Teaching Thoreau in the Heartland of China
21 Sep 2009 1 Comment
in Teaching Tags: American Pie, dreams, Literature, Thoreau
I was teaching Thoreau in a time when the Chinese were migrating from the countryside into the cities. It was a new Industrial Age—but this one was taking place during the age of globalism, cell phones, and Hello Kitty. Experts estimated that a population greater than that of America’s total population would move into Chinese cities within the next 15-20 years. There I was at the vanguard of this exodus where some of my students had left their families behind in the rice paddies. These students were their family’s only hope.
But for those now living and working in the cities, there was the heady pleasure of shopping. The cities became a Promised Land, and consumerism quietly ousted atheism as the dominant faith. In the Promised Land you could work in a factory and escape the ceaseless toil of the rice paddies. Of course, it was your job in the factory to crank out more stuff for other people to buy. And of course, you had to tear down the last vestiges of traditional China, and bulldoze Mother Nature in the name of progress. Anything to modernize China. Anything to become a member of the middle class. Yet for some Chinese these issues of modernity were recognized as a problem—and without Thoreau having to tell them.
