Following is an article digested from Dear Alice: Letters Home from American Teachers Learning to Live in China, available from Amazon.com, the leading online bookstore. Though we do not agree 100% with the author's comments, we highly recommend this book to all ESL teacher wannabe's.
China had only been "reopened" to the West in 1979, after forty years of isolation, and Western ways appeared at times almost antithetical to those of the Chinese. Being in China was thus a profound and paradoxical experience, as the teachers struggled to establish their own Western-based identity while trying to understand and blend into a radically different sociocultural and political milieu. They were discovering that, in spite of all they had tried to learn in advance, their preconceptions and ideas about China were about as accurate as their conceptions of Mars.
The first round of Americans who went to China to teach in the 1980s wrote of a China in the early throes of awakening and reaching out beyond its traditional borders. Westerners were treated with intense curiosity, sometimes hostility, and often great warmth and kindness.
They also found a China where deprivations were the norms, not the exception: they often lacked heat and hot water and had to contend with broken windows, mice and rats, poor sanitation, and a bureaucracy so entrenched and dehumanizing that Westerners found it both monstrous and malignant. Getting a simple train ticket could take hours if not days of intense finagling or overwhelming frustration trying to maintain both position and "cool" at the train station window while being roughly jostled by others on the same mission.
Going to a Chinese post office in the 1980s could make grown men cry, and making a phone call - well, it simply couldn't be done. There were almost no computers, TVs, phones, or even washing machines available to teachers. Americans could really test their mettle and "come of age" in China. It was tough "surviving" a year in China, but in hind-sight it was usually an exhilarating and life-affirming experience.
In the 1990s, however, China began slowly to offer a different physical and cultural environment for many teachers, at least on the surface: heat and hot water were a little more dependable; phone service appeared; and washers, dryers, and color TVs popped up in teachers' apartment. Even the twin bete noires - the post office and travel arrangements - while still frustrating, started to become more user friendly. There were still a lot of "hardship" teaching posts throughout China, but they were not quite as hard as they had been. By 1997, every university had telephone service and was hooked to a fax machine, and most had e-mail. Compared to 1991, when international mail took from three weeks to a month, communications both internal and international had become instantaneous. What a spinning world!
The fall 1996..was a watershed. Instead of complaining (usually justifiably), many teachers felt comfortable in their surroundings, and some even grumbled that the experience was just a little "too easy." Where were all the hardships and deprivations we had warned them about? Not only were many teachers connected with their families via e-mail, but some could even sit in (relatively) comfortable apartments and have excellent pizza delivered right to the door. Was China becoming more like the United States and less like Mars?
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