Chapter 5: A Professor’s Revelation: From China to the United States

I have lived two lives. The first, which lasted until 1989, was in Socialist China and firmly grounded me as a Chinese elitist with a deeply impregnated system of morals and values. It was in this life that I internalized the supreme importance of education as the path to upward social mobility for those from humble family backgrounds with little political capital upon which to draw. Upon my successful acquisition of a BA degree in English, I went on to become the first professional educator in my family, taking up a university teaching career in Xian. However, my first life soon came to a voluntary end and my second—initially as a student again—began when I took advantage of an opportunity to pursue postgraduate work in the United States. Since the only scholarship awarded to me by my home university was a geography scholarship, I had to be willing to study geography in order to come to the United States. However, I completed an MA program in geography with no regrets. Then I went on to complete a PhD program in the same field and have since resumed my teaching career. I now teach geography at a regional university in South Carolina, and it is this second life, which is still unfolding, that has challenged my professional views in a fundamental way. Having been educated and developed a career in two cultures that contrast sharply, I have over time become increasingly sensitive to and acutely critical of both. I sometimes indulge in an idealistic fantasy in which the best of Chinese and American cultures fuse into a harmonious and synergized whole. More often, however, the quest for such fusion and its application in the classroom frustrates and inspires me in turn. My second life has thus involved an ongoing process of mediation between two contrasting ideologies and realities that has been sprinkled with fulfillment and disappointment alike. Overall, however, the complexity of my bicultural world view and my dialectic approach to reality have served me well in the only world with which I am familiar; academe, where critical exploration and evaluation of different cultures are considered to be of educational value.