深圳 notes 6: The lies of a Chinese teacher

Have you ever heard of the saying, "when all your have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail"? Well, that's the law of instrument and it is something I want to talk about today quite specifically, in the context of learning the Chinese language. In the last 8 weeks, I have been in 8 countries (the UK, China, Macau, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Spain, Finland and Estonia) and I work in a very multilingual business environment where I do use a number of my languages on a regular basis. But today, I want to challenge something that I was told as a child growing up in Singapore: when we were kids growing up, my father used to wax lyrical about just how important it was to be good in the Chinese language, how it would be vital in the business world in the future when China is a world economic superpower. My Chinese is quite rusty today and I did struggle with the language in China, but has it affected my ability to do my job in corporate finance? Actually far from it - to be really cruel about it, I make far more in a month what a Chinese teacher in Singapore is making in a year, so does that mean that it was a complete was of time to have spent all those years studying Chinese in Singapore then? Is the Chinese language useful at all? Why were we fed those lies then about Chinese being somehow useful in the workplace? Well it's pretty obvious: Chinese teachers don't have a clue what the hell they're talking about.

Was it a good choice to spent all those years learning Chinese?

I suppose the reason why I am writing this piece is just out of sheer frustration with my parents: you see, I think at some level, they realize that as primary school teachers, they couldn't help me cope with the complex world of business that I had chosen to enter a an adult. After all, they were primary school teachers, the world beyond the primary school gates confused them. The only useful thing my father could give me to prepare me for adult life was the language he taught: Chinese. So when I went on to achieve great things at university and then in my career, they would often make comments like, "oh it is because you speak Chinese, right?" I would roll my eyes in total disbelief because I they knew that they were hoping that they had somehow managed to contribute to my success despite the fact that the languages I use most at work are French, German and Spanish (along with English of course) and I hardly ever use Chinese. When I pointed this out to my mother, she adamantly pointed out that, "yes but maybe one day you will need it, right?" And goodness me, that really upset me - I told her that she doesn't even know what I do for a living, so she couldn't possibly make a statement like that at all. I don't want to seem ungrateful to my parents, but I just have to accept that as primary school teachers, trying to explain to them the world of corporate finance is like trying to teach a cat how to speak Greek. 

But putting my own experience aside, just how useful is the Chinese language to young students these days? Well, the simple answer is no, it is not useful at all for a lot of jobs and unless you're intending to either go work in China and Taiwan or if you intend to work in the tourism industry where you are dealing with tourists from China and Taiwan all the time, then you don't need Chinese at all - English is all you need. If you wish to go work in China and/or Taiwan, then your Chinese needs to be good enough to operate in a work environment where not only everyone in Chinese speaking, you will need to be able to deal with all the paperwork in Chinese. The fact is most Singaporeans simply have not managed to attain that standard of Chinese after years of studying in Singapore - the standard of Chinese required to say watch a Chinese movie without subtitles or order a meal in a restaurant in Chinese is far lower than the standard required to produce an official marketing document in Chinese for the local China market or to handle a Q&A session about a technical product entirely in Chinese. In short, the system in Singapore is highly warped: students are made to study a difficult language for years, yet very few of them ever attain a standard high enough to actually use it in the work place and for the others, it is really just a complete waste of time. They would have been much better off learning French.

You know whom I am going to blame for this? Chinese teachers, I know that because my father is one such (retired) Chinese teacher. Don't get me wrong, my father wasn't a bad Chinese teacher, that wasn't the problem: the problem is that he knew little of the world beyond the primary school gates. So when he tries to dispense any kind of career advice about how useful Chinese will be to his students, well, essentially he doesn't have a clue what he is talking about as he is so out of touch with what is going on in the job market. Imagine if he told his students, "Chinese is not important, you don't need to pay attention as English is really the only language you need to get a job these days." No, like many teachers, they resorted to threatening the students with their own future. "This subject is going to be so important for your future, you will need it to get a job - if you don't pay attention, if you are lazy and fail this subject, then you will destroy your own future." Many of us students did study hard and we did as we were told because we actually believed our teachers - it was a means to get us to obey, study hard and do our homework. Chinese teachers would also get into trouble if many of their students performed poorly at the exams - so in order to make sure that the students do well for their exams, most teachers don't think twice about using threats like that to scare the students into studying very hard.

Many teachers actually tell lies like that to scare their students into studying harder and paying more attention, but really, a good teacher shouldn't have to resort to such lies and tactics. I have met such good teachers before and that's the main reason why I studied geography at university: how on earth is a geography teacher going to convince a class in this day and age that you can't get a job without geography? Let's face it, you can be quite ignorant about geography but as long as you're very good at what you do, you'll get on perfectly fine in the working world. So what do geography teachers do instead to sustain their students' attention during a lesson? Well, they make the lesson interesting, engaging and interactive: in short, they do what a good teacher is supposed to do in the first place. They bring the topics to life, they challenge the students to think outside the box, they keep the lessons fun for the students whilst imparting vital knowledge. So once the good teacher has achieved that, the students will crave the knowledge and will want to learn about the subject because the teacher has done such a good job imparting that knowledge. It seems that only lousy maths and Chinese teachers have to resort to the 'if you don't know Chinese/maths, you can't get a job in the future' lie to scare their students into studying. Are the teachers deliberately lying or do they actually believe the crap they are saying?

So was my father a liar who had no qualms about misleading his students? No, I don't think so. As someone who was a Chinese teacher in Singapore, he actually had virtually no contact with anyone from China at all. After all, his social circle was extremely limited to his Singaporean colleagues (and ex-colleagues) at the school and his neighbours who lived in the same street: none of whom actually included people from China. Whilst he has visited China as a tourist and watches TV programmes from China, he has never ever spent a day working with a real person from China. So whilst he can clearly has a very good command of the Chinese language as a Chinese teacher, he hasn't actually had any real meaningful contact with Chinese people in the working world. Like why would he anyway, he's just a humble primary school teacher, not some kind of international businessman doing deals all over the world? It is almost unfair to expect him to know that much. No, I do believe that there is a certain sincerity on his part to help all his students prepare themselves for the challenges of the working world and in a small way, as a Chinese teacher, he is indeed contributing to their education and I'm sure he would like to think that his contribution is not just meaningful but important. I'm sure many teachers do enter the profession with those same noble intentions, to make a meaningful impact through education.

The truth lies somewhere in between my father's noble but idealistic intentions and my sarcastic, cynical attitude. Teachers do play a vital role in their students' lives but they can do a lot more than just getting the students to pass exams. Allow me to tell you the story about my friend Kelly (not her real name): Kelly had a difficult childhood, her father held a dead-end job earning very little money and her mother couldn't work full time due to her poor health. Kelly had an older sister who always got into trouble as she fell into bad company, her older sister ended up getting married quite young just to get away from the family. You get the idea, life was so tough for poor Kelly and she didn't have much aspiration as a young person - she was very afraid of her parents who had a nasty temper and she was also bullied by her older sister at home. As a result, she was a timid and quiet person in school and typically, students like that just kinda fade into the background: they're shy and quiet, they keep to themselves, they don't cause trouble, they don't speak up, they become invisible. Luckily for Kelly, one teacher actually recognized that despite the fact that she was clearly a troubled child, Kelly was quite intelligent and was achieving pretty decent grades despite not really studying much. During a creative writing class, she displayed glimpses of brilliance in her writing: she understood wit and irony, came up with original jokes; this was something her teacher did not expect from a child who was normally so very quiet in class.

So this teacher began taking an interest in Kelly, spending more time with her and encouraging her to think about university. Now for many of my Singaporean readers, you guys don't really get a choice in the matter because you're all expected to get a degree one way or another. However in Kelly's case, nobody in her family had ever applied to a university, never mind graduated and it was just something that Kelly had never ever thought about. That kind teacher got Kelly thinking about what she would like to do as a career and then worked out what Kelly had to do to get a job in finance eventually. When she went home and told her parents she wanted to work in banking, her mother laughed and said, "Are you joking, what do you know about banking? What the hell are you going to do there, clean the toilets in the bank? Make them tea for the managers whilst trying to seduce one of the rich old men?" Fortunately, with her teacher's help, Kelly mapped out a path of what she needed to do to make her dreams come true and twenty years later, she is now working in the world of corporate finance like me. Not only was she the first person in her family to go to university, she was the first person to do loads of things like travel longhaul, earn her first million, buy her own home. All this happened because a teacher cared about Kelly, this has little or nothing to do with whatever this teacher actually taught Kelly in the classroom - yes teachers can make an incredible impact, but it is often not with the lessons in the classroom.

Let me focus now on something that my father has said to justify why we should all study Chinese. "现在中国人很有钱!" (Chinese people are now very rich!) Where do I even begin, as this is the kind of stupid crap only my dad can come up with. Firstly, there is a Chinese middle class that is about 300 to 350 million (depending on what you define as middle class), that may seem like a huge number when you consider that the population of the USA is 325 million but even at 325 million, that represents just 25% of China's 1.3 billion population, that means 75% of Chinese people are still very poor. So surely we must adjust that statement to be, 现在中国有一些人很有钱, 但其中大多数仍然非常贫穷。(There are some rich people in China now, but the majority are still very poor.) But nonetheless, even if we do focus on this 325 million very rich Chinese people, how are you going to get a well paid job just because you speak Chinese? Chinese teachers like my father just don't see the link between being able to speak Chinese and actually getting a very well paid job - my father waxes lyrical about how the Chinese tourists in Singapore are spending a lot of money in town: when they go shopping on Orchard Road, they buy loads of designer goods from all the most expensive boutiques. But in this case, yes the salesperson serving the Chinese customers certainly speak Mandarin, but how much does a sales assistant in a shop on Orchard Road get paid? Is this the kind of job that will make you rich? Quite the opposite, you work extremely long hours and get paid very little for it. Certainly the owners of these designer boutiques see a lot more of the profits, but they're not the ones on the shop floor serving the Chinese customers and no, they don't need to know a word of Chinese.

Now that's the kind of detail that many Chinese teachers ignore: sure the Chinese teacher has taught the shop assistant a useful skill that is directly relevant to the job, but how satisfactory is the outcome for the shop assistant? Well, not at all satisfactory is the answer because it is not a well paid job at all compared to what a lawyer or hedge fund manager is earning. But this is when the Chinese teacher would play the anti-elitism card, "how dare you look down on people working in shops like that? You think you are so much better than them?" You get the idea, it's not that I am looking down on people like that (heck, one of my best friends works in a shop like that and I interviewed him for an article on my blog), I'm merely pointing out that if speaking Mandarin is pretty much all you can do, your employment options are very limited and the people who earn the millions are the lawyers and bankers who have a lot of other skills beyond the language(s) they do speak. In short, languages can only do so much for you in the job market - they are useful of course, but I'm afraid Chinese teachers often grossly exaggerate just how much of an advantage they will give you when young people are actually looking for a job today. Sure I am earning a lot of money today, sure I studied Chinese when I was in school but I can tell you that my ability to speak Mandarin is not what helped me make my millions - I simply relied on other more relevant skills to further my career. Being multilingual simply isn't enough to make you a lot of money these days.

What about working in China or Taiwan then, you may ask? Surely my ability to speak Chinese would open doors for me in those exciting markets, right? No, actually - they won't. Firstly, you need bear in mind the fact that in order to compete for the best jobs in those markets, you need to be able to speak/read/write Chinese at the level of a native speaker and very, very few Singaporeans actually manage to attain that kind of standard without actually having lived in a place like Taiwan or China for an extended period. Singaporeans are educated in English and if you are trying to compete for jobs in a Chinese speaking work environment, you're at a huge disadvantage. Oh are you trying to tell me that you're bilingual and you speak English as well? Guess what? The younger generation in China who have gone to the top Chinese universities tend to speak English rather well too and unlike Singaporeans, they are actually truly bilingual. Most Chinese Singaporeans are what I would refer to as an imbalanced-bilingual, that means that they are probably fluent in English and are at best competent in Chinese, but it is always going to be at best a second language. By that token, you're never going to compete with the locals for a job in their home market unless somehow, you can speak Chinese as well as someone who has grown up in China - which let's face it, is highly unlikely if you were educated in Singapore, in English.

When I went on my recent business trip to China, my father had no idea what the hell I was doing there (mind you, he doesn't even know what I do for a living since he doesn't understand the concept of corporate finance) but he said something like I can now 去中国跟中国人做生意 (go to China and do business with the Chinese) because I can speak Mandarin and I'm like, that's not how it works. Speaking Mandarin is certainly not a perquisite to doing business in China, it makes certain aspects easier of course like navigating your way around a big city like Shenzhen and being able to communicate with your taxi driver who doesn't speak English. But what kind of business are you doing in China? What makes you think the Chinese are going to roll out the red carpet for you just because you speak Mandarin? After all, over a billion people in China speak Mandarin, it is not a special skill - no quite the opposite, you're merely doing what everyone else in China is doing, you're not offering anything unique or different. Fortunately, I was in China with a company that had a brilliant product that the Chinese were very interested in and even though I was very self-conscious about just how much I struggled with the language, it wasn't an issue at all. After all, they were interested in the technology and the (rather poor) standard of my Chinese was thankfully a rather irrelevant point. Phew. Thank goodness.

And lastly, for all the headlines you have read about China's economic boom, about 现在中国人很有钱, those of us who have actually spent some time in China and have a deeper understanding about modern China will realize that it is not a nice place at all. The irony is that my father - the retired Chinese teacher - has a very sanitized vision of China gleamed through CCTV's programmes and during the few trips he has made to China, he has always been a part of a tour group. So he has never ever had to try to take a bus in China or even attempt to make a simple journey with public transport on his own. And most of all, he has never even befriended a single person from China before - that is if I were to exclude people like the friendly tour guide who was paid to be nice to him whilst he was on his holiday. Is my father unique in this aspect? Hardly, many older Singaporean Chinese people actually have little reason to have much contact with people from China. In sharp contrast, I have worked with colleagues from China for many years - at one stage, my best friend at work was a woman who was raised in Shanghai. As a child,  I was practically raised by my gymnastics coaches from China whilst training with the national team in Singapore. I have even had a huge shouting match with a Chinese colleague once entirely in Mandarin whilst we were working in Istanbul. Work has actually taken me to China on several occasions and despite the fact that my Mandarin is limited, I have engaged many Chinese clients and companies over the years (using English, not Mandarin as the language of communication) and as a matter of principle, I never use a tour guide whether I am in Africa or China. I just cringe at the idea of using a tour guide because I believe that only people like my parents need a tour guide; I'm quite capable of navigating my way around any Chinese city on my own. 

Thus someone like my father has a far more positive image of China than I have because he has never had to put up with rude and unreasonable Chinese colleagues (because he has never worked with Chinese people), he has never had to suffer the agony of using public transport in a crowded Chinese city and most of all, he is simply not accessing the bad news about China because he doesn't speak English. I have just watched a disturbing video by Serpentza - if you don't know him, he's a white South African Youtuber with a Chinese wife living in Shenzhen and his latest video is about Chinese ultranationalists who are extremely racist and xenophobic. In the video, he talks about how there's a group of Chinese nationalists openly plotting to kill him on the Chinese website Baidu and this kind of hate speech would be completely illegal in the West, but in China it is not only tolerated but condoned in the name of nationalism. Then he talked about how a French man and his Chinese wife was attacked in Beijing in broad daylight in a busy shopping district by a racist with a sword, looking to kill Americans. And the worst part of that story was that nobody stopped to help the Chinese woman who was stabbed as she bled to death in the busy street, despite the fact that it was in a busy street and I find it hard to get my head around how incredibly selfish, indifferent and cold these Chinese people are, to witness an attack like that and do nothing. How messed up is that kind of situation? I just look at it and feel sorrow and despair. 

Look, don't get me wrong. There are awful, nasty people in every country in the world and by the same token, I have actually made some incredible friends in China. But the bottom line is that China isn't that promised land that your Chinese teacher told you it was, it is a rapidly developing country with a lot of problems from pollution to corruption to an insane amount of bureaucracy. Unless you're as tough as Serpentza and are prepared to deal with those kinds of challenges, China is not going to be your friend. Here's a dose of reality for you young people here: nobody in China is going to do the dragon dance to welcome you just because you speak Mandarin, it's really no big deal to them. And if your Chinese teacher ever told you tales about 去中国跟中国人做生意 - sigh, how do I put this delicately without making it sound as if I am looking down on Chinese teachers? I think that Chinese teachers should stick to what they do best: teaching the Chinese language but they should tell their students to go seek career advice from someone who has actually built a really successful career rather than tell their students bullshit fairy tales about something they know nothing about. After all, why did my dad teach Chinese in a primary school in Ang Mo Kio all his life despite the fact that he had an excellent command of the Chinese language? Why didn't he 去中国跟中国人做生意? Why didn't he practice what he preached then? So, let me know what you think, leave a comment below please and many thanks for reading.