“Do you think shepherd boys there really need to know English?” my friends ask when I tell them of my plans to participate in a volunteer English-training program in a poor, rural area in the mountainous northwest Chinese province of Qinghai.
It’s a good question. I know that this trip will be a great adventure for the 11 UCLA students and three professors who will go, but I can’t convince my friends it will be of any benefit to the kids there. And even as a native Chinese, I really have no idea what I’ll encounter once I get there; having grown up in Shanghai, the United States is more familiar to me than will be this remote and mysterious region of Mongolian, Tibetan and Muslim minorities to which we will travel.
Just getting there is an adventure in itself, one that begins with a 13-hour flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai, a 37-hour train ride to Xi’ning, the capital city of Qinghai Province, and a six-hour bus trip to Guanting, a town of a single main street and about 2,000 people. Our long march is an odyssey in reverse through the full spectrum of economic development in China, from the ultra-modern urban sprawl of Shanghai to the primitive backwater of Guanting.
When we finally get there on an August afternoon, it is clear that our arrival has been much anticipated. Students and local teachers have been waiting for us for several hours. At the gate, the teachers offer each of us, in the manner of Tibetan tradition, three small cups of super-strong liquor and a long silver scarf known as a hada. Kindergarten students greet us with what likely are their first English words, “Welcome to Guanting,” and other students sing Tibetan and Mangghuer songs and dance for us.
After the opening ceremony, our group is divided and sent off to six different locations. Mine, the village of Xiela, is another hour away along a rutted dirt road. Our students there are primarily from the middle school and already have had one to three years of English instruction — mostly from textbooks and without the benefit of teachers who really know the language, so their pronunciation is very strange. Several primary-school students, who don’t yet know the English alphabet but are eager to learn, also join in our beginner class.
What is the reason for our being here? Organized by Political Science Professor Richard Baum ’62, the director of the UCLA International Institute’s Center for Chinese Studies, we have come at the request of a unique program that teaches English to the local minority population and trains them to use the Internet to identify and apply for development-assistance grants. The project has been highly successful, with more than 85 local projects — ranging from construction of village classrooms, greenhouses and latrines to the digging of water wells and the purchase of energy-saving solar cookers — funded over the past six years in this region where annual incomes average $100 to $200.
It is an intense experience for all of us. Teaching one subject five hours a day for three weeks is both a physical and emotional challenge as we design our own curriculum and apply the lessons we learned in a two-day orientation and training session at UCLA. Games, we find, are an incredibly effective way to teach and to encourage the students to speak English — dodgeball and hangman are among the favorites, and I also blend lessons with Chinese children’s games that I played 15 years ago. One class is crazy about the song “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” and sings until they run out of known animals and have to start adding in new ones, like tigers and zebras.
One of the most gratifying things about the experience is the dedication of our young students. Xiela is one of the most impoverished villages in the region — the climate is poor for agriculture and the productivity of the land is low — and half of my students come to class in the mornings without having had any breakfast. Many must walk more than an hour from another village on the other side of the mountain to get to school. One or two slices of dry wheat bread or a handful of dry beans is lunch. There’s no electricity in the schoolhouse, no running water, no glass windows. In spite of the challenges their poverty presents, our students are remarkably bright and their grasp of what we teach them exceeds our expectations — after a brief explanation of some rules of pronunciation, the quickest learners are able to figure out the pronunciation of complicated new words.
I also have an opportunity to get to know the leaders of the development project that has brought us here. The Sanchuan Development Association (SDA) consists mostly of local teachers and peasants and maintains a simple, straightforward philosophy: One project, no matter how small, is better than nothing. What amazes me, other than their selfless devotion to their cause, is their optimistic lifestyle. One day, as we are returning to the village after visiting a development project, it begins to rain heavily. Two local teachers sitting in the open bed of the truck, with one small umbrella between them, loudly sing love songs all the way back as we drive through the downpour.
After three weeks, it is time to leave. The closing ceremony proves to be one of the most emotional experiences of my life. When the farewell song is finished, some students burst into tears, and soon every student is crying. Moved by these strangers in their midst who have come to one of the remotest corners of China to help them, these shy village children cling to us and hug us, and one of the quietest boys in my class looks at me and says simply, “I will miss you.”
Now back in the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, I still can’t convince my friends that what we did this past summer in China was of significant benefit to the children there. Indeed, there’s no certainty how our brief interlude there will affect my students. But I know that I have benefited. I saw a part of my native country that until now had been alien to me and which has attracted little attention even from within China. I saw how people struggle with an unfriendly natural environment and try to be as resourceful as possible. I saw how students struggled against both natural and economic constraints to receive an education in an attempt to better their lives. For me, “poverty” and “development” are no longer just words; when I read a paper about economic and social development, it is real and tangible.
A fellow UCLA student on the trip, Grace Jun, told one of the leaders of this program that we are all changed in different ways from the experience. Grace, a Korean American, began to learn Chinese this quarter and plans to return to China to learn more about the people and the culture. Another student, Vivian Zhan, says she will never complain again about lack of material things. Kevin Johnson is working part-time in Beijing to help prepare for the 2008 Olympics.
As for me, I am currently reading up on rural development and thinking of future fieldwork on the SDA as a case study of successful non-governmental organizations in China. And most importantly, I’m thinking up new games for my students in Qinghai.
