Volume CXXXIII, Number 1 September 7, 2001 f

Life in China: A Bowdoin Perspective
OREN M. ABELES
Staff Writer

The first in a series of articles by a former Bowdoin student currently residing in China

It's 6:30 in the morning and all I want is another half-hour of sleep before I have to get up to teach my first day of classes at the Tanghu Middle School, a Communist Party boarding school in Shuang Liu, China. I toss over on my hard Chinese mattress, but something is keeping me up. As I start to gain conscious I realize what that something is. It's The Beatles. Someone is playing "Hey Jude" extraordinarily loud. Its not my roommates. Alex is still sleeping and Kevin has already gotten up and left. The music, it turns out, blares out of the Tanghu School's numerous loudspeakers. The students, along with half the neighborhood, are being woken up for the day.

"Hey Jude" comes to an end, but it is replaced by the impatient voice of a man barking out commands. I only speak a few words of Mandarin, but I can tell from his tone that he is not a happy camper. He snaps and snarls for about 30 minutes, but by the time I have jogged the half a block to the school to investigate what is going on the loudspeakers have been turned off and the students are milling around quietly as though nothing unusual has happened.
I eat breakfast, which this morning consists of soy milk, a hard boiled egg, and a steamed pork bun. Pork is a healthy part of every well balanced meal in China. Two weeks ago I was a confirmed vegetarian. Since I arrived here I have had pork at least three times a day. If there was a way to drink pork I am sure I would have been introduced to it.

I spend the next couple of hours in my office, reviewing my lesson plans and then beginning the Virginia Woolf novel that I brought with me. Just as Virginia and I are really starting to get acquainted, the same Mandarin voice from this morning starts booming out commands over the loudspeakers. I drop my book, run down the stairs in the direction of the raucous and come to the end of a hallway that overlooks the school's soccer field. There, lined up in geometrically perfect lines, is the entire student body of over 3000 children.
The head gym teacher stands with a microphone on a platform at one side of the field. As I watch, he orders them to move around into different formations. Coaches and teachers circulate through the lines of students, berating the ones that fall out of place. My first impression is one of ethnocentric disgust. "How can little kids be forced to march like soldiers, and how dare those teachers manhandle the children." During college I was fascinated and enthusiastic about Communism, but I can already feel my once high opinion of Marx going down the drain. One of the female gym teachers goes nuts because a 12 year old boy was talking to his neighbor. She is screaming, her face inches away from his, and I can see that the little boy is petrified. I want to go over there and give her a piece of my American mind. But I don't.

There is a brilliant documentary on the Vietnam War called Hearts and Minds. Throughout the movie, spliced into scenes of villages burning and American soldiers marching, are shots of an American high school football game. The players act like they are going into battle, and the coaches scream at them as though they were their commanding officers. Later in the day, when I am alone again in my office, I remember the documentary, and all of the other times I have seen American teachers and coaches (and parents) treat their children as though they were soldiers. I may be on the other side of the earth, but lots of things about life here feel eerily familiar.