Due to
Hurricane Sandy, the other family our ayi
works for had to return to the United States for an indeterminate amount of
time, in order to retrieve water-logged (and, apparently, never-used) wedding
gifts from the flooded basement of the New Jersey house they haven’t lived in
for more than a decade. To the
Princess’ delight, they left their dog, Mokka--and a mountain of mini-bones and
doggie-sausages, with instructions on their liberal use as rewards for sitting,
staying, and timely off-leash returns--with us.
We haven’t had as much time as I’d like to spend with the
dog, though, what with taekwondo,
hamster-hunting (yes, the fourth hamster we’ve purchased in the last six months
went--temporarily, I am happy to report--missing last week), and homework. The girls are getting much more
efficient, but the volume of work has increased and their own standards are
simultaneously escalating, which means we haven’t seen much gain in leisure
time. Their benchmark may be
rising because the girls are getting better and better academically, feeling
more and more pride in their work.
Perhaps they are simply understanding the instructions and what is
required of them more fully. Or,
it may be because there are certain disciplinary and community realities currently
in play that the language barrier previously spared them.
For instance:
Apparently, one of the children--let’s call him the Karate Kid--began
kicking one of the other kids’ cubbies one day. As will happen in the loose round-up of barbarians we call a
“second-grade-class,” another kid observed the new activity and, noting its
obvious improvement over any sanctioned diversion, joined in. Together, they kicked so hard and so
long that the cubby broke.
The victim of this crime noticed it, of course, but he opted
not to tattle. According to the
girls, it took several days before the teacher discovered the destruction. But discover it she did, and, when she
had, she naturally demanded to know who the destroyers were. One way or another, they were identified,
at which point Wang laoshi commanded
them--not to switch cubbies with the owner of the now-broken cubby, or to
repair the cubby, or work to pay off the value of the cubby, but…to kick their
own cubbies until they were broken, too.
Now the girls, not being the cubby-kicking types, are
unlikely to suffer (if suffering is what follows when the punishment for a
crime is to repeat the same crime with permission) from this brand of justice.
They, instead, are being kept in line by a mélange of social pressures, class
envy, favor-bestowing, and public shaming that would make Louis the Fourteenth
proud. This year has seen the
introduction of the xiao dui zhang, the zhong
dui zhang, and, I presume, the gao
(or maybe da) dui zhang, although that last one is so exalted I’ve never heard of it being
bestowed.
What is a dui zhang,
you ask? Well, like a miniature
American flag or a paper-back bible, it is both nothing and everything. I heard the girls talking about the
subject--who in the class had received xiao dui zhang, who the zhong dui zhang, what the requirements were for such an honor--long
before I realized that they were talking about the badges I’d seen pinned to
some of their schoolmates’ shoulders.
These badges are white and bear one, two, or three bars on them. Depending, I presume, on whether the
kids are still wearing the green scarf or have moved up to the red scarf, the
bars are either green or red. I
have recently learned that one and a half RMB (about twenty-four cents) will
buy you one at the local office-supply store.
But of course, their value is not in the plastic they are
made of, but in the right to wear them, granted by the teachers for…and that is
where things become hazy for me.
The badges and bars themselves are directly related to the Young
Pioneers, the Communist party youth branch. But because there is no real difference seen between
being a good party member and a good student (appropriate enough, at this age,
I suppose), they are generally given out for some combination of good behavior,
good academic performance and, apparently, popularity. I do not know, although MTH and I have
our suspicions, whether the size (or existence) of the mid-year
parent-to-teacher hongbao have anything
to do with their conferral.
I do know, as the girls’ reports to us became more and more
angst-ridden, that many of their friends had the honor bestowed upon them
before they themselves did.
They did seem to feel (although MTH and I were more dubious) that they
WOULD, for sure, be given the opportunity to wear the xiao dui zhang, at some point, as the honor would rotate amongst
the children, and, per the girls, “everyone will get a chance.” They told me that each row in the
classroom had a badge and that, once granted to a member of the row, the honor
of wearing it lasted a single week, at which point it was passed on to the next
person.
Based on what I’ve seen thus far, a turn-and-turnabout
rotation seemed unlikely in the extreme, but I bided my time. And, indeed, they turned out to be
right, or sort of. The Rooster
came home one day beaming, telling us that the Little Martinet, who sits in her
row and had already won the chance to wear the xiao dui zhang, had chosen the Rooster as the badge’s next
wearer. Or, perhaps she didn’t so
much choose her as break a tie between her and another member of the row, both
of whom qualified this week by, according to the Rooster, “getting the EXACT
SAME number of stamps in our xiao benzi!” The stamps’
contribution to xiao dui zhang
eligibility making me understand why having a stamp slashed out after the
glo-stick fiasco was so meaningful.
And the Princess?
Apparently her turn in her row had also come up, and she had ALSO, in an
extraordinary coincidence, exactly tied another member of the row for number of
stamps. Why she changed her
methodology I don’t know, but for the Princess’ row, Wang laoshi decided to call a vote. And so the three remaining kids in the row voted on whether
the Princess or the other child, who I’ll call The Obvious Choice in a Public
Vote if Your Goal is Success in the Chinese Classroom, ought to get to wear the
badge. I report with pride that
the Princess received 33.3 percent of the vote. The loss notwithstanding, she had been assured that
the next week her turn would come, as she was the last one left in the row, and
she seemed, if mildly hurt, relatively philosophical about the vote and its
outcome.
As I said, the girls initially told me that they would be
allowed to wear the xiao dui zhang for a
week, after which it would be passed on.
But at the end of the Rooster’s week, the word came from on high, passed
on by the Rooster herself, that we were to go buy a xiao dui zhang badge.
This we did, whereby proving, after only a brief bout of panic, that the
closet-sized store in the secret lane near our house really does have, as the
Little Gentleman’s mom assured me in the pre-first-grade scramble,
everything.
We sent the badge to school with the Rooster, and, now, this
week, both she and the Princess have gone to school with the little badges
safety-pinned to their sleeves.
Whether this second badge-wearing week is representative of an oversight
on the part of the teachers (I can only imagine the punishment for impersonating
a bona fide xiao dui zhanger), or the
girls have misunderstood, I can only guess. I have heard that, at least in some schools, both the
scarves and the badges are batched, with the “best” kids getting them first. So perhaps what the girls thought was a
rotation was really a step-wise promotion. Regarding what is to happen with the Princess next week, I
await my instructions.
And then there are the stamps. The Rooster told me this week that if she got x-number of
stamps in her xiao benzi, then she could
get a truck sticker, and if she got three truck stickers then…to be honest, I
can’t remember what the carrot is.
Or maybe I never knew; it is possible that it was lost in the wails that
erupted when she discovered that she had not brought home her er hao
ben, in which she was supposed to write one
of her exercises, an exercise she assured me--probably accurately--would not be
deemed stamp-worthy if done on a plain piece of paper rather than in the little
number 2 booklet.
It was as I was trying to reassure her that the stamp
system, while possibly useful as a tool, was not in and of itself important to
her education (“Then why does Wang laoshi
think it’s so so so sooooo
important?”) that the Princess looked up from the couch, where she was
cheerfully cramming her English homework onto the two inches of white space
left on the Xeroxed sheet detailing the assignment, and said “You know
what? I think they are using those
stamps to train us the same way we use treats to train Mokka.”
That delivery of that comment, set against the thirty-minute
crying jag the Rooster went on last night when she realized she’d failed to
fully show her work on two of the sixty problems on yesterday’s math mid-term,
are as good an encapsulation as any of how the year is going so far.
