Memoirs of an Expat

The Crisis of Ambition

I had only been teaching in Beijing for a few months when I decided to ask my students about their future hopes, dreams, and aspirations. It seemed like a simple thing, guaranteed to spark some conversation and discussion and allow me to learn a little more about them. I was therefore surprised when the question engendered no comments at all. I thought it might have just been shyness so I quizzed students individually, but all I got were shrugs. I thought it might have been a vocabulary issue, so I switched to Chinese. The answer I received was simple: “I don’t know. Graduate and find a job, I guess.”

“What kind of job?”

“I dunno. Any job.”

“Do you think it will involve English?”

“Maybe, I dunno.”

I began to interrogate my other students. One after another, class after class, I got the same answers. Only a score of students had any kind of goal–mostly “study abroad someday”–and none of them had a concrete plan. As far as I’m aware, out of the nearly 350 students that I’ve taught, the ones who will actually study abroad can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

I thought, perhaps it was what the students were studying. After all, they were entirely Business English majors, which is useful but doesn’t suggest a specific trade to go into. I volunteered to run an extracurricular English Corner at school, met other students with different majors and asked them the same questions. I received the same answers.

I’ll be the first to admit that my generation is infamous for being directionless. Generation X was all about pushing boundaries and challenging assumptions; Generation Y is perhaps best transliterated as Generation Why Bother? Apathy is the hallmark trait of my generation. Most young people in the States, however, have a general sense of direction. They have a pie-in-the-sky dream that they’d like to accomplish someday, or an area of interest (anthropology, Japanese culture, model trains). While it’s true that few of them will actually get a job relating to those interests, they have a vague idea of what they want to do that guides them in a certain direction.

Youth in China seem to lack that same sense of direction. If they do have a dream, it’s mostly of material possessions–they want to have a car, a house, and the latest cell phone that does everything except wash your dishes. If they do have goals, they’re usually the ones their parents have laid out for them. They go work at jobs that their parents find for them by leveraging contacts, they major in subjects that their parents tell them to major in. I never took a formal survey, but I’d estimate somewhere between 30-60% of my Business English majors were studying English primarily because their parents had told them to.

That said, there are those who have specific goals–the self-driven individuals who say, “this is what I want” to their parents and to their friends and who lead lives of their own choosing. Perhaps my sampling space is simply skewed–after all, those kinds of motivated people might be ones that already have mastered English. Perhaps my impression of normalcy is skewed, as I run with a fairly off-beat crowd in the States. Still, I’ve met all sorts of people in my time here, and the ones who walk to the beat of a different drum are rare.

There is no simple explanation for why there seems to be a nationwide epidemic of apathy. Some possible explanations include:

• The extremely competitive job market, which makes it difficult to find any job. Many candidates possess equal qualifications on paper, which makes personal connections much more important.
• Lack of realistic job training in schools–many who graduate with a degree are still not qualified to work in that field.
• Lack of extracurricular activities in education leaves many with academic credentials but no real job experience upon graduation.
• Cutthroat competition and lack of intellectual property rights enforcement stifles innovation/imagination. Why bother developing a new idea when someone is just going to copy it?
• Education and social indoctrination focuses a great deal on not losing face–the quest to not look foolish makes many people leery of trying to begin with.
• Lingering Confucian respect for elders, which includes doing everything they tell you without question, inculcates a habit of passive obedience.
• There’s always someone better: the crowning achievement of Chinese youth is the National University Entrance Examination, which limits definitions of achievement to a few narrow fields. Only a few students can do very well, most end up crushingly aware of their own mediocrity.
• Family sacrifice–parents give up a great deal to send their children to the best schools they can, which puts enormous pressure on students. They are unwilling to go against the wishes of those who have given up so much for their own benefit.
• Learned helplessness–from a young age children are not in control of anything important with regard to their own lives.
• There is no social stigma attached to still living with your parents in your late twenties, which makes young people less inclined to try and assert their own independence.
• Lack of career counseling leaves many students unaware of potential career paths. The bottleneck of the National Entrance Examination means that students don’t have a chance to start customizing their skill sets until after they enter college.

I suppose the major difference between the United States and China lies in the reaction to authority. Gen Y asks, “Why should I listen to you? Why should I want the same things you think I should want?” But Generation China asks very little. After all, mother and father know best.

© 2008 The Hypermodern.