Hello dear colleagues,
In the past I’ve often written about big things in the wider world, but today I just want to tell a story about something very personal and ‘close to home’. Hope it will be fun to read and let you feel some of the same happiness I feel when I tell it to you. Maybe this will make you think of someone you know, or maybe it will inspire you to try something similar, but in any case I hope you enjoy, and to be sure, it is all true.
My girlfriend is from a village in Henan province, and as is common in her village she has a large family. Not large by American standards, but perhaps very large by general Chinese standards. In any case, my girlfriend has two younger sisters and a baby brother. I think the reason her family had so many children is related to traditional ideas about having a son. Perhaps if their first child had been a boy, there would have been only one, but as it happened, there were three girls before her brother was born. Who knows, maybe if the fourth child had been a girl, there would have been five. I understand the practical reasons why it has been important for people in traditional settings to have a son, but I still think it’s a stupid tradition, and I hope that it is going away. Anyways, that’s not what I wanted to talk about though…
Since my girlfriend was the oldest child the family had some savings when it was time for her to go to college. They had to borrow some additional money from relatives and so forth also, but basically, the family was able to pay for her college tuition and my girlfriend was able to just be a normal college student for four years and read books and become fluent in the great conversations of humankind without having to worry about practical things. Because of this time spent training her mind, she is able to have a professional job now, and also, more importantly, she is able to understand the world and have some deeper understanding of what is going on all around.
Her second sister (the third daughter) was not so lucky though. In fact, by the time that third daughter was done with Junior High, the family didn’t have enough money even for her to go to the local high school. So, third daughter quit school when she was 15 years old, and moved to GuangDong to work in a factory. Does that sound like a common story? Maybe it is all too common, but for a child to quit school to work in a factory is still a tragedy. A terrible, stupid tragedy that people should not accept.
That was six years ago, and from that time until a year ago she worked a number of jobs in factories and restaurants and gave most of the money she earned to her family. When I came to China a year ago and found this out about my girlfriend’s sister it broke my heart. I mean, just by good luck my girlfriend and I had the chance to spend four years in college just learning and exercising our minds, and as a result, we both have the opportunity to work in professional jobs now with a future. For little sister though, she never had the chance to just spend time reading books or exercising her wonderful mind, and for it had no future other than maybe going back to the village and marrying someone her parents chose for her.
I couldn’t accept this situation, so I suggested to my girlfriend that we invite her to Xi’an to live with us and find some kind of a training school that could lead to a better future. My girlfriend found a training program in interior decoration that could lead to a job as a decorator, and her sister agreed and came to stay with us to begin the training. Three months later she finished the training, and went to work as an intern in a design company. This was great, and even though she still couldn’t really earn any money, it was incredible to see her learn computer skills so quickly, and to see her use her mind in ways she never had before.
Still though, it was not enough. For example, when talking to clients, her sister said she often had no idea what to say to people, because she had spent her whole life in factories and restaurants, and had never read the books or been exposed to the ideas that professional people have. So, since I had seen what a great student she was in the training program I got the idea that she should not worry about making money now, and at this time in her life just get as much education as possible. “Think about when you are forty, not when you are twenty-four” I told her. “What kind of life do you want to have?”.
Now, in the United States, if you didn’t go to high school, there is still a way to be able to go to college, but I had no idea about how to do that in China. My girlfriend had to do quite a bit of research about it too, and found out that there are several ‘tracks’ that people like little sister can take to get a college degree. The one that she ended up choosing is a way called ??, and we found that there is a really quality program for this at ??????. So, the good news I want to share with you all is that starting this week, my girlfriend’s youngest sister, a girl who until a year ago only had a junior high education and thought she would just go back to her village and start having babies, is now a full time university student and lives in a dorm with five other girls. She chose Japanese for her major, but in any case, will have to study all the basic subjects that educated people must know something about. When I spoke to her on the phone a few nights ago, she told her sister and I about her class on Marxist Theory, and how excited she was to start learning something about it. Maybe that brings back terrible memories for you of long, boring classes, but can you imagine little sister’s feeling, that everyone else knows this thing that she doesn’t know, but now she has the chance to know it too. I could hear a kind of excitement in her voice that I had never heard from her before, it still makes me happy to think about even right now.
Now, you know that one semester of high school in Henan province must be very cheap, I will tell you that one semester at ????costs about 6000 RMB. Now I have a question for you. Can you tell me why I chose the title ‘behind vermilion gates’ for this story? I will buy a nice lunch for the first person who can email me a good explanation of that title
(and Chengdu colleagues, that includes you, because I will go to visit there soon J)
So, what do you think of this story?
-Noah
XA12736
