News Reading/ Morality and rules, and how to avoid drowning - what my daughters learned at school in China

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.

Near the end of third grade, my twin daughters, Ariel and Natasha, officially joined the Young Pioneers of China. This organisation is under the auspices of the Chinese Communist party, and members are between the ages of six and 14. In order to become a Young Pioneer at Chengdu Experimental primary school, the public institution my daughters attended in the south-western Chinese city, there was no application, no interview and no ceremony. Parents were not consulted or informed. The twins simply came home one afternoon wearing Young Pioneer pins on their right breasts. The pins featured a gold star, a red torch and the name of the organisation – Zhongguo Shaoxiandui – in gold Chinese characters. Ariel and Natasha told me and my wife, Leslie, that from now on they would be required to wear the pins on Mondays, when Chengdu Experimental held its weekly flag-raising ceremony, as well as on other special occasions.

Young Pioneers also wore red scarves that were knotted at the neck. According to the organisation’s constitution, the scarves are red because they represent the blood that was sacrificed by the martyrs of the 1949 Communist Revolution. When I first lived in China, in the mid-1990s, schoolchildren had to be selected to become Young Pioneers, and red scarves were a mark of kids who were politically favoured. But by the time I moved back to the country, in 2019, membership had become compulsory at most schools, including Chengdu Experimental. Unlike the pins, red scarves were not provided to Young Pioneers, and we bought them from small-time vendors who arranged their goods on the sidewalk near the school’s entrance. Every Monday morning, there was a proliferation of these vendors, because some Young Pioneers had a tendency to forget their scarves, despite the organisation’s official motto: “To struggle for the cause of communism, be prepared!”

Of the 2,000 or so students at Chengdu Experimental, Ariel and Natasha were undoubtedly the least prepared. They were the only Americans, and they were also the only children who had entered the school without being able to speak Mandarin. Leslie is Chinese American, and she had grown up speaking Mandarin at home, and I had learned the language while working in China from 1996 to 2007. But we never tried to teach Chinese to our daughters. When they were toddlers, Leslie and I had moved to Egypt to work as journalists, and we decided that it would be too much trouble to try to teach the twins Chinese while studying Arabic. We always had the notion that some day we would return to live in China, where the girls could learn the language through immersion.

In theory, this seemed relatively simple. Ariel and Natasha were nine, an age at which language acquisition is still relatively easy. But China has no tradition of immigration, and few schools have had the experience of mainstreaming foreign students. One reason we ended up at Chengdu Experimental was that the institution had a reputation for being relatively open-minded. Even during a time of terrible relations between China and the United States, the school administrators were willing to accept our daughters. They placed the girls in a class of 55 students who were taught by a middle-aged woman, Teacher Zhang.

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.

Every afternoon, when the twins returned from school, Leslie and I gave them flashcards with new characters to learn. In China, the national curriculum is standardised to such a degree that even the acquisition of words follows a set order. All first-graders begin the march to literacy with the same character: 天, “sky; heaven”. From there they learn 699 more characters, and then add another 900 in second grade, with the final lesson ending on 坟, “tomb”. In order to become proper Chinese third-graders – to go all the way from heaven to tomb – Natasha and Ariel needed to memorise a total of 1,600 characters.

They started with 10 a day, a rate that we eventually increased to 20. In terms of spoken language, the process was much faster, because they were surrounded by so many Chinese speakers for so many hours every day. On 2 September, the first day of class, Ariel and Natasha were both in tears when I picked them up from school, because they had understood so little. On 20 September, when the pupils reviewed a lesson in language class, Natasha stood up and for the first time, in a halting voice, read a section of the text aloud; afterwards the class applauded. On 8 October, the twins wrote their first essays in Chinese. The grammar was simple, and many characters were poorly written, but they were legible. Another momentous date was 7 November. That afternoon, I couldn’t help but feel a surge of pride when Ariel came home with a three-character phrase she had learned from a boy in class: wangbadan, “turtle’s egg”, a colloquial insult that means, essentially, son of a bitch.

By the time the twins became Young Pioneers, six months later, their language was more or less at the level of their classmates. Up to that point, we had spent relatively little time thinking about the bigger picture, because it took so much energy just to catch up. But now we were there: the red scarves, the gold pins, the flag-raising ceremonies. The school rules, which were displayed prominently in a central courtyard, began with the following: 1. Love the Party, love the Country, love the People.

When Leslie and I decided to enrol our daughters in the public school, a number of friends warned us about the political environment. Ever since Xi Jinping had become the nation’s leader, in 2012, he had overseen a crackdown on political freedoms and other aspects of civil society. Education was among Xi’s many targets. Once, in a speech at Peking University, he described the process of educating young people in core socialist values as similar to “fastening buttons on clothes”. The key, in Xi’s opinion, was to do it correctly from the start. “If the first button is fastened wrong,” he said, “the remaining buttons will be fastened wrong.”

At Chengdu Experimental, I expected that the twins and their classmates would be drilled in nationalistic stories about the Opium wars or the Japanese invasion. But there was surprisingly little history in the curriculum. I learned that such material tends to be covered more heavily in subsequent years, when older children are taught the party’s view of the past. In the various texts used for third and fourth grades, it was actually difficult to find much content that was explicitly political. During third grade, in language class, the twins studied one lesson about the Spratly Islands, the disputed archipelago in the South China Sea. That section of the book was titled The Fertile and Abundant Spratly Islands, and the lesson staked out China’s claim: “The prosperous and fertile Spratly Islands have been our home for generations. Following our Motherland’s development of constructive causes, the charming Spratly Islands will inevitably become even more beautiful and even more fertile.”

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. Ariel and Natasha’s buttons were wrong from the start: they seemed to have an instinctive distrust of the Chinese approach to nationalism and politics. Leslie and I found that it was more important to remind the girls to be respectful. We often told them that they were guests at the school, and while they had no obligation to believe everything they were taught, they should keep contrary opinions to themselves.

All levels of Chinese education have mandatory party-controlled political classes. For elementary schoolchildren, the political course is called morality and rules, although in fact there are few lessons that can be considered overtly political. The course is much more focused on how to behave in society; if anything, my daughters’ morality and rules textbook was more Confucian than communist. One lesson was titled Teacher, You Are Working Hard, and the activity involved children hand-copying their instructors’ weekly schedules in order to better appreciate their commitment.

Another chapter in morality and rules featured cartoon children delivering self-criticisms. “I am a picky eater,” one boy said. “This is not good for my body, so in the future I will correct it.” Another cartoon child remarked: “I don’t play on windowsills or slide down banisters, that way I don’t fall and get hurt.”

The text was full of cautionary tales – children who suffered injuries, illness or worse. Such things were especially likely to happen during summer vacation, with the implicit message being that unstructured time was dangerous. The twins’ morality and rules text described a recent summer vacation when seven middle-school students drowned in a river in Shandong. According to the book, five more elementary school kids drowned during the same vacation in a pond somewhere in Henan. Meanwhile, in Heilongjiang, seven students played on the banks of a river, where four of them drowned. Why were my daughters reading about this litany of drownings? And what did any of it have to do with morality and rules?

In the 90s, when I first taught in China, I had noticed that my students and colleagues had attitudes toward health that impressed me as somewhat fearful. It wasn’t surprising, given China’s long history of poverty, epidemics, large-scale accidents and natural disasters. Even at that time, I witnessed how hard life could be. One of our department’s students died after receiving poor medical care, and a colleague had a young daughter who succumbed to a mysterious illness. Since then, the nation had made an unprecedented rise to prosperity, with safety and health care improving dramatically. Chinese life expectancy had risen to more than 78 years. But many old fears endured, especially in the wake of the one-child policy, which wasn’t loosened until 2018. Almost all of Ariel and Natasha’s classmates were only children, and their parents and teachers seemed afraid of spontaneous play or vigorous physical activity. The school’s playground had a small, run-of-the-mill jungle gym, but administrators strictly forbade any child younger than sixth grade from playing on the equipment for fear of injury.

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. It was hard to tell the difference – both fun and story seemed equally dreadful. When the twins read aloud, they always used a hectoring tone:

The morality and rules text also featured a long parade of children who paid dearly for stupidity and carelessness. One chapter told the tale of Mo Mo, a nine-year-old who plays with his father’s cigarette lighter in a vacant field. Fortunately, the fire was contained, but the chapter lingered on Mo Mo’s fate:

None of these horror stories seemed to have any effect on Ariel and Natasha. By the time they entered fourth grade, they had learned the most important lesson that morality and rules has to offer, which is that morality and rules is the least important academic class in a Chinese school. After the twins noticed classmates using the period to surreptitiously catch up on other homework, they did the same. Ariel told me that she kept the morality and rules text open with her maths book inside. She also used the period to zoushen, a term that translates directly as “the spirit walks away” – to daydream. When I talked to undergraduates at Sichuan University, where I taught English and writing, they described similar activities in their own mandatory political courses. Nobody I taught seemed to take these classes seriously.

It was one of many mixed lessons in a Chinese school. When politics is omnipresent, it becomes a kind of background noise, and students learn to tune it out. Even at the age of nine, my daughters and their classmates were figuring out the real priorities in Chinese education. President Xi had instructed the party to create a patriotic younger generation and there seemed to have been some success with youths who came to be known as “Little Pinks” for their tendency to attack non-communist viewpoints online. But national surveys indicated that highly educated young Chinese were becoming less patriotic and less inclined to join the party. Among my own best students, I noticed a pronounced tendency to disengage from politics. From the party’s perspective, this probably wasn’t the worst outcome of the mandatory courses. As long as young people were apolitical, they were unlikely to cause problems.

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. At every step, Liu finds a way to zoushen – he gazes out the window and writes a verse about the view and the disconnect with what’s inside his mind:

Poetry was among the many positives that outweighed the drawbacks of a Chinese school. In language class, students engaged with verse that had been the heart of Chinese culture for centuries. By fourth grade, Natasha and Ariel had memorised dozens of classic works by Li Bai, Du Fu and others. Virtually all educated Chinese learn certain poems by heart, like A Gift to Wang Lun, which Li Bai wrote in the eighth century after saying farewell to a friend:

Such a poem is relatively easy to memorise: four lines of seven characters each, a total of 28 syllables. A Shakespearean sonnet is five times longer – 140 syllables. But even a short string of characters in classical Chinese can convey a great deal:

As a boy, Li Bai lived near Chengdu, which was also home to Du Fu, the other most famous poet of the Tang. The same dynasty produced Xue Tao, yet another Chengdu resident, who was one of the great female poets of ancient China. Ariel and Natasha’s class memorised one of Xue Tao’s poems, and there was a monument to the woman less than a mile from our home, on the banks of the Jin River. It was hard to imagine a better environment for children to connect with literature. Where else in the world can a schoolgirl read a 1,200-year-old poem knowing that the author was another woman, in her same city, writing in the same language?

The class memorised about a dozen poems per semester. Periodically, Teacher Zhang used a random-number generator to pick a student who then had to stand and recite a poem. If the student made mistakes, he or she lost points on a board that tracked behaviour and academic performance. Girls and boys in the top 10 were eligible to serve terms as xiao zuzhang, “small-group leaders”, who were responsible for managing classmates.

Natasha and Ariel were driven to become xiao zuzhang. Repeatedly, Leslie and I told them not to worry about grades; the main goal was simply to learn Chinese. But no matter what we said, the twins cared, and as time passed, it became clear that they had some advantages despite the late start. Chinese characters are so difficult that they tend to slip away: even while children learn new words, they constantly forget others. For Ariel and Natasha, everything was still fresh, whereas the other fourth-graders were having to relearn their first significant wave of forgotten characters. When children made errors, teachers sometimes pointed out that Ariel and Natasha were writing correctly.

For other parents, this opportunity was too good to pass by. When I picked up the girls after school, it wasn’t unusual for a mother or father to approach me with their child in tow. “Look at Cai Cai and Rou Rou,” the mother would say, using the twins’ Chinese names, and then she would exaggerate their abilities. “They just started learning Chinese, and they’re already better than you!” Next to her, the poor kid stood tired from the long day, his Young Pioneer scarf askew like a Friday-night drunk’s necktie. “You need to study Cai Cai and Rou Rou’s example!” the mother said. “Work harder!”

This happened so often that I wondered whether it was the reason we had been admitted to Chengdu Experimental in the first place. I often thought about how in the US this would have been a recipe for disaster: take two children from a country that has essentially become a national enemy and then relentlessly browbeat the native kids about how they can’t measure up. But Ariel and Natasha’s nationality seemed irrelevant in this context. The parents didn’t care where the twins came from or what the Trump administration was currently doing. If the twins could be used to motivate their classmates, that was all that mattered.

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. The things that might be important for popularity in the US – athletics, social dominance, being cool – mean very little in a Chinese classroom.

During the autumn, Natasha became the first of the twins to serve as xiao zuzhang, a small-group leader. Soon Ariel was also granted the honour. It made them proud, but I could see that small-group leadership was basically unpleasant. Xiao zuzhang had the responsibility of deducting points for bad behaviour, and they also corralled homework and in-class assignments. Periodically, teachers organised head-to-head competitions between small groups, which then recited Tang poetry or solved rapid-fire maths equations. It was stressful to be in charge of a group, and Leslie and I told the twins that they could simply decline the position. But the honour meant too much. The party failed miserably every time it attempted to indoctrinate Natasha and Ariel with clumsy political propaganda, but the system was far more successful with competition and titles.

When the class studied Li Bai’s eternal poem about departure, friendship and sadness, the other students taught Ariel and Natasha an alternative version. The twins came home with this second verse diligently memorised:

The metre and rhyme were perfect, with everything conveyed eloquently in those 28 syllables:

When I mentioned this poem to Chinese friends, they recalled different parodies from their own childhoods. In some versions, Li Bai plumbs the depths of memory, emotion and shit, because his true friend Wang Lun has provided a generous gift of toilet paper. Other verses feature the Lake of Peach Blossoms being used as a Li Bai bidet. One friend named Willy, now in his late 40s, could still recite the poem that had been popular in the rural school he attended more than three decades ago:

These shit-show shadow classics impressed me almost as much as the Tang verse in the fourth-grade textbooks. Imagine if American schoolchildren knew poetry well enough to appreciate scatological versions of Andrew Marvell or John Donne! For me, there was also relief in the irreverence. Despite the strict discipline of the classroom, and the wooden lessons in morality and rules, these students engaged in play that mocked the material they were taught.

On the whole, the kids seemed remarkably well adjusted. We organised occasional get-togethers of a dozen or so girl classmates at our apartment, and the group dynamics were different from what I had observed among American girls of similar age. The Chengdu students didn’t form cliques or deliberately exclude others, and there was never any mean-girl drama. In part, this seemed to reflect the fact that Chinese girls of 10 or 11 typically don’t engage in the kind of preteen behaviour that is common in the US. And the cultural emphasis on the group means that Chinese children learn to compromise and accommodate. Despite the fact that most kids had no siblings, they didn’t behave like spoiled brats.

The problem was never whether the girls could get along – it was whether they could get together. Scheduling a playdate required weeks of WeChat messaging with parents because of endless buxi, or supplemental courses, and other activities. These routines had become so entrenched that parents seemed befuddled by the possibility of unstructured play. Once, Leslie invited a classmate over on a weekend afternoon and the girl’s mother sent a somewhat panicked message asking if they could go to the science museum instead. She wanted a destination with a clearly defined educational purpose, otherwise what would the girls possibly do, and what would they learn?

At every small party, the kids played in the courtyard of our residential compound, organising their own games. Parents often commented on how nice it was to see the girls so happy. But over the course of two years, nobody else in the twins’ friend group organised a similar gathering. It simply wasn’t done; children were too overscheduled and parents were too narrowly focused on education. Many mothers had quit their jobs in order to manage the single child, a pattern that was unheard of a generation earlier. Of the women I taught during the 90s – about 100 in total – there wasn’t a single one who didn’t work full-time after having children. But now it was becoming more common in China, in part because of new prosperity, but also because of educational pressure.

Eventually we stopped hosting parties, because scheduling was too difficult. Some parents seemed to recognise how unhealthy it was to keep their children so busy. Once, Leslie and I had dinner with the parents of a classmate of the twins. When the conversation turned to education, the father said that he hated enrolling his daughter in buxi courses, but he felt helpless. “That’s the way all parents feel,” he said. “It’s too competitive. But if you want your child to have a chance, you have to do all this stuff.”

For Chinese parents, the most terrifying spectre – even worse than free time, or summer vacation, or children playing around random bodies of water in Henan and Heilongjiang – was the gaokao, the college-entrance exam. Chinese high school seniors sit the gaokao at the end of the academic year and admission to college depends entirely on the score. This was one reason why Leslie and I had moved to Chengdu while our daughters were still in elementary school – we figured this would be early enough to avoid the malign influence of the gaokao. But the system had become so competitive that small children were starting to feel the pressure. At Chengdu Experimental, as in all Chinese schools, each semester ended with a week of final exams. Even in third grade, these exams were gruelling: 100 minutes for language, and 90 minutes each for maths, science and English. The children were trained like endurance athletes, and Ariel and Natasha became much better at focusing. But they also talked about the pressure, and they picked up random gaokao details. At the beginning of fourth grade, the maths teacher announced to the class that if they hoped to enter Tsinghua University in eight years, they would need to score at least 649 on the gaokao.

At the end of two years, we moved back to our home in Colorado. On the twins’ last day at Chengdu Experimental, Leslie and I picked them up early. Teacher Zhang and the other children had prepared a farewell video, and after they played it, classmates came to the front of the room one by one, giving small gifts and saying goodbye. Teacher Zhang spoke last. “These two years have been very long,” she said. “There was one period when we were at home because of the pandemic. But you always kept learning, and all of our students can learn from your example. The most important thing, though, is our friendship.”

In some respects, having Ariel and Natasha in public school had been the most challenging part of our time in Chengdu, because it required so much work. But in other ways the experience had been completely straightforward. After Natasha and Ariel were enrolled, nobody at the school asked us for favours or gifts, and we were never charged a single yuan in tuition. The toxic political spats between China and the US never had any influence on school administrators. As long as Ariel and Natasha did their work, and as long as they came to class prepared, they were treated the same as every other child. In this regard, the school was one of the few parts of my Chengdu life that had never been complicated by politics.

On Ariel and Natasha’s first day, they cried when I picked them up. At the time, it had seemed impossible that they could ever fit into the system, and certain aspects of Chinese schooling never felt comfortable – the workload, the pressure, the lack of physical activity. But there were many other features that we came to appreciate. Respect for education is fundamental to Chinese culture, and these values had survived all the nation’s changes and even the narrow-minded competitiveness of the gaokao. Leslie and I also admired the teachers’ competence and the dignity with which they carried themselves. It was vastly different from many parts of the United States, where parents and students often disrespect their instructors.

Teacher Zhang’s comment on the last day was accurate – it had been a long two years. I knew that the Chengdu experience would stay with Ariel and Natasha for the rest of their lives. At the end of the classroom presentation, the other children applauded, and Teacher Zhang escorted us down the hallway and out of the school. Leslie and I told her how grateful we were for all her help. “Cai Cai and Rou Rou never could have done this without you,” Leslie said. Teacher Zhang waved off the compliments, and she knelt and hugged each of the girls. They cried, like they had on the first day, and this time Teacher Zhang cried too.