I Stand Corrected Read online

  If—for whatever reason—Chairman had failed to reproduce, he would have been given the option to subcontract that task. For there are now agencies in China that cater to wealthy would-be parents by securing a birthing surrogate in America. When that child—born in the United States and thus a U.S. citizen—turns twenty-one, he can apply for green cards for his parents. In this way, some wealthy Chinese are ensuring their succession in China and, at the same time, are incubating backup plans to immigrate to the United States.

  PART SIX

  Children and Their Many Consequences

  A child’s life starts like one piece of white paper.

  —Chinese proverb

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Our Dongzhimen apartment looked out on one of the compound’s several playgrounds, where ever-attentive nannies shadowed their single charges as if protecting perishables. Small, spry grandmothers used straw fans the size of elephant ears to cool down what would always be their only grandchild.

  Like most apartment enclaves in Beijing, ours was enormous, and it was at its Olympic-size swimming pool one morning where I saw something plausible only in China.

  Two women arrived with a little girl who looked no more than three years old. One of the women was the little girl’s mother; the other, her nanny. While the nanny removed the little girl’s clothes and replaced them with the bottom half of a bikini, the mother conferred with a young man dressed neatly in sports attire. He had a whistle around his neck and a small kickboard tucked under his arm. The little girl, familiar with the routine, held out her arms while the nanny made the necessary adjustments to her water wings. After a second check to make sure the water wings were secure, the nanny picked up the little girl and handed her to her mother, who handed her to the young man, who lowered her—now holding the kickboard—into the pool. He blew his whistle. The little girl kicked her way down the full length of the fifty-meter pool without stopping. As I watched her turn around and kick her way back, I thought to myself, The rest of us have had it.

  The little girl kicking her way up and down the Olympic-size swimming pool was not the only example of supervised discipline among the children in our compound. As I left my apartment every morning for the market, I walked by a young boy being put through an impossible-looking regimen of table tennis. When I passed him on my way back several hours later, the poor boy—drenched in sweat—was still at it, relentlessly driving the ball across the net and returning it at lightning speed. I wondered if he was allowed the occasional pleasure of simply playing the game.

  Physically precocious children appear in the crosshairs of their country’s fixation on winning, and promising athletes are often plucked from their families at adolescence and sent to state-run sports academies. But the wider scope of pressure forced on the nation’s children has been enabled by their parents’ upward mobility. Chinese adolescents are swallowed whole by the schooling their parents can now afford.

  Confucian principles dictate that the mastery of any subject is achieved only through long and exhaustive study. This fundamental tenet—that hard work and rote study trump creative discovery—echoes through Chinese history.

  Each year, China’s Ministry of Education is faced with the daunting task of educating over 250 million students; for the most part, it succeeds in that ambitious and admirable endeavor. According to the CIA World Factbook, China boasts a literacy rate of 95 percent. That the Chinese education system places an emphasis on high-pressure memorization and promotes standardization of knowledge over creative expression and independent thought is not without consequences. It has resulted in an intense work ethic, but it has also produced young people less capable of envisioning issues within a larger perspective.

  China is undergoing an economic transformation ten times the speed of the West’s Industrial Revolution, but for China to maintain its national growth, it must change its economic model from one based on manufacturing to one based on innovation. It is possible that China’s educational system will prevent that metamorphosis.

  Mei convinced me of this.

  Mei and her parents lived on the same floor as we did in the Dongzhimen compound. Her mother was a doctor; her father, the editor of a business-to-business magazine specializing in aviation. Mei was twelve years old and attended a well-regarded middle school in another neighborhood. The school’s reputation was based largely on the number of its students who were accepted into excellent high schools—high schools that had an impressive percentage of their graduates accepted into good universities.

  Every weekday morning, Mei was up at six. She dressed, had breakfast with her mother, and was out the door by seven in order to make her first class at eight. Mei arrived at school fifteen to twenty minutes early so she wouldn’t risk being late by one minute, for the school’s strict attendance policy penalized tardiness. Mei’s mother did her best to drive Mei to school, but sometimes Mei had to take public transportation; on those days, she started her commute even earlier.

  Mei’s class schedule depended on the day of the week and included the subjects of Chinese, mathematics, English, and history. There were also “electives,” such as Chinese classical literature, which, though technically voluntary, were considered obligatory in light of the highly competitive nature of high school admissions.

  In class, Mei sat quietly, listened intently, and took notes. She made herself known only to answer the occasional question from a teacher, which required naming a place or date. Regardless of the subject, the class structure was roughly the same: new material was presented, exercises were assigned to ensure that the material was properly processed, and weekly tests were given to confirm that the material was retained. Essays had a standardized format: students synthesized information they had been taught, drawing conclusions the teacher had already outlined for them. Standardization was rewarded. Diverging opinions resulted in lower grades, a risk not worth taking.

  Mei finished school at five and immediately went to evening classes at a private cram school adjacent to her middle school. During her second shift of schooling, Mei reviewed the same material she’d studied in her day classes. She also learned various techniques designed to give her an edge on standardized tests. The evening classes finished at six-thirty, and Mei usually ate dinner on the same block as the cram school and with the same girlfriends who were attending the same school. Once home, Mei did several hours of homework, getting to bed no earlier than eleven. Every Saturday, a private tutor worked with Mei to improve her test-taking techniques. On Sunday, Mei did something she was not allowed to do for the six preceding days and nights: she put aside her schoolbooks.

  Between 2005 and 2010, China’s urban population increased by 43,500 every day, according the the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics. China’s middle class will continue to grow at a staggering rate, and a correspondingly large number of students will flood the education system. Demand for higher education in China is outpacing supply, and two fundamental facts are creating a voraciously competitive student body: there are only so many hours in a day to study, and there will be more and more students applying for a finite number of openings at the prestigious universities. The year I knew Mei, seventy million high school seniors in China were vying for nine million university slots.

  Given the incredibly competitive nature of the Chinese education system, any slip in Mei’s schedule might have lowered her class rank, significantly lessening her chances at a successful future. Mei’s father lacked the connections to guarantee his daughter’s smooth transition into an elite high school, leaving Mei entirely dependent on her grades and test scores in order to stay on her upwardly mobile path.

  Mei had a guitar, a gift from a relative, but she never learned to play it. It wasn’t that Mei was uninterested in music. It had been deemed an “unuseful” activity by her parents. They believed that any activity not directly improving Mei’s chances of getting into college was a liability.

  Mei didn’t know any boys. Her school separated the
sexes in the classroom, and the teachers didn’t encourage mixing on the playground. Mei’s few girlfriends went to the same school, shared the same class schedule, and attended the same cram school. With the exception of occasional outings to a karaoke parlor to sing with these girls, Mei rarely saw them outside of school. Never would Mei consider confiding in them, for when the time came to apply to college, those same girls would be her competition.

  Mei’s life, as I came to know it, was typical for children in her family’s socioeconomic bracket. Acceptance to a good university is believed to be crucial for a secure future in China—not so much for the quality of the education as for the status of attending the right school. The right school brings with it the likelihood of connections and the inevitability of a higher salary after graduation.

  Tens of thousands of Meis are being shaped by China’s educational system—a system that is not teaching the next generation how to think critically, a system that prevents creative spontaneity, a system unheeding of the cautionary warning of a Chinese proverb: “Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Western brands of academic elitism have colonized China.

  The first to arrive was a satellite school for Harrow, followed by other franchises of Britain’s best-known private schools. And newly wealthy Chinese are sending their children to American prep schools in the hopes of improving their chances of admission to brand-name Ivy League universities—a trend that has created the lucrative niche business of securing appropriate visas for Chinese parents to live in the States during the school year.

  My son’s deliberate reversal of this educational trajectory caused consternation among my Chinese friends. What possible reason could there be to withhold an American education from your only child? they would ask.

  I won’t deny that Gilliam’s academic career had its own kind of burlesque staging. It was cast not by my academic aspirations for him, but by his unremitting personality. The dictionary features misleadingly similar definitions for the words “personality” and “character.” In practice, they are different. Personality is a congregation of traits on the surface, while character has an interior foundation. There are subtleties to a personality, but character is fundamentally weak or strong and dictates virtually everything else. Even at its worst, an unappealing personality can never be as dangerous as a flawed character.

  Where personality ends and character begins is a mystery to me, but since personality is the totality of one’s traits, I was struck that it appeared so early in Gilliam. When he learned to talk, what he said and how he said it spoke on behalf of his suspicion of anything that couldn’t be proved. It was just a question of time before his unforgiving Cartesian logic would focus on his parents. This reason—more than any other—convinced W. and I to hand Gilliam over to the French when it came time for him to attend school.

  The French system of education was created by Napoleon Bonaparte. It has changed little since. Homework is still done in fountain pen with blue ink, grades are publicly posted at the end of each week, and a mistake is worse than a mistake—it is a transgression. French students are on the same page of the same book on the same day, no matter where they are in the world.

  Gilliam’s list of school supplies for first grade warned me of what was to come. After searching through the Larousse French-English, English-French Dictionary for the better part of an hour, I managed to translate only two of thirty items: a large band to tie his books together and a small chalk slate for his class in mathematics.

  The Lycée Français in Los Angeles is situated on a hill and housed in what was once Clara Bow’s mansion. The school’s old-style Hollywood backdrop adds to its intrinsic out-of-place aura. W. suggested we not tell Gilliam he would be attending a school where—with the exception of the English class—only French was spoken.

  “The boy doesn’t know what school is. He’s never been, so how would he know what happens there?” argued W.

  “It’s lying by omission,” I said.

  “It’s not lying. It’s taking a position,” insisted W.

  “What position?” I asked.

  “The one that gives us the upper hand for as long as possible,” said W.

  “He’ll figure it out,” I told W.

  “Yes, but not right away,” said W. “The important thing is to buy ourselves the time to get him to fluency; once he learns the language, the rest won’t matter.”

  As soon as he got in the car at the end of his first day of school, Gilliam reported that, in case I hadn’t understood, the school was run by French people. He pointed out that we were not French. He asked if we were planning to move to France. I said no. Then why was he in a French school?

  Honesty was my only way out.

  “You’re there because it’s important for you to learn another language,” I said.

  “Why?” asked Gilliam.

  “Because the world is not just where we live,” I told him. “Because the more languages you know, the more chances you have to know the world. The more you know the world, the more chances you have to make it a better place and the more chances you give yourself at an interesting life.”

  “Okay,” agreed the boy. “I’ll try.”

  For Gilliam to become fluent in a language neither of us spoke fluently, W. suggested we spend as much time as possible in French-speaking countries. I had limited opportunities away from work during Gilliam’s school vacations, so my role in our travel en famille was telescoped into a few days at a time. The three of us would arrive at the designated location. I would settle them in, then turn around and go back to L.A.

  Our first French language trip occurred the summer that Gilliam was between first and second grades. W. rented a house in southeast France from an old college friend. To say the house was rustic would have been generous. It was located in Combas, an absurdly small rural hamlet.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I told W. “We have no directions and the town doesn’t seem to be on a map. How will we find the house?”

  “Apparently, Combas isn’t far from Nîmes,” said W. “We’ll ask there.”

  Nîmes is located on the Via Domitia, a Roman road originally constructed to connect Italy to Spain. Its shield shows a crocodile chained to a palm tree. This is not as mysterious as it would seem when one learns that the city was settled by Roman legion veterans from Julius Caesar’s Nile campaign who, having loyally served for no fewer than fifteen years, were granted plots of land to cultivate on the plain of Nîmes. The city had been one of the richest in Roman Gaul; its grand remains can be seen in the amphitheater in the middle of town, still used as a bullfighting arena. We rented a car and were pointed in the right direction for Combas.

  Our rental turned out to be a seventeenth-century textile mill, one that had not been convincingly converted into a house. Instead of bathrooms, there were toilets behind closet doors, and the water pressure in the single makeshift shower was so anemic that it provided no more than a thick dribble. The first-floor hallway was as dark as a tunnel, and its ceiling wept with condensation that solidified into mineral stalactites.… The kitchen was an uneven, cave-like room that opened onto a garden with a wisteria-covered arbor, which harbored rabbits, neighborhood cats, and a loud magpie. None had the slightest qualm about joining us in the house when the back door was left open.

  The village consisted of a cemetery and three narrow cobblestone lanes converging on a war statue marking its center. There was no grocery store, no bar, no bakery. Bread and eggs were sold in the mornings by a man from the closest town out of his van parked near the statue. So removed was Combas from the rest of the world that the townspeople would have been surprised if a family from Paris had arrived for the summer.

  Gilliam came equipped with a universally recognized icebreaker among children: a Game Boy. Within an hour of its being unpacked, everyone in the village under a certain age had congregated in our kitchen. That
afternoon, I heard Gilliam’s exuberant French swell and recede, depending on the level of gaming brinksmanship around the table. After the stone houses had absorbed the evening’s cool air, the same gaggle of children appeared at our front door to invite Gilliam for a game of boules by moonlight.

  Just at the time his whereabouts began to worry me, I heard him struggling with the thick wooden front door. He was holding a half-eaten baguette, his knee was scraped, he had a large clump of mud hanging from his hair, and his white polo shirt had acted as unprimed canvas for several large, oil-haloed stains of Nutella.

  “What have you been up to?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” he said with a Cheshire cat expression of someone who had become a possessor of the town’s secrets.

  Four days in Combas was what I was given before business called me back to L.A. Gilliam and W. stayed on. By the end of their summer, when Gilliam talked in his sleep, it was in French. He returned to me in L.A. relaxed from country life, proficient in French, and newly devoted to Tintin comic books.

  Georges Remi—a Belgian cartoonist better known as Hergé—was Tintin’s French-speaking creator. He provided countless ports of call for Tintin, but no nationality or family. Unencumbered by the expectations of parents or the requirements of adulthood, Tintin is free to roam from one adventure to the next in Egypt, Peru, Scotland, Tibet, and even the moon. Accompanying him is a scrappy white terrier and a familiar roster of traveling companions. There is Captain Haddock, the bearded sailor who manages to function despite his precariously high levels of alcohol consumption. Several stories feature twin detectives almost identical: Thomson and Thompson. With the exception of Bianca Castafiore, an opera diva, few women join the adventures. In light of the single-sex odysseys, I was especially impressed that no matter how dangerous Tintin’s situation—whether he’s kidnapped, trapped, injured, under fire, lost, blackmailed, falsely accused of drug smuggling—his manners remain impeccable and his clean clothes beautifully pressed.