There was one morning, about a year and a half ago now, I think, when one of the most influential teachers in my life, Prof. Curtin, told us a story during class of a trip he made to India. He and his colleagues went through a traveling nightmare, apparently to see and meet the unconditionally benevolent Mother Theresa at the abandoned facilities she was using as a hospital for the helpless. He said he recalled arriving and being immediately put to work, caring for and becoming intimate with those who had not a coin to spend for medical services. The Honorable Mother was restless, tending to each and every broken, diseased and occupationally inviable patient there, unable to tolerate a moment wasted entertaining guests while others lay in their agony. After a few hours of directly experiencing the very real faces of poverty of these slums, the already exhausted travelers began their return to their hotel, leaving unshaken in her compassion-driven stamina the heroic Rev. Mother.
The hotel they returned to was high-class and extensively prosperous, servicing as well some of the wealthiest businessmen in the country. Together, Prof. Curtin's colleagues and these businessmen sat wrapped in towls, surrounded by the steamy waters of the hotel hot tub that overlooked the city, sharing cocktail glasses over bouts of laughter and jokes. Upon coming across this scene, my professor said he felt in himself an absolute shock at the surrealness of the reality he was seeing; how could these men possibly sit in hot tubs, spending money on Epicurean-fashion refreshments, in a tourist hotel that was in part responsible for the wealth imbalance in this region of the nation, with the very men who openly invested in and profited from the businesses to blame for the massive unemployment rate and social welfare injustices felt by those suffering around them? Had they already completely forgotten where they had been that day, the pain on the faces of those unheard by their own government?
Upon hearing the end of this story, I too mysteriously experienced a pain that struck me to the core. I contained my overwhelmed emotions of anguish and bitter resentment -- and just pure sadness -- provoked by the scene my teacher described until class ended and I could return to my dormitory room to dwell on it.
Today, in the far outreaches of a dryland (well known, however, as the Loess Plateau) two hours outside Xi'an, there is a small rural village outlayed on a mountain ridge overlooking a valley. The sun was blazing over the overlapping ridges, eventually reaching its full flammation as the bus climbed one of the steeper and tallest ridges to the top toward the village. We stopped at a small elementary school, sitting directly on the crest of the mountain, its grounds smaller than the standard American suburban home property. In the center of the grounds were four lines of students, suited in traditional garments, waiting patiently for our arrival while their unfashionably dressed parents stood and watched from the periphery. The student stood on either side of a central flagpole, bearing the school's and China's national flags, in the order of their four grades from left to right. Around them was a common U-formation of three miniscule, one-storey buildings that included bathrooms and all other necessary facilities. The students smiles and excitement in seeing the bus stop in front of their school radiated several times more brilliantly than even the summer sun. For the next couple of hours, each grade demonstrated their well-rehearsed lyrical dances and watched us improvise a few American songs and simple dance we recalled from childhood. They exchanged with us pictures and paper ornaments they had made for candy, snacks and sports equipment the program provided us to give them. Going from an order of performance and observation to a chaos of gift-giving, handshakes and attempted greetings between every student and program member, everyone gathered around the back of the primary building to play with the new soccerballs, jump ropes and tennis rackets together. Even the parents standing at the edges of the arena watched with endearment the interactions between their children and travellers from a distant region of the world. Village neighbors stopped their bikes and the occasional truck to stand and watch us from the dirt street out front.
I took this opportunity while many of the others were playing to ask one of the English-speaking coordinators for this visit about the structure and education of the school. I was already aware that it owed its existence to Plan International, an NGO that worked with the government to found such a facility as this within the village, a solution to the common problem in rural regions of China where distance to the nearest schools prevents families from sending their children there, despite the pressures of China's nine-year compulsory education. This particular school had been founded in March last year, which explained the still missing upper grades that would have to wait two years for fulfillment. Five teachers and one principal secured management and teaching positions for 66 students, their salaries payed by the government to meet sufficient living standards though only by unwavering commitment to a contract for occupation. The services of the NGO start with the costs of land purchase, building construction and other financial procedures, but Plan Int. also committed itself to orgainizing an education that would ensure children's participation in matters of decision-making concerning their own education and the development of their rural community. Documented evaluations of their participation presented to the right government authorities would guarantee, the organization believed, a more dedicated and heavier interest in the work such NGOs provided, perhaps to the point of granting them further capacities and resources toward extending their abilities and impact on a national level even. This hope has persevered and may yet for some time to come.
I had to note that among its six subjects of curriculum taught, this school, unlike schools residing in the city that are properly funded, had no science course, by which it might to some extent understand the intricate workings of biology underlying the process of the farming that provided most of the average village family's source of income. This village, a township named Cheng (I believe), occupied a land that was mostly unarable and thus, along with government decree, coerced the villagers to surrender their efforts to nothing but the farming of apple trees, the fruit of which has since become widespread in sale despite the low pay to the farmers who produce them. Acres of procured and harvested apple trees surrounded the school and bordered the residential dwellings of the villagers. The direness of this singular dependency on an only mildly dependable crop -- that is, the bad side of extreme monoculture -- seemed to me exacerbated by the singular dependency of the future farmer's cultivation and maintanance on only their own family's breadwinner, who probably now knows little other than how to grow and tend apple trees. I wondered what immediate effects could be seen in the hypothetical introduction of science classes that incorporated an education of farming biochemistry, preferably twoard the long-term goal of sustainable development over industrial economic development (at this point now belabord ad nausium by government authorities). (Perhaps I can receive some responding comments here from my knowledgeable and dear friend, Tom, on this subject...)
The residences still comprised of mudcake blocks for houses, now in their better days also having adjoining brick additions deliberately constructed in front to hide the older facilities. Government slogans promoting the one-child policy -- which is almost entirely ineffective our here where extra farmhands are necessary for survival -- and some of the more profitable names of local businesses stained the walls of nearly every home in striking red and white hues, all beyond the choice or even likely the care of the homes' owners. We visited two near the school, both with children attending the school: The Wang family occupied a hand-shoveled out five-room mostly underground dwelling, meant for their family of six, which they built within three months of the year 1973. The dirt and concrete walls were covered in newspaper clippings and magazine ads, which they said was meant for decoration. Their kitchen stove was a metal table over a small fire pit. They all shared beds. Meanwhile, standing a little closer toward the center of the village was the Liuo family, whose slightly higher-status abode housed only five people and, being built in the 1990s, was all above ground in the more contemporary fashion. The presence of more furniture in their homes did not hide the fact that it was all of the poorest quality by our standards. Both families had children and spoke in a tongue that even our Chinese guide could not interpret. In showing us their homes, I noticed both families carrying a plain and simple pride, marked with curiosity at our desire to see their abodes and well-accustomed living standards. Regardless to the shock in difference between this and what we had all see in China so far, the official I inquiried at the school told me that he himself hardly considered this region 'poor' -- after all, it unlike many had the tremendous benefity of having roads (whatever their condition) to travel and by which we were able to come to see it.
I got on the bus for the return to the city in a state of extreme yearning to get back off and stay and work alongside these people -- these people who still knew what work was in terms of day by day survival. No amount of briefing or description truly prepares us for the absolute reality that presents itself when we come to these places -- be it the outlying regions of centralized China, or the often ignored backwater neighborhoods of Mississippi or Louisiana. And the moment we feel the impulsive urge to do something, not merely pass judgement or console ourselves through agreements of pity with our same-status peers, is the same moment we are forced to regard the full realy of OUR living conditions, our worldview and complementary lifestyle, now under the threat of not being the innocent society or example of justice we thought it was. The world's globalization necessarily must include an integration of even the most regional perspectives to account for the lack of responsibility toward them that has ensued on the part of every one of us thus far. It entails a shaking of one's present world to dislodge from it the pieces yet unseen, unseen but just as intimately vital to the continuous activity of compassion and responsible living.
That evening, I ate with the others at a fanciful restaurant to the point of bloating; I joined some on a trip to a professional foot massage; I sat with them in the polished brass and marble hotel lound drinking tea and champagne; and I continued to despair in the surrealiness, the absolute shock that applied as readly to myself as to those around me: Had I alreadly forgotten where I had been today? For a moment, I thought I could feel the inclination of Prof. Curtin's comfort-seeking fellow travelers, the desire, however indeliberate it may be, to disregard the inadequacies of what I have known, and have now come to know, to be true, to retreat into the simpler logic of pleasures and pains of only oneself, to respond to the inconsistent pieces of the story unfolding before us with the security that "at least I am satisfied, at least I have the potential within my lifetime to be happy." This statement, in a sense, is not possible for me anymore, so long as I know and adhere to the truths that promote remembering what is forgotten. As was said by the famous utilitarian years before, "'Tis better to be Socrates unsatisfied than a pig satisfied." I would restate it now it its potentially evolved form: "It is better to realize satisfaction through not merely attempting to avoid depriving it from others, but creating happiness in the lives of all concerned, which in part entails learning about them -- and oneself through them." Make a nice day.
