Zhōnghuámén, the China Gate, stands in the southern part of Nanjing. One of the few remaining of the original thirteen in the 600 year old city wall, it is, in actuality, a small fortress consisting of courtyards enclosed by several portals in succession-the final one topped with a rectangular stone tower that brings its height to about eighty very solid feet. Although the wooden pagoda that rested on this tower was destroyed by the Japanese in 1937 and never replaced, what is left of the gate is in excellent condition. Now separated from the length of wall around it, it has been fenced in and turned into a small park-a tourist attraction complete with a detachment of menacing looking mannequins dressed as Ming-era soldiers guarding the entry and lining the ramps leading to its main observation platform. Despite its history, Nanjing is not that much of a tourist destination and Zhōnghuámén is a little too clean, like someone uncomfortably dressed for a formal party. The decorative flags and traditional red lanterns hung for the opening ceremony of September’s World Historical & Cultural Cities Expo, held here, continue to softly unfurl and sway in the easy, late afternoon breeze. The city wall was constructed over a period of about twenty years. Protecting the Ming capital, it was especially fortified, with very stringent measures taken to ensure the good quality of the work. The bricks used in the wall’s construction were marked with their makers’ names and hometowns. If a brick was poorly made, the offending party could be tracked down to, ostensibly, replace it. Some accounts say that as the bricks were brought to the work site, an officer in charge would smash two random samples together. If they broke, he’d try two more. If those broke, he’d execute the maker on the spot. Over 600 years have come and gone since the wall’s completion. If you can read traditional Chinese, you can still make out some of the makers’ names on the their bricks. Was Dīng Dé apprehensive as his bricks were tested, or was he confident? Could he have guessed that his handiwork would last this long, through so much turmoil and destruction? Could he have guessed that his name would be known these centuries later, spoken by someone from a place that he never knew existed? This anonymous man’s brick, and his trade, have become his testament. His skill has become the mark of his immortality…at least as long as his brick holds together in its niche. From the top of Zhōnghuámén, a long stretch of the wall can be seen as it curves along the Qínhuái River. Time, of course, has taken its toll. It has been breached, not by invaders, but by the necessities of modern times. A thick, amputated stump, now overgrown with grass, weeds, and small trees, slopes jaggedly down to the road that now runs next to it. Outlasting its original purpose as a city defense, the wall eventually became an impediment to Nanjing’s traffic flow. Cars, buses, and motorbikes now hurry through where this section of it used to stand. But although walls may be boundaries, they are also, by their nature, supportive. And so it is for this one. Standing next to Dīng Dé’s brick, I look down, across this street to a rest area in the wall’s shadow. A woman with her dog talks to another with hers as the dogs sniff each other, just like they always do. An old man leans to hold his grandson’s hand as they walk. Another sits in a wooden chair, having a haircut. A card game is played at a makeshift table, near parked bicycles. Two girls goof around in their blue and white school sweatsuit uniforms, even though there’s no school today. And if I come back here next Sunday at this time, I’ll probably see the same people doing the same things. Life here goes on, as it always does, and the wall takes its special place in it, quietly and unobtrusively.

In China, education is about as important as rice. I had a vague notion of this before I first came here in 2003, but by the end of that summer, I was certain of it. Now teaching English at a university here in Nanjing, I’ve never once had to reconsider this. My opinion, if anything, has been strongly reinforced. When I am on campus at night, walking past classroom windows, I will often see so many students inside that it looks like there are classes going on. It’s only when I see no instructor that I understand that everyone is just studying independently. This goes on, I know, at universities everywhere, but I don’t know if it goes on to this extent. Although not true for everyone, studying hard seems to be one of several almost clinical conditions of Chinese society-its importance hammered into students’ heads so consistently and from such an early age that it is difficult for it not to take hold. In and of itself, I don’t think that this is necessarily bad-getting the most out of an education is extremely important, something I’ve found that many (myself included) don’t really understand until after leaving school, if ever. Since I’ve been here, however, I have become aware of something that at first I didn’t pay much attention to but now think is a real problem. Almost every day, in the courtyard behind my building, I pass students either sitting on the stone posts that serve as seats, or pacing back and forth in the tiled area that forms its center, their noses buried in books, reciting English aloud. Before my classes begin (and sometimes, irritatingly, during them), I often see my students poring over the same paperback book-one with a cover picture of a little frog lifting a barbell over his head. One day I asked a student what it was. He showed me, wordlessly. It was essentially a Chinese-English dictionary. The word he was looking at was clutch. I asked him to try to use it in a sentence. Silence. And why was he reading a Chinese-English dictionary with a weightlifting frog on the cover? Because in China, one of the requirements for receiving a university degree is to pass a nationwide English competency exam, the CET (College English Test). There are different levels of this test, but non-English majors must pass the CET Band 4. I’ve been told that, in order to pass this exam, candidates need to know at least 4,000 English words. This book holds them, and then some. If they pass, they get a nifty little certificate with an official seal on it (in China, nifty little certificates with official seals on them are very popular) that will supposedly enable them to get higher paying jobs. That’s great. But my student still had no idea how to use the word clutch. Nor could he tell me what he was reading. This is far from unusual, even though, on average, most of my students have been studying English in a formal environment for eight to ten years. Don’t misunderstand me: I have no complaints about that student or most of my other ones. My complaint is with the system. On the one hand, you have education by decree: everyone must learn English to graduate. On the other, you have a national obsession with doing well on tests (another clinical condition), and an age-old learning method based on memorization and mindless repetition. The problem is that this method trains them to spit out what they’ve memorized and to pass exams. As far as English goes, this isn’t enough. So why bother? So what if a student passes the CET 4? It doesn’t necessarily mean that they know what they’re doing. And if it’s a requirement for all university graduates, it doesn’t really make them all that special in the job market. The only time it becomes truly important is if someone doesn’t pass it and they can’t get their degree. Should a student who never intends to leave China be kept from receiving their degree because they don’t pass an English test that doesn’t really serve a valuable purpose? At best, this policy is a waste of time for uninterested students and at worst can blow a big hole in an otherwise good academic record. Chinese students are pragmatic enough to figure out if they’ll need to learn English in order to try to best meet their goals. If they do decide that it will help them, they’ll be motivated enough to try to learn it correctly. Why make it mandatory?

Clarification: After posting the above entry, I became aware of the fact that I may have unintentionally given some incorrect information regarding Chinese policy. In fact, although at one time it was an official government requirement for university students to pass a CET exam in order to receive a degree, this is no longer the case. This policy decision now rests with the universities themselves. Currently, passing the CET 4 remains a minimum graduation requirement for students at my university. Beyond these basic facts, I believe that things become more complex. At this time, however, I am unwilling to speculate on it further without a closer examination of the details. Suffice it to say that, although I sincerely beg my readers’ pardon for my error, I wholeheartedly stand by the general message of my essay. Matthew MacDonald

Visiting the Xīnjiāng Autonomous Region last week, I was taken by how extremely different it is from eastern China. Whether it be the Central Asian look and sounds of the people there, the signs written in Arabic as well as Chinese (with English a distant, faltering third), or the expanse of desert ringed by unreal looking mountains of sand, rock, and then snow-capped peaks, this is not the China that most foreigners imagine. Yet despite this and the differences in language, religion, and opinions, and despite also my impression that the hodgepodge of ethnicities native to this region, particularly the Uighurs, are looked down upon by the Han majority, this is part of it. China is the far side of the world; Xīnjiāng is the far side of China. Accordingly, it represents to many Chinese what China represents to many Westerners-a distant, mysterious, exotic place. Traveling out to Ürümqi, Tiān Chí, and Turpan (Tŭlŭfān), I felt a jolt similar to, although less powerful than, the one I experienced when I first came to China in 2003. But even while still out there, I had another feeling, not a jolt so much as a steadily growing idea that I began to have a few months after my return here in 2005: China’s not as different from the United States as I once thought it was. I kept thinking of how this part of the country, in its peculiar desert beauty, looked like Arizona. And how the Tiān Shān range looked very much like pictures that I’d seen of the Rockies. Of course, China’s about as foreign as it gets, in all of the obvious ways and others that are not so visible. But the two countries are similar. If you’re willing to take the time to compare US and Chinese cities, rivers, mountains, deserts, airline and railway hubs, and any number of other things, you will find that they match up quite nicely. But this is not the only way that they are alike. I’ve also found in my time here that daily life, although different in its details, often follows a pattern close to that of the United States. This, for me, was a personal and, to some extent, relieving discovery. Before I came to China, I had planned on going to Vietnam. When I gave my notice at work and told my soon-to-be-former colleagues that I was planning on going there to live, one of them said something like, “So you want to stand in line to pick up your toilet paper, huh?” in reference to the perceived communist way of doing things. He wasn’t entirely joking. Worse, I started thinking, “What if he’s right?” In spite of myself, I visualized standing in a long line of irritated Vietnamese people and then being screamed at by some equally irritated low-level government official waving a roll of toilet paper in my face and then not giving it to me for some reason that I literally didn’t understand. I still haven’t made it to Vietnam. Maybe that’s how it is. In China, however, it isn’t. The toilet paper, toothpaste, toothbrushes, Coke, batteries, and just about everything else you can pick up at your local Walgreen’s is available here, too. And the line at the counter’s usually not too bad, either. I’ve found that many daily activities here in Nánjīng are very much like those in Boston: catching the bus, looking busy at work, figuring out what to eat for dinner, watching TV, surfing the net, getting the kids ready for bed, whatever. Sitting in a friend’s living room after dinner one night as we watched a cop show on TV, I told her that this is pretty much what people in the States do after they eat. She seemed surprised to hear it. I went on to say that life in America isn’t like the TV shows popular here on DVD and unlike the characters on Friends, people usually need to hold onto a steady job in order to keep an apartment in Manhattan. She politely listened to what I had to say and then launched into a very precise explanation of how the Umbrella Gang swung the rent. She knew her stuff. I didn’t have a chance. Eventually, I managed to crawl out of the conversation and we went back to watching the show. Nice time. Hey, I’ve got my toilet paper.