China: Let's Talk About Schools

What Has the World Come to?

Every time I bitch about all the annoyances of living in China, my mom retorts, bring the kids back to the US already!  But in light of the recent Sandy Hook shooting, I'm riddled with fear of sending my kids to school even in wealthy suburban neighborhoods in the US.  I tell my mom, they could be shot!  She says, well, in China they could be hacked at by a knife (referring to the recent knife-hacking event that injured 22 at an elementary school in Henan)!  I say, being hacked at is better than being shot!  At least you are still alive!  She snorts, and says, living with such pain and possibly severe disability is a fate worse than death.  If you've been to the  hospitals in China, you know she's right.  What has the world come to, that we are wondering whether we prefer our children hacked at or shot? 

Anyway, having two young children, your mind is never too far from pondering on what kind of education to provide for them.  And our quest for education in China has not been straightforward and easy.  As if that's not enough to kill my brain cells over, now I have to worry about their safety. 

If You Aren't Rich, Life Truly Sucks

To understand the kind of competition Chinese kids face, you have to first understand the pressure of living in modern China.  Development is concentrated in large cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, so housing prices in these places have skyrocketed.  Take Beijing, the market I am most familiar with, for example, to purchase a home that comfortably houses a family of three, you need about a million dollars.  US dollars, that is.  In cash, or a lot of sellers won't sell (an overwhelming number of Chinese buy houses with cash rather than take on a mortgage).  Sure, I guess you could get away with buying a place for say, 300k to 400k, but then you won't actually be living in Beijing.  It would be like saying you live in NYC when you actually live in suburban (like, very suburban, NJ, not like Jersey City).  Your commute will be at least an hour and you'll either be pressed up nose to nose against someone on the subway or bumper to bumper on the high way. 

Beijing is built on concentric ring roads and just by telling people where you live along the rings can reveal a lot about you.  The second ring road is build around the old city center, and to live within the city center, either you are an older Beijinger (like my parents with a very old government provided flat that they bought for pennies on the dollar) or you are a very wealthy expat paying over $5000 in rent living in one of those traditional courtyards.  And your next door neighbor may be twenty families squeezed in the same-sized courtyard as yours.  With a public bathroom (squatting style, no less) two doors down.  Within the second and third ring roads, you'll find a mishmash of residences--some very expensive and some very rundown.  Then come the space between third and fourth ring roads--those used to be farm land, so the developments are newer and somewhat more affordable.  That's where we live and due to limitation of space, our kids share a room with stackable beds.  Beyond fourth ring roads you have these expat compounds where they are bubbled up in their own little worlds, where they can pretend they never left their home countries (I've found for many of them, when they think of local Chinese, they think of their drivers and nannies, so it's hard for someone like me to make friends with them.  I imagine it may be hard for them to treat me as one of them when I look like one of their nannies.  All sorts of racist sentiments come loose so after a few dissatisfying encounters I've pretty much given up on the whole lot of them.  It's a whole complicated issue that merits its own blog entry).  If you live outside the fifth ring road and not in one of those McMansions, well, life is a bitch. 

And wealth is very unevenly distributed these days.  Some people are ultra rich, driving their Maseratis and Ferraris up their (multiple) villas while those earning average wage may never be able to buy a house in Beijing.  Most people still opt for salaried jobs, and the kind of job you can get is largely driven by where you had received your college degree.  For a mid-tier college graduate, a steady, high paying job may be forever out of reach.  The pressure of being able to afford a house and car is so great, because it very directly affects your ability to attract a mate or to even marry.  Sometimes I think these Chinese youngsters see each other as tradeable goods with a price-tag where one person can be straightforwardly compared with another based on annual income, square-footage of housing and size of savings account.  Competition starts as early as kindergarten, because getting into the right one will boost your chance of getting into a good elementary school, then a good middle school, then a good high school, and eventually, a good college. 

Let me run some numbers by ye faithful readers so you get a glimpse of the kind of competition these kids and their parents face.  Beijing has a dozen tier-one elementary schools, pretty much all concentrated within the third ring road.  All of them require entrance interviews.  Not the "sing Mary Had a Little Lamb for me and count to ten" kind of interview.  More like, read a newspaper in English and do additions and subtractions within 100 and write a novel maybe we'll even consider you.  I'm pretty sure I, and many of you, would have failed.  Next, bring in the parents and let's check out their socio-economic status.  If your kid isn't a bona-fide genius, or you aren't a member of China's PolitBuro, you really have no shot.  But no worries!  If your parents can find the right connections and for $10,000-$100,000 in cash (depending on the school--the most ridiculous I've heard is $150,000), you will find yourself in the welcoming arms of the school of your choice.  Though sometimes I wonder, if you had that much cash to spare, do you really need to vie for a spot so your kid can get a good salaried job?

This Is Our Experience

Our quest to find the right school had been pretty strenuous.  I knew I didn't want to dish out that much cash for my kid to be in an over-crowded tier-one school where I have to secretly slip cash and gift cards to teachers even after we get in (or your kid becomes "special" in ways you may not like).  I also loathed the ridigity of Chinese schools, but international schools don't teach Chinese and cost more than my college tuition.  For Juju's first year, we opted for a Chinese private school 30 minutes away, but with city's worsening traffic, it soon became clear that that wasn't sustainable.

We had another school right downstairs by where we lived, but it was a "migrant worker school".  Any Beijing family with any means would consider sending their kid there a travesty in the truest sense of the word.  In fact, even some migrant workers turn their noses up at the school.  But hey, it was better than having to be bused.  And it turned out, even that school wasn't easy to get in.  I called multiple times, and then went to the school with cash in hand, and they still almost turned me down.  In the end, I pretty much begged, and it cost us $1,500 in cash for them to take Juju.  Coming from a private school where she was previously coddled, Juju was shocked at how teachers treated the students and became very unhappy.  Her only consolation was the deal that we had struck: that she'd only be in that school until she finished second grade, then we were moving back to the US.  Our friends and coworkers practically dropped jaws when they found out where our daughter went to school.  It was that dramatic--as if we were sending her to juvie camp. 

Then, one day, in the first week of second grade, I had by chance discovered another school.  It was built just last year and only had first and second grades.  It was a satellite school operated by one of those not-tier-one-but-highly-desirable schools.  Again, I turned on my charms and begged (you really have to have thick skin if you want anything done in china) the school to take Juju.  In the end though, it was her own charm and good looks that got her in.  That, and $4500 in cash.  But it was the best money we'd ever spent.  The school is still taught in Chinese style, but the principal has an eye towards the west and incorporates some of the ways found in foreign schools, which, ironically, is why the original school isn't a tier-one school.  It's not as focused on just grades and the kids don't have truckloads of homework.  They put on school plays and musicals and let the kids out to play when it snows. 

Of course, none of that is as reassuring as the fact that now Juju comes home happy, singing praises of her new school.  So much so that she's forgotten about our deal.  I still think we paid heftily to go to a public school, but many parents in the city have paid much much more.  The saddest part is, while we like our school, these other parents, after paying all that money, their kids may not even be happy going to their schools.  They are overloaded with homework and have to overcome the crushing pressure of testing well. Majority of Chinese kids tend to wallow in the middle--the bad students are not that bad as once they've completed all that homework they are bound to learn a thing or two while few good students have the chance be truly extraordinary or develop into Steve Jobs/Bill Gates.  But what if suddenly one day, they wake up, and find that it's not these cookie-cutter test-taking androids but different-thinking, inventive minds that the world needs?  Some parents are realizing this early and doing everything they can to send or at least plan to send their kids outside the country for school. 

As for us, we consider ourselves very lucky.  The kids like their schools now, and we have the choice of bringing them back to the US once the pressure becomes too much.