Our featured writer today is Martha C. Franks.
Let’s give her a warm welcome!
If you would like your talent featured in the Artists in Our Midst series or Authors in Our Midst series, send me an email message. Don’t be shy! I have no more Artists posts in the queue, so please get in touch if you would like to be featured.
Conversing with the Middle Kingdom
by Martha C. Franks
Books without Borders: Homer, Aeschylus, Galileo, Melville and Madison Go to China tells the story of my two years teaching the liberal arts at a high school in Beijing from 2012 to 2014.
My time in China came at an exceptionally interesting moment in Chinese education. The decades-long Chinese nationwide educational obsession with STEM training was failing to produce the technological creativity that the Central Committee wanted to gain parity with the West. In response, some Chinse educational leaders began timidly to offer the idea that the way to produce such creativity was to encourage students to think and converse more freely, more broadly and more critically, in short, to adopt some form of “general” education. Some advocated return to teaching Confucian classics; others pressed for adapting Western liberal arts teaching to Chinese classrooms. It was a politically risky notion, but for just a few years, an experiment in teaching liberal arts was allowed. The Chinese authorities’ feelings of ambivalence about the liberal arts experiment hovered uncomfortably over my students’ conversations. At a more general level, there was a similar ambivalence hovering over the whole society. Life in China seemed to be unsure what it wanted. Songs of the Communist Revolution contended with exploding commercialism.
I came to China with the methods I had learned as a student and teacher in the
“Great Books” program at St. John’s College, which relies extensively on open, free-form discussion of classic texts, Eastern and Western. Recounting conversations as they occurred in my Chinese classroom, my book displays how the students got over their initial reluctance to speak in class and entered fiercely into passionate exchanges about the central ideas in great human writing—the questions of how our short human life is best lived, of how we can govern ourselves, of what part science plays in how we think and the heartfelt issue of meaning.
Xi Xinping came to power while I was teaching in Beijing, and since I left his hand has grown stronger. There has been a crackdown on the kind of education that I was able to offer to my Chinese students. Nevertheless, I like to think that what my students and I did together will find a way toward a growing global conversation that will allow all of us to speak and respond to each other, spurring a creativity that spills into the biggest possible ways of understanding.
Martha C. Franks, Books without Borders: Homer, Aeschylus, Galileo, Melville and Madison Go to China (Respondeo Books 2019)
You can get the book at the Respondeo website or on Amazon.
About Me
I am a long-time lurker at Balloon Juice and feel pretty shy about coming out into the open. I love the place. I got started here just when John found Lily by the side of the road and was unsure whether adopting her would work. Listening to that uncertainty develop into such a giving and getting of love has made stronger my diffident but stubborn hope that we can all, human and non-human, learn to see each other. So, please keep writing, complaining, quarreling and questioning—you are having great effects on the world!
I am a part-time faculty member at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I am also a lawyer, specializing in Southwestern water law (as I describe in the book, I taught a class on American law in China and did not find out until afterwards that the subjects I taught had been expressly forbidden by the Central Committee—sheer luck that no one noticed).
I write a little legal column for a magazine published through Respondeo Books. The magazine is called the Minimum Wager. https://respondeobooks.com/our-books/the-minimum-wager/
It’s Balloon Juice, so I have to send in a picture of an animal I care about. Humphrey, handsome though elongated, was with our family when I was a child. He has been gone for many years but I think he is a big part of teaching me what I like best. I miss him.
WaterGirl
Martha, please chime in when you get here so we know you are available for questions.
edit: This went up on the wrong day last week (!) so Martha wasn’t here. When I realized my mistake I pulled the thread – so the first 12 comments are from last Sunday.
Welcome Martha, for real this time!
Dorothy A. Winsor
What a fascinating teaching experience. What was your living situation like?
eclare
Your book sounds very interesting! I read another book about teaching in China, from a young man teaching English. His approach was more from a “how daily life works” point of view, I wish I could remember the name of it
ETA> I think it’s River Town by Peter Hessler.
topclimber
It’s nice to see a Liberal Arts major make it.
I may have to wait until it is on sale, but I am going to buy your book.
ETA
Looks like the Chinese court is making the same mistake their forbears made, trying to limit exposure to subversive Democracy and Humanity while cherry picking Western technology.
oldster
What an amazing story. I look forward to hearing more.
Towards the end of my teaching career — a little before you were in China — I remember thinking to myself, on many occasions, how lucky I was that the best and brightest of China’s youth were coming across the ocean to study in our colleges and universities. And I would think about how impossible that communication would have been when I was a college student — when the walls between China and the US were as high as or higher than those between the US and USSR.
I think we did a lot of good — you, bringing the West to them, I showing them a part of the West during their time here. I worry that this vital exchange is being cut off by Xi Jin Ping and his rejection of openness and democracy. And I hope that the re-closing of China will not last too many years.
dc
Did you teach any women writers or writers from minority groups within whichever dominant culture? And if you did, how did the students react?
WaterGirl
I’m hoping there wasn’t a miscommunication about when the post would go up! I thought we said 3pm on Sunday.
PJ
@WaterGirl: did you discuss time zone? 3pm EST is 1pm in New Mexico.
dexwood
@PJ: Yup, it’s only 2 here now.
WaterGirl
@PJ: I always speak in blog time but I supposed it’s possible that this is the one time that I didn’t specify that.
WaterGirl
@PJ: Oops, I checked back on our email exchange.
I may have to pull this and repost next Saturday when she is around.
WaterGirl
Okay, everybody please come back next SATURDAY and give Martha a warm welcome again, when she is here!
Marfks
I”m here!
Marfks
Is this the post from last Saturday with the same comments?
Marfks
I’m so sorry I got crosswise with the time last week, so I might as well do penance by answering last week’s questions, even if no one ever sees the answers.
I lived in a dorm room on the campus of my school, which was a fairly posh place (oddly, I guess, for a Marxist country). It was where the second tier party leaders sent their kids. The first tier went to boarding school in Switzerland.
My students were pretty racist, sadly, against a lot of minorities, most prominently people from Mongolia and the Japanese, but they had also absorbed the more traditionally Western forms of it. They had a strange relationship with misogyny; the Party was officially against it, but it was all over the place anyway. Lots of them grew up on old Disney movies, too, to learn English, and they had taken in those attitudes.
dmsilev
@Marfks: Seems to be the same thread, with the older comments.
Your description of the changes in Chinese education styles really rang true to me. I have a bunch of both colleagues and students who came up through the Chinese system, though just about all of them did/are doing their graduate work in the US or Europe, and it’s something we talk about now and again. Even in the STEM-specific areas, there was and still is a lot more rigidity in how students are taught (more emphasis on rote learning than anything else is the example that is usually brought up). The rigidity also extends to hierarchy, which may be ok at the high school level, but is a real detriment once you get to the advanced undergraduate or graduate student level and you have the goal of turning out graduates who can do high level original work.
Marfks
I think that’s exactly right. I went to the first conference on the liberal arts in China, in 2012, and the Chinese speakers were making just that point. A Party representative was there, too, and was much more cautious (as far as I could tell through a translator). He got restrained applause, suggesting lots of tension.
Marfks
I talk in my book about a thing called “the Needham question” after Joseph Needham, a sinophile who asked “Why did the Scientific Revolution happen in the West and not China” when China invented everything first. Some at the conference were hoping that liberal arts education was the answer. Others have argued that the answer is Christianity, which, by bringing God down to earth, made the earth a field of study rather than a place of corruption and chaos (compared to the clean, regular heavens).
The Dangerman
I’ll have to check it out and see how it matches up with my memory of teaching in China (circa 1997, for a very brief amount of time, in Chongqing). A lot of interesting memories. The hot pot was great and I ate everything until they offered me scorpion, at which point, I passed. On exiting out of Chongqing, the flight attendant said I was tall and put me in the emergency exit row, which happened to be Row 13 (I am a white knuckle flyer in the best of situationsI). I had an interpreter that I later decided was a bit more than an interpreter (I have no great idea what he was but I’ll just leave it as more than an interpreter). I thought Chongqing was fascinating. Hong Kong kinda bored me out n comparison but I was in HK fairly briefly.
WaterGirl
@Marfks: Yes
People were asking you questions last week and I figured they might still want answers. :-)
Marfks
Hot Pot! Yes!
In China the unlucky number is 4, so they put all the foreign teachers on the fourth floor. Also, no one would choose phone numbers with 4s in them, so our ours were nothing but 4s.
I suspect the scorpion is mostly for tourists.
Marfks
I visited Hong Kong on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. I was shocked when I went out in the streets and saw pictures of Tank Man, all in the open. I realized that I had internalized the feeling in mainland China that this is an event that no one is allowed to talk about. They do, of course, in corners, but it has the feeling of being obscene. Frightening how easily you can fall into such attitudes.
dmsilev
@Marfks: The other thing of note that I get is that most of the students here don’t want to go back if they can help it, largely because of pessimism over the political climate there and a general belief that it will get worse before it gets better, it’s not a representative pool of course, since choosing to attend grad school in the US self-selects for at least some level of dissatisfaction with either the educational or political system in China.
StringOnAStick
I had a friend in the early ’80’s who had taught English in Beijing for a year as one of the first from the West to do so, then did a year in Kuwait. He and his wife recounted how in the cold winter there were weeks where the only thing you could buy in the veggie markets was bitter melon. It was a transformative experience for them; I imagine for you as well.
Marfks
I think you are right, dmsilev, that most of my students were hoping to find some way to stay in the West; the Party knew that and wanted them to come back, so no one talked about it. If I asked them their plans they just got cagey. It was another instance of the difficult place that everyone was in–the Party wanted students to get the benefit of a Western education so they funded places like my school, but they also knew they would lose students forever. The result was an angry tolerance, like being mad at your teenager for not understanding how much worse you had it.
That’s interesting, StringOnAStick. We didn’t notice shortages, and were constantly told how much the economy was improving. We didn’t know whether to believe it, but maybe it was true.
Yutsano
@Marfks: Where is everyone else?
Posts like this make me both hopeful and sad. Hopeful because I know China needs to evolve. Sad because any ideas that could threaten “social order” (control of the Chinese Communist Party) get squashed really quickly. You may address this in the book, but do you hope some of your lessons stuck in their minds?
Marfks
Yes, I have a real–maybe naive–belief that ideas find their way. At first in my classes my students were silent, unable to believe that I actually wanted them to talk. It took them a long time, and then a long time again to say something they really thought, rather than what they had guessed I wanted to hear. Once they had that idea in their minds, though, they were excited and talked non-stop. It’s too liberating and wonderful to be suppressed forever. It can be suppressed for a long, hard time, though, I’m sorry to say.
Marfks
To be clear, when you talk of “your lessons,” this is the chief one that I want to stay in their minds–that it is an essential part of human life, whatever governments might say, to bring out your own ideas and experience and give it to the world. Also, there is not much that is more fun.
Marfks
@Yutsano: I think I have been doing the comments wrong. Here is my reply:
Yes, I have a real–maybe naive–belief that ideas find their way. At first in my classes my students were silent, unable to believe that I actually wanted them to talk. It took them a long time, and then a long time again to say something they really thought, rather than what they had guessed I wanted to hear. Once they had that idea in their minds, though, they were excited and talked non-stop. It’s too liberating and wonderful to be suppressed forever. It can be suppressed for a long, hard time, though, I’m sorry to say.
Fair Economist
I’ve put your book on my to-get list.
Marfks
@Fair Economist: Thanks! I would love to hear your reaction!
Marfks
thanks to all who read this.
Jim Appleton
@Marfks: On a flight from LA to Portland late 90s, I struck up a conversation with my seatmate. We made mostly smalltalk for half an hour or so about what he could expect about his new home. He had been hired by a tech firm.
Then I asked where he was moving from. He had just arrived from China. I asked how he learned unaccented English with natural and casual flow, ability to carry on humorous banter, and no indication that he was anything other than your typical bright American.
He said he was self-taught, and ours was his very first conversation with a native speaker!
PJ
Sorry there weren’t more questions, but I would suggest that holding one of these on a Saturday afternoon after Thanksgiving, when many people may be traveling or busy with family, might not be the best time.
Miss Bianca
Wow, cool – I almost applied to St John’s College as a nipper – loved the thought of that kind of rigorous classical education. However, even back in 1981 when my feminism was in its larval state, I remember being a little disturbed when I scanned the list of curriculum texts and noted that the only female author’s work deemed worthy of being “canonized” at that time was Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (granted, a worthy text, as well as my favorite novel from my favorite author, but still…).
That and the thought of being required to try my hand at calculus were the major turn-offs for me. But I still sometimes wonder what it would have been like.
What a fascinating time you must have had, I think I will have to put your book on my “to-read” list!
Sure Lurkalot
I may be too late to the thread, very interesting topic to me as a failed Classics professor (I bailed 4 years into my PhD).
My question is…do you see similarities in reverse in the U.S.? My school years were 1961-1973 where we had one standarized test a year other than the PSAT/SAT/ACT college entrance exams in high school. STEM was not emphasized as the only way to success.
It seems around 2000 the trend changed dramatically, frequent testing and teaching to the test was all the rage. Backlash to that doesn’t seem to have moved the needle much back to a liberal education (aka humanities?). STEM is king and the idea of education teaching a love of learning, intellectual curiosity and good study skills seems lost in the weeds.
Almost Retired
Very interesting post and comments. I’m curious as to why the Chinese government would forbid the teaching of American water law? Or am I reading that prohibition too narrowly (i.e. was it American law in general)?
WaterGirl
@Jim Appleton: What a great story.
Dan B
Looks like a fascinating book and a look at how authoritarian societies shape individual behavior.
A cousin’s son moved to Beijing in the early 90’s, married a local, and seemed like he would stay. They moved to the US in 2010 or so. I wondered if they saw the return to dictatorship or a rise in prejudice towards intermarriage.
J R in WV
deleted
sab
My sister was in the first class of American students studying in China in the early 1980s. She has had a lot of Chinese graduate students in the US over the years. I can’t wait to read this book.
Kayla Rudbek
sab
@Almost Retired: [The Chinese right now are going their own way on law of the sea, and not recognizing international law, especially the definitions of boundaries.]
They modernized their post Mao legal system in the 1990s with heavy contribution/consultation by a well-regarded NYC lawyer. So they didn’t have a problem with American law, or American commercial law in general.
ETA Ignore what is in the brackets. I misunderstood that she was referring to water rights and not maritime law.
sab
@Dan B: They may have just wanted cleaner air. Chinese cities have horrible air pollution.
AJ
Thank you for this wonderful post, Martha!
Great to hear a bit about your fascinating work. Hope you’ve had a nice holiday.
Marfks
@Miss Bianca: yes, St John’s has worked painfully for years to grow into all the wonderful writers who didn’t get recognized by the original canon. We do better now. Lots more conversation and change to be had, but I can’t help loving the place despite its shortcomings. It’s full of students asking questions they really care about.
As for calculus, I was scared of it too but one of the things I’m most grateful for is that St John’s made me do it. I was raised to believe that women couldn’t do math so it was great to find out I could. And even when I messed up the actual calculations, I could love the ideas and talk about them.
Marfks
@Miss Bianca: yes, St John’s has worked painfully for years to grow into all the wonderful writers who didn’t get recognized by the original canon. We do better now. Lots more conversation and change to be had, but I can’t help loving the place despite its shortcomings. It’s full of students asking questions they really care about.
As for calculus, I was scared of it too but one of the things I’m most grateful for is that St John’s made me do it. I was raised to believe that women couldn’t do math so it was great to find out I could. And even when I messed up the actual calculations, I could love the ideas and talk about them.
@Sure Lurkalot: I do see a reverse situation in the US. It was kind of strange that China was experimenting with the liberal arts when the US was shutting them done. I hope it means they will endure somehow, somewhere
Marfks
Marfks
@sab: what was forbidden was teaching the US Constitution with doctrines like the rule of law, separation of powers, checks and balances. The students were interesting about it. They suggested that the rule of law made no sense in a place of Confucian tradition because law was too rigid to be humane
@sab: my god the pollution was terrible! Sometimes it was fuzzy at the other end of a large room.
sab
@Marfks: Thanks for the response. That’s interesting about US cconstitutional law v Confusian tradition.
YY_Sima Qian
Very late to the thread, but my 2 cents:
Lastly, I think it is worth keeping in mind that things change in China very quickly, for both good & ill. Any experience more than a couple of years old could be out of date.
sab
@YY_Sima Qian: Thank you so much for weighing in. My sister has Chinese inlaws who are very extremely bright. They do look at the world differently from Americans. Some came from humanities background. Others from medicine. Others from engineering.
They look at the world and education differently from us. I have no connection with science or engineering. I do with social science. I think we could learn from each other. In law we already have. In social science both sides are distressed. In the arts all artists just look at who is buying their products.
China and US have both had very heavy handed government impact lately. I hope it stops. Both governments have gone heavily towards emphasizing the main ethnic group at the cost of others. Since we are both highly diverse countries I hope that stops also. So much harm is being done.
I sound bland, but both countries current trajectories really distress me.
Steeplejack
@YY_Sima Qian:
Very interesting; thanks for posting.
YY_Sima Qian
@sab:
Yeah, there are huge uncertainties w/ both countries. The challenges to social sciences in the two countries are different, in China the root cause is the overbearing hard authoritarian CCP regime, in the US it is resistance from nihilist reactionaries, but the situation in the US is still orders of magnitude better than in China. (Although it is always worthwhile to keep in mind that polities & societies occupy different spots on a continuum, meaning the differences are real & can be quite stark, but things are not black & white, either.)
As my daughter prepares to go to kindergarten, I have been having long running discussions w/ my wife on what kind of elementary school our daughter should attend. My wife & in-laws have been insisting on the better state schools, as that is what they are familiar w/ and instruction better suited for the gauntlet of standardized tests she will have to brave, and cheap. I have been insisting on private international schools (bi-lingual ones aimed at Chinese upper middle class, not ones aimed at international expatriates whose Chinese instruction is limited), whose instruction nevertheless builds a much more solid foundation in mathematics and reading/writing than is typical in the US, but rather expensive. I have bad memories of too much homework late at night from my elementary school days & I do not want it for my daughter. However, education reforms in China in recent years has significantly reduced workload, testing & rote learning in elementary schools, so much so that I am at least now willing to consider the possibility of sending my daughter to a state school, as I learned more about the current state of instruction. There are no more tests allowed before 5th grade. Chinese parents have curiously conflicted feelings. Before they were distressed at the level of pressure their children are under from the homework & testing, now they are distressed that lack of testing means they no longer have visibility (they believe) to their children’s educational progress &, more importantly, relative standing against their peers.
I have always told my wife that I would like our daughter to go to the US starting from junior high or high school. I have no wish for her to experience the intense pressure of standardized placement exams, or the required cramming ahead of each one. My wife has been understandably distressed about the prospect of leaving her life in China behind & emigrating to a foreign country. (Trump, the pandemic, anti-Chinese xenophobia, & stories of Chinese students getting shot outside of the campuses of the best universities in the US, stories played up by Chinese media, do not help, either.) I always told her that the planned move is 10 – 12 years away. Who knows what will happen in the mean time. Perhaps in 10 years things are so bad in the US that I have no wish for my daughter to go there. Perhaps in 10 years things are so bad in China that my wife would desperately want our daughter to leave.
May be I should look up the immigration policies of New Zealand…