LECTURE:

THE WRITINGS OF THE TEACHING FOREIGNERS IN CHINA

A substantial part of late twentieth-century travel writing about China

is done by those who – like Peter Hessler – have spent some time working as
teachers at various Chinese schools and universities. There are a few
specifications that need to be made in order to clarify the context in which
these travelogues were produced.
Entering the sphere of higher education in China is a period of major
transition in one's life. It is no smaller transition for the foreigner who moves
to China to teach there for several semesters and who will later write a travel
book, describing his or her experience. To fully understand what it means for
a writing laowai1 to go to live on the campus of a Chinese school or university
it is necessary to first have a brief look at the Chinese public high school and
the conditions in which the students live and study. This is important because
it is impossible to grasp the sheer magnitude of the change the Western
person’s experiences, without having a general idea of the school life. When
one opens a book written by a foreign teacher in China they immediately
become aware that, although the teacher did not have to personally go through
the same experiences as the students, he/she was an involved witness for
whom the experiences of the students truly became his/her own. In his book
Adrift in China Simon Myers aptly quotes a certain Guide for foreigners who
are about to enter the Chinese education system: “Once you are in China, you
will face not only the challenge of another educational system, but also a series
of unstable emotional experiences owing to the new cultural environment”
(Myers 17).

1
Laowai - one of several Chinese words for foreigner.
 When they enter the college or the university the Chinese students are
given for the very first time in their lives a certain measure of independence
and, even more importantly, some free time which they can use however they
please – an absolute novelty. At the Chinese middle school the concept of
spare time practically does not exist. They do have one free day on which they
are busy recuperating from the grueling week that has just passed and getting
ready to start the new one.
The majority of the writing foreign teachers in China teach in colleges
and universities. Few of them go to middle schools. However, middle school
experiences have prompted travel writers to produce some of the most
fascinating literature on life in China. Before publishing a book, many of those
teaches create their own weblogs while they're still in China and share their
experiences with interested readers. Sometimes they do not produce a book at
all but that does not make their writing less interesting.
One such author is Hank Jones who worked at a high school in Anhui
province and used to have a blog which was extremely popular with the online
reading community. Sadly, he had to stop blogging because he received death
threats for his sincere and uncompromising representation of the society he
was living in, and most of his writings were taken off-line. Hank Jones
displays no sense of humor in his writings and he takes life extremely
seriously. This is one of the reasons why his blog, marvelously written though
it is, is at times extremely depressing. The author feels personally hurt by the
daily petty injustices (as he sees them) and imperfections of the Chinese
school. Instead of trying to cope with them, he attempts to defeat them, which
inevitably leads to more disappointment. Sometimes the frustration he feels
turns into aggression towards himself:
I was angry at an antiquated, image obsessed reality, a
reality that I was a part of, for better or for worse, that define
what I had to do. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t want to be a window
 dresser, nor did I want to be a pedantic, rod wielding Victorian
school marm. Wasn’t there something in the middle? And if there
is, how can I find it when social, cultural, and most of all,
educational dictations refuse to allow me to do otherwise?
His disappointment with the system gradually increases until he begins
to question his own status in the school and the reasons for which he has been
hired:
[A]m I just some foreigner here to travel and rubber stamp
grades and play the role of window dresser? A window dresser,
as all experienced foreign teachers know, is sometimes what is
expected of foreign teachers here. You’re hired for image, to
fulfill the requirements that all colleges and universities must
have foreign teachers.
This ‘realization’ is typical of many writing teachers in China and the
theme haunts their books and weblogs. Even Peter Hessler who has spent
many years in China, periodically returns to this topic and reexamines it.
As was mentioned earlier, most of the teaching travel writers work in
colleges and universities. Their experience is similar to the experience of the
foreigners teaching in high schools but there are some very notable differences.
For the first time in their lives, for example, the students have some free time
on their hands, real free time which they can spend however they wish. It is at
this moment of their lives that they are given the opportunity to develop real
social relationships and to be relatively independent from their parents.
The great majority of the universities in China want to have some
foreign teachers, especially from English-speaking countries. In a nation
where the English language enjoys such a high status, for a university to have
a “real” Westerner in its staff is a question of prestige. For this reason, since
the gradual opening of China to the Western world in the 1980s and 1990s, a
score of Western teachers, adventurers and expatriates have flooded the
country. It is not quite clear what percentage of these teachers write about their
experiences and publish their writings but during the last decade there have
been an increasing number of travel books by foreign teachers in China. The
blogs written by such people are even more numerous; while the majority of
them do not have literary value, there are some truly impressive blogs whose
authors describe (or construct) contemporary Chinese reality in insightful and
idiosyncratic ways. Examples of such blogs are Sinosplice and Angry Chinese
Blogger.
Typically, when they arrive, the blogging university lecturers are
overwhelmed and excited by the new environment they find themselves in and
enter the honeymoon stage of the culture shock. This can be seen even in the
writings of the famous blogging lecturer Uriel Wittenberg, who was notorious
for his ‘negative’ attitude and willingness to criticize and condemn. In the first
pages of his account Western Teacher, Chinese College, he feels elated and
enthusiastic:
Simply put, China represents economic reality -- a much closer
reflection of how most of humanity lives than what we know in the
West. But my reason for being here, of course, is to escape the
intellectual and social Siberia that North America has become, and in
that I have been amply rewarded. Time will tell whether this is merely
a honeymoon phase, but so far everyone I've had any dealings with has
been utterly congenial. (Letter 1)
The process of teaching English in China has its own peculiarities. It is
entirely teacher oriented. The teacher stands on the podium and talks, and the
students listen. When the foreign teacher steps into the classroom for the first
time, he or she is taken aback by the students’ attitude. The students are very
quiet, they are afraid to speak and generally refuse to ask questions for fear of
losing face in front of their peers. When they do not understand something,
they will not tell you. However, as Wittenberg points out, if you give them
your phone number or e-mail, some of them will call you later, or write to you
with a series of pertinent questions, related to the material you have presented
to them. Not all foreign experts adapt to this situation. Some of them grow
bitter and start a confrontation with their students and colleagues (Wittenberg,
Letter 17).
A few a few weeks after he/she starts teaching, the writing foreigner
typically becomes self-conscious of how the students are perceiving them and
reports this in his/her travel account. Sometimes, when the writer finds a way
of discovering what he/she looks like in the eyes of the students, he/she makes
some very curious discoveries.
Everything we did was talked and written about… They
wrote about my foreign nose, which impressed them as
impossibly long and straight, and many of them wrote about my
blue eyes. This was perhaps the strangest detail of all, because
my eyes are hazel -- but my students had read that foreigners had
blue eyes, and they saw what they wanted to see. (Hessler 2001,
16)
This observation seems to imply that the “background books” Eco was
talking about with regard to Marco Polo can easily be found in the background
of the Chinese people as well. Bob Gifford seems to be making a similar
observation in his book China Road when talking about the businessman
Zhang Guoqing (Gifford 209).
Another thing regularly pointed out by writing foreign lecturers is that
apparently the Chinese school system leaves the student with the impression
that making mistakes leads to losing face. Consequently, they try to avoid
exposing themselves to this risk. This kind of behaviour is reported in almost
all travel accounts and it happened numerous times in my own seminars. Most
authors content themselves with repeatedly mentioning this phenomenon and
noting how it annoyed them. Some of them, however, go to a greater depth
and relate the silence of the students to the more profound problem of the
invisible barrier between the cultures, especially when topics such as racism
or xenophobia are concerned. One of these authors is Hessler. As he describes
the reaction of his students he makes the following observation:
[T]here was an instant hush and you found yourself
looking at forty-five circles of black hair as the students dropped
their heads. They had done the same thing a week earlier, during
another discussion, when I had said gently that I thought racism
and xenophobia were problems everywhere, even in China.
(Hessler 2001, 169)
Another fundamental problem that emerges from the travel accounts of
the “foreign experts” in China is the problem of communicational context.
When people communicate, the context is one of the major, though unseen,
aspects. You can never be sure that what interests you will also be interesting
to your listeners, especially if they belong to a very different culture. Peter
Hessler, author of the hugely popular travel accounts Oracle Bones and River
Town, rightfully remarks in an interview that the context in which many
Chinese university students view their material is set by their textbooks and is
not subject to change. Discussing the textbooks the Chinese students had to
use, he points out that they would discuss education in America and they
would give some examples of incidents that occurred in some university in
South Carolina where some students were raped. This was what the stress was
on. They would discuss religion and they would only talk about the Jonestown
mass suicide.
It is worth noting that the majority of the writing foreign experts tend
to become indignant when their own culture is misread or misrepresented by
the host culture, remaining, at the same time, oblivious of their own
misrepresentations. Hessler, however, is quick to notice the correlation. To
him, this is one of the things that one has to avoid doing when one is talking
about China, having lived there for a certain period – setting the wrong context.
This is one of the difficulties I have had to deal with when writing my book
about China. For instance, I might read a captivating story in the Chinese press
that a certain number of people in a certain Chinese village have been infected
with AIDS through blood transfusion, but that might not be the right thing to
bring to the reader's attention immediately. One needs to make sure they are
sufficiently familiar with the context to understand the story. I find this one of
the most difficult things to achieve. 2
In China the question of why you are studying English is a fascinating
one to many foreign teachers. Both Jones and Hessler report that some
students keep diaries only in English. According to Hessler the newly acquired
foreign language gives the students a different sense of themselves. They do
not keep diaries in Chinese because that is a key part of their identity – it
allows them to escape from something they grew up with (Hessler 2001, 17).
For some writing foreign teachers the idea of the identity of the Chinese
student remains a key one throughout their narratives. The author of River
Town devotes a considerable portion of his book to exploring the subject. He
does not devote a whole chapter to it but he discusses it frequently throughout
the narrative. The life of the students after their graduation interests him
deeply. After he leaves his university in Fuling he remains in touch with many
of them.
It is understandable why the self-identity problems faced by the
students after their graduation should interest the foreign teachers so much.
Hessler is not the only one to stay in touch with his students and write about
it. A number of writing lecturers inform the readers of their books and weblogs
that they kept writing to their former students a long time after their teaching

2
A good illustration of the communication failure caused by the lack of proper context is provided
by Peter Hessler in his book River Town (Hessler 2009:145)
days were over. Almost invariably, one can find in their writings a strong
connection between the student’s post-university life and hes/her self-identity
problems. Perhaps this fascination is related to the fact that the newly arrived
foreign teachers in China always face self-identity problems of their own. The
new environment, sometimes perceived as threatening, makes them ask
themselves who they are and what their role is supposed to be in this foreign
society. They realize that China is not something homogenous. They soon find
out that many people in the cities they go to have strong ideas of excluding
outsiders.
In the eyes of the foreign expert the ex-student looking for a job in a
faraway city is in a similar position. Through the letters of his/her former
students the foreign teacher is suddenly able to use someone else's eyes to see
a world similar to the one he/she settled down in some time ago. For the first
time the students realize how their foreign teacher must have felt because they
feel like foreigners. Sometimes they try to hide their identity and where they
are from. For the first time they get the feeling of living in a completely
different place. This feeling of commiseration is easily detectable in the texts
produced by the foreign teachers, especially if they have already left the
country.
Almost all travel accounts produced by foreign teachers in China
mention the benefits of good university education. In his interview Hessler
points out that within three or four years the students who have received a
good education and have been lucky enough to find good jobs are earning
more than anyone they know from their home town. Again, however, not so
many authors dig deep enough to realize, like Hessler, that something is lost
in this process: the communication with their own families. They still deeply
respect their parents and certainly love them but when they have a problem of
some sort or a question, they can rarely turn to them for advice. Instead they
log on to the Internet and use search engines to get the information they need.
This is how they get their information about the world. They also turn to the
radio. In China there are many call-in shows where young people will call in
and ask for advice about boyfriends or about living together or about marriage.
One of my former students sent me an e-mail talking about this and she spoke
about this very seriously, much more seriously than she would speak about
any advice she got from her parents. This appears to be one of the main issues
in China – the sense of the generation gap because things have moved
extremely quickly.