I’ve been conducting oral interviews this week in English for part of my students’ final exam. One of the things we talk about is their childhood. A few telling facts:
-98% of my students are first generation college students
-About 90% are from the countryside and their grandparents and/or parents were farmers
-About 75% did not live with their parents while growing up because their parents had to leave the countryside to find work in a city in another province in order to put their child/ren through school; instead, most of my students were raised by their grandparents. The kids felt a lot of pressure to do well in school because their parents were working so hard to pay for it. (Farmers are often not subject to the one child rule.)
(One girl is a twin, and she said her grandparents could not afford to keep both her and her sister, so she stayed to live with her grandparents in the countryside and her parents took her sister to work with them in the city. She has spent all her life away from her sister. She said,”It’s sometimes weird to me that there is a girl who looks just like me that I don’t know very well.” Another girl got a little emotional remembering her mother getting on the bus to leave their village, leaving my student behind. These stories broke my heart a little. It was an effort to keep my face neutral while they were speaking.)
-All my students want to be teachers or work in business; they speak very respectfully of their parents and grandparents, but they don’t want to be farmers. Their dream is to buy a house for their parents.
It is true that Peace Corps volunteers are placed in more needy areas, so my students’ experiences are not true for all Chinese college students. But, I venture that there are more kids these days in my students’ shoes than not, i.e. first generation college student/non-farmers. I think we often judge China through the lense of our own society’s development and position. Economically, our countries are closer and closer everyday. But socially, I’d say my students’ lives in China are more akin to how things were in the early to mid 1900’s in America.
This is a really interesting fact about China. I had no idea. I wonder what the effect of so much displacement/seperation will be on the long run.
ReplyDeleteWow, I just could not imagine being in the parent's or the child's shoes. So much hardship they must endure.
ReplyDeleteIt's an interesting comment on evolving societies.
ReplyDeleteI was listening to a show on NPR the other day, and the speaker was talking about the Comaches, and how much of the last fifty years of revisionist history has gone too far in painting a sympathetic picture...there was a reason many Indians were called savages in the day, and it wasn't just prejudice.
But he also said how tribes like the Comache were acting had strong parallels with Europe a thousand years earlier, with how groups like the Celts and Vikings behaved...an especially good analogy given they were now primarily fighting the Scots-Irish settlers of Texas.
Those stories are heartbreaking! One can only hope these kids have a better future for themselves and their families.
ReplyDeleteYou will go home with a whole lot of stories and a softer heart. If you write a book, I'll buy it!
This post made me sad for some unexplicable reason. :(
ReplyDeleteHow will you ever NOT miss these amazing young people?
Sadly, these stories about your students in China, aren't all that different from people in Appalachia if you substitute coal mining or steel work for farmer.
ReplyDeleteThat's amazing.... we take so much for granted in our (affluent) society, don't we?
ReplyDeleteI cannot FATHOM leaving my children behind to go find work... I can't even imagine how heart-breaking that would be.