Tianni on Eat: Be Very Hungry

About a month ago, the Chinese-owned nursery our two-and-a-half-year-old goes to in Beijing decided it wanted to improve communication between teachers and parents.


Little K’s playground - Huijia. Hardly the swankiest in the area, but positively paradisaical compared to others

So it started giving out a feedback form at the end of each week, summarizing the curriculum covered in class and listing out the progress made by each tot in memorizing songs, distinguishing colors, or the like. This being one of the world’s last remaining bastions of communal (communist) spiritedness, the weekly reports also included observations on the kids’ ability to play together and cooperate with others, and their participation in herd, I mean, group activities.

I did not initially pay much notice to the A4-size slips of paper handed to me when I dropped the tot off at school. After all, I’ve become quite familiar with the school’s eagerness to introduce so-called progressive measures befitting its status as a private preschool and its corresponding inability to follow through with these policies. Take its Web site, for example. Each parent was issued an ID and password and told that we could keep in touch with our children’s progress in class with photos and updates posted online every day. It sounded like a brilliant idea, especially to working parents like me. Except that after about a month, the daily updates dwindled into a fortnightly trickle, and then eventually stopped completely. The last batch of photos posted online is dated November 2009, about five months ago.


Drawing, games and outdoor activities – a packed curriculum for little tots to justify astronomical fees

Expecting this feedback form to follow the same quick route to obsolescence, I forgot about the sheets handed to me. Until I got home from work one day and the ayi (helper) in all seriousness told me, “Kaela,” basically meaning, my daughter is anti-social at school. Now my nanny has been with us for close to the duration of our stay in China, helping to look after the kiddo since she was a teensy 2-month-old baby. A proud, tough (and loud) Beijinger who was during Mao’s revolution sent into the countryside for ‘re-education,’ she is also highly competitive on behalf of my toddler. The image of her running with my girl in her arms and overtaking dozens of other nannies and children in order to grab the most sweets during Halloween trick-or-treating has seared itself for posterity into my memory. So when she spoke to me in that tone, I had to pick up the form and see for myself if the sky had indeed fallen.

Predictably it hadn’t, but apparently, disliking group activities and preferring alone time in class was equally bad, if not worse. Then her teacher, in trying to put this terrible piece of news across in the gentlest manner, wrote after the initial remarks that she is “certain” Little K will “improve with time.” She was trying to be reassuring, I must add, but that only made me wonder how bad my daughter’s crime really was.







Now, first things first. This preschool my daughter attends is one of a rash of privately-run early education schools that have mushroomed across China in the past decade. Adopting Western concepts of early childhood nurturing with bilingual instruction, these businesses have very much succeeded in cashing in on the consequences of the country’s one-child policy, namely two generations so far of over-indulged children and their obsessively competitive parents who are, in the words of a Singaporean statesman, very “hungry” for their offspring to succeed in life. In a country where the average income is about SGD$8,000 per annum in large cities like Beijing, these schools cost about $400 a month, an astronomical sum by any stretch of balance-sheet arithmetic. One can only imagine the extent to which middle-income Chinese parents must have scrimped and saved in order to hedge on their future retirement – a burden that traditionally falls on the children.

Still, fees at these upscale local nurseries pale in comparison to truly "international" kindergartens run by foreign investors and staffed, not by local staff and the token "English teacher" (usually a straggly Peace Corps-type foreigner looking to earn pocket money during local immersion), but by full-time native English speakers holding relevant qualifications to boot. These nurseries charge at the least, double of what private Chinese schools advertise, ostensibly because they bestow upon their young charges not just an early classroom introduction to tomorrow’s United Nations world, but also a much-coveted North American accent. The promise of an early boost up the crowded societal ladder has seen no lack of affluent parents fill many an international classroom with young Chinese faces.


Forget Baby Einstein; for these kids of migrant workers, 'kindergartens' are basically cheap and sometimes unsafe daycare while their parents labor in the city


Half an hour’s drive from the city center, it’s a different world at the Cuigezhuang village largely inhabited by migrants workers.

Unfortunately for my dear future investment of a daughter, her parents, both relatively poor scribes, can’t afford to give her a leg up in the Darwinian race with a blue-chip preschool enrolment. In our darkest guilt-laden hours, we reason that our liberal-leaning tendencies towards egalitarianism can only make our toddler a better human being, even if she has to make a living in adulthood cleaning for these rich mainland kids who are poised to take over the world with their melodious Beijing Mandarin and perfect American English.

My delusions, however, haven’t stopped me from fretting, as good mothers do, of depriving my only child of a good start in life and generally having been too lax. After all, I’ve been guilty of not using picture flashcards on her the moment she started to crawl, and of not having signed her up for any of the myriad music-and-movement classes other mothers had when she finally learnt to totter upright.

Yes, Little K could be only two and yes, toddlers at this age are generally disinterested in their own kind, but perhaps, just perhaps, her lack of social graces is an early signal that she is neither likely to be voted class monitor, nor to win the title of Miss Popularity, nor to run for the college student union. In all likelihood, she could be a complete failure in the schmoozing and networking circles that characterize high-level corporate success. It was a complete nightmare to think that my precious daughter will be following in my very footsteps!


Barebones -- no fancy equipment, no ‘English teachers,’ no early childhood curriculum.

Much has been said about how hard Chinese parents push their children from a tender age, but you don’t really appreciate it until you experience first-hand the jostle to survive among 1.3 billion people on a day-to-day, cheek-to-jowl basis. Whether it’s the millions lining up for seats at the train stations at Spring Festival, the tens of thousands queuing up for admissions interviews into the country’s top universities, or the thousands applying for a few hundred civil service job openings, cut-throat competition is just a day in the life for mainland Chinese.

Often, the only difference determining which side of the great divide one belonged to – whether one was comfortably behind the wheel of a luxury European car on the clogged streets, or perched on two thin rubber wheels in between two-feet-high sacks of potatoes – was whether one had the opportunities afforded by well-connected and moneyed parents, or lacking that, had struggled hard enough to lay hands on a brand-name college degree. Social realities have given birth to a generation of parents and youngsters willing to go to great, and here I mean extreme, lengths for the faintest hope of raising a few notches their social standing. The corruption rampant in every tier of Chinese society or the dishonest merchants selling fake milk or eggs to me do not pronounce a judgement on morals, but only reflect the necessities of survival in the jungle. Play by the rules of victors or risk being sidelined.

It’s hard not to face up to the stiff realities of competition that my daughter, cocooned as she is, will likely find herself up against when China becomes a global superpower and its swathes of very hungry and ambitious citizens venture abroad in ever larger droves. At the very least, I’ve chided myself, I could equip her with as many soft skills as I can afford to buy. Perhaps there was even a special course somewhere on the Art of Playschool Socializing that I could sign her up for.

Very thankfully, about a month after it introduced the feedback forms, the school stopped handing them out, as I'd expected. I could at last return to my laissez-faire parenting and deluded faith in stress-free childhoods. The worrying, I tell myself, can wait, at least till the day Little K runs home crying over her first broken heart.