Little Soldiers Read online

  Dedication

  For my parents

  Epigraph

  I am a little soldier, I practice every day.

  I raise my binoculars, I see things clearly.

  I take a wooden gun—bang, bang, bang!

  I drive a small gunboat—boom boom boom!

  I ride as a cavalryman—go go go!

  I am a little soldier, I practice every day.

  One-two-one, one-two-one, Let us forward march!

  FOR . . . WARD . . . MARCH!

  —A song taught in Chinese kindergarten

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  Prologue: The Red Star

  Part I: The System 1: Force-Fed Eggs

  2: A Family Affair

  3: Obey the Teacher

  4: No Exceptions to the Rule

  5: No Rewards for Second Place

  Part II: Change 6: The High Price of Tests

  7: Little Soldier

  8: One Hundred Days ’til Test Time

  9: Shortcuts and Favors

  10: Beating the System versus Opting Out

  Part III: Chinese Lessons 11: Let’s Do Math!

  12: Genius Means Struggle

  13: The Middle Ground

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Map

  Prologue

  The Red Star

  It seemed like a good idea at the time. When my little boy was three years old, I enrolled him in a state-run public school in Shanghai, China’s largest city of twenty-six million people.

  We’re Americans living and working in China, and the Chinese school system is celebrated for producing some of the world’s top academic achievers. We were harried, working parents—I’m a writer, my husband’s a broadcast journalist—motivated by thoughts of “When in Rome. . .” as well as a desire for a little Chinese-style discipline for our progeny. Our son would also learn Mandarin, the most widely spoken language in the world. Excuse me for thinking, What was not to like?

  It seemed an easy decision. And two blocks from our home in downtown Shanghai was Soong Qing Ling, the school, as far as posh Chinese urbanites were concerned. Soong Qing Ling Kindergarten educated the three- to six-year-old children of ranking Communist Party officials, wealthy entrepreneurs, real estate magnates, and celebrities. Strolling past on weekends, I sometimes spotted young Chinese parents gazing through the school’s entrance gates, as if daydreaming about a limitless future for their child. Inside a culture where the early years are considered so critical that there’s a common saying: 不要输在起跑线上, or “Don’t lose at the starting gate,” we figured Soong Qing Ling was among the best education experiences China had to offer.

  A transformation began almost immediately. After the school year began, I noticed my normally rambunctious toddler developing into a proper little pupil. Rainey faithfully greeted his teacher with “Laoshi zao!”—Good morning, Teacher! He began heeding the teacher’s every command, patiently waiting his turn in lines, and performing little duties around the house when asked.

  He also began picking up Mandarin, along with a dose of what the culture valued: hard work and academics. One day, Rainey tried to decipher the meaning of a Chinese phrase he’d heard in the classroom.

  “What does congming mean?” he asked me, large brown eyes wide.

  “Congming means ‘smart,’ Rainey,” I responded.

  “Oh, good. I want to be smart,” he said, bobbing his head. He wrinkled his nose. “What does ke ai mean?”

  “That means ‘cute,’” I said, and his eyes widened.

  “Oh! I don’t want to be cute. I want to be smart,” Rainey said.

  One afternoon, he emerged from school with a shiny red star plastered to his forehead.

  “Who gave you that star?” I asked my son.

  “My teacher! I was good in school,” Rainey chirped, glancing up at me as I studied his face.

  “What do you get a red star for?” I ventured, always curious about his classroom environment. “Do you get it if you run fast?”

  Rainey laughed, a hearty guffaw that emanated from his tiny belly and up through his throat, as if I’d just uttered the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard.

  “Mom, I never get a star for running in the classroom,” he said, smirking, large, brown eyes dancing. “I get it for sitting still.”

  Sitting still? I immediately recognized the error in my assumptions. In America, a student might be rewarded for extraordinary effort or performance, for rising a head above the rest. In China, you get a star for blending in and for doing as you’re told. It was America’s celebrity culture versus China’s model citizen; standing out versus fitting in; individual excellence versus the merit of collective behavior.

  The Chinese way was certainly familiar to me, the daughter of Chinese immigrants to America. Yet I’m also a product of US public schools and their culture of personal choice, and as a parent, I wanted good habits instilled for the right reasons, and delivered with a firm but featherlight touch. I began to wonder: Were Rainey’s teachers instilling the right values?

  “Why do you sit? Do they make you sit at school? Do you have to sit?” I asked Rainey, my voice increasing in pitch and speed with each query.

  But my rapid-fire questions were too much for a three-year-old. My husband, Rob, told me it sounded as if I were saying, “Are your human rights being violated?”

  A few weeks later, Rainey suddenly announced at dinner, over stir-fried tofu, “Let’s not talk while we’re eating.”

  “Where did you get that idea?” I said, immediately on the case. “Did the teachers say that?”

  On this, Rob was also incredulous. “So you can’t speak during lunch, Rainey?”

  “No. Bei Bei and Mei Mei were talking and the teacher said, ‘Be quiet.’ Sometimes the teachers are angry to us,” Rainey said, as Rob shook his head. Some of the fondest memories from my Texas childhood come from the school lunch table; there, we learned to barter peanut butter for ham sandwiches, negotiate playdates and Friday-night meet-ups, and collect votes for student council elections—and we forged friendships with as much noise as we could muster. Rob also came out of American schools, and I gather he had trouble imagining his own son being subjected to silence over salami (or, in this case, soybeans).

  Cultivating a superstar student in China, I’d come to learn, started with impulse control at the earliest age. Jammed into rows alongside his twenty-seven Chinese classmates, planted in a miniature chair, my son had learned to arrange each hand on its corresponding knee, back erect and feet positioned in parallel. He learned never to squirm in his seat or allow a foot out of place, for there was no faster way to draw a teacher’s ire. He understood he shouldn’t ever touch the student next to him, talk when the teacher is talking, or stand up for water without permission. Above all, he learned the last thing he wanted was to draw attention to himself.

  The red star was his reward for sitting mute in a chair, and my son proved a stellar trainee. Though Rainey’s toddler talk came out in halting sentences, at home he was clear about communicating one thing: The sticker would not be removed. Rainey brandished the red star at the dinner table, forehead tilted proudly toward the ceiling. He wore it during soccer practice and at a classmate’s birthday party. He even refused to peel it off when I tried to wash his face.

  “No, Mom—don’t touch, don’t touch!” he’d yelp, as we readied for bedtime. Off to bed he marched, red sticker intact.

  Were we unwittingly engaged in a battle over our son’s mind?

  “Should we be
concerned?” I found myself saying out loud.

  “Don’t worry about it,” my husband would respond, though sometimes I saw his forehead furrow, too.

  I couldn’t help but worry. Strolling through my Shanghai neighborhood, I observed Chinese children who were proper in public, polite to elders and peers, and orderly on the playground. I sauntered past the neighborhood elementary school at three p.m. on weekdays to see parents and grandparents waiting patiently in a pickup line that snaked around the block: Education here is a family affair. It was no stretch to imagine these children growing up to be disciplined geniuses, respected the world over. But what, if anything, were they giving up?

  A journalistic curiosity kicked in as I began to seek answers—by watching closely, asking the right questions, and pursuing experts with more knowledge than I had. As a daily reporter in New York, Minnesota, and California, I’d always defaulted to this approach, and although Chinese society seemed to frown upon independent inquiry, I was driven by a powerful motivating force: parental anxiety.

  Ironically, four months after Rob, Rainey, and I had arrived in China in 2010, the country posted some impressive education news: Shanghai teenagers scored tops in the world in math, reading, and science, according to a global student assessment test named PISA (Program for International Student Assessment). In their exam debut, students in my newly adopted city had beat out peers in nearly seventy countries (the United States and the UK finished in the middle of the pack). The result shocked the education policy world. “The Shanghai Secret!” trumpeted the New York Times. President Obama declared it a “Sputnik” moment, and the president of Yale marveled in a speech that China was building its own version of the American Ivy League, creating the “largest higher-education sector in the world in merely a decade’s time.” Meanwhile, media headlines continued to broadcast China’s galloping economic juggernaut; not only was China muscling the rest of the world onto the sidelines but was also out-educating the West.

  What I was reading in the newspapers didn’t exactly sync with my experiences on the ground. Just as I began looking into the school life of these super-achieving Chinese kids, I started to notice troubling signs in our son, such as a habit of obeisance that trickled into other aspects of his life. One day, a classmate’s mother asked him if he liked singing. “I don’t like singing, but if you want me to do it, I’ll do it,” he responded. Other days, Rainey would recite Communist Party songs, singing praise unto the “motherland.” I would try to convince myself that our home environment was just as important as that of school; meanwhile, I began to watch my son carefully, as if I’d developed a sixth sense especially tuned to subservience and a seventh to brainwashing. I suddenly recalled a conversation I’d had with a European expat friend who had pulled her daughter out of Chinese school. “I did not raise my daughter to be a robot or a people-pleaser,” she fumed.

  I noticed the Chinese around me had anxieties of their own, but of a different kind. A long-lost but now rediscovered Shanghainese cousin had begun frantic arrangements for his daughter’s primary school entrance interviews, enrolling her in a fearsome after-school activity called “Math Olympiad.” A high school kid I’d met began marathon preparations for the National College Entrance Exam. A rural Chinese woman who’d babysat Rainey for a year suddenly hightailed it home to Hubei province. The son she’d left behind in the countryside was struggling in the run-up to high school entrance exams, and now he had nowhere to live. “The government is razing my house to clear the way for a building project,” the woman said through tears, one of hundreds of millions of Chinese migrants blessed by job opportunity yet simultaneously cursed by the devastation rapid economic change can bring.

  Rob and I had headed to China for what seemed like limitless opportunity, but the Chinese themselves seemed uneasy about the change happening around them. I wondered about the contradictions I was sensing: Was the obedience I observed in Rainey part of the Chinese secret to academic success? Was the Chinese education system really pumping out robots or were their students actually getting a superior education? Although the world seemed to hail China’s march toward global superstardom, are Chinese methods really what the West should measure itself against, much less emulate?

  These questions surfaced again and again, and before long I began taking a pen and paper everywhere I went, jotting notes as I looked for answers. For several years, I trailed young Chinese and talked to teachers, principals, and education experts. I dropped in on schools in the United States and China, and traveled deep into the Chinese countryside to look into reports of devastating poverty and inequality. I pored over research studies and volunteer-taught at a Shanghai kindergarten. I was certain my reporting would open a peephole onto a massive country that seemed formidable from the outside, yet was quietly struggling to make sense of its newfound standing in the world; and it would also illuminate the best way forward for Rainey in his own schooling.

  Early on, I instinctively understood my family would need to bend and be flexible to find our compass (in fact, we’d be required to deliver practice tests before breakfast!). As my journalistic quest began to calm my anxiety as a parent, one important lesson became clear: If we opened our minds, we just might reap the benefits of rearing our child in a second culture, and educating him the Chinese way (while hopefully retaining our Western sense of individuality).

  Ours would be a journey that would require grit, more than a few leaps of faith, as well as an outward respect for everything our newfound culture would throw in our direction (including bribery by red-star sticker).

  China would have it no other way.

  Part I

  The System

  1

  Force-Fed Eggs

  She put it in my mouth, I cried and spit it out, then she did it again.

  —Rainey

  My Chinese uncle told me luck must have been falling from the sky the day I received the news: My son had been accepted into Shanghai’s most prestigious kindergarten.

  “How did you get Rainey into Soong Qing Ling?” he asked.

  In other words, how had I—his American niece—succeeded where he’d come up short? His granddaughter was three, just like Rainey, but she’d been denied a spot. Uncle Kuangguo had been an executive at one of China’s first auto supply companies and for much of his life had enjoyed guanxi, networks of people he could call on for favors and introductions. He’d had connections of the sort that made the impossible materialize on your doorstep.

  “Only luck, I suppose,” I told him, as he wrinkled his nose at the floor.

  We’d moved to Shanghai from Los Angeles in the summer of 2010, when Rainey was eighteen months old. As we announced plans to move, I was surprised to detect an undercurrent of envy in our American friends’ responses, as if we’d hopped a speedboat to China and they’d soon be treading water in our cultural and economic wake. Certainly, America’s future seemed increasingly unstable—in the year 2010, the US economy was still spinning inside a recession—while China seemed to be eating the planet’s economic lunch. China boasted the world’s fastest-growing major economy, the biggest market for autos, the largest number of cellphone users . . . a new superlative seemed to scroll across Western media headlines every other week. Within a decade or so, experts said, China would surpass the United States to become the largest economy in the world.

  We’d also been feeling the intense pressure of raising kids in a competitive urban environment. More and more, talk at dinner parties had begun to revolve around how to line up interviews for the few spots available at good American preschools, or the odds of winning that charter school lottery. The decision to relocate seemed easy: Rob had been offered a job as the China correspondent for a US public radio show just as we were closing in on the starting line of an American parenting rat race. “Rainey will be bilingual!” one friend mused with raised brows, as if it had suddenly struck him that a two-language toddler might help with those preschool interviews. “Nanny help is affordable
in Asia, I hear,” pondered a girlfriend, after she’d battled fiercely with her husband over daycare pickups that week.

  Rob and I chose to live in Shanghai’s former French Concession, a part of the city center known for its winding streets, from which narrow alleys wind and weave, populated with small shops and cafés and overhung with abundant green foliage. This section of the city was conceded to the French in 1849 but transferred back to China in the 1940s during World War II. In the century in between, the French had made their mark, establishing the concession with now-historic buildings and luxuriant London plane trees. Here, the foreign population enmeshes with its Chinese neighbors, together creating ample demand for such Western delights as French baguettes, gourmet coffee, and fresh Brie, alongside Chinese street delicacies such as scallion pancakes, pork buns, and taro cakes. East meets West, right outside our front door.

  We found everything we needed in our new city and made friends quickly. At first, Rainey was more likely to stick chopsticks in his ear than use them to eat, but he adjusted to his new surroundings, too, picking up spoken Mandarin and acquiring a taste for pork dumplings. We hired a Chinese ayi named Huangrong to take care of Rainey while Rob and I worked, and they developed a close, playful bond. Rainey spoke Mandarin with Huangrong during the daytime, and English in the evenings with us, and he was soaking up new words in both languages.

  “How’s Rainey’s Chinese coming along?” friends back home would ask with a smidge of envy.

  “Great, he’s already counting to thirty,” I’d boast. “He’s perfectly bilingual.”

  As Rainey’s third birthday approached—about a year into our time in Shanghai—he was getting restless at home. A bilingual nursery where he spent time each week changed teachers frequently, and I knew we needed a real preschool with competent administrators. We briefly considered a Western-style school, but tuition for international schools in Shanghai cost as much or more than an Ivy League university, nothing short of insane for a child who couldn’t yet wipe his own behind. More than that, we couldn’t easily afford it (many American companies covered school fees for their employees, but at the time we were on our own).