Uriel in China (2000)(see also Darker, Deeper: Uriel in China 2002: Inside China's Diplomacy School)Western Teacher, Chinese Collegeby Uriel Wittenberg
In September, 2000, I boarded a plane from Toronto to a different world and spent five months living and teaching English at a university in Beijing. I encountered joy and pain, enthusiasm and resentment, hilarity and loathing, innocence and deceit. And I reported it all in a series of letters written and emailed at the time to a list of 65 recipients. I was free to teach as I saw fit, so I took the students on a figurative flight to my own world through readings drawn from The New York Times, Shakespeare, Monty Python, and the scripts of a few popular sci-fi movies such as The Matrix. There were confrontations with recalcitrant students or wrongheaded administrators. I followed the unusual route of taking a principled stand rather than submitting to banal "cultural misunderstanding" rationalizations. Readers thus witness confrontation scenarios that rarely get played out in real life. The reasoning as expressed was: "Someone has to yield. Why should it be the guy who's right?" The letters are opinionated, easy to read and often humorous, but the observations they report are conscientiously factual and objective. The picture they paint of life at one college provides insights into modern Chinese society that would challenge the preconceptions of many readers -- for instance, that Chinese students are generally hardworking, that they live under a strict regime, or that a Western teacher would face considerable restrictions on classroom discussion topics.
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