Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page i
Full Circle
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page ii
This page intentionally ...
62 downloads
1405 Views
1001KB Size
Report
This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page i
Full Circle
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page ii
This page intentionally left blank
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page iii
Full Circle A Life with Hong Kong and China
Ruth Hayhoe
Women’s Press Toronto
Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. Full Circle: A Life with Hong Kong and China by Ruth Hayhoe First published in by Women’s Press, an imprint of Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc. Bloor Street West, Suite Toronto, Ontario MS V Part of the Women Who Rock series www.womenspress.ca Copyright © Ruth Hayhoe and Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc.All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without the written permission of Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc., except for brief passages quoted for review purposes. In the case of photocopying, a licence may be obtained from Access Copyright (The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), One Yonge Street, Suite ,Toronto, Ontario, ME E, () -, fax () -, toll-free ---, www.accesscopyright.ca. The three cartoons reproduced in Chapter Six were originally published in the Chinese newspaper Ming Pao in October . Reprinted with permission. Every reasonable effort has been made to identify copyright holders. CSPI would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to its attention. Canadian Scholars’ Press/Women’s Press gratefully acknowledges financial support for our publishing activities from the Ontario Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP). National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Hayhoe, Ruth Full circle : a life with Hong Kong and China / Ruth Hayhoe. isbn --- . Hayhoe, Ruth. . Teachers—China—Biography. . Teachers—China—Hong Kong— Biography. I.Title. la.ch
.'
c--x
Cover design, text design and layout by Susan Thomas/Digital Zone Cover photo: the author with students at Heep Yunn in .
Printed and bound in Canada by AGMV Marquis Imprimeur, Inc.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Doris Emilie Hayhoe (née Guignard). If she had not kept my letters to her from to , it could not have been written.The fact that weekly letters were written over much of this time, and that every one was kept, speaks volumes. I also must thank my dear friend Marian (Lykken) Welch, who persisted in pressing me to write about China for a wider audience than the academic, and encouraged me in every step along the way.Thanks also go to my friend and colleague Mark Bray, who, with his wife, Ora Kwo, read an early draft and immediately suggested publication by the academic press with which he is associated in Hong Kong, believing even academics would find the book profitable. And, finally, thanks to my aunt Alice Churchman, my mother’s youngest sister, who read the manuscript and advised on seeking a publisher in Canada, a search that led me to Women’s Press. My husband, Walter, my first audience, was subjected to nightly readings aloud as each chapter progressed, and offered his suggestions at many points.And now, as the book goes out in “quest of the world” as the evocative Chinese phrase for publish, wenshi, expresses it, I hope and believe all of my family members will be warmed and uplifted by this tribute to our mother and grandmother.
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page v
Image not available
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page vii
Contents Prologue Writing a Life........................................................................[ 1 ] 1 A Canadian Childhood and Education, – .................[ 7 ] 2 Novice Teacher: Hong Kong, –...............................[ 17 ] 3 Apprentice Scholar: London, Shanghai, and Toronto, – ........................................................[ 57 ] 4 Knowledge and Action:An Academic Career between China and the West, –...............................[ 99 ] 5 The Scholar’s Vision: Creating a Global Dialogue between Asia and the West, –.................................[ 139 ] 6 Hong Kong Returns to China, and I Return to Hong Kong, –.............................[ 185 ]
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page viii
This page intentionally left blank
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 2
November .Thirteen years of age.
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 1
Prologue: Writing a Life
Image not available
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 3
W
hy write an autobiography? Partly it is a compulsion to reflect on a life lived intensely over fifty-six years. Partly it was the encouragement of friends, who felt it was important that I tell the story of a life rich in cross-cultural experience. A third reason might be the latest phase of my life.After nearly five years in Hong Kong as director of the Hong Kong Institute of Education, I have a sense that my earlier life and career were an important preparation for this unique opportunity to lead a new institution for teacher education at the time of Hong Kong’s reunification with China after years as a British colony. Somehow the two main parts of my life—the early years in Hong Kong and the later years of scholarship and teaching related to China—seemed to come together in a full circle.
Sources for a Life What will I use for a book on myself? First I begin with photographs, which are scattered and rare for the early years, but became more prolific as time went on and more pictures were taken and saved.Then there are the letters to my mother, written twice weekly in the early years, that range over twenty-four
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 4
years, from the day I left home at age twenty-one to move to Hong Kong in , up till the last letter I wrote to her as a diplomat in Beijing, before returning to Toronto in to care for her in her last four months of life. Over all that time she had kept every letter, filed month by month, year by year, yet she never told me of that precious gift. Her death left me deeply sad, with every moment of the last few months etched sharply in my memory.Yet there was comfort in the memories of happy times together, of her vitality, dynamism, and absorbing interest in people and life, that gradually superseded the sharp memories of pain, weakness, and acceptance of the inevitable. Nearly six years after she had passed to her reward, long after her home had been dismantled and my father had remarried, this amazing pile of letters was recovered from a shelf and given to me. It was my mother’s last gift. Other writings—papers submitted for courses at University of Toronto, University of Hong Kong, and University of London—also give insights into my earlier self at different phases of my development.A short story and a novel, written in Hong Kong in the s but never published, give another angle.And, finally, my first published academic paper appeared in the British Journal of Teacher Education in October on the “The Changing Role of Teachers in China.”This was the beginning of a torrent of academic writing: over ten authored and edited books, and over seventy refereed articles and book chapters. My memory has also been stimulated in a special way by being chosen as a subject for another scholar’s narrative project in exploring the lives of influential teachers. The transcribed version of the first interview brought back many memories and a way of interpreting my life that somehow popped out in the last few minutes of an intensive two-hour interview: In a way, education was my salvation. Because, as I told you, I loved to swim in the deep waters of knowledge.And this saved me from the narrow concerns of fanaticism. But it took me a Full Circle
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 5
very long time, because . . . I didn’t like conflict. I did not want to be a rebel and to show disrespect. . . . In telling you the stories I realized how my love of learning, reading, exploring gradually liberated me.
Structure of a Life How will this life story be structured? There are so many different questions I could try to answer, and each would lead to a different way of organizing and interpreting the sources available. How did I come to devote my life to understanding China, and seek to be a bridge between China and the West? How did I gain the proficiency in Chinese that has been a key factor in my acceptance into Chinese communities? How did I come to choose comparative education as the field that was to dominate my interest for decades? How was it that I developed feminist leanings, and became interested in the intersection between women’s ways of knowing and Asian ways of knowing? Why did I not marry until the age of fifty, in spite of always believing I wanted to marry and have a family? How did I learn the arts of diplomacy that were to be so valuable both in my embassy job, and later as director of a newly developing institution in Hong Kong? What were the most important influences in my life, in terms of mentors, seniors, and friends whose lives intersected with mine over long periods? In reflecting back over the years, and talking with many young people about their preparation for doctoral study and about China-related research, I came to see two commitments that shaped my scholarly career, beginning in when I started to plan for graduate studies in London.The eleven years I had spent as a teacher in Hong Kong liberated me so I could ask myself what I wanted to do with my life and find an answer.The answer, dimly perceived at that time, seems to have shaped the subsequent two decades. It was a dramatic period in Hong Kong, with the Prologue
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 6
fall of the Gang of Four, and a realization that a whole new phase in China’s history was about to begin. I sensed that this opening up to “modernization, the world, and the future,” in the words of Deng Xiaoping, would be crucially important for China and her people, and would make possible an outflow of ideas from China’s rich civilization into the world community. Firstly, I wanted to understand the opening up process by studying the history of China’s past educational relations with the outside world in a way that would give insights for valuable and mutually respectful action in the present and future. I also wanted to participate in the opening up by teaching. Both knowledge and action were to be a part of this agenda. Secondly, I wanted to facilitate the outflow of the treasures of Chinese thought and civilization that had been of interest to only a small number of career sinologists in the West, and given little attention otherwise.
Full Circle
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 7
A Canadian Childhood and Education, 1945–1967
Image not available
1
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 8
1. My parents’ wedding:“A smiling young couple standing between parents on both sides who looked rather grim.” 2. Bridesmaid at sister Liz’s wedding. June . Nineteen years of age. 3. A smiling Grace Irwin, c. -. 4. First family portrait. November .Aged three months.
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 9
M
y birth on August 15, 1945, marked the day on which the Second World War ended with victory over Japan. My parents had married in September , just as the war began, a hasty wartime marriage ordered by my grandfather in the hope that it would defer my father’s enlistment into military service.A few years later, after the birth of my two older sisters in and , my parents moved from Toronto to Prince Rupert on the northern coast of British Columbia, where my father served in the Canadian Navy.Thus it was that I was born in a remote Canadian town on the Pacific coast facing Asia rather than on the Atlantic coast facing England, Ireland, Scotland, and Switzerland, the countries from which my grandparents and great-grandparents had emigrated.The first picture in my tiny collection of early photographs is of my parents’ wedding in , a smiling young couple standing between parents on both sides who looked rather grim. The next, a formal portrait taken at Benson’s in Prince Rupert, shows the young family, with three daughters—threemonth-old me in my mother’s arms, two-year-old Liz in Father’s arms, and five-year-old Doris standing on a stool between them. As the third girl in a family of eight, I learned early of the need to help my mother with cleaning, cooking, and child-minding. My mother often commented that “the secret of bringing up
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 10
eight children lay in having the older half bring up the younger half.” I believe, in fact, my mother’s secret lay in ways of organizing all of us to help and co-operate.This made it possible for her to achieve amazing feats of bread making, preserving, pickle and jam making, curtain making, rug making, quilt making, furniture reupholstery, and mind-bogglingly complex knitting projects, all achievements that made housekeeping a high art rather than simply a selfless duty. I have only a few pictures of these very early years, one in front of our Toronto house, two taken at our Muskoka cottage. In one of these I can look into the deep-set, dark eyes and see some of the intensity of emotion, energy, and focus which I later came to believe I had inherited from my mother. How did a middle child gain enough attention to build her own sense of confidence and identity in a family of eight? It seems that the occasions when I travelled away from the family, on my own, were very important for this purpose. Regular trips by train to visit my grandparents in Ottawa were followed by visits to Grand Rapids, Michigan, to visit my mother’s sister.When I look into the eyes of my thirteen-year-old self in a series of pictures taken in November outside our Riverside Trail house, it is a cheerful, confident, and carefree young girl who looks back at me. People have often asked me about the first associations with China that affected my life. In –, when I was eleven or twelve years old, I had a stamp collection, and my mother suggested that I write to Miss Helen Willis, a missionary from our Christian meeting, who was living in Shanghai at the time. I duly wrote and asked her for stamps, and was thrilled when a letter came back. One or two years later, I met Miss Willis when she was home on furlough, after being one of the last Protestant missionaries to leave the now “liberated” Shanghai in . She was staying at the “Swallows’ Nest,” a large boathouse cottage belonging to the family opposite our cottage on Hamer Bay, at the north end of Lake Joseph. She had invited a number of young girls around F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 11
for a Chinese supper. I do not remember anything about the food, but I do remember my first lesson in using chopsticks. She spread out a large number of dried peas on the supper table, gave us each a pair of chopsticks, and told us we would be given the chance to taste her Chinese dishes once we had picked up all the peas with the chopsticks and put them into a bowl. After an elemental lesson in how to balance the two sticks between fingers and thumb, we set to work and learned quickly! Our secondary school, Humberside Collegiate, was one of the better public secondary schools in Toronto, and I started Grade there in . I was immediately put into an accelerated class and completed five years of secondary schooling in four. I have no written records to draw upon, only scattered memories of those years. I loved study, and was gradually drawn into Latin, French, and German in Grade , adding Greek in Grade , while still covering all the other major academic subjects— history, geography, mathematics, general science, and biology. I have positive memories of my teachers, but one teacher won my heart and was to become a mentor and friend of a lifetime.That was Grace Irwin. Under her influence, I took a special interest in Latin, and also joined an extracurricular Greek class. Her vivacity and delight in teaching, her ability to use dramatic techniques to enliven our Latin and Greek classes, and the depth of her spiritual commitment to teaching and to her students probably did more to draw me into the profession than any other influence.With very little questioning or reflection, I somehow always knew that I would become a teacher.There was also very little discussion or consideration of what I would study in university. Of course I would take up the course in Classics that she had done, and which she felt to be the finest academic formation one could get.This was a decision I never regretted. I remember taking refuge in my academic studies, and applying myself to them with a passion, in the conviction that this was A Canadian Childhood and Education
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 12
the one area where I might be able to excel. I felt my two older sisters were far prettier, and far more adept in dealing with the world of boyfriends, parties, and social life generally. I was the quiet one, who would voluntarily spend hours in the kitchen before and after the many extended family events and parties held in our large and lively household. Home, school, and the cottage shaped my memories of those years. During high school, I also spent time after school in my father’s ice-cream factory, first helping with tasks on the factory floor, and then later assisting his wonderful secretary,Anna, who trained me in managing the accounts and running the office. One summer when Anna took an extended vacation in Australia, I even took care of the office for several weeks.Anna was tough and loyal, also full of admiration for my father’s integrity. Many other businessmen would have declared bankruptcy and left their creditors in the lurch,Anna often told me, but my father always honoured every debt. The third major arena that shaped my life was our church, or the meeting, as it was simply called among the group of Exclusive Plymouth Brethren to which we belonged. From early childhood, the church—a plain, even spartan building on Gladstone Avenue—was a second home.The Richard Hayhoe family always sat in a front row near the centre on Sunday morning, and around us were other large families of relatives and friends.All of them were close to my parents, and I knew I could turn to anyone for help, love, or encouragement. It was truly a community of love and security. That was how I perceived it.At the same time, I also knew we were different, not only different from unbelievers, who had no idea of the spiritual wealth of the Bible, but also different from other Christians, who had not been specially chosen out, as we were, to be “gathered to the Lord’s Name” in the “One Place” where He had agreed to be present. We were being taught “truths” which they had little understanding of. One memory, relating to the Bay of Pigs crisis in , when I F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 13
was a sixteen-year-old secondary school student, serves to illustrate the mindset fostered by this life within the Exclusive Brethren Church. One of my best friends, Gail, was a daughter of the local United Church minister, and lived in a house just below us in the valley, a lovely area called Brule Gardens. I often spent time in her home after school, and she shared with me the intense fear and sense of threat she felt in face of that crisis. Perhaps the Soviets would attack us and World War III would begin. My reaction was entirely different. It was rooted in our church’s teaching that we were “citizens of Heaven.” I felt no fear and little concern.What happened on Earth, outside of our intimate community, was of little consequence.After all, Jesus would return any time, and we would be raptured to Heaven, leaving all others to face the kinds of judgement they deserved. This was, however, a two-edged sword. Some aspects of this literal understanding of the Bible that undergirded our lives left me troubled.I knew it was important to “be saved”and at quite an early age I had “confessed my belief in Jesus as Lord and Saviour,” and had “assurance” that I would not be consigned to the “eternal conscious torment of the damned.”This latter phrase was sometimes used by the more colourful preachers at our Sunday evening gospel meetings, when we were often reminded that we were all “lost, guilty, hell-deserving sinners,” who could be saved by God’s grace and mercy in sending Jesus into the world to die for us.The vivid depictions of hell-fire and damnation were later to haunt me, as I found it difficult to extricate myself from lurid imaginings of what this torture might actually look or feel like. In September , I began my studies in the four-year honours program in Classics at the University of Toronto. It was an intense and demanding program, reputed to be similar in its curricular structure to the “Greats” in Classics at Oxford. Every year we read major texts in the original, both Greek and Latin. There were also intensive language demands, as well as interpretative work. In the first two years there were required courses in A Canadian Childhood and Education
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 14
English literature and one hour a week of elective studies. I chose to do French literature. Fine arts and courses in Greek and Roman history rounded out this four-year program. I was in a very small class of about four or five students, although some classes were larger and included students from other courses selecting electives within our program. It was somehow tailor-made for my needs, giving me the opportunity to exert my best intellectual efforts within a clear and demanding framework. For the most part, I kept the two worlds of my hard-won intellectual achievement and my increasingly narrow and pietistic spiritual life rather separate. It was too difficult to find a bridge across the two worlds. During the summers of my university years, I helped with the gospel tent work in Nova Scotia. Every year, a Labouring Brother from the Exclusive Brethren organized a series of evangelistic meetings for children and adults in three different towns. There were two important agendas in this mission effort.The first was to bring the gospel to as many children and adults as possible to ensure their salvation.The second was to teach the truth of the “One Place” and establish assemblies that would be quite separate from local churches.The five or six young people who helped in the work—and I was one of these—were subjected to intensive Bible teaching sessions that strongly emphasized the need to be completely separate from the world, and that association with Christians in Open (that is non-Exclusive) Brethren assemblies or other denominations was more dangerous than “worldly” contacts. After all, these were deceitful imitations of the One True Place where God’s people were gathered. Over these four years of university study I lived in two worlds that really never intersected: the world of the university with its highly academic demands, and the world of the Exclusive Brethren Church with its insistent pressure for absolute devotion to a simple and all-embracing mission.At one point, I felt I could bear the tension no longer, and considered dropping out of F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 15
university to find a role in serving the church, which would have no intellectual demands. Evangelism in local hospitals for the incurable seemed one way of occupying my time. I started regularly visiting such a hospital and often took others from our young people’s group to sing for or visit with the patients. In my last year of university, I graduated with high honours, a gold medal in Classics, and a number of accolades. One of them was the offer of a scholarship to study archaeology for one year in Rome. My professors were delighted, Grace was proud, but I myself had little joy in these achievements. For me, the tension was now intolerable, and I had to find a way to channel my energy in ways that would win approval within the narrow spiritual confines of a rigidly interpreted Exclusive Brethren theology.The natural solution was an early marriage. Both of my older sisters had married in the year of their graduation from university, and were beginning to find their own entry into a wider world through moves to the United States. I believed then, and in the decades that followed, that it would be natural and appealing to fall in love and marry. However, none of the young men who approached me within the rather formalized dating style current in the meeting at the time were able to win my heart. So a different solution was found. I would go to help a small group of missionaries belonging to our meeting in Malaysia, Hong Kong, or Singapore. One of them was Mr. Christopher Willis, the elder brother of Miss Helen Willis, who had sent me the stamps from Shanghai. He corresponded with me during my first year at university. He was somewhat of a Greek New Testament scholar, and on learning of my prowess in classical Greek, he encouraged me to apply these studies to the understanding of the New Testament. During my last year in university, I wrote and asked him if I might help his work in Malaysia, where he had a Christian Book Room and various other missionary projects. He suggested instead that I go to Hong Kong, where his sister was also running a Christian Book Room, and there was a small meeting, as well as two missionary schools. A Canadian Childhood and Education
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 16
So I decided on Hong Kong, with very little delay, and left in June after I graduated. It was a step entirely approved of and supported by my parents and the Exclusive Brethren meeting, yet also a move that led to personal liberation and discovery. Ironically, it was my Catholic classmates, who seemed to have intimations of where this step might lead. I had become very close to them during the four years in our small and carefully nurtured Classics cohort. Two were nuns, one a former mathematics teacher who had come back to study classics mid-career. One was a Basilian father, and the fourth was a young woman of my age who had come down to Toronto from Sault Ste. Marie for her university studies.They all were to be friends of a lifetime, and somehow shared a deep sympathy and respect for my spiritual life, even though its conventions were so different from their own.They presented me with a Jerusalem Bible as a farewell gift, and in the front of it was written the following words from the Book of Ruth in the Old Testament:“All that you have done ... has been fully told me, how you left your father and mother and your native land, and came to a people that you did not know before.The Lord recompense you for what you have done, and a full reward be given you by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge” (Ruth :–). I have only a very few pictures from those last years in Toronto. In one, my long hair had been gathered up in a high chignon on the back of my head, a proper and traditional hairstyle approved by the Brethren, who took the literal interpretation of Biblical passages stating that “a woman’s hair is her glory” and decreed that it should not be cut.
F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 17
Novice Teacher: Hong Kong, 1967–1978
Image not available
2
Full Circle
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 18
Cousin Marjorie (centre) barely came up to my shoulder. Mrs.Yung, my Chinese mum, in . With students at Heep Yunn in . Entry gate to Heep Yunn School. Delivering Bibles to the New Territories for the China Bible Fund, c. -.
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 19
M
y first letter to Mother was dated July 1, 1967, and in it I described my arrival at the Hong Kong airport and reception by the older missionaries I had come to join. It was Thursday. On the following Monday, I reported to Mother, I would begin my Chinese studies. It seems I had also decided to find employment.The early letters described my vigorous efforts to find a suitable teaching job, and by early August I had committed to teaching English at Heep Yunn, an Anglican girls’ school. Thus within my first month of settling in Hong Kong, three main themes emerged that were to recur in my letters over the whole eleven-year period: my efforts to help the missionaries; my work at Heep Yunn School, where I taught throughout the eleven years; and my studies, which began with the Cantonese language and ranged over a wide and changing spectrum of areas. Other themes that emerged with some consistency were a passion for hospital work, a concern for young people caught up in drug addiction and prostitution, and a growing interest in China and some kind of Mainland China mission. It may be helpful to begin this chapter by introducing some of the key figures who were to influence my life deeply. Of particular interest are the older generation, each of whom had a history of their own. I believe their histories and their sharing them with
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 20
me greatly influenced my own development. Somehow, I found older people much more interesting to be around than younger ones because of all I could learn from them. First of all, however, I should introduce the Hong Kong I found and came to know in , which was a very different city from the one I was to return to thirty years later in .
A City of Refugees Hong Kong was a city in crisis when I arrived in June . There were bus and ferry strikes by protestors opposing fare rises, and a good deal of unrest, which was closely related to the escalating Cultural Revolution in Mainland China.A number of bomb incidents occurred, where bombs were planted on the street or in cars and exploded, causing death or injury to ordinary citizens. I actually witnessed one of these. Hong Kong was also a city of refugees—those who had come in the fifties, those who had escaped during the great famine of the early sixties, and those who found their way out during the grim days of the Cultural Revolution, often by a desperate gamble of swimming across the waters separating Hong Kong’s New Territories from the Mainland. Many of the hillsides on both Hong Kong Island and Kowloon were covered with refugee shacks hastily put together by these families, and there were also extensive squatter areas in the city itself.The first government-built resettlement estates were seven-storey concrete buildings with no elevators, communal bathrooms on each floor, and only one room allocated to each family, with a shared outside balcony that doubled as a kitchen and walkway.The roofs of these resettlement estates were given over to schools for refugee children, established by various missionary and charitable groups. It was only in the s that nine-year compulsory education was provided for all children. Before that most managed to get some years of primary education through such schools, then often went into factories to F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 21
work when they were as young as twelve or thirteen. Families were typically large—five to ten children—and older sisters were expected to start work early and earn money to help pay for younger siblings to enter the poorly equipped, profit-making secondary schools that supplemented the public and aided systems. It was a city bursting with people struggling for survival.They worked in factories for radio parts, toys, plastic flowers, wigs. There was also the whole subculture of those involved in prostitution, drug peddling, and addiction, which was easily evident in crowded downtown areas.These were the days before the highly effective Independent Commission against Corruption was established, and it was well known that some police and other government officials were involved in protection rackets for some of these activities. “The old people,” as I affectionately termed the three older missionaries who were main characters in my letters to Mother, lived in an old two-storey house adjacent to a six-classroom primary school within a courtyard in Diamond Hill.This was a bustling little town with narrow streets, lined by tiny shops, and a maze of alleys winding their way through the makeshift structures that housed the mostly refugee population. Few people had running water, and it was common to see children as young as ten or twelve balancing heavy pails of water hung on the ends of a carrying pole across their shoulders as they walked from the common water cistern to their tiny family home. My memories of Hong Kong in these early years are of a city teeming with people, many of whom lived in what to my Canadian eyes appeared to be indescribable squalor.Yet they had hope, and they were working extremely hard to improve their own circumstances and those of their children. It was also a city of mercy, with countless individuals and organizations, large and small, reaching out to help. Finally, it was a city of indescribable beauty, again to my Canadian eyes, used to the flat terrain of southern Ontario. Views of the ocean from many different perspectives were breathtaking; the mountains hovered around N o v i c e Te a c h e r
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 22
and above us on every side, and frequent experiences of crossing to Hong Kong Island from Kowloon on the Star Ferry made one feel this busy harbour was the hub of the world. As a passionate Christian and evangelist, I was very concerned for people in all of their varying circumstances, yet also comforted by my sense of a loving God watching over all.The mountains were, for me, visible evidence of this all loving God, and my prayers often began with the words of Psalm :“I will lift up my eyes to the hills; From whence does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made Heaven and Earth.” Of course Hong Kong was to change dramatically in the eleven years I worked there, with new and constantly improved government housing so all the refugees could move out of their pitiful shacktowns; with free and compulsory schooling extended to nine years for all children; with low-end factories transformed into much more sophisticated centres of manufacturing; with tunnels proliferating across the harbour and through mountains; and with a modern subway being built. By the time China opened its doors to modernization in , Hong Kong was ready for its next big move—transferring a great deal of manufacturing to the Mainland, to be replaced by a wide variety of service industries in finance, management, communications, and transportation.That was also the year in which I moved on, first to London in , then to Shanghai in .
The Cast of Characters At the heart of the little missionary community I joined in June was my father’s cousin Marjorie Hayhoe, a diminutive woman who barely came up to my shoulder in the photos I have of that period. She left Canada to go to China as a missionary with the Exclusive Brethren in the s, lived and worked in an orphanage in India during the Second World War, and then returned to Hong Kong in the early s. Her lifelong dream F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 23
was to have her own primary school, and she was able to buy the two-storey house in Diamond Hill in the late fifties and build a school beside it. There she moved Yan Kwong (Grace and Light), the Christian school for underprivileged children she had first established in rental quarters. Cousin Marjorie’s devotion to each of the children in her school was legendary, and decades later former pupils contacted me in Hong Kong to express their appreciation for this woman who had given them the chance to learn. She was already suffering from Parkinson’s disease when I arrived in , but bravely continued her work until her family insisted that she return to Canada early in . The second person in this trio of “old people” was Miss Helen Willis.The picture of her that I sent my mother in shows a woman of profound intelligence and firm determination. She did a master’s degree in Medieval English at McGill University, a rare accomplishment for women of her time. In she left Canada to go to China as a missionary. She spent her first two years teaching English in the famous Bridgeman Academy in Peking, a Christian secondary school for girls. Later, she joined her parents and her brother, Christopher Willis, in the mission they established in Yeung Kong, and subsequently moved to Shanghai to work in the Christian Book Room that her brother had established there. She was one of the last Protestant missionaries to stay in China after the Revolution of , returning to Shanghai just in time to take over the work of the Christian Book Room from her brother. From the early s till shortly before her death at the age of eighty-five in June , she managed the Christian Book Room in Hong Kong, producing beautiful painted texts, cards, calendars, and a small selection of books. She was a strong person, who had endured many hardships, and radiated a profound spiritual depth and a razor-sharp perception of those around her. The third member of the trio of “old people” was Mr. Harold Collier, a widower in his late seventies. He had left Canada to go N o v i c e Te a c h e r
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 24
to China as a missionary with the Brethren in the s. In his role as senior missionary of the Brethren in Hong Kong, Mr. Collier was in charge of the small meeting that met regularly in the basement of the school. He also ran a rooftop school in the Wong Tai Sin resettlement estate, not far from Diamond Hill. Many refugees from Yeung Kong who had been associated with the missionaries in earlier years came to gain spiritual direction, help, and support from him and the meeting. Only about three or four months after I arrived, Mr. Collier had a stroke, and had to spend a lengthy period in hospital recuperating, and getting back the use of his left side, which had become paralyzed. During the months in hospital, I often visited him in the evenings and listened to him talk about his many years as a missionary in China. Often the tears streamed down his face,as he described some of the experiences he had been through. I believe this sharing of memories of China first sparked a deep and growing fascination with China in my mind. The next person in my cast of characters who deserves a very important place is the woman whom I came to call my Chinese mum.After living in the mission compound for a year, I moved in with Mrs.Yung, who lived nearby.This was an ideal way for me to establish some independence while remaining close to the “old people” and continuing to help them in whatever ways I could. Mrs.Yung was a Cantonese born in Tianjin. Her father had been one of the cohort of young Chinese studying in Japan before the Revolution. She had enjoyed an excellent modern secondary education in a Mennonite mission school before marrying a Nationalist army man from Nanjing in . Mrs.Yung taught Mandarin to all the primary grades in a wellknown private school, and spoke excellent Cantonese and Mandarin, but had very little knowledge of English. Living with her for six years helped me to become fluent quickly in the difficult and tonally complex Cantonese dialect and eventually in Mandarin. Even more important, I believe the six years spent with Mrs.Yung until I moved out of her home in laid the F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 25
foundation for my sense of connection with China and my increasing interest in that country, which would become the focal point of my life in . She later visited me when I was living in Beijing in the early nineties, and I took her to Tianjin for a conference.Together we explored the city she had left sixty years before and never had the chance to revisit.We found the apartment where her family had lived, and she wept over the maternal grandmother whose strength had shielded her from family difficulties created by a playboy father. She had never seen her grandmother again after leaving Tianjin at the age of twelve in . Difficulties of communication and the increasing chaos of the Japanese incursions meant that she was never able to find out how, when, or where her beloved grandmother died. Gradually as I settled down with Mrs.Yung and her daughter in , she opened up and shared her past. She had six children, four of whom were living in Mainland China and the eldest in Taiwan.The youngest, Scarlet, named on impulse after her mother saw the film Gone with the Wind, was the only one born in Hong Kong and had never met any of her older brothers and sisters. Mrs. Yung’s husband had held very senior positions in the Nationalist army, including a posting in the revolutionary base in Yan’an during the period of co-operation between the Nationalist and Communist armies against the Japanese. During that time, she and the children had lived in Xi’an, the closest major city.They had no choice but to leave the Mainland in , yet their four children elected to stay with the new regime, living in Nanjing with their paternal grandmother. With the increasing radicalism of the regime, all possibility for contact gradually broke down, especially with the onslaught of the Cultural Revolution, so there was no way for Scarlet to meet her siblings in China, and the costs of visiting Taiwan, where the eldest son lived, were prohibitive. The final blow to hit this divided family was the sudden disappearance of Mrs.Yung’s husband during a weekend trip to Macao late in . She had no idea where her husband had gone, but felt N o v i c e Te a c h e r
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 26
convinced that the best thing to do was to wait. In the meantime, she needed to sublet her apartment or rent out a room to earn money. Her patience was rewarded nine years later, in , when he returned to Hong Kong from the Mainland. It turned out he had been asked to visit his very sick mother in Nanjing during that fateful weekend in Macao in , and was then imprisoned and subsequently forced to live in the remote countryside. My close ties with Mrs.Yung have continued throughout my life, and she visited me in Shanghai in , in Canada in , and in Beijing in after taking her husband’s ashes back to Nanjing for burial. She had had fifteen years with him after his return from China, and over that period was able to see all four of their children in China and the son in Taiwan on numerous occasions. One of the joys of my return to Hong Kong in was the opportunity for frequent weekends with my Chinese mum, sharing memories that went back more than thirty years. The last person in this cast of characters is the one whose memory brings the greatest discomfort. Nevertheless, he was an important influence in my life, in my learning Mandarin, and in my determination to prepare myself for working effectively in Mainland China. Brother George, as he was known to many, was the youngest missionary to be sent to China by the famous China Inland Mission (CIM), in . Not yet twenty-one, he was assigned to the far northwestern region of Chinese Turkestan, where he learned a number of minority languages as well as Chinese, and travelled throughout the region on horseback.When the war broke out in , his intimate knowledge of inland China enabled him to be very useful in British intelligence, and he rose to the position of lieutenant colonel. He enjoyed styling himself as Colonel for the rest of his life. At some point he founded the China Bible Fund, and established an office in Hong Kong dedicated to delivering as many Bibles in simplified Chinese script to house churches in the Mainland as possible. In this he gained support from the Bible F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 27
Society and various other groups. Miss Willis and Mr. Collier introduced me to the Colonel, and within a short time he gained a powerful influence over me. I was prepared to give much money and time to the work of the China Bible Fund, to the point that it gradually edged out many of my other activities. I did, however, retain my teaching position at Heep Yunn School. The Colonel was a man of tremendous confidence and authority, one used to being obeyed. He was proud of being in charge of the most complete and sophisticated intelligence system for supporting churches throughout China at the time.That was how he presented himself to me, and I was somehow caught up in his web. Many other people, older and younger, influenced my life and thought over these years, but none to the degree of these five people. Each of them had lived very rich lives deeply connected to China’s history and development. I believe they passed on to me a certain passion, a curiosity to know, and a desire to become a part of that great civilization. My induction into China studies was thus rather different from the common pattern of university studies. My purpose in going to Hong Kong had been to help “the old people” in whatever ways I could within the strict Brethren belief framework, which I had embraced wholeheartedly. However, the fact that I found professional employment very shortly after arrival and continued teaching in that same school for eleven years was perhaps an indication that I wanted to be in a place where I could grow professionally, support myself financially, and establish an identity of my own.The “old people” seemed to understand that. While they appreciated very much the help I was able to give them, they never tried to persuade me to give up that job and devote myself full-time to their particular causes.What had been a means to support myself, while I focused my efforts on the meeting and the old missionaries, became somewhat of an end—a place for reflection, self-discovery, and development. It is thus appropriate to take as the first thread of this chapter the story of my work at Heep Yunn School from to . N o v i c e Te a c h e r
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 28
Heep Yunn School I was very fortunate to get a teaching job in one of the older and more prestigious of the Anglican secondary schools, a school for girls established before the Second World War, and one of a select group called “Grant in Aid” schools, which enjoyed special recognition and support from the government. It was thus a privileged group of girls with relatively high academic ability whom I taught over those years. Almost all the teachers were Chinese, and Chinese was the language of preference in the staff room and corridors, though it was an English medium school in terms of teaching, and the English standards were reasonably good. In addition to myself, there were usually one or two other “foreign” teachers who taught English but had few other responsibilities. Since I had learned to speak Cantonese fairly fluently during my first year in Hong Kong, I could participate fully in all aspects of school life including the extracurricular activities.Among many other things, it was a marvelous place for immersion in spoken Cantonese. I taught English and Biblical Knowledge to large classes, typically forty-five students per class, from Form up to Form . In later years I also taught English and Biblical Knowledge to the smaller Form and Form classes preparing for A-level examinations for university entry. From the first day, I came to love the students with a passion, and became very interested in their concerns. I had had absolutely no training in pedagogy, but I seemed to prepare lessons with care, according to the textbooks laid down. As I gained experience, I gradually moved toward more progressive forms of teaching that accommodated individual differences, and some of my experiments are described in my letters to my mother.Teaching English seemed easy, with motivated students and an orderly environment. It was the classes in Biblical Knowledge or Religious Education that captured most of my attention. My work involved not only teaching, but in time also F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 29
developing a syllabus for these classes from Form to Form after I became head of the department in about . Later I chaired a government committee for revising the content areas to be tested in the school certificate examinations. Finally, in my last two years in Hong Kong, I helped to set up a professional association for teachers of religious education in Catholic and Protestant schools, which improved curricula and teaching methods in this area.The association broadened the way in which this subject was taught, beyond a textual study of the Bible, to include many areas related to personal values and spiritual development, and also beyond an exclusive focus on Christianity to include a small element of the study of other religions. In the early years, however, my focus was on personal salvation, and my efforts and intentions were to convert as many students as possible. I wanted to see each of my students come to the personal knowledge of Christ that I experienced, and enjoy the same assurance of salvation. In addition to organizing extensive extracurricular Bible study classes, I involved the students in many of my own activities, such as hospital visiting, and working with girls in a reform school for juvenile delinquents. During the summers, I organized social service activities for large groups of students, visiting places like the leprosy asylum on Hei Ling Chao Island, a hospital doing pioneering work for children with TB spine on Hong Kong Island, and many other such facilities. I wanted the very best for the students. In the early years, I understood this to be the kind of Christian experience I had grown up with. Behind that concern lay the fear of the eternal conscious torment, which I believed would be the fate of all those who were not “saved.”This concern extended to my students, hospital patients whom I came to know in frequent rounds of visits, or young people involved in drugs or prostitution. In a letter to Mother of May , , I told her about one of the hospital patients who died rather suddenly of cancer between my visits, and then added, “I’ve just been haunted by thoughts of hell and the everlasting burning—I can’t bear to think about it.” N o v i c e Te a c h e r
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 30
When I look at the pictures of my early and later years at Heep Yunn, I can see a gradual change in myself as a young teacher. In those taken in the first year, as I wrote to my mother on the back of one of them, I looked more like a student than a teacher—warm and outreaching, yet somewhat diffident, very young, and naive despite the rather severe chignon. In the later pictures with my Heep Yunn students, I look more mature and confident. However, I was no longer so confident of the verities I had earnestly sought to teach in the early years, but was launched on a search for understanding. I wanted to understand more about students and how to teach, which led me to the Certificate of Education courses I took at the University of Hong Kong from to . I wanted to understand Christianity more deeply through the Diploma of Theology courses I took with the extension program of the University of London and the London Bible College from to .Above all, I wanted to understand China, a pursuit that would come to dominate my thoughts and dreams. Basically HeepYunn had given me ground to stand upon,a place from which I could reach out and begin my search for knowledge and for the possibility of action based on understanding. It also inspired my decision to pursue master’s and doctoral study in the field of comparative education.All of my education up to the age of twenty-one had been in Canada, while during these eleven years in Hong Kong I was exposed to both Chinese and British values and patterns of education.The principal’s administrative style, my colleagues’ teaching philosophy and approach to students, and the students’ attitudes toward learning prompted me to reflect on aspects of Chinese educational traditions. The British-inspired organizational structure of the school, with a prefect system and a house system, were also completely new to me, as was the examination system reflecting the O-level and A-level standards of the British system. I reflected on the differences among these three educational cultures while going about my daily duties. Much later, when I chose the title of “A Chinese Puzzle” for the Eggertson lecture presented to the Comparative and International Education F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 31
Society’s annual meeting in , I located the beginnings of the puzzling process that was to absorb me for so many years in my educational experiences at Heep Yunn.
The Meeting and the Hong Kong Mission Cousin Marjorie, Miss Willis, and Mr. Collier formed the heart of the Exclusive Brethren meeting in Hong Kong.Their life experiences were rich and extensive, and their breadth of vision and depth of humanity and concern for others were contrary to any notion of exclusivity, yet they were the institutional expression of the “One Place” recognized by the particular sect of Exclusive Brethren to which we belonged. It was a worldwide network as clearly defined and tightly guarded as a Roman Catholic order or a secret society, even though it had no central office, no formalized list of those “in fellowship at the Lord’s Table.”What was even more important—and I was very aware of this from the beginning—the financial support for the missionaries’ work (the Christian Book Room, the two schools, and the meeting itself) came from Brethren assemblies within the network on a sporadic basis.There were no salaries or contractual arrangements for these missionaries of a lifetime, who had learned very early in their careers to depend directly on the Lord for their needs. In retrospect, I can see it was clearly the sunset period of their work. Rooftop schools were no longer needed when the government introduced compulsory education, and old-style sevenstorey resettlement estates were replaced by high-rise public housing with far better amenities.Yan Kwong School could have adapted to government provisions for the wide range of Christian aided schools, but Cousin Marjorie’s family in Canada decided in that the property should be sold to provide for her retirement needs in Canada, so it was closed by the summer of . The Christian Book Room was taken over by Miss Willis’s niece in , and developed in somewhat different ways, outside of the N o v i c e Te a c h e r
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 32
Brethren network, until it was sold in the s. At the time, of course, none of this was known and the expectation was that the younger missionaries might carry on the work. I set aside time in the early years to help Miss Willis in the Book Room, but I never felt there was a place for me over the long term or full-time in that ministry. However, I developed a close personal relationship with Miss Willis, accompanying her on a sea voyage to Singapore in the Easter vacation of , helping her by driving her around, and celebrating her birthday with old friends year by year. I spent Easter vacation with her in April , and on June , she died of stomach cancer. I reported this to Mother, making the comment: “When I visited her on Saturday, she was very bright and looked wonderful—her face never got thin or emaciated at all. I’m very glad I went to see her on Saturday, as I had not seen her for a couple of weeks. I’m also very glad I had that two weeks staying with her at Easter time.” Recollecting those times now, twenty-six years later, I realize I was blessed from the close contact I had over those years with the only person I have ever known whom I would characterize as a saint.This was a very special legacy. During my first year in Hong Kong I had lived in the old house on the compound of Cousin Marjorie’s school. The ground floor of the house was a part of the school, and the upstairs was the main living area for the missionaries.Thus I felt closely connected with the school from the beginning and threw myself intensely into activities with and for the “young people,” graduates of the school who would come back every Saturday evening for a fellowship group, and who would join a summer camp that Cousin Marjorie organized every summer in a rural school in the New Territories. A lover of children, with tremendous empathy for all in need, Cousin Marjorie was not a highly organized person. I remember how the summer camps seemed to just happen, with anywhere from thirty to students showing up at a rented rural school near a beach, sleeping on straw mats placed on desks F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 33
that had been pulled together—a classroom for the boys and another for the girls. I was very concerned about the organizational arrangements for her school itself and tried to persuade her to set up a board of managers and put things on a businesslike basis, but she resisted such directions, fearing loss of control over her beloved school. The result was that it simply could not be continued, in spite of the willingness of one of the younger missionaries to lead it, once she gave in to her illness and returned to Canada. Until /, the school’s last year, Cousin Marjorie continued to hope for a treatment that could overcome the increasing weakness brought about by Parkinson’s disease. During a month she spent in hospital in Hong Kong in September , I reported to my mother how I visited her every evening, gave her a bath, and helped her with her evening meal to make sure she was getting enough nourishment. I remember the great contrast between her fragile body, shaken by tremors, as I held her in my strong young arms, and the tremendous courage and determination of her spirit. By this time, I was absorbed in many new projects and was sadly away from Hong Kong when she returned to Canada in . Mr. Collier, the third in the trio of the old missionaries, was the leading brother in the meeting by virtue of his age, seniority, and long service, and so was responsible for the leadership of the meetings and other mission activities. He had a stroke in and returned to the rooftop school for several years, but after a broken leg in , he never fully recuperated. He finally died in the summer of , just before the mission compound was closed. In , Mr. Christopher Willis, older brother of Helen Willis and the leading missionary of the Brethren’s China mission, was suddenly expelled from the Exclusive Brethren fellowship. He had been living in retirement with his daughter in Canada when certain brothers in the meeting where he worshipped decided that something he had written was heretical and succeeded in having him excommunicated from the fellowship. Mr.Willis was accused of promoting a “bloodless salvation” because he insisted N o v i c e Te a c h e r
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 34
that Christ’s words on the cross,“It is finished,” meant that salvation was achieved before the soldier had pierced his side. Those who made this judgement were successful in gaining the support of leading brothers in charge of meetings around North America and England. As a result, this aged missionary, who had started up Christian Book Rooms in Shanghai, Singapore, Sandakan, and Hong Kong, and pioneered many other missionary projects, found himself suddenly cast out of the fellowship. Naturally his son and daughter supported him, as did some others who could not accept this harsh judgement of one whom they deeply respected. My father was one of those who decided to leave the “One Place,” to which he had been loyal all his life, in support of Mr.Willis, and he joined other like-minded members of the meeting in Toronto to found a new place of worship outside of the Exclusive Brethren fellowship. It was a daring act on my father’s part, given the way he and all of us had been taught, and it led to a new openness for the whole family. This event created a terrible dilemma for the old people in Hong Kong. If they rejected the judgement on Mr.Willis and cut themselves off from the Exclusive Brethren fellowship, much of their financial support would come to an end. To accept it meant excluding from their fellowship the one person who had done the most to establish and lead the work over fifty years. I too, as one of the younger missionaries, found myself caught up in a quandary.When my parents had visited Hong Kong and Sabah in , they were part of the Exclusive Brethren fellowship, and breaking bread with the old missionaries was a special joy and privilege. Now they had left the meeting, and when I returned to Canada for Christmas in /, I had to decide whether or not to break bread with my parents. If I did so, I would be excluded thereafter from fellowship in the meeting in Hong Kong, since it would be a breach of the “One Place” doctrine. Before leaving in December, I spoke to Mr. Collier and told him I had decided to break bread with my parents. He told me he understood this, F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 35
yet with great sadness, as it would mean I could no longer break bread with the meeting in Hong Kong; otherwise he feared the local Chinese brethren would be cut off from fellowship with Japan, Canada, and the rest of the network. On return from Canada in January , the matter reached a crisis. I went to see Mr. Collier and offered to not participate in the breaking of bread, but he requested me to stay and take part. When I did so, sitting beside Miss Willis, she passed the Communion bread past me, not having been privy to the conversation I had had with Mr. Collier. Heartbroken, I left the meeting that day and wrote a formal letter to Mr. Collier, explaining in detail why I felt I had to withdraw. A number of letters passed between us, with me copying all of them to my parents.The final outcome of these discussions and negotiations was a compromise that showed a remarkable degree of diplomacy and risk-taking on the part of this elderly missionary. He knew how attached the young people were to me, and he did not want to see me cut off from the mission work. While he could not endorse my increasing participation in a wide array of Christian groups and activities outside of the Brethren network, he encouraged me to come back and break bread with them. Considering the threat he and the mission were under, this was an act of remarkable courage and openness. I respected it, and continued to take part in the fellowship until the early spring of when I decided it was time to withdraw. I learned that the old people were by this time quite relieved at my decision. In the letters between me and Mr. Collier, and between me and my parents, for the first time the issue of a woman’s role in ministry and women’s right to be heard came up.This seemed to be an important element in my dissatisfaction with the meeting, and I quote from a letter to Mr. Collier of February , , which I had copied to Mother and she had kept in her collection: When I see how the Lord Jesus treated women in his day, I do not believe He would insist on them being kept in absolute N o v i c e Te a c h e r
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 36
silence, not even free to ask a question or offer a prayer.This is one reason why I have had to seek a measure of fellowship elsewhere, where I have been free to share my burdens and pray to the Lord in a group.And when I have heard the prayer of even such sisters as Yuet Wah I have felt what a loss it is to the Church that they have never been given freedom to pray in the group. I know that in saying these things, I am being absolutely unorthodox, as far as Brethren teachings go, and I also know my own parents would not go this far, but I believe I am expressing some of the frustrations felt by the young people, and some of their spiritual needs.
On another occasion, I wrote to Mother about how the younger woman missionary who was working on Bible translation for tribal peoples had told me that no one had ever prayed for her work in the Friday evening prayer meeting, which she attended faithfully, if silently. On yet another occasion I commented how ironic it was that among the young people, the girls were most eager to take part in leading the prayers, but they were not allowed to.This seems to have been the beginning of some sort of feminist consciousness, but feminism was certainly not uppermost in my mind in this long struggle with the meaning and demands of my Christian faith. I have only two photographs of Mr. Collier in my small collection from those years. Both are taken in the courtyard between the school and the missionaries’ residence, one before his stroke in the autumn of , and the other a few years later.There his right hand is pressing on a walking stick, and his left arm is held protectively by one of the Chinese “sisters” from the meeting.A tall, stately gentleman, with considerable white hair and a frosted moustache, his face glows with kindness and gentility. What did I learn from this man, who had shared so much of his past in China during our long conversations in the hospital, and who had treated me with such kindness and courtesy when caught up in a painful situation in the mission? First, patience— F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 37
the ability to live with unresolved and unresolvable contradictions, somehow a very Chinese virtue, as I later came to realize. Secondly, diplomacy. Only now does it occur to me that this experience may have helped prepare me for working as a diplomat in Peking fifteen years later, just after the Tiananmen Square massacre on June , . Most of all, my heart feels warm at the thought of having known a truly good man, one who knew nothing of malice or guile.
Work with Hospital Patients and Social Outcasts The fact that I had a full-time teaching position, at least in the early years, and gave considerable time to helping the “old people” and working with the “young people” associated with the Brethren mission, was apparently not enough to absorb my time. Flowing through my system was an immense amount of inner energy that I have always believed came from my mother. Her energy was expressed in a huge range of household arts and intense involvement with her eight children; her twenty-one grandchildren; and needy relatives, friends, or acquaintances who found themselves caught within the benevolent net she cast. It amazes and dismays me to see from my letters how I did not hesitate over those years to draw upon her charity. She sent clothes and blankets to be distributed to refugees, organized a number of her friends to send monthly cheques for students needing help to pay fees for their secondary school studies, and took care of several problem students who had found their way to Canada—providing temporary accommodation, helping them to find summer jobs, whatever was needed.All of this was in addition to a constant flow of parcels to me, containing my favourite homemade pickles and jam, homemade cookies, clothes made specially, and hand knit sweaters. Somehow it was not enough for me to be a responsible teacher and a faithful supporter of the mission. I felt driven to reach out N o v i c e Te a c h e r
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 38
to those in greatest need in that teeming city of refugees. In the early years, to , and then again from to I did a lot of work with prostitutes and drug addicts.The hospital work involved getting to know individual patients and doing personal evangelism, then organizing students from Heep Yunn and young people associated with the Brethren mission to make regular visits to sing, distribute gifts at Christmas, and otherwise take an interest in the patients. In the later years, I worked sometimes with a Christian nurses association to organize Bible studies and worship services for patients. In many cases this involved basic literacy work, as few of the older patients knew how to read and write. It was there I learned to look death in the eye, often praying with patients who were dying.There also, as I have recounted earlier, I would agonize over the thought that some might be consigned to those everlasting flames. My work with social outcasts began in May , less than two years after I arrived in Hong Kong. Near Heep Yunn was a government home for delinquent girls, surrounded by a high fence, with barbed wire above, to prevent escapes. I seem to remember a brass plaque beside the front door, with the name Ma Tau Wei Girls Home. From the beginning of my life in Hong Kong I was aware of the underworld of prostitution, drug peddling, and addiction. It was only too evident in the downtown areas, as one crossed from Kowloon to Hong Kong on the Star Ferry, or walked in the back streets of either Kowloon or Hong Kong Island. Somehow I decided that part of my calling should be to bring the gospel to girls and young women who had fallen into this kind of trouble, and as I walked by this prison-like edifice every day, I decided that was where I should begin. It took some courage to knock on the door one day and request a meeting with the superintendent.Then I asked her if I would be allowed to come on Sunday mornings to give a Bible message to the girls, and teach them some songs. She agreed, and my ministry began. For two years I went every Sunday, and got to know a lot of girls. I held classes for two age groups. Often I involved some of F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 39
the Christian students from Heep Yunn as helpers. My vision was not only to see these girls “get saved” and onto a right track of life, but also to show them they could also participate in ministry. In a letter to Mother of December , , I describe how I had obtained permission to take the girls from this home, in two groups, on December and January , first to sing in one of the hospitals where I visited regularly, then on an outing, and finally back to my home for a party. Similar expeditions every few months are described in later letters, until finally in the summer of , the superintendent told me I would no longer be allowed to visit the girls. It seems those responsible for the home were not quite sure what this enthusiastic young missionary might be up to.After all, I had no experience or training in social work, and was not affiliated with any organization that might give legitimacy to this work. Mrs.Yung, my Chinese mum, was always extremely generous about the many young people I invited to the apartment, the many parties I held, and the constant flow of company. However, she also became a little concerned about my involvement with these girls. She felt I was probably too naive to deal with them firmly and appropriately.To some extent she may also have been concerned about her family’s reputation, with young women of this kind coming around. Naturally, the girls would phone and want to visit, especially after they had completed their term at the reform school and been released.Thus I decided we needed to open a halfway house where they could come to stay if they needed a place, and where they could visit freely. I was too absorbed with other projects to undertake this alone, but I had a good friend from England, a nurse called Joann Murray, who shared the hospital ministry and was looking for a project and a place to live.We rented an apartment in a crowded urban area not far from Diamond Hill. Thus the New Youth Hostel opened its doors on January , , with a special service of blessing carried out by Stephen Sidebotham, rector of Christ Church and a close personal friend. Gifts of money, including some from my family, helped to pay the N o v i c e Te a c h e r
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 40
rent and three or four girls moved in soon after. It was also a place where young people of all backgrounds could drop in, and many of my students and the young people of Yan Kwong helped with its activities, English study classes for workers on some nights, Bible studies on others. By summer of Joann returned to England and a Swedish missionary lady, named Margaretha, moved in and took it over. Gradually I became absorbed in other projects, and did not follow its later development. I believe it closed within a year or two. Later from to , my interest in this kind of work was to be revived again when I was invited to join the board of directors of an organization that rehabilitated drug addicts. Known as Wu Oi (Mutual Love) Fellowship, it had a centre in the very area where the New Youth Hostel had been, as well as a property out in the New Territories where those who had taken a step of faith in Christ could go to stay while they came off drugs. My role was mainly as an adviser, taking minutes for the management meetings and helping to solve practical problems in running the centre. I also worked quite closely with the one woman worker, May, who was responsible for reaching out to women drug addicts. Most of them were prostitutes as well, often supporting their husbands’ drug habit through their prostitution. I sometimes accompanied her on prison visits and other types of outreach to these women. My motivation in this work, I believe, was social concern and a sense that I should not limit my efforts to working with students and young people who were more privileged members of society, but also reach out to those less fortunate. There was also the anguished sense that any who were not “saved” through belief in Christ were headed for unspeakable torment. In a letter to my mother of May , , I wrote:“I am still constantly horrified at the thought of hell—these bar girls have brief unhappy lives and afterward they go to hell and suffer unspeakably forever, as just punishment for maybe thirty years of life. It is an awful thought and one can only say,‘Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?’” F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 41
China Mission When I left for Hong Kong in June , China meant nearly nothing to me. I arrived in Hong Kong at a time of turmoil when the Cultural Revolution disturbances were beginning.The references to China in my letters were light and sporadic up to but then increased from to . Perhaps it was the combined influence of the China stories shared with me by the three old missionaries and Mrs.Yung. Perhaps it was also my delight in studying spoken Cantonese and the written language. Within about two years of part-time language study, I became a fluent reader of the Bible in Chinese, and also studied some of the primary school textbooks as a way to gain a wider vocabulary. One of my Heep Yunn students gave me a book of Tang dynasty poems, and I even tried my hand at translating poems a few times. Perhaps it was my knowledge of classical Greek and Latin that made learning Chinese both enjoyable and relatively easy. It also drew me to a deep appreciation of the culture and history of this civilization, so different from that of ancient Greece and Rome. The Colonel was clearly impressed by my fluent Cantonese and obvious devotion to Christian causes. He himself was affiliated with a group of Brethren who are sometimes called Open Brethren in contradistinction to the Exclusive Brethren we belonged to. I began my work for the China mission by helping once or twice a month in distributing Bibles, printed in the simplified script by the Bible Society, for the churches in China. They were taken to various churches, mainly in the New Territories, where the Colonel assured me there was an effective underground that would ensure the Bibles were taken into China and distributed very quickly. Gradually, as I accompanied him on these trips through the New Territories, he began to tell me of his early years as a missionary in Chinese Turkestan, riding by horseback long distances, and finally escaping through extremely dangerous terriN o v i c e Te a c h e r
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 42
tory to Kashmir, twenty days alone on horseback in .This was followed by stories of his exploits during the Second World War when he was based in Singapore and in charge of a large office of intelligence for the British. After the war he had been British Consul General in Urumchi. Now, he explained to me, he had been able to establish a secret system of communication with house churches in China via radio and also via digitized and miniaturized messages. As he gradually “trained” me in various aspects of intelligence work, I was required to keep absolute secrecy.Throughout and into the spring of , I gave every minute of spare time I could find to this China Bible work, as well as large financial gifts from my modest salary at Heep Yunn. One of the pictures in my collection reminds me of a painful setback in the autumn of . It shows a plump and smiling Chinese Salvation Army captain, aged about fifty, with his elderly mother, standing beside the Colonel. One of the key figures in the work, whom I met fairly often out in the New Territories, this man had an active church ministry. In early December , he suddenly died of a heart attack. After his death we found a very large cache of Bibles that had been stored in his rural church for some time, and were dusty and mildewed.There were enough to fill the capacious trunk of my large car twice.That incident was the beginning of doubts for me as to whether the Bibles really were reaching their destinations in churches throughout China. However, these doubts remained deeply submerged for reasons that I still am not able to explain. By the early spring of , the Colonel declared that he was going to organize a mission to China that would take about three months and involve visits with churches all the way up to Xinjiang province in the far northwest, and indeed as far as Kashgar on its farthest western border. By May, I was told that I would be invited to go along, together with the Colonel and his wife, as well as an American couple, whom he identified as members of the organization, though I had never met them. F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 43
Naturally it was a considerable loss of face to the Colonel when none of us were able to get visas and the trip had to be cancelled. Given that he had broadcast the plans rather widely, and I had made special arrangements to cover my responsibilities in Hong Kong for a three-month period, this was pretty upsetting.Why did I not realize how impossible such a trip would be? Was it the Colonel’s rather clever association of our visa refusals with reports of China’s fifteenth nuclear test at their Lop Nor site in the far northwest in June of that year? Why did I spend another year and a half devoting my time, money, and efforts to this strange but riveting individual? I have no answer for this question, and can only report that I continued to work very hard for the project of sending Bibles to China, going to England in the late autumn of to help the Colonel and his wife with making contacts and publicizing the work there, as well as in Germany and Sweden. By the summer of , the Colonel had successfully persuaded some churches in the Toronto area and in California to support his work, and one of them endorsed the decision of an American Lutheran woman to come out and help him with the growing correspondence associated with the work, and the editing of a book of stories from the Chinese churches that he wished to prepare for distribution. Marian arrived in August and she and I moved into the apartment on Chatham Road near the Star Ferry, which was also used as an office. By this time, I had begun a full-time program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong to study Mandarin, and was also continuing to teach at Heep Yunn one afternoon a week. Thus while Marian typed correspondence and took dictation from the Colonel of the stories for the China book, I pursued my studies of Mandarin, which were seen as necessary for future work in China. I also did a great deal of public speaking on behalf of the China Bible Fund at local churches of many different denominations. I was supposed to be director of the women’s work, and so coordinated quite a few meetings for women evangelists involved N o v i c e Te a c h e r
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 44
in visiting churches in China, and had particularly close relations with a Christian nurses association.Naturally,at the end of each busy day, Marian and I would compare notes on what we were doing: I finally felt there was someone to whom I could confide some of my worries about the Colonel and his network. Meanwhile he was becoming increasingly secretive, often telling us that a certain person should not be allowed to visit the Chatham Road apartment, because the Chinese elders, to whom he reported, did not consider this person trustworthy. Neither of us had any idea who these elders might be, and we gradually began to feel somewhat spooked by the notion that there might indeed be some shadowy figures from Mainland China who were watching who was coming and going from our apartment.After all, it doubled as the office and Bible warehouse of the China Bible Fund. It was a difficult time for a young twenty-nine-year-old—I was still extremely naive, and wanted desperately to believe in this mission to which I had committed so much. In the end of October of that year, Marian returned to California to deal with a family emergency, and I finally decided that I could no longer believe all of what I was being told by the Colonel and must withdraw from the work. He did not take my departure lightly. I can still recall the flash of ugly determination that came over his face when I gave him my resignation, and his parting words of threat:“If you leave the China Bible Fund, I will blacken your name in every church in Hong Kong.” It was so tempting just to flee the situation and return to Canada as quickly as possible. On second thought, however,I knew that if I left Hong Kong,people might well believe whatever ugly accusations the Colonel planned to lay against his most faithful worker. I summoned up courage to contact a CBF board member,a senior British businessman and construction engineer who visited Hong Kong from time to time.He gave me the best possible advice—keep what you know to yourself, stay in Hong Kong, and go forward to rebuild your life. That was exactly what I did. Within a short time, I was enrolled part-time in a Certificate of Education course at the F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 45
University of Hong Kong, which started in September and finished in August . Meanwhile I took up full-time teaching again at Heep Yunn School after completing my Mandarin course in the summer of . My growing fascination with China now took a new turn as I wrote term papers on educational developments in China, and prepared for future graduate studies in comparative education. I also arranged my very first trip to the Mainland in April .
Studying up a Storm Lessons in Cantonese dominated my first few years in Hong Kong. I was fortunate that the old missionaries introduced me to a Chinese couple, Mr. and Mrs. Lam, both of whom gave Cantonese lessons to missionaries in their home. From to , I studied with Mrs. Lam. She agreed that the focus should not only be on spoken Cantonese, but also on reading and writing. However, from the very beginning she let me know her own personal goal for me—that within a year I would speak fluently enough to pass myself off as a native Cantonese on the telephone. It was a fantastically high goal to set, and I believe that alone spurred me to genuine effort. My most vivid memories are of her intensive drilling in the tonal structure of sentences. Often I had to repeat a sentence as many as ten times before she was satisfied with my mastery of the tones. It was probably this training, in addition to my love of languages, that led to my success. In addition, I was immersed in a Cantonese-speaking environment, both in Heep Yunn School, where I taught, and in the home where I lived with Mrs.Yung. After two years of study with Mrs. Lam, it was somehow decided that I should study with Mr. Lam for the next period of my Chinese language study.This seems to have been related to my growing interest in Confucianism, Chinese philosophy, and related topics. Mr. Lam was working on a doctoral thesis on Nestorian N o v i c e Te a c h e r
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 46
Christianity in China, and had a more scholarly bent than his wife. Thus in addition to reading the Bible, he often walked me through other texts, and introduced me to the richness of Chinese literature. In November , two months after I began studying with Mr. Lam, I wrote to my mother: “My lessons with Mr. Lam are positively fascinating—he has a tremendous grasp of Chinese philosophy and it all makes such an interesting comparison with what I know of Europe at the same period.” My lessons with the Lams came to an end in when they moved to the United States so that Mr. Lam could pursue further studies. By then I was a fluent speaker of Cantonese, comfortable also with reading Chinese, and able to teach Sunday School as well as give talks and sermons in various local churches. My work with the China mission brought me in touch with many different denominations and groups, but Cantonese was almost always the main language of communication. The other area of study that I somehow found time to pursue over these early years was that of creative writing. I took two courses by correspondence, tried writing a number of short stories, and also completed a short novella that I sent to my family for feedback. In the end, however, I found academic writing more appealing. When my first scholarly article was published in , in collaboration with a British scholar whom I got to know while studying education at the University of Hong Kong, I felt a great sense of satisfaction.Twenty-three years later in , I was fascinated to note how prophetic the title is:“The Changing Role of Teachers in China.” Little did I know then that I would return to Hong Kong in to lead an institution dedicated to teacher education just at the time of Hong Kong’s return to China. The article sketches out six models of the teacher: () the traditional Confucian teacher, () the teacher as innovator under Japanese influence, () the patriot teacher under the Nationalist party and American influence, () the expert teacher under Soviet Communist influence, () the proletarian teacher during the F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 47
Cultural Revolution, and finally () the eclectic teacher under Deng Xiaoping’s new pragmatist regime.The paper then goes on to assess the new educational environment and the role of teachers in the post-Cultural Revolution era. In many ways this paper outlined the broad context that was to absorb my research interests for two decades—continuity and change in China’s educational development over the whole century, with the interweaving of influences from a range of countries and educational traditions. In , I published a co-edited volume, Education, Culture and Identity in Twentieth Century China, which covered a similar time period and range of themes, of course far more fully developed. Besides the study of Cantonese and written Chinese and the study of creative writing, other courses that I took in the early s included dramatic speaking and voice production, also the study of classical Chinese bronzes and Sanskrit, which I described to my mother as “a bridge between East and West in terms of language” (June , ).These were extension courses provided by the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Hong Kong, and I can only guess that my studies merely skimmed the surface, given the hectic whirl of activity I was caught up in. Only in did I begin to undertake studies for credit that required a reorganization of my time to meet all requirements.This change was related to the demands of the China mission work. By the spring of I decided to engage in full-time studies of Mandarin and written Chinese, in order to be more effective in the Bible work, which was to involve more contact with people from Mainland China. I was able to get into the fourth term of a two-year certificate course in Mandarin at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, beginning in July . Apparently the written Chinese I had acquired with the Lams, as well as fledgling efforts to learn some Mandarin from Mrs.Yung, had prepared me well for this fairly demanding program. In the autumn of , during my second term in the course, I left the China Bible Fund. My studies then became a lifeline, something I could embrace wholeheartedly and with a passion. N o v i c e Te a c h e r
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 48
My classmates came from a wide range of backgrounds; there were several Canadian diplomats, some Japanese journalists, an American medical doctor turned poet, and others.The course involved spoken Mandarin; readings of contemporary Chinese texts from the Mainland; modern Chinese literature, including stories of Lu Xun; and writing a weekly composition in Chinese. I began to attend a Mandarin Baptist church regularly so I could hear spoken Mandarin, though naturally it was only the older members of the congregation who were fluent in Mandarin. Only after I arrived in Shanghai several years later did I discover how well my studies had prepared me for functioning in a Mandarinspeaking environment on the campus of Fudan University. The China mission had been a positive force in my decision to study Mandarin, which in turn became a source of inspiration and consolation as I made the difficult decision to leave the China Bible Fund. Christmas / was a turning point in my life, as I decided to apply for a two-year Certificate of Education at the University of Hong Kong, while returning to teach full-time at Heep Yunn School. I was excited about all there was to learn in the field of education—there were courses in educational psychology, history of education, comparative education, teaching methodologies, and many other areas.The cross-disciplinary demands and the need to read widely in all of these areas proved highly stimulating, in some ways taking me back to my university studies in Classics, which had involved history, literature, sociology, political science, and fine arts, a sweep across all the main disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. My certificate course was completed in the summer of , and I was delighted to be one of two or three students in a cohort of ninety to be awarded a distinction in the course.The future focus of my work was also becoming clear at this time. Mao Zedong had died in September , and the subsequent fall of the Gang of Four, his radical supporters, and the emergence of Deng Xiaoping as China’s new leader created an entirely new climate. I realized that China’s door was beginning to reopen, and F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 49
I hoped to participate in this by making a practical contribution, as well as to study its implications for China and for the global community that China would finally rejoin. As a teacher of English, it seemed clear that teaching would be a useful way to contribute, and that the greatest need initially would be at the tertiary level, so I applied for master’s degree studies at the University of London Institute of Education. Should I take applied linguistics or comparative education, the field that had most attracted me in my educational studies over the two years? I recognized the practical value of applied linguistics, but made the riskier choice of comparative education as this field had already captured my interest. Never mind that well-intentioned friends at the university warned me I might never find a job in the field! I took a year to arrange my departure from Hong Kong, somehow knowing it was a major transition, and that I might never return to the life I had lived. I wanted to think through my next steps, and also to complete all of my responsibilities in different areas before departing. By this time two of the “old people” had died, and the schools had been closed. Cousin Marjorie had returned to Canada, where she died in . I was left with rich memories and continuing contact with Frances, Helen Willis’s niece, who was now managing the Christian Book Room. My headmistress at Heep Yunn was reluctant to see me go, but she herself retired that year. There were several other pieces of unfinished business I wanted to complete, and one was my theological studies. Gradually I had developed wide-ranging contacts with Christians in other churches, both Chinese and Western, and often preached or gave talks in Cantonese, particularly during my years in the China mission. I enjoyed a long-standing association with a prayer group at an English-speaking Anglican church, where I got to know the rector and his wife through participation in a so-called “charismatic” prayer fellowship where “speaking in tongues” was promoted as a gift of the Spirit. By this time, I was open to a variety of Christian experiences, and N o v i c e Te a c h e r
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 50
found this one rewarding at first, somewhat puzzling, and even disappointing later.The more important outcome was becoming part of a lively and open prayer group where all kinds of issues were discussed openly, where there was genuine support for spiritual development, and also an opportunity for theological study. I first completed a correspondence course in Anglican theology through my involvement with this group, and then decided I should undertake a more thorough and academically demanding course, the Diploma of Theology offered by the University of London on extension terms. Because of the many other demands, I had not made much progress in this program by the summer of , but I now decided to finish it within the next year. It was possible to take all of the eight three-hour examinations in June , and that is what I made up my mind to do. I wrote all eight examinations in five days from June to , , while teaching at Heep Yunn. My overall results on the course were, once again, a distinction. But the real gain for me was the opportunity to reflect at length on the teachings of the Bible, in their historical context, within the framework of thoughtful commentaries on Church history, the philosophy of religion, and other religious traditions. In April , as I was caught up in detailed preparation for the examinations, I wrote to my mother about the course: “I find it really fascinating. It seems most of the doctrinal problems one meets today have already been thoroughly thrashed out by the early Church fathers, particularly in areas concerning the person of Christ and the Trinity.” My letters to Mother over this period also reveal that at one point I was wavering between pursuing theological studies in London or academic studies in comparative education.The primary consideration in this decision, I believe, was my love for China and commitment to participating in its opening up to the world in the best way possible. Comparative education struck me as a field that would require careful observation and respectful listening to understand the culture underlying different educational systems and pedagogies. It would be F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 51
the ideal preparation for my China sojourn. Theology would not have fulfilled this role. As I prepared to throw myself into studies of comparative education and of China, I vowed to continue living my Christian faith but to remain largely a silent participant in church life.This was my way of dealing with the intense emotional pain of the doctrinal controversies of the past. I also vowed to attend church only when I felt drawn for spiritual reasons, not as a matter of duty. Over the subsequent years this draw remained strong, and I benefited from taking part in Anglican services in many parts of the world, including Japan. The second piece of unfinished business that occupied me during that last year in Hong Kong was my wish to visit China.I had read and heard so much, and had lived on its doorstep for nearly eleven years, but I had not been able to enter the country. Many attempts had been made to apply both individually and with a group, but none had succeeded. Finally I found the key through a young Australian student I had met. Jenny Grant was a student at Fudan University in Shanghai, and came to Hong Kong for some rest and recreation. She managed to get me a formal invitation to Beijing from the Australian cultural counsellor, Dr. Jocelyn Chey, which finally unlocked the door in terms of getting the long-hoped-for visa. My plan was to visit China in March , and up to nearly the last day, I was kept on tenterhooks as to whether the visa would be issued. I’ll never forget the sense of elation when a call from the Mainland authorities came through to me at Heep Yunn on the last teaching day before the Easter holidays. On the next day I set off, purchasing my own train ticket to Guangzhou (Canton) and from there to Beijing. I wandered all around Guangzhou, taking in my first view of this socialist “paradise,” which I had been able to see only from the contrasting lenses of rosy Cultural Revolution rhetoric and the grim stories of refugees who had escaped to Hong Kong.To my eager eyes, which devoured every detail, there were many strong contrasts with Hong N o v i c e Te a c h e r
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 52
Kong—the old-style taxis from the fifties, the rather decrepit infrastructure, and the drab clothing people wore.There was also a greater sense of spaciousness, the feeling of a country of huge dimensions compared to the city-state of Hong Kong.There was a notable sense of ease among the people I observed, who were still largely dressed in harsh Cultural Revolution styles, yet somehow projected an aura of knowing who they were and where they belonged.This surprised me and I attributed it to the depth of China’s cultural traditions and the strength of a civilization that political movements could not erase.Those were my first impressions. In the evening I got on the train for Beijing, only to meet a British professor, Don Rimmington, who had travelled with me on the train out of Hong Kong. He was accompanied by a government-assigned interpreter for the day in Guangzhou, and complained that the interpreter assigned to take care of me had also had hung around him all day, since I had disappeared immediately after getting off the train and could not be found! My fluency in Cantonese had enabled me to get a coveted hard-class sleeper ticket, which gave me the opportunity to talk with many ordinary people along the way. He told me he was stuck with two drunken Dutchmen in a soft-sleeper compartment! After three days during which I took the opportunity to talk with many different people in my largely unpractised Mandarin and stared out the window to see the cities and countryside we passed through, we arrived in Beijing. I was met at the station by my young friend Jenny. Easter weekend was spent in Beijing, visiting many of the great monuments: the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Ming Tombs, and the Great Wall. We attended church services on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, as I reported in a letter to Mother.We also went to the famous Peking University, where Jenny had friends who were foreign students. After about four days in Beijing, Jenny and I took the twentysix-hour train ride (hard class sitting up) to Shanghai and another few days were spent exploring that huge city. It was so different from Beijing, with Shanghai’s history as a commercial and F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 53
industrial centre where Chinese and Westerners met.There were few ancient monuments, but many fascinating streets and alleys to explore, and I spent the best part of a whole day at Fudan University where Jenny was studying. I talked with some of the students who were among the first to take the national entry examinations in July and January , after the Cultural Revolution.They were bursting with curiosity about the world. Two years later, when I returned to Shanghai as foreign expert, several of them were to be my students in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature. Back in Hong Kong, after this exciting journey of exploration, I prepared to move to London in September of that year. In addition to the examinations for the Diploma of Theology, which took place in June, I was required to do two examinations for entry to the master’s program in comparative education. Success in these examinations would enable me to complete the degree requirements in one calendar year, by the end of October .Thus much of the summer was spent in the library of the University of Hong Kong, reading books and articles on the subject to prepare for the two examinations scheduled within the week of my arrival in London in early September. It was then that I began to think about who might be the writers of these scholarly articles and books, and what would be involved in contributing to knowledge in this particular way. Studying was a somehow a refuge from the storms of life, or a way of creating a counter-storm that would absorb my energies and interest. It was also liberating.“Swimming in the deep waters of knowledge ... saved me from the narrow concerns of fanaticism,” as I explained in the narrative interview with a researcher in Hong Kong who chose me as a subject for his study of influential teachers and teacher educators.A passion for lifelong learning, which I think characterizes every effective teacher, had come to characterize my life for reasons somewhat specific to my family and church background, as well as my first experiences as a teacher in Hong Kong. N o v i c e Te a c h e r
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 54
Conclusion: Tying Together the Threads Of the many people who influenced my life, one provides a fitting link between the past and the future.When I left Toronto in June , my secondary school Greek and Latin teacher, Grace Irwin, introduced me to a friend who was then living in Hong Kong.Annemarie had managed to escape Hitler’s Austria and gone to Shanghai via North America, visiting Grace in Toronto on the way. Throughout the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, she had been given permission to run a kindergarten in the French concession and to live on its premises, as polio had crippled her and she was unable to travel around the city with ease.The kindergarten was for children of diverse backgrounds, including Scandanavian, Swiss, German, Russian, Turkish, and Korean families.All of the Americans and British, of course, had been put into concentration camps. In spite of the cruelties for which they were well known, the Japanese simply could not understand the pressures from their German ally to round up people of Jewish ancestry. As a result, Shanghai was one of the few open cities for refugees from Hitler. Annemarie moved to Hong Kong in the early fifties, and then went back to Austria for the birth of her second son.Thereafter she lived in Hong Kong until , returning from time to time to keep in touch with relatives and friends in Vienna and her widely scattered family around the world. I first met Annemarie at a dinner for my twenty-second birthday,August , , less than two months after I arrived in Hong Kong.Throughout my eleven years in Hong Kong, Annemarie was always there for me to visit and talk over my problems with, and the friendship endured in subsequent decades. She had faced many deep hurts—including the loss of both parents during the war and a painful divorce—with great courage and resilience. In her middle years she took a degree in psychology at the University of Hong Kong, and was a lively member of the F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 55
German-speaking community in Hong Kong, teaching German to children and young people over many years. When I returned to Hong Kong in the summer of , I was sad that Annemarie had returned to Vienna just a few months earlier after sixty years in the Far East. When I visited her in Vienna in June , and we drove by the apartment where she had grown up in the family of a distinguished medical doctor, I felt a deep sense of the amazing continuity of her life. She had written her own autobiography for her children and grandchildren, with vivid depictions of her childhood years in Vienna. Now, so many years after reading it, I drove past her family home with her in the beautiful city of her childhood.The life she had lived, the memories she had shared with me, the sound advice she had often given me, were another important part of the legacy I inherited during my years in Hong Kong. And so I end this chapter with a celebration of the strong older women who had given me so much of their spirit, their endurance, their rich experience, and who remain with me as mentors now. Grace Irwin, my inspiring secondary school teacher, is also an accomplished author of creative fiction and served for many years as minister of her church after retirement from teaching. At ninety-six, she remains active and in close touch. Mrs.Yung, who is eighty-six, was delighted by my return to Hong Kong. She showered me with affection, warmth, and good advice during the many weekends we spent together from to . Annemarie, who felt I filled a place left empty because she had sons rather than daughters, kept in close touch, supporting me in spirit in my work. She celebrated her eightyfifth birthday in March , but sadly she died suddenly in October of that year. Her comments on the first draft of this life story, which I sent to her that July, have added deep poignancy to the work:“It makes me very proud that I have been an example to you in some way. This gives more value to my life, and believe me, I have always been very proud of ‘my daughter.’” The lives of each of these three women, in Canada, Europe, N o v i c e Te a c h e r
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 56
Hong Kong, and China, root me in these places of my heart, where I have been privileged to enjoy both education and the opportunity for demanding professional work.
F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 57
Apprentice Scholar: London, Shanghai, and Toronto, 1978–1986
Image not available
3
Full Circle
1. 2. 3. 4.
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 58
Fudan students performing in Chekhov’s The Marriage Proposal. Mr. Zhao Yilu, auditor at Fudan, with his family. . The bell that began the May th Movement in Shanghai. . Ma Xiangbo and his daughter Ma Yuzhang, c. s.
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 59
I
n leaving Hong Kong in September to move to London and begin graduate studies at the University of London Institute of Education, I had a sense that this would be a fundamental shift in my life, and that I was unlikely to return to Hong Kong, where I found an identity and sense of direction over eleven years. This caused me to plan for the move slowly and methodically, experiencing every aspect of the transition—the sadness of parting with friends, the sense of closure with Heep Yunn School and the various organizations and activities I had supported, the completion of part-time study. I continued to write regularly to my family, and my parents’ warmth and loving concern never abated, in spite of my retreat into silence on all matters relating to the church.There was a continued flow of letters, gifts of clothing, and money to help with travel home or for other needs. I made three visits home in : in June, for the wedding of my second youngest sister, Suzanne; in September, for my parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary; and at Christmas, just before setting off to teach in Shanghai. Over this time my spirit was discovering a new home—that of the university. Until then, the one place I had felt at home in spirit was the church. By this I mean not so much my parents’ church, with its rather unique characteristics, but the Christian
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 60
Church in general. From the late s I worshipped mainly in Anglican churches, and have found particular comfort in the beauty of the liturgy, the prayers, and reflections that link us back to Christians over many generations of history, the uplift and comfort that often accompanies the music of the liturgy. Perhaps at the deepest level it is a sense that time and space are superseded in the moments one spends in worshipping God and reflecting on His omnipresence and omnipotence. Whatever problems I might have had with particular doctrines, the sense of providence, of an all-wise God guiding my steps and giving me strength to open up to each new opportunity, has been a continuing foundation of life. The one core concept that I associate most deeply with Christian belief is the idea of grace, the sense that each moment of life, with the special opportunities it opens up, is a gift from God to be accepted and held in open hands, never to be tightly grasped or held so closely that the next moment or opportunity is overlooked.This has meant living a life of thankfulness for each moment—the painful as well as the happy ones—and for each opportunity, which is a gift. When I lived in Japan in , I found this way of thinking embodied in the simple, one-word prayer shared by all before every meal: itadakimas. I would paraphrase it in the following way: “We are the recipients of undeserved gifts from above.” The university became a new spiritual home for me over these years, alongside of, yet quite distinct from, the church. It became not only the context for my graduate studies but also the focus of those studies as I took up the theme of China’s academic relations with Western countries over the twentieth century for my doctoral research.This required me to give careful attention to the core values of the European university tradition, compare them with core values of Chinese scholarly institutions, which have an even longer history, and understand sources of conflict and possibilities for synergy as China borrowed various aspects of the Western tradition. Thus my study of the concept of the F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 61
university, while a graduate student at the University of London and subsequently a foreign expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, induced a self-reflexive approach to university life that was very different from my earlier experience as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto. At that time I had never questioned or thought about the university as an institution with a particular set of core values or a unique historical identity. What has the university provided me as my second spiritual home over an affiliation that spans twenty-four years? It is a place where any question can be asked, any issue can be debated, and where there is an expectation that deeper knowledge, and a closer approximation of truth, will be found. It encourages creative thinking, the speculative casting out of hypotheses that may solve important problems, followed by their critical testing in specific experimental or social conditions. It is a place where truth can never be absolute, but where scholars are prepared to devote a whole lifetime to advance understanding in a particular area or field. Its contribution to human advancement has been enormous, but usually indirect.The most fundamental breakthroughs in knowledge often spill over into medical, technological, or social applications only much later.Thus there must be an intrinsic sense of reward and satisfaction to keep the scholar focused on a task that may require a lifetime of effort and a huge team of colleagues working together on different angles of the fundamental problem being addressed. Finally, it is a place where problems and issues are looked at in the long term as a part of the broad advance of civilization over centuries, not simply in a short-term or immediate way.This was an aspect of the university that was to strike me particularly in a later phase of my career when I worked as a diplomat in an embassy where the luxury of time and a longterm perspective was rare. And so I found this new spiritual home to be a wide and spacious place, relatively free from emotional turmoil or narrow dogmatic interpretations and quarrels, a place where every view could be articulated, discussed, challenged, and considered.After Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 62
the emotional storms of my years in Hong Kong, struggling with the implications of doctrines that divided people, the university was a haven for my soul.The people I became close to within the university community were to become mentors and role models for the next phase of my life. The one notable emotional challenge of university life has been learning how to tolerate the intense awareness of one’s own ignorance, and not be paralyzed by this as one delves into the huge stores of accumulated human knowledge.A vivid memory of my first formal event as a master’s degree student at the University of London illustrates this point. It was a cocktail party to welcome new graduate students, and my professor and mentor, Brian Holmes, made a short speech to introduce all of us to his style and expectations. In his hand, he waved a lengthy bibliography, which each of us was to take home, and his advice was simple and clear: “Read as you please, and come to see me, if you dare!” And so I began to explore this new spiritual home, the university.That was September . The move to London was a fundamental shift, from which there would be no turning back. I have given this chapter the title “Apprentice Scholar” as it was the period from to that provided my induction into the university community, with my appointment as assistant professor at the University of Toronto in July signalling a new phase of life, and thus a new chapter for this volume. Over these eight years of induction into scholarly life, I was fortunate to be associated with three excellent universities—the University of London, Fudan University, and the University of Toronto—and also to live in three great cities— London, Shanghai, and Toronto. Thus the three places of my heart—Europe, China, and Canada—now also became places of my mind as I explored the different academic traditions associated with universities in each.
F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 63
Graduate Student in London: Phase One, 1978–1980 My choice of London for graduate study was related to the University of London Institute of Education’s reputation in the field of comparative education, and the fact that this city and university were for me a gateway to Europe. For more than three years, I was privileged to live in a Georgian-style residence for graduate students of the institute, on the edge of Bloomsbury and adjacent to the British Museum. From the Elgin marbles to the first printed texts from ninth-century China, the museum was a world of cultural and historical treasures that I explored eagerly by attending weekly gallery talks. On weekends I visited nearly every museum in London and many of the historic churches. London was a city so different from Hong Kong, so comfortable in the layering of its architecture over centuries; the sense of pride and continuity of a civilization; the way in which modern buildings, such as the cluster of concert halls on the South Bank, where I often enjoyed musical performances, fitted into the urban landscape. By contrast, Hong Kong had already begun a frenzied destruction of its old colonial buildings as land prices rapidly rose with China’s opening up.They were replaced by skyscrapers that have turned Hong Kong’s skyline into one of uncompromising modernity. Our M.A. program was nicely structured to encourage extensive and wide-ranging reading, discussion, and debate, with two courses in the autumn and another two in the spring, but only one major assignment—a master’s thesis to be submitted in the summer of .We were expected to come to class well prepared for thorough and critical discussion of readings identified in advance, and often lively debates broke out among students of many different regional, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. I thrived in this environment, luxuriating in the long hours spent in the library reading basic works like the writings of Karl Popper, Max Weber,Talcott Parsons, and struggling with ways to Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 64
turn my interest in language reform in China into a researchable thesis topic by considering the interconnection of language reform with issues of curricular change and modernization, as well as comparisons with Turkey and Japan, which had also attempted language reform as part of modernization efforts.The fact that I had completed fairly rigorous education and theology programs on a part-time basis in Hong Kong while teaching and working on many social projects meant I knew how to organize my time effectively. By early January , I felt the thesis plan was under control and was confident I would do well in the program.Thus I asked Brian Holmes if he would allow me to attend his doctoral seminars, and prepare in advance for enrolment in the doctoral program as of September. This was tentatively accepted and confirmed without difficulty when I was awarded a distinction for the master’s degree in September. Perhaps my experience of accelerated education years earlier at my secondary school, Humberside Collegiate, had formed this habit of planning ahead in academic study, which has served me well ever since. This plan linked up with my growing fascination with China. One of my first actions on arriving in London was to identify the Chinese Embassy, in Portland Square, and to summon up courage to ask for a meeting with Madame Liu, the person responsible for education. My first meeting was in October , and by March I had a confirmed appointment as a foreign expert to teach English at Fudan University in Shanghai. Since their term began in early September, and my master’s degree program would be completed only at the end of September , it was decided that I would take up the post in February after the Chinese New Year vacation in Shanghai.This gave me six months to begin doctoral studies before going to Shanghai, where I would use the two years for field research. What stimulated this rapid and effective planning was the intellectual excitement I felt after my first meeting with Madame Liu. She had mentioned the possibility of an appointment to Fudan University on our first meeting in October, which was to be F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 65
confirmed the following March. Meanwhile, in my wide-ranging readings on China and higher education I stumbled upon the story of the founding of Fudan University in , which resulted from a dispute between French Jesuits and Ma Xiangbo, a Chinese scholar of distinction and former Jesuit, who had donated significant family property for the creation of “a new style university that would keep pace with western universities.”This story intrigued me and I came to feel it might be a microcosm from which I could explore the creation and development of modern universities in China, and the conflicts that arose in the process of introducing clusters of values from the West associated with the European medieval university, modern French and German universities, as well as American and Soviet universities—the four distinctive Western models that had the most significant impact over the twentieth century. My doctoral thesis was later to be titled “German, French, Soviet and American University Models and the Evaluation of Chinese Higher Education Policy since .” How exciting to know that I would have the opportunity of teaching and research for two years at one of China’s best-known universities, whose founding had resulted from deep-rooted conflicts over values of scholarship and higher learning between China and Europe.This topic for doctoral study was already developing apace in my mind as I attended the lively doctoral seminars Brian Holmes held weekly in the spring of . By February , before departing for Shanghai, I was ready to present an outline of my research plan, submitting it to the critical scrutiny and lively questioning of about fifty faculty and students who attended this exciting weekly event. My preparation for the two-year teaching period in Shanghai thus included reading into Chinese and European traditions of higher learning so that I would be prepared to observe closely and interrogate everything on the Fudan University campus, from the architecture of the buildings to the experiences and ideas of senior professors and the leadership. Other aspects of preparation included taking a course in the autumn of in Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 66
teaching English as a foreign language, and collecting teaching materials that might be useful. I also had several meetings with two university teachers from the Mainland who were among the first to come to England for graduate studies after the end of the Cultural Revolution, and who were able to give me a good sense of how I might best contribute. Other experiences that enriched this study year in London were two visits abroad, organized by the Department of Comparative Education, to give us the opportunity to broaden our horizons. There was an annual study tour to the Soviet Union in December , which opened the way for my first and only visit to Moscow and Leningrad. We visited schools, from kindergarten to the secondary level, a pedagogical institute for teacher training, and other technical and academic institutions. There were many opportunities to ask questions and discuss views of education, as well as issues in comparative education.We each wrote a report on one of the institutions visited, and these were compiled into a volume of readings to be shared with other students. This was a tremendously valuable experience professionally, and also afforded insights that were important for my thesis research. Our visit to the Hermitage and several of the exquisite historical buildings in the Kremlin gave me a strong sense of the deep European roots of Russian civilization. In many ways, the socialist system had allowed the Russians to preserve academic traditions at the secondary and tertiary level that had already been eroded in Western Europe. No wonder, I was later to conclude, the imposition of Soviet patterns of higher education on China in the s was to result in such intense cultural conflict, in spite of the shared political framework of Marxist-Leninist thought.This cultural dimension of China’s educational relations with the Western world would absorb my interest for two decades, long after the thesis itself was completed.While the Soviet Union may have been the East for Europe and North America during the Cold War, it was definitely the West for a China that had shaken F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 67
off other forms of imperialism in the thirties and forties, only to fall prey to Soviet “social imperialism” in the s. The other trip abroad organized by the Department of Comparative Education took us to Paris, where we visited UNESCO and the International Institute for Educational Planning in early May . It was my first visit to Paris and I revelled in the beauty and dignity of this city, to which I was later to return often, as I tried to understand some of the special characteristics of French-Chinese educational interaction over the twentieth century. Just as Paris regarded itself as the cultural capital of Europe, with French culture as the epitome of European civilization, China saw itself as the centre of East Asian civilization, the country that had bequeathed high culture to the whole region. It was a very exclusive relationship of mutual admiration, which gave a special flair to both the activities and the people on both sides who were caught up in this interaction. In the early months after my arrival in London, I was extremely restless and anxious to contribute to society after being cut off from all my philanthropic activities in Hong Kong. For a few hours each month, I provided Cantonese-English interpretation for new immigrants from China or Hong Kong who might face difficulties in communication in the law courts, in arbitration over employment issues, in the search for housing, or in medical appointments. I got to know a Chinese social worker, whom I liked to call Ronald Confucius as he shared the surname of the great master, Kung, and Ronald called upon me whenever he needed assistance. It gave me an interesting microcosmic view of sources of conflict and misunderstanding between Chinese and English people. Finally, I was privileged to make a number of close friends during this period in London, some going back to my days in Hong Kong. One whom I saw often and who offered very special support and understanding as I prepared to move to Shanghai was Dr. Lillian Pang, a supporter of the China Bible work. I had stayed at her home during my earlier visit to London in /. She Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 68
was a senior scientist at the Royal Cancer Research Institute in London, with a doctorate in pathology, and a focus on breast cancer research. She was born in China, and both of her parents had been medical doctors, as were five of her seven siblings.What was so remarkable about Lillian was how she had managed to keep her feet in the world of socialist China where her siblings worked and the Western world where she had a successful career and was active in the Chinese Christian Church. For me, Lillian embodied the possibility of reconciliation between worlds that were so different and made such different demands. My heart warms now as I think of the loving way in which she welcomed into her home this Canadian student, who had already become half Chinese by virtue of language studies, friendships, and career orientation.
Foreign Expert in Fudan University: Shanghai, 1980–1982 My move to Shanghai in February was accompanied by much anticipation and excitement. On arrival in Beijing, via Paris, I was met by the staff of the State Bureau of Foreign Experts (who were responsible for hiring all foreign teachers at the time), given a few days to stay at the Friendship Hotel in Beijing while being taken to see the main sights along with another newly arrived foreign expert from England, then put on the train for Shanghai. Once I arrived in Shanghai, Fudan claimed me for its own, giving me excellent accommodation in the old Jin Jiang Hotel near Huai Hai Road, once the Avenue Joffre in the centre of the French concession, with French-style architecture evident in some of the buildings.Authentic French croissants were still available in nearby bakeries, whose chefs had been trained long ago. Opposite the hotel on Mao Ming Road was the Jin Jiang Club, originally established as a French club in the s, with an amazing -metre swimming pool elaborately decorated in fine French-style mosaic F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 69
tiles. Mao had reportedly enjoyed swimming in the club’s swimming pool on trips to Shanghai.As the trial of Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife and a key figure in the Cultural Revolution power struggle, was publicized on TV in my first months in Shanghai, I often thought about the vicissitudes of political and social change over the century while swimming there. At this time, Beijing had already begun major construction to support China’s opening up to “the world, modernization, and the future.” By contrast, Shanghai was a city where all Westernstyle buildings reflecting its historical development were simply preserved and kept clean. Nothing new had been built since , nor were the narrow streets and fascinating back lanes of the central areas widened or developed. Public transport was limited to heavily overcrowded old-style buses, some of them running on trolleys. When my Austrian friend, Annemarie, visited in the New Year of with her son and her American daughter-in law, we were able to find the house where Annemarie had lived and run her kindergarten. It was only a stone’s throw from my hotel in the former French concession. There was also a Jewish synagogue nearby. To her American daughter-in-law, Shanghai looked “like a black-and-white movie of the s,” a phrase that aptly summed up the city’s appearance at that time.This situation continued until about , making Shanghai a great place for exploring the history of China’s relations with Western countries. Most historical buildings, which dated from the s and s, or even from the mid- to late-nineteenth century in some cases, were easily identifiable, and street maps from the s and s could still be used—only the names had been changed. Often on the weekends I spent a day reading in the Shanghai municipal library, which overlooked the People’s Park. Only gradually did I realize I was sitting in a building that was part of the former complex for horse racing, and then its unusual shape suddenly made sense! Fudan University was one of two or three major national universities that recruited the very brightest talent from the Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 70
whole of China. Indeed, Shanghai was a university city with more than fifty higher institutions, including a major normal university, a number of excellent technological universities under central ministries such as those of the chemical industry and textiles, as well as a number of excellent municipal universities run by Shanghai’s own bureau of higher education. It had the same status as a provincial bureau and a much higher profile because of Shanghai’s importance as China’s major centre of industry and commerce. Fudan was located on a spacious campus northeast of the city, about thirteen kilometres from the Jin Jiang Hotel, and its architecture reflected both Chinese and Western styles in those buildings erected in the s and s when it was a private university. Later buildings were designed in the rather drab Soviet style of the s.There were about ten foreign experts (from Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Japan, and North America) teaching in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. There was a considerable community of foreign experts living at the Jin Jiang Hotel at the time, though some Shanghai universities had already built their own residences for their foreign teachers and guests. It was a privileged lifestyle indeed to be driven to the campus every day, provided with meals and every amenity at the hotel, and lunch in the foreign students’ dining room on campus.While local teaching staff had no offices and worked out of their modest apartments in buildings specially built for staff accommodation on campus, we were given spacious offices where students could come to consult with us. In addition, the university’s Foreign Affairs Office, popularly known as the Waiban, arranged cultural activities and trips to places of interest for us. Some foreigners were frustrated by what they perceived as constraints on their freedom imposed by the Waiban, but I found the conveniences and courtesies provided were wonderful. I was able to focus on teaching, in the initial period, and then gradually give attention to research whenever possible. I felt it was important to gain the Waiban’s F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 71
confidence first through a serious commitment to excellence in teaching before asking for various kinds of support and consideration for the research work.This approach worked well, and I was never blocked or hindered in anything I wished to do. The colleagues who had the most direct influence on my work were four women—the party secretary, the department chair, and two senior professors from the English section of the department. The department chair was reputed to have served as interpreter for Zhou Enlai, and was later promoted to a senior position in the Shanghai government, while the two women professors had come to Fudan from St. John’s University. Fudan’s vice-president for foreign affairs was an outstanding physicist, Professor Xie Xide, who had completed a doctorate at MIT in solid state physics in the early fifties and then returned to China and served the university with distinction. She was appointed president of Fudan a few years later, the first woman president of a major national university. Shortly after my arrival, she invited me to a welcome dinner and I was later to get to know her quite well. However, it was the students who were the most remarkable actors in this drama of China’s reopening after a decade of isolation during the Cultural Revolution and three decades of Communist rule.There were four groups of students in the class of and two in the class of whom I taught.Their ages ranged from the early twenties to thirty-five. Because of Fudan’s status, it attracted the very best students who came from a range of different family backgrounds: old intellectual families who had suffered under Communism, high-cadre families who had been winners within the system until the Cultural Revolution, and just ordinary families with bright and hard-working young people. Most of the students had had extensive experience travelling around the country, initially doing rural labour in the fields and often later engaging in projects such as establishing rural schools and factories during the long ten years when higher education was inaccessible to them. I was originally assigned to teach courses in intensive and extensive reading, as well as English conversation, but soon I was allowed Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 72
to focus on journalistic English, which involved reading and discussing articles from newspapers and magazines in English. I was given a free hand in selecting material and chose from the English Guardian Weekly,American magazines such as Time and Newsweek, as well as the Canadian magazine Macleans.While not trained in journalism, I did a lot of related reading, and prepared classes so that students took in linguistic, social, and political aspects of the use of English in the media. Class discussions were lively, and students’ facility with English style and vocabulary, as well as their ability to develop good arguments, progressed quickly. Of course most already had a good standard.They were also voracious readers in English, and I energetically collected novels and other books from my ever-supportive family and other connections to develop an informal lending library. My most exciting course assignment was to develop and teach a course in Western classical and Biblical literature. Most of the English major students were doing courses in English literature, from John Milton onward, and had quite a lot of difficulty with the many classical and Biblical allusions.The department leadership found out about my background in the Greek and Latin classics, and asked me if I would prepare a course on classics in translation, drawing on the rich but rather musty library materials untouched since in this area. In the end, we decided to focus on key works in Greek literature and selected passages from the Old Testament, as these would be most useful as background for the students. What a pleasure it was for me to prepare a textbook for students that included works such as the Apology of Socrates, the Poetics of Aristotle, Oedipus the King, and selected Old Testament passages from the Books of Moses through to the major prophets. Once the textbook was prepared for printing, I reported to Mother, I prepared detailed lecture notes: “It takes lots of time, specially a lot of reading for preparing the lectures, but it’s so interesting, and I can’t imagine anything I’d rather be doing!” (March , ). I taught the course twice, in the spring F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 73
and autumn terms of . Somehow I felt it was one more example of a tendency in Chinese contexts for the leadership to get to know people at a deep level, discern any hidden talents or gifts they may have, and use them to the full. It was a delight to share some of the knowledge and insights from my classical studies at the University of Toronto and my Biblical studies in the London University diploma program with these bright students. The wonderful groups of students I taught over those two years were thirsty for knowledge after the difficult years when serious study was declared politically incorrect and political activism was the order of the day.Yet it took time for them to understand the high expectations and standards I set for their work, as they tended to think that foreign experts were there to entertain them, and some foreign experts did indeed play that role. However, few of the students disappointed me in the end. In the first few months of my work at Fudan, two classes of students persuaded me to help them celebrate the May th movement by producing a drama in English.The work that went into selecting the plays, intensive practice over about five weeks, and finally the production itself was a great stimulus for their English capacity and dramatic expression. In my small collection of photos there are some featuring individual students acting out their parts and the group in costume, with their foreign expert.They are a highly intelligent, fun-loving group of young men and women caught up in the world they were creating through theatre. There were a number of older students who participated in my classes as auditors and were not expected to meet examination requirements or gain a formal qualification. One of them was a middle-aged teacher of English from the city of Hami, in the far northwestern autonomous region of Xinjiang. Once in an English conversation class, students were encouraged to share their personal stories with the group. Mr. Zhao offered to tell his story. In the early fifties he lived with his family in Shanghai and had a promising career in the People’s Liberation Army. He studied at Fudan at a time when getting a graduation qualification mattered Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 74
far less than promotion within the army. Just as things were going extremely well with his career, he was called in by a superior and questioned about the woman he was engaged to marry. She had relatives in Taiwan, and he was warned that if he did not break off the engagement, he would be dismissed immediately. He told us what a blow this was, and how he had searched his heart as to how to respond. Finally he decided he would not break with the woman he loved, no matter what the cost. As a result, he was expelled from the army at once and sent to the far northwestern region of Xinjiang where, after years of difficulty, he finally found a place to use his talents as a secondary school teacher of English in Hami. Only now, twenty-five years later, did he have the chance to return to his native city of Shanghai and the university campus where he had studied English so long before.The final point of his story made a deep impression on the listening students:“I love my wife now as much as the day I married her, and I have never regretted my decision.” At a time when young people were likely to be highly pragmatic about their choice of marriage partners, and there was considerable cynicism over the betrayals of the Cultural Revolution, this simple declaration had a noticeable effect on Mr. Zhao’s younger classmates. Before this he had been one of a shadowy group of auditors, with no proper student status, who were trying to catch up. From then on, they treated him with a special respect. I also got to know him quite well, and corresponded with him for some time after he returned to Hami. A photo he sent to me in February shows Mr. Zhao with a quiet demeanour and gentle smile, beside his wife and two beautiful daughters. On the back, he had written in Chinese:“We will never forget you, and we hope the friendship between the Canadian and Chinese people will always prosper!” My own research had also proceeded apace during the two years. I had located much interesting material on the history of Fudan University in the library’s archive, particularly early student newspapers, university magazines, and related material going back F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 75
to before the May th movement of . I was also able to interview about ten older professors who had had a long affiliation with the university and were able to share aspects of its history. Before leaving Shanghai in March , I travelled to Shandong Normal University in the city of Jinan, capital of Shandong province, on China’s East coast north of Shanghai.There I spent two days talking with Professor Zhang Yi. Originally a student of the secondary school affiliated with St. John’s University, he was expelled for taking part in the May th movement.Afterwards he spent much of his career at Fudan University as student, professor, and finally president. I also explored some of the historical sites in Shanghai associated with the early history of Fudan, including its first campus, now a secondary school located in a prestigious urban area, known as Xu Jia Hui after the Ming dynasty Catholic scholar Xu Guangqi. There I located and photographed an old bell, which I knew from my research had been used by Fudan professor and distinguished journalist, Shao Lizi, to arouse Fudan students on the early morning of May , , when he first got the news of the May th movement from Beijing. My photograph of this bell, taken in the autumn of , shows a stark wooden structure, holding a large school bell, neglected and ignored in the corner of the schoolyard. I was able to meet and get to know the granddaughter of Fudan’s founder, the Catholic scholar and statesman, Ma Xiangbo, who had set up Zhendan University (L’Aurore) in , Fudan University in , then Furen University in the s.As I write, I am holding in my hand a treasured photo which Ma Yuzhang gave me, of herself with her grandfather, taken in the s, when she lived with him during the last years of his life.A beautiful young woman, dressed gracefully in a long dress and jacket, she sits beside and a little below the old gentleman, who is dressed in a long scholar’s robe, and looks solemnly into the camera as he holds an open book in his hands. She was able to fill me in on many details of his life and thought which were not easily discovered in Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 76
published materials, given that the Catholic community was proud of his leadership and outspoken voice for democracy and patriotism, but did not wish to take into account the fact that he had had a family, after leaving the Jesuit order.The edited book I published in , Ma Xiangbo and the Mind of Modern China, was a culmination of many years of interest in this important thinker, who I believe succeeded in integrating fundamental aspects of European and Chinese thought at an unusually profound level. Another aspect of my research involved improving my ability to read classical Chinese and explore elements of China’s rich intellectual traditions.Within a month of starting my teaching at Fudan, I became an auditor for a basic course in Confucian thought for students of Fudan’s philosophy department in Mandarin. I had little difficulty in following the lectures and readings, and found the course stimulating.More important,I got to know one of the other auditors, who persuaded me to take a more serious approach and actually read the Four Books of the Confucian canon under his guidance. For about a year he and his brother supervised my studies. Each week, I was instructed to copy several pages of text, leaving space between the lines for explanation.As a way of recording the correct interpretation of the text, given in the weekly lesson, I was expected to write a full translation of each line in modern Chinese in the spaces that had been left. Occasionally there was time for discussion but that was rare. Normally the lesson began with me being instructed to read the passage under consideration aloud in Mandarin. One time, however, my teacher noted that he had heard I could also speak Cantonese, and asked me to try reading the passage aloud in Cantonese.This was difficult but I did my best to read the characters in the Cantonese dialect, a feat that was followed by exclamations of admiration. “Now read the passage in English,” my teacher requested, thinking he would taste the flavour of one more strange dialect.“That’s impossible,” I said,“it would have to be translated first.”That gave me my first awareness of a very traditional Chinese mindset, which puts China at the centre of the F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 77
world, and sees all languages and civilizations as mere offshoots of Chinese. It would, of course, have been possible to read the text in Korean or Japanese. There were so many rich aspects of my two years in Shanghai. I travelled to different parts of the country and developed friendships with other foreign experts who shared similar interests. Our teaching contracts entitled us to one trip each year, organized by the Foreign Affairs Department. In the summer of , my British, American, and Japanese colleagues and I went through the Yangzi gorges to Chengdu, where we climbed Mount Ermei and visited the giant Leshan Buddha, then went on to Kunming and finally to Guilin, where we enjoyed the fabled cruise on the Li River, surrounded by surreal mountain scenery that one thought existed only in Chinese paintings. In February , I went with a German teacher to Fujian province, on the southeast coast, taking the train all the way from Shanghai down to the provincial capital of Fuzhou, then going by bus to the ancient port of Quanzhou and finally Xiamen, once known as Amoy.The terrain, architecture, people, dialects, overall atmosphere, and stage of development were completely different from the southwestern hinterland, making me aware of how distinctive different regions of the country were.This region, which faced Taiwan and Southeast Asia, had considerable investment and support from overseas Chinese,was modernizing more rapidly than Shanghai, and had a completely different cultural climate than the inland provinces of Sichuan,Yunnan, and Guangxi. In April I spent several days in the northern port city of Tianjin, the city where Mrs.Yung, my Chinese mum, was born and grew up. It had amazing architectural heritage from the six nations who had once had concessions there. I was invited by a Hong Kong organization that was seeking to establish some academic exchanges. It was my very first experience of consulting, and it gave me pleasure and a sense of empowerment that I could write a report that would provide useful guidelines for setting up these exchanges.A month later, on the May st Labour Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 78
holiday, I visited Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius in Shandong province on the east coast north of Shanghai, together with an American colleague, Barrett Mandel, who was also a foreign expert at Fudan. We climbed Mount Tai, China’s most sacred mountain, which every emperor visited at least once to show his respect to the great teacher. Finally, let me say something about the friends and companions of these years in Shanghai. Basically one had two choices—friendships with local Chinese whom one might meet informally in different ways, or with other outsiders who were part of the foreign expert community. Because of my many years in Hong Kong, I felt comfortable mingling with Chinese people.Through attendance at local churches, which were just opening their doors again after the Cultural Revolution, I was able to make a few friends outside the university community. One elderly Christian gentleman, Mr. Ni, whom I had met by introduction, accompanied me to church on one of my first Sundays in Shanghai. He brought along a middle-aged Cantonese-speaking woman, Mrs. Yang Yayu, to meet me, knowing my fluency in Cantonese.Within half an hour I discovered that she had known Helen Willis well over many years. She had been the best friend and schoolmate of Miss Willis’s one and only adopted Chinese daughter.Thus I was to become close friends with someone whose ties with one of my beloved “old people” in Hong Kong were as strong as mine. It was a thread of continuity throughout all the dramatic changes in my life, and it reminded me of things Miss Willis had told me about the Christian Book Room during its years in Shanghai, as well as her personal experience living there.Yang Yayu’s husband had studied theology, and continued to write expository texts on the Bible for informal sharing in the Christian community. Her mother was still alive, and her younger sister, an accomplished nurse in a local hospital, lived just around the corner from the Jin Jiang Hotel with her family. I was welcomed into this extended family with open arms and often invited for meals on special occasions, such as Christmas and Easter. When my parents paid a brief visit to F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 79
Shanghai in the autumn of they too were invited for a meal by this warm-hearted Cantonese family. I also made a number of close friends within the community of foreign experts and foreign students. Overall, it was rather a strange, eclectic collection of individuals from all over the world. Some had come to escape difficult circumstances in their personal lives; others to expose themselves to a new cultural experience; still others were attracted to China’s socialist system; some overseas Chinese were looking for their roots, and came to reconnect with the place of their childhood or education. Many other circumstances lay behind people’s choices and decisions to come to Shanghai. Since China had opened up so recently, the Chinese authorities responsible for selecting and appointing these people were not easily able to discriminate between those who could truly make a contribution and those who might cause more trouble than their teaching was worth. A common characteristic of many was an eagerness to bring about immediate change and reform, not only in terms of teaching methods, but also in textbooks, departmental organization, student management, and other features of university life. Some also suffered from paranoia, a sense that they were being watched or controlled, simply because they could not easily understand how decisions were made and why certain restrictions were put upon their movements. It was exciting and almost irresistible to plot how to get around these restrictions, for example, by travelling to a forbidden destination. As a budding scholar of comparative education, I noted how difficult it was for those who liked to see themselves as excellent problem solvers to adopt the relatively passive role of creative and perceptive observers of all that went on around them in the initial period of their work. Their own educational experience had never prepared them for this, yet it was essential if they were to adapt to a system so different from the ones they had known, and work effectively with Chinese colleagues to bring about change.That was my conclusion after trying to resolve many conflicts between foreign Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 80
experts and the famous, or infamous, Waiban, which was supposed to manage them. For me personally, many friendships developed with people I might never have met in the normal circumstances of a university career in my field.Two distinguished scientists who came to visit Fudan University for different reasons became good friends. One was a biologist from York University in Canada, Robert Haynes. The other was a professor of chemistry from Harvard University, William Doering. These friendships gave me the opportunity to see issues in university development in China from the scientist’s perspective, which brought another dimension to my consideration of the problems dealt with in my thesis research. These were also long-lasting and rewarding personal friendships, crossing the boundaries that often divide the humanities from the sciences. I also made some lasting friendships among the students who came to Fudan from Europe and North America for graduate research or language study.The one who remains closest to me still,Anne Cheng, is an accomplished scholar of Chinese philosophy and thought. Born in France in the fifties, the daughter of a well-known Chinese literary scholar who had moved there in the forties, she graduated from the prestigious École Normale Supérieure. I have often jokingly noted how her education and scholarly accomplishments bring together those two supremely confident, if not arrogant, world cultures, the French and the Chinese. Her personal struggle with the tensions of a complex family situation, spanning the two countries and civilizations, has made her a particularly empathetic listener in some of my times of trial. Finally, I must note the change in my own personal development. Perhaps it was only after I removed myself from the emotional strains of doctrinal controversy that I could open my heart to deep feelings for the opposite sex.Thus over my years as an apprentice scholar, I experienced more than one “affair of the heart.” However, marriage was still not a priority for me. My F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 81
focus remained on developing a career in university teaching and scholarship that could contribute to China’s opening up to the world, both in practical ways and through a deeper understanding of the cultural conflicts underlying China’s educational relations with Western countries. In March , I left China and Fudan University, sad to say goodbye to my students and colleagues, but energized for the next phase of my work—completing my doctoral studies in London, and seeking a university teaching position. I had already begun to feel that I might be able to make a more significant contribution to Chinese higher education if I became well established in a Canadian university, and could foster exchanges and co-operation at the institutional level, or indeed the national level.A particular encouragement, both practically and in terms of morale, was my success in obtaining a fellowship from the Association of Commonwealth Universities, designed to assist students from Commonwealth countries with graduate studies in other parts of the Commonwealth. The fellowship covered tuition, which had more than doubled since I departed for Shanghai in , as well as a stipend for living expenses and books. I thus arrived in London, after a stopover in Hong Kong to see old friends, in April , ready to focus all my energies on the next stage of my apprenticeship as a scholar.
Graduate Student in London: Phase Two, 1982–1984 In April , I moved back into the wonderful three-storey Georgian-style residence. I was returning to a city I had come to love.While in Shanghai, in addition to improving my classical Chinese, I took lessons in French from a French student at Fudan, and made links with the French academic community. I wrote a number of papers while in Shanghai on the history of Fudan University, analyzing both the early French influences and Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 82
resulting conflicts as well as the later American influences. I also presented a paper for Fudan’s Founder’s Day on the concept of the medieval European university, which was published in Chinese in Fudan’s prestigious journal of the social sciences. On the invitation of a senior French sinologist and historian of the Nationalist period, Marie-Claire Bergère (whom I had met in Shanghai), I gave a paper in Paris in June , taking this opportunity to extend my connections to the academic community in Paris. I particularly wanted to meet Marianne BastidBruguière, whose work on Chinese education, both in the Qing dynasty and the modern period, had been an inspiration.Though my French was limited and I felt myself very much the gauche young scholar, the rewards I got from this trip to Paris encouraged me on many later occasions to be proactive in seeking out contacts for scholarly interaction.The university was truly proving to be a community not limited by national or linguistic boundaries, an open and welcoming place for sharing ideas and pursuing knowledge. I was tempted to spend several weeks or even months in France to pursue various angles of the history of French-Chinese educational co-operation, but my professor in London, Brian Holmes, advised me to sketch out the whole thesis in a preliminary draft, and then fill in some areas of historical detail that might be important.Thus back in London in July I wrote a full preliminary draft of the thesis. I had extensive original materials on the history of Fudan, as well as a broad overview of the development of China’s modern higher education from to the s. I had read widely and developed ideal typical models to clarify core features of the European medieval university and the distinctive types of modern university developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in France, Germany, the United States, and the Soviet Union. It was now a matter of piecing all these materials together into a thesis that would be original in its argumentation, and achieve my goal of a cultural explanation for some of the key conflicts in the development of F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 83
universities in China over the twentieth century. I hoped this would provide a reference point for designing forms of academic co-operation between China and Western countries that would be mutually enhancing rather than ridden with conflict. The thesis was my main focus of attention and I was grateful for the British model of the research degree, which set no course requirements for the doctoral program. In the spring of , I obtained a part-time teaching position at Whitelands College, then a part of the Roehampton Institute of Higher Education in Putney. I was introduced by Brian Holmes to teach a course in comparative education to undergraduate students preparing to be teachers in a bachelor of education program. Classes were held one afternoon a week, and I was delighted with this first opportunity to teach comparative education, the field I had been studying with such passion. The atmosphere of the college fascinated me. It boasted a history earlier than all British universities except Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, and London, and was founded by the Church of England as a college of education to train primary school teachers.With its programs now upgraded to degree level and broadened beyond teacher education, it still maintained many of the characteristics of the traditional normal college, with a large percentage of women students and a strong ethos of moral responsibility and service to the local community. I remember feeling a sense of its unique ethos when I entered the campus and passed by the gatehouse, where all those who entered were expected to pay their respects to a fatherly figure responsible to keep an eye on all who came and went.This was similar to the situation in Chinese university campuses, but very different from the universities I knew in Europe and North America. Only much later, as I was meditating on the cultural and epistemological demands of the transition from college of education to self-accrediting university for the Hong Kong Institute of Education, did I realize how the ethos of the normal colleges of France, England, and the US, founded in the nineteenth century Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 84
with a completely different mission from that of the university, formed a kind of bridge to Chinese traditions of scholarship, which were so different from those of the European medieval university. A paper published in Teaching Education in spring of elaborates on this point. The other important aspect of my second period in London was the development of close links with scholars doing work similar to mine, and involvement in various scholarly organizations, from the London Association of Comparative Education (LACE) to the Association Francophone d’Education Comparée (AFEC), the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE), and the World Council of Comparative Education Societies. In the spring of I made a second trip to Paris, followed by a visit to Germany. Through a chance encounter with the well-known German professor of comparative education, Oskar Anweiler, at a conference in London, I was introduced to his doctoral student, Juergen Henze, who was working on contemporary Chinese educational issues. Juergen welcomed me to Germany and helped me to interview various German officials involved in academic exchange activities with China in Bonn. Together we prepared a paper for the biannual meeting of the CESE, held in Würzburg in July . Over the subsequent years we collaborated in a number of book projects, and developed a friendship that has lasted until now. In Paris I also got to know Dr. Françoise Kreissler, a French scholar who was writing a doctoral thesis on German cultural influences in nationalist China from the late nineteenth century up to the Nazi period in the s. Her work helped me greatly in understanding that aspect of the modern history of Chinese higher education. The following year, in the spring of , I made a similar trip to France and Germany to coordinate a workshop for the World Congress of Comparative Education Societies to be held in Paris in July .This time I found time to spend some days in Lyons, visiting the archive in the municipal library, which held fascinating materials from the Chinese student worker movement F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 85
during the First World War, which had brought Chinese such as Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai to France. Even more interesting for me was material about the Sino-French University, established with campuses in Lyons, Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou in the early s.This university was one of the efforts of that giant of modern Chinese intellectual life, Cai Yuanpei, who was an admirer of both French and German traditions of higher learning, and had reformed Beijing University in along the lines of the famous University of Berlin, with its emphasis on autonomy and academic freedom. It was an inspiring precedent for scholarly co-operation that embodied mutual respect and mutual understanding across cultures. The summer of ended my London sojourn in the best of all possible ways. My doctoral thesis was now complete, and I defended it successfully in mid-July. Just before the defence, I spent a week in Paris coordinating a workshop on Chinese education in interaction with the international community as part of the th World Congress of Comparative Education Societies.Almost all of the scholars whom I had gotten to know and co-operated with over the two years came to present papers. Out of this colloquium a couple of years later I was able to develop an edited book that encompassed many aspects of China’s educational relations with the Western world and Japan. Marianne Bastid agreed to co-edit the volume, and wrote an authoritative historical overview that linked the chapters analyzing China’s historical relations with Japan, the United States, France, Germany, Canada, and the Soviet Union in education with the chapters on contemporary Chinese educational development. It was one of the first such volumes to have substantial input from a Mainland Chinese contributor, Mr. Huang Shiqi, an experienced retired official of China’s Ministry of Education, who gave a perspective from within on China’s experience with educational exchanges in the period since .The volume was called China’s Education and the Industrialised World: Studies in Cultural Transfer (). Its Chinese translation, which came out Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 86
in as part of a series on Chinese cultural history under the title Zhongwai bijiao jiaoyu shi (A History of Chinese and Foreign Comparative Education), probably had a wider impact than the English, given the tremendous and growing interest in this theme in Chinese universities. It was now time for me to move back to Canada, where I hoped to find a university position, although I knew well that it would not be an easy search. I was fortunate in securing a twoyear post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC) that would cover my basic living expenses while I continued my research at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), affiliated with the University of Toronto. In the autumn of , I returned to Canada for a month, and met Professor Cicely Watson, who was to become my mentor and the supervisor of my post-doctoral work.Thus the last phase of my eight years as an apprentice scholar took place in Toronto, the city of my childhood, which I had left seventeen years before in .
Post-doctoral Fellow at OISE, University of Toronto, 1984–1986 The move back to Toronto in August was as demanding a transition as any of the others I had made over the years.The city had changed so tremendously since I left for Hong Kong in that I felt very much a stranger. It was easier to be a stranger in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and London, the cities I had lived in with the expectation that much adjustment would be needed on my part, but to find myself a stranger in the city of my childhood was more difficult.The friends I had had in university no longer lived in Toronto, and I had to make new friendships. My family was very supportive, but they were absorbed in their own lives and work, with all of my siblings long married and all but one having children of their own. F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 87
I found a small apartment a short distance from the university, not far from where our original Brethren meeting hall had been. Often I wandered through the areas that were slums during my childhood and marvelled at the gentrification that had transformed these neighbourhoods into relatively classy urban communities. Another striking change was the growing number of ethnic communities whose languages were used in street signs, and whose shops, restaurants, and churches or other houses of worship created colour and diversity in the city core—Little Italy, Portugal Village, Chinatown, and a Korean neighbourhood were all within a short walk of where I lived. In addition, the striking Toronto waterfront had developed into a very pleasant area with parks, restaurants, and upscale residential communities replacing the ugly old industrial buildings and factories I had seen in my childhood. The changes were thus pleasant ones, but I had to make an effort to get reacquainted with this city after my years of absence. It was great to have an office in the Higher Education Group and complete freedom to arrange my time as I wished.There were no courses, no requirements, not even a thesis to be written in the conditions for the post-doctoral fellowship—simply a report to be submitted by my supervisor and mentor once a year, confirming that I was on course with my research plan. OISE was founded in , just two years before my graduation from University of Toronto, as a major centre for graduate studies and field-based research in education. My mentor, Cicely Watson, was a founding member of the institute and the most senior woman professor on the staff. I was thus in very good hands. Still I found it extremely difficult to establish a new pattern of work in this new environment, where the lack of structured demand upon me led me to feel diffident and uncertain.When Cicely suggested that I meet with her once a month on a Friday afternoon to discuss the progress of my work, I decided to write one paper each month to give her for discussion, and to ensure that I kept on track in following my research plan. I also decided to take a trip to Washington, DC, to become acquainted with Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 88
different aspects of US educational relations with China, a burgeoning field that was an important part of the comparative study I hoped to complete under my post-doctoral fellowship. I had had ample opportunities to do interviews at the British Council in London, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and other German agencies in Bonn, and the French cultural and educational ministries in Paris. Now it was time to slot in the American and Canadian parts of the picture. In , before I left China, I did interviews at the American and Canadian embassies in Beijing to get a preliminary understanding of their programs and approaches. However, I had no special research funding for this trip, and was held back by uncertainty of my own status and my own unimportance in the wider scheme of things. Who would be willing to talk to me in that great American capital, which I had never visited before? Fortunately, I took heart from the tremendous rewards of my visits to France and Germany while a doctoral student in London, and decided that no matter how painful my lack of confidence, I would simply ignore my feelings and go. I interviewed people in the National Academy of Sciences and the World Bank, who were involved in many interesting projects for the development of Chinese universities, and met several influential scholars doing research on the subject of United States–China relations.The American colleagues I got to know in these months took my scholarship seriously and welcomed me into their active and stimulating community. While working on my research and auditing a wide range of classes at OISE to gain a better understanding of the teaching situation, I also began to apply for university positions. I was only too aware that my post-doctoral fellowship could not be renewed after the second year, and was intended as a bridge to a more permanent position in the university community.When I was shortlisted for a position at a major American university, Cicely Watson took action to have me appointed as assistant professor in the Higher Education Group the following year, on the under F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 89
standing that she would be retiring by that time.This was a rather unorthodox thing to do, but the respect in which she was held, and the support she gained from the rest of the small department, made it possible. She did not want to lose me! By the end of March of the first year of my fellowship, I had a letter of appointment in hand, for July , as assistant professor. My dream of a university teaching position in Canada had been realized more quickly than I could have imagined or hoped. I still had more than a year left of the post-doctoral fellowship before my appointment began, which gave me the opportunity to complete the apprenticeship in a measured way.The two aspects of the apprenticeship that were extremely valuable, in retrospect, were the preparation for a graduate-level teaching career, and new developments in my approach to research that went beyond the approach of the doctoral thesis. On the teaching side, I audited seven half courses that year, listening, observing, reading, and taking part in discussions. It gave me the chance to observe a variety of teaching styles for graduate-level courses, which were typically fairly small, about ten to twenty students in a class.This, in addition to the course I taught to undergraduates in London and my years of teaching bright undergraduates in Shanghai, prepared me for the first class I taught at OISE in the spring of . On the research side, two major developments took place in my thinking that added new dimensions to the approach I had developed under the guidance of Brian Holmes.The first related to the issue of the value neutrality of scientific research, a principle that Holmes considered fundamental, following on the ideas of sociologists such as Max Weber and philosophers of science, such as Karl Popper.The second related to the role of subjective insight and understanding in research. In my doctoral work, I interviewed a number of older professors and people such as Ma Yuzhang, the granddaughter of Fudan University’s founder, but my purpose had been more to clarify and supplement factual material from archives or other written sources, and less to gain Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 90
an understanding of their subjective views on the questions I was exploring.With this new phase of my research, it finally became possible to visit Chinese universities and interview senior members of the leadership in areas such as teaching, research, student management, and international relations, as well as professors in different fields, including many who had returned from abroad.Thus one could seek out their views and understandings of the dramatic reform process underway, and the relative value of different contributions from Western countries and Japan, as well as international agencies.This was something that had not been possible in the work on the doctoral thesis. Let me take up the issue of value neutrality first. I noted earlier my efforts to become familiar with United States–China relations; there was a parallel set of exciting developments in Canadian relations with China. Canada had restored diplomatic relations in , seven years earlier than the United States, and had had a fairly active national exchange program for Canadian and Chinese students. By the early s, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council had an agreement with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for the exchange of researchers. In , the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) signed its first agreement with China’s Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade, and initiated a range of development projects in agriculture, energy, and education. Management education and language education were two areas of focus in the early years, followed by a wide range of university linkage programs designed to assist Chinese universities in new program development. After my visit to Washington in the autumn of , I made a trip to Ottawa to find out more about CIDA’s projects as well as academic programs under the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.The people I talked to were interested in and impressed by the comparative research I had done on other countries, including the United States.Thus in the following spring, when OISE’s assistant director for Research and Field Services put in a proposal to CIDA to evaluate two of the initial CIDA F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 91
projects relating to education, she was astonished to learn from her CIDA counterparts that OISE had the best-known person in this field already working on its staff! She called Cicely Watson and demanded to know who this person was. As a humble postdoctoral fellow, I of course had not come to her attention in a large institution, with several thousand graduate students and about professors. I was indeed the only person in OISE with a thorough ongoing knowledge of Chinese higher education, and with competency in Mandarin, China’s national language.The assistant director was ready to offer me a job on the spot to help her implement these consultancies in evaluation, but Cicely wisely warned me simply to offer advice, keep to my scholarly work, and not get deflected from fulfilling my post-doctoral research plan. This involvement in advising the assistant director caused me to reflect on the issue of value neutrality. She and her colleagues were extremely competent in technical evaluation, having wellorganized procedures for collecting data and subjecting it to quantitative analysis, but who was to evaluate the goals? And who would examine the situation ten years later to see if the desired outcomes had taken root in lasting change, or if cultural or political dynamics in the context had made them irrelevant or, worse, the source of serious conflict? I thought about the Soviet Union’s tremendous contributions of technical assistance in the s that had enabled China to make considerable strides in industrial and scientific development, but had culminated in the total rejection of all external inputs in the Cultural Revolution and a devastating return to isolationism. It seemed to me that this new wave of projects of technical assistance from Western countries needed to be evaluated at a fundamental cultural level if they were to be successfully integrated into the change process initiated by Deng Xiaoping in . For this there needed to be a shared vision of the future, in which the values could be made explicit. It was not enough simply to offer value-neutral technologies to be slotted into a trajectory of change already underway. My research thus called me to seek out this kind Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 92
of broad framework for shared understanding, and I was thrilled to find a whole literature committed to envisioning preferred futures for the global community. Neither Marxist nor functionalist, this literature had been initiated by the Norwegian professor Johann Galtung, the first professor of peace studies, and taken up by a group of sociologists and political scientists from all over the world. It included figures such as Samuel Kim, Ali Mazrui, Ashis Nandy, and many others who styled their work at that time the “World Order Models Project.”Their intention was to envisage a future world order characterized by greater social justice, economic prosperity, and environmental sustainability. In this literature I found concepts that enabled me to create a framework for an ideal set of relations between China and Western countries, characterized by mutuality and ordered around the values of autonomy, equity, solidarity, and participation. With this as a value-explicit framework, open to discussion and debate but in no way neutral, I was able to sketch out a model for evaluating the policies and the practices of the various countries involved in educational contributions to China, and international agencies such as the World Bank, UNESCO, and UNDP, that would take into account these deeper cultural and political values. It would not be limited to mere technical questions of efficiency, effectiveness, and impact, which dominated the evaluation literature at that time.Through this method, it was possible to compare and contrast the different national approaches, and “measure” in a broad way, the degree to which they approximated genuine mutuality. All of this can be found in the volume I published in , on the basis of my post-doctoral research project, entitled China’s Universities and the Open Door. In working out this value-explicit approach to research, which was quite distinctive from anything I had learned from Brian Holmes, I have the sense that some of the passion of my early Christian beliefs may have found expression. A Hong Kong friend, Dr. Pauline Chan, who did her doctorate under Brian Holmes at the same time as I, commented that my passion to F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 93
evangelize during the years in Hong Kong had now been directed into new channels in the work I did for China.This was an interesting insight that can perhaps be judged more fully in the next chapter when I deal with the projects of educational co-operation that I initiated with CIDA’s support in China. This was the conceptual aspect of my research, while the decision to gain more subjective insights into the development of Chinese higher education through extensive interviews with members of university communities in China was a result of the new possibilities for collaborative research in China that had come with China’s opening up.This determination to listen to Chinese perspectives was also part of a reaction to a sense I had had during my two years in Shanghai that many Western sinologists came to China only to “mine the data,” whether that be archival data or newly emerging survey data.They often had little interest in or respect for the opinions and views of Chinese scholars themselves. This was, of course, the result of many different factors, such as the demands of sinological careers in Western universities, and the real constraints upon Chinese scholars who might have wanted but were unable to interact with colleagues from abroad in the early days of the opening up. In any case, soon after starting my post-doctoral work at OISE, I prepared a detailed research application to the joint program of the SSHRCC and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) for an opportunity to visit universities and government offices responsible for education and international collaboration in Beijing and throughout the northeastern region of China, which has three provinces.That was a region I never managed to visit while living in Shanghai, and due to similarities in its terrain to certain parts of Canada, there were a large number of CIDA-supported projects there in education, agriculture, energy, and forestry. My application was successful and in late August I set out for the first of what were to be many field trips in different regions of China. With the assistance of the CASS, which made many of the practical arrangements and Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 94
covered the cost of my travel, I was able to visit twenty-five universities and colleges in all three provinces, and carry out extensive interviews with vice-presidents, provosts, and heads of student affairs, research, and international co-operation in these institutions. I also visited a number of the CIDA-supported projects in education and training. It was a fantastic opportunity to collect extensive information and views on the reform of higher education, with a particular focus on agricultural education, since this was the leading sector in the first years of reform in China. I also became aware of the degree to which Chinese universities had a powerful shared or collective memory, since there had been little faculty mobility since the s and most professors and administrators had spent their whole lives at one institution. I was thus able to learn a lot about the history of particular institutions over the recent period, as these scholars enjoyed reminiscing on the past and giving their views on the present and future. In addition, they were usually willing to provide detailed statistical information on questions relating to finance, student enrolment in different fields, job assignment, and related topics.This successful research trip in the autumn of was a harbinger of many more to come, and an approach that became more and more collaborative as I found Chinese colleagues willing and eager to work with me in the research. The last two years of my apprenticeship were thus full of exciting developments in teaching and research.Toronto also afforded me a wonderful context for getting to know other scholars working on related issues and problems.The most striking opportunity took place in March when Professor Gail Kelly, the president-elect of the US-based Comparative and International Education Society, elected to hold that year’s annual meeting in the OISE building in Toronto.This provided me the opportunity of meeting many luminaries in the field, whose works I studied while in London, in addition to Gail Kelly herself, whose work I admired. These luminaries included scholars such as Harold Noah, Max Eckstein, Philip Altbach, Robert Arnove, Vandra F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 95
Masemann, and many others.That year I joined the society, and rarely missed a meeting in the years that followed. I was elected to the board in the early s, and to the vice-presidency in . On the personal side, these were also good years as I established myself in Toronto, bought a townhouse not far from the university once I was appointed assistant professor, and spent time with my parents and siblings.After all the years away, family get-togethers were treasured occasions for renewing my acquaintance with my siblings, and getting to know my nieces and nephews, who numbered twenty-one in . I also made a number of new friends, mainly within the university community, but also through my involvement with an Anglican church, St. Stephen’s, in my neighbourhood. My townhouse was to be shared with many different friends over the years, including quite a few Chinese scholars and students who needed a place to stay.
Conclusion: In Praise of My Intellectual Mentors In bringing this chapter to a close, I’d like to reflect on the gift of mentorship, which I believe was the most important element in my eight-year apprenticeship as a scholar.The development of a research program that would last a lifetime, teaching experience at the university level, as well as participation in scholarly associations in my field, were all important aspects of the apprenticeship. Each of these aspects gained in focus and clarity as the years passed. However, I am convinced that the single most important factor in my apprenticeship was the support of my intellectual mentors. First I want to pay tribute to Professor Brian Holmes, the supervisor of my doctoral thesis and chair of the Department of Comparative Education, my intellectual home when I lived in London. Brian was not an easy person to work under, but the Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 96
standards of scholarship he set and his brilliance and perceptiveness made all the difficulties worthwhile. I still believe his text, Comparative Education: Some Considerations of Method (), remains the most coherent and well-thought-out approach to the field,with its deep rooting in debates over the philosophy of science, and classical sociological issues of how to deal with values in education. He could skim through several chapters of a thesis draft, and pick out one core problem for discussion that went to the heart of the argument being developed. I remember this with particular vividness in the transition from the first to the second draft of my thesis, where there was a fundamental change in my understanding of the relation between external influences and the internal dynamics of change in the Chinese context. After retirement in , Brian continued to be active in scholarship and mentorship, and his death in , at the age of seventy-three, seemed premature to all of us who had been privileged to work with him. The mentor of my post-doctoral work in Toronto, Professor Cicely Watson, grew up in a working-class family in Montreal, then won a scholarship for doctoral study in history at Harvard University, and went on to do post-doctoral work in demography at the London School of Economics. She was a founding member of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and as an educational planner was heavily involved in research and advising on many important educational developments in Ontario, including the creation of twenty-two colleges of applied arts and technology in the s. Her research work and contributions were of an entirely different character from what I was seeking to do, and I was in awe of her formidable publications in the area of educational planning. She was also a wonderful role model for a young woman seeking a professorial career. What struck me in my relationship with her as a post-doctoral fellow was her encouragement to stick to my own research plan and themes, and her hesitation to give me any specific advice, given that my background and area of focus were so different from her own. She helped me tremendously in her good judgement F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 97
over many matters, small and large, relating to the development of my career.While I was under her academic guidance, our relationship was a fairly formal one, and I found that appropriate as it meant I always knew exactly where I stood with her. Later, more personal aspects of friendship developed as I got to know her husband and family. I was also in a position to observe her leadership style over those years, as she was head of the department, and in that role organized two high-profile conferences relating to the professorate and university governance.These gave doctoral students and myself the opportunity to meet and learn from a number of well-known figures in the field of higher education from England, Australia, the United States, and Canada. In November , Cicely celebrated her eightieth birthday, surrounded by students and colleagues who wished to commemorate her enormous contribution to OISE and to education in Canada. It is one of my greatest regrets that I was not able to be there, due to my responsibilities in Hong Kong at the time. Overall, I felt tremendously fortunate to have had these two outstanding senior scholars as my mentors in my years as an apprentice scholar. In addition, as I have noted, I sought out other mentors in specific areas of scholarship where I needed guidance. In retrospect I have come to realize more fully how fortunate I was to gain their attention. One of these has already been mentioned, the distinguished French sinologist and historian, Marianne Bastid, who read chapters of my thesis and gave suggestions, then later co-operated with me in a co-edited publication and some scholarly activities in Canada. Another was a Chinese professor in the Department of History at Fudan University, Zhu Weizheng, whose knowledge of the Chinese classics and the history of scholarship and scholarly institutions in traditional China was critically helpful in various stages of the research. At the end of Chapter Two, I noted the three women who had been my spiritual mentors and who remained close throughout my life. Here I would add my appreciation for these intellectual mentors whose guidance and advice made it possible for me to Apprentice Scholar
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 98
find a foothold within the university community, and to go forward from there to build a scholarly career.The fact that they spanned three continents—North America, Europe, and China— meant that the development of my mind benefited from the distinctive academic traditions of these different regions.
F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 99
Knowledge and Action: An Academic Career between China and the West, 1986–1991
Image not available
4
Full Circle
1. 2. 3. 4.
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 100
Bus decorated for Million Person March in Beijing, May , . Set for Canadian Television Week in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, June . Pipa player. Beijing, Christmas . In the Forbidden City with Annemarie Pordes, my Austrian mentor. November .
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 101
I
t is hard to describe the sense of joy and anticipation I felt in July as I began to prepare new courses in the Higher Education Group at OISE, and to think about my research plans. Finally, I had a stable environment at an institute that was Canada’s premier centre for graduate studies and research in education. There are, of course, no letters to Mother for this period as I was living in Toronto, and visited her often. However, my mood is captured in two letters, one to my eldest sister, Doris, written in June , and another to my friend Marian, who had shared my difficult experience with the China Bible Fund in Hong Kong, and had renewed contact with me at Christmas in . First, let me share a quotation from my letter to Doris: I don’t know whether Mother and Dad have told you my exciting news. I have been promised an assistant professorship tenure-track in our department, starting in July of 1986, just before my post-doc ends.This is really more than I could have dreamt for, as it involves only graduate teaching and doctoral supervision, as well as time for my own research. I will develop my own courses in comparative higher education, also help to set up a research centre on comparative higher education with special reference to Asia.…
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 102
Then, a year and a half later, I wrote to Marian: I now have a tenure track assistant professor’s position, which means a lot of hard work (as you know, I’m sure, from working at Stanford), but also the opportunity to develop research and scholarly questions about China that have interested me for many years. So I am so grateful to God for this opportunity! I worship at an Anglican church, just ten minutes walk away, which has a small congregation with an amazing racial mix, and what I find to be a quiet spiritual atmosphere. And of course living in Toronto again means seeing a lot of my family and enjoying an ever growing crowd of nieces and nephews. My parents are still in good health.
This chapter will trace the scholarly career that accelerated quickly in these ideal conditions, with a promotion from assistant to associate professor in two years, and then to full professor a mere two years later. So much research, teaching, and writing had already been done, with one edited book published in the autumn of , to be followed by a second in and a monograph in ; also a considerable number of refereed articles had appeared in journals such as China Quarterly, Compare, Comparative Education Review, and Canadian and International Education. I was thus in a position to open myself up to new challenges and engage not only in research and teaching, but also in community service, which was now entirely different from my philanthropic projects in Hong Kong a decade earlier. My dream on leaving Hong Kong was to study and contribute to China’s opening up in ways that would support positive development in China, but also make it possible for the wealth of China’s educational and cultural traditions to be better known in the global community. During my post-doctoral work, I committed myself to developing a framework for evaluation that made mutuality its core value, and emphasized forms of interaction between China and the West that embodied values of equity, F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 103
autonomy, solidarity, and participation. Now I was finally in a position to do something about this in addition to teaching and research, the two activities that tended to be given the greatest importance in an institution like OISE. Thus I have called this chapter “Knowledge and Action: An Academic Career between China and the West.” I can clearly see a pattern whereby I was constantly being called from knowledge to action over these years, and I attribute this at least in part to Chinese traditions of epistemology, which had influenced me deeply from my earliest exposure to them. In the traditional Chinese context, the scholar had to strive to become an official and serve his community through benevolent projects of governance at various levels if he was to demonstrate the value of the knowledge he had acquired and gain people’s respect. The phases of my career development moved back and forth from an intense focus on knowledge, theory, and research to a greater emphasis on action. From to , I was occupied with teaching at OISE, doing research, and launching the first development projects I undertook in co-operation with the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).The next phase was a sudden call to action when I became first secretary for education, science, and culture in the Canadian Embassy in Beijing for two years from the fateful summer of , just after the Tiananmen tragedy. In the third phase, from to , I returned to scholarly work in the university, with some ongoing commitment to projects of co-operation supported by CIDA. I did not imagine then that I would once again be drawn back to Asia at the time of Hong Kong’s return to China in .These two phases will constitute the fifth and sixth chapters of this volume. Lest I be too absorbed in this depiction of broad phases in my career development, let me describe a little of my daily life in Toronto over these years. In September , I moved into the seven-room townhouse I had purchased on Clinton Street, which was about a half-hour walk from OISE. I had lived in one room as a foreign expert in Shanghai, in a relatively small residence Knowledge and Action
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 104
room in London, and in a two-room apartment during my first two years in Toronto, so this was an incredible luxury of space. I jokingly called it my “seven-storey mansion” though my husband was later to give it the somewhat less complimentary nickname of “the staircase.” It was one of the most inexpensive types of real estate in Toronto at the time, in an ethnic neighbourhood, with many residents of working class background.Yet, for me, who had wandered the world for seventeen years, it was my castle. From the very day I moved in, my new home was shared with various friends and colleagues.The first was one of my students from Fudan, Li Jian, who was given a job at the famous Qinghua University in Beijing on her graduation in , and was later sent to Canada for master’s degree studies.After completing her degree she needed a place to stay for several months before moving to the United States for doctoral studies. Over the years, many others stayed for shorter or longer periods.The most memorable of all my house guests was my second youngest sister, who lived with me for half a year with her two young children, Helen, aged three, and John, aged five, while completing her master’s degree at OISE. It was the only time in my life that I lived with young children on a daily basis, and I treasure the memories of that lively household. Not only did it embrace my sister and her children, who occupied the basement and the television room one level above, but also a graduate student from Shanghai, Lu Yongling, who lived in the guest room on the top storey. My sister’s focus on language in education in her master’s degree meant that she had a particular interest in her children’s language development.We were fascinated over conversations between the two children, which showed how early gender issues can affect young children. John would tell his sister,“You are going to be a housewife when you grow up,” and Helen would reply firmly,“No, I’m not. I’m going to be a work mummy.” John would start a conversation about how superior Batman was to Catwoman, and Helen would reply that she was going to be “Batwoman” when she grew up. F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 105
Most touchingly for me, on another occasion, when asked what she would like to be when she grew up, little Helen, with her fair curly hair and soft brown eyes, answered without hesitation,“I am going to be a Chinese!”Yongling was her idol, and the Chinese dumplings she often made, with Helen’s assistance in wrapping them, were Helen’s favourite food. John was a little more skeptical about the Chinese connection. However, some years later, the youngest son of Louise, my youngest sister, seemed to have caught a little of the same spirit. Ian was of even blonder complexion than Helen, and when he was about seven years old, he came home from school one day and reported to his mother that he had told his classmates he was “half Chinese.” Mummy asked him,“Ian, how could you be half Chinese?” His reply had its own simple logic.“Auntie Ruth lives in China, so I must be half Chinese!” (By this time I had returned to Hong Kong, and Hong Kong had returned to China. It was a pleasure to hear how my love of China had affected my nieces and nephews.) Thus my desire to be a bridge between China and the West was not limited to scholarship or the world of ideas, but also had an impact on my family.This was a time when family ties were renewed, and I was particularly grateful to share Friday night dinners with my parents on a regular basis after so many years of living on the other side of the world. I also benefited from my mother’s help in everything from making curtains to choosing a fine china set for my new home. Over these years my mother made me a quilt in shades of rose, green, and dark blue, a task that took several years and a gift I have treasured ever since. She had hoped I might need one for a double bed when she started this project.To her disappointment, however, my continuing focus on my professional career meant such was not to be the case for some time. Only in later years, after she had gone to her reward, was I to marry and start a new phase with a husband who brought balance and companionship into my life.
Knowledge and Action
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 106
Establishing a Career in Education and Sinology, 1986–1989 My first and most pressing task as a newly appointed assistant professor was to develop new courses for the department, as well as teaching our basic course,“Recurring Issues in Postsecondary Education.”The two courses I developed in the first year were built upon the literature to which I had been exposed in London.The first was a course in comparative education theory and methodology, which was laid out as an intellectual history of the field, linking it to wider developments in sociology over the period since the s.This reflected my conviction that comparative education was really a macro sociology of education, though allied writings in philosophy and history were also important.The second course laid out readings and activities that would enable students to apply theories and methodologies to actual research in the field of higher education. Case studies for this course included developed and developing countries, capitalist and socialist/communist countries. The third course that I very much wanted to develop was in the area of international academic relations. I wanted to put the literature I had discovered on envisioning preferred futures for the global community and a value-explicit approach to understanding social change into a course that would be useful for graduate students in higher education. At the th Congress of Comparative Education held in Paris in the summer of , I picked up a paper by Professor Hans Weiler, a German-born political scientist who had long been a professor of comparative and international development education at Stanford University. I found myself reading and rereading this paper for the richness of its conceptual articulation and the literature it drew upon from all over the world. It included scholars associated with the World Order Models Project, the group whose work had helped me so much in my post-doctoral research. What attracted me most was the framework for critical evaluation of higher education in relation to national and international F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 107
political systems, which made it possible to identify ways in which scholars could actually make a difference. Knowledge and scholarship need not be merely a tool for the political legitimization of states or international bodies. Rather, given the right emphases and values, they could contribute to change in a preferred direction.As explained in Chapter Three, this was a burning concern of mine, which was specifically related to China’s opening up to the world, and the new projects of “development” at the national and international level. It was only too easy to be cynical about the political and economic motivations of Western governments as they rushed to create initiatives in development aid for China. It was in the context of these concerns that I found Hans Weiler’s paper so significant. However, could I dare, as a young and inexperienced assistant professor at the University of Toronto, approach a senior professor at Stanford University directly and ask for the opportunity to visit and learn more about the thinking that lay behind his paper? I hesitated for some time, struggling with my lack of confidence. Finally, I decided to take my courage in both hands and write to ask him if it would be possible to come to Stanford for a seven-week “mini-sabbatical.” Once again, I was richly rewarded for taking this initiative.The university proved itself to be a community where those genuinely seeking knowledge and scholarly co-operation, no matter how humble their status, were welcomed and affirmed. Hans Weiler wrote back positively and made all the arrangements for me to be received as a visiting scholar over the period I had chosen.The fact that Stanford was on a four-semester system meant that teaching was going on while I was there, so I was able to observe many classes, and meet doctoral students and well-known professors working in areas such as the sociology and anthropology of education. It was also an opportunity to get advice from Hans about the course I wished to develop. The course I developed in this way was taught first in the spring semester of at OISE. I look back with pride at the later achievements of some of the graduate students who were Knowledge and Action
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 108
the first to take it. Alistair Pennycook completed his doctoral work in the early s and has since become well known in the cultural politics of language. Karen Mundy was appointed assistant professor at Stanford University just as she was completing her doctorate in and has done path-breaking work in the area of international organizations, education policy, and the global political economy. In teaching the course I wrestled with the interconnection of knowledge, culture, and the political economy, particularly the question of agency, and how far universities and the scholars within them could make a positive and meaningful impact on social change in a global context. My immediate concern was with the project I was beginning to prepare for submission to the Canadian International Development Agency. Little did I know that I would soon be caught up in the sweep of global politics myself, with an appointment to the Canadian Embassy in Beijing, which started immediately after the tragedy in Tiananmen Square. Finally, there was a personal reward also arising from this effort to reach out to the scholarly community in the United States. In February , as I was beginning to make my plans for the minisabbatical at Stanford, I went back to the two-room apartment where I had lived as a post-doctoral fellow to see the owners of the house, and found months’ worth of accumulated mail for me. Among the letters was one from Marian Lykken, the American Lutheran friend who had shared an apartment and a life with me in the dark days of my final period with the China mission in Hong Kong in .We had kept in touch over the years, and I had visited her in California once or twice, but we had not communicated for some time. She was now working in a support role at the Stanford University’s Faculty of Medicine, and was personally involved in the care and education of two young grandsons. Marian welcomed me to stay in her home during my seven weeks at Stanford, and the older of her grandsons, Michael, became a godson to me. A second unexpected outcome of my decision to go to F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 109
Stanford was how it linked me to some of the younger scholars within the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES). I have mentioned my first experience of participating in the annual meeting of CIES in March , and how welcoming I found the American scholarly community. CIES has always encouraged graduate students’ active participation, and I got to know a number of student members during my seven weeks at Stanford. In addition to auditing many classes, and gathering materials and ideas for my new course, I also gave two or three seminars to present some of my research and the ideas I was developing for the new course. In late January after I returned to OISE, I was stunned to be asked if I would be willing to give the prestigious Eggertson lecture for CIES’s annual meeting to be held in Atlanta, Georgia, in mid-March. I was convinced some mistake must have been made. This was an honour usually accorded to a senior scholar with an international reputation in the field. How could it be that I was selected? Later I discovered that several doctoral students I had met at Stanford had approached the committee responsible for selecting the Eggertson lecturer and put forward my name.They felt it was important that a younger scholar with new ideas in the field should be invited. So it was that I gave the lecture at the Atlanta meeting in . I am sure many of the older members of the society were even more surprised than I to see an unknown upstart in the field take the stage that day. It was immensely rewarding, however, to be honoured by a standing ovation at the end. My paper, entitled “A Chinese Puzzle,” linked my search for a value-explicit methodological approach to comparative education with my research on Chinese education. Teaching was certainly a first priority in these early years at OISE, but I was also very quickly drawn to action.As I mentioned in Chapter Three, CIDA signed its first agreement for development co-operation with China in , and I had familiarized myself with its approach during my post-doctoral research. In November , OISE had a visit from Mr. Huang Xinbai, then Knowledge and Action
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 110
vice-commissioner of the State Education Commission in China, a senior figure in Chinese higher education policy at the time. He was aware that this was Canada’s largest centre for doctoral research in education and asked OISE’s assistant director if the institute would be willing to support some of China’s major normal universities in developing doctoral programs in education. Under the Soviet model, China had had undergraduate programs of an excellent academic standard, and the beginning of graduate programs that functioned like an academic apprenticeship.There had never been formal academic degrees at bachelor, master’s, or doctoral level, however.Then during the decade of the Cultural Revolution, all programs established under Soviet influence were destroyed. In the early eighties a new academic system was set up with a committee on academic degrees under the State Council laying down guidelines. China’s universities were in a hurry to move forward with graduate programs, as well as their re-established undergraduate programs.Thus one of the priorities of the State Education Commission at the time was to find international partners who might assist in this process. I still remember how the assistant director looked me in the eye and said,“You are the only one at OISE who can take up this challenge, and we will give you every support in applying to CIDA for help.” I was thus given my marching orders! A few months later, Professor Gu Mingyuan, then vice-president of Beijing Normal University and a leading figure in comparative education in China, visited the institute and we began to plan a project proposal for CIDA in detail. It was to involve normal universities in most major regions of China, with a specific focus on those that had recently started doctoral programs.This meant there was likely to be at least one older scholar with adequate scholarly qualifications to take the lead. In the case of Southwest Normal University near Chongqing, the scholar in question, Professor Zhang, had a doctorate from Stanford University dating back to ! The leading scholar at Northwest Normal University, Professor Li Bingde, had studied with Jean Piaget in F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 111
the Institute Jean Jacques Rousseau in Switzerland in the s. And so it was that I became connected to a remarkable group of older scholars in different regions of the country who were themselves a part of China’s educational history. The task of preparing a major project proposal for CIDA proved extremely complex. It took nearly two years and a number of national-level workshops for me to learn how to put our modest plans for co-operation into CIDA’s wonderfully elaborate “Logical Framework Analysis,” and to plan a budget that was technically acceptable. There was considerable competition and a complex set of evaluation procedures for the proposals.Thus it was April before I was finally informed officially that the proposal I had developed, entitled “Canada-China Joint Doctoral Programs in Education,” had been selected and would be provided with a grant for Can. $, over a six-year period. Only two months later, of course, the Tiananmen tragedy unfolded, creating many difficulties for the initial phase of our project, yet at the same time confirming its importance. One of our greatest concerns in the development of its design was that it would genuinely support the academic development of the Chinese institutions involved, and that there would be real mutuality in the learning on both sides. It was an exciting moment for me to be entrusted with a project that involved the kinds of contribution to China’s opening up that I had dreamt about since . At the same time I maintained my connections with the World Bank and its higher education projects, and was delighted that a loan project on upgrading the science faculties of sixty provinciallevel comprehensive and normal universities,two in each of China’s provinces, would be overseen by a committee of senior scholars, whose main office was to be in Toronto. Professor Arthur Bourne, recently retired president of McMaster University, was chairing the committee, and I suggested that he set up his office in the Higher Education Group at OISE.This provided excellent synergy, as we often discussed issues relating to this project, and he was able to take part in many of the intellectual activities of the department. For my Knowledge and Action
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 112
part, I was able to follow the development of this and other related projects in some detail, and one chapter of my book, China’s Universities and the Open Door (), provides a critical overview of these World Bank projects in Chinese universities and their major outcomes. Let me turn now to research, the third element I needed to give attention to in establishing my new career in education and sinology.This dual focus created tension for me as the criteria for excellent research in the field of sinology or China studies are quite different from those of comparative education. To further complicate the demands, I was now located in a department of higher education, and was expected to publish research that would enhance the department’s profile. There were thus three circles of scholarly publishing in terms of journals whose articles I should track and to which I might contribute my research findings. This was a daunting prospect, but I tried to keep these differences in mind in planning the articles I would write and the journals I might submit them to, giving careful attention to the expectations and requirements of each journal. Thus over the years I have published frequently in two major sinological journals, China Quarterly and Pacific Affairs; in one major journal of higher education, the Amsterdam-based and internationally oriented Higher Education; and a wide range of comparative education journals, including Compare, Comparative Education Review, and Canadian and International Education. Although I was located in a graduate school of education where there was no one else doing research on China, it seemed to me important to maintain good standards of sinological research. Thus I prepared a second proposal to submit to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada for consideration under the agreement of co-operation with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. It was a study focusing on the East China region, particularly the cities of Shanghai and Nanjing, where many new initiatives in higher education reform were underway. F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 113
The trip was taken in June and I spent three weeks in the two cities, carrying out interviews, collecting data, and developing a framework for understanding the issue of the geographical distribution of higher education in China.This was one of the most sensitive and conflict-ridden issues throughout the twentieth century. Out of this research project, I published an article entitled “Shanghai as a Mediator of the Educational Open Door” in Pacific Affairs in . It looked at the historical contribution of higher institutions and intellectual talent from Shanghai to the development of hinterland regions in China in the s and s, and considered the possibility of Shanghai balancing its newly opened door to the West with continued support for the hinterland.With the issue of widening gaps between highly developed and underdeveloped regions of China becoming a focus of concern as China joined the World Trade Organization in , this study remains quite topical. This was followed by a second study, commissioned by the Committee for Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China (CSCPRC) of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, which examined the views and experiences of a large number of Chinese scholars who had returned from abroad and were teaching in eight major universities in Shanghai, including Fudan, Jiaotong University, and the East China Normal University. The research involved collecting hundreds of questionnaires and analyzing their results, as well as intensive interviews with a select number of scholars in each institution.The results were published in the autumn of in a series of two articles entitled “China’s Scholars Returned from Abroad: A View from Shanghai” in China Exchange News, a quarterly journal of the National Academy of Science’s Committee for Scholarly Communication with the People’s Republic of China. There were personal as well as academic angles to these two rich experiences of research that drew me back to Shanghai in the spring of and the autumn of . On the first visit, I was able to meet and have an interview with Professor Chang Knowledge and Action
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 114
Chung-li, who was head of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, the organization that was sponsoring my research. Professor Chang’s son was one of my students at Fudan in –. On this research visit in I finally had the opportunity of meeting this influential historian of Chinese intellectual life in a situation where his talent and contribution were recognized in his native city of Shanghai. On the second visit, I was blessed with the opportunity of meeting again with Professor Xie Xide, the president of Fudan. She had a high level of political influence in the nation as a member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, a recognition given to few university presidents in China. Nevertheless, she was always open and informal, in spite of the seniority of her position. Not only were my ties as a foreign expert in Shanghai nurtured by these return visits, but my earlier ties to Hong Kong were also strengthened. I always passed through Hong Kong on my way to China. My Chinese mum had visited me during my first year in Shanghai in when she was able to reconnect with her children for the first time in thirty years.After I moved to London, we remained in close touch and I looked forward to bringing her for a visit once I was settled. In the summer of , when I stopped in Hong Kong after my research trip in China, I arranged for her to travel with me back to Canada for the summer to meet and spend time with my family in Toronto. Other aspects of my newly developing research agenda involved bringing together scholars whom I had learned from and associated with in sinology, comparative education, and higher education, and bridging the gap among approaches to research in China, Europe, and North America. When Cicely Watson stepped down as chair of the department, she was succeeded by Ian Winchester, a philosopher and historian of higher education. Ian suggested that we organize a colloquium together in the spring of around the theme “Educational Reform in China F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 115
and the West.” It was my first experience of applying for conference funding to bring together scholars from diverse backgrounds, and we were successful in bringing a group of Chinese scholars of education from the Central Institute of Educational Research in Beijing—which had assisted me in my study on reforms in higher education—including the francophone scholar Zhan Ruiling. We also invited Marianne Bastid from France, as well as several other renowned scholars from Europe and North America. The papers were published the following year in a special issue of the journal Interchange. The final experience in developing my research during this period was intertwined with the sudden change in my career that was to draw me once again from knowledge into action. In addition to the major development proposal I submitted to CIDA for joint doctoral programs, I decided to approach CIDA for funding for a series of regional studies in higher education reform in China’s six major regions. By the autumn of , a five-year proposal had been submitted to CIDA, and was moving successfully through various hurdles toward approval. Then suddenly I received a phone call from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, asking me if I would be willing to stand for the position of first secretary for education, science, and culture in the Canadian Embassy in Beijing. My first response was negative as I was wholly absorbed in my new academic career, and did not feel ready for a change so soon. However, after some discussion with friends, I decided to allow my name to stand and went to Ottawa for an interview. Friends persuaded me that I might get a different insight into the problems and issues that concerned me in Chinese education from the perspective of an embassy and a diplomatic position. This certainly was to prove the case. Nevertheless, it took some courage to face another big move in my life, leaving behind the home I had come to love, and the students and colleagues whom I was just getting to know. After some discussion and negotiation, the department agreed to appoint Dr. Pauline Chan, a Knowledge and Action
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 116
colleague who had also done her doctorate at the London Institute and had recently moved to Canada from Singapore, to teach my courses and carry forward the joint doctoral project I had negotiated with CIDA. By February my appointment at the embassy was confirmed, and I made an agreement with CIDA to do the first of my five regional studies in April/May before taking up the embassy position. Once I was a civil servant, even a temporary one on secondment from the university, I would no longer be qualified to do research and consultancy for CIDA. CIDA officials thus suggested that I choose a colleague to carry out the studies on my behalf while I worked at the embassy. Professor Claude-Yves Charron, my predecessor at the embassy and a professor at the Université de Québec à Montréal, did the second study on my behalf, in collaboration with my French-speaking partner, Zhan Ruiling, a scholar from the Central Institute of Educational Research. It is difficult now to describe my emotions during the now infamous events of the spring of in China.Two years earlier, in the first Christmas in my townhouse in Toronto, my close friends from Germany, Juergen and Nin Henze, had stayed with me and we followed with concern the radio and television reports on the student movement in December and January . It was motivated largely by concerns about corruption at high levels and strong anti-Japanese feelings. In the end, it subsided, only to recur with the unexpected death of Party Chairman Hu Yaobang in April . Hu was replaced by Zhao Ziyang after the movement of /, but remained a beloved figure in the intellectual community. His sudden death, together with the approaching seventieth anniversary of May th, and the confluence of various other events, such as the visit of Gorbachev to Beijing, were to stimulate a student movement of remarkable profile and importance. So much has been written about that period of Beijing politics that I will recount only my own experience during that fateful F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 117
spring, and the striking contrast it provided to my later life as a diplomat in Beijing from July to August . The regional study I had planned for the spring of , as the first of five, was focused on the North China region and included representative institutions in Beijing,Tianjin, and Inner Mongolia. This series of regional studies was designed to be done with a Mainland researcher, and my partner for this first study was Zhan Ruiling, a French-speaking specialist working in comparative education at the Central Institute for Educational Research, whom I had met first in and who had joined our conference in the spring of . Four of the institutions had CIDA projects of different types, while two were newly developing institutions at the local level. As the movement unfolded starting in early April, I was concerned as to whether it would be possible to do research.To my surprise, however, all the signals remained positive, and indeed only one set of interviews, scheduled for the Beijing Bureau of Higher Education, close to Tiananmen Square, had to be cancelled.That was May , after martial law was declared, the day when the government dropped leaflets on the square warning of drastic action to remove the students that night. Early in May, we spent several days in Tianjin, and then in the third week of May we went to Hohhot, capital of Inner Mongolia, for our interviews there. Our base was People’s University, where I stayed in a guesthouse for foreign teachers and students.This gave us the opportunity to observe the whole movement from one of the campuses where students were most deeply involved. People’s University was founded in on the basis of one of the revolutionary institutions in the Communist base areas, and with the help of Soviet advisers who used the Moscow Planning Institute as a model. The university focused mainly on the social sciences, trained generations of party cadres and teachers of political theory, and had academic departments in areas such as history, law, economics, and international trade.Thus it had a higher than Knowledge and Action
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 118
average percentage of students from the families of high-level party cadres. Our interviews in Tianjin went smoothly, as did the early interviews in Beijing.There was still a sense of hope about the movement among university leaders and scholars.As I reported in a letter written to friends and colleagues in June of that year, a number of them told us with real seriousness that “The students have given us back some hope in our future.” Just before we left for Inner Mongolia in mid-May, Ruiling and I spent an evening in Tiananmen Square. It was May , and we stood on the steps of the monument to the revolutionary heroes watching contingents of students arriving on bikes from all the major university campuses in the northeast of the city, each with their distinctive banners.This was the beginning of the hunger strike, which was to cause the movement to escalate so quickly. During our week in Inner Mongolia, we followed developments in the Chinese media, which were allowed a remarkable freedom for that brief time.We also took part in a student protest in Hohhot, in which the president and deans of the university also participated. There was no sense on that day of the grave developments about to unfold in Beijing, and the university leaders made the sensible decision to join an activity they felt would be difficult to constrain. On our return to Beijing, the atmosphere had changed completely. Martial law had been declared, and there was a daily expectation that the government crackdown might come at any time. On the other hand, the students had gained a great deal of support from outside the university community, and commandeered a large number of trucks from nearby factories. Every day on campus, we saw crowds of students, with flags and banners raised, jumping onto huge trucks and setting off to Tiananmen Square in scenes reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution in terms of style, though not the substance of their concerns. When we asked the student leaders at People’s University if there was any way we could help, they indicated F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 119
it would be best for foreigners to keep a very low profile, but they would be grateful for our help in preparing rice congee for those students coming off the hunger strike. One afternoon was thus spent buying and cutting vegetables, and cooking huge pots of congee in the kitchen of our residence. The most remarkable aspect of this whole experience was the sense of freedom from the usual controls and constraints, which was both exhilarating and frightening. One felt the impulse to laugh uproariously at times, then felt very fearful and uneasy at other times. It was such a striking contrast to the normal sense of careful regimentation and control on Chinese campuses. The students now appeared to be in control of the campus, keeping around-the-clock surveillance at the main gate, where they directed traffic, and had a system of loudspeakers broadcasting minute-by-minute accounts and analysis of the development of the movement and the struggle in the national leadership.There were big character posters all over the campus, many of which made interesting reading, with lots of people milling around to discuss their implications. There were no authority figures evident on campus at all, no sign of party authorities or of the university’s academic leaders. One of the lighthearted moments I remember during one of these days was a sudden outburst of roaring engines, sounding like a motorcycle brigade zooming through the narrow streets of the campus. Sure enough, that is what it was. A group of small-scale business operators wanted to show their support for the students by circulating around the main campuses in this noisy way! The most memorable event of all was the Million Person March of May , my last day in Beijing before departing for Shanghai on May , and from Shanghai back to Toronto on May , according to my original plan. I watched that event from a vantage point near the gates of People’s University, and shot a whole roll of film. One photo shows a colourfully decorated bus, with hands stretched out of the windows and flags waving, and a huge slogan along the side: “We demand democracy, and Knowledge and Action
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 120
oppose dictatorship.” Here is my description of the march from a circular letter sent to relatives and friends in June of that year to let them know of my impending move to Beijing: I can only describe the atmosphere on my last day in Beijing, Tuesday, May 23, when a huge demonstration reportedly involving a million people took place throughout the city, again in a carnival atmosphere. From the front gate of People’s University I watched for two hours as people from all walks of life went by with their banners and flags: truckloads of workers from factories, fleets of buses decorated with banners from various organizations, a delegation of handicapped people in wheelchairs, seniors and young parents pushing baby carriages, infants on the front of bicycles, etc.The banners were far more explicit in their messages than earlier ones had been:“Withdraw the army!”“Recognise the power of the people!”“Li Peng, step down!”“Ten thousand years to the people!”“Beijing is a heroic city and her people are heroes!” One poster carried a detailed quotation from the national constitution with appropriate underlining to indicate that the declaration of martial law had been done in an unconstitutional way.
I arrived back in Toronto on May , only to see the tragic denouement of the movement unfold on television. Much of the month of June was spent in Ottawa, where the orientation planned for my appointment to the embassy in Beijing now turned into an opportunity to assist our Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in contacting Canadian students in China and arranging for their safe passage back to Canada. In late June, the th World Congress of Comparative Education was held in Montreal in a very sombre atmosphere. Surprisingly, however, a number of scholars from Mainland China were present, including Professor Gu Mingyuan, the vice-president of Beijing Normal University, who was responsible for my CIDA-supported joint F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 121
doctoral project on the Chinese side.This meeting provided a good chance to discuss how we would initiate the project, and how we could overcome the various difficulties that we could foresee in the emerging situation in China. July was spent preparing for the move to Beijing. What a luxury, for the first time in my life, to have a professional moving company assist me with the move of my household goods and clothes. I arrived in a very sombre Beijing on July , . One of my first actions was to visit the display at the Museum of the People’s Liberation Army entitled “The Quelling of the Counterrevolutionary Riot.” On one side were the people’s soldiers, the fifteen heroes who had given their lives to restore order, and on the other were the “black hands” who had initiated the movement—a number of well-known intellectuals became scapegoats in the campaign to restore order. Most of the crowds of visitors were interested only in that side of the display, not in the so-called soldier martyrs. Outside in the yard were remnants of the burntout buses, tanks, and military vehicles that were a vivid reminder of the violence used to put down the movement.What a different mood and atmosphere from the one I had experienced only two months earlier. These were the comments I wrote to my friend Marian Lykken, in California, on that day:“The grief, pain and anger that must lie in people’s hearts can well be imagined. On the surface, however, life goes on and I find the people as beautiful as ever—it was such a pleasure to be out on the streets surrounded by bikes and pedestrians, people enjoying their Saturday shopping, in spite of a not-too-evident military presence still around” (August , ).
Knowledge and Action
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 122
Scholar-Diplomat: Building Educational Relations in a Climate of Political Constraint, 1989–1991 The two years during which I was privileged to live as a diplomat in Beijing were rich in experiences of many kinds. First, I will describe the context of my work and life as a diplomat, then recount my work in Canadian studies, which linked me with many universities in diverse regions of China; my work with film, television, and other media; the wonderful contacts I had with creative writers and other artists, who were remarkably resilient under political stress; and the renewal of friendships that brought sunshine and warmth in a climate of continuing political freeze between China and most Western countries. The Canadian Embassy was located in the northeast quarter of Beijing.There were many other embassies in that area, located in compounds guarded by soldiers. Our embassy was an old building, bursting at the seams but comfortable. My residence was an enormous apartment in the diplomats’ quarters on Jianguomenwai Street in the southeastern area of the city, a twenty-minute drive south from the embassy. From my apartment on the eleventh floor, I could look down on the Jianguo Bridge (Bridge for Establishing the Nation), over the second ring road linking our street to the great Avenue of Eternal Peace (Chang’an jie), which passed by Tiananmen and the Forbidden City just kilometres to the east, a short bike ride.When I first arrived, there were still military tanks positioned on the bridge, but they were removed not long after.The apartment was very spacious. My Chinese friends told me that only a minister in the Chinese system would enjoy such a large apartment. I luxuriated in the spaciousness and the light that flowed in from windows at both ends. My household included a cook and an ayi who was to help with cleaning and washing clothes.After a while, I decided that I really did not need a cook for this one-person household, and asked Xiao F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 123
Li, my ayi, to prepare a simple lunch for me every day, with the leftovers to be eaten on the evenings when I was home and not attending dinners and receptions. For entertaining, I hired a parttime cook. At the office I had a wonderful Canadian secretary, Greta, who told me it was her first experience in the Canadian bureaucracy of working for a boss who was a woman! I also had two young Chinese assistants, Xiao Yang, who helped with the media, film, and television work, and Xiao Zhou, who was responsible for the Canadian studies side.“Xiao”in Chinese means “small” or “young” and has come to be the common way of addressing colleagues or assistants in an informal and affectionate manner. I was privileged to work under two different ambassadors, each with a distinctive style, during my two years in Beijing. In the first year I worked with Earl Drake, a highly experienced, quiet spoken, and courageous man whose leadership during the June th crisis brought special honour and recognition. In the second year, Fred Bild took over as ambassador, and I was privileged to work with a dynamic and colourful individual who enthusiastically supported projects undertaken by the cultural office. When I arrived at the embassy, there was a huge collection of books and materials on Canadian history, literature, politics, and economics, intended for the support of Canadian studies. Some modest grants had been designated for distribution to appropriate institutions. My mandate was very clear—to develop peopleto-people relations through an active role in supporting educational exchanges and university development. But how was one to do “people-to-people” work in an embassy under the formal conditions of life and work established by the Chinese government for representatives of foreign governments in Beijing? It was a conundrum that I reflected on for some time until suddenly the answer occurred to me simply and clearly: Get out of Beijing and travel around the country. So I travelled to every major region of China, initially visiting those centres for research on Canada that were already active and later establishing new ones in various regions. Normally I would take along one Knowledge and Action
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 124
or both of my young Chinese assistants, Xiao Yang or Xiao Zhou, and try to stay inexpensively on the campuses we visited so as to keep within the modest travel budget I had. Through this approach we were able to build up about fifteen centres for research on Canada in universities in all of China’s six major regions, and link the work of these centres to the two major programs of education exchange that I managed at the national level between China and Canada. One program enabled twelve to twenty Chinese scholars to go to Canada for up to one year as visiting scholars, in exchange for a similar number of Canadian scholars coming to China.The other was a program for five-week study visits to Canada that focused on developing a new course related to Canada or carrying out a research project on a subject with Canadian content.This program had originally provided about twenty places per year, but the quota was raised to fifty-five, reflecting the Canadian government’s determination to increase support for people-to-people linkages at a time when political relations were at a very low ebb. As far as I could see, this was a fairly unusual approach.The American Embassy was not able to do much in the area of cultural or educational relations in the first year after Tiananmen as both Fulbright and Peace Corps activities were put on hold due to the strained relations over the American media presence on Tiananmen, notably the role of the Voice of America. European countries, on the whole, felt that cultural relations should be halted as a symbolic protest against the Chinese government’s suppression of the student movement.The French took a particularly strong stand, and had a poignant line of empty bicycles at their celebration of the th anniversary of the French Revolution in the autumn of , representing the student democrats of China who gave up their lives. I had the opportunity to quietly ask some of the Chinese scholars what they felt about these contrasting approaches to cultural relations.Their answer reflected the dichotomous way in which Chinese people tend to assess situations, a kind of unity of opposites: It was good F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 125
that the French took such a strong symbolic stand against governmental violence, but it was also good that the Canadians had decided to use education and culture as a way of keeping the door open to the Chinese people.As intellectuals, they would have felt an intolerable sense of isolation if all Western countries had closed their doors in the wake of these events. For me personally, there was nowhere else in the world I would rather have been than living in China during this difficult period for Chinese students, scholars, artists, and the many personal friends I had made in China over the years.There was not much that I could do, but I was there to share what they were going through, and to do what little I could. It was also a challenge to put into practice the concepts of cultural agency that I had been developing for my course on international academic relations. How far could the university be an actor for good in the international arena at a time when governments were barely on speaking terms? I was often caught in a see-saw over this question. One day the ambassador and I would be called in to receive a dressing down from a vice-minister of education because Canada was “plundering China’s talent” by allowing students and scholars in Canada to stay permanently. On the next day, in a meeting with working-level officials of the Ministry of Education, all would go smoothly in negotiating details for sending a new group of Chinese students and scholars to Canada. One of the messages we often tried to communicate to Chinese interlocutors was the fact that we, as mere civil servants, had little control over policies made by our Parliament in Ottawa.The most important factor was pressure from the voters, who had viewed the whole Tiananmen story on television.This was a lesson in democracy that was difficult for them to comprehend, given the character of their political system. Over the two years, about Chinese scholars affiliated with the Canadian studies centres went to Canada for short-term visits, and another thirty to forty went for longer periods of study under the national exchange. Each year, we held a special week-long orientation for those going to Canada, bringing the successful Knowledge and Action
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 126
candidates from all over China to East China Normal University in Shanghai in the spring of , and to the Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages in the spring of . For some of those from remote regions such as Inner Mongolia, Gansu, and Heilongjiang, this was their first visit to these coastal cities and almost as exciting as the trip to Canada itself! We also held film shows, educational seminars, receptions, and other activities in as many of the centres as possible, in an effort to bring together people from the region. Often three or four members of my team in the cultural section travelled with me to help organize these events. Naturally, one of the most important aspects of our national exchange was having a fair and open selection process for choosing who would go to Canada each year.We wanted to open up the opportunity to a wide variety of applicants, but Chinese officials were concerned that there should be appropriate controls over who was selected and allowed to go.Therefore we laid out clear criteria, and put in place a rigorous process of selection by a jury, with Canadian and Chinese scholars, as well as a representative from the Ministry of Education. At this point, I’d like to share the story of a young poet from the southeastern city of Chongqing who had made a rather unusual application to the program. Because Chongqing was a sister city to Toronto, he found and translated into Chinese the poetry of a Toronto poet, Michael Bullock. He had learned about our program and got the idea of applying to it, in order to visit Canada, meet the poet whose work he had translated, and introduce more Canadian poetry to China.We felt his application was unique and should be given careful consideration, but our Chinese representative from the Ministry of Education and the two Chinese scholars from local universities who sat on the jury insisted that he was not qualified. After all, he was not working at a university, and did not even have a university degree. In fact he was supporting himself by doing a service job in a hotel, while spending every spare minute on his poetry.We argued that in North America, this was a typical pattern for poets until they F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 127
became famous, and that the fact he had published in prestigious national journals indicated the high quality of his poetic work. However, the Chinese side held to their position that he was not qualified to be considered. Finally, I hit upon a solution to the deadlock over this application. I asked the Chinese side if they would accept a judgement by Professor Lan Renzhe, then vice-president of the Sichuan Foreign Languages Institute in Chongqing and head of its Canadian studies centre, as well as president of the nationwide Canadian Studies Association. I suggested that he assess the quality of Mr. Dong’s poetry, both his original work and his translations, and determine whether there were solid professional grounds for him to be accepted in the program. Professor Lan was a fairly cautious and conservative academic, and had the trust of the ministry. Personally, I must admit I thought it was unlikely that he would recommend Mr. Dong to the program.After all, he had many protegés at his own university and in the Canadian Studies Association who were competing for the opportunity. Still, it was the only way I could think of to give this young man a chance. What a thrill it was, therefore, to receive a letter from Professor Lan a few weeks later, affirming that Mr. Dong’s poetry was of high calibre, and that indeed he would be willing to have him go as an associate of the Sichuan Foreign Languages Institute since he had done some courses there on a part-time basis. I was later to meet Mr. Dong both before and after his visit to Toronto, and it was great to see the sparkle of excitement in the eyes of this young man who had found his way through the thicket of bureaucracy to fulfill his dream.Ten years later, when I was working at the Hong Kong Institute of Education, I received a letter from a Canadian diplomat setting up a new Canadian consulate in Chongqing. She passed on greetings to me from Mr. Dong Jiping, now a well-known poet and cultural ambassador in the region! One of the Ministry of Education’s concerns, of course, was that scholars sent under these national programs might not return to China, but see this as an opportunity to start a new life for Knowledge and Action
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 128
themselves and their families in Canada. Inevitably, some did do this, but not the Dong Jipings of this world. He and many others treasured this opportunity as a way to build links across oceans, continents, and cultures.Another, who went to Canada from the remote city of Lanzhou in , Mr. Feng Jianwen, still sends me a Christmas card every year, with news on the latest activities of his Canadian studies centre at Lanzhou University. He and several other of my protegés at Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou had the honour of meeting our prime minister on one of his trips to China in recent years, something I have never managed to do myself! The other half of this work was caring for Canadian students and scholars who came to China for study and research. I was impressed by the trilingualism of most of our young scholars, who moved fluently among French, English, and Mandarin, and by some of their remarkable accomplishments. Once or twice each year, I invited them to my apartment in Beijing for parties, while during my travels I tried to link those studying in different regions around the country to the nearby Canadian studies centres.Two of those students I felt most proud of had reached a standard in the study of Chinese medicine where they were able to write a full thesis in classical Chinese on their findings. Let me turn now to our relations with film, media, and television in China. This was a completely new area for me, and I welcomed the opportunity to learn.There were many different aspects of the work.We helped to organize showings of seventyfive Canadian films in different regions of China, mainly for those professionally involved in filmmaking. I remember one interesting discussion with a group of Chinese film professionals in Beijing about Denys Arcand’s powerful film Jesus of Montreal.They were taken aback that this kind of religious theme would have popular appeal in what they felt to be the postmodern world of North America, where religion should have died out long ago, according to Karl Marx! F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 129
We also held a number of film receptions in Beijing and Shanghai, including a first showing of The Making of a Hero, the joint Canada-China production on the life of China’s Canadian hero, Norman Bethune, the doctor who spent the last year or two of his life caring for the wounded in Mao’s guerrilla movement and died a martyr to the Communist cause. In addition to active relations with the world of film in China, we tried to co-operate with Central Chinese Television and China’s provincial television stations.They were hungry for new materials and new ideas to serve an ever-growing audience.There was a particular interest in the wonderful Canadian television series Anne of Green Gables, which was hugely popular in Japan. The problem was that, quite rightly, the Canadian producers were not prepared to give the rights to China, and Chinese television could not afford to pay for them.We tried hard to find corporate sponsors, but Canadian companies in China were mainly selling infrastructural products, such as telecommunications, or environmental cleanup equipment, and were therefore not interested in reaching a mass audience through television advertising.Thus we had to satisfy the ever-growing interest of our Chinese television contacts with materials we were able to get free, such as promotional videos prepared by different government offices.The alltime favourite was a twenty-minute video introduction to the Royal Canadian Mint! The topic of money, whatever form it might take, had wide appeal at this time of early experimentation with “market socialism.” One story may help to illustrate the many dimensions of this work in film and television. In March , I was taking Xiao Zhou and Karen de Guise, my two assistants on the Canadian studies side, to Shanghai,Wuhan, Hunan, and Guangzhou for a series of co-operative activities with universities. Meanwhile, I had arranged for Xiao Yang and Carole Courchesne, who was then assisting on the film and television side, to represent the embassy at an international television festival in Chengdu, Sichuan, in the southwest of China, which was taking place at the same time.After Knowledge and Action
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 130
completing her work in Chengdu, Xiao Yang took this opportunity to visit her father, who lived in nearby Guizhou.While in Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou province, Xiao Yang met a young man who was working as a reporter at the provincial television station.The two young people came up with the idea of a Canadian television week in Guizhou, and started to plan for this project. It took the young man nearly a year, first to persuade his boss that this was a good idea, then to get all the needed permissions at local, provincial, and national levels.Thus it was the spring of , about a year later, before he and his boss came up to Beijing to arrange the details.They chose from our collection a set of video materials for broadcast that would provide forty-five minutes of viewing on prime time each evening for a week.We flew down to Guiyang on a Saturday evening in May, hurrying to get there in time for the launch of the Canadian television week. Only after I arrived in Guiyang for that visit did I learn the story of the young reporter who had initiated the project. He was one of only two students from the province of Guizhou who succeeded in getting into the prestigious Fudan University in Shanghai in . It was a matter of rejoicing for the whole family, and he did well in his studies in journalism over the four years and was expecting an excellent job posting to a national-level newspaper in either Beijing or Shanghai. However, during that fateful June of , his graduation year, he went to Beijing and reported on some of the activities of the student movement in Tiananmen Square. His punishment was to be assigned to a job back in his home province of Guizhou, working for the provincial television bureau as a reporter on political issues in the countryside. It was about the lowest and least attractive job he could have been given. Instead of retreating into despair or anger, however, he grasped the opportunity of collaborating with the cultural section of our embassy through his chance contact with Xiao Yang. As a result, he was responsible for the first Canadian television week in China, which took place in this remote province. A month or two later, the second Canadian television week F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 131
was launched by the much larger and more prestigious Zhejiang provincial television station, and it was my pleasure to take along my friend Marian Lykken from California, as well as Xiao Yang, for that event in Hangzhou in June . By this time the Central Ministry of Film and Television had gotten wind of what we were doing, and insisted that a Chinese province could not hold a Canadian television week—the most they were allowed was to focus on one province, as appropriate to their level within the country! This was typical of the kinds of bureaucratic interference we often came up against. Our contact with writers and other creative artists was one of the most rewarding aspects of the work of the cultural section.The first event, which I remember with great nostalgia, was a special reception for the elderly Chinese writer Xiao Qian, to celebrate the publication of his translation of selections from the Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock. It was hosted by Ambassador Earl Drake and his wife, Monica. Also present was the famous actor Ying Ruocheng, who appeared in The Last Emperor, and who was vice-minister of culture at this time. He came out that day to honour one of China’s greatest modern writers. Xiao Qian was one of the few writers who was truly bilingual and published prolifically in both English and Chinese.As a journalist, he had lived for many years in England before . His autobiography, Traveler without a Map (), gives an intriguing account of an unusual life. He truly was like a green pine tree that had survived the long and bitter winter of Chinese political movements and came forth in old age to share a remarkable sense of humour.What a privilege for us Canadians on that day to hear him reading one of Stephen Leacock’s humorous pieces in Chinese! In my second year at the embassy we became even more proactive in developing co-operation with writers.With the encouragement of Ambassador Bild and in collaboration with the Chinese Writers’Association, we held a reception and invited about thirty members of the Writers’Association to meet some visiting writers Knowledge and Action
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 132
from Canada. It was a pleasant enough event, but I felt that something was not quite right. Several of the best-known writers had simply not shown up.Toward the end of the reception, someone pressed a small note into my hand on which was the name and home telephone number of the well-known woman writer Zhang Jie.When we contacted her, she invited us to visit her in her home, and explained that she and several other writers did not feel comfortable attending an event organized by the Chinese Writers’ Association at that time. If we wished to invite them on a purely personal basis, however, they would be pleased to come! This provided the occasion for a more select dinner party at the ambassador’s home, where we were honoured by the presence of Wang Meng, who stepped down as minister of culture right after the student movement. He was a writer of great accomplishment, and had the unusual capability of writing in Uygur as well as Chinese after his many years of exile in Xinjiang. We also were successful in inviting Zhang Jie, whose books Love Must Not Be Forgotten and Leaden Wings have been translated into many languages.A third writer who was present that evening was Feng Jicai, who created a sensation with his book of the stories of people during the Cultural Revolution. There were many other contacts with writers, not only in Beijing, but also in Shanghai, where I had the privilege of meeting Wang Anyi and several other post–Cultural Revolution writers. Over the two years I collected as many of their works of fiction as I could, in English translation, and found it a tremendously enriching way to explore aspects of the Cultural Revolution period and the new China that was emerging. Reading them in Chinese would have taken up energy I had reserved for the translation work I was doing for my book about Ma Xiangbo and other ongoing academic projects, so I read them in translation as a way of relaxing at the end of what were often long and exhausting days. It was a learning that was pure pleasure. In my responsibilities for culture, there were many other pleasant duties—invitations to concerts of traditional Chinese and F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 133
Western music, ballet, other types of dance performance, and plays. It was a particular pleasure to see revived versions of plays such as Lao She’s famous Tea House and Cao Yu’s Sunrise. A stream of visitors came to stay with me in Beijing. Marian and my godson, Michael, came for Christmas in , and spent two weeks in my home. We explored the great sites of Beijing— Tiananmen Square, the Great Wall, the Forbidden City. It was also a time for making connections with the children of friends in the embassy and local friends who were close in age to thirteen-year-old Michael. For one of the parties held in my large apartment, we were delighted by the performance of a group of musicians who played the gucheng, the pipa, the dizi or flute, and several other traditional Chinese instruments.The musicians had telephoned my Chinese assistant offering to liven up our Christmas by an informal performance. Marian and Michael visited me again in June , not long before I left Beijing. On that occasion I remember Michael accompanying me to a formal luncheon on the invitation of the State Education Commission. Scorpions on a bed of deep-fried vermicelli were among the delicacies served that day! He heroically swallowed one of these creatures. However, the following day, when I took him to a newly opened Pizza Hut, he told me that meal would be his happiest memory of the Beijing visit! Other visitors who came to stay with me over the two years included Annemarie Pordes, my Austrian friend and mentor, who came from Hong Kong for a week in October , and Joann Murray, my English friend who had helped to establish the New Youth Hostel in Kowloon in . Howard Buchbinder, the professor from York University with whom I had shared an office during my first year as a post-doctoral fellow at OISE, came to lecture on issues of higher education and brought along his artist wife, Jennifer Elion, who delighted in the opportunity to explore Chinese pottery and porcelains. Many colleagues involved in China-related research got in touch Knowledge and Action
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 134
with me as they passed through Beijing, helping me maintain my links with the scholarly network I had worked so hard to nurture in the years after completing my doctorate. My Chinese helper, Xiao Li, took wonderful care of all my friends and visitors, preparing mountains of dumplings and Beijing-style roubing (meat cakes) to sustain them against the Beijing winters, as well as keeping the household in meticulous order. Such was the quality of our sharing over those two years that she has remained a friend ever since, and I have rarely missed a visit with her on the many occasions when I have returned to Beijing. Just before I left Hong Kong in March , a parcel arrived from Beijing: two hand-crocheted sets of slippers, blue for my husband Walter, red for me. I knew there was love in every stitch! One of my regrets during the Beijing years was that none of my family was able to visit me. My father’s health was such that a trip of this kind would not have been possible, and I was to learn toward the end of my time in Beijing how fragile my mother’s health was. My siblings were all busy with their own professional careers and had young and growing families. I was, however, able to return home for a summer vacation and see my family.Also I was able to make a sentimental visit to Europe in May , renewing acquaintance with good friends in England, France, and Belgium, and visiting my professor Brian Holmes at the London Institute of Education. During the autumn of , I agonized over whether or not to stay on for a third year at the embassy. Naturally I had to consult with my department at OISE, and Professor Ian Winchester, then chair of the department, conveyed a strong and clear message that they wanted me back by the summer of ! There were courses to teach, doctoral students to guide, and other hopes and expectations of what I might contribute to the department. On December , , I wrote a circular letter to send to my friends at Christmas, explaining why I had decided not to prolong my stay in Beijing: F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 135
When I wrote last year I was very conscious of the transition from the scholar’s life, with time for reflection, research and writing, to that of a public servant, faced with a fairly demanding program of action.There has been real satisfaction over the year in seeing the development of the Canadian studies centres, the growth of our two programs for research on Canada that enable us to send seventy-seven Chinese scholars to Canada this year, and a sense of cohesion in the regional cultural/academic activities which we have encouraged around Canadian studies centres in different parts of China. It was an honour this autumn to be invited by both the Embassy and Ottawa to extend for a third year, as it was felt this approach had been valuable in our overall efforts to rebuild the relation between Canada and China. I considered this very positively, but in the end my first calling to scholarship, and especially the doctoral program at OISE, claimed my loyalty. I am thus planning to return to OISE in August of 1991. It was an unusual experience for me to have the choice between two kinds of work that each bring with them different forms of satisfaction and pain, giving me occasion to examine my life goals very carefully. It was especially gratifying to find the theoretical reflection that has often been extremely difficult and has left me feeling a sense of uselessness in relation to concrete social needs has borne some fruit in the present context here.
Only six months later did I discover how important was that decision to leave Beijing after working as a diplomat for two years.
Conclusion: A Sad Return to Canada Early in July as I was preparing for the move back to Toronto, I got an unexpected phone call from my brother Douglas, in Toronto: “Mother is very ill in hospital, having just had an emergency operation for gall bladder problems. The Knowledge and Action
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 136
doctor has given her only six months to live, due to the fact that the cancer in her gall bladder has spread to the liver and is inoperable.”This message struck me like a thunderbolt. Could this be my mother, who had hardly spent a day in hospital throughout her life, except for the birth of her children, and whom we thought of as seventy-three going on fifty-five because of her boundless energy and enthusiasm for life? It was Father’s health that had been a constant cause of concern, but now we learned that Mother’s time of transition had come. Before returning to Canada, I made a short visit to Hong Kong, where I attended a church service with Mrs.Yung. It was a comfort to pray with her for my own mother in Canada. By late July I was home, settling back into my townhouse, and devoting as much time as possible to my mother. She was calm, preferring not to talk about what lay ahead in terms of her own condition, but rather devote all the energy and attention she could to spending time with her children, grandchildren, and friends.At our summer cottage, she still went for an early morning swim every day in the cool waters of Lake Joseph. Through the autumn months in Toronto, I took up my teaching and normal duties at the university, but my colleagues kindly encouraged me to take off whatever time was needed to care for my mother.Thus I went to my parents’ home many evenings to cook their evening meal, and shared the experience with my mother of taking a course in macrobiotic cooking that we felt might be helpful for her condition. Physically it probably made little difference, but psychologically it gave us a focus and a reason to spend time together. It was remarkable that she could still take an interest in such a subject, given the state of her health. I can still picture her coming up the escalator in the Christie Street subway station in Toronto, where she would meet me to attend the cooking classes in the autumn of that year. She insisted there was no need for me to drive out and fetch her from her home in the suburbs, as my father could take her to the subway station near their home, and I would meet her at the other end. F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 137
As I waited and watched for her to appear, and then suddenly she was there, my heart overflowed with the joy of seeing her and with the sadness of knowing there would not be many more such occasions.This was my mother’s way—to remain strong in spirit, and resist taking any more help than was needed.The very last time I took her for her regular doctor’s appointment, just before she was admitted to hospital for the last two weeks of her life, she apologized to me for needing my help in getting into the car! That was also the only time she spoke to me directly about her coming death.While I was driving, with my attention focused on the road, she said quietly, “Ruth, I want you to know that I have perfect peace about myself. It is only your father that I am concerned about.”“Mother, you know we will all take care of Dad,” was all I could reply, holding the driver’s wheel and looking at the road. During her two weeks in hospital, I spent a number of nights with her, several times accompanied by Alice, my younger sister, who is a nurse. By now she was on a morphine drip, and was often in and out of consciousness. An agonizing decision I had to face was whether or not to go ahead with a trip to San Francisco and Hawaii in late November, where I had been invited to give two keynote addresses, one at the University of San Francisco, the other at an international conference in Hawaii. I delayed the decision until the weekend before my planned departure on a Monday. If she survived through the weekend, I felt it would be a sign that I should go. She had always been so supportive of my professional activities, and I somehow felt she wanted me to go. On the other hand, if she passed away during that weekend, I would cancel the trip. My colleagues in San Francisco and Hawaii understood the dilemma and told me to do whatever I thought best. On Sunday, she seemed to revive somewhat, and was able to talk to us for a short time.That evening I slept once more by her side in hospital and left for the airport the following morning. I gave my lecture in San Francisco, and in the early morning of the day I was to speak at the Hawaii conference, I received a call from my Knowledge and Action
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 138
older sister, Elizabeth.“Mother has just gone early this morning.” Before giving my lecture that morning, I paid tribute to my mother, then launched into my theme. Afterwards, I was surrounded by the loving support and concern of many of the participants at this conference, which had been entitled “Chinese Education for the Twenty-first Century.” It made me realize how deep were the collegial ties I had formed with scholars—some from Mainland China as well as Hong Kong—who were interested in some of the same questions as I. They felt like a family to me in this time of unbearable loss. Right after the lecture I returned to Toronto to share with my father and all of my siblings a final farewell for my mother.The tributes were overwhelming, not only from family and friends but from a huge number of people whom she had reached out to over the years.This included many young women from Japan whom she had taught English, quilt making, and Bible study classes while their husbands were doing post-doctoral work at the University of Toronto.That autumn was one of the most beautiful I could remember in Toronto—the brilliant red, orange, and yellow leaves seemed to linger longer than usual. However, by the time of her funeral on November , the bitter winter, with its biting wind and snow, had arrived. At the moving service of tribute, held in the Open Brethren church in the suburbs near their home, I looked out over the large congregation of several hundred people with misty eyes. My heart was touched to see two Chinese women, Qiang Haiyan and Fu Jun, who were affiliated with my projects in China, and were spending a study period in Toronto at the time.They had somehow learned of my mother’s death, and found their way to this difficult-to-find suburban church, wanting to share my sorrow. It was another one of those moments when my two worlds, so far apart, came together. My beloved teacher, Grace Irwin, who had always remained in close touch, came to the funeral home to pay her respects and attended the funeral. She also came to the cemetery, braving the wind and cold, to join in the final prayers around the grave. F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 139
The Scholar’s Vision: Creating a Global Dialogue between Asia and the West, 1991–1997
Image not available
5
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 140
1. In Toronto, October , at the conference, with Xie Xide and Julia Pan. 2. Showing off the engagement ring at the th birthday party.Walter on far right. 3. Henan University. June . 4. Professor Zhu Jiusi, former president of HUST. May . 5. Japan, May :“The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,” with Professor Igasaki Akio, Makino Atsushi, and Lu Yongling.
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 141
M
y return to Canada in the summer of was a time of great personal sadness, with the death of my mother. It was also to be a time of new perspectives that affected my teaching, research, and the projects of development I was involved in with the support of CIDA. The period from to included new developments in my teaching at OISE, a wide range of activities relating to our major joint doctoral program with seven Chinese universities, the broadening of my research interests to include Japanese higher education, and my appointment as associate dean for graduate studies at the time of OISE’s unification with the University of Toronto in . It also included a life-changing event in my personal life, my marriage to Walter Linde just before my fifty-first birthday, in August . In this chapter I will deal thematically with three major areas: firstly, OISE’s development work in co-operation with CIDA and ways in which we tried to turn it into a dialogue across civilizations with mutual learning and mutual development in all activities; secondly, new approaches to teaching and research that resulted from this new global outlook; thirdly, the extension of my research agenda to include Japan and Japanese higher education. Naturally, the changes in my personal life with marriage
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 142
and a newly acquired family changed the pattern of my life and work, so that story will be interwoven through the chapter.
Our Collaborative Project with China When I returned to OISE in the autumn of , one of the most urgent matters on the agenda was carrying forward the joint doctoral project in collaboration with seven normal universities that had been approved by CIDA and the Chinese government in the spring of .The plan was for each of the seven universities to identify a number of doctoral students and put them forward for a period of study of about one year at OISE, where they would be given an academic supervisor, access to the library, and the opportunity to take some graduate courses.Their thesis was to be written in Chinese, with an English summary, and defended under the rules for doctoral study of their own university. If it were possible for the Canadian supervisor to be present, that would be a plus, but not necessary. By the same token, doctoral students at OISE were given the opportunity to apply to the project and spend up to one year in one or several of the Chinese universities, with a senior Chinese scholar as their supervisor. Naturally, language was somewhat of a barrier on both sides, but it was a barrier we managed to overcome. There were a number of students at OISE who were Chinese and thus fluent in the language; there were also some Westerners with fluency in Chinese among our students. In addition, several OISE students took part in the project without a knowledge of the Chinese language, went to China for a short period, and were assisted by graduate students in China in their research. For the Chinese doctoral students, English was also a challenge, and many had to spend quite a lot of time improving their English. However, it was not language, but other issues that created difficulty for the project in its early years. F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 143
Dr. Pauline Chan, a friend from our years of study together in London, launched the project in its first two years and taught my courses in the Higher Education Group when I was a diplomat in Beijing. Her first difficulty was finding colleagues among the professors at OISE who would be willing to supervise a doctoral student from China—most were already extremely busy with their own teaching and research agendas, and China held little interest or attraction for them.They had to be persuaded to get involved. Secondly, new restrictions and rules had been imposed by the Chinese in the wake of the June th Tiananmen tragedy. Doctoral students in national-level universities were not allowed to go abroad on government-approved programs, lest they stay away permanently and contribute to the brain drain, which had been one of the serious consequences of the movement. The Chinese side now wished to send middle-aged scholars (rather than doctoral students) from the partner universities who would come as visiting scholars and would be more likely to return. As a result, a number of experienced Chinese scholars at associate professor level came from China under the project, as well as a lively group of doctoral students, and at least one participant who attained one of the first doctoral degrees in education in China and came as a post-doctoral fellow.The project lasted six years until the summer of , so there was time for careful selection and the preparation of a program suited to each individual’s research interests and needs on both sides. In the first two years, it was fascinating to see the Chinese bureaucracy at work in terms of the way restrictions were imposed.There were two provincial universities—Nanjing Normal University and Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou—that were part of our group of seven because they had doctoral programs in education. Since these two universities were under the jurisdiction of their provincial bureaus of education, Beijing could not control them. The provincial authorities had no hesitation in sending their doctoral students abroad, in spite of the concerns about the brain drain.Thus, by an amusing reversal of the usual situation, it T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 144
was scholars from these provincial-level universities who first came to Toronto to join our project, while those from the national-level universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Changchun, Chongqing, and Xi’an were only able to come somewhat later when official anxiety over the problem of non-return died down. A second issue that needed some attention was the gender balance of those coming to Canada under the project.The first three or four scholars were all men, and when the Canadian side put forth a request that women be given an equal opportunity to participate, the Chinese side responded that there simply weren’t any women doctoral students at project universities. In a way this was not surprising, since at that time only per cent of the students in doctoral programs in China were women, reflecting the revival of traditional Chinese values that tended to undermine women’s professional careers.Women had less family support for graduate studies, and there was a concern that an overeducated woman might not find a marriage partner! However, CIDA’s overall policy had guidelines that specified gender equity in all projects.We thus continued to push our Chinese colleagues to identify suitable women candidates for the opportunity to come to Canada, and in the end nine of the twenty-two Chinese participants were women. It turned out there were a number of women doctoral students who were studying on a part-time basis while teaching. Since they were not part of the mainstream, the Chinese side at first did not consider them, but under pressure from us, they were given the opportunity. A third important issue was ensuring that the scholars returned to China after completing their study in Canada. It was a time when many Chinese scholars took advantage of opportunities in Canada and the United States to gain permanent resident status or extend their stay.We told the Chinese authorities from the beginning that we could not, and would not, police those who came under the project in terms of their obligation to return and complete their doctoral studies in China. However, we felt we must build relationships of genuine mutuality with the seven F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 145
universities. It was crucial that scholars participating on both sides felt they were building a community for the long term, not simply supporting individual interests.The vision for a community across civilizations led me to organize two major conferences, the first in Canada, the second in China, where we could all participate in an endeavour larger than our personal careers, or even our individual institutions and their development. From October , I worked with a group of about fifteen to twenty graduate students and several colleagues in planning the first conference,“Knowledge across Culture: Universities East and West,” to be held in Toronto in October . Our first priority was to invite the older Chinese scholars who were doctoral supervisors at the seven universities—NW Normal in Lanzhou, NE Normal in Changchun, Beijing Normal, East China Normal in Shanghai, Nanjing Normal, SW Normal in Chongqing, and Shaanxi Normal in Xi’an.They were each invited to present a paper and visit several Canadian universities with doctoral programs in education after the conference was over, from McGill and the Université de Montréal in Montreal, to the University of Alberta and the University of British Columbia in the West. Since the theme of our conference was broad, embracing issues of science and social thought in Eastern civilizations, we also invited a number of Chinese scientists—Xie Xide, then retired as president of Fudan but still very active; Dai Ruwei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Ma Kanwen, a specialist on the interaction between Chinese and Western medicine; and Ji Shuli, a wellknown historian and philosopher of science from Shanghai. Our vision was to consider the challenges to knowledge from three major Eastern civilizations—the Arabic, Indian, and Chinese.Thus we took advice on suitable individuals to invite and reached out to scholars such as Majid Rahnema from Iran; Abdul Rahman and Renuka Narang from India; and Ali Mazrui, who brought an African Islamic perspective. We were deeply touched that Abdus Salam, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from Pakistan, founder of the Third World Academy of Sciences, who T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 146
had done so much to support scientists in the developing world, sent a paper for the conference, although his health did not allow him to participate. On the Western side we were honoured to have scholars such as Hans Weiler from Stanford; Ursula Franklin from the University of Toronto; Philip Altbach, then of the State University of New York in Buffalo; and Verna Kirkness, the founding head of the First Nations House of Learning at UBC. A former ambassador to China, Earl Drake, presented a paper comparing India and China in their relations with the World Bank. These scholars are only a few of those who came and participated. We were particularly struck by the enthusiastic response of scholars from the Islamic world, with many interesting papers presented on the theme of Islamic contributions to science and social thought. The year we spent raising funds and planning for this conference was in itself an experience of community building. About five doctoral students and scholars from China associated with the project were with us that year, and they were excited about welcoming their doctoral supervisors from China. Also, about fifteen OISE doctoral students worked hard on all aspects of preparation, and after the conference was over they assisted in editing the conference volume, which was published in both English and Chinese in a collaborative effort between OISE Press and Hubei Education Press. At the deepest level, it was my hope that our young Chinese scholars would take great pride in their own civilization, and make comparisons with other Eastern civilizations in terms of knowledge and the organization of higher education.Also, I hoped that they would think of what they could contribute to their own nation’s educational development, as well as to the wider global community. It was the beginning of efforts to fulfill a vision that went back to , when I saw China begin to open up after the fall of the Gang of Four, and had such a deep sense that this would make possible significant contributions from Chinese civilization to the global community.One of the plenary sessions of the confer F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 147
ence was held entirely in Chinese. It seemed symbolic that such an event should now be possible in a Canadian venue. After this successful conference, the project moved ahead smoothly, and there was a growing interest among our professors at OISE in the project.Two years later, in May , the Chinese side held a follow-up conference at the historic site of a traditional academy on the campus of Hunan University, which the Yuelu shuyuan had built in CE, over a hundred years earlier than the earliest of the European universities.Among those who participated in the conference were most of the older scholars and younger doctoral students associated with our project in China and Canada, an illustrious group of scholars from around the world, such as Yvonna Lincoln, whose work on naturalistic inquiry is so well known; Ashis Nandy from the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in India; Syed Alatas, the distinguished Malaysian writer and critic; as well as many others.We were delighted also that Ali Mazrui was also able to get to this second conference.The Asia Society in Hong Kong had assisted us by holding a seminar on democracy in post-colonial societies, involving Ali Mazrui, Ashis Nandy, and Syed Alatas, and matching the travel costs provided by the Association of Commonwealth Universities.This was just three years before Hong Kong’s return to China, and it was fairly unusual to have visitors of this calibre from Africa and India being given attention in Hong Kong.The event was a great success, I am told. These two conferences were part of a collective effort in community building across continents and civilizations. If there was one reason why our project was relatively successful in the return rate of our doctoral students from China and their subsequent contribution to their institutions and to the field in China, I believe it was their sense of being part of a transition in the global order, where the society and civilization in which they had been nurtured now had an important role to play. It also gave them remarkable connections to some of the most senior and inspiring figures in the field. One of these scholars who came from the smallest and remotest of the universities told me years T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 148
later how Yvonna Lincoln had continued to send books and materials to his university to encourage the young scholars who had been nurtured there within the project.This was just one of many such connections built up through the project. Overall, twenty of the twenty-two Chinese doctoral students and scholars returned to complete their work and serve their institutions, though a few later moved back to North America. Subsequently at least fifteen remained part of a close network of colleagues in the field of education in China who joined hands in to plan a second project of collaboration with Canadian colleagues. I should also share some of the heartaches and disappointments of the project on both sides. Two of the young women scholars of whom much was expected in their home universities simply disappeared partway through their study programs, finding opportunities in the United States or other parts of Canada. One male scholar devised an elaborate scheme of deception—applying for a scholarship from another department with fraudulent transcripts—which I stumbled upon by chance and managed to thwart. In spite of such setbacks, when the project reached completion in , there were many reasons to celebrate. Most of the participating Chinese scholars completed their doctoral studies or research and were contributing in vital ways to their institutions. Eleven doctoral students from OISE participated in the project and completed theses of considerable interest relating to reforms in Chinese higher education and the contribution of Chinese science and scholarship to the global community.We had had real difficulty in getting CIDA to provide funding for the travel costs of our eleven doctoral students to China, as the project was one of “development,” meaning only China was to be “developed,” not Canada! Fortunately, we found our way around this hurdle and gained some support to supplement the generous provision of the Chinese institutions in receiving the students at that end. Thus by we were ready to move into a new stage of cooperation, one that led to the expansion of our network of collab F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 149
oration. As I tell the story of the next phase, some history needs to be explained.The first is why we took on a second phase of the project. During the conference in Toronto, our oldest participant was Professor Li Bingde, senior professor and former president of Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou. On the last day of the conference, he asked if I would be willing to develop a second project to follow upon this one and provide support for the young people in the next phase of their careers—developing new courses for their institutions and collaborative research.We felt impelled to take up the opportunity for an ongoing linkage project that was to be offered by CIDA in the autumn of . The second piece of history is a personal one, as it was in the autumn of after returning from the conference at the Yuelu Academy in Hunan that I first met my husband-to-be,Walter. Before the conference, in that same spring, I had participated in a team reviewing World Bank projects in higher education, under the leadership of Dr. Hena Mukherjee. I had also taught my course in International Academic Relations in Mandarin at the Higher Education Research Institute of the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan.After the conference I flew from China to Europe to visit old friends in London and to participate in a week-long seminar for doctoral students in sinological programs in universities in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. I felt truly honoured to be invited to present some lectures relating to my research on education in China, and to have the opportunity also of getting to know sinologists in other areas, such as history, political science, sociology, and economics. In the summer of , I felt at the peak of my career as an academic.The conference in the Yuelu Academy was a high point in terms of the location, the scholars who had attended, and the overall sense of a profound dialogue already underway in areas of importance for universities in both Asia and the West.The visit to Europe was also rewarding and enabled me to keep in touch with the sinological community that had proven so helpful during my doctoral studies in London. T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 150
In spite of all the stimuli associated with these rich experiences in China and Europe, as I settled back in Toronto in summer , an intolerable sense of loneliness engulfed me. It was time, I felt, to have a family of my own, a husband with whom I could share every part of life.Why was it that I had been able to solve so many other problems over the years since I started my career as a secondary school teacher in Hong Kong, yet seemed incapable of solving this one? Up till that time, I had always felt this was a topic I could not discuss with my family, but now I consulted two of my sisters, also one or two friends, and we decided there were ways in which one could prepare positively for meeting a desired companion and spouse. What was most important was to find someone compatible, who was also at a stage of his life when this need was in the forefront. Before very long, I was corresponding with Walter. He had gone through a very difficult time with the loss of his first wife to cancer in the year after retirement, and a whole year in which he had nursed her at home. He knew that somehow he needed to begin a new life. It was probably a little bit too soon for him, given the time needed for grieving, when I came onto the scene. However, we both agreed later that if we had not had some time to send letters back and forth, sharing our past lives, our ideas and beliefs, our interests and concerns, we might never have come together. A chance meeting at a social occasion probably would not have provided the opportunity for the kind of sharing at a deep level that took place in the letters between us. From then on, I had a partner who took a tremendous interest in my life even though it was so different from the world of business and engineering, which had been his background until retirement. In the autumn of he moved from New York to Florida, but often visited Canada, where he had a daughter and a father-in-law, who was a true father to him.We thus had many occasions to meet over the year, and in August , I celebrated my fiftieth birthday, just as there were widespread celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. I F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 151
decided to have a big party and invite members of my family as well as my colleagues and friends at OISE and in the wider university community, about people in all.What was planned as a birthday party also became an engagement party, as Walter let me know the night before that he had obtained permission from his five parents to give me an engagement ring that day.These were, of course, his children, one of whom was at the party, and all of whom I had come to know a little over the past months. Meanwhile, our work on the collaborative project continued. In May , I had obtained a small grant from CIDA to bring about twelve of those scholars associated with the first project, who had returned to their universities in different regions of China, back to Toronto for a workshop and period of planning. The purpose was to prepare a follow-up proposal for a second phase of our university linkage project.This time the focus would be on collaborative research in areas they were seeking to develop in their home institutions. These included moral education, women’s education, and the education of minority students, both in terms of bilingualism and the inclusion of minority history and culture in the curriculum. Our first concern was to adhere to the highest possible academic standards for the research, and to produce research results that could be published in national and international journals in the field, after going through a peer review process. This made the involvement of scholars from Canada, the United States, and England who were experienced in meeting this kind of demand very important, and gave our young Chinese colleagues the opportunity for mentorship in research design and method. This was important for career development of the young scholars in China, since Chinese universities had begun to place considerable emphasis on research productivity and quality in their personnel decisions. The second and equally important concern was that the research results would have a practical impact on educational development in China, particularly in the hinterland regions T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 152
where the need was greatest.We wanted our research on issues of bilingualism and curricular development for minority students to make a genuine difference in their learning and development, so we involved a Tibetan scholar who was the first to get a doctoral degree in education at one of our partner universities, Northwest Normal University.We wanted our research on women students in the transition to higher education and their undergraduate studies, as well as on women faculty in their career development in the university, to have practical benefits as well as provide deeper theoretical or cross-cultural understanding. In this concern, we were perhaps reflecting a long-standing emphasis of Chinese epistemology on knowledge in action or knowledge in practice. That month we spent in intensive planning for the new project proposal provided a solid foundation for its development. Our workshop attracted a unique group of people committed to helping us in developing the project. Ambassador Fred Bild and his wife, Eva, now retired and living in Montreal, came to offer advice and guidance.Two professors from Nagoya University in Japan, one a distinguished psychologist and dean of education, joined us for the event.Two First Nations scholars from British Columbia, one the new head of the First Nations House of Learning at UBC, came to give advice particularly on issues related to minority education. Dr. Hena Mukherjee, the Malaysian scholar and official at the World Bank who was responsible for a series of Chinese higher education loan projects, joined us for one day. Her interest was to get to know some of the scholars from China in our network, and she was later able to involve them as advisers and consultants in some of the World Bank’s projects in teacher education and basic education in China. The project proposal, which was put together in a truly collaborative way, was submitted to CIDA in the autumn of .The Chinese director of the project was to be Professor Qiang Haiyan, vice-dean of education at Shaanxi Normal University in Xi’an, reflecting our concern that the project should focus on the hinterland of China, rather than the increasingly prosperous east F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 153
coast. Five of the same institutions and one new one joined on the Chinese side, with the addition of the Higher Education Research Institute of Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan. On the Canadian side, the University of British Columbia joined in with OISE/UT, ensuring the participation of a number of experienced scholars in educational psychology, women’s studies, and minority education. The second project was approved in the spring of , and initiated in July of that year, with a five-year life until July . In the spring of , while I was living in Nagoya University, Japan, on my first ever sabbatical, I visited each of the project universities in China—seven institutions in seven different cities and regions—accompanied by my fiancé,Walter. He had been to Hong Kong once, but this was his first trip to Mainland China, and it was a real test of our compatibility and his patience and understanding in a completely different environment from any he had experienced before.We began our journey in the northeast, visiting Northeast Normal University in Changchun; then travelled to Beijing; then on to Lanzhou, visiting Northwest Normal University; by train from Lanzhou to Xi’an; and from Xi’an to Wuhan; and finally to East China Normal University in Shanghai. In Beijing we had a party to introduce Walter to my friends from various universities and other organizations in Beijing. My friends and colleagues were more than delighted that I had finally found a life companion and partner. As for Walter, he seemed to adjust well to academic and diplomatic circles. His most memorable conversation at that evening party was with a senior professor and former provost of Beijing University, Professor Wang Yongquan, on whom he tried out his theory of the Chinese emperor’s management system.After his visit to the Great Wall and Ming Tombs, as well as other imperial sites in Changchun, he had come to the conclusion that the unity of the Chinese written language and the spartan system of rule through the scholar official class was a brilliant and long-lasting means of keeping order and maintaining power. Professor Wang T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 154
complimented him on his perceptiveness and this affirmation gave Walter quite a boost. From Beijing we continued our travels. I spent time in each university discussing plans for the project, and gave one or two lectures, while Walter was taken to see the main sights in each city. In Xi’an we took part in a conference on women and minority education, organized by professors Qiang Haiyan and Fang Junming, the vice-dean and dean of education, both returnees from the first project who were taking a major responsibility in developing the second one.Walter took delight in the visit to the terracotta warriors of the Qin Emperor and enjoyed the conference. In the closing session, there was a pause in the proceedings and, stimulated by some of the discussion relating to women and gender conveyed to him by an interpreter, he told his favourite story, that of Emperor Ho, a Chinese doctor in Hong Kong, who was once asked,“Are you also emperor at home?”After thinking about it for a while, he answered,“Yes, I always have the last word at home. Do you want to know what that ‘last word’ is? ‘Yes, dear!’”With this story,Walter introduced a favourite concept of his—that of the “benevolent dictatorship” of wives over their husbands—and asked participants at the conference why this concept was such a well-kept secret and never discussed at conferences on women’s issues! I had the task of translating this phrase, and when I used the term normally used for the dictatorship of the proletariat in socialist terminology (shanliang de zhuanzhi), Walter’s question brought down the house! It was a new experience for me to have a companion in my travels, and I was delighted that he got along so well with my Chinese friends. In some ways, it made me think back to my first research trip to China in the autumn of . I stayed in a hotel in Harbin where several Western specialists working on the evaluation of a World Bank project in higher vocational education were staying, and we naturally struck up conversation, and shared views on the issues we were researching.All of them were men, one a retired community college president, others senior academ F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 155
ics.They were accompanied by their wives, who assisted with all the details of social life, and did everything possible to make their husbands’ work go smoothly. I remember thinking at the time that as a woman academic working alone on my research project, I had to demonstrate that I was as competent and competitive as male colleagues, while not having the advantages that were a natural and expected part of their lives. Now, finally, I had my own travel companion for what turned out to be quite a strenuous trip, covering seven universities in seven cities, with lectures given at each in Mandarin, as well as meetings for detailed planning of the new project. While I had expected to direct this new project, my life was to take an entirely new and unexpected turn in the early spring of , drawing me back to Hong Kong. (More of that in Chapter Six.) As a result Julia Pan became co-director, along with Dwight Boyd, a professor in the philosophy of education at OISE, who was heavily involved in the collaborative research with Chinese colleagues on moral education issues. I continued in an advisory role, and was amazed to see how the many dimensions of the project thrived, with a genuine blossoming of talent among the scholars who had been doctoral students in the first project, and many others who became involved in the collaborative research projects taking part in six different provinces from the northeast to the far northwest, and including Hubei, Jiangsu, and Shanghai as well. In May , before the project reached its official completion in the summer of that year, a conference was held at Northwest Normal University in Lanzhou, with the active participation and leadership of old Professor Li Bingde, now ninety years old, who had done so much to nurture this collaborative venture from its earliest days.As he spoke about the work that had been done, all of us felt a warm glow of satisfaction.Through our project, the younger scholars in the Northwest Normal University’s Department of Education and Educational Research Institute put this institution on the map as a serious contender for good students, research projects, and development activity. T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 156
When the final report on the project was completed in the summer of , the results were amazing. By this time, the Chinese government had begun to allocate serious funds for establishing centres of excellence in research on areas of high priority, and three of the project universities—Northwest Normal, Northeast Normal, and Nanjing Normal—were successful in a competition to establish centres in minority education research, basic and rural education, and moral education respectively.The young scholars who were doctoral students in our first project and collaborators in the second are now backbone faculty leading these research efforts, and are recognized as leaders at the national level. Their experience in Canada and long-standing collaboration with scholars on the Canadian side in looking comparatively at issues of common concern has made a real difference for them. The output of the project included textbooks and teaching materials that have had a direct and practical impact on the education of women and minority students, as well as moral education. There are also a significant number of research papers in national and international journals that meet world standards of excellence. Perhaps the most remarkable of the new textbooks is a Tibetan culture reading book, now being used widely in primary schools in northwest China. It is bilingual (Tibetan and Chinese), with substantial historical, literary, and scientific content from the Tibetan people. Bilingual texts have been common in minority schools in the past, but there has never been a text of this kind that validates minority knowledge, enabling Tibetan children to be proud of their own heritage, while learning knowledge and skills that will enable them also to participate in the mainstream. Many Tibetan teachers and scholars led this initiative, which has been applauded both by the Chinese government and Tibetan religious leaders.The involvement of some scholars from the First Nations community in Canada was also a significant factor. Our twelve years of co-operation with Chinese normal universities, from to , finally came to an end, but this end was in fact a new beginning. Many different types of collaboration F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 157
have sprung up among the universities in China and with various partners in Canada, the United States, and Europe.The many professors and students on the Canadian side have been immeasurably enriched in their scholarship and personal lives.They have had the satisfaction of seeing Chinese universities and scholars come out of the shadows into the mainstream of the global community as China has developed at a rapid pace economically, and taken increasing responsibility in global affairs. China’s acceptance into the World Trade Organization in was one important indication of its new global standing.
Research and Teaching My description of our work on the collaborative project with Chinese universities may lead you to believe this was a full-time job, but in fact it was very much a sideline activity in terms of my responsibilities for teaching and research in the Higher Education Group, and my appointment as chair of this small department in the summer of . In teaching, I felt our courses in comparative higher education had to be fundamentally rethought in light of the end of the Cold War and the emerging dialogue of civilizations, or clash of civilizations, whichever aspect one might wish to emphasize.Thus I worked together with one graduate class in the spring of to reshape entirely a main course on comparative higher education, from the perspective of civilizations as well as the global political economy. Originally the course readings had been organized around higher education systems in developed and developing capitalist and socialist societies, with the main axis of comparison focusing on the political system and level of economic development. Now we felt it was important to recognize the ways in which different religious traditions had influenced higher education in different societies around the world, and the continuing influence of different heritages in the modern period. T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 158
As for research over these years, I continued my series of regional studies in higher education reform in China, with support from CIDA. In the spring of , the focus was on the central-south region, from Henan province down to Guangdong and Guangxi, with the main centre of the region being the city of Wuhan. My partner in the study was Mr. Chen Changgui, a senior scholar in the Higher Education Research Institute of the Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Over a fiveweek period we visited twenty universities in four of the six provinces, from national-level institutions to provincial and prefectural level, as well as four provincial bureaus of education. It was fascinating to see the shift in this economically vibrant area, from a system dominated by Soviet-style planning, which had made Wuhan the centre of the region, to one deeply affected by economic change, which had moved the centre of gravity to the dynamically growing Guangdong province in the south. Statistics for agricultural and industrial growth by province from to , as well as population growth, provided a context for seeing how far higher education growth in terms of institutions and enrolments was responding to economic change. This was also an opportunity to learn a great deal about history, and see how the reorganization of higher education under Soviet influence in had privileged the province of Hubei, while creating major setbacks for the larger province of Henan to the north and the province of Hunan to the south, both of which had lost most of their national-level institutions to Hubei in the reorganization, and further suffered during the Cultural Revolution. I was also able to collect institutional histories from each of the universities visited. My visit to Henan University in the ancient city of Kaifeng, Henan, once the imperial capital during the Song dynasty and an area of great cultural wealth, left me deeply saddened. As I look at the pictures of this beautiful campus, taken in , I see graceful classical Chinese architecture, and some elegant European-style buildings, with crenellated roofs, all built in the F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 159
s and s. It was established as a comprehensive university with faculties of science, arts, engineering, law, and education. Under the Soviet-style reorganization of , however, it was dismembered and required to contribute its colleges of science, engineering, and law to new institutions in Wuhan and elsewhere, leaving behind only a low-level college of education and the arts. After , it was once again developed into a comprehensive university, but there was a great deal of catching up to be done. A memorable encounter of this research project in the centralsouth was with Professor Zhu Jiusi, former president and party secretary of the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan.This university was founded in as a college of science and engineering, and had gained a remarkable reputation after as a newly emerging comprehensive university leading the reforms in a number of important areas, such as the introduction of subjects like the history and philosophy of science and scientific journalism, as well as a dynamic centre for research into higher education. In , it was one of only eighteen universities given permission to establish a school of graduate studies, because of the remarkable level of its research and the excellent quality of its scholars, including those who used fluent English for research. I was curious to learn how this relatively unknown institution had risen to national prominence in the years after the Cultural Revolution, and requested an opportunity to talk with the old president, who was by this time a retired scholar active in teaching and research in the Higher Education Research Institute. He responded positively to my request. I will never forget the scene on the afternoon scheduled for my meeting with him.A number of scholars associated with the Higher Education Research Institute felt this interview I had requested would give them the opportunity also to learn from the old president, so about twelve others sat in on the interview. The meeting lasted for three hours, with old Professor Zhu providing breathtaking details about the low state to which the university sank during the Cultural Revolution, and the vision T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 160
he gained in that difficult time as to how the university should be transformed.The fact that he had gone to Yan’an, after the famous Long March, while a student of philosophy at Wuhan University in the s, gave him a unique status within the Communist Party and the authority to restore academic activity in his university with far less hesitation than many other university leaders in the late seventies. He recruited hundreds of intellectuals of high quality who had been exiled to the countryside, and thus brought remarkable new talent to the institution. One three-hour session was not enough for Professor Zhu to tell his story—it was extended to three afternoon sessions of around three hours each, during which I felt I had gained deeper insight into higher education history and the reforms after than any of my other research activities had provided. Professor Zhu has remained a friend since that time, was a plenary speaker at our conference at the Yuelu Academy in , and has kept in touch ever since. My last trip to Mainland China before I departed in the spring of was to Wuhan, with my husband, Walter. I wanted to fulfill a promise that I would see Professor Zhu once again before moving back to North America.We were delighted to find him in excellent health, still active in teaching and writing at the age of eighty-six. The following year, in the spring of , the focus of my regional study on reforms in higher education was on northwest China, covering the three provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu, and Qinghai, as well as two autonomous regions, Ningxia and Xinjiang.This time my partner in research was Professor Qiang Haiyan, vice-dean of education at Shaanxi Normal University and one of the returned scholars from our first CIDA project. On this trip, we visited sixteen universities, of all types and levels, covering each of the five provinces and autonomous regions in the northwest.The patterns of economic growth in industry and agriculture, as well as population growth in the northwest, showed a much different profile than that of the economically vibrant central-south. One could thus see how the higher education F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 161
developments of the s and s, which had emphasized support for the hinterland, have benefited this region in terms of the places available in higher education.That was to change in subsequent years, as the east coast began to move rapidly toward mass higher education, and private provision for higher education generally thrived in economically prosperous regions. We paid particular attention in this research trip to the situation of women and minority students. One of the notable patterns was a relatively high percentage of women and minority students enrolled in institutions in the region compared to national averages.We discovered that male students and students of Han background were more likely to win places in national institutions in other regions and to take up these opportunities, leaving more space for women and minorities in institutions within the region. We also interviewed thirty-eight women scholars (four of them were of minority status) from universities in the region, who had returned to serve their institutions after studying abroad. After describing these two regional studies, I would like to pay tribute to two more intellectual mentors. In Chapter Three, I mentioned my first experience of attending a conference of the Comparative and International Education Society, held at OISE in March , and how exciting it was to meet some of those senior scholars whose work I had read during my studies in London. Among them was Professor Philip Altbach, then a professor at SUNY Buffalo, and editor of the Comparative Education Review, the society’s prestigious journal.After I delivered the Eggertson lecture two years later in Atlanta, Georgia, Philip asked if I would submit the article for consideration to Comparative Education Review, which I happily did. Subsequently, he was often to offer me helpful and encouraging advice with regard to academic publishing, an area where he had a wealth of experience and expertise. In the late s, not long before my sudden move to Beijing, he asked me to edit a book on Chinese education for the series he was responsible for with Pergamon Press in England. I agreed, realizing I would have much to learn in the process, and it turned out to be T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 162
a project well suited to my situation in Beijing.There I had no time for new research, but was able to spend quiet weekends in correspondence with those who had promised chapters for the book, and managed to complete that project for publication in . It was called Education and Modernization:The Chinese Experience. Phil had a special interest in comparative higher education, and was aware of some of the research on reforms and regional developments in Chinese higher education that I was doing after returning to Toronto from Beijing.Thus in about he asked me if I would be willing to prepare a monograph on the subject for a new series he was editing for Garland Publishing. I demurred for a while, feeling overwhelmed with teaching, project work, and other responsibilities, but finally promised to try. My intention was to write a book based on my doctoral thesis research, updating it with a chapter on the recent national reforms in higher education in China, as well as two chapters depicting developments in the two contrasting regions, the central-south and the northwest, which were the subject of my fields trips in and .Work on the book proceeded gradually, but this was the most satisfying of my efforts at academic writing. So many different threads were interwoven into the volume—the historical and the contemporary, as well as anticipation of the future pressures of mass higher education.Three maps in higher education were identified: the knowledge map (a curricular focus, with philosophical implications in blending Chinese and Western categories of knowledge); the geographical map (issues of regional participation in China’s vast hinterland); and the gender map (issues of women’s participation at each phase of the development of modern higher education over the century). China’s Universities –: A Century of Cultural Conflicts is the most complete statement so far of the insights I have gained in my research on higher education in China over the years. I am deeply grateful to Phil Altbach for encouraging me in this work. The other scholar who had a significant impact upon this volume was Professor Edward Shils, whom I was honoured to F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 163
meet at a conference on the university, culture, and democracy. Professor Shils was already advanced in age, but I was deeply impressed at his liveliness of mind and his immense interest in academic communities around the world. He knew India very well, but had no direct personal experience of China, and perhaps felt I could help to fill this gap. He corresponded with me after the conference and encouraged me to write two pieces for Minerva, the prestigious journal of science and social thought that he founded in and edited up to his death in .The first, entitled “Chinese Universities and the Social Sciences,” appeared in Minerva in the spring of , and the second,“Ideas of Higher Learning East and West,” came out in the spring of . I have a vivid memory of receiving edited versions of both articles with detailed suggestions for greater clarity, greater precision in the use of words, and some helpful elaboration of the crucial concept of academic freedom, as it found distinct expression in the British, French, and German contexts. How fortunate I felt to have attracted this kind of attention from a scholar of his experience and standing, and how helpful it was in shaping the early chapters of the book. The book was published by Garland in . It was in the two years that I was getting to know Walter that I completed the manuscript. I had hoped to publish it in to mark the th anniversary of the first modern university established in China, but it was delayed. As it turned out,Walter was also engaged in a passionate research project that covered exactly the same period, to .This may therefore be an appropriate place to provide a fuller introduction to my then husband-to-be. Walter immigrated to Canada from Germany in , a young man who had lost his father in the Second World War and decided to start a new life. In a spirit of adventure, he set off with his friend of a lifetime, Peter Krueger, by sea, to one of the only two countries then open to immigrants from Germany— Canada.With an engineering degree from Karlsruhe Technical University, but minimal knowledge of English, it took him some T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 164
time to find his way into a professional career.After three years, he was invited to establish a representative office of the German firm, Linde AG, in Toronto, and before long a subsidiary in New York. He thus spent twenty-eight years in New York; eighteen years at the helm of Lotepro, the New York subsidiary of Linde AG, which built oxygen plants all over North America; and ten years in charge of a holding company formed for Linde AG, known as LAGUS. His first wife was from Toronto, and their five children grew up in New York, then started professional careers in different parts of the United States and Canada after graduating from university. Just a month before Walter’s retirement in June , his first wife faced the recurrence of a serious cancer that was to take her life the following spring. After closing the sale of the family home, Walter faced the difficulty of beginning a new life in retirement all on his own.The CEO of Linde AG in Germany, for whom he had worked for many years, Dr. Hans Meinhardt, offered him a consultancy project that might occupy his mind and ease the pain of the loss of his life time partner.The task was to write a history of the oxygen industry, with a particular focus on its early years.This was in preparation for the th anniversary of the founding of the industry. While a professor at the Technical University of Munich in ,Walter’s great-grandfather, Carl von Linde, made the path-breaking discovery of liquifying air at – degrees Fahrenheit, a necessary stage in separating oxygen. He obtained a patent and developed the beginnings of the modern oxygen industry, which eventually was to be so important for the steel industry, for other modern industrial applications, for medicine, and even for the space age. Research on the development of the industry in these early years thus required considerable travel on Walter’s part to consult relevant archives.The paper he prepared,“How It All Began,” was presented at the International Oxygen Manufacturers’Association annual meeting in Tucson,Arizona, in October . I was privileged to be invited along with Walter to the event, and two F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 165
months later to the formal retirement party in Wiesbaden, Germany, hosted by Dr. Meinhardt for him. I thus had the opportunity of sharing these experiences of honour and recognition that crowned a successful career spanning most of the second half of the twentieth century. Lest there be any misunderstanding, I should mention here Walter’s often repeated comment,“I am not a spoiled heir.” In spite of his family connections, his involvement with Linde AG had been entirely on a professional basis. From this time onward, it was mainly Walter who had to adjust to the demands of my academic career in ways that we had hardly imagined when we began preparations for our wedding in the summer of . He has often shared with me his appreciation of the support he received from his first wife at many important junctures of his business career where he felt her judgement and advice was of crucial importance. How fortunate I was that he saw in our relationship the possibility of providing me with the kinds of spousal support and understanding in my career that had benefited his own so greatly. It was a matter of reversed roles, as one of Walter’s business friends aptly put it. Thus from the beginning,Walter has been my strongest advocate in many matters relating to my academic and professional work. He felt that the University of Toronto had underestimated and underused what he called my “management talent” and was delighted when I was offered the position of associate dean for graduate studies at OISE/UT in the autumn of . He insisted that I upgrade my wardrobe to bring image and substance somewhat more into balance.When I wore a suit he had chosen for me, and which we had jokingly called “the admiral’s suit,” to a reception held by the Japanese consul general in Toronto to welcome a prince and princess from Japan, University of Toronto president Robert Pritchard, whom I knew quite well personally, said,“Ruth, I did not recognize you!” So changed had I become under Walter’s influence! All of this of course leads to the surprising turn in my life that took place in the spring of when I was called back to Hong T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 166
Kong for a new and unexpected challenge. In the meantime, however, in the autumn of , I was preparing for a long overdue sabbatical in Japan, which was to last from January to June . I was to be a visiting professor at Nagoya University under a Japan Foundation Fellowship.The third major section of this chapter will thus be devoted to the Japanese connection, which had arisen out of a broadening of my research interests, and the pursuit of a vision for dialogue not only between China and the West, but among Asian countries and Western countries.
The Japanese Connection On my first trip to Asia in , the first stop had been Tokyo and Kyoto before going on to Hong Kong. Nine years later, when my mother came to visit me in Hong Kong in , I met her in Japan, where she was visiting the families of the many young Japanese women whom she had taught over the years in Toronto while their husbands pursued post-doctoral research at the University of Toronto medical faculty.We travelled around the country at that time, privileged to visit wonderful cultural sites, such as the Kinkaku Ji (Golden temple) near Kyoto and the Imperial Palace.We even stayed in an ancient Japanese inn, the Holy Tree Inn, near Kyoto, as guests of one of the families that was hosting us. My mother enjoyed the trip tremendously, insisting on trying out all of the unique Japanese dishes offered to us, and taking great interest in the families, as well as the country. My first professional trip to Japan, however, was in January . Professor Brian Holmes, my doctoral supervisor and mentor, had visited Japan early in his career and done collaborative research on moral education in Japan, getting to know many scholars in the field of comparative education.While I was a doctoral student in London, I met Professor Shin’ichi Suzuki of Waseda University in Tokyo, and assisted in editing a lecture he gave for publication as an occasional paper of the London Association of Comparative F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 167
Education.Thus when Professor Suzuki decided to host a major conference on education and modernization at Waseda in January , I was among those invited to give a plenary lecture for the conference.The other two from Canada were Professor Douglas Ray of the University of Western Ontario, and Professor Vandra Masemann, then past president of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies. Vandra and I travelled together to Tokyo and back, and shared hotel accommodation and the experience of finding our way around Tokyo on the famous Chikatetsu or underground railway. I could read many of the signs through my knowledge of Chinese characters, but of course could not match the sounds to what I was hearing because of the completely different pronunciation of the characters in Japanese.We both enjoyed that week in Tokyo immensely, roaming the interesting district around the hotel in the early mornings, shopping in some of the exquisite department stores in the fabled Ginza district, and experiencing Japanese traditional culture in at least one museum, as well as the many small temples, gardens, and monuments we walked by. It was a safe environment for a woman on her own, and one that held enormous fascination to me, whose unwavering focus on China over twenty-five years was beginning to broaden. That conference was to provide my last opportunity for a visit with my mentor, Brian Holmes, who was accompanied by his young daughter Ruth, because of his fragile health. For this oppportunity alone I am deeply grateful to Professor Suzuki for including me in the list of speakers. It was also a unique opportunity to meet many Japanese scholars whose work I had admired, as well as a remarkable group of scholars from around the world, including some from the new Russia and several Eastern European countries. For me, the most important encounter was with Professor Teruhisa Horio, whose critical work, Educational Thought and Ideology in Modern Japan (), gave insights into the dilemmas of modern educational development in Japan that called into question many of the rather T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 168
simplistic suggestions about the value of emulating Japanese education for the sake of assured economic benefits that were current at the time. The encounter that was to change my life, however, was with a young scholar from Nagoya University, Professor Atsushi Makino, whose fluency in Mandarin and research achievements relating to education in China were impressive. Makino asked me if I would consider taking a sabbatical in Japan, and let me know he would welcome me to Nagoya University, one of Japan’s eleven imperial universities.Another scholar from Nagoya in the area of IT and education, Professor Takashi Otani, had spent a year at OISE while I was a diplomat in Beijing, and he also contacted me to see if I would be interested in coming to Nagoya. Furthermore, Professor Toru Umakoshi, a well-known comparative educationist and specialist in Korean education, was also a professor at Nagoya University.There were thus good reasons for me to take this invitation seriously. On return to Toronto I therefore began to make enquiries at the Japan Foundation office about applying for a fellowship. As I considered the invitation and my own growing commitment to fostering a global dialogue across civilizations, I thought about the enormous impact Japan had had on the global economic community. It was, of course, the only Asian member of the G group of countries, and a country whose modern industrial success had posed a threat even to the great United States of America. Its well-earned reputation for the quality of its products—from cars to computers and audiovisual equipment—its unique approach to management, the example it set for the developing world in basic education and teacher education, all had attracted so much admiring interest. My question as a comparativist, mainly focusing on higher education at the time, was why Japanese universities were not more active in the global community, and why they did not seem to match Japan’s enormous economic influence with a parallel influence in the world of scholarship and culture. My participation in the conference in Tokyo F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 169
gave me some glimpses into the rich dialogue going on within Japan over many issues relating to knowledge and culture, but little of this seemed to be reflected in the global dialogue, even though Japanese scholars travelled widely and were relatively active in the international community. I was also aware that Japan had become a major donor of development aid, after the United States, and I wondered what kind of educational and cultural values were being disseminated along with this funding for development. These were questions that would not be easy to answer. I thus started a program of reading the literature on Japanese education, and paying very close attention to the Japan Foundation Newsletter, which I had been receiving for some time and found both stimulating and insightful. Gradually I developed a set of questions and a plan for research that would involve four levels of interviewing: () national-level agencies such as the Ministry of Education, Science, and Culture (Monbusho), the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Gaimusho), agencies such as the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), and the Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund (OECF); () prefectural-level government agencies that managed local universities and local-level interaction with international partners; () the international offices of universities (both public and private, national and local); and finally () the scholars themselves. I also developed some simple questionnaires to maintain consistency in the interview process. Without the help and encouragement of Professor Makino, this planning would have been daunting. But it so happened that he and his family came to OISE for an eight-month sabbatical in May , just in time to take part in the workshop for planning our second CIDA project. Makino spent a lot of time visiting schools in the Toronto area, and carrying out his own research relating to multiculturalism in Canadian education. He was also able to advise me on a regular basis as I prepared for the research. This was the academic aspect of my preparation. Linguistic preparation had begun within a week or two of my return from Tokyo in the winter of . For several years I had weekly T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 170
Japanese lessons with Yuri Okura, a professional teacher of Japanese, whose second language was Chinese rather than English.Yuri had moved to Canada a few years earlier, on marrying Raymond Okura, a Japanese Canadian whose family were missionaries for the Tenrikyo (Tenri Church) in Toronto.Yuri herself had been a teacher at Tenri University, the heartland of this religious community, where her parents had also dedicated a whole lifetime of service. Unfortunately, due to the limited time I was able to commit to this project, and the fact that I had only six months in Japan, with inadequate exposure to genuine immersion in the language, the results of my study were limited. I could understand and carry on simple conversations, but could not participate in academic discourse or read with real fluency. Nevertheless, I still feel that I have a good sense of the structure of the language, both spoken and written.When I happen to overhear Japanese being spoken, I respond with a warm sense that this language has become a friend through my efforts to understand it over those years. A friendship developed with my teacher and her family over these years.There were good opportunities to get to know Yuri’s husband’s family in Canada, as well as Yuri’s own parents. After moving to Japan in January , my first trip from Nagoya was to Tenri, where Yuri and her husband, Raymond, showed me around the city and the university, and some of the nearby historical sites in the ancient Japanese capital of Nara.This friendship has lasted, and Yuri has kept in touch through beautifully written letters in Japanese, geared to a level that I can read and understand, which reach me once or twice each year. The moment for my departure to Tokyo, in January , arrived.Walter took me to the airport, and we discussed our plans to meet in China in mid-March.After that he was to spend three weeks in Japan. Meanwhile I would spend my first two and a half months settling down in Nagoya, beginning the research interviews, as well as reading and collecting needed information. As a visiting professor I was assigned an office in the School of F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 171
Education. In my first two months, I focused on getting familiar with the environment, doing detailed planning for the interviews, and participating in the academic life of the school as much as possible. I was able to observe quite a number of the oral examinations held for master’s and doctoral students, highly formalized events that emphasized the student’s ability to deal with demanding intellectual questions from three senior faculty members. I was also allowed to observe a faculty council, a most interesting formal event with all professorial staff present. Of the thirty-eight to forty professors on staff at the school in , only one was a woman, a situation typical for national public universities in Japan. It was thus a considerable concession for members of the council to allow this foreign woman professor to observe their proceedings. Generally, I found my relations with Japanese academic colleagues quite formal, mainly due to the severe limitations of my basic Japanese. Students were very friendly, and I was particularly blessed to have the assistance of a graduate student, Ako Tomoko, who was trilingual, with equal fluency in English and Chinese, as well as her native Japanese.There were also a number of international students from China, Mexico, and Iran, whom I got to know well. Many pleasant lunches were spent with younger women in assistant teaching or librarianship roles.They were welcoming, and tolerant of my limited ability to express myself in Japanese. Overall, I found life in Nagoya enjoyable and relaxing. I read a great deal of Japanese literature in translation, which provided a thought-provoking backdrop to my reflections on Japanese scholarly culture and the possibility of it being projected more effectively to the global community.This included the works of writers such as Natsume Soseki, Endo Shusaku, Inoue Yasushi, and the Nobel Prize winner Oe Kenzaburo. It reminded me of my two years in Beijing, when reading Chinese literature in translation was enjoyable and rewarding. By the time Walter came to spend three weeks with me in Japan, after our epic tour to six cities and regions in China, I had completed a number of interviews locally, and also made short T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 172
trips south to Hiroshima and Fukuoka, where I was able to do interviews at both national- and prefectural-level universities, as well as with the prefectural government authorities. My visit to the peace park of Hiroshima was a moving experience, as was a long talk I had with the head of international affairs at Hiroshima University. He described the recent visit of ten prominent figures from countries such as Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia, among them ambassadors and cabinet ministers, as well as professors. They came to the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War as all of them had been students at Hiroshima University in and survived the nuclear bomb. He saw this kind of historically based tie, at the local level, as one of the most hopeful aspects of Japan’s international relations. I had also found time on Sundays to worship in an Anglican church near the city centre in Nagoya. Members of the congregation were warm, often inviting me to stay for an informal lunch of noodles and vegetables after the service, which gave me an opportunity to engage in some simple conversational Japanese. While I could understand only a little of the sermon, the Bible readings, prayers, and hymns were another matter—my familiarity with the service in both English and Chinese meant that I could grasp a great deal of the Japanese, and add to my limited vocabulary in the process. The other opportunity I had had for informal sharing took place in the first two weeks of March, before I went to China to meet Walter.The Nagoya university apartment where I had been staying was no longer available to me, and I was offered temporary accommodation by a group of Roman Catholic priests who were teaching at Nagoya’s neighbouring university, Nanzan.This university was founded in the early fifties when the German fathers of the Holy Word, who had been responsible for Furen University in Beijing, moved to Japan. China was closed to Catholic higher education after , and Furen was absorbed within Beijing Normal University.These priests kindly offered me a room and allowed me to participate in some of their F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 173
communal meals. It was a great opportunity for sharing and learning about their university and their lives. Most were Japanese priests, but two were European, fluent in Japanese after a lifetime of dedication to the country. While Walter was with me, we enjoyed the wonderful cherry blossoms and also visited the unique Meijimura gardens, where historic buildings had been moved from all parts of the country. These buildings were built in the Meiji era of Japan’s push for modernization (–) and included the famous Tokyo Hotel buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Before returning to Canada,Walter was able to conduct interviews at Nippon Sanso and Teisan in Tokyo regarding the history of the oxygen industry and visit the historic site of the first oxygen plant, which was built with German technology in . In our weeks of exploration, dependent on my limited conversational Japanese, we came to see how many secrets of harmonious social life and consideration for others were hidden in Japan’s social organization. For example, on several occasions, when we were trying to purchase something, the storekeeper went out of his way to telephone all around the city in order to help us find an item not available there, then drew a map to tell us how to get there! The buses and taxis were excellent, with clear bilingual signage and every assistance for passengers. It was a society where a million small things conspired to make life smooth and convenient, and to make one feel at home in the social universe, different as it was from our own. Of course I cannot say enough to express my appreciation to my hosts and colleagues, particularly Professors Umakoshi and Makino at Nagoya and Suzuki at Waseda.Without their help I would never have been able to get appointments in major government agencies at the national and prefectural level, in university international offices, and with a remarkable group of senior professors in different institutions who had experience in international work. Many of my interlocutors were able to speak English, and for those who could not, I had the help of either Professor Makino or his student, Ako Tomoko, who was a most effective research T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 174
assistant. Makino and his family also arranged innumerable visits of cultural and social interest. For two weeks spent in Tokyo in May, I stayed in an apartment for visiting professors at Waseda University and had assistance from Professor Suzuki and a young scholar in the university’s international office in arranging valuable interviews there. I also made a visit to Toyama on Japan’s northwest coast, facing Russia.There I have a striking memory of our reception by Professor Igasaki Akio, who invited us into a traditional Japanese-style room in his apartment, where he laid out his father’s samurai sword on a low table, beside a vase with three chrysanthemums. In spite of his lifelong commitment to peace and socialist politics, he was deeply proud of this aspect of Japan’s traditional culture. Another fruitful visit was to Tsukuba, where the influential Tsukuba University was established as a new model for international co-operation in higher education in the s. What did I learn, and what answers did I find to my early questions about Japan? The most fundamental question, underlying all others, was why Japanese scholars and universities did not exert a global influence in the academic and cultural community that could parallel the economic influence of Japanese companies and Japan’s development aid.The answer seemed to me to lie on three levels.The first and deepest was the nature of Japanese scholarship, which was closely linked to the history of modern universities, and the very language itself in which scholarly work was written. Up to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, much of Japan’s scholarly writing was expressed in characters borrowed from China since the introduction of writing from China in the sixth century.Then in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the development of modern universities on Western models, concepts introduced from German, French, and English were accommodated by katakana, a syllabary that had the express purpose of absorbing foreign words. The remarkable combination of three writing systems—kanji or Chinese characters; hiragana, a syllabary for the written expres F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 175
sion of the spoken language, especially all the connecting parts of the language that could not be expressed in kanji; and katakana, a second syllabary for foreign words—made it a difficult language. However, it is a language capable of translating all of the most advanced scholarship around the world.Thus, to a degree Japanese universities have been caught up in a scholarship of absorption rather than a scholarship producing new theories and new ways of understanding.The fact that the Japanese translation of the word “science,” kagaku, means a compendium of specialist disciplines, reveals this tendency for scholarship to be a collection of specialized fields of knowledge from around the world. The other modern term that had been considered, kyuri, or the search for understanding, was seldom used.This is a point made by the great scholar Shigeru Nakayama in his wonderful book, Academic and Scientific Traditions in China, Japan and the West (). Japanese scholars told me of their pride in the fact that there was such a rich literature of modern scholarship in Japanese, and it was not necessary to depend on English language resources. One compared this to the situation for intellectuals in India, where a knowledge of English was essential.At the same time one of Japan’s most influential educators, Professor Takashi Ohta, spoke of the difficulty of being caught up in a web of language that was a heritage from China and Europe, and made it difficult to express basic concepts for understanding Japanese society and educational processes in Japanese terms. He had turned to the language of rural people, fishermen, and farmers, to find ways of expressing an indigenous understanding of the learning process.There was also a sense that the conceptual terminology borrowed from Europe, particularly that of anthropology, had imposed a kind of unity on Japanese culture, a unity that was useful to its rulers in times of modernization and war, but that belied the rich diversity of the different linguistic and cultural traditions of different regions of the country.There was thus a sense that the Japan that was known through the literature of social science did not ring true for Japanese people themselves because they had a deeper perception T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 176
of who they were and how they should be understood, but were struggling to put it into words. A second aspect of this difficulty with self-knowledge lay in Japan’s relations to the rest of Asia.Was Japan a civilization unto itself or a culture that was part of a wider East Asian civilization, sharing philosophical and religious traditions such as Confucianism and Buddhism with China and Korea? Huntington defined it as a civilization in his influential article, “The Clash of Civilizations?” (), but most of the scholars I spoke with felt it was more a culture than a civilization.While the historic links with China and Korea were of great importance, its modern destiny had been to become an honourary part of the West, with its successful modernization at an early stage,and its participation in a colonizing mission in Korea and Taiwan in the early part of the twentieth century.One of the books on my reading list was particularly striking from this perspective. It was written by the Christian scholar Nitobe Inazo, a lecture series offered in American universities under the titleThe Japanese Nation: Its Land, Its People and Its Life (). Here Japan’s experience with her colonies is described with pride, in the assumption that colonization was an essential accoutrement to modernization, and with a confident assertion that Japan was far more enlightened and generous in its colonial policies than Europe. Not surprisingly, the view from Korea and Taiwan was quite different, and Japan’s adventures of conquest and subjugation in Asia during the Second World War left it few friends in the region. Thus the reconnection to its Asian roots seemed an essential step if Japanese scholarship was to build concepts and approaches to analysis and reflection that were distinct from those of the Western social sciences. Some of the ways in which this kind of bridge building was already underway were quite notable. In Toyama, Professor Igasaki Akio was engaged in a passionate effort to ensure his students read pre-war textbooks and newspapers that had prejudiced Japanese people against Koreans. He also worked on a project to have Korean and Chinese textbooks about the Second World War translated into Japanese, so Japanese F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 177
young people could understand how Japan’s history was perceived by these near neighbours. I met a number of Japanese professors whose dream it was to see a common history textbook for schools in East Asia, with a shared account of what had happened during the Second World War—a dream still unrealized. In other less sensitive areas such co-operation was possible, such as a project under the Foundation for Advanced Studies in International Development, the organization funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to stimulate Japanese universities into taking greater interest in international development work.This foundation sponsored a study of manufacturing companies in Asia involving researchers from seven ASEAN countries. It attempted to provide an explanatory response to the World Bank’s macro study of Asian economic development.There were also ambitious plans to develop new universities, such as a new Asia Pacific university in Oita prefecture, being developed in collaboration with the famous private university, Ritsumeikan, in Kyoto, which was to operate as a centre of excellence for research on the Asia Pacific.The Japanese academic community’s reconnection to the Asian context and roots was an important aspect of the recovery of self-knowledge, and the ability to explain its views in the global community. In Japan’s huge development aid projects, which provided the largest outflow of development aid of any country, even surpassing the United States from to , the tendency was for the government to send money and equipment, and support large infrastructural projects.Very little attention was given to education, culture, and environmental projects, which would by necessity involve much more people-to-people interaction. By , however, this too was changing. Prefectural governments and universities were developing lively ties with counterpart regions in countries such as China,Thailand, and Indonesia, and developing programs of co-operation. One of the most interesting I learned about was in Kitakyushu, a southern city where Japanese women began a struggle against pollution in the s, and now T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 178
were hosting an Asian women’s forum for training women from all over Asia in leadership, management, and environmental policy. It was supported by JICA, and led by a woman professor from a local private university. Generally, there was some support from Tokyo for a greater involvement of prefectural-level institutions in international work, and this was a second level at which there seemed real hope for universities and the scholarly community to reach out to other parts of Asia and the global community. At the national level, the situation remained difficult at that time. There was a genuine commitment to internationalizing universities by attracting more foreign students, the majority of whom came from other Asian countries, and numbers increased from around , per year in to nearly , in under initiatives begun in the Nakasone era.There were also a number of new national-level programs to support university-level collaboration with universities in the Asia Pacific, called the Peace and Friendship Scholarships.These were established in memory of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. However, national universities were a part of the government bureaucracy and did not have the status of legal persons.Therefore they could not take up development projects with JICA and the OECF in the way Canadian universities did with CIDA.The role of professors was largely individual, on a consultant basis, rather than as part of a university-level activity.This provided an interesting contrast to China, from my perspective. In spite of the high degree of academic freedom enjoyed by the faculties of national universities in Japan, the universities themselves enjoyed little autonomy in terms of taking initiatives in an international arena. By contrast, Chinese universities enjoyed considerable autonomy, and were defined as legal persons in higher education legislation of , in spite of real limits on the degree of academic freedom that was possible in a Communist system.A fuller account of the findings of this absorbing research project can be found in an article I published in Minerva, entitled “Dilemmas in Japan’s Intellectual Culture” (). F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 179
My sojourn in Japan ended in late June , and I returned to Canada via Hong Kong, taking the opportunity to give a lecture for the Asia Society, also to act as external examiner for a doctoral thesis at the University of Hong Kong. Of course I also visited my Chinese mum and my dear Austrian friend, Annemarie Pordes. I had no idea at this time that Hong Kong would soon return to my thinking and planning, although I was aware that its return to China was now imminent, and I was interested in the implications this would have for education and for the people of Hong Kong.
Conclusion: Two New Beginnings The most urgent matter that claimed my attention on my return to Canada was a very happy one—the wedding ceremony Walter and I had been planning since the autumn of . It was held on August in a traditional inn in Toronto, close to the family home on Riverside Trail where I grew up. It so happened that Walter also had happy memories of the Old Mill from his years of living in Toronto in the s, and we had had dinner there on the date of our first meeting. It was a memorable event, and we were delighted that Walter’s five children, and their spouses and partners all managed to come, as well as all of my family members.Walter’s best friend, Peter Krueger, had been intrigued by the role of best man in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral, something unknown in the German context.Walter was thus extremely pleased when Peter insisted on coming all the way from Germany to be best man, together with his wife, Erika. His speech at the reception delighted everyone. Perhaps the other star of the event was Walter’s first father-in-law, ninety-two-yearold “Daddy-O,” who had been a true father to Walter for decades, and now gave him his fullest support, even though he had lost his favourite daughter. This may be a good place to say a little about this new T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 180
husband of mine.Walter’s lifelong fascination with physics and his delight in explaining many different aspects of the physical world to me has broadened my understanding tremendously. His breadth of interest is amazing, shown in his extensive reading of newspapers such as the NewYork Times and the Wall Street Journal, magazines, biographies of leaders, history, books related to business and economics, a marked contrast to the narrow focus that has tended to characterize my life as an academic. He is a person who thinks far ahead, and sometimes feels a sense of loneliness because so few others have this kind of foresight. I am thus often challenged in many of my views, and drawn into discussion and debate on a wide range of topics. Walter is also a fair-minded person, concerned that justice should be done, not in a politically correct way but at a basic level. One of his most fundamental interests has been in the foundations of Western democracy, going back to the Magna Carta of thirteenth-century England.All of these qualities have brought a balance to our life together, and jogged me out of some of the fixed ways I had acquired in so many years of single life. After the wedding, we had several weeks left of summer to relax at Walter’s summer cottage in Haliburton, about kilometres east of our family cottage in Muskoka. One of the remarkable coincidences of our new life together was that Boshkung Lake, where Walter had had a cottage since , was also where my beloved secondary school teacher, Grace Irwin, had had a family cottage on Loon Echo Island since the s! We have thus had treasured opportunities to visit with Grace over the summers from up to the present. In September of that year, I started up my work as associate dean for graduate studies at the newly unified OISE/UT. It was enjoyable work,building stronger links to the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto, and taking part in senior leadership meetings with the other two associate deans and the new dean of OISE/UT, Professor Michael Fullan. Most of the adjustments in terms of organization and budgeting had already taken place in the F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 181
lengthy planning process for the merger, so the task now was to build a new culture that would bring together colleagues from the former Faculty of Education at the University of Toronto and the former OISE, which had had only graduate programs. It was an enjoyable period for me, a time of learning more about teacher education, and honing leadership skills I had developed in my extensive project work and as chair of the Higher Education Group. Michael Fullan had been assistant director academic of OISE ten years earlier when Cicely Watson offered me an assistant professorship, and he had approved it! Since Walter had a retirement home in Florida, we planned to spend some time there during the winter, subject to me being able to fulfil my responsibilities in leadership, as well as teaching and research.When I looked back over the / academic year in preparing a report on my activities to Michael, I was amazed at the bumper harvest from my various research projects. Three books were published that year: China’s Universities –: A Century of Cultural Conflict (Garland); Ma Xiangbo and the Mind of Modern China, co-edited with Yongling Lu (M.E. Sharpe); and East-West Dialogue in Knowledge and Higher Education (M.E. Sharpe).The latter was co-edited with Dr. Julia Pan, and included the best papers from the conference held in the Yuelu Academy. Given the continuing importance of academic work, which could be done anywhere, in my new position, it seemed likely I would be able to combine professional life with family life in a harmonious way, and enjoy the kinds of balance I had longed for, but had never been able to achieve in earlier phases of my life. That is how it seemed, until I was confronted with a new challenge in January . I was persuaded by Professor John Montgomery of Harvard University to present a paper for a conference at the University of Hong Kong on the subject of Asian values in education and social capital formation in the Asia Pacific. Because of my teaching responsibilities, this was probably the shortest trip I have ever taken to Asia, allowing me only three days in Hong Kong for the conference. Nevertheless, that was T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 182
enough time for me to be approached by a headhunter involved in an executive search for the director of a newly established independent tertiary institution for teachers, the Hong Kong Institute of Education. Andrew Tsui, who later became a friend, claimed he had called twenty-three hotels in order to track me down! It was a new experience for me to be sought out in this way, and my first response was rather negative. Did not I already have the perfect life in Canada, with academic responsibilities and opportunities that fitted well with my desire for more time with family? What surprised me when I returned to Toronto was Walter’s advice that I should consider this possibility carefully, and the simple question he asked me:“Would it turn you on?” I thought back to my early years in Hong Kong, which had given me complete fluency in Cantonese, still the most commonly used language there, and also to my two periods in China, Shanghai from to , Beijing from to . Now Hong Kong was making a historic return to China after years as a British colony. What would be the implications for education? How should teachers be prepared to deal with these implications? Was there any way such questions would not turn me on? Walter had always felt I had management talent, a subject that interested him due to his long career in business. Now he could not resist egging me on, even though it would bring major disruptions to his own retirement life.Thus we opened ourselves to learning more about the institute. It was founded in through a merger of five traditional teachers colleges belonging to the Hong Kong government’s Department of Education.The equivalent of about US$ million was spent building a beautiful new campus for the newly independent tertiary institution in a scenic location in the hills of Hong Kong’s New Territories. For a long period, teacher education was left to languish, while five new universities were founded or upgraded, and a huge expansion in higher education took place over the s. Teachers were left out of this expansion of degree-level courses, and continued to be awarded traditional certificates on the basis F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 183
of two-to three-year courses recognized only in Hong Kong. Now finally the institute was to upgrade the majority of its programs to university level, and establish a whole new set of standards for teachers, suited to Hong Kong’s new situation and identity as a special administrative region of China.This was the challenge facing the new director. In the end I allowed my name to go forward to the search committee, and gradually we learned the search had been narrowed from forty candidates to eight, and from eight to two. Walter was invited to accompany me to Hong Kong for the second meeting with the search committee, which was followed by a consultation with representatives of students, staff, and the senior management.Within a few hours, I was offered the position, and the last day was spent in negotiations over terms and conditions.Walter brought his businessman’s mind to this process, expressing a concern about issues such as the possible devaluation of the Hong Kong dollar.That never happened, in fact! Thus a new and unexpected phase of my life unfolded. It was a phase that would have been unthinkable without the support and encouragement of my husband, Walter, who was to share every aspect of this new life. I must also express my appreciation of the understanding shown by Michael Fullan and the senior team at OISE/UT who agreed to my departure after only a year and three months as associate dean.They felt the possibilities for collaboration with a new institution in Asia made up for the brevity of the time I served in the leadership team at OISE/UT. My supportive network of academic colleagues took it in their stride as well. In March I had the honour of being elected vice-president of the Comparative and International Education Society, which meant I was responsible for organizing its annual meeting for the spring of before taking on the presidency. When I suggested perhaps I should resign, given that Hong Kong was much farther from the United States than Canada, they would have none of it. After all, e-mail and the Internet now linked up the world, and former presidents had also spent T h e S c h o l a r ’s V i s i o n
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 184
much of their time abroad.The last CIES annual meeting of the century thus provided the opportunity for a unique collaborative venture between OISE/UT and the Hong Kong Institute of Education.
F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 185
Hong Kong Returns to China, and I Return to Hong Kong, 1997–2002
Image not available
6
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 186
1. Graduation ceremonies at the institute, with the Chief Executive, Mr. C.H.Tung, presiding. 2. Gan Zang Gou Primary School, southern Gansu. May . 3. Au revoir, Professor Ruth Hayhoe. 4. At the airport with Walter,Ah Lun, and his family. Good Friday, .
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 187
I
t is Christmas Day, , and it is nine months since I left Hong Kong, on Good Friday, March . I knew the time of my departure was right, difficult as it was to tear myself away. My eighty-six-year-old father fell and broke his ankle in early June, the beginning of a painful process of accepting the need to sell his home and move into an assisted living facility.There was a parallel here with my decision to leave Beijing in , and the subsequent discovery of my mother’s final illness. How thankful I was to be living in Toronto once again, and to be able to share this difficult transition with my father, and give some measure of support to my siblings who were carrying the brunt of the responsibility. A mere nine months is hardly adequate for reflection, yet I feel a sense of urgency, a desire to complete this writing task that I have undertaken. How shall I organize the rich materials of close to five years that seemed to have been lived with a greater intensity of energy and concentration than any of my earlier periods of work in Asia? Let me begin by describing the Hong Kong to which I returned in , with its striking contrasts to the Hong Kong I had known as a young teacher thirty years earlier in .That Hong Kong was a city of refugees, a city of factories employing cheap labour for industrial products, a city where the majority of
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 188
the population went from primary or early secondary schooling directly into the labour market, and only a tiny elite attained a university education that prepared them to take up positions in the colonial government.What a transformation had taken place since my departure in , with shimmering glass high-rise buildings forming an urban profile that is stunningly modern, and an infrastructure of roads, railways, subways, and tunnels that makes it possible to reach almost any part of the territory within an hour or so. Gone are all the hillside shacks, replaced by new apartment buildings, some plain, some elegant, with striking views of the ocean, the outlying islands, and cityscapes. The majority of Hong Kong’s population now work in the service sector, some in hotels and restaurants, of course, but most in various types of management and financial services that have blossomed as China’s opening up created opportunities to support the high end of industrial development and trade, while low-end manufacturing moved to the Mainland. From the mid-s, higher education went through a dramatic expansion, from two major public universities—the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, which took in about per cent of the relevant age cohort of young people—to seven universities by the early s, and the provision of publicly funded higher education for per cent of the age cohort.The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology opened in , while four other tertiary institutions were upgraded to university status and standing: the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the City University, the Hong Kong Baptist University, and Lingnan University. Meanwhile the training of teachers for primary schools and some secondary programs continued to be done by five sub-degree colleges belonging to the Education Department and providing certificates recognized only in the Hong Kong school system. The huge expansion of university-level places resulted in falling quality for teachers, since these sub-degree colleges naturally attracted students who were not accepted into universities over F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 189
these years. It caused an unintended yet serious decline in the standing of the teaching profession. When the honourable Mrs. Rita Fan, the president of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, visited me at the institute in the first year or two after its move to Taipo, she offered a one-word explanation for the remarkable government-funded facilities of the new campus.That word was “guilt”! Rita was chairman of the Education Commission in the early s when this important advisory body to the secretary of education and manpower decided that the five colleges should be merged to create an autonomous tertiary institution to upgrade the quality of teacher education and ensure a supply of well-qualified teachers for Hong Kong’s schools. She was fully aware of the serious consequences that the rapid expansion of universities had had for the teaching profession over the ten years previous to this decision. The Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIEd) Ordinance was subsequently passed in , and work on the campus began that year, to be completed in the summer of . Between and , it was not clear how much of the institute’s work would be taken up with degree-level programs as opposed to ongoing sub-degree training. In October , however, the chief executive, Mr. C.H.Tung, indicated that within a few years all new teachers entering the profession should have university degrees as well as appropriate professional formation. In the policy documents of subsequent years, a date of was set for the phasing out of all sub-degree programs for primary and secondary school teachers, and commitments were also made to create wide-ranging educational reforms to raise the overall standards of education for all children in Hong Kong and prepare them to be thoughtful, creative, and productive members of the knowledge society. The institute was thus expected to go through a dramatically rapid transition, upgrading all of its programs to degree level in a matter of a few years, supporting staff development, and attracting excellent secondary students into the profession. We were Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 190
very aware that major reforms were needed in the overall education system to accommodate well-qualified and highly motivated teachers who would introduce new pedagogies and assist all children in fulfilling their potential. While it was increasingly clear that the majority of young people in Hong Kong would need some post-secondary education to function well within the knowledge society, the education system still screened out per cent of young people at the Form level, before they even had a chance to compete for university entrance.The work of the Education Commission in setting new aims for education and laying out a blueprint for a comprehensive reform of the system was thus crucial to reforms in teacher education. While Hong Kong’s employment profile and living standards had improved dramatically over the years since China opened up in , it was clear that the education system had not kept up. The introduction of compulsory education in the s and provision of publicly funded education up to Form of secondary schooling (equivalent to Grade in North America) was a big improvement on conditions in the s, yet much more was needed to prepare the majority of young people with the skills in bilingual or trilingual communication, mathematics, and other basic knowledge areas for a society where per cent of the jobs were in the service sector. A further challenge was related to Hong Kong’s historical transition from a British colony to a special administrative region of China.This called for forms of citizenship education quite different from the educational socialization of the colonial period, and was again a core concern in the preparation of teachers who could lead reforms in pedagogy and curriculum. Let me now turn to some personal elements in my move back to Hong Kong and adjustment to this demanding new role as director of the institute. Much of the summer of was spent in perusing documents about the institute’s development, and thinking through the main issues. In July I travelled to Hong F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 191
Kong for a two-week orientation to the job, meeting many of the institute’s staff, council members, and important partners in Hong Kong society. September was an exceedingly busy month when I wrapped up my work at OISE/UT, which included preparations for an academic conference that had been planned long before my appointment to Hong Kong. The conference ended on September , and that evening Walter took me to the airport for my flight to Hong Kong and the beginning of my new job. He was to follow after the Canadian Thanksgiving in mid-October. The apartment that the institute rented for us in the first year of my appointment was in a magnificent location, almost directly opposite the newly built convention centre in Wanchai on the other side of the harbour, where the handover ceremonies had taken place. It provided a focal point for a harbour scene that was always full of interest—ferries moving constantly back and forth, occasional junks, large cruise boats sailing right past our windows, and many other craft.We greatly enjoyed the windows overlooking this fascinating harbour scene during the first year of life in Hong Kong. Much had changed since I had left Hong Kong in , but there were also continuities that made my return like a “coming home” to this city of my youth, where I had had such intense experiences of church, society, and school as a novice teacher. Shortly after my return and as a result of considerable media coverage, many former students of Heep Yunn School got in touch with me.And it turned out there were four or five of them on my staff at the institute. I also heard from some of Cousin Marjorie’s students who wrote and visited, as well as a member of the Sunday school class at the Baptist church where I had practised my Mandarin in the s. I even discovered before long that one of my Fudan University students of the early s was living in Hong Kong with her husband and two children.The opportunity for renewed contact with these students of long ago helped me to feel at home in this place, in spite of all its changes. Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 192
My Chinese mum, Mrs.Yung, had moved to a new apartment just a short distance from the old one we had shared. Many hours spent with her in her home kept early memories vivid and alive. Frances Willis, the niece of Helen Willis, was still running the Christian Book Room, and for the first year of my new life in Hong Kong, we visited with her often until she decided to return permanently to Canada in the summer of . My cousin Robert Pilkington, who had been the mainstay of both the Yan Kwong School and the meeting in the s, was still serving as a missionary through his work in running a Christian publishing house, and his leadership in a church where many of the Yan Kwong graduates continued to worship. He and his family lived just a short distance from my Chinese mum, Mrs. Yung.What a pleasure it was to attend a New Year’s dinner with their church group in January ! One of the personal joys of our five years in Hong Kong was the time we spent with this warm-hearted and accomplished family. Thus there was a sense of continuity as well as dramatic change in my return to Hong Kong at the time of Hong Kong’s return to China. It was a different Hong Kong in so many striking ways, yet the deep roots I had established in my eleven years as a young teacher had not withered away.They now provided me with a sense of belonging and connectedness as I faced the strenuous demands of the job. In the two interviews I had had with the search committee in April , one of the things that impressed the committee was my focus on people, and my belief that the director’s most important role would be to create a context where all staff and students could develop well and fulfill their potential.Also I saw the need to attract new staff who would bring the right balance of scholarship and professional teaching experience to the leadership of this new institution.Therefore I will focus on HKIEd people in the first section of this chapter, introducing some of the key figures, and sharing a few stories of students and staff. F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 193
The People of HKIEd The key figure from the beginning of the institute’s development was Simon S. O. Ip, the senior law partner in Hong Kong’s Johnston, Stokes, and Masters. Simon was appointed chairman of the planning committee, and once its ordinance was passed in , he was appointed council chairman, a position he held until the spring of . No one else has put more time and effort into nurturing this fledgling institution, from drafting its founding ordinance to planning for its institutional review to become a self-accrediting institute, which is likely to take place some time in . A wise and judicious person, with extensive local political experience as well as a very high standing in Hong Kong’s legal circles, Simon was an inspired choice. No words can express the value of all he has put into the institute’s development, from planning its magnificent campus to choosing its successive directors. It was clear to me from the very beginning how fortunate I was to work under such a boss, and Simon and his wife, Sheila, became good friends to Walter and me over the years. I always knew I could turn to him in whatever difficulty arose, and working together on the planning of many new initiatives was a delight. In the many treasured photos of events at HKIEd, I am often seen embracing this wonderful boss. Equally hard working were the vice-chairman, Dr.Thomas Leung, head of the consulting company Vision in Business, and Mr. Peter Lee, the treasurer.They too became friends, and offered unstinting support as I tried to guide the institute through many shoals. Other council members whom I wish to mention are Sister Margaret Wong, innovative educator and principal of St. Paul’s Convent School, and Mrs.Angela Cheung, a former teacher of St. Stephen’s Girls School and educational services secretary of the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals schools.Angela has a high standing in Hong Kong’s educational circles and has given much time to guiding several of the institute’s key developments.Time does not Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 194
permit me to give further details on our council members, who changed over the years as the government made new appointments, but I would like to say it was the most hands-on governing council I have ever seen, with members giving generously of their time to assist many aspects of the institute’s development.This was a baby that needed an inordinate amount of attention if it was to grow into a healthy adult and serve the role expected of it in Hong Kong society! If the council played a crucial role in guiding my work at the institute, senior staff members were also an invaluable and important asset, with three deputies taking responsibility for academic programs; academic services such as the library, registry, and student affairs; and resources and administrative services. Our fourmember directorate team spent many hours together, thrashing out longer- and shorter-term plans for the institute’s development. In the early days, the institute was organized by a matrix system, with four divisions under divisional directors managing its programs in early childhood, primary, secondary, and adult education respectively, and thirteen academic departments housing its academic staff and supplying the teaching modules for the programs. On paper, this looked like a rational and highly sophisticated form of organization, but in practice it resulted in an ongoing turf warfare over which departments would get enough teaching modules to assure the ongoing employment of their teaching staff. Every one of the skirmishes in this warfare tended to come to the directorate for resolution, and in the first year much of our time was spent resolving these quarrels.Thus our decision to create four schools and combine the work of program management and teaching within these schools was a crucial one. Our academic staff consisted of about lecturers. Half of them held civil service appointments going back to the days of their role in the five government-sponsored colleges, and the other half had been appointed after the establishment of the institute in on terms parallel to those of other autonomous tertiary institutions. I felt it was very important to get to know and understand F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 195
the aspirations and concerns of these people, whose professional growth, happiness, and well-being would be absolutely crucial to the institute’s ability to raise the quality of all Hong Kong teachers to a university level.Thus in the first year of my appointment, I made a personal visit to each of them. Naturally, people took the opportunity of seeing me alone as a chance to air deeply held grievances, anxieties, and disappointments. Sometimes after a day of eight to ten such personal visits, I was overwhelmed with exhaustion and discouragement.Would I be able to bring about the kinds of changes that could heal these wounds and motivate them to stretch themselves as far as possible to meet the expectations of society and government? My walks through campus, morning and evening, often provided me with the opportunity to hear from the grassroots some of the concerns and achievements of my staff.The more formal voice for this was the HKIEd Association of Lecturers (ALHKIEd), a very active and energetic organization.There were regular meetings with the association, and its executive let senior management know about the concerns and grievances of staff. Matters of workload were often discussed, as staff had heavier teaching loads than was customary in universities, plus two months of every year spent in supervising the professional practice of our students in local schools.The additional demands of doctoral work on a part-time basis in universities in Hong Kong, China, and around the world made for unbearable work pressures. Meetings with the ALHKIEd were sometimes stormy, as the association felt we failed to address some of their grievances in what they regarded as a satisfactory or timely matter. However, it was only with the decision to launch an early retirement scheme that this relationship became confrontational. More on that later. Over the first year of my directorship, a main focus was searching the world for new deans in the four schools we soon created, and in other crucial areas of the institute’s academic development. It was not easy to find people who had a combination of excellence in scholarship and professional commitment Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 196
and dedication to basic education, but both qualities were essential to set the right sort of example for the development of our academic staff. The most crucial component of HKIEd’s people is, of course, our students. As noted earlier, HKIEd students tended to come from working-class families, since most Hong Kong parents wanted their children to gain entrance to universities, and teacher education tended to be a second choice for those who could not gain a university place.Thus our students tended to feel like second-class citizens within higher education, and HKIEd was sometimes characterized as No. , in other words, the bottom of the pile. One of our main goals was attracting excellent students into the institute’s new degree and post-graduate programs, and changing the image of the institute so that parents would see it as a desirable place for their children to study. The economic downturn in the autumn of helped us in this as teaching became a fairly attractive profession in a time of increasing unemployment in other sectors.This was, however, a two-edged sword, and we interviewed every applicant to make sure that they truly loved children and had a personal commitment to the profession, and were not simply seeking an easy and secure job. Over the years we were proud to see—through the records of the Joint University Programs Admission Scheme, which coordinated all student applications for study in Hong Kong’s public universities—HKIEd go from being the eighth choice of most students entering Hong Kong’s publicly supported higher institutions to the fifth choice in , and subsequently the fourth choice in . However, academic excellence was only one aspect of the issue. Another was recognizing that many of our students had remarkable talents in other areas—music, the visual arts, sports, drama. These abilities, and an interest in applying them in educational settings, were as important to the students’ future effectiveness as teachers as high marks in university entrance examinations. In my F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 197
first two years at the institute, I took great pleasure in attending two plays produced by our student drama club on their own, with little assistance from the lecturing staff. One was a Chinese translation of Kafka’s Trial, which the students themselves had done to produce this complex and fascinating play.The production was superb, as were all the arrangements for advertising, ticket selling, etc. It was held in an urban theatre, rather than on campus, to make it more accessible to the general public.The following year, I was similarly impressed by the students’ production of Alice through the Looking Glass. Whatever their academic credentials, the large group of students who had achieved such a level of professionalism in producing these two plays clearly had talents that would be extremely valuable in their future teaching careers.Thus another way of looking at the problem of the institute’s image and the quality of our students was persuading society and government that excellence was not merely a matter of high marks in traditional examination subjects, but also of creativity and initiative in areas such as the arts, sports, and music. Hong Kong had a sad tradition of calling these fields of knowledge “cultural subjects” in a tone that suggested they were of minimal academic value and deserved little respect. It was up to us to change this ingrained prejudice, and the reforms to the education system undertaken by the Education Commission gave us some support in that effort. I very much wanted to have an attentive ear for students’ concerns, and the best way to achieve this was by having breakfast meetings with students each term. Over breakfast, we discussed many subjects—their programs, how they had come to choose teaching as a profession, their experience of campus life in the new residences, their struggle with language learning, etc.Among them were some older students who had come to teaching as a second career after being in social work.They felt teaching would enable them to address the problems they had faced as social workers at their very root, and help children and young people become happy and productive citizens. Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 198
There were two particular student projects that gave me a deep sense of pride and satisfaction in our students.The first was a project to celebrate the eightieth anniversary of China’s May th movement in . Often called the Chinese renaissance, this was a movement that began with student protests in against decisions at the Treaty of Versailles to give German possessions in China to Japan. However, it was far more than a political movement, affecting literature, culture, and science. It was a defining moment in China’s embrace of modern development. Peking University, under the leadership of its great chancellor, Cai Yuanpei, was at the forefront of the movement.Almost all of the youth movements that were to follow over the twentieth century were linked in one way or another to this original movement.This includes the seventieth anniversary of May th in , which was an important part of the run up to the June th tragedy. For Chinese people living in Hong Kong, however, where the British colonial government had set the tone for education and culture for more than years, there was little general awareness of the importance of May th.Thus the eightieth anniversary provided an opportunity for some citizenship education. Students organized an essay competition, inviting essays on topics related to May th, and produced an edited book containing about fifteen of the best essays, then made it widely available. This was a project undertaken by a group of students in our very first bachelor of education cohort, who had started their studies in September . I remember vividly the day they proudly presented this publication to me! I told them I was a doctoral student before I managed to publish anything, and congratulated them on achieving this accomplishment in the second year of their degree program! The second part of the project was a collaboration with a local television station to develop some cultural programming relating to May th.The same group of students who were responsible for the essay contest, together with two or three lecturers, and myself, visited the grave of Cai Yuanpei. It was a rainy Saturday morning, F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 199
and we stood around the elaborate tombstone and discussed the ideas of this great master, who had succeeded in integrating the highest levels of traditional Chinese scholarship with features of the European university, which he had admired during his lengthy stays in Germany and France.The ways in which his leadership had stimulated cultural awakening, scientific understanding, and democratic development in China were still worthy of discussion eighty years later. I had been exploring this familiar territory since my doctoral studies and my life in Shanghai twenty years earlier, but for our students and many of our lecturing staff it was electrifyingly new as they took tentative steps into their new role as citizens of China.Thus the third part of this project commemorating May th was a conference organized by our School of Foundations in Education, which attracted scholars from a number of universities in Mainland China, and provided an opportunity for a series of scholarly presentations relating contemporary educational issues in Hong Kong to the historical development of liberal education in China. A book came out of this, entitled China’s Liberal Education, edited by Professor Lee Wing On, dean of the school, along with two senior lecturers, Dr. Fang Jun and Dr. Joe Lo. I was delighted to provide a picture I had taken in of one of Fudan’s historic buildings from the s for the cover of this book, and also to have the essay I presented on Ma Xiangbo’s educational ideas included in the volume. The second event by which our students made us very proud was a series of competitions, first in Hong Kong and later in the Mainland, among the Putonghua Debating Teams of various universities. Like citizenship education, teaching Putonghua or Mandarin was an important part of our mandate in preparing teachers for a Hong Kong that was now part of China.The goal for Hong Kong citizens is fluency in three spoken languages— Cantonese, Putonghua, and English, and two written languages, liangwen sanyu.The institute’s Putonghua debating team put enormous energy into preparation for the competitions among Hong Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 200
Kong tertiary institutions, and were absolutely delighted when they won the final round against a team from the Chinese University of Hong Kong. From there they went on to represent Hong Kong in the final rounds among the runners-up of all regions of China, going to Shanghai to participate in this.When they managed to come second in the whole of China, we were amazed and delighted. It was not simply a matter of excellence in spoken Putonghua, but of being able to use the language in debating quite difficult subjects.
The Growth of a New Institution The institute is located in a green valley under the beautiful hills of the Pat Sin range of mountains, surrounded by a country park. Architecturally it is one of the most beautiful of the eight university campuses in Hong Kong with its series of linked three-storey buildings on an extended podium reaching from the entrance in a crescent-shaped curve to fit the contours of the valley. Only one of the buildings stands out—the rather grandiose colonial-style director’s lodge, at the far end of the campus on a hill, looking out over the campus and the surrounding country. Nicknamed the White House for its colour and style, that was where Walter and I were to live for nearly four years. While the outside looked pretentious, the interior was spacious and bright. During quiet weekends I wandered from room to room, enjoying the vistas of hill, valley, and the distant Tolo harbour from the different windows and basking in the sunlight as I thought through some of the dilemmas and difficult decisions facing the institute. The extravagant generosity of the government in providing these remarkable facilities for a new institution for teachers was a pressure in itself.The material outlay had been made, but it was my responsibility, as director, to see that the quality of teaching, academic programming, library development, research, and all F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 201
other responsibilities of a new tertiary institution would live up to these wonderful facilities.This would be a matter of building upon and transforming the traditions of five old-style colleges of education that went back to . Where should I begin this task? As a new leader, was my first responsibility to try to heal some of the wounds and restore confidence that had been lost in the highly public failed accreditation of the institute’s first university-level program? Clearly there were issues of public confidence and internal morale that urgently needed attention, and also there was the enormous practical responsibility of overseeing the move from nine campuses to the new campus in Taipo, which was scheduled to take place just two weeks after my arrival in mid-October . I very soon discovered that there was a well-developed infrastructure for academic and personnel decision making put in place under the guidance of the council.The institutionwas running well, with its large staff all extremely busy in carrying out their different roles. What then should my role be as the new director? Walter was not shy in giving me good advice. His experience in business had aroused in him a lifelong fascination with mission statements. “What was the mission of the HKIEd?” he asked me.“To become a centre of excellence in teacher education,” I replied,“Or at least that is how the mission has been defined by the University Grants Committee, the institute’s funding body.” “What on earth does that mean, and how will it guide your decision making?”“I am not sure,” I replied.Walter then launched into one of his favourite maxims:“There is nothing more frustrating than to have everyone working extremely hard on the wrong thing!” And so I came to see that the most important task for me was to develop a mission or vision statement to define the essence of what the institute aimed to achieve and to prove the value of its existence to government and society.We decided to use the term “vision” rather than “mission” since the government had defined its mission already, and there was little doubt about the focus on Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 202
teacher education.A small vision committee was formed, including a student representative, a member of the Association of Lecturers, senior staff from different programs, and two wellknown school principals, who were able to attend only one or two of the committee’s meetings but gave us good advice. The vision committee met every two or three weeks throughout that first year, and held a number of forums where all staff and students were invited, and encouraged extensive e-mail correspondence over the wording of our vision statement. Gradually over the year, our statement began to take shape, first in Chinese, then in English.We kept the statement itself under words, and then added a series of guiding values to clarify how we would pursue the vision. After about nine months of deliberation and consultation within the campus, we sent the draft vision statement to all the schools of Hong Kong, inviting teachers and principals, our primary partners, to help us devise a short version of the vision statement that could be expressed in one breath (one of Walter’s key criteria for judging a good mission statement!). About responses came in, including some from our own students and staff, as well as over eighty from the school sector. One of our students won the competition with an eight-word phrase in Chinese that encapsulated the two key points in the vision: that the potential of all children in the kindergartens and schools of Hong Kong should be fully developed, and that learning be a joyful process of inquiry rather than a rote response to examination pressures. In the end the committee chose a statement that had twelve Chinese characters and twelve English words:“Optimizing each child’s potential through the shared joy of teaching and learning.” If the institute could achieve this vision for all the schools of Hong Kong by preparing teachers through its programs, the difference this would make in the quality of Hong Kong people should be dramatic and measurable within a generation. University status or high-profile scholarly research were nothing in comparison to this extremely demanding vision F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 203
of enabling each and every child to develop his or her potential fully and find a satisfying role in Hong Kong’s knowledge society. The visioning work touched the very heart of my own motivation in coming back to Asia, and indeed to Hong Kong, the city of my youth—the belief that Chinese culture and Chinese educational philosophy had something important to contribute to the global community in this period of “dialogue among civilizations.” As a Chinese city whose history had deep links to the West, and which had resources for participation in international dialogue that were still limited in Mainland China, Hong Kong, I truly believed, had a very special role to play as interpreter of Chinese culture. While the core vision statement was a universal one, the guiding values gave attention to the ways in which Chinese culture would shape the institute’s scholarship, its vision of citizenship, and its convictions about the nature and role of language learning. Ideally, a vision statement should precede considerations of strategic planning and institutional structure, but given the time pressures upon us, in fact these three developed in tandem, with one of my senior deputies leading the planning process and another working with a small committee on structural change. With a huge task of program development ahead of us, both bachelor degrees in education and post-graduate diploma programs, it was crucial to have a structure that would bring together the work of academic departments and the management of programs in a collaborative relationship. It seemed to me from the very beginning that the key figures to carry out this kind of leadership should be deans, and therefore we needed to form three or four schools responsible for both programs and academic staff.The first to be formed was the School for Languages in Education for improved language teaching in English as well as Putonghua or Mandarin.This left a group of professional departments—curriculum, psychology and counselling, educational philosophy, administration and policy; and a group of subject-oriented departments, such as physical education, creative arts, social science, science, mathematics, information and Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 204
applied technology (IAT), and early childhood education.The committee responsible for advising the Academic Board finally came up with two proposals, one that suggested a school of arts and sciences and a school of professional studies, the other that proposed three schools in addition to a school of languages—early childhood education; creative arts, sciences, and technology; and foundations in education. I will never forget the day when the Academic Board met to consider the proposals and cast its vote. Members of the early childhood education program were intensely eager to have their own school as they felt this was essential to their identity and autonomy and their ability to raise the profile of the field, a much neglected one in Hong Kong.They made an impassioned presentation, and narrowly managed to swing the vote in their favour. Thus the institute ended up with four schools rather than three.The subject departments made their choice as to whether they wished to be located in the School of Foundations in Education, or the School of Creative Arts, Sciences, and Technology (CAST). Science and Social Science chose to go to the School of Foundations in Education, while Mathematics and and IAT chose to be in CAST.This definition of the character of the four schools led in turn to decisions about the recruitment of deans, and the innovative cross-curricular identity of the schools helped us to recruit visionary deans who were intrigued by the interface of knowledge areas in their respective schools. It was an unusual opportunity to shape a new institution from the very structure of its knowledge patterns. Between and , the institute developed twelve new degree and post-graduate programs, with each going through a rigorous process of internal and external validation, the latter organized by the Hong Kong Council for Academic Accreditation. For each program, a team of up to fifteen to twenty academic staff worked tirelessly in all aspects of planning, presentation, and defence. By the spring of , shortly after I left the institute, a teaching and learning quality process review F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 205
carried out by the University Grants Committee resulted in a positive assessment of the institute’s level of maturity and readiness to take responsibility for its own degree programs. There were many angles to this effort at program development, but perhaps the most important was that it was a mass exercise in the development of our academic staff, giving them the opportunity to reflect on and analyze every aspect of each program in detail, and be able to articulate some of the key intellectual and professional concepts that underlay their thinking, such as constructivist pedagogy, the notion that children should be aware of taking part in knowledge building as they learn.The shift from teaching as a craft, employing tried and tested techniques of classroom and curricular organization for the inculcation of defined bodies of knowledge, to teaching as a way of creating conditions for children to learn, based on an increasing awareness and understanding of the learning process itself, was a fascinating one. In addition to our own new programs, we also launched a number of programs in co-operation with other institutions in Hong Kong, such as the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and the Academy of Performing Arts. Our most ambitious collaborative program was our bachelor of education in early childhood education, which was the first degree program in the field in Hong Kong. For the design of the program, we collaborated with Nanjing Normal University, the premier centre of excellence in Mainland China for this area, and OISE/UT in Canada. Professors from both of these universities also took part in some of the teaching for the first two cohorts, often coming during the summer to give courses.The hopes and expectations we had for this program were enormous! First, we wanted Hong Kong society to recognize that this was the foundation of lifelong learning, a field whose intellectual and professional demands were just as high as any other, particularly with the many new neurological discoveries about the development of young children’s brains, and the increasingly cogent Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 206
research evidence for the lifelong impact of early learning experiences. Secondly, we felt this was an ideal area to integrate some of the distinctive elements in Chinese and Western pedagogy, blending child-centred and activity-oriented learning, rooted in Western progressivism, with the encouragement of introspection and attention to the inner feelings of the self and the other, which are part of China’s pedagogical traditions. Most of the students in this program were highly experienced kindergarten principals and head teachers whose enthusiasm was boundless once they had the opportunity to participate in a degree program.This was probably the most appreciated of all our programs.What a delight to be present for the graduation of the first cohort to earn the bachelor of education in early childhood education in November , and to be honoured at that ceremony myself by the conferral of an honourary doctorate of education! Overall the institute’s rapid development was a positive story of burgeoning growth and movement toward greater maturity. Yet there were storm clouds hanging over us, and no one was more aware of these than the Association of Lecturers, one of whose main concerns was the issue of job security. Fully half of the academic staff had lifetime job security as former civil servants who had negotiated the terms on which they would move to the institute.The other half were largely on contractual terms, and one of my innovations in the first year or two was to extend these contracts from two to three years, where academic planning permitted, in order to give our good contract staff the opportunity of working toward substantiation or tenure through two three-year contracts.This is a pattern common in universities, of course. In many cases, though by no means all, the staff appointed on contract terms tended to have better academic qualifications than the former college staff, though the latter were working very hard to upgrade themselves.There was thus a certain amount of jealousy and mistrust in the relations between these two groups. Meanwhile, as the institute developed, the need for lecturers F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 207
in various subject areas changed, and it became very clear that certain departments were overstaffed, while others had a serious lack of senior scholars to take leadership in newly emerging areas. In order to appoint new people, we would have to reduce the overstaffing in some of the traditional subject areas. It was neither fair nor feasible to do this entirely through the non-renewal of contract staff. While most of the former college staff had progressed extremely well, it was clear that some were unlikely to become university-level teachers, and all of our sub-degree programs, except in the area of early childhood education, were scheduled to come to an end in . The government was fully aware of this situation and encouraged us to devise an early retirement scheme that would provide for some of these former college staff to gain early access to their government pensions and depart. However, the fact that these staff enjoyed civil servant perquisites meant that we had to negotiate with three different sectors of government to gain an agreement. Fully two and a half years were taken up in negotiations until it became evident that the only type of early retirement the government would approve of was a mandatory one, based on redundancy in certain areas.We had hoped for a voluntary scheme, which certainly would have been far easier to implement. As it turned out, the timing of this approval was problematic. It came through in August , and I had decided to leave the institute by the end of that year or early in for the sake of my husband,Walter. It was tempting for me to consider delaying the implementation of the program till after my departure, but I felt strongly that I would be shirking my responsibility as a leader if I left without completing this task.Also, the whole senior team felt that it would be better to identify those who were to be given early retirement as soon as possible, around thirty to forty individuals, rather than create months of anxiety for all of the former college staff.These were the considerations that made us decide to go ahead, though we were to be roundly criticized for launching the scheme at the beginning of a new academic year. Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 208
In late August we identified the thirty to forty individuals, and in September we began to inform those on the list. The committee making the decision included our three deputy directors, four deans, and Professor Amy Tsui of the University of Hong Kong, a council member whose academic standing enabled her to play a crucial role as a presence from the council and also an academic referee of the process. Her good judgement and unfailing support through the whole episode meant a lot to me. In conveying the decision to staff, our lack of experience led to a misjudgment for which we paid dearly. How would academic staff respond when informed that they were on the list? Would they be able to go on with their teaching as usual, or did they need to be relieved of teaching while they considered the options available? We decided to relieve them of teaching, with the unfortunate consequences that some reacted very strongly. Although we changed this policy immediately, giving each colleague the choice of continuing to teach or take time off from teaching, it was too late to stop the formation of a radical protest movement against us. This movement was spearheaded by our Association of Lecturers, who passed a vote of non-confidence in senior management at their annual meeting in late September, and gained the support of two members of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, who were veteran educators and leading political figures in the Democratic Party, the Hon. Seto Wah and the Hon. Cheung Man Kwong, chairman of the Hong Kong Professional Teachers Union (PTU).The movement launched against us with the support of the PTU escalated day by day, with exaggerated stories being circulated in the media of how we had fired lecturers while they were teaching their classes and had security guards drag them out of class in disgrace. Before long a huge array of Dazibao or big character posters were hung all around the bus depot at the entrance to the campus, making the institute look like a university in Mainland China at the height of the Cultural Revolution.“White Terror,”“Black Box Operation,” and “Abuse F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 209
of Teachers” were some of the accusations on these posters. This exceedingly tense time came to a head when the institute’s leadership, including the council chairman and the general secretary of the University Grants Committee, was called to a meeting organized by the Educational Panel of the Legislative Council in mid-October and held in the main chamber of the Legislative Council, Hong Kong’s most august public venue.The council chairman was away from Hong Kong at the time, so the vice-chairman and I represented the institute. All of the points in the ALHKIEd’s vote of non-confidence were read aloud in the chamber by one of our lecturing staff during the staged question-and-answer period that followed the presentations.The accusation I found most hurtful was that of nurturing a system of patronage throughout the institute. I had been absolutely scrupulous in ensuring my own dispassion in all personnel decisions, and adhering to principles widely used in universities around the world. I knew, with a good conscience, that no one had gained an appointment or promotion on the basis of any personal link to me.Yet this ugly accusation was being read out against me in Hong Kong’s most public space, with a large crowd of students, lecturers, and even visiting professors from abroad observing from the gallery above. By early November, the movement had died down, and practical arrangements were in place to allow most of those being given early retirement to complete their teaching year. Some support and assistance was also given to those who wished to find alternative employment. In reflecting on this most difficult phase of my work at HKIEd, several things have struck me. One is the remarkable maturity of our students, who were pressured by the senior leadership of the PTU in a public meeting to support the lecturing staff. They nevertheless insisted on taking their own independent stance on the issue, and tried to mediate between the Association of Lecturers and senior management. The students’ union had organized two forums, and circulated their own measured views Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 210
on the mandatory early retirement scheme. They were not prepared to be swept away by the prevailing emotions of the moment, but applied themselves to finding a balanced understanding of the issues on both sides and seeking a reconciliation. These qualities augured well for their future work as teachers. A second was the importance of face to face communication during this type of crisis.Throughout the six weeks in which the movement escalated, every morning I walked from the lodge through the campus to my office. I looked into the faces of staff and students to see what I could read there. On numerous occasions I also met with staff in larger or smaller groups to answer questions and discuss the early retirement scheme.This was difficult, but I learned it made a difference to some staff. It was only possible for me because I knew within my heart of hearts that we were doing the right thing, and that we had been meticulous in applying professional and academic principles in the decisionmaking process. One of the difficult tests of this commitment to open communication with all our staff, and also with the media, came on the day when the Association of Lecturers organized a protest march on campus.About to staff and students marched from end to end of the campus that day, carrying banners and gathering around the fountain below the administration building to make speeches of protest.The two veteran politicians, Seto Wah and Cheung Man Kwong, were leading the protest, and there were also other outsiders present. I was asked to come down and receive a petition. Several of my staff suggested this be delegated to our head of external relations or someone else. However, I decided that I should go down myself, step into the crowd to receive the petition, and shake the hands of the two visiting politicians. The ritual of handshaking and receiving souvenirs in the many public events to which I had been invited as guest of honour passed through my mind at this difficult moment, and I smiled at each of the politicians while shaking their hands, and received the petition with the warmth and F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 211
Image not available
Frying Cuttlefish
Changing Blood
politeness expected in public life.This was, of course, a moment made for the press, and I later learned that the pictures of this occasion, which appeared in local newspapers, gained me considerable support and understanding from the public. Generally newspapers in Hong Kong take considerable interest in educational issues, and this movement, with its links to the historic colleges of education and thus to all of the teachers in Hong Kong’s schools, was front-page news for over a month. I will never forget the moment that I recognized myself in one of the cartoons in the popular Chinese newspaper Ming Pao. It was a picture of me with a chef ’s hat, frying cuttlefish in a large Chinese wok. Chao yaoyu is a Cantonese colloquial phrase for a boss firing employees.Two more cartoons appeared on the following days. One showed me lying on a stretcher in the hospital undergoing a “change of blood,” with eager smiling faces on the bags of new blood ready to Image not available be poured in, while drops of “old blood” with miserable frowning faces were being drained from the other arm! The third one showed me as the master of ceremonies leading the Chinese version of The The Weakest Link Weakest Link, a popular evening teleHong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 212
vision show.Three of my lecturers were being told “You are out of the running. Goodbye!” Overall, the newspaper coverage was fair, and genuinely reflected the views and concerns of both sides in this difficult controversy. This difficult episode reflected some of the problems of democratic development in Hong Kong.There is considerable literature on the subject of political theatre in China, interpreting student movements, such as the Tiananmen events, as staged performances rather than movements reflecting genuine democratic participation. In a sense, the extremely polemical rhetoric used in the big character posters and in the accusations thrown at us in the Legislative Council chamber reflected great frustration with the lack of genuine democratic power. Members of Legco’s Educational Panel knew that even if they succeeded in a vote to censure us and force us to shelve the early retirement scheme, they actually had no power to ensure its implementation. As an autonomous tertiary institution funded by the University Grants Committee, we were responsible to our Governing Council, not the Legislative Council.This sheltering of the university sector from direct political intervention by the Legislative Council was, of course, based on Western principles of the importance of the autonomy and academic freedom of the university sector. However, the question of democratic development in Hong Kong’s political system remains one of concern and controversy up to the present.
Government and Public in HKIEd’s Development From its birth, HKIEd was a very public institution, constantly in the public eye because educational reform was one of the core emphases of the new Special Administrative Region government, and there was a widely felt need to improve the quality and status of the teaching profession. It was often extremely diffi F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 213
cult for me to know how to apportion my time between all the demands of the internal development work and the very public role I was expected to play. Early in I was appointed as a member of the Education Commission, an important advisory body to the Education and Manpower Bureau, and I was also asked to chair a subcommittee tasked with detailed planning for reforms in the early childhood sector.As head of a tertiary institution, I participated in regular meetings between all eight tertiary heads and the University Grants Committee, as well as meetings with the UGC’s Teacher Education Sub-committee, which had a special responsibility for advising the development of the HKIEd. In addition, I was a member of the Heads of Universities Committee (HUCOM), which met every two months to coordinate matters affecting all eight of the universities funded by the UGC. In addition to these formal roles associated with the office, there were many opportunities for social interaction with senior government officials and leaders of the business community, the most regular being the monthly luncheon hosted by the chief executive. It was open to the most senior person in each major government office and public body or company. This was an opportunity to meet people at a senior level and garner support and understanding for Hong Kong’s newest tertiary institution, as well as share views on educational reform and other current issues.This was the top of the apex in our public network, while the bottom was the school sector itself—more than secondary schools and primary schools, networks of international and private schools, parental associations at the early childhood level and up, and various other concerned educational bodies. This was the public to whom we owed the most, and with whom we tried to form partnerships in as many ways as possible. People have often asked me what it felt like, as a woman and a non-Chinese, to find myself suddenly in such a high-profile public role in Hong Kong, with a calendar that involved public speeches on behalf of the institute at a rate of several per week Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 214
at the busiest times. I had come to love Chinese people and culture with a passion, yet over the years I always felt like a guest, honoured, cared for, but never fully accepted within Chinese society. In a way, this was inevitable, given China’s socialist system and the kinds of roles I had played in China. Now, however, the government and people of a Hong Kong returned to China had entrusted me with leading the institution responsible for preparing teachers for their schools, from early childhood up to secondary. It was an awesome responsibility and an honour that made me know, deep within myself, that I was now one of them. Somehow I had been searching for that acceptance all of my life. Was the fact of my being a woman something that made this kind of acceptance easier? I am still not sure of this point, as I have not yet had time for a careful exploration of the links that I feel instinctively between women’s ways of knowing and Asian ways of knowing. Let me summarize that instinct in terms of a preference for integrated forms of knowledge that privilege both subjective and objective approaches to understanding, and resistance to the strict dualism between facts and values that led to such a long dominance of positivism in Western academia.These characteristics of women’s ways of knowing are also resonant with Confucian knowledge traditions, broadly defined. Certainly it was stimulating to find myself the only woman in the all-male Heads of Universities Committee, and I felt privileged to interact on a regular basis with this group of outstanding Chinese intellectual leaders, who were always enjoyable company. In our regular meetings with the University Grants Committee, I noted how differently I felt when the scene changed, so that across the table was a senior leader, Dr. Alice Lam, who took up her role as the first woman chair of the committee in January . Having a strong woman leader on the other side of the table somehow changed the dynamic, and I have been trying to reflect on just how it changed. Alice is a remarkable woman by any measure, with successful careers behind her as a secondary school teacher of history, as a F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 215
lawyer, as a banker, and as a specialist in Chinese antiques.When I asked Alice what was the secret lying behind her successful career, and her wonderful family of three children, she replied that it could never have been planned. It had been shaped both by tragedy, and opportunity. “Embrace life with passion” is the principle she has lived by, she explained to me in a talk we had in June of . As chairman of the University Grants Committee, Alice has demonstrated passion, attention to detail, and a commitment to raising the profile of universities in government and business circles. She has also launched a number of new initiatives that have helped the universities weather the increasing stresses of Hong Kong’s economic downturn and its inevitable consequences for the funding of public higher education. Of course, Hong Kong has been exceptional as an Asian society in the number of senior women appointed to its leading civil service positions, from the gracious “First Lady,”Anson Chan, who served as chief secretary for administration to both the last British governor, Chris Patten, and the first chief executive, C.H.Tung, to the many policy secretaries, in the areas of justice, security, education, social welfare, and the environment, among others.There are also several women ministers in the ministerial system put in place in Mr.Tung’s second term of office.There have been few women, however, holding senior positions in public higher education, even at the vice-presidential level. Access to senior leaders in all sectors of Hong Kong society was an important dimension of my public life as the head of a new tertiary institution, but the other side was the relationship with schools and kindergartens, our most important partners, and also with parents. One of the treasured items in the archive of documents I brought back with me from the institute is a letter from the father of one of our students, letting me know how closely he had followed the many articles about me in the press, and the statements I had made, and initiating a dialogue with me about his own educational philosophy. There were Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 216
many opportunities to interact with this sector of society, mainly through speech days, graduation ceremonies, or other special events. I enjoyed these occasions, and tried to remind myself while preparing my remarks, or making adjustments to the speech that was written for me by our external relations department, that for each school, this was a uniquely important moment. In addition to ceremonial visits, I also found other opportunities to visit schools. For one year, I took a special interest in the field service placements of our students. Each week I visited a different school, going along with the lecturer who was responsible for supervision in each case, sitting in on the class, and then observing the discussion that followed as lecturer and student evaluated the lesson that had been taught. On these occasions, I often had the opportunity to meet the school principal, but my main focus was at the classroom level.These experiences gave me many insights into classroom situations, and into the possibilities for partnership between schools and the institute in different areas. The institute’s vision committed us to a kind of excellence that had to be shown in practice, and could not simply be a matter of academic reputation or research productivity. For this reason, it seemed important to me that we should have our own teaching school or model school, just as every university faculty of medicine has its teaching hospital. I was very familiar with normal universities in China and aware of the role of their attached schools, but this seemed an entirely new idea in Hong Kong. When I first raised it, in the summer of , as I was going through orientation, it was viewed with some suspicion. Would parents like the idea of their children being subject to experimentation in a lab school? Then suddenly the idea caught on, and people could see how valuable it would be for the institute to have its own model school, a place where best practices in pedagogy, classroom organization, and cross-curricular integration could be demonstrated. Within a very short time, we received an encouraging expression of interest from the Hong Kong Jockey Club, an important F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 217
sponsor of good causes in Hong Kong.With the support of the Education Department of the Hong Kong government, we obtained a grant of HK$ million for the building of an eighteen-classroom primary school on the campus.The school opened its doors in September . A year earlier we had opened an innovative early childhood learning centre, managed by our School of Early Childhood Education. It was wonderful to dream about putting in place conditions where the many reforms being discussed by the Education Commission and its various sub-committees could be realized on our own campus. I have mentioned earlier that I was appointed to chair the sub-committee on early childhood education, an area that had been seriously neglected in Hong Kong even though over per cent of children attend two or three years of kindergarten in privately run kindergartens, some of which are quite profitable businesses. Others are non-profit organizations run by churches and other charitable bodies, and all are subject to strict regulation by the government.The qualifications of teachers for this sector have been a concern for years. Given that the salaries are much lower than those of primary school teachers, it has been difficult to motivate early childhood education providers to accept or implement measures needed for the professional development of their staff. My own scholarly focus has been on higher education, so I felt some dismay when I was appointed to chair this committee. I soon realized, however, that my presence was important symbolically to give some profile to this area. I was fortunate to be able to rely heavily on our dean of early childhood education, Professor Lorna Chan, in dealing with the many issues under consideration by the committee. Lorna’s team did a valuable comparative study of early childhood education policies in about eighteen different societies around the world on commission to the government.This provided crucially important input into many of the sub-committee’s deliberations. Some real breakthroughs were achieved in planning for the integration of early Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 218
childhood services under social welfare and education, and in setting the standards for teachers in the field. Lorna is one of the four deans I managed to appoint in the first year of my work at HKIEd, and her return to Hong Kong from Australia, where she had become a well-known scholar in the area of child development, has been a tremendous boon to this sector of education. Finally, it is being recognized as a highly demanding and important professional field that is responsible for laying the foundations of lifelong learning for Hong Kong’s knowledge society. It is impossible to recount in detail all of the different experiences I had dealing with the various public groupings which were important to the HKIEd. But let me say a little about the language dimension of these many public events. One of the fascinating things to watch in government consultative meetings, such as those of the Education Commission, was the pleasure members felt when they looked around the room and realized that it would not be necessary to speak in English, the language of government up to .They could deliberate in their mother tongue of Cantonese! Many of them were working hard to learn Mandarin, but their first preference in communication was Cantonese, and they all spoke excellent English. Never once was I present on a committee of senior Hong Kong leaders where Mandarin was the language of conversation among them. In the Heads of Universities Committee (HUCOM) there was one member, Professor H.K. Chang, president of City University, who had grown up in Taiwan, with Mandarin as his mother tongue. He made a huge personal effort to learn Cantonese after coming to Hong Kong, and was able to take part comfortably in the Cantonese deliberations at the HUCOM meetings, as was I. For all others, Cantonese was the mother tongue. My own ability to speak Cantonese, formally or extemporaneously, on all kinds of occasions, was an important factor in winning support from the government and the public for HKIEd. I became a model of the policy of sanyu liangwen (three spoken languages and two written languages), as I was truly able F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 219
to move easily among Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. People knew instinctively that a great deal of time and effort had been invested in my learning Cantonese as a young person, and that this was incontrovertible evidence of a very special respect for them, for their language, and for their culture. It was something not many of the British colonial officials had managed to do, nor was it seen as necessary under colonial rule. The Hong Kong experience caused me to reflect deeply on issues of language, culture, and identity. I wrote one or two popular articles relating to my experiences of language learning, as well as a scholarly one, dealing with language issues in the literature of comparative education.This was presented at the annual meeting of the Hong Kong Association of Applied Linguistics in September , and later published in the association’s journal. Hong Kong was a veritable laboratory for issues of language, culture, and identity, with its new status as a special administrative region of China and its efforts to balance the learning and use of Cantonese, Mandarin, and English.
HKIEd’s Links with Mainland China Most Hong Kong citizens felt great pride over Hong Kong’s return to China and its new identity as a special administrative region of China, despite very real concerns and misgivings over issues of democratic development, the degree of autonomy Hong Kong would be able to maintain from Beijing, and a range of anxieties relating to some of their memories of past political movements in China. After all, most of the older population came to Hong Kong as refugees, fleeing war, revolution, and political persecution. In April , when Walter came to Hong Kong with me for the first time as the final decision over my appointment was being considered, I introduced him to my Chinese mum, and we spent an afternoon in her small apartment. I, of course, had Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 220
to interpret the conversation between her and Walter, but it was delightful to see how well these two got along, and there were many occasions of lively discussion and debate between them in the following years, as Mrs.Yung often came to stay with us in the lodge. On this occasion, however, one point struck Walter particularly. She described to us how that morning she had watched on television the entry of the first group of People’s Liberation Army soldiers from the Mainland in preparation for the handover, which was to take place just two months later.As she told us about this, her face lit up with pride and excitement. There was no doubt that for her, a woman who had lived in Hong Kong under colonial rule for nearly half a century, this was a moment that made her proud to be Chinese.When Mao stood on Tiananmen Square after the successful revolution of , he declared that the Chinese people had finally stood up, and China would no longer be subject to foreign domination. That may have been his most important contribution to modern China. The departure of the British from Hong Kong was the final step in ending a humiliation that had lasted over years. I thus found it a deeply moving assignment to be involved in building relations between the newly established HKIEd and universities in Mainland China. I felt I was dealing with something deeper than the political. Hong Kong people had grown up in a society so different from that of Mainland China, with British colonial influences going back over years, that there was a profound psychological gap between them and people living on the Mainland.Yet underneath that was a sense of pride in and attachment to Chinese civilization, together with a profound hope for China as a modern nation. It was on this level that I fervently wished to nurture strong links between HKIEd and Mainland universities. We needed to arrange language immersion in Putonghua for our students, and I felt it would be good for them to be located in a normal university, where it would be possible to link language studies with wider issues of teacher education. F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 221
Northeast Normal University in Changchun proved to be a good partner in this. In addition to collaborating in Putonghua studies, we also found interests in common relating to citizenship education and environmental education, which led to ties with our School of Foundations in Education as well as the School of Languages.We were able to gain support from the Hong Kong Bank Foundation to assist in building a collaborative centre on the Northeast Normal University campus, where our students and staff could stay when studying or doing research with partners there.To be completed in it is called the “The HKIEd Arthur Samy Teacher Education & Academic Exchange Centre.” My own links to China had a wide geographical range, because of the nature of my past collaborative projects, but I had a particular affection for the northwest, and for the old president and young scholars at Northwest Normal University who had participated in our project. When Walter and I got married in the summer of , we worried about how to deal with gifts likely to be given by our many friends and relatives invited to the wedding.After some hesitation, we decided to put a note into the wedding invitations, indicating that it would give us enormous pleasure if our guests would like to make a donation for rural school libraries in northwest China, in lieu of a wedding gift.We received more than $,, which made it possible to buy enough books in China for four rural libraries in southern Gansu province. What facilitated this, of course, was our close link to scholars at Northwest Normal University, who identified the neediest schools and selected all of the books with care and consideration for what would be most helpful to the teachers and children. In the spring of , we were able to visit several of the schools as part of a very special trip to China that I had arranged for Walter and his best friends from Germany—Peter, who had been best man at our wedding, and his wife, Erika.We began in Beijing, where I was invited to a celebration of Peking University’s th birthday, held in the Great Hall of the People. From Beijing we then flew to Lanzhou, and spent some time at Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 222
Northwest Normal University, including two days in southern Gansu, visiting the renowned Labulan Tibetan Monastery, as well as three of the four schools that were being given libraries from our wedding fund. We funded a small scholarship program to support girls, and our colleagues from Northwest Normal University started some research into the reasons for girls dropping out. We asked ourselves how we might be able to gain further support for this kind of work with rural schools. That opportunity came sooner than I expected. I was invited to join the Council of Save the Children (SCF) (HK) in the spring of , because of their ongoing projects in Mainland China, and their sense that I might be able to give some advice on these. Before too long a China Committee was formed, which I was asked to chair. Thus I became very involved in developing an approach to rural school building projects that involved partnership with normal universities in the area where the rural schools were being built, so that teacher training, the development of small libraries, and other kinds of educational support would complement the bricks and mortar aspect of assistance.The first project we undertook in the autumn of was to rebuild schools in areas of southern Hubei province, which had suffered from serious flooding of the Yangzi River that year, and in this we co-operated with scholars of education and rural development in Central China Normal University in Wuhan. Later we did similar work in Qinghai, Shaanxi, Gansu, and Xinjiang, in all cases working in partnership with colleagues from the normal universities in those provinces or regions of China’s Far Northwest. Since there was much to learn and contribute in the development of these projects, several academic staff from HKIEd joined me and members of the SCF Council and staff in trips to investigate possibilities for these projects. As a result HKIEd became involved in some of the activities. Our School of Early Childhood Education began to send students and lecturers to participate in some innovative programs at Shaanxi Normal University. In primary education, HKIEd has sent groups of B.Ed. students for F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 223
a summer rural school attachment under the supervision of graduate students of Northwest Normal University in recent years. There have been many other ways in which the institute has been linked with China. An important one has been the recruitment of a small number of Mainland students each year, under a program sponsored by the Hong Kong government, which provides them with scholarships.There have also been many shorter term visitors from Mainland universities, who have helped to bring a sense of connectedness with the higher education community in the Mainland. One unique and unforgettable event for me was the invitation to be a member of a Hong Kong government delegation of about senior people from government, business, public bodies, and education to join in the celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in October . During this trip, I spent considerable time with Mrs. Elsie (Elliot) Tu, the most beloved and revered British woman in Hong Kong, for her uncompromising commitment to the welfare of the neediest and most underprivileged over a fifty-year period, in which she had served as urban councillor and subsequently as legislative councillor. She had gone to China in the s as a missionary within a similar Brethren group to the one that members of my family had belonged to, and had known my Cousin Marjorie well in the s, admiring her work for underprivileged children. The fact that Elsie nominated me to be invited as a member of the Hong Kong chapter of the International Women’s Forum (IWF) was a great honour, and I enjoyed participating in the activities of that organization, and the opportunity it gave to get to know senior women leaders in many different sectors. I would also celebrate here the friendship with Dr. Rosann Kao, one of the founding members of the Hong Kong chapter of IWF.With Rosann’s help we were able to have two very special celebrations of International Women’s Day at HKIEd in early March and involving some of our staff and students. Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 224
Given that so much of my life has been spent in research on education in the Mainland, it was tantalizing for me to be living so close, yet be so fully occupied with administrative leadership that most research was out of the question.There was, however, one project I had started just before being called to consider the Hong Kong job, and that was a narrative account of the life stories of influential educators in China. I knew a number of outstanding older educators in many different regions of China, and felt they would probably be willing to allow me to interview them, so that I could write their life stories. I hoped to produce a volume that would illustrate Chinese educational thought and philosophy through the lives and writings of contemporary educators. There had been a number of outstanding educators in the preLiberation period in China, people such as Cai Yuanpei, Hu Shi, and Tao Xingzhi.Yet after it was the educational thought of Mao Zedong, and later Deng Xiaoping, that dominated the Chinese scene. Little was heard from China’s educators. I was fascinated by how these remarkable individuals had had the courage and resilience to write new textbooks, educate a new generation of graduate students, and contribute energetically to educational reforms after years in which they had been traumatized by the Cultural Revolution and, in some cases, by the earlier anti-rightist movement.What had given them the strength to continue their work against all odds and make such remarkable contributions in their old age? Somehow I wanted to take this life story approach to exploring aspects of Chinese educational philosophy and thought. Over the five years we spent in Hong Kong, I interviewed ten of these older educators during my frequent trips to China.They include Li Bingde of Northwest Normal University, Zhu Jiusi of Huazhong University of Science and Technology,Wang Yongquan of Peking University, and Xie Xide of Fudan University, all of whom have been mentioned earlier in this book. I am particularly thankful that I was able to have two long talks with Xie Xide F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 225
in the autumn of , as I was deeply shocked and saddened to learn of her death in February . It was not easy to find time to review all of the interview material and write up the life stories, so much of that work still lies ahead of me. However, I was pleased to be able to write a few short articles, drawing on this material during my time in Hong Kong. Most of all, I was delighted to collaborate with the Comparative Education Research Centre of the University of Hong Kong, which had appointed me as an associate member, in preparing for the English publication of a collection of nineteen essays by China’s leading scholar of comparative education. Professor Gu Mingyuan of Beijing Normal University happened also to be one of the ten influential educators on my list.This book was published in and launched at the World Congress of Comparative Education Societies held in Korea in July of that year. Its publication was like the first step in realizing a dream I had had for many years—that of making some of the wealth of China’s educational thought known in international circles, and ensuring that China took full part in the emerging “dialogue among civilizations.” It is interesting to see Gu’s intellectual journey through his writings, from a classical Marxist view of education to one that emphasizes important dimensions of China’s traditional civilization, which continue to shape contemporary Chinese education. Professor Gu visited HKIEd on a number of occasions during the years I was there, giving lectures and offering advice on some aspects of our development. In the autumn of , HKIEd’s first bachelor of education students graduated. On this occasion, HKIEd conferred its first ever honourary doctorate of education. One name best fitted the guidelines that the council had set forth for the conferral of that honour.What a delight, therefore, to have Professor Gu Mingyuan receive the degree in that convocation.
Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 226
HKIEd’s International Network I have mentioned earlier how it was the potential for a greater Chinese presence in the international arena that drew me to return to Hong Kong in —the sense that a new institution in Hong Kong might play a significant role in the emerging dialogue of civilizations, and be a genuine Chinese voice in global debates over educational reform.To do this, of course, the institute had to have a firm sense of self, and be deeply rooted in its own Chinese heritage. Education has tended to be a low prestige area in Western universities for historical reasons, and because of the continuing dominance of the medieval European tradition of the university, with its emphasis on pure theoretical knowledge and such traditional professions as medicine and law. China’s knowledge tradition was, however, quite different, and its emphasis on knowledge and action, the necessity of academic knowledge demonstrating its value in the social world, gives a field such as education a high profile and prestige.We thus had a uniquely rich knowledge tradition within which to build up the concept of a new-style “university of education” as a future goal for HKIEd.With possibilities of absorption into a larger comprehensive university or some other type of merger, it seemed important to highlight the idea of education being the area of highest profile in a new type of tertiary institution suited to the needs of the knowledge society. I have a profound sense that this is most likely to be possible in Asia, because of the influence of China’s progressive knowledge traditions, and am aware that already in Japan and Korea there are examples of such institutions.Thus I wrote an article for our council exploring this possibility for HKIEd, and made sure it was available also to senior government leaders in the UGC and the Education and Manpower Bureau. I felt they should consider what they might be losing, as a society and government, if they pushed the institute into a forced marriage that would submerge its unique identity and the knowledge heritage it represented. F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 227
It may be strange to begin a section on HKIEd’s international network by reflecting on its indigenous heritage and identity, but when one approaches international relations from a cultural perspective rather than from realist power politics, it is natural. From this perspective, the first thing one has to consider in courting international partners is what one has to give, what one can bring to the partnership, not only what one hopes to receive.As a very young institution, HKIEd had so very much to learn from its international partners, but we nevertheless wanted these relationships to be reciprocal. In our visioning process, it became clear that our regional context was the Asia Pacific, and that this concept reflected a shift in global civilizational influences with the growing interest of Pacific countries such as Canada, the United States, and Australia in acknowledging their links to Asia, and balancing these with the European heritage, which has tended to dominate their recent history. Thus we worked to develop linkages with Japan and South Korea, countries that had a shared Confucian heritage and built impressive modern systems of education with considerable influence from American progressive traditions. Interestingly, the educational achievements of these two countries were almost unknown to most Hong Kong people, who looked to Britain and subsequently the United States for ideas in education.We also developed links with Thailand, where UNESCO’s regional centre in Bangkok stimulated many valuable possibilities for collaboration. In addition we worked with Cambodia in providing training programs for educational administrators. In the Western world, our natural partners were English-speaking countries, and we had a long tradition of sending our students for a summer language immersion experience in England, with support from the British Council.This was extended in two ways for our new bachelor of education programs. Firstly, we partnered with institutions that had their own teacher education programs to ensure that our students got some exposure to their professional field and the opportunity to visit schools, as well as a rich language Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 228
and cultural experience. Secondly, we added partner institutions in Australia and Canada to those in England, giving students more choices.We also encouraged collaborative research among scholars in these institutions and our own academic staff. The most surprising and perhaps intellectually rewarding element in our international partnerships was that developed with the University Institutes for Teacher Formation in France (Instituts universitaires de formation des maïtres or IUFM). This came about through the proactive efforts of colleagues in the cultural section of the Consulate General of France in Hong Kong, who visited us and offered support for us to send students and academic staff to France. As a result, I led a group visit in June , and from that we developed partnerships with several IUFM in different regions, focusing on arts immersion in the case of Versailles, information technology in Grenoble, and comparative education in Bretagne. Much as I would have loved to bring the French language into our formal curriculum, at least as an elective for some students, this was not feasible while we were working hard to raise standards in English and Putonghua. Yet the remarkable openness and understanding of our French colleagues enabled us to skirt around the language issues, encouraging student dialogues where both sides used English as a foreign language. Let me close this section by saying a little bit about my personal growth as a scholar and educator through the international activities I was involved in. At the end of Chapter Five, I mentioned I was elected vice-president of the Comparative and International Education Society when I was beginning to consider seriously the move to Hong Kong.When I suggested I should resign from the vice-presidency, colleagues would have none of it, and assured me there would be no problem with leading an American-based society from Hong Kong in the internet age.We held the annual meeting at OISE/UT in Toronto, with HKIEd as a full partner in all aspects of planning and organization. The conference attracted over participants. For F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 229
HKIEd, this was a wonderful chance for collaborating with OISE/UT in a major international event. At the annual meeting in San Antonio,Texas, the following year, I gave the presidential address, entitled “Redeeming Modernity,” and reflected on the field of comparative education and its debates over theory and method, with a consideration of how Chinese and Japanese educational thought might affect the field in future. In my choice of the term “redeem,” I was deeply conscious of its Christian connections. Great joy came with this tentative step into an explicit public acknowledgement of all that the Christian heritage of my family meant to me. The following year, I was honoured to be appointed as a trustee of the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia. It was once linked to the Christian universities of China and now has a commitment to a Christian presence in Asian higher education that focuses on the servant role of Christianity. Living in Asia again thus helped me to reconnect with my Christian roots. China’s traditions of religious tolerance helped me to see how Christianity could have a significant impact while remaining open to interfaith dialogue and respect for the other. This was a Christianity that I could embrace wholeheartedly, casting away the reserves that had kept me quiet for so long.
The Sunshine and Warmth of Family Visits One of my small yet significant diplomatic quandaries on making the decision to move back to Hong Kong in had been how to explain this to Walter’s five children. How would they feel about this new woman in his life dragging him off to Asia for an extended period of time? It was Walter’s youngest son, Peter, who tended to be most direct in these matters. He let me know, in no uncertain terms, that going to Japan for six months in was already evidence that I did not give priorHong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 230
ity to the family. Now taking his father with me to Hong Kong was further evidence against me. I tried to reason with Peter, suggesting that since all the children lived in different cities in any case, regardless of whether their father was in North America or Asia, they would still have the same opportunities to see him annually.Walter would be at the cottage in Haliburton from May to October, giving the family lots of time to visit with him.Then he would spend the rest of the year with me in Hong Kong. Meanwhile, I always took four or five weeks of summer vacation with him in Haliburton. I encouraged Walter to invite his three daughters and their families to spend Christmas with us in Hong Kong in December , just four months after we moved from the waterfront apartment to the campus.Anticipation and planning for this family visit was as rewarding as the visit itself. It took nearly a year to get all the air ticket arrangements and other logistics sorted out. In the meantime,Walter invited Peter to spend the first Christmas with us in the apartment overlooking the harbour. Peter became so attached to Hong Kong that he returned three more times—for Easter of , Christmas and New Year /, and in autumn ! I did not hear too many more complaints about my having dragged his father to the other side of the earth! Three of my siblings managed to come and stay with us in the lodge. For the exciting millennial New Year, my older sister, Elizabeth, and her husband, Bruce, spent ten days with us, sharing with Walter’s son, Peter, some of the celebratory events of that transition.The following autumn, my younger sister, Alice, and her daughter, Margaret, came for two weeks, enjoying HKIEd’s second Open Day.Then in the autumn of , the visit of my younger brother,Cecil, and his wife,Joan, coincided with Peter’s fourth visit. Finally, in February , just weeks before our departure from Hong Kong,Walter’s older son, Carl, and his partner managed to fit in a visit to Hong Kong.These visitors brought me a deep joy and pleasure. Almost every one of them was taken to see my F u l l C i r c l e
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 231
Chinese mum, Mrs.Yung, and instantly took to her, without any sense of the barrier of language. Finally, I should mention the warm relationship we had with the Canadian Consulate General in Hong Kong. The consul general, Colin Russell, and his lovely wife, Linden, often involved us in events they were hosting in their residence and at the consulate. On our departure from Hong Kong, in the spring of , it was an honour to have the new consul general of Canada,Antony Berger, attend our farewell dinner.
A Fond Farewell Farewells always have a tinge of sadness, and we managed somehow to stretch ours from December to the end of March because of the need for me to bridge a gap for the new director.The outpouring of warmth, love, gratitude, and appreciation I received during those months of farewell more than made up for the stress and pain of the protest movement I described earlier.Words cannot express my appreciation for the magnificent farewell events organized to send us off like royalty. For all of these events, and the farewell gifts accompanying them, I can only say the simple words,“Thank you,” from the bottom of my heart. But let me close this chapter by recounting the two surprises that took place on our last two days in Hong Kong, Maundy Thursday, March , and Good Friday, March . On Thursday afternoon, when Walter and I were resting from the excitement and exertion of packing, a telephone call from Mr. C.H.Tung, Hong Kong’s chief executive, came through. How thoughtful and considerate of him to reach me on this last day of my tenure, in order to express his personal best wishes for our future, and his thanks for the contribution I had made to education in the years after Hong Kong’s return to China. The second surprise came on the morning of Good Friday. On the way to the airport, my driver, Mr. Li Kinglun, affectionately Hong Kong Returns to China
Full Circle
12/5/03
10:05 AM
Page 232
known as Ah Lun, asked me if anyone would be seeing us off. I told him all the farewells had been said, and I had specially requested that no one should give up the holiday to come to the airport.Ah Lun nodded knowingly, and continued driving.When we arrived at the airport, what a surprise to find his wife and four children there waiting for us, loaded with parcels. Each one of them had selected and wrapped a special gift for me, with very warm good wishes attached!
F u l l C i r c l e
