There is a moment early in “Maineland,” a quiet marvel of a documentary film directed by Miao Wang when a young school teacher in Shanghai holds forth on the concept of Chinese happiness. Her students that have just completed their calisthenics, dressed in identical blue uniforms and white. Bending parallel forty-five degrees, they jot the lesson in their notebooks with such silence and discipline that was characteristic of the Chinese language for thousands of years. When the teacher finally asked What was meant by the mantra “happiness belongs to those who know the meaning of contentment,” it seems natural that the bell should sound, anticipating any attempt to comprehend this vague and open statement.
Ask any Chinese parents, what it might mean for their offspring to find happiness, and they are likely to bring contentment, but the success. “Maineland” analyzes the experience which is becoming more common for middle and upper class Chinese families seeking the Express route to this goal: exporting their children to schools abroad. The project started when Wang, Director, who moved from Beijing to the States at the age of twelve years, was invited to fryeburg Academy, a boarding school in rural Maine that she had never heard, back in 2011, and was immediately struck by the presence of full-time students from mainland China. “It took me almost two hours to get from the airport in Portland at school, and when I arrived, I was pretty sure I was in the middle of nowhere,” Wang told me. “So, I have to ask myself how these fifteen-year-old to get here from the other side of the world?”
Van traced the promising Chinese students from the Academy and return to the beginning of the process their application in a corporate Suite in Shanghai, where the costumes of the admissions offer an information session for Teens and their parents. When the annual tuition fee for foreign students—fifty thousand dollars—POPs up on the screen, no one bats the eye. For these parents—successful entrepreneurs who are the winners in the country’s breakneck economic growth, China Friedberg is a sound investment. When the elderly father called Ms. proud noted, in Shanghai the emphasis that “ten to twenty years China and America will be the two dominant powers,” he just finished to show us around her factory, which produces humidifiers and other consumer electronics and made a fortune. Tellingly, one of the main principles Mr. Zhu chose for his company: “never allow yourself to be content.” He drives a BMW and a mansion he built for his family will not look out of place in Newport and Beverly hills. “They are the future elite,” he says about his children, nodding at her daughter.
Man, daughter, Stella—a beautiful, bubbly fifteen-year-old, who claims that he fell in love with America when I watch the movie “high school musical”—one of the two main characters, whom Wang follows within three years from tenth grade until graduation. The other Harry, the bespectacled, introspective boy whose alert and attentive eyes to suggest that it “is very vague impression of the U.S.” as a place “where people should all be so happy and successful” may be rebutted upon arrival in the country. Harry’s father tells him that as soon as a male child born in the last three generations, he carries the “hope family”. “What did you see of the outside world much more than what I saw going abroad in 1981, at the age of eighteen years”, the older man says. “Now you don’t have to worry about the tuition fees, you are very lucky. You should take advantage of this opportunity.”
Witness the drama unfold between the generations, I felt the familiar weight of the words of this father. A generation ago, my Chinese mother admonished me to “seize the opportunity”, using exactly the same conditions as Harry’s father, because my tuition was largely covered by the scholarship funds. My luck in winning a free trip, my mother warned, could not be missed. At Deerfield Academy, a boarding school where I attended, in rural areas in Massachusetts, every student I knew came from the mainland received scholarships. The rich were mainly white and come from Park Avenue or the suburbs of Connecticut. Fifteen years on, the roles have been reversed: Chinese students, like Harry and Stella is the cash cow of the Academy is never, Friedberg mind that their English, to stop and their understanding of American culture sparse. They are not only completely self-financed their education is almost five times more than the day-students, which is a big part of the school. While Harry and Stella to travel the world and attend classes during the summer holidays, their American counterparts, most of whom are white, work in hardware stores and ice cream parlors.
This inversion reveals the dramatic transformation that urban China has undergone in the last decade and a half. Stella and Harry were born, when I was a sophomore in Deerfield, and economic distance between us seems unfathomable abyss. Although in some aspects the pillow of riches has not spared the students a sense of alienation among their American peers, or expectations of Chinese parents. Beauty “Maineland” in his story about the predictable arc of foreign students experience—the way Stella with concern for her and how other kids ask confused Harry to say random things in Chinese and burrowing under it. In one of the most touching scenes of the film, which takes place in the documentary class, a group of Chinese students doing a short film about the General perceptions of Asians. Huddled around the screen, the Chinese students to carefully review the record as they described the U.S. students as hardworking, respectful, shy and smart. “Is it true?” – asks the teacher. Students look at each other, not speaking at first. Then the young woman said, “most”, and another student corrects her: “it’s all true”. The third student, wearing square-rimmed glasses, he adds: “maybe they think Asians are weird . . . When they say to you, they don’t look in the eye”.
“Why?” – asks the teacher.
“Because we are nervous,” the young woman says.
“We are scared,” a student glasses adds.
“What?” – asks the teacher.
“Make a mistake” – she answers.
“Maineland” depicts other muffled conversations such as these, where the outstanding moments of vulnerability stand out as a clear indication of what is obtained through these students of cross-cultural education. Parents Stella and Harry and others of their generation, Westbrook means a cultural capital like they never had a chance to accumulate. But for two teenagers and is the defining experience through which they will measure the distance from the point of view of values and cultural point of view, from their parents.
“There is a big difference between how Chinese and Americans understand it,” Stella said that during her first year in Nashville. “Before I left China, my dream was to become a very successful and earn a lot of money.” She goes on to explain, with a degree of cynicism: “for most Chinese, they feel happy only after reaching a level of financial security. But now I have my own opinion”. Security and contentment are not the words that are defined in the film. As we watch Stella and Harry learn, take exams, attend prom, and to make their annual pilgrimage to China and back, we are left to speculate about the extent to which they can find satisfaction in their expanding worlds. At the end of her senior year, on the threshold of graduation, Stella complaints about Chinese friend that in the end her parents don’t earn enough to free her from money worries and we would not be surprised if, despite its immersion in the American educational system, she repeats her father, seeking after and inherit the family factory. Most likely, we wonder what lessons she has learned from her experience in Nashville, and what a slippery notion of happiness, which she will pass on to her own children one day.
Sourse: newyorker.com
