According to Chinese legend, the Empress Dowager Cixi was the first person to own a car in China, receiving it as a birthday gift in 1902. While she apparently liked the car, she never rode it. The reason? Custom dictated that no person was supposed to sit in front of her. Obviously, no one could drive the car without doing just that, so the car was never driven once it came into her possession.
I heard this story while touring the Forbidden City in Beijing during our recent Middle School student trip to China. The story struck me as a wonderful example of the powerful role that perspective plays in our lives. The Empress Dowager’s fixed mindset prevented her from ever taking advantage of an opportunity that only a few people in the world had at that time.
Traveling China with our students, I was struck by the stark contrast between her unwillingness to take a risk and the open-minded perspective adopted by our students during our 8-day adventure. Perhaps just as importantly, her perspective seemed out of step with the China of today that we experienced. During our travels, I marveled at the impressive level of development in Shanghai, Beijing, and Jianyang (the “small” 2 million person city we visited about 2 hours outside of Shanghai). Indeed, if anything, the China today we experienced seems a country desperate to embrace the “new.” The Pudong district, the most highly developed and cosmopolitan section of Shanghai, for example, did not even exist 20 years ago.
I should quickly add that I don’t claim to be an expert on China, and I certainly recognize that our tour was short and we visited only a handful of places. I also realize that China’s development is complex and that, despite significant economic growth, there remains large areas of China that would still be classified as third world regions. What I took away, however, was a deep appreciation for the rapid rate of change in China and for the importance of maintaining an open perspective when trying to understand China today.
As part of our tour, we visited an elementary school and a junior high school in Jianyang. Students had an opportunity to spend an afternoon and evening with a Chinese family, visiting their home and participating in a variety of activities with the families. The next morning, we started the day at the elementary school’s Flag Raising ceremony.
The ceremony represented what I would have expected in a Chinese school – 1300 students marched in to the courtyard, lined up in perfect order, and sang a song as they raised the flag. The students, ranging in age from 1st to 6th grade, were perfectly behaved. Then, the principal introduced our group. The students started talking, laughing, and jumping up in the back to see our students as they came onto stage. While it remained relatively orderly, the entire energy changed.
Later in the morning, I had a few moments to myself, and I stood on the 2nd floor of one of the buildings and watched a group of 1st graders with a PE teacher. The PE teacher had the students pretend to be different animals and the children fully embraced the activity. At one point, he attempted to bring the children back to attention. I watched as he asked one, two, three times for attention and still students giggled, played, and struggled to regain focus. Even as he finally managed to pull the group together, two little boys in the back were pushing and kicking at each other, just out of sight of the teacher’s vision. Clearly, at some level, children are children.
Perhaps the most challenging thing for me while in China was the navigation of what I would term conversational diplomacy. This year we adopted communication norms with our faculty, including “avoid avoidance” and “don’t triangulate.” The underlying message is the importance of speaking directly and from one’s own experience. After spending a week in China, I think I can safely say that these norms were not the cultural norms we experienced in China.
During our visit at the two schools, I spent considerable time with both principals. Conversations tended to move in circuitous and meandering ways. My questions generated lengthy answers, and I often had to try to decipher the meaning. During the evening, we had a formal Chinese banquet hosted by the two principals. I tried to follow the complex art of toasting the people at the table, and I found myself relying heavily on our tour guide and our Mandarin teacher, Mei Chen, for guidance. The expectations were unlike anything I had ever experienced in the United States.
The experience left me exhausted but also reflective, as I found myself having to accept that my cultural values were not the same as our Chinese hosts. I was reminded that it is important to maintain an open perspective and to think critically about our “standard operating procedures” lest we find ourselves trapped in the same fixed mindset that kept the Empress Dowager from driving in a car.
The trip to China challenged me to expand my perspective and opened my eyes yet again to the powerful experience of international travel. A cultural exchange is the perfect embodiment of the learning by doing philosophy at the core of our school’s program. The seventeen students who participated in this trip gained invaluable experience in connecting with new people and understanding new ideas, and the experience reinforced for them and for me the high return that can be gained from taking risks. Climbing up the “wild” section of the Great Wall, haggling with a vendor in a market, teaching Chinese children how to play American games, performing for teachers and students as part of a Welcome Ceremony, or eating a duck head at a formal banquet are all experiences that stretched our students and allowed them to broaden their perspective.
It was a privilege to be able to travel with these students and the other two chaperones and to have an opportunity to experience first-hand China today. This is the beginning of what I hope will be a long-term relationship with these two Chinese schools, a relationship that will offer invaluable learning to our community and to theirs. As we move forward, I will certainly be mindful of the importance of understanding different perspectives and of maintaining a growth mindset. After all, I don’t want to miss out on the 21st century equivalent of the Empress Dowager Cixi’s car ride.