The Greatest Story on Earth: Journey Into China: Searching for Students in Suzhou City

Jet-lag works in my favor.  I snap to attention in the fives, put on my shirt and tie, and arrive first to my American-Continental-Chinese breakfast buffet.

We meet in the lobby at 7:30 sharp and catch a taxi to the local train station.  I stick my head out the window like a curious puppy, absorbing all I can of the Shanghai streetscape.  High-rises feature most prominently, though I spy a few older two and three story buildings.  Our three taxis full of people unload their cargo at the train station.  We file through security into our holding pen, and then board the First Class cabin of our high speed train.

I am enraptured during the thirty minute train ride by what I see out the window, namely, an unceasing line of development.  The sprawl of Shanghai, a city twice the size of America’s goliath, New York City, is overwhelming.  For as far as I can see through the thick air pollution, which intensifies as we hurtle East away from the ocean, skyscrapers dominate.  Where in America we would have three or five versions of one building, the Chinese have thirty, forty, or fifty of the same skyscraper, all bunched together.  Factories, exhibition halls, commercial offices, residences, shopping malls:  A veritable coral reef of humanity radiates in every direction.  1.4 billion- China’s current population- is an unfathomable number, but as I cast my eyes on this monstrous megalopolis, I begin to understand what this number means.

Our destination today is Suzhou, a city of millions that you've likely never heard of.  As with so may emerging cities in the developing world, there is an old city and a new city.  We disembark at the colossal Suzhou Industrial Park Train Station, a soaring atrium dwarfing any building in the entire state of Hawai’i.  We file into a van with the perennial aroma of all Chinese taxis, cigarette smoke.  I sneeze.  A thirty minute ride through broad avenues cutting around soaring buildings delivers us to a middle school serving thousands of students.  We drive through the security gates and file out of the taxi to be greeted by a procession of school administrators, teachers, and Educatius support staff. 

The school is a stunner.  A gleaming new ultramodern facility with stacks of state-of-the-art classrooms is anchored by a lobby that doubles as an art museum, with gold metallic calligraphy, low-cut furniture, student watercolors adorning the walls, and teacher pictures and biographies emblazoned onto metal displays in the entryway.  We turn the corner to discover 200 smiling students from from five different schools smiling cheekily, 20 school leaders, government dignitaries, teachers sitting in the front of the stage, and an emcee in a silk dress asking us to please sit and have some tea.

So begins two hours of school presentations.  12 schools - six Chinese and six American- deliver 10 minute Power Point presentations about program, curriculum, philosophy, extra-curricular activities, student life, and more.  The audience of students is at turns fascinated and bored.  Like students around the world, some of them vanish into mobile phones with head phones, and unlike what I strive for in my classroom, they are permitted to do it.  I deliver my presentation in 50% Mandarin Chinese- dusting off my knowledge from my year studying in Taiwan- and I’m successful in drawing some of the students back in, even if it’s mostly to hear the waiguoren wrangle with the tones.  I feel positive about my first presentation.

In the Q & A session afterwards, one girl says: “Mr. Andrew, may I ask you a question?”  (Respect for teachers in China is paramount, and permission is often requested before posing the real question).  “I like your school because it’s in Hawai’i!  Can you tell me more about your program?”

At the end of the presentation, a Chinese girl sweetly gives me a handmade tiger pillow as a token of appreciation.  

Before departing, we tour the school.  In the back of the presentation hall, matriculating students put their wishes into  bamboo stumps, and the wishes live there until graduation.  In a recessed interior room with Japanese style low-lying furniture, a student makes tea and offers it to me, and then takes me to the area where students play a traditional game called Go.

Our morning is complete.  Our group thanks our hosts and hostesses, and we file pack into the smoky taxi to deliver us to the Central Business District of the Suzhou Industrial Park.

Once again, we float through broad boulevards, myriad skyscrapers, and a cityscape that looks like it just soared out of the ground yesterday.  I feel like a lego man in a lego car being carried through a lego city.

We lunch in a private room on the second floor of a modern restaurant next to a canal.  Fifteen of us sit at the table- principals, teachers, agents- and share an epic feast.  Roast beef, Suzhou sweet fish, eel with garlic, dumplings, sticky rice, salted eggs, fifteen other dishes.  I eat a bite of every dish on the table.  The table is round, as it always is, and I sit next to the Chinese agents, young professional ladies who explain to me about their hometowns, Chinese schools, and how to use WeChat, the Chinese Facebook (as Facebook is banned here). 

After lunch we walk over the canal and through a skyscraper canyon to a five-star hotel.  The staff there is gearing up for a 15th anniversary celebration of a restaurant group called Blue Marlin, so music, food, people, staging, and an unbelievable lilikoi cake are all in the mix.  We carry on to a conference room that has been set up for our five schools (my school, a Christian school in upstate New York, a school in Connecticut, a school in Cambridge, and a school near San Francisco).  

I unpack my rollaway suitcase and set up my table with brochures, flash drives, a vertical banner, and an iPad with a slideshow.  I have a female Chinese translator named Y.X., who is dressed to impress the families.

For the following two hours, students and families stream into our conference room.  I am lucky to have the first table by the door: prime real estate.  Next to me, Dan Tubbs wise-cracks, “Great, I’ve got to be next to the guy from Maui who speaks Mandarin!”.

The session feels like a success.  I speak with six students and parents over two hours.  Families pose questions about TOEFL scores, AP classes, school size, tuition amount, the demographics of the current boarding population, sports, lifestyle, and more.  One Chinese girl glistens as she pores over our school yearbook, saying “I love the sea; I want to live there.”

With the students who are very interested, I go into a recessed back room for an interview. This is a higher-stakes interaction in which Chinese students demonstrate their English skills, personal qualities, and thinking abilities in a rapid-fire conversation.  I am struck by how courageous these 13-15 year olds are to commit to a life overseas away from their families at such a young age.  I wasn’t so brave at that age.

My Chinese language begins to flow more and more, which helps with some students, and definitely with parents who have little to no English.

As the session winds down, I pack up my station feeling positive about the experience.  With the contact information of six students in hand, I wonder what will come of it?  Will this interaction change one of these students’ lives, and the lives of Maui Prep’s students?  Time will tell.

The sun slips over the horizon, darkness descends, and a full moon rises over the technicolor illumination of Suzhou.  We race in the taxi on the freeway to old Suzhou, the historical part of the city far from the Suzhou Industrial area.  

The old city is situated around the Grand Canal, the manmade waterway connecting Hangzhou to Tianjin that was built by millions of people over thousands of years under death-sentence orders by uncompromising Emperors. Suzhou was an important trading post on the canal route.  Fortunately this zone of the city survived Mao Zedong’s brutal and misguided destruction of Chinese heritage- the Cultural Revolution- which spanned a decade in the 60’s and 70’s.  

We disembark into the chilly evening onto a cobblestone street in old Suzhou.  We amble down cobblestone walkways adjacent to the Grand Canal.  Singular shops sell sandalwood sculptures, silk wares, watercolor prints of traditional Chinese life, and Mao Zedong paraphernalia.  Traditional Beijing opera wafts into the streets from a riverside opera house as a woman in traditional wear smiles sultrily at passing pedestrians.  We duck into a cozy restaurant, where we settle into another sumptuous feast.

After dinner we take the taxi to the train station back to the taxi back to the Majesty Shanghai Plaza.  My plans to meet an old Princeton classmate are overwhelmed by exhaustion.  I watch Chinese television and drift away to sleep.