Fascinating
morning. Today was my older
daughter’s last day of school.
There was going to be a parent teacher conference I was told at 8:30AM,
sharp. I’d been away for a few
days on business and so I felt doubly obliged to attend. The message from my daughter was
sleeping over at school was, “Parents who show up late will be forced to sit in
different seating. Please be on
time!”
I fretted about being on time for a few hours this morning
as I moved conference calls around and tried to finish work. Then with just enough time I drove over
by myself. My wife would attend my
younger one’s parent/teacher conference later in the day. Arriving the long single file
drive in was backed up. I passed
on a parking place and regretted it, forced forward much further than I wanted
to go. Finally I had a parking
spot. Some wicked nettles ripped
my arm as I opened the door to the tall weeds and dashed across the parking lot,
and in passed the guards.
I trotted over to the big auditorium. The event wasn’t there, as I’d been
told. I spun quickly and dashed
over to the small theatre and over to a sign-in table where I stared down a
list of about three hundred Chinese names and slowly, much more slowly than I
wanted to, made my way along the list till I’d found her Chinese family name
Zhang. Zhang “Rui”? No. Zhang “Wang?” No. Ahh yes, there she is, good.
Inside I made my way to the center. I checked my phone and I had two
minutes to spare. Not bad. The assistant principal began asking
people move this way, to the center.
“Attention this young boy has lost his mother. What’s your name again son?” He recognized someone and sat
down with them. Then this
administrator made an odd announcement.
“Our administration recommends that everyone who is under the age of ten
please leave the auditorium.
Yes. Everyone under that
age. If they could leave for the
presentation that is to follow."
You could feel the odd tension ripple through the crowd.
A few kids left and then a young, professional woman in
glasses and a business skirt, haltingly took the stage. On stage the slide had her picture
beside a book and in English, amidst mostly Chinese text it said. “Talking to Our Children About
Sex.” Huh? I thought my kid was
gonna get an award or something. I
looked about me. I was pretty well
blocked in on both sides, having taken a front and center seat, assuming it
would be better viewing for my daughter. "Hi. See? I'm here on time!" My daughter is nowhere to be seen.
Now I couldn’t leave without an starting an exit reminiscent of
Bugs Bunny leaving the theatre with all that “pardon me, scuze me, pardon me, scuze me.”
We began with a CCTV video clip. The talking head was an earnest young guy who asked the
audience, “what do we say, when children ask: where do I come from?” This led to a series of
interviews. We interviewed old
people with this question, recently arrived immigrants to the city, young
fathers, young mothers. With the end of the clip we paused to consider things. Then we were repeatedly asked this question ourselves.
And now it was clear that I would be sitting through nothing
resembling a parent teacher conference, but rather had been lured to a lecture
to the parents about the proper posture to adopt with regards to sex
education. Egresses blocked left
and right, I had to master first the impulse to leave. Then, it was the impulse of haughty
disdain. “This is too tepid.” Then she started talking about teen
pregnancy and masturbation.
OK. Well, this is oddly
positioned in an amoral, modernist manner that is adrift from Confucian
antecedents and a Communist critiques of the bourgeoisie . . . shut up. If they call on me for a “foreigner
contribution” I’m gonna say something ironic and disruptive!
And gradually I noticed myself having all these disparaging
thoughts. Why? Why was it so important to apply
disdain to the Chinese process of reckoning with sex education? Some points of hers were well
taken. Why do I with my avante garde trappings err from talking
candidly about some of these matters with my own girls? Why, as an American is it so important
to believe that we somehow handle these matters in a fashion more balanced, or
thoughtful or true? And, what is
actually being said, in a nuanced way, in the grey pockets of misunderstanding
that exist between this and that Chinese explanation. Once your thirteen year-old starts to feel, 怜香惜玉[1] does any parent, any culture, really manage the
conversation the “right” way?
On the screen was a series of cartoons, drawn by a Hong Kong
youngster. There was a drawing of
a penis and a vagina. There was a
cartoon image of a seed with a long tail and a rakish grin swimming along. We say a child’s drawing of intercourse
with daddy and mommy looking oddly preoccupied. “Is it OK to talk about sex with your children? “ The author asked the audience. We said
nothing. She asked again. Then we
all repeated that sex is good to talk about with our children.
Frankly I settled on the proper posture with regards to all
this being one of pleasure at challenge of being provoked. I’m a busy parent, cut off from my home
community and shrouded in confusion about precisely what is being said, nuance,
texture and all. Good for her and
this school and of course, somewhere upstream the Party and their blessings to
confront parents this way. I'm no
better. We’re no better. It's a tough set of questions for every
culture, every generation to confront.
Later, at a mediocre Japanese restaurant that my daughters’
enjoy they were playing the 1985 hit, “We Are The World” prominently. Someone then turned the music up, much
louder. I threatened the staff
rather abruptly that if they didn’t turn it down, I’d leave immediately. It turned out that a young child had
gotten control of the volume switch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_World
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