The Same Bright Moon:Teaching China's New Generation During Covid

By Wendy Bashant

"Wendy Bashant's collaborative memoir couldn't be more timely. Her strongly voiced narrative of teaching Chinese university students in Xi'an, coupled with their own vivid accounts of struggle and aspiration, offers an indispensable and humanizing complement to the daily news. "

Dr. John Elder, author of Following the Brush; professor emeritus of English and Environmental Studies at Middlebury and Bread Loaf.

 

In 2019, Wendy Bashant, a burned-out college dean, quits her job to teach two hundred students in the ancient, walled city of Xi'an, China. The year turns extraordinary when tensions between China and the U.S. escalate: first tit-for-tat tariffs. Then a worldwide pandemic. Finally lockdowns, closed consulates, and expelled journalists. All the while, accusations are lobbed back and forth, like flaming arrows launched over the Pacific.

 

Against this background of aggression, Wendy is expected to teach a class on American culture. Instead, her students explain the realities of growing up in an emerging global power. Through their experiences and compelling perspectives, the students debate various issues such as environmentalism, gender, healthcare, and political conflict. The Same Bright Moon is a collaborative memoir, highlighting the stories of these students through their assignments, discussions, and poetry during the height of Covid-19. These vibrant voices of China's newest generation are sure to challenge, inspire, and bring hope for the future

• Language: English
• Publisher: Acorn Publishing LLC
• Release date: Aug 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223364511

Book preview

THE

SAME

BRIGHT

MOON

Over the mountain, we enjoy

the same bright moon under the same clouds.

Even in two places, we still are missing each other.

– Wang Changling (698–756 AD)

For David

I WOULD MAKE EDUCATION a pleasant thing both to the teacher and the scholar. This discipline . . . should not be one thing in the schoolroom, and another in the street. We should seek to be fellow students with the pupil, and should learn of, as well as with them. 

– Henry David Thoreau (1837)

WHILE THE MAIN TASK of a good student is to study, they should in addition participate in other things — that is, industrial work, farming and military affairs. They should also criticize the bourgeoisie. The period of schooling should be shortened, education should be revolutionized, and the domination of our schools by bourgeois intellectuals should by no means be allowed to continue.

– Mao Zedong (1966)

I THINK MANY AMERICANS do not know much about the Chinese people, especially the youth. Your country has some stereotypes about the Chinese culture. Generation-Z of China is very open-minded and creative. They have their own unique philosophies of life, perceptions of society, fashion styles, aesthetics, etc., which is different, but closely interrelated with the traditional Chinese culture.

– Jessie, Junior,

Xi’an Jiaotong University (2020)

A note on pronunciation

In this book, when I write Chinese words, I usually will write in pinyin — Western letters rather than Chinese characters. For the most part, these letters are pronounced as they are written.

The exceptions are words that have X, Q or Z in them. (And, sadly, while these letters are uncommon in English, they are ubiquitous in Chinese.) So, for those letters, X is spoken with a soft sh. Thus, for most of this book, I’ll be living in Xi’an (She-an). Q is a harder ch sound. A park near our house is Xingqing Park, which is pronounced Shing-Ching Park. Z sounds like dz, except when it is next to an "h." Then it becomes something akin to a dj. When Covid breaks out, I am in Guangzhou (Guang-djo).

A second note, this time on names

CHINESE STUDENTS START studying English early, some as early as kindergarten. In these early years, students adopt English names that they use in their English classrooms. When I told the students that I was writing a book about them, I asked which name they wanted me to use. Some said they wanted me to use their English name. Others chose their given Chinese name. Some wanted both. Others asked to remain anonymous. I complied with their requests.

A Virus

Prologue

GUANGZHOU, CHINA, JANUARY 22, 2020

We walked through the empty airport, built for a city of fifteen million, and there wasn’t another soul in sight.

Airy windows two stories above our heads seemed made for giants. Florescent and natural light merged, creating an unholy glow as we wheeled our suitcases through the vacant terminal. Steel supports stood sentry at the building’s entrance forming a series of Vs.

V for virus. V for vector. V for virulent, I whispered to myself as I studied their simple geometric pattern before entering the building. The sturdy metal zigzagged through the entrance hall like crooked bolts of lightning. They were the main structural supports of the Guangzhou International Airport.

At one of the ticket counters, a person wrapped in white plastic peered at us through a window behind a closed door. Twice, we’d been notified by the airline that our return tickets had been changed as the new virus began to close down domestic travel. We stopped at the counter to get the tickets reissued and confirm that the plane traveling to Xi’an was still scheduled to leave. But the person disappeared down a hallway behind the closed door as soon as he saw us.

We adjusted our masks, turned to the automated ticket kiosks to print new boarding passes, and then made our way towards security. All we heard was our own steady breath and the protesting squeak from the wheels on our luggage. As we walked down the terminal’s wide, empty boulevard, the same V-pattern, the lightning bolts from the steel supports at the building’s entrance, could still be seen inside.

V for virulent. V for virus.

We walked to our gate through the eerie light. It felt as though we had been transported into a video game; the rules and the objectives were unclear. All the stores were dark. Security gates had been pulled down, protecting the plastic, faceless models, designer handbags, duty-free perfume. The dusky shadows cast by the mannequins reminded me of a zoo, only the creatures looking back at us were clothed in Louis Vuitton and carried Coach purses.

We didn’t know that in eight hours all of China would be locked down.

We didn’t know that after that closure, the country wouldn’t reopen for more than three years.

We didn’t know that soon the entire world would be dealing with the same virus, or that, in the three years China was closed, almost seven million people globally would die from it.

All we knew was the gray liminal space that surrounded us: the steel architectural Vs, the two-story windows made for giants, the well-dressed mannequins huddling in the shadows.

All we knew was that we needed to get to the gate, board a plane — any plane — and get back to our temporary home in Xi’an.

MY HUSBAND, DAVE, AND I had been teaching at a university for almost six months by this point. I had been a college professor and dean for thirty years. Dave was an internal medicine doctor. He had some teaching experience working with medical students and residents. When we left our jobs, we both felt like we needed a change of scenery.

Back in the eighties, we’d ground our way through college and graduate school. Over the thirty years we’d worked, we had watched education and medicine get more complicated. We felt more and more detached from the decisions that we were asked to make. We had spent years managing people, which all too frequently meant serving as the playground director: a lot of conflict without a lot of resolution. In short, we were burned out.

So, we moved to China to teach. Dave would teach scientific English and help translation classes understand the ins-and-outs of scientific terminology. I would teach American literature and writing.

The first semester was uneventful.

We taught. We gave exams, and then we had six weeks to travel for winter break. We chose to go south — Guangzhou — to get away from the thick pollution and the winds that swept down from the Gobi Desert and Inner Mongolia, fingering the Xi’an streets with face-bruising cold. But then, suddenly, our friends and family were sending us web links that warned of a viral outbreak in Wuhan. And then we got text messages from our students back in Xi’an. You need to leave now. There is a very bad disease near you. A virus! If you can get return tickets to the U.S., please get them now. If not, come back to Xi’an where there is no disease. Finally our department sent us an official email, urging our immediate return.

WE CONTINUED THROUGH the empty airport, our suitcase wheels whispering their protests. The shop mannequins seemed unfazed by the lack of an audience. Since no one was at the gate to take our tickets, we walked down the gangway to the waiting plane. The air was sharp and sour: lemon mixed with bleach. We looked at the other passengers — there were only about twenty. They too were moving deliberately through the florescent, lemon-infused walkway — also masked, also wary. The plane looked like it could hold 150 people. We all ignored our seat assignments and chose seats that allowed us to spread out across the plane. There was plenty of room.

When we arrived in Xi’an, we lumbered into the subway station. It was a system designed to serve ten million people. Again, there was almost no one.

Makeshift card tables had been set up at the entrance. Two workers had been drafted to staff the flimsy tables draped with white crepe. The workers wore baby-blue hazmat suits and gas masks. With their dark goggles and molded plastic faces, they looked like alien beetles. At the station, we produced our passports, our work visas, our university I.D. cards. They took our temperature with something shaped like a plastic water gun. We signed affidavits swearing that we’d never been to Wuhan. We then continued our journey, stumbling through tunnels lit by cool blue LED lighting, labyrinths that seemed as though they were borrowed from a zombie movie set.

When we got to the subway platform, there was only one other person. He too was wearing a plastic suit. A jug of aquamarine liquid was strapped to his back. He walked along the platform spraying the subway’s escalator, its signs, the city map, the cement benches. Eventually, he headed towards us. As the train approached and then came to a smooth, silent stop, he sprayed our luggage, our boots, the hem of our pants. The air around us smelled of alcohol and floral potpourri.

We wheeled our suitcases onto the train and for the first time took a deep breath. We’d made it back to Xi’an before the country closed.

Were we lucky? We weren’t sure.

AS SOON AS WE GOT BACK to the apartment, I reached into my backpack for a bag of tangerines that I’d bought at a store just three days earlier. I wondered if they would glow terracotta gold, like hard-won booty from an online video game. After all, I’d carried them through a time warp into a new world. But when I emptied the tiny globes of fruit onto the table, they were just orange.

Dave and I peeled and sectioned the fruit, tasted the sweet flesh, and opened our laptops. We then began to work our way through emails and official notices. We learned that that night, the whole city of Wuhan — eight and a half million people — would be locked down. Wuhan was a short four-hour train ride from Xi’an. 

We looked at each other.

Dave began to search the internet for more information: Flu, Ebola, rabies, hantavirus, HIV.... As he scrolled through medical databases that focused on viruses, he looked for anything that he could find on this new, unnamed, airborne pneumonia-type disease. There wasn’t much.

Meanwhile, I saw that our English department had sent us another email. It said that the city’s subway had just been shut down, and that the gate that connected our apartment complex to the university would be locked. It also said that school was closed for the foreseeable future:

o  No leaving apartment.

o  Please strengthen self-protection prevention.

o  Keep good hygiene health.

o  Pay attention to authoritative information.

As I read the email out loud, we looked at each other and wondered how this game was going to play out. We got into bed. I reached under the covers to squeeze his hand. He squeezed my hand back. As we fell asleep, Dave undoubtedly was thinking about the dangers of viral outbreaks, but I fell asleep remembering when we first arrived in China. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the process. There was a storm and red decorative streetlights. But, before that, it was a hot summer day in San Diego when I got an email from Mr. Chen

July

Write a Process Paper

Assignment

1. First, Apply

SAN DIEGO, JULY 2019

We are recruiting teachers for the next academic year. Please arrive in China after August 26. The semester will begin September 2.

This was the beginning of the acceptance letter that I received during the summer when I was working as the dean of students at a local law school. 

A week earlier, it was another meaningless day. I had worked for thirty years, first as a professor, later as a dean at small colleges, a large state university, and graduate schools. I made a decent salary, but my job was like herding sheep. The goal was to get as many students from orientation to graduation with as few injuries as possible. There were so many wolves that could thin the herd — everything from illness to drugs, family crisis to financial distress, mental health to food insecurity. Deans also manage staff, interact with faculty and parents, and work with the leaders at the top who make monetary decisions that too often seem divorced from real-life experience.

On the day that I started thinking about applying for a job in China, I had had a two-hour meeting where H.R. discussed a new way to evaluate staff. We tried to sit still as the hefty, bearded man ran through his slide deck. The Formica table reflected the glow from the slide projector. The room looked like a detention center. Plastic seats sang a soft descant over his drone. There were graphs and forms and instructions.

We were told that we would yearly put employees on a grid:

THE THING LOOKED LIKE a tic-tac-toe board. All I could think was: My output is going to be low if I sit through more meetings like this.

After the meeting ended, I had an emergency appointment with a student who had interrupted his torts professor, mid-lecture. A little background: a tort isn’t a contract; it is something not written down. They are important when you get injured. Say you trip over a skateboard left on the sidewalk. There is no written document that says sidewalks are bad places to store skateboards, but generally we recognize that skateboards and sidewalks are a toxic mix.

The student wanted to talk to his professor about this. Sort of. 

The student interrupted the teacher to ask if torts extend to people living on Mars. At first, she thought he was joking. Then she thought maybe it was a bizarre hypothetical. Quickly, she realized he was having a mental breakdown. That got him a meeting with me, the dean of students. Who had just learned how to rank my staff.

While this may seem absurd, it’s actually an unremarkable appointment in a day in the life of a dean. Other meetings I’ve had include one with the whole floor of a dorm after a group of students tried to turn their shower into a hot tub with plastic sheeting and duct tape. The weight of the water broke through to the floor below.

Or the day a teacher called because a student brought a service animal to school. The animal was actually an illegally trapped lemur from a farm in Texas. Once a student was found naked in a parking lot, wrapped in a blanket, with no memory of how she got there. Another woke to his roommate pointing a gun at him. Still another spent his tuition money on some sort of Scientology purification. Without money, he could neither go home nor finish school.

I’ve contacted several parents when their child died in accidents, a hospital when a student didn’t have health insurance but needed immediate health care, and a county jail when a student was reported missing and friends suspected he was there. Plagiarism, poverty, foolish games, tragedy: whiplash seemed to define my life.

Dave and I talked that night. We weighed our options as we made pasta. The smell of garlic and tomatoes billowed in steam above his head. It wouldn’t be hard to rent our house. We lived in central San Diego — not far from downtown, not far from the beach.

We forked spaghetti onto our plates and carried them to the table.

After dinner, I produced a piece of paper that I had divided into two columns: pros and cons. We then talked about where we could go. Who would have us? We listed countries that we had visited, countries we might return to. As a child, I lived for a year in Germany, two in Tokyo. More recently I spent short stints teaching college students in Thailand. Dave spoke French fluently. I didn’t. But we’d been learning Chinese together from a tutor who came to our house for the past five years. I’d given academic presentations at conferences in Beijing. We both worked with Chinese nationals, both students and patients. We cleared the dishes in silence.

We have a limited window, I reminded him. Many countries won’t hire teachers older than 60. We were 59.

I looked at his back as he loaded the dishwasher. We’d been married for twenty-five years. Over those years, strangers occasionally approached us to say that he looked like Jason Alexander — George Costanza in Seinfeld. "Are you that guy on that T.V. in Friends? Or is it Seinfeld?" they’d ask. We would always laugh. I frankly didn’t see it. He didn’t have Costanza’s neuroses or insecurities.

Dave rinsed the dishes and then methodically bent over to put them on the rack. His form was so familiar — a t-shirt with a cello on it (he was an avid amateur musician), comfortable, well-worn jeans, brightly colored socks. (He always wore festive socks: men don’t have enough color in their life, he would complain.) We knew the clichés used to describe marriage — rocky roads, rough seas, thorny pathways. Over the years, however, we had found that those descriptions didn’t really describe our relationship. Most of the stumbling blocks we faced — the boulders and trenches of life — lay in our work or dealing with other people.

He wasn’t reluctant to make the leap. He had seen many patients who believed that they would accomplish their dreams, only to watch the fantasies be extinguished when they came down with a horrible disease. His father died of a brain tumor a few months before turning 52.

Besides, he too had had a rough week. The ex-wife of one of his patients left her business card on his desk. On the back in bold letters, she’d written PLEASE CALL ME. When he did, he learned that his patient had a gun and fantasized about killing his physician. The patient was angry because Dave wasn’t willing to increase an opioid prescription.

Mental health crises. Guns. Both of our jobs felt like we were using duct tape to hold together society. We slept lightly that night. What would it look like if we left? Dave worked for the Veterans Administration, so he could easily go on hiatus and return. He was just a cog in a vast system that was used to doctors coming and going. I didn’t care if I came back to a job or not. As far as I was concerned, thirty years was a long time to work. I dreamed of returning to a cloistered life of writing, tea-drinking and reading books. Quitting my present job would be a decisive step towards that exit plan.

The next day I sent out applications. For many, I didn’t receive a response. I can understand why. I was a person in her late fifties. Most asked for my current salary. A U.S. salary is much, much higher than in the countries we were looking. There was no place to comment that salary wasn’t important. I sometimes entered my monthly salary, hoping no one would notice.

Another meeting. This time with the ACT, or Assessment and Care Team. ACTs have been developed by universities to anticipate campus shooters. Ours was broadened to try to identify any threat on campus. We were called when the librarian’s ex-husband said that he wanted to kill her. Or a student was dismissed. Or someone wondered if torts existed on Mars. A report would be filed, and we then would try to figure out how to keep the campus safe. There was nothing like the anticipation of an ACT to make you look longingly at the map of the world and think, What else can I do?

And then the email from Jiaotong University came. We have sent your application to the English Department and will let you know if it is accepted. Not long after that, I received an email from Mr. Chen: 

We have accepted your application. I will begin to apply for the work permit.

Please send:

1.  PhD diploma. Keep well original document.

2. Certificate of No Criminal Record. Keep well original document.

3. Physical examination. Keep well original report.

All documents must be authenticated at the Chinese Visa office in Los Angeles.

4. Also photo.

My heart lurched. I wrote back and asked, What about my husband? Could he work at the university too? I attached his résumé, a list of classes that he’d taught to medical students, his piles of degrees.

There was a pause, and then my email pinged. Yes. Please send his information too with Chinese embassy authentication.

So, there it was. Was it an acceptance letter? A scam? I felt terror, and then a rush of excitement, not unlike an astronaut shot into the solar system to discover Mars. Was this my midlife crisis? I knew little about the school. Would I sign a work contract? Would it be in Chinese? Does China have torts? What does a social contract look like in Xi’an? 

My calendar beeped, telling me that the ACT was starting. I responded to Mr. Chen: Thank you so much. I look forward to working with you. I will begin to gather the documents.

2. Then, Learn the Language

ONE OF THE MORE FORMIDABLE steps in the process of preparing to teach in China is the language. We started well before I applied for the job. At my school, there were many Chinese nationals. Being able to pronounce students’ names, being able to communicate with them when they visited my office with academic problems — that was important to me. Dave, as an internal medicine doctor, also had patients whose first language was Chinese. That was why we initially decided to try to learn the language. For five years, we took classes at the local university, employed a weekly tutor, used audio apps, and completed workbook assignments.

But when I received the email, I was still at the most basic level. Learning tones, memorizing characters, understanding sentence structure: at best, I could mimic sentences in the textbook. Original statements were beyond me.

From the Chinese workbook, I learned how to ask someone on a date:

TO SUPPLEMENT THE WORKBOOK, I added audio tapes, which were business-oriented. I could therefore also say things like:

As the departure date got closer, I got more nervous. How useful would these be?

A few months after I arrived, I assigned a paper asking the students to explain to me the differences between our languages. Lord, I wish I had had their responses earlier!

One student went for the short-but-sweet formula.

First, fewer people speak English than Chinese. But people who use English live all over the world.

Second, the history of English is shorter than Chinese.

Third, English has strict grammar. There are sixteen verb tenses in English. You must make sure there are no errors in every sentence you say.

Last, English belongs to Indo-European language group.

This was the entire essay: a pocket-sized meditation on our linguistic differences.

Another student offered a deeper comparison. This student was thoughtful, worldly. Rather than calling her by her Chinese name, she asked me to call her Doutzen, adopted from the Dutch supermodel, Doutzen Kroes, who represented L’Oréal.

My student looked nothing like Kroes. Doutzen, the student, was petite with shoulder-length hair; her face round rather than sharply sculpted like her Dutch counterpart. I suspect she felt a kinship to the Dutch woman because Doutzen, the model, was an advocate for global issues. Both were cosmopolitan and very cool. Regardless of the weather, Doutzen, my student, arrived wearing chic sunglasses that made her look like an influencer. She rarely spoke in class, but her essays were thorough: sometimes wordy, but always insightful.

For her comparison between English and Chinese, she offered a clearer picture of differences between the two languages:

As two of the most powerful languages, Chinese and English are a perfect counterpart to each other. However they differ in many ways. Both Chinese and English are popular languages, especially Chinese is gaining increasing popularity. Both are UN working languages, and both, as mutual modern languages, have numerous borrowings from other languages. For example, English borrows from Nordics, Greek, Latin and French, whereas Chinese, from Japanese and English. Despite the similarities, there are plenty traits that distinguish them. They belong to different language families and thus the different grammar. Chinese is peculiar to China while English is the mother tongue of people from many different cultures. And while Chinese is pictographic, English features alphabetical succession structure.

Wow! As I read her essay, I tried to picture writing one like it in Chinese: I would like to invest in your restaurant. Would you like to go with me to the movies? China is the world’s factory.

Surprisingly, a few of these carefully rehearsed sentences came in handy.

On August 23, the day we left for China, President Trump unleashed several angry tweets:

For many years China has been taking advantage of the United States on Trade, Intellectual Property Theft, and much more. Our Country has been losing HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year to China....

... Starting on October 1st, the 250 BILLION DOLLARS of goods and products from China, currently being taxed at 25%, will be taxed at 30%...

When we arrived, many wanted to talk to us about this development in the Chinese/American geopolitical relationship. When we went to the park, when we ate at restaurants, when we went grocery shopping, men usually in their twenties or thirties stopped us. They first would ask to take a selfie with us. Then they’d ask in Chinese or broken English what we thought of President Trump. How did we feel about China and its economic policies?

My five years of Chinese were limited. I ran through my memorized phrases: Would you like to go to the movies with me? If you open a restaurant, I could provide investment capital. Useless!

Others, however, became refrains that