Today's Reading
PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
REJECTION
September 2019
The very last thing that any teacher wants to do—and the very first thing that I did at Sichuan University, even before I set foot on campus—is to inform students that they cannot take a class. Of course, some would say that rejection is a normal experience for young Chinese. From the start of elementary school, through a constant series of examinations, rankings, and cutoffs, children are trained to handle failure and disappointment. At a place like Sichuan University, it's simply a matter of numbers: eighty-one million in the province, sixteen million in the city, seventy thousand at the university. Thirty spots in my classroom. The course title was Introduction to Journalism and Nonfiction, and I had chosen those words because, in addition to being simple and direct, they did not promise too much. Given China's current political climate, I wasn't sure what would be possible in such a class.
Some applicants considered the same issue. During the first semester that I taught, a literature major picked out one of the words in the title—nonfiction—and gave an introduction of her own:
In China, you will see a lot of things, but [often] you can't say them. If you post something sensitive on social platforms, it will be deleted.... In many events, Non-Fiction description has disappeared. Although I am a student of literature, I don't know how to express facts in words now.
Two years ago, on November 18th, 2017, a fire broke out in Beijing, killing 19 people. After the fire, the Beijing Municipal Government began a 40-day urban low-end population clean-up operation. At the same time, the "low-end population clean-up" became a forbidden word in China, and all Chinese media were not allowed to report it. I have not written an article related to this event, and it will always exist only in my memory.
As a student of Chinese literature, I have a hard time writing what I want to write because I am afraid what I write will probably be deleted.
Applicants handled this issue in different ways. I requested a writing sample in English, and most students sent papers that they had researched for other courses. Some titles suggested that the topics had been chosen because, by virtue of distance or obscurity, they were unlikely to be controversial: "Neoliberal Institutionalism in the Resolution of Yom Kippur War," "The Motive of Life Writing for Aboriginal Women Writers in Australia." Other students took the opposite approach, finding subjects close to home but following the government line; one applicant's essay was titled "The Necessity of Internet Censorship." There was also safety in ideology. A student from the College of Literature and Journalism submitted a Marxist interpretation of Madame Bovary. ("Capitalism has cleaned up the establishment of the old French society, and to some extent deconstructed various resistances that limit economic and social development.") Another student abandoned every traditional subject—politics, business, culture, literature—and instead produced, in prose that was vaguely biblical, a five-hundred-word description of a pretty girl he had seen on campus:
'She was a garden—her shoots are orchards of pomegranates, henna, saffron, calamus and cinnamon, frankincense and myrrh. She was a fountain in the garden—she was all the streams flowing from Lebanon, limpid and emerald, pacific and shimmering....'
My first impressions were literary: I saw the words before I met the students. Their English tended to be slightly formal, but it wasn't stiff; there were moments of emotion and exuberance. Sometimes they made a comment that pushed against the establishment. ("I am still under eighteen years old now, living in an ivory tower isolated from the world outside. I'm expecting to change it.") All of them were undergraduates, and for the most part they had been born around the turn of the millennium. They had been middle school students in 2012, when Xi Jinping had risen to become China's leader.
Since then, Xi had consolidated power to a degree not seen since the days of Mao Zedong, and in 2018, the constitution was changed to abolish term limits. These college students were members of the first generation to come of age in a system in which Xi could be leader for life.
The last time I had arrived in Sichuan as a teacher was in 1996, when Deng Xiaoping was still alive. While reading applications, I imagined how it would feel to return to the classroom, and I copied sentences that caught my eye:
Only when a nation knows its own history and recognizes its own culture can it gain identity.
Just as Sartre said, men are condemned to be free. We are left with too many choices to struggle with, yet little guidance.
Actually, all of us are like screws in a big machine, small but indispensable. Only when everyone works hard will our country have a brighter future.
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