The American Dream

Things made a bit more since today after having a class with a group of teachers and later with a group of principals with the same topic of conversation. What are the differences between American schools and Chinese schools? I begin by having them participate telling me what they imagine American classrooms looking like. Universally, they sounded like this:

• In American classes, students lounge around on the floor during classes.
• At most, there are 20 students per class.
• American students are more talkative in class, but that's to ask deep and penetrating questions.
• American students and teachers are always great pals.
• American classrooms are "more open," meaning few if any rules.
• American classes are extremely fun, involving lots of games.

More importantly, they all - every one of them - unhesitantly believed American education was better. An example was a principal who told me that 20 years ago educational scholars from China visited America and American scholars visited China. Both teams came to the conclusion that they well disciplined Chinese classrooms were better and the undisciplined American classrooms were worse. In those 20 years, however, no Chinese citizen has won a Nobel prize while Americans have won many.

With that, what we're doing out here makes since. I've often complained about feeling like the foreign teachers are expected to be English-speaking clowns. Come in, play games, make the kids have fun and love English and like magic the language will sink in. Disciplining children is not allowed. What we're doing, it seems, is recreating the Chinese image of the American classroom setting. They want us to come here and do to their students what they think was done to us. They want that magic spark that we were given to rub off on the next generation of Chinese.

Unfortunately, this image of the American classroom is incorrect. While Montessori schools and small private schools do exist, they are rare and most American students endure something very similar to the Chinese classroom.

While most American teachers would love the conditions that Chinese people are describing, the apathy and attitudes of American students prevents it from being a reality. I often corrected their notion of a rules-free zone by outlining each behavior associated with Childhood - horse playing, running, touching - that American teachers spend an extraordinary amount of time preventing for liabilities sake. Thus American teachers daydream of complicit and obedient [and imaginary] Asian classrooms where students want to learn and beg for three hours of homework a night.

In coming days and weeks I want to look at this issue more deeply. I want to more clearly identify, by the numbers, where the strengths of the Chinese classroom are and where the strengths of American education are. I'd also like to explore the idea of why, despite the huge number of science graduates in China, there have been no Nobel Prizes.

Yellow Smocks

Before I went to Amsterdam I'd never seen a prostitute before. Well, I have a memory of a prostitute coming and putting her leg on our families rental car when we were in Miami in '93, but that's just too weird to have really happened. In Amsterdam they were more like zoo exhibits than anything else. They were presented as tourist attractions. I'd never seen one in her natural habitat though.

Even on the famed Emerson and Phillips intersections in Jacksonville, which I once lived not too far from, I never saw one. Ever. Everyone said they there with the crack dealers but I never saw them either. I think my parameters of "normal human behavior" are just too wide to spot someone dressed eccentric enough to scream, "approach me for solicitation of sex and drugs."

Everyone claimed that the late nigh barber shops in Tianjin were all sin dens, but every time I looked while driving by they were doing legitimate business. But Shenzhen. Wow. Different story. Obvious isn't even the word. Apparently, we compete with Thailand on the sheer numbers of women coming to look for work and deciding the indentured servitude at a factory just wasn't what they had in mind when they left the farm.

Within a five minute walk I could count at least ten businesses of scandalous intent. Juries out on what they really are, precisely, but they're neon lit establishments with big glass windows with couches overflowing with bored young girls in short white dresses. There's always one booth for cutting hair and not a single customer. For that matter, I've never seen anyone coming into or out of one of these places. They're just kinda there. Existing.

Though prostitution is against the law, I've never seen a crackdown on the brothels like I've seen with street vendors [or reporters, or...], so it came as some surprise to read this in an article about prostitution in China in the International Herald Tribune today:

At the end of November, officials in Shenzhen, the southern boomtown, got the bright idea of reviving the Cultural Revolution for the purposes of temporarily cracking down on its prostitutes.

This came to pass as a face-preserving measure after a regional television station broke with decorum by mentioning the existence of this industry in a city famous throughout Asia for its sex trade.

To send the message that Shenzhen was actually a clean and proper place, the police dressed several dozen prostitutes in identical yellow smocks and marched them through the streets of Futian district, to be shamed by a jeering crowd and have their names and hometowns announced to all.

What's even stranger is no one I know had any idea this happened until we read about it on international websites. The news here is strictly "happiness abides," so things like this rarely get reported. Curious though, ey?


Tags: Treyopia current events news prostitution Shenzhen China Chinese Asia Cultural Revolution persecution

Off the Rails

There's a freedom living abroad that's difficult to describe. One is not judged the same as you are back home. Locals tend to attribute almost all our behavior - better or worse - as just being something foreigners do. The minor guilts that haunt everyday life are absent and true personalities shine. You begin acting on your own conscious without second thoughts instead of having to consider what other people think. That freedom is exponential in somewhere like Cambodia, an impoverished nation putting itself back together after wholesale slaughter during decades of civil war. There's an allure to the anarchy that draws many colorful characters.

It's also the subject of Amita Gilbao's Off the Rails in Phnom Penh: Into the Dark Heart of Guns, Girls, and Ganja. Unfortunately, it was horrific in every imaginable way. To begin with the writing was sloppy. There was no narrative arch, no story to unfold, and he simply doesn't have a writers hand at description. Three times in one paragraph he described Cambodian music as somber. He invents words - something I'm not opposed to - but sticks with the duds throughout the book. One of the words in his last sentence was "tragicomic." No one says this. Your last sentence is supposed to be poignant, reflective... tragicomic is what you come up with? It's almost as bad as him stopping to add "shopping arcade" in parenthesis to let us know that's his clever term for strip malls.

So we've got down that he's a bad writer... so what does he pick as the subject of his book? Whoring druggie pedophile expats. He delivers almost 200 pages about men running around in Southeast Asia snorting heroin before their English classes and renting teenaged peasant girls sold into sexual bondage.

He throws out his cards early by having someone describe his work as a being " Like a Gonzo rant from Hunter S. Thompson" on the cover but then falls on his face emulating the unedited stream of consciousness style that only a select few can pull off. There's also little tension between the writer and over-the-deep-end friends like Thompson had with Oscar Acosta. Thompson uses his lawyer almost as a proving point of his own sanity and keeps Acosta at a safe distance when he's is at his worse, you really get a feeling that Gilbao deeply admires the men he writes about. He wishes he could be brave enough to sleep with a $2 illiterate 14 year old prostitute too.

It's so disappointing because the subject matter is so rich. Gilbao brings up the Josef Conrad link early saying that there's a reason Kurtz goes crazy in Cambodia in Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Copalla's re-imagining of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Heart of Darkness is about a good man gone mad without any of the routine social factors keeping us sane. Deep in the jungle, far removed from civilization, morals and ethics bend beyond recognition. Gilbao makes the connection in the first chapter, but then does nothing more with it.

This would have been an excellent approach to the book instead of the self-important diary entries. Gilbao touches on it briefly, when he visits a brothel and leaves before anything happens, afraid that there was no turning back afterwards. It is precisely that moment, when heavy moral questions about actions disappear after trial, that is worth writing an entire book on. The depravity in and of itself is not interesting. It's the mental slide into an entirely different world where the values and norms you grow up with vanish without notice that holds literary weight.





Tags:Off the Rails Phnom Penh Cambodia Amit Gilboa Gonzo Thompson Hunter S. travel writing expat lifestyle Asia Treyopia