Don't Be, Do Be, Just Be Jujube

The upside of being asked all these nosy and obnoxious questions by my fellow Chinese is that my questions to them are fair game.

The playground was crowded with children today and yesterday. I struck a conversation with a mom yesterday who told me that most of the parents in the complex simply refuse to send their kids to Juju's preschool and those who do complain about it bitterly. I asked her why that was, and she complained that the school only lets the kids play and doesn't teach them anything!

The same complaints were echoed by two grandmas today.

One of them said Untal Robah (Uncle Robert, the English teacher) recites the same stuff everyday and the kids haven't learned any English. She called her granddaughter over and asked what English she's learned from Untal Robah recently. A girl just shy of school age came over, and said in sing-songy English, "I'm hungry; I'm not hungry". Then the grandma looked at me and asked if it made any sense. I smiled and nodded encouragingly. But when she asked her granddaughter what she had said, the girl told her she had no idea. Yeek, strike one against the school.

The other one told me, "Our Precious knew all his numbers and could even recite Tang Dynasty poems, but after attending the preschool, he's only had fun and forgotten everything!" She pulled out two sheets with her grandson's doodling, all jagged lines and scratches, and said, "Look at this, what is this! This doesn't look like anything, and this is what he draws at school everyday! The nursery school across town teaches kids how to draw all sorts of stuff that look like something!" The other grandma clucked sympathetically and re-emphasized that the kids simply learn nothing while their peers at other schools are excelling at all sorts of subjects.

This mentality of stuffing the kids as full of so called knowledge as possible is very common-place. When I was going through Juju's Chinese children's books, I found that aside from the ones translated from a foreign language, almost all of them were self-labeled as some kind of curriculum to teach babies stuff or to smarten them up, and all the art work was computer-generated cartoons. Where's great stuff similar to Eric Carle's Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See and The Very Hungry Caterpillar? My mom had dismissed the artwork in Juju's American reads as too abstract or simple, but Juju loved her books. Now she can't sit through any of her Chinese books and I find myself uninterested in reading those silly things to her. Who really cares if reading this or that will stimulate exactly 400 gray cells on the upper left hand corner of her frontal lobe and boost her score on the college entrance exam? This focus on learning is destroying her love of reading!

While I want to shield Juju from this craziness and simply want her to have fun in school, I am starting to feel a bit of pressure to follow the herd. Sometimes I look at Juju and wonder, what if she doesn't make it to Stanford, beloved alma mater of Mr. MP and mine? Would she still achieve happiness? Or, more accurately, would we as parents be seen as failures and cause me to feel like shit (Mr. MP has already announced that he couldn't care less whether the kids go Stanford, Ivy League or otherwise, as long as it's not Berkeley), since our kids should be well-positioned for admission to these schools of prestige? These Chinese parents would kill to send their kids to a first-tier American college. My uncle, full of envy upon hearing my acceptance into Stanford, said that if jumping off a 10-story building could guarantee his son a spot at Stanford, he'd be more than willing. In China, competition amongst young people is cutthroat simply because there are so many of them, but having well-schooled children also boosts the social status (as well as ego) of the parents.

I was feeling a bit of angst when I found out for $1,300 a month I could be sending Juju to a preschool founded by an American woman with a Masters in Education from Harvard but we won’t because it’s just so ridiculously over-priced when she would be perfectly happy at a $300 one. But if I don’t, am I short-circuiting her chance of going Ivy-league? I’ve learned a while ago that making getting into a first-tier college an end goal in itself is incredibly short-sighted. When I started college I felt lost for quite a while, because I didn’t really know what else to work towards. Besides, having a Harvard, Yale, Stanford degree does not in anyway guarantee happiness. Just look at me: I thought getting into a top business school would propel me into a perpetual state of ecstasy, but alas, no such luck. I was always unhappy about something: my classmates were not inclusive, there was too much drinking, I was, um, pregnant, and last, I had to play single parent while going to school. I don’t want my children to be like me. If they can be productive and happy, that should be enough. Still, I can’t deny my vanity in wanting them to go to some hot shot college.

I know this will be an on-going struggle for me and I hope to have the wisdom to know when I’m helping my kids becoming kind, content and productive members of society versus mere test-taking machines.