Nonviolence and Education

Cross-Cultural Pathways

Hongyu Wang

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138287129
• eBook ISBN: 9781135049225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

In current global politics, which positions China as a competitor to American leadership, in-depth understandings of transnational mutual engagement are much needed for cultivating nonviolent relations. Exploring American and Chinese professors' experiences at the intersection of the individual, society, and history, and weaving the autobiographical and the global, this book furthers understanding of their cross-cultural personal awareness and educational work at universities in both countries. While focusing on life histories, it also draws on both American and Chinese intellectual traditions such as American nonviolence activism, Taoism, and Buddhism to formulate a vision of nonviolence in curriculum studies.

Centering cross-cultural education and pedagogy about, for, and through nonviolence, this volume contributes to internationalizing curriculum studies and introduces curriculum theorizing at the level of higher education. Hongyu Wang brings together stories, dialogues, and juxtapositions of cross-cultural pathways and pedagogies in a powerful case for theorizing and performing nonviolence education as visionary work in the internationalization of curriculum studies.

1
The Past Leading to the Present

Cross-Cultural Engagements

I found David as a participant through an Internet search of bicultural institutes in China where American professors teach Chinese students. Actually, I found another potential participant, but our schedules conflicted, so I had to find a replacement. The brief description of David and his substantial experiences in China on the Internet attracted my attention. As I began to interview him, it turned out that the depth and breadth of his engagements with China were much more extensive than I had ever imagined. It was a pleasant surprise.

The fact that David was a busy administrator bothered me a bit since I knew that time would be an issue. It was indeed an issue. When I first met him in his office, David showed a great deal of interest in my study, but when I said I wanted to do three one-hour interviews, he replied that he probably would not be able to have an hour at a time with me, perhaps half an hour, or maybe 20 minutes. But once he started to talk, his passion prevented him from stopping at 20 or 30 minutes. And it was his passion for what he had been doing for more than two decades—building bridges between China and the USA through study and educational exchange—that ran deep throughout his life history. “I love what I am doing,” David said repeatedly, and his commitment and devotion were evident in his stories. He finished three one-hour interviews with me despite his overbooked schedule.

David had made great contributions to Chinese and American educational exchange. His long-time engagement with China had been both dramatic and gradual. In this chapter, I discuss those defining moments and transformative pathways in David’s cross-cultural experiences in the context of the shifting lenses of China studies in the USA and their contributions to his pedagogy of cross-cultural mutual learning.

Defining Moments and Turning Points

David was born in 1965 in a cosmopolitan city in the northeastern part of the USA. His formative years as a child were influenced by the international orientation of the city and of his parents. His father was a professor at a well-known university, and his mother was an exile from a European country under communist control. David spent almost every summer in Europe, where his grandparents lived, and he was bilingual with dual citizenship. He described his parents as having international minds, so he had grown up comfortable with international settings. David commented, “If I have any issue with adjusting to a place, that would be those places not cosmopolitan.” But his early experience was very Europe-focused and Asia was not in the picture. His earliest exposure to Asia was slides of Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan taken by his father in the early 1950s.

The early cosmopolitan experiences made it easier for David to venture into another culture and take full advantage of that experience in China when he was a teenager. There was no hesitation on his part to go to China when such an opportunity appeared, even though he knew little about China, which was portrayed mostly negatively in the USA in the early 1980s. As we will see in later chapters, David’s early childhood exposure was unique among the participants. It is informative here to briefly compare David’s openings to another culture with Alan Watts’ exposure to Asian cultures. As a leader in the US countercultural movement in the 1960s, Watts made an intentional break during his teenage years with his rigid upbringing (Watts, 1972; Wang, 2009). While the foundation for David’s encounter with China was firm and organic, Watts departed from his own tradition in a rebellious way. Watts did not like the denial of sensuality and the body in fundamentalist Christianity that had set the tone of his childhood life. It was his deep dissatisfaction with the mainstream of his time that turned his attention to alternative horizons that promised him a different world. Here we see two contrasting modes of opening to differences: For David, it was a continuity of a cosmopolitan pathway; for Watts, it was a discontinuity of an existing pathway and the quest for a new alternative.

For David, the foundation of his childhood life eased his dramatic encounter with China into a natural extension of his youthful adventure in life. But there were milestones in the process, since China was so different from the USA and Europe. He located two turning points in his life: The first was eight months of living in China as a teenager; the second was his encounter with the Chinese student movements in 1989 when he was a young foreign instructor in a Chinese university.

Teenage Adventure in China

David’s father started to have some Chinese students in graduate seminars in the early 1980s after the China–US relationship returned to a normal diplomacy in 1979. The students invited his father to go to China, who began to think: Why not go to a country different from England or France? Their neighbor, a great Chinese historian, was so excited about the invitation that he walked over to urge: “You have to go. This is a most exciting time. China is changing.” This historian’s passion made a great impression on David, as he could see so clearly that this person cared very much about China. Accepting the invitation was a risk on his father’s part, not only politically but also because the living conditions in China at that time were quite difficult. But his father decided to take the risk and go.

David was in high school at that time and his parents let him choose whether or not to go. As he laughingly put it, “Staying at high school, bored, or going to China. That was not much of a choice.” He took off his senior year and went to China with his parents and two of his sisters. He enrolled in Xinhua Secondary School (pseudonym) a year back in order to avoid being with students who were preparing for the national college entrance examination. He described this experience as “absolutely the biggest, the most dramatic thing I’ve ever done in my life.” Even the travel was difficult. They took a detour through Switzerland, Greece, and India in order to reach Beijing, and from there went to the city where they lived. At that time there were very few American academics and probably only 30 foreigners altogether in that city.

It is interesting to note here that it is not unusual for youth to be open to another thought and another culture. Quite a few pioneers in introducing Buddhism to the West were young when they began their engagement with Eastern thought. For example, the founder of the Buddhist Lodge in London, Christmas Humphreys, encountered Buddhism when he was 17; another Buddhist pioneer, Ananda Metteyya, read The Light of Asia in 1890 when he was 18 (Humphreys, 1968), and Alan Watts (1972) declared himself a Buddhist when he was 15. In a sense, youth is an age of exploration into all kinds of different possibilities. If family or educational institutions do not try to constrain youth’s creative energy, they may be freer to tap into new potentiality. Dwayne Huebner (1967 [1999]) suggests, “Perhaps it would be more appropriate to ask what prevents creativity than to ask how one learns to be creative” (p. 134).

David described his initial encounter with China as “a pleasant surprise” because as much as he had tried to learn about China before they went there, what he knew was only from books, which could not match the richness of the culture that he experienced firsthand. The experience was “endlessly fascinating, and always challenging,” as everything was so different. The image of China in the USA was quite limited and often negative. All Chinese were imagined as uniform. But when David arrived in China, he could see that a lot more than uniformity was going on. As Paochin Chu (1991) relates, the American attitude towards China between 1957 and 1982 was gradually changing from hostile to conciliatory. Not until the late 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s could Chu publically talk about China without being treated with “stiff faces and frozen civility” (p. 174). David arrived in China during this period when two countries and two peoples began to be open to each other. Like David, France H. Conroy (1991) wondered whether the Communist party members in China would appear as all the same rather than unique individuals, and during his visit, Conroy was delighted to encounter individual persons who showed their own singular personalities. In cross-cultural encounters, face-to-face interaction with the other is important for unlearning preconceived notions, which are usually stereotypical.

David’s experiences at Xinhua Secondary School had a huge impact on him. First, he was immersed in learning Chinese, with the teaching of a tutor and the help of his classmates who accompanied him on the road between home and school. Everybody spoke Chinese at school. It was experientially-based learning, as his classmates taught him Chinese by pointing to what was surrounding him: This is street, this is bridge, this is car, etc. The intimate link between language and culture implies the necessity of learning another language in order to understand another culture in depth. David had this unique opportunity to learn the Chinese language through his experiences, and he tried to take full advantage of it. Later he also introduced such experiences to American students by setting up exchange programs.

Second, he immediately became the center of attention at school. For the first two months, whenever there was a break, he was surrounded by classmates who asked him questions:

I think it helped that I was a fairly mature 17-year-old, so I was not too alarmed by that kind of attention and I was not bothered by things that were different. I was just fascinated by almost everything that happened every day. For me it was endless. And I really liked the people who I got to know. They were very intelligent and very good people. The question was always, “Do you carry a gun?” “Do you smoke marijuana?” “How many times do you beat up your teachers?” “Is it too scary to be outside of the house in America?” There was this whole vision of America as a scary place and everybody was exploited and violent and there were problems everywhere…. And we had a lot of trust built. They were so interested in everything, and they were always trying to learn more, to learn language.

So to a great degree, David and his Chinese peers were mutually fascinated by each other’s cultures, although stereotypes of each other—Chinese as uniform and Americans as violent—largely promoted by politics and the media of that time in both countries were evident. They learned from each other and helped each other, and intercultural trust was developed through these interpersonal experiences despite the initial stereotypes. David was singled out at school as a foreigner, a powerful experience for a teenager. David seemed to handle that amount of attention well. Living in a stranger’s land as a foreigner, David lived existentially the stance of a stranger who saw the world as if for the first time and experienced himself through another dimension to generate new understandings, new awareness, and new relationships (Greene, 1973; Kristeva, 1991; Wang, 2002). For Dwayne Huebner (1985 [1999]),

Education is a call from the other that we may reach out beyond ourselves and enter into life with the life around us…. Education is the lure of the transcendent—that which we seem is not what we are for we could always be other. (p. 360)

David lived with a transcendent vision of education throughout his life.

What is also interesting is that David did not perceive pain in this stance of the stranger but approached it as the site of learning opportunities. Donna Porche-Frilot (2002) questions the notion of the stranger based upon her painful experiences of “being the other” as a “colored girl” in Louisiana schools. And she asks whether welcoming the metaphor of the stranger “affirm[s] Western culture’s propensity to reify otherness, to iconize human differences, and hence, create valuated categories of humanity?” (p. 302). So the relationship between the self and the stranger/the other is not easy to define, depending on the specific dynamics in a particular context of power relationships. While acknowledging the profound effect of racism on “people of color,” I also think David’s cosmopolitan experiences in his early childhood and his constant contacts with different cultures had already cultivated a sense of comfort with the stranger or with himself being positioned as the stranger. David and his classmates in their mutual strangeness provided each other new opportunities for growth, and trust and friendship were built across differences.

Third, cultural difference became the foreground due to cross-cultural encounters. One dramatic example was the male/female relationship, which was very different between China and the USA when David came to China. The code of forbidden intimacy between boys and girls in China—even the smallest gesture of a small gift exchange would lead to the teacher’s scolding—was not something David was familiar with, but he quickly learned the code and respected the boundary.

Fourth, the contrast between American and Chinese living standards was shocking, but the students’ hard-working mentality made a lingering impact on David:

But the great impression I had at the time was that their conditions were so basic, and there was almost no heat anywhere. Many of students lived in dormitories and they lived in incredibly crowded dormitories, not well-kept, not very clean. There was an enormous pressure at school to get basic things done, and not many were properly clothed, and this was the best school in the province. And they were from the city, and they, by my standard, were incredibly poor, and yet they were studying all the time. I remember that they studied in the cold, and their fingers were kind of purple or cracked sometimes. It had a huge impact on me as a student. One reason that I have a Ph.D., I think, was because of that.

He had a great admiration for the students’ commitment to learning. And he also enjoyed the simple entertainments his Chinese peers devised for fun, made up from almost nothing. He visited his Chinese peers’ families and sometimes the homes of his parents’ friends, and was continually amazed by how the Chinese managed to make the best out of the basic living conditions: a small living space full of people, no indoor plumbing, and poor sanitary conditions. The contrast between American life and Chinese life was sharp, but he was not driven away. Not many Americans could have had such an appreciation if they had gone to China in the early 1980s.

Fifth, David’s self-confidence increased as a result of dealing with difficult situations. On most occasions, Chinese people took care of them very well, but on rare occasions they had to handle issues on their own. David was the one who helped his family to get through difficulties. He remembered one occasion vividly:

I remember on one occasion, we’ve gone on a trip to Xian. I cannot remember the reasons, but we ended up in Xian train station—the only time—but did not have tickets to get back to [the city where we lived]. Almost every time things were arranged for us, but that time nobody was with us; and in those days, you probably remember, getting a ticket was very difficult. You know there was such an incredibly long line of people, everybody pushing each other trying to get to the front. And you know it was completely outside the range of my experiences, but I had been in China long enough and my Chinese was OK and could function for me to buy the tickets. And my dad could not do any of this, so he sent me to get tickets. I was already very big, tall, so I did not feel physically threatened, but it was a different [kind of difficulty], sort of pushing my way to come forward for the tickets…. It built a lot of confidence.

His story reminded me of the time when I was waiting outside the ticket office in a crowd to buy a train ticket in the early 1990s. When I got a chance to push my way into the office, I lost one of my shoes and ended up finding it upstairs, carried up by the crowd, even though I bought my ticket downstairs! But David could find what was positive about the situation and was proud of himself for accomplishing things he would never have imagined in his comfortable home in the USA. Dealing with situations like these and playing the role of being an adult when necessary contributed positively to his sense of self.

After three decades, David spoke about his experience in China as a teenager enthusiastically, with fondness and vivid memories. It was definitely a turning point, which channeled him onto cross-cultural pathways. Yet as much as he felt that he was compelled to do so, he also chose to walk that path. His opening to China in that formative year was dramatic, but it was also a natural extension of his cosmopolitan mindset. His open-mindedness, cultivated in a cosmopolitan family in a cosmopolitan city, played an important role in his ability to adventure into a culture that is dramatically different from his own and to learn the most from his experiences. The difficult living conditions in China did not turn him off but inspired him to commit his life to cross-cultural learning and intercultural education.

From his accounts, we can see that he respected his Chinese peers and appreciated Chinese attitudes towards life in general, even though China and the Chinese people, in the American public imagination at that time, were largely portrayed as backward, authoritarian, and antidemocratic. He could easily have adopted a stance of “we are better than you are” after witnessing the living and political climates in China. I have known Americans who came back from China with a reinforced notion of “we are better.” But David saw and admired the resilience of the Chinese people and the younger generation’s willingness to learn and to change. His teenage adventure set the stage for his later cross-cultural engagement.

Encountering the Student Movements in 1989

The second turning point for David was initially exciting but turned into a traumatic¹ experience. When he graduated with a B.A., he got a fellowship for teaching English in China. He went to a normal university in central China where he was involved in a lot of extracurricular activities and made many Chinese friends. In December of 1988, students started all kinds of groups—they called them “salons”—to talk about various ideas. David found it exciting and felt that these students were like the May Fourth generation in 1919, which was a part of the broader New Culture Movement in China that questioned traditional Chinese culture and called for the formation of a new culture adopting Western science and democracy to revitalize China. He was not alone in experiencing the 1989 movement as the “new May Fourth” (Cunningham, 2009; Mitter, 2004). As I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 2, the May Fourth movement set a milestone in China–West engagement and transformed the Chinese political, social, and cultural landscape. David saw what was happening in 1988 and 1989 as similar to what had happened 70 years earlier.

David described these students as

intellectually curious and idealistic, that I almost had not experienced in any other time, in any other place. And often under the miserable conditions, they got together to have coffee, tea and very cheap snacks in a very cold room, and somebody got up to talk about Nietzsche, or Laozi; then another guy said, “Well, that is interesting, but it makes me think about love,” and then they talked about that for a while …

These discussions covered numerous topics, many of which involved social and political issues, such as social inequalities and lack of political freedom. As an American, David could not directly part...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 0 Pathways of Surprise, Stillness, and Spirituality
• 1 The Past Leading to the Present: Cross-Cultural Engagements
• 2 Beyond the Category: Cross-Cultural Imaginations
• 3 From Drama to Peace: A Hermit in a Cosmopolitan City
• 4 Serendipity: We Teach What We Are
• 5 Following the Flow: An Organic Approach to Research
• 0 A Playful Curriculum of Nonviolence in a Zero Space
• References
• Index