#interesting textbook so far. it's got a list of common vocabulary in the front and it's all pretty much what you'd expect except

[coquelicoq]

to self-soothe i have started reading a 1957 textbook for second-year french learners. as one does.

[tenyearsapeasant]

41. Education

If our descendants want to inherit the skills and experience of their elders, they're going to have to learn. And for this we need education.

Earlier I wrote about the living situation in the villages. Naturally this made me think of the education there.

Shaxi township in Yongfeng prefecture was the ancestral home of Ouyang Xiu and one of the "Eight Grade Clans of the Tang and Song Dynasties." The famous stela of the 泷冈阡表(Shuanggang qianbiao) stands right in the Setting Sun Pavilion.

The Setting Sun Pavilion.

Xiaxi Square in the town of Enjiang was home to the Qing dynasty primus (状元, zhuangyuan, the one who scored highest on the imperial exams) Liu Feng. Even Lugang was home to Xi Xu'an, who was a teacher to the Jianwen Emperor of the Ming dynasty. The Zhang clan in Libeishang is able to trace their ancestry back to none other than the famous Tang poet Zhang Jiuling. Yongfeng has historically been very cultured. Even now, nearly every year there are students who make it to Peking or Tsinghua Universities, the best schools in China.

1. The rise and fall of the village elementary school

But when I was at Libeishang, the most educated villager was Zhang Sixi. He had completed 'simple normal school,' the equivalent of middle school. The next was Zhang Baimao, who had completed elementary school. The rest were illiterate, with only a handful able to recognize any characters at all. The children would go to elementary school at the Pioneer Production Brigade, but a year or two in they would be needed in the fields. By the time they grew up, all they retained was recognizing their own names. They gave the rest of the knowledge back to their teachers, so to speak.

Here in America, many Chinese-Americans only spend a year or two in Chinese school before giving up. In the end they have learned nothing.

I asked the villagers, why quit school? They said it was too hard. "The worst part of farming is weeding; the worst part of school is the tests." If they couldn't do well on the tests, they felt like it was better to just go home and farm.

It is true that not all people are good at school. And yet, not all people are good at farming. To them, farming was very easy, and schooling very difficult. Yet to me, schooling was very easy, and farming was nigh incomprehensible.

But the dropout rate in Libeishang was far too high.

When I became the production team leader, some villagers suggested that we could run a small school inside the village. This would let the children get an education and still help out around the house. Then many parents would be happy to let their children get an education. This seemed promising, so we whitewashed one of the walls of the now empty shrine and got some of the handier villagers to make some benches and desks for the classroom. When the villagers saw we were serious, over a dozen children signed up.

I tried to get two sent-down youth who were teaching elsewhere to come to Libeishang. They weren't interested. There was another sent-down youth who was, but I thought they wouldn't be good. As the beginning of the school year approached I still had no confirmed teacher. In desperation, I asked the commune's director of sent-down youth to help. Soon, he recommended a sent-down youth to come teach in Libeishang. Our school began on time, and the enrollment rate in Libeishang shot up.

We had first and second grade in the same room, which was very common. This was called "复式教学, reinforced education." We used the national Chinese curriculum; at the time there was no alternative.

Zhang Sixi, who had taught before, showed me an old introductory textbook. It had vocabulary lists such as "Pots, stoves, rice zeng, windmills, drying baskets, and rakes." Even though my middle school education didn't prepare me for a few of the more obscure agricultural terms, I could easily tell that this book was all about everyday vocabulary. The publisher's note indicated that it was published in the early 1950s as part of the province's adult literacy movement.

But the school was not successful for long. In two years, I was no longer the team leader, and Master Hang, the sent-down youth who was the teacher, went back to the city. The school, which had no official name, shut down. The children could only go to school at the Pioneer Elementary School, and the dropout rates increased again.

At the time, Zhang Sixi's son Zhang Fengsheng was in first grade at the school. Many years later, he was a high school chemistry teacher at Yongfeng Middle School. He still remembers his time in that school, and mentioned it to me when I visited.

Zhang Meifa's child Zhang Fageng never attended our little school. But they're the principal of Zuolong Middle School in Yongfeng now.

Fengsheng and Fageng are upstanding citizens from Libeishang, and live in the city of Yongfeng. They rarely go back to Libeishang. Since they're both in education, I hoped that they would work to help the community of Libeishang. When I asked them about it, they both shook their heads, saying, "It's too hard. Things are complicated in the village."

Call me old fashioned, but I keep thinking of Mencius' advice, "the poor must care for themselves; the rich must care for the world," and Fan Zhongyan's famous lines, "When living high in the monastery one worries about the people; when on the frontier one worries about the country's ruler." I often think, if even the native Fengsheng and Fageng don't care about the progress of the village, why should an outsider like me?

But I can't stop myself from caring and worrying.

Fan Zhongyan also wrote, "Advancing and retreating are full of worry. When can one be happy? We must be the first to worry and the last to enjoy."

2. Teaching in Yongfeng Middle School

Starting in 1977, Chinese universities re-instated their entrance exams. Of the 2500 Shanghainese youths sent to Yongfeng prefecture, fewer than a thousand remained. Many of them went to the Culture and Education Department to enroll in the entrance exams.

The department said that, since it was a "re-instatement," the rules would be the same as for the 1965 entrance exams. Critically, the maximum age for enrollment was twenty-five. This excluded the vast majority of the sent-down youth.

Some of those excluded stayed at the department and refused to leave. A few days before the test, the Jiangxi province's education department suddenly announced that the age restrictions would be relaxed. So many of the sent-down youth were actually able to take the test. But many also didn't hear the news after going back to their villages, and missed out on the 1977 entrance exams.

Xia Yuanlin and his little sister Xia Yuanjie were in the Yang'ao Production Brigade. They were able to take the 1977 test. Xia Yuanjie had completed some middle school, and got into the Jiangxi Traditional Medical School. Her brother Xia Yuanlin had been in high school before coming to Jiangxi, and got the highest score. But this was just when the government in Ji'an, a major city, was starting a new normal university (a university for teachers). They snatched up all the best students, including Xia Yuanling.

I visited home in the summer of 1978. When I got back, a villager told me that someone from Yongfeng Middle School had come to look for me. I didn't think much of it.

But a few days later, Mr. Wang from Yongfeng Middle School came and found me in the fields. He said that, starting the next year, there would be an English portion of the exam. So the middle school needed to improve its English instruction. He had heard that the sent-down youth in Lugang were from some of the better schools in Shanghai, so He came here, only to find that most of us had already left.

So as one of the last remaining sent-down youths I followed him to the English department. He told me to read an instructional text in English, and I became a substitute teacher at Yongfeng Middle School. My salary was thirty-three yuan per month.

The Yongfeng Prefecture Department Store. The author bought two thermoses here when he got his first paycheck.

There was a cafeteria in the school, so I didn't have to plant vegetables or chop firewood to cook. There was a movie theater across the street; the department store and restaurant were around the corner. After I got my first paycheck, I went to the department store and bought two green thermoses. Every day I could go to the cafeteria and fill them up with hot water. I had gone a long time without such a luxury. These bottles are still in my house in Shanghai. The school also had electric lights, which were much better suited to reading than oil lamps.

The campus had an abandoned Catholic church; the doors were tightly locked. There was a small two story house nearby, which was once the priest's quarters. I had a room in this building. My window faced the basketball courts.

In 1998, not long before the house was demolished. The right window on the second floor belongs to the author's old room.

Looking out from the window, you could see the school entrance in the distance. There was a slate wall next to the gate, with a small door in it. The other side of the door also belonged to the school, originally. But the school was under jurisdiction of the Culture and Education Department, and they had built a two-story office building there to serve as their headquarters. They had even dug a fish pond in front of the building.

Most importantly, there was a room on the second floor of that building which housed the new graduate from normal university, Ma Liping. Just after six in the morning, I could see from my window that the students had gone into the classrooms for morning study hall. The door in the slate wall would open, and Ma Liping would come in. She had neatly-combed short hair and white sneakers, and promptly began her workout, running around the track. I was swallowed by waves of tenderness and love.

I was responsible for teaching seventh grade English. I had five to six classes a day, and had grading and prep work on top of that. It was not a particularly easy job. Adding to the stress of work was the fact that, despite having been the class representative for English class in school, I was still very bad at English.

I had only taken two years of English in Shanghai. At the time, there was a pedagogical trend of "oral skills first." So we focused mainly on listening and speaking. The school I was at took foreign language instruction quite seriously, and emphasized small class sizes. Our homeroom split into two section during English class, and we had one teacher for each section. Our half went to a special foreign language classroom. I thought that maybe this was why I got the job after just reading one passage. Mr. Wang had a very strong Upper Yongfeng (he was from Tengtian) accent himself.

I asked people to bring the English typewriter my father had bought in America, and Linguaphone English textbooks. I made a lot of flashcards and studied them after dinner. After waking up I would turn on the light, grab the flashcards by my pillow, and keep reviewing. Sometimes I forgot to turn the light off before sleeping. It got bad enough that the school's teaching supervisor reprimanded me for wasting electricity at night.

The students worked extremely hard.

From six to seven in the morning was morning study hall. The school took attendance, and the students were supposed to arrive before six. The doors closed at exactly six. Tardy students wouldn't be able to get in to school. Some of them would turn around in a panic, not knowing what to do. Some even burst into tears.

I taught seventh grade, in a newly built classroom. The windows hadn't been put in yet, and neither had the electricity. In the wintertime, study hall happened in darkness; the students all lit candles in the dark so they could study.

When gust of wind blew into the room they all shielded their candles with their hands so they could continue studying.

After a while, it got to be too cold. Intermittent stomping became a constant rumble in the classroom.

I often went to the room to check on the students. One of the more mischievous boys sat in the first row. Since his candle kept going out, he was always busying himself lighting the candle. Later, he got his stubby candle to stay lit, and put it inside his desk with his textbook. He stuck his hands in, as if he was warming his hands by the campfire. He looked down, forehead red from the cold, beaming with pride at his innovation.

Suddenly, the student next to him began to scream. The other students saw a wisp of smoke coming from his desk. His textbook had caught on fire! I ran over and helped him put it out. I sentenced him to stand outside for a while, which didn't really make a big difference in terms of temperature.

Evening study hall was from seven to nine.

Luckily, the school decreed that, since seventh graders were still young, they needed to sleep early in order to wake up early the next day. So they were spared evening study hall.

Including me, there were six teachers in the English department, of which four were accredited.

Mr. Qin sat across from me. Coincidentally, I went to the same middle school that he did, just years later. When the Cultural Revolution began, he was a student at the Beijing Normal University. He was studying "economics and geography," and after graduation he was assigned to Yongfeng Middle School to teach geography. Later, due to the lack of English teachers, he filled in and taught English. At the time, he was working hard to get an assignment in Nanchang, and was on the brink of success.

Unfortunately, on his way to Nanchang he died in a car accident. His wife, Ms. Yu, was also a teacher at the Yongfeng Middle School. Later she retired as the vice prefecture head and returned to Shanghai.

The homeroom teacher for my class was Ms. Wang, who had graduated from Shanghai Normal University. She later found a way to get re-assigned to Fengxian prefecture in Shanghai, and eventually became the director of the Shanghai governmental agency for "the study of public governance and human resources."

I only taught English at Yongfeng Middle School for one semester.

As the political climate changed, my parents were figuring out ways to get me back to Shanghai. I went back from Yongfeng Middle school to Libeishang, handed off my various responsibilities, dealt with my personal belongings, and then followed the great tide of sent-down youth returning to Shanghai.

In 2010, when I went back to Yongfeng Middle School, one of the administrators told me that he had been in my class. I couldn't remember him, though. He reminded me that I didn't have a Yongfeng accent, and that I had "authentic American English." I was shocked to say the least. He then said, his homeroom teacher was Wang Xin; I had to admit that he was right, but I still couldn't remember him. That night, he brought his son, a student at Yongfeng Middle School, to come see me. I immediately recognized his face. He sat in the front row, though he was not that boy who set his textbook on fire.

Yongfeng Middle School has moved to a new location.