Eureka moment – I finally got it!

As I mentioned in my last post, last night was pretty emotional for me (and today was even worse). I’d bought gifts for some of the students that I really bonded with, and I’ve just been so busy for the last two weeks that I’d failed to personalize them (I’d bought most of them journals, and so I wanted to write something in each of them), and then I still had to wrap them. From 8 o’clock onwards, until about 11:30pm, I met with a stream of students, and each meeting was a mix of laughter, happy tears and words of encouragement from me.

Everyone who knows me knows that I get on well with young adults, partly because I treat them as adults who just happen to be young. As I have said repeatedly over the last couple of weeks, these young Chinese leaders are incredibly special and have all just burrowed their way into my heart. Coming from their traditional culture, which shields them so much from what is happening in the rest of the world, and not being shown or encouraged to think for themselves, seeing them develop and test those skills is almost like watching the scene where Bambi takes his first faltering steps.

All of these young leaders really love, respect and honor their parents, but I also get that many of them realize (either consciously or subconsciously) that education is a one-way ticket, transporting them away from the rural villages where they grew up. 

Thinking about it, I remember going through the same sort of feelings when I went to college, leaving behind the mining town that I grew up in. The difference is that there wasn’t such a big delta between the before and after pictures for me (while much of college life was different from what I was used to, much was still the same). 

For these kids, their world is almost changing at the speed of light, and thanks to China’s urbanization program (which aim to move 280 million people into cities – many of them brand new cities – between now and 2030), there won’t be an old world to go back to after 4 years.

In some ways, visiting Sias feels a little it like being an extra on a real-life version of Glee, with a subtle subtext that you can’t always interpret. The students that I hung out with are just so pure and innocent, and just really wear their hearts upon their sleeves. You just can’t help from feeling paternal / maternal, and you find yourself just wanting to wrap your arms around them and protect them from the harsh realities of their fast-changing world.

I said that I had a Eureka moment last night, and here it is. For the last two weeks, the subject of my age has come up frequently, often when they’ve been asking about my family, and I slip into ‘proud dad’ mode and tell them about my daughter, Hannah, who is a teacher in London and who will be getting married over the summer. Without exception, the student that I’m talking with gets confused at this point, thinking that they’ve misheard or misunderstood me.

When I’ve asked them to guess hold I am, they’ve all told me that they think that I’m in my 30s. The first time this happened, I processed the information with my Western brain, and decided that it was an overt form of flattery, and that they were buttering me up. Looking in their eyes, I realized that that wasn’t the case, and they really did think that I was in my mid-30s.

My next theory, which lasted until lat night was that they just hadn’t come into contact with enough foreigners who told them their age, and so they don’t have enough data to make a qualified guess.

Last night, I had a breakthrough. After speaking with young man who was telling me about his dad who is about the same age as me, and who has worked in construction all of his life. I suddenly realized their wasn’t so much about how young I look (I know I look after myself, keeping fit, eating well and running half-marathons, etc.), but it would either have to be a very dark room and/or some suffering from night blindness, for me to pass as 35+.

Instead, it is all about how I look incomparison to their parents. Whereas I’ve always worked with my head, their parents have mainly worked exclusively with their hands, working long hours in often difficult situations. If I’d have started work after elementary school, and worked that hard for almost 40 years, my body would be pretty worn out, too!