Strange, balding teacher

MAY 23, 2007: Dined last night with a strange, balding teacher.

He had phased me into reading 600 English words into a microphone for him. "Teacher Shen" is a 50-year-old, chain smoking, computer whiz Chinese English teacher. He says he's a descendant of Confucius, 75th generation or so and for some reason he was contantly trying to rope me in to learn his 'Cool Edit' sound recording program. I don't really know why. But his views on Chairman Mao were fascinating.

His landowning family had everything taken away when the Communists won the Chinese Civil War and he grew up in extreme poverty. His 80-year-old grandfather was severely beaten by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution and died shortly after. However, he said Mao was not to blame: "This was the lower classes," he said, "they took the wrong meaning from Mao's words."



Nor was Mao to blame for the Great Leap Forward disaster, according to Teacher Shen. That was the peasants obeying Mao's instructions too eagerly. After 100 years of occupation, "everyone wanted to help make the nation stronger". This explained why the peasants went into giant farming communes and melted their tools to make useless pig-iron while they starved as food continued being exported. According to "Teacher Shen", at the height of the famine Mao ate pork only "once in six months.

"So," he added, "I love Mao very much because he was a true servant of the people."

Teacher Shen seems to have been rather successfully (re?)educated. But strangest of all when he was younger he used to think his family's dispossession was right. Back in those days, he said, "it was a great honour to be poor. The poorer the better."
But now he says it was wrong. I've met quite a few people with these apparent contradictions in thinking. Maybe, due to the rote-learning education system - one in which a teacher might tell a class, "cats eat mice," and a student who questions this will be told they are wrong despite the teacher himself knowing otherwise.