In the months leading up to the July 1 return of Hong Kong to China, the world media noted one of the more basic changes that was certain to occur at the educational level. In colonial Hong Kong students were more likely to study European rather than Asian history, and Britain's role in Hong Kong's rise was mostly positive--the facts that British merchants made fortunes selling illegal opium to China, that the Opium Wars were fought mainly to protect a nineteenth century drug cartel, were rarely mentioned. This description of history is sure to change in the months ahead, as new, China-approved history books appear in Hong Kong schools, books that will emphasize the injustice of Britain's treatment of China while perhaps de-emphasizing the increased standard of living the inhabitants of Hong Kong enjoyed under British rule. Both British and Chinese approaches to Hong Kong's history include a mixture of fact, ignorance and censorship.
Recent travel literature on China offers numerous opportunities to explore how differently Westerners and Chinese view history, particularly a number of books written in the last ten years by American teachers in China. One would hope that such educators could see China in a more objective way, but in fact these authors seldom seem to realize the one-sided, self-absorbed nature of their discourse. I hope to examine four of these works--Mark Salzman's Iron and Silk, J.D. Brown's Digging to China, Richard Terrill's Saturday Night in Baoding, and Bill Holm's Coming Home Crazy--in particular focusing on episodes in the classroom where discussions of history present differing world views. For these American teachers, their work often seems to go beyond grammar and sentence structure to include, in Edward Said's word's, "the theme of Europe [or America] teaching the Orient the meaning of liberty." In attempting to "liberate" their students the teachers often find their own beliefs questioned. During a discussion of the Second World War, Salzman is confronted with such questions as "how do you feel, knowing your country dropped an atom bomb on innocent people?" and "[American] newspapers are owned by capitalist organizations, so of course they make things up to support themselves. Don't you think so?" questions that leave him almost speechless--speechless, it seems, because he finds the questions so ridiculous. Terrill throws a Chinese textbook into the trash during class because he dislikes its version of American history, an act that he perhaps sees as liberating but to his Chinese students must have seemed terribly odd. He tells us that a few students laughed or applauded, but surely Terrill knows that in China laughter is often a sign of embarrassment. One suspects that Terrill would never do such a thing in an American classroom.
As an American who has taught in China for two and a half years, I find these moments particularly interesting, moments when we realize how differently various cultures see the world, and, despite the power of American cultural imperialism, how strong other cultural views remain. American readers may be tempted to laugh at the kind of episodes described above, but it is important to examine the stereotypes and assumptions at play in these moments, moments that a Chinese reader would probably see in a very different light.
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