Eric's Beijing Diary

With Snow and Fly on the pier by the sea.
Sunday morning, I took the bus into town for church. After church, a young middle school student came up to me and started talking. She had her classmate with her, and we walked together toward the town square. They are students at a local middle school, which apparently has a boarding school component. The term middle school in China can be confusing, because the term "middle" denotes an intermediate between elementary school and university. In America, the term "middle school" denotes a program bridging elementary with high school. So the term "middle school" denotes a broader range in the Chinese education system. So junior middle school would equate roughly to junior high school or middle school in the US. Middle school would generally equate to high school in the States.

Snow is 18 years old, so I am assuming she would be in the upper middle school, although she told me that she has two years left at this school, so perhaps there was some problem transitioning from her village elementary school. Wouldn't surprise me. Elementary education in the villages can be quite limited.

For all the talk about China's current prosperity, this is still very much a peasant nation. Eight hundred million people in this country live on a dollar a day or less. So one thing China has an abundance of is warm hearted farm kids. They don't all speak English as well as Snow, though. But they do speak Mandarin. With the adults, there are no guarantees. Many of them are pretty much limited to their local village dialects. I should clarify this, though, because the various local dialects in China are Chinese dialects. So the speakers of these various dialects would be able to read the same newspapers (assuming they could read), but they would not understand each other. But if you can manage Putonghua (Mandarin), you can communicate with the young people.

I took Snow and Fly to McDonald's and bought them each a strawberry sundae. Neither of them had ever had a sundae at McDonald's. Snow ate hers with no difficulty, but Fly had trouble getting his down. He said he was full, but I rather think it might have been a bit of a shock to his system. Probably ten times sweeter than anything he had eaten before.

Labels: Beihai