The Greatest Story on Earth: Journey Into China: Searching for Students in the Old Capital-Nanjing

Sunday, December 7th

Sparkling Chandelier at the Majesty Shanghai Plaza

5:30 AM and I snap to attention.  Maybe I should always be jet-lagged.  I work in the morning darkness while luminescent flashing bulbs from neighboring skyscrapers scatter light into my 11th story hotel room.  I send messages, call my wife, refine my power point, and prepare for the day.  

I breakfast with Andreas, the Swedish man who serves as Director for International Marketing with Educatius; he has me in stitches with frank and funny anecdotes of his travels and his return to skateboarding, as I devour dumplings, eggs, sesame buns, tea, and more.

I pack my bags as we are changing cities today.  We meet at 8:30 in the lobby and taxi out to Hongqiao Train Station.  Moving west away from the ocean, I marvel again at the ceaseless vertical density of this world mega-city.  Hongqiao is the old Shanghai Airport, and Hongqiao train station is the gleaming, hangar-sized terminal constructed adjacent to the Airport. It’s bigger than Grand Central, and as it’s attached to the airport, the scale of the whole area is dwarfing.  I scoop a Shanghai Daily English newspaper for 3 yuan (50 cents) and German-made moisturizer, as the dry, cold air is wreaking havoc on my lips and skin.  

The City That Never Ends. . .

The train ride from Shanghai to Nanjing is 80 minutes.  I settle in to my window seat, work on this journal, and watch China undulate out the window. I lose count of cranes and buildings under construction.

Nanjing is one of the five historical capitals of China.  It was an imperial capital about 500 years previous, before the Manchu Dynasty.  It also was a twentieth century capital, first when Grandfather of the nation Sun Yat-Sen established his base here for the few months that he attempted to run the country.  It had a second run as Chinese power center when Nationalist Generalissimo Chiang Kai Chek used it as a base of operations in the 1930’s and 1940’s.

It is also infamously the home of one of the worst atrocities in living Chinese memory.  In 1937, as the Japanese stormed into China, the Japanese army “raped” Nanjing, committing acts of plunder, murder, and rape on the civilian populace that have not been forgotten nor forgiven.  It is one of the key tragedies in the fraught relationship that continues to plague the two countries.

We taxi from the colossal train station for 30 minutes to the Central Business District of the New City.  Our hotel, the Jinling Hotel, has two wings, the older, greying, 25 story wing, and the stunning 55 story new addition.  The two hotels are connected through an underground tunnel.  We enter a marble lobby with a Chinese lady dressed in a white dress and a black coat gracefully playing achingly beautiful piano music.  As Steven checks us in, I drink Chrysanthemum tea and Ginger Tea.  

We lunch at a restaurant in the hotel, where I misfire on my orders.  I begin with blueberry jam on cold yams.  The yams are cold and bland, the blueberries overly saccharine.  I follow it up with pineapple and sour soup, which is stimulating but not very delicious.  Fortunately I sip potent Nanjing tea to keep me satisfied.  

When I request to eat the vegetarian pesto risotto of a colleague, I’m told in China it’s rude to finish someone else’s food.  I feel sad and hungry about that, and in my mind I think it’s rude and environmentally irresponsible to waste food, but this time I let the waiters throw it away so I can respect the Chinese custom.

My room lies on the 45th floor, and it’s ultramodern.  A panel of buttons allows me to create five different mood-lighting systems, to activate two barriers of shades, and to adjust television volume from the bathroom.  I also have a refrigerator full of free drinks; what a concept!  I reset and prepare for the afternoon’s event.

At 1:45 PM our crew meets downstairs for the marketing event.  We proceed to a conference room that’s packed with chairs, presentation tables, and a screen.  I settle in to my table, unpack my rollaway, and prepare for the deluge of students and families who I hope are on the way.

At 2 PM the event begins, with about 10 students and their families present.  It’s not the 15-20 students we were hoping for, but that’s the nature of the business.  Educatius contracts with agents in various cities throughout China.  The agents then build local networks of students and families. 

This agency, run by Kathryn of Golden Sunshine Group, had poured a lot of financial and personal resources into reserving the space and advertising the event to the public, and this was the turnout.  Just like American boarding schools and Educatius, Kathryn had to be entrepreneurial, which requires taking risks, which aren’t guaranteed to always succeed.

I set up my table with brochures, don my lei, and smile at the Chinese families and my colleagues in the room.  The first presentation is a sharp but overlong comparison (in Chinese) of the different educational styles of China and America.  It is lines, memorization, tests, mass-produced lessons and rankings vs. circles, creativity, projects, customized education and holistic assessment.  Of course it’s simplistic, but the presentation does cut to the heart of why many Chinese dream of studying in America.  I wonder if it also cuts to the heart of why Shanghai has the highest math scores on the planet, while America struggles to keep pace.

The first presentation gives way to our American school horse and pony show, where each of us trots out photos, testimonials, program descriptions, and whatever our school’s comparative advantage is (I emphasize “Aloha,” “Ohana,” community, personal connections, small classes AP Courses, field science, golf, tennis, surfing, cultural diversity, location, et. al).  Today I go last, and after two hours of presentations, the audience is fading.  I crack a few jokes in mediocre Mandarin to create a little shock value (The Big Nose speaks Chinese!), and at the very least engage my audience.

Come to Maui Preparatory Academy!

The presentations give way to an hour of personal conversations with students and parents.  Unlike yesterday, my table isn’t heavily trafficked today.  I sit smiling with my brochures and my IPad slideshow.  I do meet a few students, and I spend this time trying to find out vital information: Who are you?  What do you like?  What do you think of America?  Do you want to come or are you being sent?  How is your English?  Are you prepared to leave home?  Are you interested in a big school or a small school?  What do you know about Hawai’i?  Why are you talking to me?  

Students pitch back at me with a variety of questions.  How is the dorm?  What does “preparatory” mean?  Are there activities?  Is there a robotics club?  Can I succeed?  What are the requirements to enter?  How much does it cost?  Can I choose what to study?  How many Chinese are there?

The room is overheating and as I have only spoken with a handful of students; I don’t feel as successful as yesterday.

I unload my materials back in my room, and then we rendezvous in the lobby for a dinner excursion to a traditional Chinese restaurant.  As we are staying at one of the largest high rises in Nanjing, we only need to walk across the street to arrive at the most futuristic ten story shopping mall in the city.  We walk through underground tunnels into the steel and glass atrium of the mall, and we proceed to a restaurant with a traditional decor: stone, bamboo, and thatch decorations house waitresses in historical Chinese garb who scurry forth with platters of roasted animals and animal parts.  Our group of ten is led into a private back room with a round table.  Kathryn has reserved us a room at this restaurant, which seats 200+ and occasionally has lines of over 100.  Steven and Kathryn take charge of ordering and food begins to appear.  

My pescatarian wife would have struggled to remain at the table for this meal.  Chicken claws, cow innards, salty eggs, fatty-fried pork, roots, sponges, greens, sweet bone fish; the food is celebratory, historical, heavy, Nanjing style.  I eat one of everything to honor my hosts and the experience, though I struggle to scrape too much meat off the chicken claws.

Post-dinner we stroll through the skyscraper mall, which is decked out for Yuletide.  Christmas trees, angels, flashing lights, presents: the inexorable commercial force of Christmas marches on, with an particularly atheist flavor in the People’s Republic.  

We stroll by a line of strikingly painted cows (skate ramps, Marilyn Monroe, flamenco dancers), a public art installation that’s here in Nanjing, in People’s Park in Shanghai, and perhaps scattered around the nation.

The day is finished.  I retire to my high-rise hotel room and marvel at the shimmering lights of Nanjing city.