Daydreaming of Education Under a Yellow Sky

I was considering getting a corkscrew curl perm that many teenage girls had, but decided it made them look like poodles. I bought heels instead, barely squeezing into the largest size (8.5 US) available in China. I went out into the melting sun, ignoring the yellow, polluted sky overhead. Beijing was in the heart of a sweaty summer and I was there to enjoy a lazy July before my last year of high school.

“Ni hao,” I smiled nervously, picking a bagful of peaches. The Chinese man outright stared at my white skin as he leaned against a post, smoking a cigarette with his brown eyes glued on me. I hopped from the dirt-covered fruit cart to a noodle stand that was placed haphazardly in the crowded street, thinking how fitting in sure is impossible when you’re tall and American.

While getting onto a bus, I snorted as I saw a fat Chinese man carrying a McDonald’s bag. A brown-haired Chinese girl came over and asked to sit next to me. She explained in English that she and her friends were on their way to their English group. She was excited to practice speaking with an American, she said, smiling sweetly at me.

And then it hit me. The Chinese dedication to education. She was learning more English in the middle of summer. This was a stark contrast to America, where many people made it a point of pride to be ignorant. There were few spots in top colleges here so people studied very hard, she said.

I flashed back to earlier that day when I had seen yet another elderly woman hunched over, wrinkled with sunspots, picking sticky plastic bottles out of overfull trash bins to recycle. She used the money to survive on. Education here was a competition because only the smartest would escape such poverty.

I suddenly knew the pride of pushing yourself in education as if your life depended on it. In many cases around the world, it did. I stopped daydreaming and decided to practice Chinese harder, eating my dehydrated chicken-feet snack and wishing I knew more about the world.