I thought about what a previous teacher had told me – that in Shenzhen, free and guaranteed education is only given up till secondary school. After that, there are only enough high school seats for half of Shenzhen’s teenage population, and so 50% of them end their schooling right after middle school. I was curious about this, but thought that it might be because of the sheer number of “undocumented” citizens lured by Shenzhen’s economic promise who do not figure into population counts or policy changes. Perhaps this was why no more schools could be built. It seemed to me an oddly regulatory move in a city of supposedly rampant capitalism.

With this in mind, I asked Gong Laoshi what he thought – would there really be a population decline in the next few years? He shook his head again. “They are wrong, I think. But the real reason they are like this is because for them, fewer teachers are easier to manage,” he said. I recalled again the relatively centralized financial flow of Shenzhen’s education budget. I may be wrong about this – Joe, if you’re reading this feel free to correct me – but I had understood that in the States, public schools receive their funding after district residents file their taxes. The portion of those taxes designated for the local school system then eventually winds up at that school. I don’t know the extent to which an entire city government has to involve itself in this affair, but if Los Angeles Unified is any indication, it may end up being pretty complicated as well. Still, some amount of the process remains localized. In Shenzhen, it seems that taxes are taken out of wages before they are delivered, meaning no individual taxes are filed (Mandy, please correct me about this if I am wrong again) and that those taxes which are paid to the government are paid by large employer groups, which seems to grant weight towards the top of management for budget concerns. If Shenzhen’s education system does indeed approach their budget from a more top-down perspective than schools in the States do, then I can see how they would want to artificially keep the number of teachers down. But I still don’t think it’s a good policy decision for anybody but the government office.

“Some teachers have to send money to the government to ask them if they can pass the test,” Gong Laoshi laughed. I wasn’t sure if he was joking or if he meant that those teachers were desperate or just outright bribing the Education Bureau. “And then there are young, beautiful women teachers…” he laughed again. I laughed too, a little uneasily. “Do you understand what I mean?” In any conversation where I am switching between two languages with every other sentence, this would usually have simple connotations, but I wasn’t sure. “Eventually Shenzhen would only have young, beautiful women teachers?” I hazarded. He didn’t say anything and just went back to eating.

The pensive quiet after that persisted into today’s lunch. Usually I eat with the other English teachers, but today everyone seemed to be whispering to each other in small groups. Over every office there is a tense silence, and some teachers occasionally wipe at their red eyes with a kerchief. Coming home without having passed is a dreadful thought for both younger and older teachers alike. One muttered morosely “if I fail, my parents will be so disappointed” under her breath. An older teacher who had been looking forward to having the time after the test to cook a nice meal for her son learned that she did not pass today and I found her in the office long past work hours, quietly slouched in her chair with her son at her side. I taught five classes today, an unusually heavy load for my work week, so I wasn’t in our office much – but I did eventually learn that none of our teachers had passed the exam. I’m not sure if that means none of our department’s teachers, or none of Yucai Third Middle’s teachers. Either way, I really wonder about the fairness and efficiency of this system, especially given the actual market need for more teachers and the 50% of students for whom it will exclude from further education.

I think I should probably bake some more cookies.

Maybe they were just reacting to their insecurities about suddenly becoming a minority themselves, though. I might not be immediately treated with red carpets when I step into a shop the way the other 老外are, but in a way that I didn’t expect to feel, I’m feeling more at ease here than I have ever felt before in my life. While the others are complaining about constantly being ogled at and swooned over, I can blend in almost seamlessly as long as I don’t speak (it helps that Shenzhen is China’s richest city, making my American clothes and mannerisms less of a giveaway among the hip and trendy youth here). When I was growing up in Olympia I thought I had steeled myself to ignore and rise above my insecurities of being the only Asian kid at school, and of always feeling self-conscious when my family of four would adventure into a rural Washington WASP-y town. I thought of Los Angeles as a place of diversity where I could achieve the greatest racial comfort in all of America. I guess I never knew how unconscious my mental guards had been, and how accustomed I had become to warily looking for people who might not take kindly to my presence. Call it a family curse of always feeling like an outsider: myself as Chinese in America, my grandfather as Chinese in Indonesia, and even my father as huaqiao Chinese back in Beijing. As my failed Fulbright essay application reads, my extended family has spread itself out across the globe in search of a new home, nestling in America, Canada, Germany, Holland, Indonesia, and generally everywhere but China – the epitome of the Chinese diaspora. We live everywhere and we think of ourselves as belonging to our adopted homes, but perhaps they do not always think we belong to them – and because China kept spitting my family out time after time, from the Taiping Rebellion to the Cultural Revolution, we have always felt that we have no real home anymore.

All of this is why I am so surprised at myself for feeling so at ease here in Shenzhen, and how warm and friendly the Chinese have been to me.

A few different incidents to illustrate this pleasant picture:

——————

At the north corner of the city block that houses my school grounds is a small cafeteria. Every time I walk back home from the bus stop I look at it from a distance with a wistful longing for some boba tea, but shyness and my complete incomprehension of the written menu there had prevented me from walking in. Chinese shopkeepers too can be so eager for business that they quickly assault you with welcomes, pleasantries, or questions about what you want, and with my slow speech I usually have to awkwardly explain that I am not merely a retarded adult but a foreigner who doesn’t understand what they are saying. Yesterday I decided to just go ahead with it though and pushed the door open, smiling stupidly as the expected three-girl army of shopkeepers leaned over the countertop to jump on the customer-prey.

They asked what I wanted, and I replied that I couldn’t understand the menu because I was American. The sales pitch of the three girls seemed to skip a beat as they processed this – what? – and in that duration, all the other café customers perked up to pay attention to our exchange. Three jumped over and began to help me with the selection, trying their best with some simple English words that they knew. By the end of it they had helped me choose a litchi-flavored milk tea with coconut shavings, one of the girls’ own personal favorites, and I was sitting down at a table having a four-way chat with attendants and customers alike that lasted half an hour, one guy trying to explain the local fruit delicacies and another girl hopping back and forth between the café Internet connection and its English-Chinese dictionary. I left with my milk tea and a gang of tea-shop buddies who I hope hang out there a lot, in case I am ever back there.

——————

Yesterday night the American CTLCers gathered at a music bar in northern Nanshan to collect their passports, fresh from the Shenzhen police bureau with brand-new residence permits, from James and for a night of board games and drinks. Kamolika and I left early to catch the subway before it closed, which we did successfully, but Shenzhen’s subway system is incomplete and for us stops at a location a few miles away from our homes. From there we would have to run and find some buses that could take us the rest of the way, and we weren’t sure if they were even still running (figuring out a bus schedule is incredibly difficult when you can only read a couple words of it).

I stopped in front of the guardrail for bus 72. There were a couple of people apparently waiting there, but the sign I had read said the 72 had stopped half an hour ago. My phone rang. “Hey, did you make it?” asked Kami, who had successfully hopped onto a bus heading west for her school at the boarding platform above me. “I’m not sure yet, but I’ll call you back,” I replied. The man in front of me eyed me curiously, as people do whenever I begin speaking in English. I hung up and asked him “请问，这汽车还要开吗?” (Excuse me, is this bus still running? Or something like that…my grammar is still pretty bad.) Without pausing he responded that it was, and the sign I had read was merely wrong. He told me that he had been surprised by my extraordinarily good English, but was very happy to hear that I could also speak some Chinese – he himself had studied some English before, but as he said, “we usually do not dare to approach other foreigners and try to practice with them – they are too intimidating. You, though, are friendly, a familiar face to us, and you also speak some Chinese!” He handed me his business card and after realizing that we were both heading to the same bus stop, we chatted in a mixture of Chinese and English all the way back home – in this way I met Aiven the realtor. Seeing as we live in the same neighborhood, I will probably hear from him again very soon.

——————

Lastly, Thursday was the actual Teacher’s Day in China, despite our school staff celebrating it two days early with a dinner party. I was surprised by students running up to me with gifts. “Teacher, happy Teacher’s Day!” the girls would giggle and the boys would solemnly utter. Among the gifts I received:

- A pot of homemade apple jam
- An orchid
- Three flower bouquets
- A bag of almond candies
- A ring box with a guitar pick inside instead of a ring
- A stuffed animal
- Some type of red-braided Chinese wall decoration
- A decorative fan
- An ashtray shaped like a urinal (this one obviously from a boy)
- Numerous cards.

The other teachers all received many gifts as well, but they seemed happy for my small stash and not surprised. “The students all love you,” they said. “It is to be expected that they would treat you this well.”

Written inside one of the cards: “My English not ver good. We like you lot. Welcome you bak to China.”

——————

Back to China, as if I had come from it once myself. Is that what it means? From what I have heard, part of the difficulty for Chinese-Americans in China is dealing with the Chinese expectation that you are already of China, that you know the customs and the language and can summarily be expected to live up to them, simply because you look Chinese. As a book that I have (oddly enough) about Chinese-American fast food says, “Sociologists have noted that a sense of national and cultural identity is often built on a triumvirate: blood, language and culture, and citizenship. In some countries, such as Japan, you need all three to be considered Japanese – anything less, and you’re incomplete. In America, there is no blood requirement. With the Chinese, there is only a blood requirement.” (The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer Lee, page 251 – sorry, academic habit). Yet I do not feel at all Chinese, having grown up asserting to myself my own individual self-identity before any disingenuous cultural ties that I knew relatively little about could claim me. In Los Angeles the Chinese-Americans there, who have remained in better touch through their powerful community enclaves with their heritages and who can often already speak Mandarin, Cantonese, or both in addition to English, consider me an odd abnormality, the rare “non-Californian Asian[-American]” as a friend puts it. And yet my students here, and the people, are welcoming me back with open arms.

That’s very different from what Lynn Pan and most ethnic Chinese of her generation have been conditioned to expect from the national Chinese. Here is what she wrote in her book about the Chinese diaspora, in 1994:

“China has repeatedly dashed the hopes of the emigrant Chinese, and remains to this day a country to occasion despair, a country to get away from, so limited still are its material and social possibilities, so harsh and despotic its political exactions. Even so, the millions who live outside it will never cease to wish it well, to want for it a place among the great nations, not only for the sake of their own pride and dignity, but because they find it hard to resist its power to compel tribal feeling.

Each time the emigrant Chinese visit it, they ask themselves, ‘Why are we here? Why do we keep coming back?’ Why must they return to this cruel, tormented, corrupt, hopeless place as though they still needed it? Could they never achieve immunity? And yet had China meant nothing to them, any other place thereafter would have meant less, and they would carry no pole within themselves, and they would not even guess what they had missed.

When they leave it after their visit they feel that they have left something of themselves behind, yet they also realize that they could never live there. Deep in their hearts they know that they love China best when they live well away from the place.”

So what is different now – is Shenzhen just a unique place in all of China, welcoming to individuals of all origin? Or is China finally ready to claim and support its people?

It could also be that I am simply learning more about the world firsthand, and seeing the opinions and ideas of others, which I have been too ready to accept and listen to before listening to myself, crumble before my own actual experience.