小皇帝: The Little Emperors

Primary school kids can be vicious in any society. When I was in primary school in New Zealand I was teased by my classmates for all sorts of things. As I grew older, and as my classmates and I gradually learned social skills, the bullying slowly faded away.  

Primary school is more political than parliament. I considered as I was growing up, that as schoolwork starts off basic and gets harder as the years go by, social life starts off impossible and gets easier, until you get to university where the schoolwork is really advanced, but everybody is your friend. I call this the "Inverse Proportion Between Social Skills and Class Grade”.

So I thought I had graduated from being called names and being repeatedly insulted and disrespected for hours on end. Apparently not. But wait a minute, I’m the teacher. I’m the boss. 老师是老板, 对把. However as a teacher, if I so much as snapped a child's pencil in trying to scare them, I would risk losing my job. We must take it on the chin. They say we're fat, they tell us our noses are big, we just gently tell them they shouldn't be rude and continue the class. Sounds easy, but try eight hours of it every day for three years.

In China there is a one child policy, to keep the population down. Two parents and four grandparents, all putting their hope in the one child, will do anything for that one child as long as he does his study and becomes successful when he's older. There’s no retirement pension in China, the children support the parents when they get old, so they put all their efforts into that one kid to make them as successful as possible, so they can retire in peace. Now, that's reasonable, but for some reason many parents (and especially grandparents) treat their children like royalty. Thus the rise of the 小皇帝, the Little Emperor.

It is not unusual for a foreign English teacher, in trying to teach a child one-on-one, to find that the child seems to have never been disciplined in his or her life. Nor is it uncommon, say, on the subway, to see a small child yelling at his parents without being scolded.

(I just want to point out that this isn't racist, any more than saying that Beijing has a pollution problem. Its a fact, a social problem that many people already know about. There are many very well-disciplined children, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule).

Mem: "That was the last time. If you call me bread again, I'll hit you"

My name is Brad. Brad sounds exactly like bread (does it really? Perhaps if English is your second language it might). So, of course, I have countless children shouting “BREAD, I WANT TO EAT YOUU!!!” throughout the year. My workmate Ryan had it better, he was Lion :).

So who knows what this will mean for the future of China. I hope that my principle of the "Inverse Proportion Between Social Skills and Class Grade” will set things right. We were all like that to a certain degree at that age, right? Right?

I made this mem to practise use of the word 次 (ci4), meaning 'time'. 第一次 = first time; 最后次 = last time (last as in final, not previous); 再次 = again, another time. I made it a long time before I wrote this blog.