On Chinese Children
Added 2018-09-25 18:12:00 +0000 UTCHey Laowinners!
This Chinglish t-shirt brought me back to the times of being at my babysitter in California, and hiding under a table crying while being called "no eyebrow boy". I wasn't bullied after age 5, but it's funny that I can still remember those days.
It got me to thinking about children in the west vs. China. I remember always having a close group of friends, and although I would interact with most people in the class in some way or another, it was very much "cliquey". Certain kids hung out with certain kids, and that's just the way things worked. Usually it was based on what you were into. You had the sports kids, and the video game kids, and the art kids, and the music kids, and these groups diversified and became even more poignant forms of self-expression, but by and large, everyone simply didn't just hang out with everyone.
Fast forward to China, where I saw my students interacting with each other on a much larger basis. Sure, you had the odd weird kid but, fat or thin, smart or dumb, most kids would talk to each other on a fairly even basis.
Sharing was perhaps the most interesting part of their behavior. Given a snack; let's say a small bag of chips, the western student would probably eat them himself, or share a few with his close friend. Kids would probably sit there and eat their snacks individually. In China, if a kid walked in with a small bag of chips, the teacher wouldn't have to even tell them to share, everyone is going to get some, and most of the times, the kid who brought the snack would end up with only 1 or 2 chips. I always found this fascinating, and think that there is a lot of camaraderie formed when kids are forced to study twice as long as their western counterparts, with not very much time for hobbies or time to develop the expression of one's self. This creates a strangely level feeling playing field, where the only real adversary is the teacher.
Thanks for your support, everyone.
