January 2008

Dear Friends,

I have noticed with interest and a twinge of regret how modern China is growing and ancient China is diminishing in the 2,000-year-old city of Nanjing. I am assuming this has happened since the Open and Reforming Movement of the 1970s, but when I ask people this I do not get a straightforward answer.

No one wears “Chinese” clothes on the streets. I have gone to a tailor and had a beautiful traditional red silk jacket made, but this is for dressy occasions and not everyday wear. I can see shops as I pass by that have what I would assume are traditional clothes—and at the Christmas celebration which Nanjing put on the Sunday night before Christmas for her foreign friends, there were musical performances by men and women attired in colorful authentic Chinese wear.

There are many ways that I am noticing this juxtaposition of two cultures in the one city. As I travel more to other parts of China I will be watching for this in other places as well.

I wanted to purchase a “seal” with my Chinese name on it. A student at the college went with me to a market area that has both totally modern Western shops and then several streets where we drifted back in time to ancient pictures on scrolls, tea sets, red lanterns, fans, and the shop where the artist carved the characters of my Chinese name in an ancient character form. I was amazed. I was asked to choose the material upon which the characters would be carved, and I chose a slender piece of green stone. My friend and I were asked to return in fifteen minutes and upon our return the stone had the characters formed in it. What an artist this man is; seeking the characters within the stone and releasing them with his carving instruments.

I have been seeking ways to enter into the culture here in order to facilitate communication with my students. Having gone to a music store with traditional Chinese musical instruments I realized that this is not my forte. The traditional music and the folk music are so very beautiful! I am now beginning a collection of CDs and listen to them when I want to relax.

I have been to the shop where my seal was carved and where other art forms were being utilized, and I realized that art is not my forte. I have decided to stick to writing poetry and listening to people. I’ve also realized that not being in a hurry is a part of entering into this culture of contradiction. Relaxing and finding a rhythm in my workweek of about three days is a way to walk with the people of this culture in transition.

I gave oral finals this week with my oral English students. As I listened to the students in groups of between two and six at a time, I realized the level of English mastery seemed to have something to do with the educational level of their parents. I had told them ahead of time that I would ask them to share with me about their families. As they did this I heard a pattern.  The ones who have parents who are engineers or doctors or teachers have a higher level, for the most part, of articulation in their English. I shared this with a Chinese friend who understood what I was observing. She said that it is typically the urban Chinese who have the best education and the most exposure to good English teaching. In the poorer areas of China the students may not have a good grasp of English because their English teachers are Chinese and may never have been exposed to native English speakers.

This impacts many things, including the ability to travel overseas for further study or for firsthand exposure to English-speaking cultures. The poorer students, who do not have as good a grasp on the English language because of the quality of their previous English education, also probably do not have access to the funding that would be needed in order to study abroad or even to spend a short amount of time in another culture. The students who I have met from educated and usually more affluent families may already have spent time abroad, and it makes a vast difference in their ability to function within the world of spoken English.

It seems to me that the cycle of poverty continues even with a college education when the pre-college opportunities are not equal. I do not know if the education in college can make up for the earlier discrepancies between rich and poor.

I faced a great challenge in grading my students this week. Some of the more articulate students have the kind of attitude that I might expect to find in America. They have had so much handed to them and in many ways have had life made perhaps too easy for them. The students who are poorer in language ability and in family income are often very eager and work very hard to make up for their deficiencies. According to my grading standard they are the ones to whom I want to give the A’s! According to the principles of academic achievement, it is the ones who don’t grasp how fortunate they are who are supposed to receive the A’s. Some of them know. Others are ambitious and have lost the quality of tenderness.

I pray that ancient China will not live on in the sense of a system of reward for those who have the means to advance themselves. I pray that it will live on in terms of continuing to enrich the lives of the Chinese people and of the world as we slowly come into contact with it in increasing numbers. And I pray that the modern China will integrate care of the family and respect for tradition into the upward movement of skyscrapers and city traffic. May it be the best of the ancient that is preserved beside the modern, the best of the ancient that is integrated into the best of the modern.

The treasures that my students hold inside of themselves are priceless. Last week I asked the oral English classes to divide into groups and discuss the ancient stories of China that they each know. I asked them to decide as a group on one of the stories and then to figure out how to present that story to the whole class. Each of the groups, and each of my three oral English classes did a beautiful job with this. They are being taught the ancient stories and still know the ancient traditions. There is something to losing the class structure embedded in those stories and traditions to make them speak wholeness to all people while at the same time finding the goodness in the modern that will define China’s future.  Right now it is a precarious balancing act.  I trust that the God of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah and Rachel, is at work here in China as the Chinese live out their daily lives. They are learning to live in a new way as there is no way back to the old, and so much of the old was detrimental and patriarchal. But the new is not all good either.

May God work in the Chinese as they find their way. May God work through the foreigners who can listen and walk alongside these children of God as they journey on their path to become China in the 21st century.

Lord, let not the treasures of the past be lost. They are treasures from you. At the same time let not the bondage of the past be kept. Lord, may you give the Chinese wisdom to grow into the future, taking the treasures and putting them to use in the present so that the future will be strong and humble in your world.

In Christ,

Debbie

The 2008 Mission Yearbook for Prayer & Study, p. 99