Freedom is...

"They can take our lives, but they'll never take...our...FREEDOM!!!"

Of course Braveheart's line kindles a fire within me.  As an American, freedom is my middle name.

Interestingly, there are things I am free to do in China that I can't do back home.  I can walk down the street, or onto public transportation, with a can of beer in my hand.  I can light off a fistful of fireworks whenever the occasion (or the mood) strikes.  I can smoke anywhere I want, even if there are a dozen signs claiming "NO SMOKING", because those signs in China are just there for decoration.  If I had a scooter, I could ride it onto the sidewalk and disregard any and all traffic lights.  If I had a kid, I could hold him/her over a garbage can to relieve themselves in public, and no one would call C.P.S. on me.

But what is public drinking compared to the right of free speech?  In my country, I can say whatever I want to about my government, and I won't disappear into some gulag, never to be seen again.  Even now, people disappear in China after saying politically volatile things. 

What is lighting off explosives compared to freedom of religion?  If I decide to run for political office in the U.S., I don't have to swear to renounce religion.  As a member of the Communist Party in China, you'd have to swear your only allegiance was to Communism. 

I don't have to put my age, gender, photo, health, or marital status on my resume. 

Feeling as I do, I still wanted my students to talk about the idea of freedom without feeling as if some foreigner were judging them.  Because the 4th of July is coming up, I thought it'd be a good idea to give them just a few minutes of U.S. history--specifically, why the U.S. declared its independence--and then the rest of class would mostly be open-ended discussion.

When I talked about the colonists' complaints against England (search and seizure; quartering soldiers; imprisonment without knowing the charges against you; and of course, taxation without representation), my students' eyes widened.  In China nowadays, and especially in Shanghai, some of these ideas are as foreign as they are in the U.S.

"After more than 160 years of this, the colonists were pretty upset.  Many of them had only lived in the colonies--they'd never been to England.  Sometimes whole generations had only lived in Boston or New York.  That made them more American than British (even though the United States of America wasn't a country yet!).  But the British government--over 5000 kilometers away over the ocean--was still ruling their lives.  Quite unfairly at times.  And that's why they declared independence."

I knew I was simplifying, but when your classes only run 50 minutes and you don't see the same students on a daily basis, you have to come to the point as fast as you can.

Still, sometimes teaching opens a door in me I didn't know was there.  For the first time, I could really put myself in the shoes of my ancestors.  I could feel a bit of what they must've felt.

I'd prepared about 20 discussion questions for my students--What is freedom?  What freedoms do you have, and which ones do you wish you had?  Is working 40 hours a week like slavery?  Should everyone in the world be able to bear arms (own a gun)?  I knew a lot of my students would be more comfortable if I ran the class as a partner discussion, where only one person might hear their opinions on the idea of freedom.  Running the class this way also would keep me from overwhelming them with my own opinions--at least, that was my hope.

Here are some of the things I caught from three different classes:

I try to escape from my mother's controlling!  [Laughter]  I can't make choices by myself.  [Her parents had said] "If you don't go to Fudan University, we won't send you to another one, and we won't visit you."

[Freedom means] I can read any book I want, watch any program I want...In our country, there are too many limitations, and you cannot choose...

Freedom is good, but we must have rules.

You have to say the [Communist] Party is always right...I don't think it's correct.

Freedom has limitation also.

We can discuss ideas [political, etc.] in private but not public...it will be deleted [by the government if posted online or written in print].

Governments make mistakes...[police] officers make mistakes.

We don't have complete freedom.

The government protects the rich man.  (Not a uniquely Chinese situation, I wanted to tell them.)

[Freedom means] you can say what you want, and no one can hurt you.

It was a bittersweet class, partially because it was my second-to-last Life Club class, and partially because so many of their opinions were similar to my own.  And yet they lived in a country where they couldn't have some of the freedoms they knew existed elsewhere.

At the end of my second class, a female student asked, "Teacher, what's your opinion?"

Part of me wanted to get up on my soapbox, but after living in China for a total of three years now, I knew it'd be the wrong thing.  I wouldn't have been surprised if the government had sent the occasional "guest" to "monitor" my classes, and I could also see myself getting hauled out of the country before the day was over for instigating a revolution.

"Well, this class isn't about me.  It's really about what YOU guys think freedom is.  My ideas about freedom will be very different from your ideas, because we come from different countries."

She looked disappointed, and asked again, "But what's your opinion?"

I wanted to tell her, but at the same time, this was a student I'd never met before.  I knew this was China, and I was feeling a bit paranoid.  The irony is that I'd grown up believing freedom of speech was a God-given right, and here I was, buttoning my lip...meanwhile, a Chinese person, who'd grown up under Big Brother's watch, was asking me to speak freely.  But paranoia won out.  I repeated what I'd said before. 

In the third class, it happened again, this time with a smaller class of students I'd known for a while.  I gave them a similar answer, then expanded a bit. 

"I think education is really the ticket to freedom," I said.  Not very original, but it's something I've believed most of my life.  "We're really lucky--American women, Chinese women.  We get to go to school."  All of my students in this class were women, and they were nodding.  "If we were in some places in Africa or the Middle East, we wouldn't be at school.  We'd be at home with the baby, or working in the field.  That would be our life.  I think it's great that China has such high respect for education."

This was true.  I've felt more respected as a teacher here than I ever have in the States.  Of course, most of my students in the States were considered at-risk youth, so that might have something to do with it.

I was also hoping a little flattery would cover up the fact that I wasn't completely giving my opinion--that on my VPN-sourced news, I've read how many Hong Konger's online posts are taken down; that the people here work hard, pay taxes, and have no right to say what the government does with said taxes.  Taxation without representation!  Censored art exhibits!  My sealed packages being cut open at the post office every single time to be searched right in front of me. 

Only one student seemed to catch on--a girl named Soonie, the one who'd been forced to Fudan University by her parents.  A bright student with smooth English, she looked a little disappointed at my lack of complete transparency. 

If I was ten years younger, I probably would've spoken my mind completely, and damn the consequences.  But was that the right thing to do?  To inspire my students into a democratic revolution less than two weeks before returning to my own "land of the free", leaving them to be silenced (by any means necessary) by their government?  I'm not saying I have that much power, but as a teacher, you sometimes never know.

My hope is that, by having them discuss freedom, by thinking about what it really means to them, that they will come to their own conclusions, their own truth.  My hope is that they will be inspired to discuss things more freely, that they will fight for freedom, not in my way, but in their own.

My hope is that, one day, freedom won't just belong to Americans.  It'll belong to everyone. 

Making peace with China

A ten-year-old sits on the second floor of a duplex and ties bed sheets together.  She's thinking about how she can use them to crawl out the window unnoticed--when her mother enters the room.

Months later, I'd try to run away again, this time while my family was in China.  I remember I packed a few RMB, some clean underwear, and maybe some White Rabbit candy or peanuts.  We didn't have many snacking options.  I don't think I brought any water--I was 10, remember?  I walked along the dirt road that wound through the sand dunes.  I was walking east.  I came to an overpass and stopped, realizing I hadn't seen any water the whole time.  I don't know how far I'd walked, but it felt like a good hour had passed.  All around me was sand--just sand.  No water.  No animals.  No people.  No plants.  I could count to ten in Mandarin, and say hello and thank-you, but I had no idea how to say, "Get me the hell out of here and back to my hometown and back to the life that my parents gave up so we could come to this hell hole."

I was only 10, and I wasn't exactly thinking of all of these things, but I could feel them.

Golmud (sometimes on the map as Ge'ermu) was at the end of the train tracks in Qinghai Province.  Back in 1988, there was no airport in Golmud, no high speed train.  A chugging steam engine took three days to go from Beijing to that little town in the middle of the desert, where criminals were sometimes sent.  As if the town were a penal colony without walls.  I'm sure it felt like the Old West in America--nomadic Mongolians and Tibetans (the "Indians") and the Han Chinese and laowai (foreigners) (the "cowboys").  It was poor and dusty and colorless, and there was plenty of moutai ("whiskey") to drink.  If Chinese people were allowed by their government to own firearms, I feel certain that there would've been a fair amount of shooting going on.

 

I think it was that first evening in Golmud, when our bus pulled up to the hotel, that Mom sat on her bed and cried.  I didn't see this.  She told me about it later.  I don't remember if I cried then.  I do remember seeing some wild white ponies on our way in, and, as a horsey girl, that sight alone made the idea of living thousands of miles from home seem not quite so bad.

But that didn't mean I wanted to be there.

I had friends back home.  My whole world was Cheyenne Road where our yellow and white house was.  Pets that had died were buried in the back yard.  My handprint was in the concrete we'd poured.  How could Mom and Dad have given that up?  It was my homeland.

I'm now nearly the same age now as my parents were back then.  The thought sometimes gives me pause.  Of course I understand better now.  But back then I was so angry.  My mind was dead set against China from minute one, and so was my heart.  I was determined to hate it, and it wasn't hard to do when we got out there, because the living conditions were worse than those I'd experience later as a Peace Corps Volunteer.  The locals, unused to seeing white people, touched my hair and my sister's constantly.  I started wearing my hoodie up with the strings tied tightly.  People said "Hello, hello!" and formed huge groups whenever we stopped to buy something at the market, or look at something at a tourist site.  We were stared at the way amoebas are examined under a microscope.  And China was gross!  People hawked snot and spat all the time!  Their cigarettes stank.  The men had long, dirty fingernails.  Sheep were butchered steps away from our dining room, and after walking around their bloody corpses, I had no appetite for the stuff.  Yak milk smelled funny and tasted funny.  The tofu was tasteless and looked disgusting.  The sweet and entertaining cook had some strange ideas, like putting cloves in the spaghetti sauce.  The bread grew mold at an alarming rate.  Beer had dead flies in the bottom of the bottles.  My sister and I existed on white rice and Chinese fruit juice that came in little green boxes.  We ate peanuts and White Rabbit candy and whatever luxuries came from home (my favorites were peanut butter and oatmeal).  There was one channel, CCTV.  The only bright spot were the interesting commercials, and the episodes of "Journey to the West".  Our newspapers came through DHL weeks after the news was fresh.  And of course, there was no internet or Skype back then.  The President could've been assassinated, and we would have never known.  Especially since the Chinese would've kept it from us if they'd found out first.  I feel pretty sure that that's true.

 

When it was 2013 and I'd accepted my job here in Shanghai, my dad smiled and shook his head.  "I can't believe you're going to China, Heather."

But here I am, and nearly two years later.  I've learned that Shanghainese are some of the rudest people in the world--they push, they shove, they cut in line, they never say "Excuse me"--but also some of the sweetest people--students give me gifts of candy and fruit juice, exclaiming, sincerely, about how great I am and how much they love my classes.  I've been invited to a Chinese home for Mid-Autumn Festival.  I've made some good friends with locals, both at work and outside of work.  And I know that some of those friendships are some of the most genuine I've had in my whole life.

China is not America.  That is the truth in 800 different ways.  But my mom is right--there is a sweetness about China that does not exist in America.  There is an appreciation for learning, for study, and a respect for teachers that I feel is lacking in my own country.  I have left my wallet accidentally in a market and half a dozen people yelled at me in Chinese, one man running up to me with it in his hand, grinning.

I'm not saying China is better.  I wasn't always wrong.  China can be gross!  I still dodge lugees on the sidewalk, and I still see men peeing on the street all the time--in broad daylight, next to main roads.  I saw an eight-year-old girl pooping about 10 feet from the gate to my apartment complex.  The side streets are still slippery with rotting vegetables and the blood of freshly butchered turtles and frogs.  There are sidewalks covered in dog poop and oily noodle water, discarded in the gutter.  And then there are sidewalks in Jing'an or the former French Concession, buffed to sparkling--neighborhoods I could never afford to live in or even to shop in.

And I'm not saying that America should be a Communist country--far from that!  But this experience in China has been my own.  It was my choice to come here this time.  And the experiences I've had have changed my mind and my heart about so many things that I thought and felt as an angry 10-year-old.



The Grinch

This post is rather religious.  I've tried not to be preachy, but if you'd like to avoid this topic, I'll understand.

"We have Christmas in China now," one of my students said several months ago, tossing her long, silky black hair over a shoulder.

"Do you believe in Christ?"  I asked, curious.

Silence.  She looked caught off guard, uncomfortable.  Then:  "Well...no..."  She trailed off.

Then, just a week ago, my students were working on their "bucket lists".  When I told them to imagine they had a month to live (and would die December 14th), one of my older students exclaimed, "But that's right before Christmas!"

I remember laughing.  "But you're Chinese!"  I said.  "Why do you care?"

He looked crushed.

I felt like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings--Christmas is mine!  My own!  My prrrecioussss!  It wasn't the Christmas spirit at all, but I couldn't help it:  It seemed to me as if my students were acting excited about Christmas because Westerns were doing it--plain and simple.  Like wearing Levis or drinking Starbucks.  But there didn't seem to be an understanding that the very word referred to Christ, to Christianity.

When my family lived in China in the late 80s, there was no church for us to attend.  Qinghai Province was a hardscrabble place, where survival was good enough.  Any Muslim or Buddhist pilgrims bowing their way across the desert were kind of laughed at out there. 

There are Catholics in Shanghai, believe it or not, openly worshipping the Virgin Mary and saying the "Our Father".  But China’s government is officially atheist—Communist Party members are forbidden from belonging to a religion.  So of course, Catholic priests must be approved by the government in Beijing (Wikipedia, that source of all knowledge, says:  “All worship must legally be conducted through state-approved churches belonging to the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA), which does not accept the primacy of the Roman Pontiff.”).  In the past, those who disagreed “were subject to oppression, including long imprisonments as in the case of Cardinal Kung, and torture and martyrdom as in the case of Fr. Beda Chang, S.J." (again, Wikipedia).  According to the Pew Research Center, only about 5% of Chinese people declare themselves Christian.  China never ceases to amaze me with its ability to say one thing and do another:  A non-Christian country that has imprisoned Christians for spreading the Word now has citizens that want to celebrate Christmas! 

Just because they put up some decor doesn't mean anything, I've grumbled inwardly, more than once.  But isn't that what happens in America?  Can you honestly tell me that ALL of those light-hanging American present-slingers think about WHY?

"There's wealth associated with Christmas," one of my ex-pat friends said. 

She had a point.  Thanksgiving weekend sees a whopping $50 billion in retail sales, according to the National Retail Federation--that's 20% of total annual sales—possibly more. 

"It's a sign of status to spend and to do what foreigners do," my friend continued.  She'd lived in Shanghai a bit longer than I had, so her information was usually good.  "That's what they care about.  It has nothing to do with beliefs."  I agreed that she was probably right, but I still felt like a child unwilling to share her favorite toy.  Here in Shanghai, I find myself ungenerous with my own religion. 

I also find myself unable to attend church most of the time.  Teaching working adults means that I work Saturday evenings and Sunday mornings.  My days off are Monday and Tuesday, and most of the time I am running errands--or hiding in my apartment, away from 23 million people, watching Netflix.  I don't make the effort to ride two subways over an hour away to go to a quiet weekday mass.  I've probably attended church three times here since I arrived in July of 2013.

My unintentional Scrooginess with my students has forced me to take a good hard look at myself and my beliefs.  Whether Chinese people believe in Christ or not is not really for me to judge, is it?  Will Christmas lose its meaning for me just because millions of people blindly celebrate Christmas?  Sometimes I'm afraid it will.  Then...the problem here is with my own faith--not with what other people do.

It would be so much easier to stay angry at my students, and to even blame them somehow, no matter how irrational that sounds.

However, rather than making an opportunity to invite Chinese people to discuss Christmas, to learn about what it means, I've been shutting them down.  I've been shutting the door.

Is that what a good Christian does?

I keep coming back to Matthew 7:5.  I'm worrying about the behavior of others--judging it--when I should deal with my own shortcomings.

Americans consider blowing half a year's savings on Christmas a sign of status, too.  We want that perfect Disney-Hallmark-Christian Christmas, when everyone in the family gets along, the meal is perfect, and the gifts are unforgettable.  We make ourselves crazy trying to make this happen.  "Keep the Christ in Christmas" seems like clichéd advice from a bingo-playing granny, but Granny has a point.  What's more important to me, to us:  missing family to work overtime so we can buy the latest gadgets and the hottest fashions?  Or having a smaller, less expensive holiday, but one in which we can actually spend time with loved ones?

The meaningful thing, the good thing, is usually not the flashiest.  A good Christmas is usually not the one we see on TV--we see the extravagant Christmas, the perfect Christmas.  And we all want that.  But is it real?

But some of my best Christmas thoughts aren't about gifts at all. 

When I was a child, my mom used to put a little nightlight in the bathroom for us at Christmas time, or in our bedrooms when we were sick.  The nightlight was a little ceramic house, maybe five inches square, painted like brown brick, its roof draped with snow the way a gingerbread house is coated with frosting.  A single small light bulb glowed from the house's tiny windows, shining through the holes ("ornaments") on the little tree outside the house.  So warm and so cozy!  How many nights did I fall asleep looking at it?

I also used to love to watch the tree.  My dad put the lights on a timer, and sometimes if I couldn't sleep I'd sneak out to the couch and stare at the tree while the lights were still on--the bubble lights gurgling, the silver horses dangling on their red cords, Mom's reindeer hanging from the prickly pine branches.  The little portraits my sister and I had made in preschool hanging near the top of the tree.  I have felt more peace looking at a Christmas tree--alone in the cozy darkness of my house--than I have almost anywhere else.

It occurs to me that both of these thoughts are about light, and how Christians are supposed to be the light of the world.

I am human and I have messed up.  I've been stingy when perhaps I can find a way to share.

I will try my best to change that this Christmas.

Postscript:  During a Current Events class about the American tradition of Thanksgiving, one of my students wanted to know the difference between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  I had to smile, because her confusion was understandable:  due to marketing and the media, everything between Halloween and Valentine's Day probably seems one big candy and gift fest.

Carefully, I told them that Christians believe Christmas is the day Christ was born.  Most of them nodded.  They've heard of Christ, and they seem to know the basics.  Some of them did seem to know that decoration and presents are just for show a lot of the time--no matter the holiday, no matter the country.

I'll admit when I saw IHOP's holiday pancakes commercial (online) right after Halloween, I felt a wave of nostalgia and homesickness.  People in the marketing business know exactly what they're doing, and we fall for it every time. 

Without trying to sound preachy, I told my students that the commercialism bothers me.  It does hurt me sometimes--here and at home--when people put up a tree or buy presents without thinking about why.  It's exactly like having a birthday party and not even speaking to the guest of honor--we wouldn't do that to a human person--why are we doing it to Jesus?

Christmas is in the heart, not in the other stuff.

Post New Year

Feb. 7

It's 9:44 am, and it has been raining for over 24 hours. 

That's not stopping the New Year, though.

The fireworks stands have vanished, but apparently some people have a stash.  As the Shanghairen return in droves to the city, pushing and shoving, the thunder of fireworks echoes in the canyons between high rises, booming up to Heaven and frightening away evil spirits.

This must be the safest place in the world right now--from evil, I mean.  Although, if I was a Communist government, I'd be more than a little cautious about this.  One of my first thoughts (as an American, of course), was "Wow, this is a LOT of gunpowder!  If a group wanted to revolt, they'd have some serious firepower at their disposal."

Red bits of firecracker paper swirl in the wind and become soggy chunks in the gutters. 

Feb. 10

It snowed yesterday and today!  No accumulation, though.

Yesterday I went to Lujiazui where all the new, crazy-looking "Jetsons"-type buildings are.  I saw all sorts of cute little kids bundled up and laughing delightedly at this new white stuff floating down into their mittens and onto their faces.  I didn't hold back my grins.  So cute!