Students' Paradise

Some students, including one of the girls whose disclosure to me had led to my noise questionnaire, were skeptical about results. Actually, there seemed to be no doubt in her mind that there would be no results. I couldn't see what she had trouble understanding. We had a plan; Meng was on board; the school had the power. Students would be getting up in the morning, if they knew what was good for them, and would thus be going to bed at night. It was simple.

In my initial flush of satisfaction over the students' paradise that my New Rules were ushering in, I thought it beneficent to issue a supplementary edict. It was quite aesthetic in its structure, a 3-step tautology as elegant as a math theorem:

Re: Cancerous Smoke

Second-hand smoke (i.e., smoke caused by other people's smoking) causes cancer [boldface].

All students at ICB have a right to a healthy living environment.

If you are disturbed by second-hand smoke in your room or in a study area, please let me know so I can solve the problem.

The notice was signed with my name, and noted: "All inquiries treated confidentially."

No one, in fact, has yet appealed to me to rescue them from cancer, even though it's a very undesirable disease.

I mentioned this separate initiative to Meng. He was diplomatic as always but, it seemed to me, a little too contained in his enthusiasm. I tried to make him appreciate the measure's importance to ICB by telling him about a complaint Mr. Li had had to deal with from a parent of one of the students.

I'd heard about this from Jim. There is this silly fashion among a very small proportion of the boys here (and of course I've also seen it elsewhere in Beijing) -- they dye their hair a kind of woody reddish color. When this is coupled with a sullenly resistant attitude towards teachers, they think, they end up looking cool and Western, especially if they can also spend hours picking at a guitar.

Jim told me that in one of the boys' dorm rooms, all six of the students dyed their hair this way. There appeared to be some social pressure at work. This prompted a call to Mr. Li from a concerned parent, upset that the school was not paying enough attention to how his boy was living. This, at least, is the possibly garbled version of the story as it was relayed to me.

I presented this to Mr. Meng as an example of an unjustified complaint about the school. My point was that if a parent complained that we did not protect students from (cancerous!) second-hand smoke right in the very rooms where they had to sleep, that complaint, by contrast, would be thoroughly justified. So we had to have measures in place to help students who objected to their roommates' smoking.

"I had not heard about this," rumbled Meng. "This is very bad, students coloring their hair. I will look into this."

"Yes but, you see, smoke is even worse. We can't reasonably be expected to stop students who want to dye their hair. But we are responsible for the environment where they sleep."

"It makes the school look bad, when the students have red hair."

"My point is ...."

I explained it again. I don't know if the point ever got across. Cultural differences, you know.