Dilemmas of a Chinese Study Abroad Student: Where to raise our Kids?
by Wang Houhou
translated by Angelo Ngai
On my most recent trip to Boston, I had the chance to meet up with my former classmate, “D”. D was now a Masters student at MIT, a typical example of what Chinese parents’ like to call “someone else’s perfect child.” D was already a Canadian citizen, she had come to Canada at the age of 15 where she attended high-school through university and later worked in finance for several years. When we were classmates in primary school D was “Class-Head,” as expected she went on to become the leader of various student groups during college. We hadn’t seen each other in 12 years, and D had changed significantly since our childhood days.
While sitting at the Park Bar next to Harvard, she began discussing her future plans with me: “I have been thinking a lot about whether I want to raise my children in the U.S. or China. I don’t want them to grow up breathing polluted air, but at the same time I would rather they didn’t grow up to be ‘Chinese-Americans.’ I want my children to actually “be Chinese,” to speak their language fluently and be competent in the manners and customs of Chinese culture. Then again, I still think they should have all the benefits of a private American education. After all, China’s current college system is a mess of hyper-competition and the over-privileged children of the “new-rich.” I don’t want my kids to spend their formative years in a place like that, but I also don’t know how I could meaningfully expose them to the good aspects of Chinese culture while in the U.S.”
Upon hearing all of this, my first reaction was: “D, you’re only 23, why are you worrying about all of this right now?”
D replied: “Of course I need to worry about it, my children should have all the resources that my parents provided for me, I want them to grow up happily in a healthy environment.”
“Well, why not move back to China,” I asked, “In all honesty I think that Chinese primary education is quite good. I mean, both of us got our early education on the mainland.”
D replied, “That’s true, but I think there have already been significant changes in China since we were in school. Unhealthy levels of competition are becoming more and more commonplace, and for many good primary schools it’s nearly impossible to even get your child a spot without guanxi (“connections”). I don’t want my kids to grow up in that kind of environment; the reason I came to MIT in the first place was to eventually be able to provide them with a better alternative.”
She continued, “Compared to China, I think America’s private upper-education system is better developed. Also, in U.S. society people are taught right from wrong. When unjust things happen here, people get angry and are willing to speak up. Everyone approves of cultivating this type of mindset in American education, but the mainland isn’t like that yet.”
After talking with D, I started thinking about our generation of Chinese Study-Abroad Students: What should we do when the time comes to raise our own families?
I had already discussed this issue with some other female Chinese friends studying in the U.S. Regardless of whether they ultimately wanted to raise their kids in the States or China, everyone agreed on the importance of raising children to be “international,” to gain a wider perspective from experiencing life in different countries.
With these issues in mind, I kept bringing this question up with my fellow Chinese international students. To my surprise, the vast majority all wanted to raise their kids in China (there were only 2 who said they preferred their kids grow up in the U.S., from primary school to college). The answers my friends gave largely reflected their own experience studying abroad: “If I got the chance to study-abroad, and reaped large benefits from being exposed to both Chinese and American culture, then my children can take the same path and reap the same benefits.”
In truth, I was more than a little surprised by this response. Our parents’ generation all thought that the opportunity to move to America not only was the height of success, but could ensure a far better future for one’s children. This being the case, why was it that so many young people of my generation wanted to return to China to raise their families?
Chinese early-education is far better than its critics realize.
A large number of Chinese international-students will tell you that the academic knowledge they gain abroad is only one small piece of a larger process of growth and maturation. The ability to live and learn in a foreign environment, to interact with all types of people of different nationalities, is itself ultimately more valuable than taking any particular course at any particular university. For our generation, getting to study in the U.S. is like peering into an inverted mirror: in observing American society and its contrast with our own, we come to more clearly understand ourselves and our families.
Eventually, at some point most of us come to realize that all the knowledge and East Asian discipline we were “force-fed” as children actually turned out to be incredibly useful.
Furthermore, this intellectual foundation was only formed by the educational practices we were exposed to in our youth. Upon turning 17 in the U.S., an American might have the ability to sample courses that a Chinese student never would. But we started rigorously learning math at age 6, got used to waking up at 6 AM and learned that you don’t go to bed until your work is finished; these all are incredibly important skills that were cultivated by Chinese parenting and schooling. We may have grown up with pressure and harsh discipline, but after coming to the U.S. we finally got the chance to realize how important our early Chinese education was for our future success.
How important is it to grow up bilingual?
My American friend Angelo is now living in Beijing. His father is Chinese and his mother is American, but he was raised by his mother in New York so he didn’t grow up speaking any Chinese. It was only in college that he began formally studying Mandarin. In his opinion, raising a child to be bilingual isn’t the most important aspect of their education, more important is the ability to cultivate their mastery of a single language, to focus on using that language to allow the child’s communicative and analytic skills to reach their highest potential. His own language-learning process has been a reflection of this, the analytic skills and creative thinking he cultivated in English have been very useful for him in the process of learning Chinese. These skills not only have enabled him to learn Chinese unusually fast, but also have helped him make sense of concepts that are completely foreign to American culture.
On the other hand, a Professor in college once told me about his experience teaching American-born-Chinese students (ABCs). He said that because these students were born and raised in the U.S., their oral English abilities were no different from other Americans students; they had no accent and certainly nothing to culturally mark them as “foreign.” Yet, my Professor often found significant issues in their writing ability (which sometimes was no better than that of international-students from the mainland). His theory was that the families of these students simply lacked the necessary language-background to properly cultivate their children’s writing skills.
I think that most students of my generation still hope to raise bilingual children, and plan to apply equal effort to foster their children’s comprehensive language abilities in both English and Chinese. But coming from the perspective of a mixed Chinese-American, I think Angelo’s view is worth considering: that comprehensive mastery of at least one language is more important than being bilingual, not just to increase the elegance of one’s spoken and written communicative ability, but also because this degree of competency is very important for cultivating an individual’s “higher-level” analytic and thinking skills.
How to choose between Chinese culture and American culture?
I first came to study abroad in the U.S. when I was 17, this year I turned 23. Except for one year when I returned to China for my studies, I have been in the U.S. for nearly 5 years. At this point, unless they pay close attention to my attire or overhear me talking about China, most Americans think I grew up in the States. Essentially, you become “American” once you get an American passport. What can this tell us about American culture? It tells us that the American perspective on “who is American” is very different from the Chinese perspective on “who is Chinese.” American society is a society of immigrants, there really isn’t any one particular cultural label that is necessary to mark you as “American”.
In contrast, Angelo is in a very different situation from me. At this point his Chinese is quite fluent (often you can’t even hear his accent). He drinks tea, eats steamed buns from Qingfeng Baozi Pu, lives with a Chinese family, reads the Analects (the vernacular-Chinese version) and has watched every episode of 《大时代》(an old Chinese TV show about doing business in Shenzhen). Yet, because of his background and his appearance, almost no one in China would mistake him for being Chinese. People are extra-polite with him, but they still turn to their friends and say: “This is my American friend Angelo, his Chinese is great!”
My former classmate M (the one who moved to Canada when she was young) once put it this way: “Chinese culture is deep and complex. Even if you speak Chinese, if you didn’t grow up in China you will never have a full mastery of its subtleties. In fact, using the Chinese standard, ‘American culture’ doesn’t really count as ‘culture’ at all. This doesn’t mean that ‘American culture’ doesn’t exist, but that it mainly consists of a particular outlook on life and a set of social values: honesty, fairness, equality and living as an ‘upright’ person, rather than a particular set of traditions. Regardless of their original cultural background, anyone who adopts this attitude and makes an earnest attempt can assimilate into American society fairly well.”
M also told me that her plan was to raise her kids in China until age 14. From her perspective, location was less important than learning to live bravely and proactively. Compared to American society, Chinese society may be rife with corruption and social issues, but learning to navigate a more complex social world where true disparity is revealed without pretense carries its own benefits. Nowhere in the States would her children be able to experience the dense, inter-connected layers of human relationships that define Chinese culture. M was determined that her children would attend elementary school in China. She also had considered moving to Europe (after all, the European continent was about the same size as North America but more diverse). Eventually though, she decided that life in Europe would be “too equal” and “too relaxed.” Only by letting her children observe and understand the true face of inequality could she ensure that they would be well-prepared to deal with the ways of the world.
Another Chinese international student of my generation, W, once told me that if he has kids he wants them to attend an American University only after receiving all of their pre-college education in China for the following reasons:
- He doesn’t like the American early-education system, which he thinks puts too much emphasis on developing creativity and character while neglecting academic basics. He thinks that he can provide an early educational environment in China that is just as nurturing as an American one, but that also gives his children strong academic fundamentals.
- He strongly believes (early education is the focus of his academic research) that the influence of parents, both direct and indirect, is by far the most important variable for children’s educational performance. He himself attended very mediocre Beijing schools from elementary school to high-school, always in the “standard”-track classes, and still ended up being one of the most intelligent and capable students I know. He believes that the key reason was good parenting.
- He sees the transmission of Chinese culture as important not because it’s “something Chinese people are supposed to do,” but because he wants his kids to be familiar with their roots, to “know where they came from.” He has no intentions of telling his kids “you are Chinese, and therefore need to do X,Y and Z.” Rather, the point he wants to teach them is “this is where you came from, now you need to figure who you are and where you are going in life.”
- W admits that he is “thoroughly Chinese.” Although his intellect is the product of an international education, his feelings and emotional intelligence remain very Chinese, and he hopes he can pass this on to his children. Again, the goal is not to force his children to “be Chinese,” but rather to give them a good foundation to make a definitive choice later about who they want to be and where they want to live.
Most of us [young Chinese people] born in the 90’s don’t yet need to make a definitive choice about these questions, but our experiences abroad have left us in a unique position: we have far more choice in deciding how we want to live our lives and rear our children than our parents did.
Come to think, the possibilities are quite exciting.
