Navigating the Challenges of Canadian School Culture as a Chinese Kid in the 1990s
From Draconian Discipline to Flexible Diversity
September 1, 2023, Berlin.
Something about this date, coupled with a sunny, cool pre-autumn breeze invites memories from school days to resurface. Today, I have time to capture these impressions from 25 years ago (that’s the 90s!) and funnel them into words. These are the impressions from a much younger self - one that was still heavily bound by a strict Chinese upbringing, despite the very Canadian surroundings.
We moved from China to Calgary when I was six. My first few years in elementary school were spent predominantly with an ESL instructor, fatefully from Germany, where I now live. After my language skills had progressed to a level comparable to my peers, I was ‘mainstreamed’ and left ESL behind me. Nevertheless, it took me many years to acclimate to the Canadian educational system, and perhaps I never did. The culture and habits of the Chinese way of learning were deeply etched into my parents, my mother especially, and they were subsequently carved into me.
September 1st was the ceremonial day of return to school. By the time I started to clue into what it meant to go to Canadian school, I was in junior high, 13 years old. I remember the buzz of excitement and nervousness of arriving at the school grounds, finding out who would be in my homeroom, who I was going to sit next to, and which classes and teachers I would have for the rest of the semester. And this all the while looking for the kids I knew from last year, which ones to watch out for, and who I might consider competition for the best grades. Thinking this way was conditioned into me, if not directly by my parents, then by the handful of other Chinese kids in my classes.
These years were when I learned the importance of watching my back and tempering my expectations. It was about finding the path between all the diverse social currents, figuring out how to move between a rush of bodies, and navigating up and down long staircases, squeezed in a mash of backpacks. It may have been exciting to be fed with so many new intellectual inputs, but it wasn’t as simple as just learning the content of class material. The contrast of the elegance, simplicity, and clarity of subjects like Math and Physics was stark compared to shifting, amorphous subjects like Social Studies, Geography, and History, which seemed arbitrarily selective of some slice of humanity unrelated to my own life experience.
But worse than that were the very real social games that were being played on top of the classroom. The giggles and pointing between girls sat at the front; the bits of paper that would come flying from random directions to land on my desk. Here is where I learned the value of stoicism, or at least projecting the image of it. The value of ignoring distractions and focusing on the ideas before me. Of simply not engaging with the uninteresting, uninviting games being played around me - they all seemed so asinine, meaningless, and incomprehensible. I could, in fact, not understand why kids were acting as they did, putting their energy into chatting, braiding each other’s hair, doodling, laughing, and passing notes, when there were IDEAS to meet, connections to make from foundations built before, the feeling of the mind being expanded, lifted to new heights. What gossip or social game could be better than that? Furthermore, I couldn’t understand why these kinds thought they were here - to be with friends? What a poor use of time when they could be learning!
But because I myself didn’t know how to play those games, I couldn’t see it any other way except intentional stupidity, a waste of resources. I wrote these kids off my internal intelligence list, felt sorry for them, and had a sense of vindication when their grades were, expectedly, lower than mine. It was important to find ways to feel good at that time, and how else to do it than through comparison to others, in areas where I had relative skill? School and grades were everything I was taught to know - everything else I was told to see as a distraction.
The result: I dedicated all my energy to grasping ideas, practicing with exercises, explaining things to myself, and doing problems forward and backward, the easy way first, then the hard way. When teachers assigned one section of a page as homework, I would do the entire page. How could you leave content unused in a textbook?
Textbooks were my bibles - I carried them, multiple thick, hard-covered texts around with me in my oversized backpack, lugging them to and from school every day, ready whenever we may have need of them. I saw this as a mark of my dedication, to struggle with the weight of books in my bag. I couldn’t understand kids who would leave textbooks in their lockers - what good were they there? What if you had to look something up? Even worse, what if they got dirty or damaged? Would their parents not severely punish them when they saw this, especially if they then had to pay a fine to replace them?
In China, not treating your study materials with the utmost care was an egregious sign of disrespect, and if discovered, would be grounds for immediate parental retribution. It would be a commonplace sight to see parents pull their child to the side of the hallway, lash them with criticisms and shame, and pepper it with a bit of corporeal punishment - a whipping slap on the palm with a ruler or a rolled-up tube of paper, for any misbehavior they got wind of. The child is expected to receive this all with lowered head, demure voice, and expressions of regret. Many years later, when I returned to China to work at a school in Wuhan, parents would even outsource this task to the teachers, encouraging them to hit their children, because “we don’t hit them enough at home,”
So, school in Canada was a bewildering experience. What actually was the point of studying this hard, as much as I enjoyed it? Perhaps what I deemed enjoyment was simply the fulfillment of the role that I knew was expected of me. But it remained a puzzle to me why these Canadian kids, so many of them as wild, unfocused, and undisciplined as they were, still managed to get on well with the teachers. How could these teachers, to me paragons of learnedness, be both so well-informed and dedicated to their craft, yet so tolerant of misbehaviour? Did they not feel disrespected? Was it even customary to disrespect teachers and authority?
And was this something I could also try?
Having been immersed in many more years of education in the Canadian system following this, I am now much more appreciative of my experiences there. I deeply integrated the value of creative thought, of group work, of the humanities, and many other pillars that today form the foundations of who I am and how I think. I’ve also come to see my Chinese upbringing in a less caricatured light. All the same, I remain both appreciative and critical of the range of educational paths I’ve taken, and am still at times sitting with the self in me that believes that as long as I solve all the problems in my textbook, I will be prepared for all that life has in store for me.
Have you also had a mixed-culture education? What have you gained or lost from this approach? Leave a comment below!