By Carolyn Cole
Published on August 2, 2008

Droves of Chinese college students chased Mustang’s Katy Smith and Megan Milner through campus like they were rock stars, snapping photos with their cell phones and asking prying questions about the women’s lives.

With the opening of the Olympics Games Aug. 8 in Beijing, China and her people have become obsessed with American culture and are brushing up on their English. Smith and Milner were hired to teach American English at a university near Xi’an, China, located several hundred miles north of Beijing.

“They want to show that China is the best country,” Milner said.

The best friends and recent University of Oklahoma graduates expected to struggle in their first semester of teaching since neither were education majors. Milner has a bachelor’s degree in finance, and Smith majored in letters, OU’s broad-based humanities program.

They never expected to be celebrity sensations. When Smith walked into class on the first day, her students gave her a standing ovation.

“They were ecstatic, almost tears rolling down their faces they were so happy,” she said. “It is such a prestigious thing to be taught, to study, under an American.”

To be fair, Smith said, most Chinese living near the ancient city of Xi’an, former capitol of China, had never seen a foreigner. Unlike the United States’ melting pot of culture and ethnicity, more than 90 percent of China’s population is Han Chinese.

The blonde-haired, former MHS volleyball players towered over even most of their male students, reaching almost 6-feet in height in heels. For the 4 1/2 months the best friends worked in China, Milner said they lived under a microscope, facing constant questions about their mannerisms, their families and personal lives. Smith said the Chinese considered no subject too intimate.

“They honestly wanted to know, and we were going to tell them,” Smith said. “If we don’t, then we are mean. That’s how it was. It was so funny — they have no regard for personal space.”

As the women started teaching their classes, they quickly learned their students knew more about the United States and its history than they did. Milner said she found herself researching Congress’ vote on the alternative minimum tax to answer students’ questions and listening to Chinese recite famous American speeches in their entirety.

As she talked more with students, she said she found while they had vast English vocabularies, they didn’t really understand what the words meant or how they are used.
Milner’s students became pen pals with her mother’s second-grade class at Mustang Creek Elementary, and she said their level of writing wasn’t that far apart.

“On the first day of class, I learned my students are all smarter than me, and I have to live with that,” Milner said. “The only thing I have is I am a native English speaker from America, and they think American English is the most standard. That is really important in China.”

In China’s education system, youth start down their career paths in sixth-grade and attend schools that prepare them for those futures. China’s college English majors have really focused on American studies since they were 12 years old, Smith said, but unlike in the United States, a lower priority is placed on all other fields of study.

“There is no such thing as a well-rounded education,” Smith said of China’s system.

With more than 1.3 billion Chinese competing to attend the best schools to qualify to work for future employers, she said youth are pressured to succeed from an early age. The pressure becomes even more intense in college, and in the first week Smith and Milner taught, they said two students committed suicide at their campus.

Chinese learn early in life to be realists, Milner said. In applying for high school and college, Chinese students seek the best school they think they can realistically achieve. If they overestimate their ability and fail to gain entrance in their chosen school, students are sent to the country’s lowest institutions.

The top students at their school had one goal — to immigrate to the United States. However, Smith said she believes they are at a disadvantage because they have learned not to take risks. If she asked a question, they answered by reciting mottoes.

“They are not independent thinkers whatsoever, which is the No. 1 flaw of their education system,” she said. “Because you can’t ask an open-ended question in a classroom and get an answer. They all stare at you.”

Unlike in the United States, students in China are taught to put the welfare of their group above themselves. Smith said students worked together to make good grades, and strong students would intentionally move their bodies to allow other classmates to see their answers during tests. During speeches, she said students would pass around copies and mouth words for the speaker in case their classmate stumbled.

“It’s all about helping that person out so the group will do well,” Smith said.

In their first few weeks, both women made the mistake of honoring individual students for their work in class.

“That would have totally crushed that student because then they would have been yelled at by the rest of the class for looking better,” Milner said.

Smith made the mistake of allowing winners of a game to leave class a few minutes early for lunch. Students allowed to leave early waited in the hallway because they felt they couldn’t leave their group behind.

“Everyone who was left in the class hung their heads in shame,” she said. “I completely devastated them, I felt awful.”

As the women started rewarding their students as a class for their work, they found this group value extended throughout Chinese culture. Milner said she saw it most pronounced in the days following a natural disaster.

Xi’an is more than 300 miles away from Chengdu, the epicenter of a 7.5- Richter Scale earthquake that shook China May 12, but tremors were felt in the area for weeks. In Smith’s sixth-floor apartment, she said doors were rattled off their hinges and tiling in her kitchen fell from the walls crashing to the floor.

Thousands of Chinese sought refuge outside, dragging their beds, couches and television sets into the park or onto the sidewalk — anywhere they could find a little safety and space from buildings.

Their neighbors thought Smith and Milner were crazy, they said, because the women refused to camp out on the street in the cold with the thousands of other college teachers and students.

“That is absolutely what drove everyone outside during the earthquake, because one person got fearful and obviously the whole group should be fearful,” Milner said.

With a sea of people camping outside, she said it was anything but quiet as neighbors chatted about the tremors and their lives in Chinese. Since neither Smith and Milner speak the native language, they were left out of the “group therapy.”

For other young Chinese, Smith said the earthquakes offered a chance for freedom and a slumber party. Chinese college dorm residents must follow strict rules with an enforced 10 p.m. curfew.

“These 21-year-olds, who had never been on their own before, the fact that they got to live outside in tents and hang out with all of their friends — they were so happy and excited to be out there,” she said.

Others asked Milner and Smith why they weren’t afraid, and the women took the chance to talk about Christianity and their faith — a taboo topic in Communist China where religion is officially banned. Serving as missionaries was part of the women’s motivation to visit China, but with the government control at the colleges, Milner said they could have been deported from the country if they were caught discussing religion.

Instead Smith said they seized on students’ questions related to their faith. The women held an Easter egg dying party and answered questions about Christmas and other holidays.

“We wanted to be their friends — we were there as missionaries, too,” she said. “It was really important to us to develop these relationships with these students. They were all so cool — we loved them.”

Smith said it was as difficult a balance as the line between teacher and friend. Milner is age 23 and Smith age 24, just a few years older than their students. Both said they don’t believe a similar program would have been possible in the United States because it would have been difficult to prove themselves and lead classes containing their own peers. In China, it works, Milner said, because Chinese have “an incredible respect for any authority at all.”

The women also struggled with the government controls they found on Internet usage, but their students showed them ways around the blocks. News reports deemed as controversial by the Chinese government can cause certain Web sites to be difficult to access from within the country. For example, Milner said she had a hard time reading reports about the Tibet protests.

The friends used Web cameras to talk with their families at home. While both had taken mission trips to south Africa, and Smith worked in Honduras and Milner spent time in Turkey, neither had been abroad for longer than one month. Smith said in addition to job and culture shock, they both faced homesickness and called the trip an emotional roller coaster.

“There were nights of depression, there were nights of ecstatic joy,” she said.
Both women are back in the United States to celebrate Smith’s wedding, and Milner will return to China in August alone to start her second semester teaching.

Milner said she’s looking forward to watching the giant as it continues to emerge as a superpower. Many Chinese don’t yet realize their country’s impact on the world, she said, adding they were amazed by all of the labels on her belongings that state “Made in China.”

“It is so strange because they value tradition, but they are changing so quickly to be modern,” she said.