June 15-26, 2008

   Rough notes – July 29, 2008

 Marjorie King

 Executive Member of ICCIC

The Ida Pruitt Scholarship Fund (IPSF) currently supports over 20* high school students at the Shandan Bailie School (SBS), a vocational school in Shandan, Gansu, China.  All but 3-4 are girls.  They come from farm families in rural villages throughout Gansu.  The average yearly income of their families is 6,416* Chinese Yuan, which comes to about $900 U.S. dollars at the summer, 2008 exchange rate.

Students are majoring in one of five specialties:

 1.     machinery technology

 2.     electro technology

 3.     accounting

 4.     preschool education

 5.     English education

These are all new majors at the SBS, which was founded to teach orphan students the industrial technology skills necessary for self-sufficiency in rural farm communities.  (See newly-released film “Escape from Huangshi,” also titled “Children of Huangshi” for a fictionalized account of George Hogg’s trek to Shandan with boys orphaned by the WWII Japanese occupation of China’s cities.) 

During my visit to the SBS two years ago, I held meetings with the IPSF students as a group, as well as separate meetings with groups of teachers, and school administrators.  I studied their record-keeping and fund-distribution system.  The four-member administrative-oversight committee and I hammered out a written agreement between the school and the IPSF.

This year, my visit focused on individual and small-group chats with students as well as on filmed interviews with students and administrators.  The raw footage will be available in mid-August.  Soon, we hope to make a short film available through the Ida Pruitt Scholarship Fund website.  Our long-term goal is to document the scholarship students on film every few years after their graduation as one means to evaluate the effect of the scholarship on the lives of the individual students, their families and their communities.

Each day of my visit to the Bailie School, I invited 4-5 IPSF students to eat lunch with me in the school cafeteria.  I paid for their lunches.  For 30-50 Y, we enjoyed 4-5 tasty vegetable dishes seasoned with pork, as well as rice or noodles and perhaps some other local treats.  On a typical day, they would have eaten a large bowl of noodles covered with vegetables and meat sauce costing 5-6 Y.  (6x7=42Y/week for lunch, 42x4=168 Y…more than the 110 Y/month our scholarship fund is giving them.  This is indeed food for thought.  Two years ago, the School’s director, Mr. Chen, insisted that they would rather distribute our funds to more students than to give a few students more money….  Perhaps we should revisit this decision in the future.

The students were typically shy and polite as we ate our lunches together, but I gradually got them talking with me. We spoke in Chinese because many students were not studying English and even the English majors felt much more comfortable communicating in Chinese.  A few of them stood out for their willingness to open up a bit, even to try out their English skills, so I chose them for an on-camera interview.

 As the students warmed up to me, they shared a little about their hobbies (reading/ping pong/sleeping) and courses of study. I learned that most selected their major course of study themselves after consulting their parents and parents’ friends. I was impressed by the number of young women pursuing “male” vocations such mechanical electronics and computer electronics.  Everyone claimed to enjoy their major.  A few were obviously enthusiastic so we tried to get them on film as they worked on their machines, computers, or English lessons. 

Gradually I realized that these students had never been out of their villages until traveling to the town of Shandan for boarding school.  The school is very well-known throughout the province for its quality education and low tuition, so it is the natural choice for farm families hoping for upward social and economic mobility.  Almost all of the students plan to pursue their vocation in a large urban area after graduation.  They have their sights set on a high income as well as the excitement of the bright lights and big city.  The special economic zones of Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong, were most often mentioned.

I wanted to verify my understanding that most of the students plan to emigrate permanently from Gansu province, so I asked them if they hope to find a marriage partner in Shenzhen.  This question provoked a response like none other!  They girls were horrified by the idea of marrying someone from outside their village.  I asked the obvious follow-up question:  How will they marry a fellow villager if they leave home permanently?  The girls seem not to have considered this problem.  A few even mildly protested, saying that at age 17 they were still quite young to be thinking about marriage.  They felt more at ease once I asked if they plan to return home for Chinese New Year’s holiday (Spring Festival).  The girls relaxed and one decided that she would find a husband during that holiday.  Left unspoken was the assumption that their parents will help the girls to find the right husband.  Personal independence only extends so far. 

I asked the students what they knew about life in Shenzhen and other cities and if any of their classmates have already made the journey.  The students admitted that they know little about working or living conditions but trust their teachers to arrange everything for them.  The accounting student easily assured me that she will go wherever the government sends her after graduation. Only two had heard directly from a classmate.  One classmate had returned home because the 15 hour/day factory work proved too difficult.  Another sent word home that her monthly wage rose to 2500 Y. more politely than the other workers did. ** 

None of the students seemed at all nervous or suspicious after hearing about their classmate’s experiences.  One of the most forthcoming students, Bonnie, admitted that even with poor working conditions they still want to go somewhere else because they like the idea of living independently, and besides, their parents and neighbors back home will laugh at them if they come home after studying!

The few students who planned to return to their native village after graduation were all studying to become primary school English teachers.   However, even some of those—notably a forthright boy named Lang Minghong—plan to spend two years in Shenzhen before returning home.

 Apart from the excitement of city life and social pressure to emigrate, the main motivation for aspiring to a big city job is the higher income.  Compare the farm families’ 4,500-9,000 Y. per year income reported on the students’ application form for the Ida Pruitt scholarship with the prospect of 18,000 Y in Shenzhen or the 30,000 Y salary of the “extra polite” worker in Qingdao.

Such hopeful faces and adventurous spirits the Ida Pruitt scholars shared. My reservations, based on knowledge about other young factory workers in special economic zones and export processing zones around the world, died on my lips.  I could only tell them to take care of themselves and to stay in touch with me and with their families and teachers.

I continued my summer travels, then returned to the U.S. but my concerns still linger:  I’ve read about the poor wages and labor conditions of factory workers special zones in China and elsewhere, as well as their difficulty saving enough money to send home and the environmental and social problems that threaten their happiness and independence. 

Beyond the problems experienced by the young workers and their families lie questions about the communities left behind in Gansu and elsewhere.  What are the implications of this “brain drain” for the villages and towns of Gansu and other poor provinces of China?  How is the larger economy of China affected by the young generation of farm families’ turn away from agriculture…even modern, mechanized, agricultural technology that can turn the desert into verdant fields?  At a time when China’s farm fields are increasingly used for roads and buildings and China begins to import food products, is this the right direction?