The Ballad of Seven: The 60s in China

My students in China picked English names for themselves; consequently, I taught a lot of Kobe Bryants and Steve Nashes (the NBA is very popular in China--Yao Ming did not appear in a vacuum). I also taught many Johns and Georges and Susans. But one girl I knew named herself "Seven," simply because she liked how it sounds. She spoke excellent English and had a butch haircut, and always wanted to talk with us American English teachers.

Her mother demanded that she study to be an engineer. Seven instead desired to be an artist; her mother ended up confiscating her art supplies to force her to study engineering more.

When I started using a cheap guitar to teach English songs to my students (and I tell you what, you have not lived until you've heard a full class of Chinese middle-schoolers belt out John Denver's "Country Roads" at the top of their lungs!), she was inspired to get her own guitar. She would get up at 5 am, she told me, so that her mom wouldn't hear her practice.

Finally, her mother caught her and confiscated the guitar, too. Though Seven was typically good-natured, one could see how this young 14-year-old was already reaching her breaking point of desperation. "First the art supplies, and now this!" she cried to me in despair.

I was only in China a semester, so I sincerely wonder what happened to her. I bring this up because the stereotype of the overbearing mother oppressing her free-spirit daughter is a full-on cliche at this point--at least, in America it is. It would barely make a lame Lifetime original movie. It was already an old story in the 60s.

But this is a new story in China. Once, a group of native-Chinese English teachers asked us what to do about the "naughtiness" of the children. My response was, "Um, I'm 23--I'm literally brand-new at this, shouldn't you be giving me advice about classroom management?" For when I first started, the kids often misbehaved, as middle-schoolers are want, so I just assumed that it was evidence that kids are kids, no matter where you are.

But no--disobedient children, who disrespect authority, who express individuality, who prefer to follow their own impulses over the cultural demands of the community, is a new phenomenon in China. This is their first generation that has behaved thus. The teachers don't know how to deal with it.

And lately, I've been wondering who else in power over there isn't prepared, either.

For it recently occurred to me that Seven should be 18 by now, possibly 19. And lately I've been wondering what she's up to. Did her "Tiger mother" finally break her? Did she rebel? Is she in school? In engineering? In art school? Married off? A desperate run-away? Did she escape to Shang-hai to join the Chinese Punk scene? Is she a burgeoning political activist? "Facebook" claims to have made the world smaller, making it easier to reconnect with lost people, but China is a very big country.

And that's just the thing--how do you keep 1.3 billion people in line, if you're the Chinese government? Now, it helps if you have centuries-long traditions of cultural indoctrination privileging the communal over the individual (see the Beijing opening ceremonies for an example of this ethos expressed).

But as China has opened its doors to the West, and to Western markets, and has tried to beat the West at its own game, indeed, has attempted to become the West, economically-speaking, the unintended consequence is that China has begun to become Western, culturally.

What does the Chinese government do when there is an entire rising generation of individuals, of young, restless, American-influenced students with little respect for authority, and are tired of being told what to do?

In other words, what would the 60s look like in China?

Shoot, when I was there, they even acted like they were currently in the 50s in America--complete with regressive gender roles, dressing up to fly planes, a booming economy without environmental protections, and people smoking like chimneys, even doctors in their office. So again I ask--if this is their 50s, what might their 60s look like?

I'm curious as to whether or not we'll find out for ourselves soon enough. I think the next decade or so will be very interesting for China watchers.

A fun game for Americans in China is to keep track of all the poorly-translated English phrases on their t-shirts--I laughed along with everyone else, until I realized that I never once saw t-shirts with Chinese characters. Never even seemed to occur to them to have Chinese t-shirts. The cynical part of me just attributes that English-centrism to typical Western hegemonic imperialism, assimilating all in its path, destroying cultural distinctiveness in favor of some dull gray homogeneity, constantly teasing the "not-white-not-quite" of the world striving for a standard we will never permit them to achieve, so as to reinforce our own privileged position.

But on the other hand, I wonder what a China full of people reading American English are observing about a nation that is not only richer (for now) than they, but is also irrefutably freer than they--and what they will do next about it.