Return to China: Day 9: Teaching Chinese Students in Dongguan, Workshop of the World

Now which train do I take. . .?

My day begins at 6:45 AM in Guangzhou, the third richest city in China, the anchor city of the Pearl River Delta, and home of the most futuristic, fast-growing, and impressive urban core I’ve ever seen.

Guangzhou out the train window. . .

This morning I’m commuting on a bullet train an hour away to the southeast to Dongguan.  I put on my coat and tie, even though business casual in the South doesn’t require a tie as it does in the North.

Chinese Starbucks precision. . .

Morning basketball tournament .  .

I walk across the bustling, sultry, modern, tropical, Spring streets to the gleaming new train station on top of an underground shopping mall.  This station has nine entry portals and spans multiple city blocks.  Everything is written in Chinese characters or pinyin Romanization.  I randomly choose a line, only to be told by the teller to get in a different line.  I wield my Chinese language skills.  Harried groups of Cantonese workers push forward in the lines, but I procure my ticket successfully.  I pick up a sushi roll at a convenience store, move through the security and ticketing lines, and line up with hundreds of other people in a tight, underground corridor to wait to enter the platform.  On the side, a merry crew of pastry chefs does synchronized dance moves to advertise their breakfast snacks.

Morning exercises: We need this in America!

The gates open, and we pour forth.  With over one hundred million people in Guangdong Province, and Guangzhou being the center city, public transportation here is always intensely crowded.  It is also brand new, hyper-organized, efficient, clean, and safe.  It makes Penn Station look like a relic of the twentieth century.

English Class

I settle into first class, a ticket that costs me just three U.S. dollars extra, and for the next hour I watch China.  I see banana trees, fruit farms, lush hills, enormous factories, hundreds and thousands of concrete block high rise apartments, train stations, power plants, and the Pearl River Delta that links it all together.

Classroom charging stations. . 

I arrive in Dongguan at 9 AM.  This city you’ve never heard of that contains over 6 million people is a center-spoke in Factory China.

I am welcomed by Max- a chipper, clever, bilingual Director of Admissions at a Boarding School- and his driver, a former military officer who now works at Max’s Boarding school.  My eyes greedily take in the thirty minute drive from the train station to the school.  Shopping malls, high rises, mansion developments with golf courses, tropical foliage, neoclassical mega mansions surrounded by moats, five star hotels: the brand new prosperity in Dongguan surpasses my imagination.  We stop at a Starbucks (ubiquitous in China) for a morning jolt; of course it’s new, clean, empty, and the service is exquisite.

Music Class

I had arranged to meet Max for a specific reason.  There is an entrepreneurial company of about ten people called Innovative Academies.  The idea of this company is to offer online courses in Asia run by American high school teachers.  Initially IA had attempted this in Korea, but the lure of the Asian dragon proved irresistible.  Now IA is piloting classes in Taiwan and at this xchool in Dongguan, where some 50 students are currently enrolled in American high school courses.  Maui Preparatory Academy’s online courses haven’t quite taken off yet here, partly because the Chinese market chooses the lowest priced courses, which are offered by other schools.

Lush interior school courtyard

The Dancing Bar're on the Roof

I am here to meet Max, see his school, learn something about Chinese education, and open the pathway for any potential partnerships (student travel exchanges, online courses, online student exchanges).

Max’s school is monstrously big.  Just 22 years old, it now has an enrollment of 3,600 students, and all of them are boarding students!  Students are stacked in dormitories of eight to a room.  As Admissions officer, Max is currently tasked to increase enrollment by some 1,000 students.  

Chinese school teaching Selfie

This public high school is one of the most prestigious in Dongguan.  Some ten international companies, including Lenovo and Cisco, operate out of Dongguan, and students from Hong Kong and Taiwan attend school here as their mothers and fathers work for the companies.  The students are trained and groomed to join these companies, with direct links between curriculum, internships, and employment.

Mas, Students, and Me

As we enter the campus, I know what’s about to happen. I’m about to make a lot of friends.  When I worked in Taiwan in 2003-2004.  I was the only Da Beizi (Big Nose = foreigner) in a school of thousands of students.  I stuck out.  As I exit the van in a campus the size of a University, I’m the different one.  Swarms of students in jumpsuit uniforms are streaming out to the central field for morning exercises,  hundreds and even a thousand students.  I proceed with Max to a gym as big as War Memorial Gym, the biggest gym on Maui, where hundreds of other students are watching a basketball exhibition game between the best middle school team and the fourth best high school team.  The high school team smokes the little guys.

Tomas Simonssen & Guangzhou New City

I walk outside to witness morning exercises.  This happens every single day.  It could never happen in America, as students and families would talk about legal rights to make individual decisions and not be forced to do things, but I would love if this did happen.  It’s activities like this that will make China the most important power of the 21st century.

Dragon Boat Ship Artistry in the Building Lobby

Half of the students, maybe 300-400, line up in perfect lines in the middle of the field, and all of them do synchronized Tai Chi/ Yoga/ Stretching exercises.  The other half of the students, another few hundred, runs laps in small groups anchored by students with flags.  As they run, other students take notes to see who is trying and who is not, and as the students pass by the Vice Principal and the Administration, who stand on a raised platform surveying the crowd, students shout out the slogans of their class groupings.  It’s an incredible sight.  

Three story scintillating chandelier

Max introduces me to the Vice Principal.  “His name is Mr. Lie, but he never lies!” says Max.  I exchange pleasantries with the chipper gentleman, and I tell him in Chinese that Americans are growing too chubby, and that we need to do morning exercises like his students.  He loves the comment so much that he steps to the microphone, introduces me to a thousand students, then repeats my joke, which leads to mass chuckles.  As Max tells me.  “It’s good to tell them.  They need encouragement!”

Futuristic, curvaceous, bulbous skyscraper.

I return to the basketball game inside, where all of a sudden I’m helping deliver awards to the losing team, and taking lots of pictures. I greet a few hundred students in Chinese, and as with so many people here, they smile and they’re grateful that I’ve made an effort to speak their language.

Guangzhou Tower

Next comes the school tour.  I walk with Max and Mr. Lie through four story tall buildings with interior courtyards and endless hallways.  Fifty students per room, with no computers or phones to distract students, but lots of focus and participation.  I witness a music class with a piano playing man, a singing woman, and fifty students singing in unison.  I witness a conversational English class with fifty students looking up words and absorbing new vocabulary.  I teach two guest lessons, one on Hawai’i, the other on studying English.  Students brightly mob me with questions, and many of them join my WeChat (Chinese Facebook) page.

New City Underground Shopping Arcade

In the music room, Mr. Lie and I sing and play “Silent Night” together, he on guitar, me on drums.  I tour some three private, sound proof rooms with pianos.  I tour a ballet class (girls only).  I tour a rooftop, open-air ballet venue.  I drink strong green tea with Mr. Lie in his office, and teach Max and him about Maui Preparatory Academy.  I meet the Head of the English Department, who is Max’s sister.

My colleague Mark from a French American School in NYC.

It is time to depart.  Max gifts me tea and a hardbound school yearbook.  He scurries me back to the train station.  At one stop light men in suits descend on us to sell us mansion apartments with golf courses.  Dongguan is so prosperous that people are hawking luxury properties at streetlights!  Max declines because it’s too far from his school.

Public Library and Guangzhou Tower

I bid zaijien to Max.  I haven’t eaten enough, so I purchase some butter-salt-chocolate cookies; it’s not a good choice.  On the train back to Guangzhou I write and reflect. What a school!  3,600 Boarding Students, and Maui Prep is hoping for just 48!

Back in Guangzhou I stream through tunnels, turnstiles, and crowds to enter a taxi line of over a hundred people.  The taxis pull up thirty at a time, though, so I’m quickly in.  I head to the new city downtown where Clyde, Mark, Tomas, and I have a meeting with ______________ agency.  It’s on the 20th floor of a high security, gorgeous, downtown high rise, with a jade dragon boat in the lobby and a four story chandelier bigger than my living room.  

One of the world's tallest, and growing. . .

This agency is the one that delivered my school’s first two boarding students- Bond and Lewis- a year ago.  Incredibly, there has been so much turnover in this office that no one is aware that this occurred. Increasingly I find this to be the case in the International Education Agency Business in China.  There is massive demand for Chinese to attend high school abroad, especially in America, but there is even greater supply of agencies- big, medium, and small- to broker this export of Chinese students.  The industry is changing as fast as China itself, and maintaining relationships, or guanxi, takes a lot of work when the players constantly change.  

Construction everywhere. . .

I present my twenty minute, 40 slide presentation to ten agents, sharing Maui Prep’s curriculum, athletics, location, physical plant, boarding facility, student culture, college connections, AP program, and more.  Two agents, the ones who lived in Toronto and abroad, are especially engaged.  They sit up front, ask pertinent questions, and focus.

I leave materials, and tour the office.  Incredibly, the second part of the company is an emigration wing, even though it’s called “EK Immigration.” Fifty Chinese people work in tight cubicles in an office to help other Chinese get out of the country.  It’s an incredible operation.  1.4 billion people live in China, and even if a small percentage want to leave, it’s still al lot!

Open Theater for 15,000 on the Pearl River. . 

We descend to the street and stroll through the new city.  Built out in the run up to the Asian Games in 2010, the modernity of Guangzhou is impossible to fathom without visiting.  A stunning, green, pedestrian park runs between skyscraper canyons.  Soothing bamboo flute music floats through the air of the park from hidden speakers in the trees.  A metro system and a mega-mall lie beneath us, but you’d hardly know it.  One of the top ten tallest buildings in the world continues to be built higher, as it towers terrifyingly over the park.  We watch tons of materials being hoisted by cranes some 100 stories tall.  A modern library, a world-class entertainment venue, an outdoor presentation theater with 15,000 seats, the Guangzhou Tower, gardens galore. . . . Guangzhou is a new and rising tribute to Chinese modernity that every American should know about.  China is so much more than America realizes. . . 

Fatigued from the walk through the new city, we split up to reset at the hotel.  In the evening the four of us meet at an al fresco Italian restaurant called Oggi.  Just a few years old, it has franchised into four locations throughout Guangzhou.  Lightning fast growth is the rule.  We dine in a circular courtyard surrounded by gleaming new skyscrapers and centered by fountains and gardens.  Some thirty restaurants ring the perimeter.

Sleep comes easily tonight. . .