V 1 N. 29 A Canadian-American Family in Beijing 1988-89

 

A Canadian-American Family in Beijing

                           1988-89

This piece was written more than thirty years ago when we had returned to North America after living for almost a year in Beijing, China during one of that county’s  most tumultuous times in its long history.  Our base was Beijing Normal University in the northwest portion of that city.  It was a thirty minute bicycle ride to Tiananmen Square, and we made that trip often, especially in the Spring of 1989 when the Tiananmen Student Movement was blossoming in the city.  But we also saw other parts of China in that year.  During the Lunar New Year celebrations in February of ’89 when the country all but shuts down and people go on holiday, we travelled south then southwest and finally very far west to Tibet to see that part of  China.  Then we returned to Beijing and unexpectedly became witnesses to those world shaking events in April, May, and June.  The Tiananmen events themselves will be covered in another chapter of this blog.

 

March 6, 1989

It is a sunny day in Beijing, but the industrial haze almost obscures the mountains just west of the city. After six months in the Chinese capitol, we've learned to use that parameter to judge the quality of the air and  weather, when we look out from our fourth floor apartment. Winters with additional coal dust from heating and Spring dust storms carrying soil from Mongolia also affect the visibility.

It is almost a year since Marie-Andrée was notified that she had been selected from amongst five hundred applicants to teach English at the Canada China Language Center in Beijing. Our two children Dominique, seventeen, and Jacques, sixteen, were eager to go, but at the same time a bit reluctant to start a new life. They had been through this before when we had taught for three years in Zimbabwe and had endured several moves between Canada and the States. Selling our house and furniture in Montreal and selecting what items to take to China and what to store for our eventual return to North America occupied much of the Spring of 1988. Studies of Putonghua, the official Chinese language, also filled many of our hours. Jacques and I probably saw more Montreal Expos games than normal knowing we would not see baseball for a year.

The house sold in April and we had to vacate immediately. We moved into a 2 bedroom apartment subleasing until the end of June. We looked on it as a preparation for the much smaller apartments in China. A third move to another temporary home in July prepared us in case we joined a group of nomads in China. My father's serious illness in May made our decision to leave more difficult but my mother gave us her blessing to make this trip and in exchange we promised to return to the States to live near her at the end of the year.

Leaving a scorching North American summer in August 1988, we arrived in a scorching Beijing summer. The latitude of Beijing and Dayton, Ohio where my parents live is almost identical.

What hits the North American visitor first about China is the number of people. The density of people in the cities is unbelievable. Stores are constantly jammed with shoppers, streets packed with vehicles, cyclists, pedestrians, and horse drawn carts. I had to return to the States at Christmas and at the peak of the American holiday shopping season, the stores seemed deserted after the Chinese experience.

But despite these crowds the city of Beijing is amazingly clean. Garbage trucks come through our neighborhood several times a week. The streets are swept everyday. People rarely litter the streets with paper.

In China there is very little home or apartment hunting. The unit you work for is responsible for accommodations. Where does a family of four settle? We were given a two bedroom apartment in the Foreign Experts building of Beijing Normal University. It is a 2 year old building that looks much older. The apartment was furnished and we managed to rearrange wardrobes in one of the bedrooms to serve as room dividers and give Jacques and Dominique some privacy from each other. There is a small kitchen with a gas stove and fridge, luxuries the ordinary city family has only recently begun to realize. We have a color TV, English news broadcast at 10:00 p.m. on weekdays. Education is free. We enrolled the children in full time study of Chinese at the university. This was one of the decisions we knew we would have to make before leaving N. America for China. At our arrival there were no high school level classes available for foreigners in Beijing.  It was fairly much accepted that kids would probably lose a year of high school while in China but we felt the experience actually gained living in China would more than compensate their loss. Beijing Normal University, a teacher training facility, has a special foreign student department that has several hundred foreign students studying Chinese. Most of Dominique and Jacques' classmates were Japanese who had a lot of experience with characters which are quite similar to Chinese Characters. The teacher failed to appreciate this distinction between Eastern and Western students and taught his class assuming everyone could read characters, thus leaving our children in the dust. But by Christmas time their Conversational Chinese was showing great progress. After Christmas we pulled them from the language courses and enrolled them in high school correspondence courses offered through Indiana University. My daughter, whose high school experience has been in French Canadian schools, is now struggling with  printed English letters.

I arrived without a job but found that virtually any foreigner is considered an expert at least in the teaching of English. A number of untrained Americans were busy teaching English at university level and I was quickly drafted into teaching two courses of composition and a course in newspaper reading.  My pay was somewhat less than what I had earned in the 1960’s while serving in the Peace Corps. 

I've taught in six other countries but I found the Chinese university students to be the most polite and eager students I've ever worked with. Lessons are done and handed in on time. Long hours of study are evident. The toughest thing to deal with—the biggest difference between them and other students I have met—is their unwillingness to question a teacher. The authority of a teacher in the classroom is conceded by the student. It took several weeks to alter some of their entrenched habits to meet some of my expectations in the classroom. I gave them a lot more freedom than they were accustomed to having, but also explained that they now had responsibilities that they would have to learn to deal with. One of the reasons I decided to teach this way was not to introduce North American ways just for the fun of it, but because many of these students planned to go to work in the private sector of the new Chinese economy. Only a few years ago all students were assigned to jobs for life by the university or obtained these lifetime positions by connections or "guanxi" so commonly used in China to obtain the unobtainable. When the Chinese government allowed the formation of privately owned businesses a few years ago, many new jobs opened in this sector. However, nothing was guaranteed for life and a number of social benefits would be lost. The lure was higher pay. Professional people's salaries in China are abysmally low. A street corner fruit seller can do better than a teacher or a doctor. Most of my students were planning for careers outside of the teaching profession, so my classes were geared to prepare them for a bit more independence and self-reliance. Brainstorming, where the students set their own tasks and planned their work, were used. Group work rather than individual work was emphasized, preparing them for teamwork on the job site. I emphasized that what went on in my classes would probably best be kept there for the moment. It would be too much of a change if they were to request such teaching from their more tradition-bound Chinese professors. They said they wouldn't dare make such demands.

After two months with these wonderful students I learned of my father's death and returned home to be with my mother through the Christmas holidays. By the time I returned it was too late in the semester to continue the classes. Classes did not stop for Christmas. But hopefully some seeds were planted that will help these students to survive in the new Chinese economy. Because of my extended absence for my father’s funeral and some medical treatment while home,  the university decided to cancel my classes. 

When I returned to Beijing in January I received a request to teach American Studies at an adult night school for several weeks. My degree in exercise physiology was again not going to serve me very well. After meeting the students the first night and learning that there were many professional people in the class, I decided to make a class of comparative lifestyles, contrasting what I had seen so far in China. I taught them about credit, costs of operating a car, finance companies. Their response was that Americans must have a lot of worries about payments and taxes that the Chinese do not yet have to deal with. They were interested in courtship, marriage, divorce, school systems, and costs of college. They pay almost nothing for university education, but the chances of getting accepted into a college in China are very slim and almost nil for a rural peasant.

During my Christmas absence, Marie-Andrée and the kids decided they wanted to experience some real Quebec-like weather, and took the train 24 hours north to Harbin where they got everything they hoped for and more. Harbin, one of the northernmost cities in Heilongjiang province, once called Manchuria, is famous for their ice sculpture festival and construction was going on full throttle. It was cold too and fur hats and winter boots had to be purchased.

On my return in January the children were able to get themselves out to the airport on public transportation at 1:00 p.m. and negotiate minibus transport back to our apartment. Their increased self-confidence was quite evident in the way they were now taking care of their father.

By February, Marie-Andrée had completed her first term of teaching and we had a month free to travel through China! Many of our colleagues were heading out of the country either home for their vacation or south to the beaches, but since this would be our only chance to get around China we decided to remain in-country. We rode the trains for two days south to the city of Guilin where exists some of the most famous scenery of China—the small sharply pointed limestone mountains, almost a forest of hills. It was only a few degrees warmer than Beijing but so much greener, a big change from the greys of the capital. We spent several days in a smaller village called Yangshuo, well on its way to becoming a backpackers' haven/stopping point on the Li River. From there we visited surrounding villages by bicycle. From Guilin we flew to Kunming, one of the main landing points for the Hump pilots of World War II. Kunming is famous for its year-round springtime weather and we were warmly treated not just by the weather but by the friendly peoples of Yunnan Province. Had we more time to spend, Yunnan would have been a place to explore more intensively. Many colorfully costumed minority groups lived in the area! However, the main goal of our three-week trip was to visit the autonomous region of Tibet.

To arrive in Tibet meant travelling another day by train north from Kunming to the capital of Szechuan province, Chengdu, a bleak industrial town once inhabited by long dynasties, poets and philosophers. Rain and cold gave us few pleasant memories of Szechuan. We secured tickets for Tibet and flew in to Lhasa on February 22. Travel stipulations required that we spend 2 nights in the Lhasa Holiday Inn at $120 per night compared to the $15 average we had been spending up to that time. We managed to get the requirement cut to one night and gladly moved into the less luxurious but friendlier, more vibrant Yak Hotel for $8.00 a night. The Yak was right in the middle of town where a steady stream of prostrating pilgrims circled the Jokhang Temple, weaving between the stalls of merchants of religious objects, prayer flags, juniper for burning in the stupas, antiques, and Coca-Cola. Sights and sounds of Lhasa were magnificent. The 12,000-foot altitude provided freezing nights and skin-scorching days. Costumes of various Tibetan tribes reminded us of Amerindian groups who are certainly not distantly related! Our clothes absorbed the smell of burning yak butter lamps found in every temple. Dentists with foot-cranked drills were busy drilling and capping front teeth for sixty cents bottom price to $2.50 top. Dogs were everywhere in Lhasa—so noticeably absent in Beijing. They are thought to be the incarnation of lamas who didn't quite make it into a better life. They are well fed and fairly friendly, though we didn't approach them intentionally, not knowing whether a rabies situation existed.

The Potala (the Dalai Lama's residence) was a major effort to climb up to see at the 12,000-foot altitude. Jacques and I had both been quite sick our first night because of the lower oxygen pressure! In the week we spent in Lhasa we visited several monasteries outside of town and walked, climbed, and scrambled up some of the minor hills around the city, getting up to 15,000 feet, but coming back down each day. We still felt dwarfed by the 20,000-foot mountains surrounding the city.

The Yak Hotel proved to be a good meeting ground for backpackers, which we were essentially. The backpackers have all the latest information on costs, places to stay, people to be aware of—that even the best guidebooks cannot possibly contain. At the time we were there most of the backpackers were waiting for the road from Lhasa to Kathmandu to open. It was still blocked by knee-deep snows and required a dangerous 125-mile walk to get to the Nepalese border.

In addition, at the time of our visit the Tibetans were disturbed by the curtailment of Tibetan New Year celebrations by the Chinese authorities. The day of our arrival Marie-Andrée and I, in a high-altitude stupor, walked into the middle of a demonstration against that decision. As we approached the main square in front of the Jokhang Temple (Lamaism/Buddhism's holiest shrine), we saw a contingent of policemen or soldiers jogging in file into the crowd in front of the Jokhang Temple. Shortly afterward about ten women came running out of the crowd screaming. We continued into the square, not certain what was happening, but did see a few other Western tourists milling about. A couple of Frenchmen who spoke Tibetan said that several nuns had been putting on a 'manif'—the French slang for manifestation—against the New Year decision by the Chinese.   One Tibetan young man came up to us and quietly said in English, “We are fighting for our freedom.”   I was carrying a video camera, and concerned that the film might be confiscated or I might be arrested,  I shot from the hip, not letting on that I was filming the scene.   We stayed in town for about three days before flying out directly to Beijing. 

Security on the plane was bizarre.  The stewards asked all the Tibetan men to hand over their swords after they got on the plane.   Most Tibetan males carry a short sword about a foot long.  But before we landed, the stewards re-armed those passengers.   This of course was before the   9-11 attack on New York and Washington.  We landed safely in Beijing and returned to our campus not knowing that the next chapter in Chinese history was about to unfold.

 

George Brose  (below a few scenes from South China and Tibet)

Upper Left outside the Jokang Temple,  Lower Left Dominique and Marie

Upper Right  George and Dominique in Gulin, Right Center,  Jacques lounging at the Yak Hotel,  Lower

Right, street near the Jokang Temple

Comments:   What a marvelous experience for all four of you.  You say Dominique and Jacques were eager to go.  Having raised four children, I was stunned.  They were 17 and 16, in the full throes of teenage angst.  They had the best friends anyone ever had, perhaps a boyfriend or girlfriend, a school they enjoyed, etc.  China?  I had trouble getting my son to move off the couch.  Much as I love my kids, had this move been suggested, they would have slit my throat as I slept.  Granted Dominique and Jacques were not normal teenagers, but there is only so far I, who suffered through his kids' high school years, can stretch my imagination.  You and Marie- Andree did a good job.  Roy Mason, Ukiah, CA

Roy,  If you recall, we visited you on our way to China and immediately when we got back to the US.   George