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In China, the English-learning vocation is a fixation. Omnipresent billboards advertise learn-by-osmosis programs that guarantee fluency for a small sum of several times the annual income of the average Chinese urbanite, taught by blonde speakers from the West.

When in China, I am often mistaken as an English teacher. Indeed, why else would a foreigner be in China if not as a vessel of the native tongue of the West? And I’m not even blonde.

If I had 10 RMB for each time someone informally offered me an English teaching stint, I could easily fund my Chinese Starbucks addiction. I’ll take that 44 RMB Venti green tea red bean Frappuccino, please.

English Education and Ideas of the West

I often ponder what this fixation indicates about the average Chinese person’s understanding of the English speaking world.

Certainly, alarmist reports about China’s rejection of Western interests make sense when thinking about, for instance, China’s petrol dealings with Iran. But, beneath high-level politics, there is a human face.

As I view it, the urban Chinese fixation on learning English as the single-planked bridge to success—to admission to Western universities, jobs in Western companies, immigration to Western countries—is symptomatic of a broader embrace of the West as a socioeconomic and cultural promised land.

China’s English addiction is a vote of confidence in the idea, indoctrinated in me throughout my childhood, that the West and its values represent the endpoint of human social and economic progress.

For me, it is, in one sense, gratifying to see my own homeland so enthusiastically embraced by the Chinese masses.

But at the same time, I find it disappointing. As I have explained in previous posts, my own fascination with China—indeed, at times even more neurotic than the Chinese preoccupation with English—stemmed from a determination to break out of the Western cultural world and its ingrained values and perspectives.

That I fly across 13 time zones and over the Great Wall and find a universe of people who believe that my homeland is the gateway to success is something of a let down.

The Unified Chinese Dream?

Oceans of ink have been spilled in vain attempts to summarize who “Chinese people” are, what “Chinese people” think and what “Chinese people” aim to achieve.

But there are 1.3 billion stories to tell. I learned that during my first visit back in 2006, when the generalizations of modern China that had read and learned were proven and then refuted and then proven and then refuted again—an intellectual migraine of Chinese proportions—by what I saw and heard on the ground.

Yet, I had always thought that the desire to learn English was one valid generalization. Before this past year, I had never met a single Chinese person who did not want to learn English or at least force their children to learn English.

Rejecting English: Abdullah from Jilin

But my Fulbright year, during which I researched China’s not-insignificant population of 60 million Muslims, showed me otherwise.

One example stands out. I met Abdullah, a Chinese Muslim from Jilin Province, on a piercingly frosty January morning in the city of Yiwu, the central heating-deprived export-oriented leviathan in Zhejiang Province.

“English is useless (meiyong),” Abdullah barked to me after I told him that I am American—a strange immediate reaction, to be sure.

Yes, most Chinese Muslims whom I met did want to learn English, but Abdullah was far from the only one who expressed disdain for English and its speakers.

“Whenever I think of the fact that I spent my schooling years learning English, I get angry (fennu). Arabic is the language of Allah and of heaven, the mother tongue of mankind. Forget English. It is a waste of time,” he snapped. “You Americans should wrap your heads around that.” 

Abdullah’s attitude initially seemed insulting. But after cooling down, I found Abdullah’s attack somewhat refreshing. Here was an individual who refused to accept his country’s general fixation on learning English—an individual who resisted the notion that the language of the West constitutes the fundamental gateway to success.  Finally, I was not elevated on a pedestal but being castigated for my English ability – a breath of fresh air.