Dinner With Students I: Minzu Daxue

I had dinner with some students from the 中央民族大学 or Central University for Nationalities (CUN) last night and over plates of sweet lotus root and chicken in a claypot, they told me about their experiences in university and dreams for the future.

First of all, the school is still in lockdown after the peaceful vigil convened by some 40 Tibetan students at the university last week (which caused some Chinese leaders to bemoan the fact the Tibet "troubles" had made their way even to Beijing), so I could not meet the students on campus. When asked, the students seemed eager to deflect attention from the issue and insisted that things are normal and peaceful on-campus. But when pressed, they sheepishly explained that there are armed guards in all the dorms and only students with the university's identification card are allowed on-campus. "It is for our safety" they explained the security in place, and few seemed sympathetic to the right of the Tibetan students to protest. There has been no indication when this lockdown will end.

After some introduction the three sophomores and four graduate students spoke to me candidly about their expectations for university, and in most of their cases, their disappointment with the education and anxiety towards entering the job market. These are unique students, several are ethnic minorities themselves from faraway provinces and they attend school with a student body made up of 60-70% ethnic minorities. Several were from the first literate, nevermind college-educated, generation of their families.

The undergraduates were the most interesting. A Shui ethnic student talked about working hard to be at the top of his class in middle school, or as he modestly described, "an OK student" in Qiannan, an autonomous prefecture in remote Southern Guizhou Province riddled with so many ethnic minorities and so much poverty that it is hard to associate any particular ethnic minority or products with this area.

As it turns out, I visited this prefecture on several occasions last year and we traded notes on the bull-fighting and horse-racing competitions common during the largest holiday of the year in October. I watched his eyes shine sparkle with pride as he described the courtship songs and many rituals the Shui are known for. When this seemingly confident lad later talked about being shy and explained that he was speaking from his heart on this night, there was no denying I was surprised, and moved.

This student was lucky - as the youngest in a line of five, he was relatively free from obligations to his family. He was selected to attend a charity school in Guangzhou on scholarship where he received a superior education than in Guizhou, which has trouble attracted and retaining educated teachers.

He was not the only student to talk about missing home. When I asked a Hani student what he thought of Beijing and whether he missed his home in Yunnan, he paused, and answered, "Yes, when I was a first year, I missed it very much, but things are better now", as he looked over to his friend for reassurance. All of the students talked about dreaming about attending school in Beijing, but not really being prepared for all the challenges it brought.

One girl from Inner Mongolia spoke of her buyer's remorse towards the Communications major she had chosen. Perhaps "chosen" is not the correct term to use. Students in China test into universities, and into majors within universities through a baccalaureate exam called the gaokao (高考). This exam comes to represent their entire academic record and in many ways determines their future opportunities in life.

This girl spoke of how she wanted to study English and Law and in previous years her score would have been enough but in 2006, it only qualified her for the Communications major at CUN. Most people's understanding of communication studies, and her own tragically, would be a combination of media studies and media technology, the like. But at CUN, xinxi (信息) means neither xinwen, news, nor tongxin (通信), mobile technology but the science behind how communications technology works so lots of math and physics which for this social humanities lover has been the bane of her existence. She also quickly noted that had she been a minority (She is Han but lives in a disadvantaged and heavily Mongolian area), she would have gained admission into the programs she wanted, just a reminder of the quotas and affirmative action programs in place for minorities in China.

When asked about their ideal careers, even the graduate students, who are only a year away from their own job search, were cautious and guarded in their expectations. Slowly it came out that the girl from Inner Mongolia wanted to be a news broadcaster, the graduate students studying family education hoped to teach and the two minority students wanted to use their financial management degrees to do good. They also expressed frustration that the school offers virtually no career guidance. There was debate about the existence and function of the career service on campus indicating a lack of outreach and education on-campus about career services in general. I asked several times about internships and the students mentioned odd jobs they'd taken over breaks or research projects they initiated independently but there is no structured internship system set up or encouraged for students unlike at the elite universities of PKU and Qinghua just down the street. We were at the consensus that hands-on experience at an internship constitutes the best preparation for the real world.

With the disintegration of state-appointed work unit system, these students face many of the same challenges as university students in the workplace: an increasing competitive and globalized service-based economy with a plethora of choices. The students spoke of struggling with finding what they enjoyed doing and their life's work. The graduate students who majored in English spoke of the possibility of ditching their graduate work and being employed as translators or at a foreign company. When asked why they embarked on a graduate degree in the first place -the explained that just like in America, graduate degrees are increasingly required from civil service to company jobs. It's a matter of wenping (文平）or credentialing where a credential becomes shorthand for ability and (perhaps wrongly) experience.

One encouraging note is that none expressed the belief that a job is just a way to get paid; they all seemed to maintain hope that they could find a job that they both enjoyed and supported them. It will be a difficult search.

At the end of dinner came a deeply humbling moment. The Shui student said he admired me for taking my degree from an elite institution and then choosing to volunteer in China and using it to give back. He called it an inspiration for himself. Earlier, he explained his resolve to use his degree to help his family and people back home in Guizhou. He talked about his parents, both in their sixties, who could scarcely understand the modern world he inhabits and pressures he experiences. But you could see in the way he described them his deep respect for his parents as he expressed his determination to study hard in their honor, make money, and eventually return to set up a company in Guizhou. It reminded me of my parents' own struggle to provide a better life for me and the story of so many immigrants in America. I could hardly express to him how honored I felt and how much more worthwhile and surprising his own story was and continues to be.

As we debated the benefits and drawbacks of the Han's efforts to standardize Mandarin across the nation and bring all ethnic minorities into the fold, I thought to myself, this young Shui ethnic who speaks Shui as well as his accentless Mandarin (now rare I'm told), he truly embodies the hopes of people from his village, of the Shui's, and of all of China. It's a big responsibility. I certainly he gets some good career advice down the line.