Anniversary

It's the 4th of June in Baoding, China, a run-of-the-mill town just an hour south of Beijing. After being here close to nine months, I have an easier time assessing what feels like a normal day in Baoding. The intense summer nips at my heels during the day and shies away at night, a subtle warning that it will be here to stay, in all its ferocious intensity, in just a matter of weeks. Aside from the rising temperature, everything feels eerily normal.

Around the campus, girls clench their parasols so that their porcelain skin will not be tainted by the sun. The boys, less concerned with the tone of their skin, walk together with friends, clutching school books, backpacks, and thermoses full of tea. Occasionally I see couples, so blatantly youthful, not with in-your-face PDA, but rather shyly showing ownership with his hand around her wrist. They all seem to walk in a staccato fashion, or are busily fumbling with their cell phones until a car honks at them or someone dings the bell on his bike to move out of the way.

I arrive to my classroom. It is the last class of the week. This group of students are the most quiet of the four. I call attendance using their real Chinese names instead of the English names I recognize them by. Not only is it helpful for my Chinese pronounciation, but it's also an icebreaker. The sound of a Westerner diffidently pronouncing their names in earnest tickles them beyond what you would imagine. I mispronounce the 'C' (which sounds like the 'ts' in 'cats') everytime, and this puts them in a roar of laughter. They clap when I say a name perfectly (which isn't all too often) and I curtsy. I feel rewarded. I stand in front of my 35 Chinese teachers, averaging 20 years in age. Crazy to think that the year they were born, I was a second-grader in Austin, Texas. I loved my teacher, freckled and orange-haired Mrs. Benthall. She was sweet, noble and protective. I wasn't so fiercely governed by her, therefore I never really got in trouble like I did in other grades. One time someone called me an insulting name while we stood in the lunch line. I ran to my teacher and madly tugged on her skirt. She leaned down and handed me a quarter. "You're not a butthead," she said. The quarter was for an ice cream. The last day of second grade was the last time I saw Mrs. Benthall, for she left the school after that year. I still think about her sometimes.

Fast forward twenty years later, and here I am in her place. Well, kind of. I'm in China and my students are much older than seven. But in some respect, they share the innocence of my seven-year-old self. It wasn't until years after second grade that I began to hear the depths of my own voice. I remember sitting in classes at my university, listening to professors' lectures, hoping to find some sort of loophole, some gap of logic so that I could freely pounce inside and prove them wrong with one single question. Or, I would at least try to raise a different point. Looking at my students today, none will ever make a statement that questions perspective or my knowledge on the subject. In fact, no one speaks out unless I practically beg for them to. It's not just the Chinese way.

This morning, before walking into that quiet classroom, I heard my own familiar voice deep inside, the loud one from college, eager to question a situation that may not appear exactly right. But when I walked inside and saw their fresh, childlike faces, it slowly began to subside. My desire to know just what exactly these students know about their birthyear was blanketed by rationale...and fear. I came here to teach English, not to be some sort of revolutionary, unprepared for the consequences that may come along with asking taboo questions in a country swathed with Communism. Instead I chose merely to observe this town's silence, aside from the blaring street horns or the rustling leaves from the heated wind. Twenty years ago I was in Austin, Texas, and the only idea I had of China was the staccato sounds from Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's "Chinese Dance" from The Nutcracker. It sounded like a piccalo, not a gunshot. I was told by several, the moment I arrived in the East, to remember the adage "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." I feel much sorrow for the hundreds (or thousands) of unarmed and slain people merely trying to make their voices be heard, and in some weird, twisted paradox, it's making me be quiet.