…because damn, some of these students are deserving.

I came to China with some green-minded lessons, and a cooler full of Petri-films and other water-testing materials.  I thought I’d teach a little bit about water pollution and point out that it’s quite a large problem here in China (duh.)  My audience, I imagined, would be a group of spoiled only children who were solely concerned about getting a top grade in the college entrance exam; why would they care about the environment?  I had read a little about China’s rarely enforced environmental protection laws, and “economic growth first, then clean-up” attitude, so I thought I would bring some water-testing materials with me to check out the situation myself, and introduce the students to environmental science while I was at it.  How naive was I?

China’s environmental situation is definitely looking less than ideal.  I didn’t know it was possible, but the canal flowing through Kunming is pretty much black.  (So I guess Elizabeth Economy was not exxagerating when she published The River Runs Black) The water foams where stormwater joins the canal through giant human-height pipes every ten meters or so.  It rains a lot here in Kunming, so one might expect stormwater to be pretty clean, but just about everything gets dumped onto the sidewalks and streets.  Laundry water, food waste, raw meat drippings, pet droppings, hair dyes, wash water from the many informal car mechanic shacks and impromptu construction material manufacturers…the list goes unfortunately on.

Who is to blame though?  The average Chinese city dweller might not have studied ecology in school and modern materialism and disposable-ism have already encroached on some homes and streets, but China is by tradition a relatively energy efficient society.  Most people carry around the same glass jar that they fill with hot water a tea leaves at the start of each day.  Just about every apartment uses on-demand hot water, and often solar hot water.   Electric clothes dryers are virtually nonexistent and much laundry is done by hand.   Living space per person is in generally quite small, with 6-8 high school students crammed in each dorm room and many families living in their own shops.   Most Chinese cannot even afford to eat meat, and at least in Kunming, fruit and vegetable stands are literally on every street.  The youngest upper middle class generation is taught that vegetarian food is not only healthy for the body but also for the environment.

Open-air coal burning is a major problem, but food vendors can’t help that infrastructure for cleaner energy sources is severely underdeveloped or too expensive.  They are attempting to make a living on serving food for 5 yuan per customer.  Dumping onto the street is no less of an issue, but if shops have no sewage lines, where else is waste going to go?  And as for disposability?  It’s a vicious cycle.  Those who can afford it are so disconcerted by the grit and grime everywhere that they would rather trust cheap plastic containers than china washed in the restaurants.  Oh, except for the china that comes vacuum packaged, or is taken straight out of UV-sterilizers placed proudly in the customers’ view at the finer dining locales.  Case in point.  The Chinese who don’t have the time or the will to boil their water are big fans of the bottled fare (gahhh I hate the idea of bottled water but I am such a hypocrit while I’m here and living off of gifts of bottled water left for us by all three of our hosts so far.)  It’s a little different here though, since I actually think the tap water in China is not for direct drinking.  (Lesson learned: do like the ancestors did and drink tea.)

Moving on to my main point: students.  China’s students are certainly not ignorant, and more certainly are quite restricted.  When it comes to the environment, they already know as much as if not more than I came prepared to teach.  Today, I thought I’d start off with something I could describe in Chinese in case I could not convey my point in English: pH testing.  I had the students find the pH of three “samples”: a laundry detergent-water solution, Sprite, and some water from the popular Green Lake nearby.  The detergent and Sprite unsurprisingly came out to be ~10 and ~3.5 respectively.  The lake water turned out to have pH 9.  I had never tested lake water, so I did not know to expect or explain this result, except to say that there were unknown pollutants in the water.  One of the students explained that there are many factories near the lake that have dumped waste including organic chemicals into the waters that feed the lake, and there may also be excess fertilizer from runoff.  He was able to list several kinds of fertilizer and describe how they might affect the pH.  Wow.  After we finally reached an understanding through a combination of Chinglish and electronic dictionary action, he asked me, how do we clean the water?  So I started painfully describing purification methods in Chinese: filtration, precipitation, flocculation, distillation…but was quickly stopped.  One of the students pointed out that this would be impossible: you cannot boil the water without also boiling all the living organisms in it.  Slowly I realized that they were asking how to clean the lake itself, not to get clean water from bad water. Damn, I’m looking really stupid now…I’ve had two semesters of environmental engineering; why haven’t I learned this yet?  I could only answer that this is very complicated and expensive.  It might be easier to prevent future pollution.  The students laughed.

All in all, I may have lost face, but I learned a lot from the high school students.  I chatted with a first-year liberal arts (here they choose between liberal arts and science at the end of middle school) students for almost an hour before a teacher came and shooed her to the dorms for the 10pm lights out (yes, high school students were voluntarily crowding into a mosquito-y classroom to talk about science and learn English until 10 PM)  She told me that her family lives by Dian Chi, which is a large, well-known lake near Kunming.  Her father and grandfater used to swim in the lake, she said, but she has never been able to because the water is very polluted.  It is a very beautiful place, but she hopes that the pollution problem is remediated someday so that more people would recognize it as a beautiful place instead of allowing factories to continue dumping there.  Before leaving, she remembers that even ten years ago, the lake’s health was much better.  As a six-year old, she was still able to play at Dian Chi, although she was not allowed to swim in it because of the pollution.  Today, she says, she would not be able to re-live any of her childhood activities at the lake.  She repeated her hope that the pollution would be reversed before apologizing profusely that she had to run because of lights-out and rushing out the door.

Earlier in the evening, I was speaking with a few seniors about the Chinese college entrance system.  In China, this exam is the sole determinant for college placement.  It consists of six or seven subjects, and all high school graduates must take either the liberal arts or science version.   The seniors I was speaking with were using our chat as precious practice for the oral English section.  In general, they expressed their dislike of this exam system.  High school students, especially seniors, spend all of their time preparing for the exam. They are under immense pressure to do well in all of the exam subjects, and do not have time to develop their own interests, or pursue knowledge in subjects that are not tested.  In the end, a very bright student might fail the exam, while an average student that simply studied the exam to the letter might earn top marks.  With my limited knowledge, it seems that this exam system severely undervalues many students’ sincere academic interests and creativity. 

I mentioned that at MIT, students have the opportunity to travel to many foreign countries to study or work on internships.  This was fascinating to the seniors I spoke with.  None of them had been outside of China.  Yet most of these high school students knew more about world politics, economics, and geography than the great majority of Americans I have met.  We discussed President Obama, whose speeches and diplomatic actions have spread like wildfire in Chinese news (like in many countries.)  One of the seniors asked me what I thought about President Hu Jintao, and added quietly that she thought the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has acted much more capably than the president so far, especially in response to the Szechuan earthquake.  One of her friends, who incidently wants to be a lawyer in the future, immediately reminded her that she should not be talking about politics to us.  As for the foreign travelling, I suggested that they might have more opportunities during college, but they responded that the government makes it pretty difficult to go abroad at all.  I also pointed out that some Chinese students go abroad for college, but I was quickly reminded that only the highest scorers out of over the millions of seniors that go through the exam each year would be given this option.  What a frustrating reality.