MCLC: teaching The Great Gatsby in Chengdu

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: teaching The Great Gatsby in Chengdu
***********************************************************

Source: The Daily Beast (5/20/13):
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/20/teaching-the-great-gatsby-
in-chengdu-china.html

Teaching ‘The Great Gatsby’ in Chengdu, China
What can F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Roaring ’20s novel tell us about
present-day China? 
Matt Lombardi teaches the American classic to students in the city of
Chengdu.

Danghao Geng, the sophomore class president at Southwestern University in
Chengdu, China, stood at the front of a cinder-block classroom before a
crowd of eager students—and sold books. The university had failed to
acquire the course texts in time for the first class, but Danghao, an
industrious Insurance major who prefers to be called Harry (“like Harry
Potter”), had solved the problem at a local copy shop. As Harry watched
stacks of his bootlegged books diminish and the stack of yuan in his hand
grow, he joked, “I could really be making a lot more money right now.”
That seemed fitting, considering one of the novels he was selling told the
story of American fiction’s most notorious bootlegger. In inky black
letters across a stark mint cover, the title read, “THE GREAT GATSBY BY
F,” followed by a line a few inches below in smaller type: “Scott
Fitzgerald.”

The Great Gatsby is one of those taught-to-death novels in America, due in
part to its critique of the American Dream. Most students meet
Fitzgerald’s glittery gang of socialites and big reader-friendly symbols
in high school, if not sooner. Last fall, Baruch College at the City
University of New York sent me to Chengdu, in southwestern China, to teach
English 2150, a writing course that I titled “Strangers in Strange Lands.”
One of the books that I taught was The Great Gatsby, and I was curious to
see how one country’s sacred classic played out in another. The parallels
between post–World War I America and present-day China seemed relevant.
Chinese youth culture is not “roaring,” but the country’s prosperity,
industrial growth, rampant consumerism, new technology, and thriving
cities resemble the American 1920s.

But as China’s new president, Xi Jinping, touts the “Chinese Dream”
despite dire rural poverty, what is the “dream” for a technologically
savvy Chinese generation born in the booming 1990s, with only vague
notions of the Tiananmen Square student protests of 1989?

If we look to The Great Gatsby for answers, it wasn’t Nick Carraway, the
novel’s conflicted narrator, with whom students sympathized. As one
student stated in an essay, “Gatsby’s unyieldingness to the gauntlet lay
down by the sham world acted like a shooting star in the darkest night,
giving the darkness dawn, the sorrow comfort, and the desperation hope.”

When Harry was not copying my entire reading list and selling it at a
bargain, then he was giving a TED Talk–like PowerPoint presentation to a
packed house of more than 80 students on how to live in New York, where he
has never been before; or he was presiding over the “English Club” he
headed, where they have met to discuss such texts as the Gettysburg
Address and the script for the pilot episode of Friends; or he was acting
as class president, an unelected position to which he was appointed by the
preceding class president and friend of the family. Harry’s dream is to
become a wealthy CFO of a large company in Switzerland, where he once
visited on a business trip with his father and was impressed by the
friendly people, cleanliness, and beauty of its cities, though he believes
Canada or the United States to be more realistic options. Like Jay Gatsby,
and many of my students, Harry’s family came from rural poverty. His
father grew up a poor sheep farmer in Inner Mongolia, but as the youngest
child he managed to attend college at Xi’an Jiaotong University, where he
met his first girlfriend and later his wife. Harry’s parents worked as
engineers for the government in Beijing and lived in a cramped, leaky
sixth-floor walk-up with no heat or air conditioning, until Harry’s father
was sent on a business trip to Italy to study some new machinery. It was
there he was offered a job with a Swiss company looking to expand in
China. After that, Harry grew up away from home at boarding schools in
China.

How one country’s sacred classic played out in another.

On a cool fall Saturday afternoon between classes, Harry and I sat on low
stools at a long greasy table in a packed open-air restaurant, drinking
peanut milk from glass bottles to cool our tongues from the enormous metal
pan of chili wheat noodles we shared. Harry was 19, short, with a broad
face and thick eyebrows above his glasses. A few days prior, the Chinese
writer Mo Yan had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Harry
was still surprised. “I really thought it would be Haruki Murakami,” he
said.

I brought up Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese writer and human-rights activist who
won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, but was and still imprisoned in China for
criticizing the government. Harry shook his head and smiled wider, “Why
would someone who causes disruption to his own country get a ‘peace’
prize? This does not make sense to me.”

While the majority of students rolled their eyes at the Communist Party’s
severe control (they refer to the government’s online censorship as “The
Great Firewall”), Harry always gave me the party line. Like a
self-conscious but loyal child covering for the detrimental parent, he
often assured me the government only did what was best for its people.
Harry wanted to be proud of his country, but I got the impression he was
curious to try the government’s talking points out on an outsider for his
own clarification. As Harry explained regarding North Korea (a country he
described as China’s “annoying little brother”), “China does not have many
friends in this world,” and Harry wanted to understand why. Despite the
government’s attempt at creating its own narrative through censorship and
state-controlled news, young adults in China are perhaps more aware of the
world than any generation that preceded them, thanks to the Internet and
stories passed around from friends who have traveled abroad.

Like Harry, Antonia is a 19-year-old sophomore. Her legal name is Mengting
Yuan, and like Gatsby, whose real name is James Gatz, she understands
image-making and plans on using the name she picked herself when she
arrives in New York this summer to finish her undergraduate degree.
Antonia told me she chose her name because of the Dutch film, Antonia’s
Line, a 1996 Oscar winner often described as a feminist fairy tale.
“Mengting,” the name her mother gave her at birth, which Antonia said
means “dream and beauty,” is the name of a character in a popular romance
novel by the Taiwanese writer Qiong Yao. But Antonia feels her new name
makes her more of an independent woman. Other students agreed. In my
classes I had a Jolie who named herself after Angelina Jolie, a Scarlett
after Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara, and an Oceanid in reference to
Greek mythology.

My students didn’t see Jay Gatsby as a naive idealist.

Antonia wore black plastic-framed eyeglasses and parted her long dark hair
down the middle. She often dressed casually in button-down shirts,
sweaters, and skinny jeans. Being a strong woman in a country run by men
is not easy, Antonia often pointed out in class. Between familial
pressure, a six-day academic schedule, a long-distance relationship with
her boyfriend, and worrying about her future career, she found life to be
very stressful. “Whenever I get sick, or miss my home, or family, or am so
stressed,” she said. “I watch Friends.” The American television show is
already regarded in China as “a classic.” It’s Antonia’s favorite because
six “completely different” people from various educational backgrounds,
who all want different things out of life, can hang out together. Her eyes
teared up a little. “They don’t care what their parents tell them to do
and they follow their hearts and their dreams,” she said. “This cannot
happen in China.”

To a generation of young Chinese, Friends serves as a liberating life
fantasy. Young people don’t expect to live this fantasy at home. They want
to transform themselves in another place, like Gatsby did. But there is a
Friends-themed “Central Perk” novelty café operating in Beijing.

An oft-cited statistic about China is that it is the world’s largest
purchaser of luxury goods. This is almost true. Currently, China is in
second place, but by 2014 it is expected to surpass Japan. After my class
read the famous scene in chapter five when Gatsby gives Daisy a tour of
his Long Island mansion, and Daisy breaks down crying on a pile of
extravagant dress shirts, we had a discussion of the tensions and
identities regarding luxury and status. Students were well aware of
China’s aggressive consumerism, as well as the irony it poses for a
communist country, but viewed this trend with simultaneous concern and
pride. A student who went by Victor wrote:

There are many cockbrain in American society now, and they reach after
personal fame and gain, they spend their wealth on the pleasure or
something like that. As a matter of fact, I have to say there are much
more wheeler-dealer in China. As a developing country, China is second
populous area of the world and it has great development potential, but
there is still a number of issues exist in our development of economy,
such as the large gap between. It is well known that Chinese always pursue
the luxury goods.

Victor, who had stylish spiky hair he sculpted forward and a pouty
expression that gave him the hip, brooding appearance of a keyboardist in
an ’80s new-wave band, is also headed to New York this summer to complete
the second half of his degree as an accounting major. He comes from a
family of poor farmers on his mother’s side. His grandfather on his
father’s side was a landowner, but was forced to hand his property over to
the government during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and to live in
poverty. Victor’s mother is a university professor, and his father, a
former professor, is described by Victor as a businessman who now runs two
companies. I asked Victor how his life differed from his parents’, who had
to work their way through college. “I never suffered,” Victor told me.
“The economy boomed rapid[ly], so my life was getting better and better
all the time.” He has a collection of 25 pairs of brand-name basketball
sneakers that he proudly showed me on his iPhone, the gem being the Nike
Airmax 360 for which he paid more than $200.

The large gap between the classes is ubiquitous in China. Near the
Wenjiang campus in Chengdu, peasants farmed the narrow plots of land along
highways outside of new shopping malls, while bicycle rickshaw drivers
jostled for position at traffic lights beside gleaming SUVs. Just below my
18th-floor apartment window I watched a swath of farmland prepped for
high-rise development in a matter of two weeks. Vegetation, large trees,
and a series of small farm buildings were cleared, and massive holes were
dug for the foundations. A destitute farmer can abruptly find himself
neighbors with a wealthy condo dweller in the kind of sudden and expansive
urbanization the government is enacting.

But many people told me that the biggest culprits of the extravagant
Gatsby lifestyle in China were government officials. Many accused party
leaders of excessive wealth and decadence filled with liquor and women.
The government banned The New York Times in China last fall due to its
exposé on former prime minister Wen Jiabao
<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/business/global/family-of-wen-jiabao-hol
ds-a-hidden-fortune-in-china.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>, whose family
reportedly controlled assets worth at least $2.7 billion.

Is this the communist dream that Karl Marx envisioned? I asked the class
if they thought China was still a communist nation. Someone let out a
definitive “Nope,” to which another student replied, “But don’t tell the
government that.” The class burst into laughter, but composed themselves
quickly. After all, a camera was mounted at either end of the room.

Some have hoped that China’s economic boom could push the country toward
democracy. But it seems to have only resulted in political complacency.
Couple this with a life increasingly lived on the Internet (Facebook and
Twitter are banned in China, but “QQ” is the social network of choice) and
many young people in China are content to just roll their eyes and humor
the oppressive government while attempting to pursue a life outside the
Chinese system. China’s new middle-class college students don’t see
themselves as primarily Chinese, but as part of a broader world culture
their parents never knew. They dress nearly identical to the students I
teach in New York, watch the same media, and see politics at home as a
lost cause. Like the people in Fitzgerald’s Roaring ’20s, China’s growing
urbanization, corruption, and newfound love of luxury has left its young
citizens both aspirational and disenchanted. Their pursuits are
individualist, and many seek to be expatriates. President Xi Jinping urged
citizens to “achieve prosperity, revitalize the nation, and bring about
the happiness of the people,” but he may be creating China’s own Lost
Generation.

My students didn’t only see Jay Gatsby as a naive idealist, whose refusal
to acknowledge reality in the face of his dream leads to his tragic
demise. They saw him as free to do so.