POSTCARD FROM CHINA: In The Workers’ Paradise

SHENYANG, China—The statue of Chairman Mao in Shenyang rises three or four stories to survey Zhongshan Square, without a doubt cutting a more imposing figure than any Mercedes-chauffeured communist official or donkey-cart-driving farmer in this provincial capital of 7 million. Clad in an overcoat, which probably still leaves him chilly during the northeastern China winters, Mao stretches forth one arm over the sledgehammer-swinging, automatic rifle-slinging soldiers, workers and peasants surging forth from his feet in sculpted struggle against the forces of the West, capitalism, imperialism and whatever else. He offers, in short, the perfect place on a Friday evening in July for a self-proclaimed “American English training center” to hold an English karaoke competition, with its Chinese employees adopting the voices of Richard Marx and Celine Dion.

“Is the irony lost on these people?” I wailed to no one in particular that night four weeks ago.

That’s something I’ll have to ask them in the following week, before I finish my term of drilling students five hours a day on patterns like “How often do you eat hamburgers?” and return to the United States. Really, though, it’s only one of many related mysteries I mull after seven weeks in China as an English teacher.

Unlike the foreigners of 100 years ago, I didn’t come to this country to carve it up like a banquet fish, sucking profits out from between every bone. I don’t live in an idyllic riverside concession graced by elegant European architecture. And I didn’t expect the special treatment that treaty after treaty once guaranteed for nationals of the various early 20th-century imperial powers.

Anyway, who needs treaties these days in China? The oddity of my white-skinned, wide-eyed appearance alone elevates me to stop-and-stare status. In the ever-mopped, ever-muddied hallways of the private English schools where I work, a foreign teacher enters and the mass of students and parents parts, the kids gazing in what looks a lot like amazement and the adults nodding in satisfaction. On a field trip, thirty or so Chinese children mobbed me for autographs. I signed school-logo baseball caps, t-shirt sleeves, t-shirt backs—and all three for some—with my authentic foreign name. Then the mothers posed their little ones for pictures with my foreign face. Later, while on vacation in Beijing, I repeated the whole “shuo qiezi!” (“say eggplant!”) routine with Chinese tourists from outlying provinces who just had to have photos of themselves with an American against the backdrop of Tiananmen Square or the Forbidden City.

If the Chinese simply desired mementos of their encounters with a Westerner, I’d brush it off as curiosity about the unknown and delight in having met it. As it is, the practice only adds to the unsettling feeling that I represent everything against which China has spent much of its modern history waging both military and ideological wars. And this country is welcoming me, perhaps at the expense of its own people.

Compare, for example, my living conditions and salary against those of Alice, a Chinese teacher and working single woman. Free of charge, the school provides me and all foreign teachers with accommodations. I have my own room, offering me air conditioning, a TV featuring four copies each of five different channels, rather reliable hot water, and furniture that typically serves its purposes, along with a plodding washing machine down the hall. Sure, the room also came outfitted with permanently-there hairballs on the randomly-chosen rugs, belching pipes, a well-entrenched lard-like slime colony on the bathroom floor, and a central bathroom drain that sends the smells of several other toilets wafting up near mine. As long as I have flip-flops lashed to my feet, though, it’s quite tolerable. For 20 hours of classroom time per week, I earn 4,000 yuan per month—about $500. The school slips in 300 yuan per month for transportation and 100 yuan per hour of overtime. In a city where a four-yuan bowl of noodles will keep me full for half a day, I’m doing just fine.

Alice, on the other hand, shares a sixth-floor apartment (sans elevator) with five other young women in one of the bruising concrete blocks that industrial Chinese cities ought to trademark. They enter into a room with a table, to which they pull over plastic stools when they want to eat. Their “kitchen,” if it could be called that, has a sink and a burner or two. The six of them sleep on bunks spread between two rooms. They don’t have much in the way of closets or drawers for storage, but that’s okay, since they don’t have much in the way of stuff to store. Their sun porch is a hanging forest of drying clothes, basically whatever they’re not wearing at the time, which they wash in plastic tubs in their bathroom. Nowhere in sight are a TV or phone, and hot water probably isn’t an issue, as they also lack a working bathtub. When it’s shower time, they pack their towels and deodorant into tote bags and head out to the public bathhouse for three yuan a visit. Alice’s reward for standing in front of a classroom about nine hours each week and sitting probably twice as long in an office is less than 1500 yuan per month.

I know all this because Alice is my co-worker. We teach English side by side, and then we return to our respective dwellings in Shenyang and stations in life.

While an unabashedly capitalist institution such as my school might segregate foreigners through income, the Chinese government—the government that bats American spy planes out of the sky and would have blamed the entire West had Beijing lost the 2008 Olympics—does the same when it hires foreign teachers for its schools and maintains segregated prisons and dorms.

At first, I wanted to know why Alice isn’t worth it. I wanted to know why someone who works with me, who works longer than me, should deserve so much less simply because she’s from here and I’m not. I didn’t care that her salary is considered good pay by Chinese standards. It still doesn’t buy her a good lifestyle by my standards.

But now I think I understand why everyone, including my co-workers, fawns over the inadvertent imperialists like myself, those of us who are living above the locals and taking from this country because we can. They believe they need us here. If not for foreign teachers, foreign students, even foreign visitors who became foreign prisoners, how would this country develop? Foreign investment, which China depends on, cannot by itself change China as the Chinese seem to want it to change. Foreign people have to come, too. But how many would, if they were offered nothing more than most Chinese receive?

Ironically, then, to state it mildly, because of my 4000-yuan monthly salary, Alice might one day earn closer to it than she does now; because of the relatively luxurious conditions in which I dwell, Alice might one day experience better than she currently does. Until then, the disparities that make me wonder why she doesn’t hate me are part of, and perhaps the price of, development.

And so China, to secure its own survival, is inviting in the imperialists, and Mao is stuck staring silently ahead as the people he left behind sing a new kind of revolutionary tune under his nose.

Sarah J. Ramer ’03, a Crimson editor, is a folklore and mythology concentrator in Dunster House. This summer, she is outnumbered.