My Place in Wanzhou
By Katie Bridges

“I guess that’s what happens in the end;

you start thinking about the beginning.”

(John Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Smith)

I’ve spent the past 21 months living in Wanzhou, Chongqing, trying to figure out what exactly my place is in this small city, four hours northeast of Chongqing’s metropolis.  I understand my role as a volunteer in Peace Corps (or, at least I think I get it—we’ve got those three goals . . .) and I’m excited about the role that China will play for me in my future careers and volunteer service in the US.  I have a whole new respect for the challenges immigrants must face, and after having to watch many instances of domestic violence (at least, as I understand them) play out on the street, I’m especially anxious to go home and find my own way to help in our country.  But trying to figure out what exactly my place is for Wanzhou and for my school, Chongqing Three Gorges University, has been a much more difficult question.

I don’t know about you, but I had a pretty clear image of what I thought Peace Corps looked like before I joined.  I think you’ll recognize the image:  mud hut, probably Africa, no running water, and probably no electricity.  A small village, more like a family, really, where even if everyone in the village is not thrilled to have an American in their midst, at least by the end you’ve made some close friends.  These close friends will let you sit in their house while they cook their families lunch or dinner, or perhaps invite you to bring your own laundry over so they can teach you how to take care of yourself in a new place.  I imagined spending hours in the evening reading, writing letters, and using the solitude to challenge myself in ways I could never even imagine before.

Had I ended up there, I think I would have understood my role a bit easier because it would have matched my expectations.  But in China it’s a bit harder.  Part of the difficulty is our primary role—we’re teachers at a university.  Our community, we’ve been told, is that university’s campus.  It’s hard to create sustainability even on American campuses—students are constantly rotating and unless you have a strong faculty advisor committed to a program, there is little guarantee that any program will continue.  Here we’re being asked to create sustainable projects in a place where you never know exactly what will change from day to day.  I’m pretty sure something will change . . . I just never know what.  The day before Thanksgiving (as I went to buy bread to make improvised stuffing) it was the bakery—completely gone, just a hole in the wall.  (Don’t worry, three days later, without seeing anyone working on it, suddenly it was back with brand-new shelves.)  So I’m trying to remember that the cards are stacked against me here when I’m asked to create something sustainable.  I’ve already seen how students’ groups, created by other students before I arrived here, thrive and then fail when just one student graduates and no one is ready or willing to pick up the reins.  In my aspirations statement, before arriving in China, I’d written a lot about partnerships, working with colleagues, and the kind of relationships I’d dreamed would be possible and the exciting discussions we could have.  I still wish this was a possibility, but I understand now much better the challenges that stand in our way.  My colleagues are busy.  They are preparing students for difficult national exams, teaching extra weekend courses, getting leaned on to raise scores, have a family or are desperately looking for the “Mr./Mrs. Right” that will please their relatives, and are attempting to get their masters so they can keep moving up in the college.  My colleagues who have been here for a few years know that I will come and go and the newer colleagues, who do show a bit of interest, are working hard to make it through their first year at this university.  They have a lot going on and even for me it’s hard to see how we can help each other in meaningful ways.

My one conclusion is that my role in Wanzhou has been to live here.  That’s it.  Just to live here.  I think I’m a good teacher, and I hope that my students have learned something in the oral English classes that I’ve taught for two years, but I’m also fully aware that my class is the last priority on their schedule and most of them don’t see the connection between what they learn in my class and the exams they must pass before they graduate.  They can tell me how having better English could help their job prospects, but they aren’t worried about those yet—there are plenty more exams to go before they need to start thinking that far ahead.  So while I’m not sure that my teaching has made a clear difference, I’m pretty sure that just living here has.  My students are shocked to learn (after knowing me for almost two years now) that I can go to the local market and buy fruits and vegetables by myself.  (They’ve finally stopped offering to help me—I guess they finally believe I can do it!)  I’m showing them an independent streak that surprises them.  The students snicker or look shocked when I go out in (long) shorts to play basketball or walk on the track, but I’m helping them to understand that women can be comfortable for sports too.  When I tell them my favorite breakfast is mantou, they laugh and finally it seems like maybe we’re a bit similar.  I stun the students and restaurant owners alike when I explain that I’m vegetarian and have been for over 14 years now.  This is completely opposed to what they’ve been told—you must eat meat or you’ll be sick.  So even that small part of who I am can shed light into a different culture, a different way of life.  (Sadly, I’ve made no converts . . . though they do eat veggie when they eat with me now, so that’s a start!)

In the community, I still can barely understand a word of what anyone says to me.  (If anyone would like to hear a heavy dialect, welcome to my Wanzhou.) Some days, this is really daunting and makes me feel like a failure.  I keep trying, on days that I’m up for it, and I know that the fruit, vegetable, and Shandong dabing sellers appreciate my attempts, even as we discuss the weather for the fiftieth day in a row.  I’m learning to get past these disappointments, to being okay with using students as translators, and accepting the fact that just by being here . . . here in little Wanzhou, where almost no other foreigners would want to come, I’m making a small difference to those around me.

P.S.  I would like to emphasize that I know we’re all in different situations, and I’m definitely speaking more from the countryside volunteers’ views.  Volunteers who live in the big cities, who have access to fluent English speakers and students who are ready to take on big issues, you have a range of other differences to make.  We shouldn’t all be making the same difference—one size does not fit all.
Katie Bridges is excited to be fulfilling her dream of being a Peace Corps Volunteer.  She is hoping to continue her work as a middle school English teacher when she returns to the US.

Why Peace Corps China?

…Continuing the Conversation

By Bonnie Thie

During IST I had the chance to discuss this topic with some of you.  Since you are living the experience, hearing your views stimulated further thoughts for me.  If this isn’t a real Peace Corps experience, what is?  Is it serving in a site with physical hardship?  Is it being isolated from American life?  Is it making an impact in the lives of disadvantaged people in another country?  Is it learning to see things from a different point of view?

Does a real Peace Corps experience have physical hardship?  Here we have no mud huts, kerosene lanterns, and water from a well so some refer to this as posh corps.  Thinking back to my own experience as a PCV in Afghanistan in the 1970s, and Afghanistan was second from the bottom on the list of undeveloped countries, I did live in a mud house and buy my water from a sakow who carried it from the river in a goat skin.  But when I extended for a third year and moved to Kabul, I lived in a house with running water, electricity, and even a refrigerator.  In fact, the majority of the Volunteers had similar houses. And my mud house in Faizabad with its fruit trees and mountain views, was more comfortable than the apartments that most of you live in here.  Later, from talking with other RPCVs I learned that this was typical for a majority of Peace Corps countries.

Is a real Peace Corps experience being isolated from American life?  Again, even in the 1970s my experience was that some sites were very isolated, but even in Faizabad which was the most remote site in Afghanistan, we had US ethnomusicologists living there for several months, an Italian film crew tracing the route of Marco Polo, an expedition of big game hunters headed to the Pamirs.  In Kabul, Volunteers could choose the life of an expat, hanging out at the USAID staff house, playing tennis on clay courts with ball boys, and socializing with the international community.  Here, the isolation is of a different sort—you can choose to have email and telephone calls daily.  But the language isolation seems to be far more profound.  Chinese is a less accessible language (the Foreign Service rates it twice as hard as others) so you have what is called “language isolation” –  most, but not all of you, are constantly surrounded by people saying things you don’t understand.

In another way, and I have heard many of you speak of this, isolation here is greater than most other Peace Corps countries – that feeling of distance in interactions with others in your community.  Often, your fellow teachers don’t return your invitations to dinner, the waiban doesn’t take a few extra minutes to ask about you or to get to know you, and your school community disappears when finals are over.

Is a real Peace Corps experience one in which you make a visible impact?  Last year some COS’ing Volunteers expressed regret that they had not gone to a real Peace Corps country where they could have made an impact.  It turned out that they were thinking of a primitive location where they could have built a water supply system or showed a farmer how to improve his crop yield.  While some Volunteers do have such assignments, when I have talked to Volunteers who tried to do these things, I often heard of immense frustration – getting a farmer to talk much less to adopt a new practice rarely happened; the new water supply system a year after the Volunteer left was no longer functioning because no one repaired the break in the pipe.  And so on.  But over and over from 1961 onward, countries have asked for English teachers for their schools.  It was true then and is even truer now, that English is a major key to development:  it is the language for advanced study in science and engineering and it is the language of commerce.

But, although I certainly didn’t understand it in 1975 when I left Afghanistan, something else that hasn’t changed is this:  just by living in your town or city, just by buying your vegetables in the market, just by teaching students to speak up in class and move around the classroom for group work, you have profoundly affected the views of 100s of people about westerners.  Your students, and those with whom they come in contact over the rest of their lives, will have a different view of what an American is – your ideas about work, fun, fairplay, the possibilities in life.  By volunteering to teach and live here for two years, you have made an impact.

And most of you, perhaps not now, but over time, will realize that you too have been impacted.  By hearing the questions of your students, the comments of your seatmate on the train, and reading the newspapers, you will have learned to see the world, America, and your lives from a different point of view.

So, I come back to the question of what is the real Peace Corps experience.  We are all familiar with the three goals:  help meet needs for trained men and women, help other people better understand Americans, help Americans better understand others.  But I decided to go back to 1961 to find out what the designers of the 1960s Peace Corps thought.  I found that while the March 1, 1961 Executive Order signed by President Kennedy, mentioned “skilled Americans building goodwill and building the peace, it stated only two goals:

“To improve Americans’ understanding of other peoples, and to help others in the countries in which we serve to better understand Americans.”

And the E.O. emphasized that our mission is “to promote world peace and friendship.”

If you are still reading, you can see that I think there is no Peace Corps experience more authentic or real than that of PC China.  You experience hardship, isolation, and you make a profound impact.  And you learn to see the world from the point of view of its most populous nation.

•

Why Peace Corps belongs in China’s “Megacities”
By Philip Razem

A month before I was sworn in as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Chengdu, China, a good friend of mine was concluding her two-year service in Benin, Africa.  The letters she wrote me were rich in tales of her teaching English on a dirt floor classroom, suffering from constant digestive ailments, and integrating into her small, extremely poor African village of a few hundred people. She undoubtedly left a positive impression of America and the American people on these villagers, and, as all PCVs hope after their service concludes, planted seed of positivity will someday blossom for future generations both in and outside her tiny village. When she arrived in 2005, she was a type of mythical, glowing goddess, and two years later, she left as the same glowing goddess because a very large percentage of her students knew they would never have the opportunity to see the land she called home, America, for themselves.  The idea of America being “mythical” in the minds of many PCVs’ students, counterparts, and friends from poor, rural villages and towns across the world is commonplace.  Even in some parts of China, the wealthiest country to which Peace Corps sends volunteers, this feeling lingers every time a curious Chinese opens the newspaper and sees Meiguo, which translates to “Beautiful Country.”  But for many of my students, America isn’t an only-exists-in-the-newspaper myth at all.  They know it exists because many of them have been there, or are planning to visit or go to school there in the coming years.  Unlike my Peace Corps Africa friend, when I walk into my specific university classroom, I barely glow at all.

That’s not to say all Peace Corps China volunteers don’t beam, but my specific luster is slightly tinged because I teach a district of one of China’s “Megacities.”  Population: Over thirty million.

Last week, I delivered a unique presentation entitled “So you are going to America…” to twenty or so Chinese university students who will be living, working, and studying in America for the summer.  After the presentation, I walked home to my apartment just outside the gates of Southwest University, about one hour north of the thriving metropolis of Chongqing, and thought, “How many PCVs around the world will give a presentation on that topic to their students and coworkers? We all teach about American life and culture when we are serving, even if we never set foot inside a classroom, but how often do we teach it to people who actually get to experience it first-hand in America?”  The answer for a large majority of PCVs is most certainly, “Never.”

Peace Corps China is unique.  Some volunteers teach English in huge cities like Chongqing, and others teach in small, rural settings that often resemble my friend’s African village, odd for a city within the borders of the world’s third largest economy. In fact, China’s megacities already account for 75 percent of China’s gross domestic product; by 2025, that figure will have risen to more than 90 percent (Newsweek, May 26, 2008). Unlike America’s higher education system, China’s developing system has built and relocated its prestigious universities to where the greatest amounts of financial resources can be found.  Many PC China volunteers argue that, as volunteers, we should be teaching at the schools who can’t afford foreign, native-English-speaking teachers, but I, on the other hand, think more volunteers need to be placed in these “megacities,” more specifically, at universities like Southwest University, a “Project 211” school.

Project 211 schools, which comprise only about six percent of China’s 1,700 institutions of higher education, are charged with the responsibility of training 80% of all doctoral students, 66% of all graduate students, 50% of all foreign students, and as much as one-third of all undergraduates. They offer 85 percent of the higher educational system’s key subjects, hold 96% of the country’s key laboratories, and absorb 70% of all scientific research funding (People’s Daily, 2008).

Chinese education has only slightly evolved from what it was thousands of years ago. A single test – the College Entrance Exam, known as the gaokao, is feared and despised by nearly every Chinese teenager – has the potential to decide your entire future.  A low score on the test means a life with fewer opportunities for personal and financial security; a high score means acceptance into a key school.  With a key school’s diploma comes valuable personal relationships, or guanxi, and the possibility of pursuing a higher degree abroad or finding a lucrative job in a highly competitive market.  If a graduate is especially lucky, he or she can even steer these connections to a position serving Chinese government, eventually working his or her way up the political ladder to a top position that makes decisions concerning the lives of millions.  And it all traces back to one 3-day exam at the end of high school.

In other words, the leaders of Tomorrow’s China attend universities like mine.

The sad, inconvenient truth is that the majority of students who are children of poor farmers from the countryside will become teachers of the next generation of students who are the children of these same poor farmers, and thus, powerless in future Chinese domestic and foreign policy-planning.  We need to ask ourselves, in our unique Peace Corps China environment, “Are PCVs humanitarians here to provide strictly humanitarian aid to those of less-fortunateness, or rather American world citizens here provide a kind of soft diplomacy to students who will ultimately lead a self-determined, newly empowered China onto the world’s stage?” I believe we are the latter.

China’s Peace Corps Volunteers are not delivering babies, organizing teams for well-digging, or teaching ABC’s.  We are giving the world’s fastest developing country its first real taste of American everything.  We are the real American diplomats, and our negotiations begin when the classroom bell rings.  Our impact on the future of China is monumental, especially when a fortunate “megacity” teacher like me is talking directly to the powers-to-be.  We might not glow like mythical gods, but the lessons of tolerance, acceptance, and world citizenry Peace Corps China Volunteers teach to the Middle Kingdom’s next wave of leaders and decision-makers will aid not only our powerful countries, but the entire world and its people.

Philip Razem is proud to call himself a teacher.  He was an English Literature graduate student and English Composition instructor at SUNY Fredonia before entering Peace Corps in 2007.  He teaches English Communication, Western Culture, Debate, and Introduction to Shakespeare at Southwest University in Beibei, Chongqing.  He calls Buffalo, NY, his hometown and spends a great deal of time praying for the Buffalo Bills to win a Superbowl.  When Phil returns to America this summer, 2009, he will proudly wander the country in search of Truth with his partner-in-crime, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden by his side. His blog is PhilipRazemInChina.blogspot.com and he welcomes any and all messages.

I want to apologize for the long period of no posting, but I have been busy with COS stuff and wrapping up my final weeks of classes in rural China. I have been busy with our in-country pseudo-literary magazine as well. And I’ve been busy with other stuff. If the word “laziness” comes to your mind, I won’t hold it against you.

I have asked a volunteer to write a piece about his life teaching English in the big city, and I also asked our Country Director to write something about Peace Corps China. The next 2 posts will be written by them about their China experiences and outlook.

Salut,
Dustin

These stands get the first piece of the economy.  Their mobility hinders their permanence, but they always snap up enough students who flow through each day, before the students can make it to the more established restaurants.  Besides, a bag of fried potatoes is a cheap lunch (1.5 RMB) and they are delicious.

Throughout the food stalls are vendors selling goods, like clothing, omnipotent phone chargers, flash drives, or study books for one of the countless tests the students must take before graduation.  Many of these vendors are students who want to try their luck at business.  It’s easy to spot the successful students because they are there week after week, elbow to elbow with the more experienced, more permanent temporary vendors.

Last week 3 former students were selling women’s clothing they had purchased in the city, calling their friends over as they passed.  It was a relatively new venture and I stopped to wish them luck, though it seems more and more difficult to make it these days; there are already several clothing vendors in the area.  I really admire them for their willingness to take a risk.  They are throwing their money down and making a silent declaration to themselves and others: “We will make money.”

A large two-tented operation moved in on the fringes, filled with shoes and a large banner with “35 yuan” written in a block typeset.  I shuffled past and asked to two men about their “stand” (two small stools with an old piece of plywood lain across).  It turns out they are temporary vendors, selling necklaces, earrings and bracelets for only a couple days before finding another place to make their pitch.

Cross the school gate and look around on campus – you won’t find anything for sale.  You have to walk about 1 minute before you come to the only student vendor and, aside from the small convenience store, this is the only place to buy a newspaper or pay your cell phone bill on campus.  The students who own a share had to buy the rights from the school (20,000 RMB), an investment they feel will eventually pay-off.

Sometimes I find that China seems to outdo America when it comes to raw capitalism.  The people seem to have a knack for making money and even the students feel this fever enough to take a shot at earning some extra money.   I can make a strong case that things like education and health care contain more of a socialist attitude in America, but I don’t want to venture beyond the school gate for now.  Even without the extensive cultural considerations, China is changing so rapidly that I have difficulty explaining it to my family.  They just need to come and see it for themselves.

In my oral English class, I asked my students what was more important, family or wealth.  They wanted both.

The people here have a long way to go.  Just a few days ago, a fellow volunteer and I experienced a series of people who cursed when we turned down lodging at their hotel.  My friend commented that people are furious when they are unable to make even a little money – something that is telling about the realities of being in a poor, rural area, which is desperately fighting for a piece of the market.

When I began assigning a weekly journal, it became a type of therapy for my students, who were eager to share their frustrations and difficulties.  These journals have taught me many things I wouldn’t have learned otherwise.  For the first time I was able to better understand China.

I have compiled some student journal entries from the most popular topic: relationship between father and daughter/son.  The entries are anonymous and reprinted verbatim.

Journal 1 – Female Student
People always says: “Father’s love as like a hill.  Means love is obscure.

As a child, father did business outside.  Our three sisters live with grandma.  We haven’t much expression on my father.

When I attend to Middle School I gently know my father.  He never spoke bad words to others, quarrelling with my mother.  But we are afraid of him, his strict eyes stare at us when we make a mistake.

It seems that father isn’t care of my life.  When I went in wrong way, he just take advantage of his army – strict eyes and no more words to say.

In father eyes, boy is best.  Traditional ideas have great effect on my father.  We get well with grandma, like to chat with the tender lady.

When mum past away, the temper of my father become changeable, due to grandma’s careless, little brother dead for swimming.  Later, mother couldn’t afford heavy pressure cause disease insult to die.

Grandma is eighty-year-old, her healthy is no more than before.  One day, when I come back home, grandma complain the worst thing to me.  Then I am going to argue with father.  But father stick to say grandma is the murder who kill my brother.

Finally, I failure.  I remember that my eyes are streak with tears.  Father said some words to me that don’t trust grandma.  Father’s words hurt my heart.

Now I want to express my feeling to father.  Don’t hide your emotion, please share with us, we can relieve the miserable from the sad mud.  However, we just have a unique bad in the world.

Journal 2 – Male Student
(The student’s father died when he was in elementary school - he recently wrote this letter)
Dear father:
Have a long time I didn’t see you.  You didn’t imagin that how much I missed you.  When I went to bed, I always couldn’t asleep.  Because your shap of body often appeared in my mind.  So I used to take your old picture to see.  And they are always let me to memorize somethings what happened between you and me in my childhood.

Seeing the old pictures for a while my heart became quiet slowly and the things what had happened liked playing a film in front of my eyes.  With the happy memories I fell asleep easily with smiling.

One thing that I would never forget it.

That is a special day as a result of you was working in another city.  You couldn’t come back home to spend the festival with us, but you didn’t forget to send me a pair of shoes that I had asked for you for a long time and I had wanted them in my dreams.  Although you couldn’t spend the festival with me I had had a wonderful time and had a word in my heart wanted to tell you is “father, I love you forever, and I hope you can come back to me as soon as possible because I miss you very much!”

Yours,
Son

Journal 3 – Female Student

To begin with this article I feel mixed feelings collecting the memory of we got together.  It’s not so easy and happy, but afraid.  Whenever I saw my father is just as the mouse saw the cat.

I still can remember the experience of my father taught me with my homework.  It seems to me that I was a little stupid.  I never know the answers of the questions and each time my father was angry to taught me a lesson.  Then later he told me with a hope word: “You must study hard on your book or you won’t lead a better life in the future.”

My father was a wiser and has ability to do with things.  At least I think so.  He had a knowledge of made wine.  So during my childhood my family earned money by made wine and it’s a nice experience.  What’s pity is each coin has two sides.  As my parents were busy making wine we had to do the housework and sometimes helped them to did it.  At once we felt tired and depression.  What we wanted to do is play games with our players.

As the time went, I grew up and my father became more calm and depression because somethings had change a lot.  On the contrary, he became warm and easy-going.

For I always feel headache, he gives me more care now.  He always told me to take good care of myself, not to get a cough.  Furthermore, I tell him the experience of my college school and other things.  It seems that he isn’t my father any more but a friend of mine.

Journal 4 – Female Student
I never talk about my father.  It’s the first time to introduce my father.

He is very thing and tall.  He is introvert.  And always don’t tell us what he thinks.  He is not good at talking and express himself.  Despite he likes this, my father loves me very much.  Sometimes I have some argument with him.  I love him, too.  Because he is my father.

My father, in my opinion, is very stubborn.  If he decide to do something you can’t change his mind.  Although the result is useless, and my father is a bad-temper person.  When he tell you his thought and opinion about something if you have the different view from his, in spite of his is wrong, he will become angry.  So when I have some different point from him I always argue with him.  I try my best to explain the reason to him.  But nothing worked.  In order to avoid arguing.  So I had to give up my thought to stop it.

No matter what my father do, sometime he may do something wrong.  I’m angry with him.  Don’t want to talk with him.  But, in fact, I know he love me at the same time.  I love him.  Because he is my father.

Journal 5 – Female Student
My father is a farmer.  This year is his fifties, he just has 3 years’ knowledge.

When he married a girl – she is my mother, he begins to feed up the family on farm.  Afterwards, they have 3 children.  My old brother, my young sister and I.  The burden becomes very strong, but he still does it.  Besides, he is a farm, he is a mason, when our families finish the farm work, he continues to mason for other people.  To add the families expenditure.  I know it very difficult to do this work, but we have nothing we can do.

When my brother graduated from middle school, he didn’t continue going to school.  Then, he followed with my aunt to Shanghai to work.  It seemed that our family’s burden was reduced.  But in actual fact, it was not.  Our family are still poor, for we must repay much debt.

My father doesn’t know how to deal with it, he just harder and harder work.  His hair from black becomes white, think about those things, I feel very uneasy now.  Even if I am a college student, I’m still get money from my parents.  At some time, I think I am a helpless daughter for them.

Journal 6 – Female Student

Good or bad, happy or sad, everybody has his or her own life with his or her own family.  So do I.  Most people may think they don’t have a happy family so that they don’t have a happy life.  But I do not.

Although sometimes my mom and my dad would have some fight with words, I also think I have a united family.  My father is three years older than my mother, but sometime my mother is more a old sister than a wife for my father.  My mother said: “you should change you clothes now.”  Then my father would take off his clothes and put on another.  When my mother say he should or would better do something, my father will do it.  Even though my mother would complain much about my father, she is also care about my father.  Their life doesn’t so romantic, they don’t rich, but they both love the family.  So do I.

When I was a child, I hardly have pocket money.  Every day what I just did was study hard and walk for more than half an hour home.  Then I would help my parents with housework of farm.  Sometimes I was hungry and tired, but my parents had more than I.  Sometimes I was angry about that, but I know that, and I must understand it.

I was helpful when I was at home, so my parents wanted me to stay at home.  I also wanted, but we know, I shouldn’t.  I must go out to study or create my own life.  I can’t make a living on my parents forever.  I miss my family but I am out now.

My parents love me and my little brother.  My brother is also out for work, earn money.  He gave up his study for some reasons as mark and the family, especially me.  I may blame myself sometimes, but I can understand.  I love my brother, love my family much.

“What are you doing?”  I asked.

“My teacher asked me to fill these out for some of the teachers in the English department,” she responded.

“What is it?”

“It’s nothing important,” she said.

After several more questions, I had discovered that this was a character and ethics test given to the Chinese teachers throughout the college [later I realized that this was probably the same test instituted by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s after massive government corruption].  The students were writing the answers for their teachers based on an “answer key” the teachers found on the Internet.  The teachers had conscripted this student to complete the forms because she was a lower ranking member of the Communist Party.  She had no choice but to obey.  The teachers had no choice but to take the test (and pay a 65 yuan fee for doing so).

“That’s pointless bureaucracy!” I said, the logic region of my brain threatening to take over, “It’s obvious that nobody cares about the test because all of the answers are going to be exactly the same!”  But then I remembered that this is China.  Besides, the student was starting to get defensive and arguing that it was necessary.  I remembered that logic is for suckers who believe in efficiency and progress.

Someone told me once that it’s not my place to change a culture, but what about inefficient ideas?  Do I have a place to tell the students how foolish certain things are?

The student said to me, “When I came to this college I never thought it would be like this.  I never wanted to deal with this kind of thing.”  But that’s the end of the road for this argument.  The result will be more swallowed bitterness and acceptance that nothing can be changed.  The student may realize that she is a part of a system that is filled with meaningless paperwork, but she doesn’t care to try and extricate herself from any of it.  It hurts me to see what I consider to be a wholesale disregard for self-respect.  But what hurts me more is the fact that I can’t help her change this situation.  She will be living this reality for her entire life.

I’ve learned the value of picking my battles.  Arguing over something that’s going to frustrate and confound students for a lifetime is only going to make them more entrenched in my world – looking in on a system filled with flaws from a place of reason and logic; in other words, when I rage against this bureaucracy, it leads my students to feel more irritated, angry, and disenfranchised.

-Angie McHodgkins; RPCV China 2006-2008

It’s been going around for a while now in China – this notion of Posh Corps. For better or worse it has become a meme, and it is alive in the hearts and minds of many volunteers in China who wonder why we are here.

But who is, “we?”  The ‘smaller’ cities of Lanzhou and Guiyang are very different from Chengdu and Chongqing, which are both different from all the rural sites throughout China.

I questioned former groups of volunteers about the name but they hadn’t heard it until years after service.  Many of the first volunteers in China didn’t face the same influx of foreign teachers, and were less likely to question the legitimacy of their roles as foreign teachers.  Mike Meyer, a Peace Corps China 3 Volunteer, expressed his surprise at the changes after coming back to visit his site and seeing the school’s ability to hire other foreign teachers.
“Peace Corps China should be in middle schools in poor counties that do not have the resources or access to American teachers. Then again, Peace Corps China never felt much like a development program, but a political and cultural one. I’d like to see more in the direction of development, because despite massive improvements, the Chinese countryside largely remains in the Third World.”

For more recent volunteers teaching alongside paid foreign teachers, there is an onus for self-justification to prevent madness.  None of the China volunteers is struggling to survive the elements or isolation like other Peace Corps countries - more often we are caught in an existential crisis.  This becomes even more significant for volunteers who work in large cities like Chengdu and Chongqing.

My college is rural enough to be just on the edge of poverty.  I see it daily outside the walls of the college.  I see it behind the eyes of staring peasants wandering down the streets with cabbage hanging from their shoulder poles.  Children playing with sticks wander the college in search of plastic bottles to sell.  They are happily packing their cheap plastic bags of bottles, dressed in grubby clothes.  I pull an empty bottle from my bag and a boy smiles broadly before stuffing it into his bag wordlessly.

On the crowded bus a woman propped a large bag of rice against the wall in a standing area.  Before she got off the bag had spilled on the floor and she had lost perhaps a quarter of it.  She was too embarrassed to do anything but gather up the bag and her basket before quickly disembarking.  By the next stop an older woman was gathering up the spilled rice, while explaining to everyone in Chinese, “I can clean this and it will be ok to eat.”  This is her explanation in a country where people are so afraid of getting disease from the ubiquitous spit on the ground that they refuse to set even a book-bag down.  Most people refuse to sit down on the curb.  If there is no newspaper to serve as an intermediary, they will squat.  Tuberculosis looms.

The poverty of Guizhou is often a hidden poverty because most of this poverty is not desperate.  Instead it’s people who simply cannot afford anything extra.  It’s people without health care who have yet to feel any real “trickle down” from the super wealthy coastal cities, which have the means to export goods.  It is a poverty of a fatalistic people whose solution to bitterness is almost too easy: just swallow.

But those volunteers who live in large cities struggle to reconcile their existence with omnipresent wealth.  One Chongqing volunteer, Philip Razem, says that he is, “training China’s future leaders.”  He argues that he is accomplishing the first goal by injecting critical and creative thinking into his lesson plans.  He keeps a blog about his experiences.  China is a place where we classify cities by a western restaurant algorithm – where cities like Chongqing and Chengdu score high and Bijie and Tongren score low.  I suspect places like Starbucks and Pizza Hut actually have no idea how many franchises they have in Chongqing.

The Peace Corps is not too happy that I have shared the realities of our situation.  I posted a blog several months ago about the ability of volunteers to hire a housekeeper to clean their apartments on their Peace Corps salary.  The reaction from Peace Corps Washington was swift and I was made aware that certain people were unhappy that I was telling the truth.  But Peace Corps Washington doesn’t know our China any better than I know Peace Corps Kenya.  They don’t understand our challenges, even if they have been compiled in a nice little memo and presented at a meeting.  Besides, the idea of volunteers getting a housekeeper is limited to only a couple volunteers that I know (though the service is accessible by anyone).  I think Peace Corps is a little like the Chinese government - afraid of a spokesperson who might paint a negative picture.  The image of China as a rapidly developing country somehow destroys that old notion of Peace Corps being about dire poverty and struggling to survive (and how Americans will help those people overcome their struggles).  It’s like nobody realizes that change happens, and they cling to the perception that Peace Corps is about crushing poverty and never-ending illness.

My own opinion about being in China is that the rural volunteers are helping people who wouldn’t have it otherwise.  China is actually comprised of two countries: the coast and everywhere else.  According to Wikipedia, Guizhou’s GDP compares to that of Kenya (I always wanted to say, ‘According to Wikipedia!’).  Despite the recent development of China’s western provinces, and the ability of schools to hire more foreign teachers, the country needs people who aren’t going to evangelize.  China’s desperation for foreign teachers has led to a don’t ask, don’t tell policy about missionary teachers.  This, in turn, has led to a skewed perception of Americans as a superstitious, evangelical people.  My students are stunned when I tell them I don’t believe in God.  Our presence as Americans who try to learn the language and do our best to help students in a variety of ways without the ulterior motives of business or religion makes us, in some sense, more respected.  And this leads to an enhanced ability to accomplish all of our goals.

I never intended this to be a defense of Peace Corps’ presence in China, but I want people to understand the issues China Volunteers face.  I’m writing this in a two-bedroom apartment.  I have a heater and access to the Internet, though neither was working last night when the power was out.  I can’t drink the water, but I can make a phone call to have a large water-cooler bottle of drinkable water delivered to my door (or I boil my water like any other PCV).  Despite the wealth of China, the realities of poverty are overwhelming.  The vast majority of my students are from the countryside and they struggle to fulfill their duties as good sons and daughters.  They experience pressures that most Americans will never understand.  We have this idea that anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but most of my students face a cold, hard, reality of future subsistence living.  Some will graduate and be unable to find jobs.  Others will return home to help their parents farm the land until they eventually get married.  I am a rural volunteer, working with students who are from the countryside.  My students are peasants who have a small chance at a better life.

Even though people sometimes frame this as Posh Corps, we still face challenges and we still help people.  This is especially true for volunteers who are at the most ‘rural’ sites (rural being somewhat different by Chinese standards).  Whether or not our presence is ultimately justified as a group of people working both in the countryside AND in cities up to people with more power than I have.   Rural volunteers help their students by giving them access to native English after a lifetime of never speaking with a foreigner.  Our students are the sons and daughters of peasants, lucky to have this opportunity for higher education.  The truth of their lives is a rather bleak picture – rural Chinese society is very restrictive when it comes to dreaming.  We aren’t there to give them unrealistic dreams, but we certainly help them to aim higher.  While rural volunteers may be able to provide students with something they wouldn’t have otherwise, this isn’t necessarily true in the city.  But that’s a question for the volunteers in the city to argue and, ultimately, find a way to justify.  Understanding how I rationalize my presence is good enough for me.

Whatever Peace Corps China thinks it actually IS will need to continuously change in the future.  We fill a variety of roles in many countries.  While I don’t advocate redefining Peace Corps as an organization that focuses entirely on goals 2 and 3, China Volunteers have come to understand how important these goals are through our constant struggle to define who we are as volunteers in the wealthiest country to which Peace Corps currently sends volunteers.

I walked down the next day to find the field of dirt and rocks is getting deeper by the hour.  The workers were clearing out a foundation just off campus, where yet another building will be placed to serve as apartments for the increasingly liberal students; many of these students just want some privacy – a place to live with their girlfriends or boyfriends.   Getting to the site requires me to go under the massive new school gate, also still under construction.  Last week I saw them drilling the hardened cement while students passed below covering their heads with books.  The OSHA inspectors have not yet stopped by to investigate.

There are now 2 new buildings waiting to be occupied, though I suspect electrical work and final interior touches are on the way.  Despite being “complete” for some time, I still see workers going in and out.  Even our newest occupied building, “The new big building,” as it’s said in the Chinese, remains filled with classrooms whose locks have not been installed or whose classrooms feel haunted by bareness – desks have not yet arrived for some floors.  The grounds outside the building have all the signs of recent construction – muddy hills surrounded by old bits of scrap form wood, even though the students have been going to class here for nearly 2 years.  Development is so rapid that people forget to stop and finish the job.  The new library has stood for 3 years awaiting the quiet sound of studying to drown out its current sound of emptiness.  For now, students crowd into the old library.  Some students leave books on the tables at lunchtime, hoping to save a place for when they return after dinner.

My campus is the sound of motors chugging up hills and cart after cart of dry cement.  Workers carry shoulder poles holding buckets filled with freshly mixed cement - they inch up wooden ramps that creak beneath the weight.

I live in the countryside.  Our campus would almost lean against the city had the karst limestone hills not gotten in the way.  With the amount of grinding the cinder block company is doing lately, we might become a part of the city sometime in the future.  There is a Chinese proverb about moving a mountain.  It’s happening here.  But instead of moving the mountain from one place to another, the mountain is transformed into cheap cinder blocks.  And the cinder blocks become homes.

I feel like my site is not so different from the Fuling of Peter Hessler’s time as a Peace Corps Volunteer.  We have about 300,000 people and many of them are poor farmers battling for a piece of the hyper-capitalist economy by selling vegetables on the street or participating in some other sideline occupation.  The monopoly on pulled wheat noodles ended last week, when savvy entrepreneurs opened up a new restaurant closer to the school.  The invisible hand is at work here.

People stare at me in the streets and yell, “laowai,” or “waiguoren,” both words for foreigners in China.  Laowai means “old outsider,” and it’s the most common word used by the children.  Sometimes the word is used in surprise when I walk around a corner unexpectedly.  I keep myself entertained by responding, “xiaonei,” or “little insider.”

Despite rapid modernization, the old ideas are still king.  Confucius is omnipresent and I take with that the good and the bad.  Chinese hospitality and kindness square off with an undercurrent of deep historical discrimination against women and anything strange or foreign.  I have been told countless times about family relationships in the following way:

“The man and his mother-in-law will have an good relationship, but the woman and her mother-in-law will have a very difficult time.  The woman will want to improve her status in the family, and the most efficient way is to give birth to a boy.”

And thus we have one reason for the problem of female infanticide.  To continue down the list, males are supposed to look after their parents in their old age.  The state has few resources available to older people and, in fact, there is even a law to enforce the value of taking your parents in as they become elderly.  For peasants, a male means better labor in the fields.   Most of my students will return home on holidays to help their families on the farm and most of my students are girls with multiple siblings (despite the one-child policy).  It typically looks something like this: Father, Mother, Oldest Girl, Girl #2, Girl #3, Boy.  You can almost hear a feudal sigh of relief from the mother when a boy is born at last.  But to do hear this sigh you should be in China, listening carefully.

As buildings go up, there is a reality that Anshun is still considered backwards by visitors and even most of the locals.  Students who come from the coastal cities are shocked to see the garbage everywhere on the streets and they never quite understand the reality of universal corporal punishment throughout the schools.  Although these students will voice their displeasure at the garbage rotting in the streets, they are more likely to look down on the lack of history – a real sign of some complex of superiority bubbling up.  It doesn’t take much to go from accusing a place of having no history to arguing that the ethnically Han places have more culture and sense than those filled with minorities.  Guizhou is the most diverse province – home to a majority of China’s 56 official ethnic groups.  The universal belief that racism is not a problem in China is quickly silenced by the stories Han peasants tell their children, which run something along the lines of a child misbehaving, then being taken in the night by a minority group.

Society here is all about groups, with loners being a rare thing on campus and almost unheard of in restaurants.  Part of this is protection from social fallout.  Spend too much time alone and you’re bound to be a topic of discussion.  The vicious gossip machine eats reputations alive.  It’s probably not much worse than in America, but it’s striking to see the juxtaposition: The students smile and nod and agree with one another so convincingly, only to return to the dorms and criticize this or that openly with their crowd.  Mixed groups are cautious and polite – careful never to say or do the wrong thing; homogenous groups relax and cleanse themselves of all the stifling, repressed feelings and emotions from the day.   It feels sneaky to me, but it’s just an aspect of collectivist culture that is manifested in their behavior.

My students are living in an exciting time.  I tell them that they are lucky to be experiencing all of this change.  The differences between Guizhou and the coastal cities are vast, but social trends relentlessly change - even here.  Fashion is never far behind, and some students are sloughing off the idea of saving money in favor of good old-fashioned materialism.  They wander the streets of Anshun on the weekends in search of new clothes or a new purse.  They treat their friends to expensive dinners.

The people are caught between two very different worlds: a modernizing capitalist marketplace pulling more and more coastal Chinese towards individualist attitudes and thinking, and a collectivist family structure, attempting to hold everyone in place by resisting change and protecting certain values that are so inconsistent with the modern transformations.

In addition to experiencing cultural differences, I have written and lectured about collectivism and individualism.  The result is that I notice more and more collectivist behaviors and I find it harder and harder to live as an individualist.  At first I was allowed to be the blind American, stomping through Chinese society with a naive regard for superficial aspects of culture.  But now, with new knowledge and understanding, I feel awkward saying the word, “no.”  I follow the Chinese path of indirectness by using one of a million apparently ridiculous excuses.  “May I have your phone number?” a student asks.  “It’s not convenient,” I reply.  And that’s that.  Everyone’s happy.  Harmony has been maintained, even if I feel a little weird about the whole situation.

Perhaps the most shocking realization is that I will likely return to China in the future and find that Anshun will be unalterably changed.  The rapid construction and other modernizations seem to be assaulting a resistant society.  The modernization will bring social change, and I wonder how the attitudes and ideas will change in the people themselves.  China will probably never succumb to a full-blown individualism, especially in the west.

After reading River Town by RPCV Peter Hessler and then seeing a picture of today’s Fuling, it’s very difficult to understand how they’re the same place - they are separated by only 10 years.  A year in China is different than elsewhere, though.  A year in China means 10 percent economic development.  It means change on many levels - and it makes China an exciting place to live for anyone interested in the nuances of cultural change.