Memoirs – Susan Blumberg-Kason

Book of week–Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve

October 15, 2017 By Susan Blumberg-Kason Leave a Comment

I’m not a perfect parent. And I’m not an expert in education. Years ago when I was first divorced and raising my toddler as a single a mother, I didn’t speak Mandarin to him even though he spent his first two years hearing it from his grandparents (for the first year) and his father (until I left him a few months shy of Jake’s second birthday).

I didn’t speak Mandarin to Jake because I was worried he would pick up my American accent, often devoid of tones. As a result, Jake didn’t really learn Mandarin until he started college 16 years after he stopped hearing it on a daily basis.

But I did something else. Starting around the time Jake turned three, I would push him on the swings at a Chicago playground with the Sears Tower looming behind us. And as I pushed him, he would count out loud–in Mandarin. Yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi, ba, jiu, shi, shi yi, shi er, and on and on until he got into the hundreds and then thousands. After reading Lenora Chu’s eye-opening book, Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve (Harper, 2017), I realized I hadn’t completely failed as a young mother years ago.

And it’s not that Jake’s ability to count in Mandarin contributed to his later language acquisition. It may have or it may have not. But according to Chu, the act of engaging in some kind of math exercises before children start kindergarten is huge. It may have contributed to what I thought was Jake’s natural ability in math. After reading Little Soldiers, I no longer believe in a natural ability; it was from learning numerical patterns and understanding how to count into the thousands and ten thousands and hundred thousands at an early age–and in another language.

Chu’s son Rainey enters a local kindergarten (which is what we’d call pre-school in the US) at a prestigious school in Shanghai. Chu and her husband are expats in China’s financial hub and do all they can to get Rainey into this sought-after school. But once he begins, Rainey is subjected to some pretty draconian practices like being force fed food he doesn’t eat (Jake cringed when I told him this part; he doesn’t eat eggs either) and being made to conform to the group and not shine as an individual.

But there are also some great advantages to the Chinese educational system and Chu dispels many myths. Chinese students aren’t naturally better in math than American students; they just start at an earlier age (per my example above). And students from the big cities don’t have a much easier time getting into the top universities in China compared to their compatriots in the countryside because the former are smarter and the latter less intelligent. It’s that the universities give more places to city kids than rural ones.

One of the most eye-opening parts of the book was the culture of graft. I feel like I’m pretty generous when it comes to giving teacher gifts in December. I’ve bought European throw blankets and pretty scarves for my kids’ teachers, but never the designer handbags or money envelopes that’s expected in China. I was upset when we had to pass out cigarettes to the police when my ex-husband needed some forms signed at a Hubei government office for his green card application 22 years ago. How in the world would I deal with handing out Tory Burch?

I could go on and on about what I learned in this book, but I don’t want to spoil it. I bought a copy for the principal of my kids’ school (here I go again with gifts to educators, but it’s not Prada!) and when I saw him last week and started to get excited about the book, he said he didn’t want any spoilers either. So please pick up this book if you’re at all interested in education, global affairs, China, or just love to read compelling stories. You’ll love it!

An evening with Lenora Chu

September 26, 2017 By Susan Blumberg-Kason 2 Comments

Last night I had so much fun meeting Lenora Chu, author of Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve (Harper, 2017). She was reading at Common Good Books in St. Paul, Minnesota, a super cozy bookstore in a fun area near Macalester College. (I was in the Twin Cities for the day thanks to some Southwest credit and was visiting my friend Christine and her son, Sam.)

Little Soldiers is a combination memoir/journalistic look into China’s educational system. Chu and her husband send their oldest son to a local Chinese school in Shanghai and it’s been an eye opener.

She spoke about the differences between American and Chinese classrooms in her son’s top-ranked Shanghai school, but also in the countryside. Her anecdotes were fascinating, like rapid-fire nonsensical WeChat messages between the teacher and parents that sound so daunting I would probably throw my phone out the window. Or the time her teacher forced her son to eat eggs when he first started at the school. Speaking from experience, that would have been a disaster in my family; my oldest detests eggs.

She also spoke about the grueling exam system in China and how there aren’t enough university places for the 200 million students there, so competition is fierce. Children with disabilities are mainstreamed, but ignored and usually fall behind quickly. There are no special ed services.

But the Chinese system has lots of benefit. Children learn to work in groups and listen to one another. There is less unruliness in the classroom. I bet teachers at my kids’ school would appreciate that. And the best thing I heard all evening was that the Chinese government has been increasing its funding for education each year by 20%, a lot of which goes to teachers.

I can’t wait to read the book and actually bought a second copy to give to my kids’ principal. It’s always great to support authors and indie bookstores and our educators. I don’t personally have experience with the Chinese education system, but would have if I’d moved to China in 1998 instead of San Francisco. Those were my choices back when I was leaving Hong Kong.

The sterilization of Nathan Road

September 12, 2017 By Susan Blumberg-Kason 2 Comments

Back in the early 90s, it was common to hear in Hong Kong that travelers either loved it or hated it. I never understood the hating part. Hong Kong was still pretty much at its peak with Kai Tak Airport, old double-decker buses, and neon. Neon was everywhere and one of the most iconic places for these signs was Nathan Road in Tsim Sha Tsui. What’s not to love?

To the far left of this photo is a sign for the Kowloon Hotel. My husband and I stayed there five years ago on my first return to Hong Kong after leaving in 1998. There was still some neon in 2012, but not as much as in the 90s when the photo above was taken.

But I was startled when I was there last month. I’m standing about half a block behind where I stood when I took the 90s photo.

The neon is gone, as are most of the signs.

Book of the week–Shenzhen

September 10, 2017 By Susan Blumberg-Kason Leave a Comment

I studied French for 8 years in junior high, high school, and college, and honestly haven’t had much chance to use to it apart from clearing customs in 1991 Phnom Penh and on the streets of Saigon that same summer. I’ve been to France a few times in recent times, but could barely communicate.

Even so, one evening in Paris this summer I spotted this bookstore near our apartment. My kids wanted ice cream, so we went to a cafe and were waiting outside for their orders when my eye caught this:

The Librarie Opera is a bookstore and suddenly I felt drawn to go inside and see if there was anything I could read. I haven’t studied French in 28 years, but figured there must be a children’s book I could partially understand.

My family headed back to the apartment and I stayed behind to browse the shelves in the bookstore. When I stepped inside, I quickly figured out it only sold graphic novels and comics. It was perfect for this substandard French speaker!

I found some graphic travelogues by French Canadian Guy DeLisle (my friend Christine later told me he was French Canadian; I didn’t know that at the time) and started flipping through one about Pyongyang and another about Jerusalem. But when I found one about Shenzhen, I knew I’d found my book!

I thought it would take days, if not weeks, to read it, so I picked it up last week and thought I’d get a start on it. Well, by the end of the day, I had read the whole thing.

Not only that, I understood at least 75% of the story!

It resonated so much. Guy DeLisle spent three months in Shenzhen at the end of 1997/beginning of 1998. That’s exactly when I last went there. I was living in Hong Kong and returned to the US in late February 1998. So the Shenzhen he wrote about is the one I knew.

I got the jokes, and understanding them in French made them seem funnier than American jokes. I laughed when he described the hotels in China in the late 90s and how hotel rooms all looked alike back then. And the console between the beds had all these buttons and it took forever to figure out which one turned off the lights. The others? Lord only knew what they did.

We had so many similar experiences. He ate dog for the first time in Shenzhen; so did I. He thought it tasted like mutton; I thought it tasted like beef.

When he went to Guangzhou for the weekend, I totally got that, too. The one and only time I visited Guangzhou was in December 1996 and the city he described was the one I knew back then, too.

My heart raced when he spent a weekend in Hong Kong. The feeling he described walking in no-man’s-land from Shenzhen to Hong Kong was exactly what I felt when I did that so many times in the 90s. It’s so hard to describe in words, but he did so beautifully in French and with his illustrations. He felt so at ease in Hong Kong that he wrote he would have spent every weekend there if it hadn’t been so troublesome to go back and forth. Hear, hear!

He writes about his isolation in Shenzhen and the animation field in China back then. For him, going to the gym was a way to beat the loneliness. For me, swimming in Hong Kong combatted that.

The last time I went to Shenzhen, my then-husband had sent me–all of five months pregnant–over the border from Hong Kong to take his money out of the Bank of China. I went to Shenzhen with one of his mainland friends and we both walked back across the border with my then-husband’s life savings. DeLisle didn’t seem to have that kind of stress, but from his story he left Shenzhen a different person.

This book is available in an English translation and I’m curious to read it now to see what I missed in the French original. I’m also eager to read his other graphic travelogues now. Maybe next time I’m in Paris, I’ll pick up the French originals of those, too.

The Mira Hong Kong

September 2, 2017 By Susan Blumberg-Kason Leave a Comment

Publishing is a tricky business, especially when it comes to your first book. I certainly learned a ton when my memoir, Good Chinese Wife, was in the editing and printing stages.

My publisher fact-checked every instance of pinyin in my book and highlighted the words they couldn’t verify. One thing I didn’t catch, however, was the name of the hotel where I had my one-night Hong Kong honeymoon. Back in the mid-1990s, there was a hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui called the Miramar. It was quite the place in the 60s and that was pretty obvious thirty years later when I went there.

But when my fact checkers Googled the Miramar in 2014, they didn’t find it.

It had changed by then and was completely remodeled and rebranded into the Mira.

In my book, all my mentions of the Miramar were changed late in the game to the Mira, and it was at a point where I was supposed to go through all the yellow highlights to verify the accuracy of those words. There wasn’t time to do another read-through of the whole manuscript. The Mira wasn’t highlighted, so I didn’t catch this error.

Or maybe I should have made the time.

People who know Hong Kong will pick up on this, and it’s kind of embarrassing to have this error in my book. But it’s part of publishing and there’s nothing I can do about it unless 5000 people suddenly buy the paperback and we go into another print run.

I recently took a walk near the Mira. I’ve been back to Hong Kong a handful of times since the book came out, but this was the first time I took a moment to look at the new compound.

The view from inside Kowloon Park.

Mira Place is the shopping arcade across the street from the hotel.

And this is the bridge that connects the hotel to the shopping arcade.

I have a thing about old hotels, so am glad I had a chance to stay at the old Miramar. But for Hong Kong’s sake, the Mira is more in touch with what travelers expect when they shell out the cash it costs to stay in a Tsim Sha Tsui hotel.