the paradigm that shapes the traditional Chinese education system might not be the best fit for their own children, and hence, attending international school and studying abroad are growing in popularity among Chinese students. 
  • Despite the growing number of international schools, and their emphasis on developing the whole character of the student, there is still no place for the “average” academic student. Admission to international schools is still cut-throat. If your kid does not happen to be Einstein, then you are out of luck. You will need to hire an Educational Consultant (see below).
  • Educational Consulting companies are big business in China.  Consultants collect thousands of dollars from families and advise them on everything from where to send the students to school to where to invest in real estate overseas, and everything in between.
  • Unrelated, but maybe tangentially related, is this: cell phones are even more pervasive in Beijing than in US cities. Imagine that.  Hop on the metro and find a single person that is not on a smart-phone in some capacity. Impossible.




On this trip, we also learned a great deal more about education in China, detailed below




Even though the years of China’s crazy, double-digit GDP growth are behind us, China continues to change at a pace that no one can really keep up with. As this incredibly old, not to mention populous, society weaves more and more into the modern world, new traditions and cultural norms are constantly born and reborn into different forms. I think we Americans that work with or study China will always have to accept that Chinese society is ever-changing.  Like an onion, China is layered with thousands of years of history, and once you peel back one layer, you realized there are a hundred more layers to tackle before you can truly understand what is at the core. But unlike an onion, once you peel back one layer, another layer instantly grows back and it is unlike the one you just peeled off. 

This is China.  It’s a place where a small city that is not even “on the map” of China contains 4.5 million people. (Thank you Brother Orange and Buzzfeed for that). It is a place fast approaching 1.5 billion people: that’s 1,500,000,000 people for those of us who like visuals.  It’s a place that sends hundreds of thousands of students to the US and uses 80 billion disposable chopsticks very year.


Hate it our love it, China is indisputably fascinating. The Chinese quench for education is insatiable while their dedication to education is unwavering. It may be taking various new forms, but the commitment will never wane.  We at Quest will continue to travel to China and explore how we can best serve a market of students whose pressure to succeed academically is incomparable to anything we will ever know.  All I, personally, want to give these kids is the gift of free-time to explore themselves, but in lieu of that, we will continue to offer programs aimed at developing the full person and at supporting each student wherever he or she may be in his or her academic journey.