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Just an ice water, pleasePosted by Ralph Jennings, April 30, 2009 4:20 PM
 with a language class-thumb-500x375-5893.jpg) Children of migrant workers attend school in suburban Beijing: Will they have spare beer money in college? This is one of a series of letters written in the years 2002 to 2006 to a foreign advice columnist at 21st Century, an English newspaper published weekly by the China Daily. Studious undergraduates from China’s countryside can seldom afford the notebook computers, designer mobile phones and dreams of graduate school that their more moneyed urban peers have counted on for years. Rural parents might have saved up the minimum undergraduate tuition for a child’s entire lifetime, sometimes at the expense of their own health care. No wonder college students from rural China feel intense pressure to repay elders as soon as possible by sending money back to the family from a lucrative career job right out of school. Here’s what can happen when rich and poor classmates go to dinner: Student letters to a foreign agony uncleDear Ralph, I'm a freshman at a university in Nanjing. Recently, some of my roommates' parents went to see them with a lot of new clothes and food. Then they invited our whole dormitory to have meals. I've attended three such meals. My parents are both (blue-collar) workers, and they hardly have holidays, even during festivals. Besides, my home is not very rich compared to those of my roommates. It would cost a lot for them to come to my university even once. So I didn't slip even a word to my parents. But I do feel guilt, and I hope I can invite my roommates as they have invited me. What can I do? Liu Yan, Jiangsu province November 2001 |
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Comments on Just an ice water, please
Chinese education is a nothing but a big fiasco. In 1998 When the communist party started to build up a whole group of middle-class in order to moderate the possible concussion from the working under class as the gab between the rich and the poor is widenning up, something was either deliberately or inadvertently ignored. They didn't think if this education frenzy is going to have a backslash, if the college graduates would be better off to have this overpriced education .The reality now is it is a big stupid mistake that makes the poor even poorer, the rich richer, and this is a communist country claiming that we would after all be equally rich if not poor.
TankMan: Replace "Chinese" by "American" and "Communism" by "Bush regime" in your text and you got it pretty accurate.
I think this has a lot to do with the Chinese culture. Most parents are from the older generation and have worked their whole childhood and didn't have the chance to go to school and have a proper education. That is why parents from the older generation want their children to have a better education these days. They don't want their children to go through what they have gone through, hard work and no proper schooling, so also no proper jobs.
When children are raised properly in the Chinese culture, they feel this commitment, that they have to look after their parents and take care of them financially, because they have spent a lot of money for their education, but they see it as an investment for the future.
and Yet the truth is, it is the parents that is continue to support the child after graduation. paying down payment on their houses (sometimes make mortgage payments too), pay for weddings and become free nannies for their grand kids. And what does the kids pay? pretty much just medical and funeral, if they are filial.