Why I came to China?

Last week, I had a moment of incredible clarity of why I came to China after assigning my students with a poem, and asking them to write about what they are experiencing right now. The students had just taken their midterm exams, and seemed to have had a very stressful week. While some students were unequal to the task many just translated a poem form Chinese to English though it did not always mean much to them. Some students did write poems themselves which I was happy to see. After writing their poems I gave them a chance to read their poems to the person next to them and tell them what it meant to them. While they did this I walked around the classroom and spoke with a few students about what their poems meant to them some said they just wrote it to complete the assignment while others spoke about their life. In the first class a student just broke my heart because he said that he just missed his mother and felt alone.

I was confronted with how I could say nothing to this boy who had not seen his family for months, and was working towards the goals his parents had for him. The one child policy in China causes many families to pin their hopes on their one child causing all kinds of pressures. This causes families to spend thousands of dollars to have their children receive the best possible education causing students a huge amount of stress. People in China know the way to success is an education, and education as become something that is both good and evil. It remains good because it imparts knowledge to its students, but evil because of the loneliness and pressure it gives to students here. It is hard to imagine a world in which many of the students you teach have gray hair from the weight they feel. These weights they hold could create a sense of unity in the students, but it is undone by the system of class rankings. Every student knows who is the top student in their class and who is the worse which creates an emotional rift for the students which is difficult for them to overcome. My hope is that somehow God can use me to show these student's hope.