In the grand scheme of things, OSTA is a small professional organization with a focus set firmly in the heartland of America. But there are exceptions. Our membership roles include teachers who currently live outside the state and outside of the country. Most live in states that border Oklahoma and we have had members who lived in Europe or Japan, working for Department of Defense schools and the like.
Currently, our longest Okie life-line is extended to Jeff Brown, an Oklahoman who currently lives and teaches in Beijing, China. We’ve communicated occasionally via email, but recently, Jeff has written and published a new book entitled 44 Days Backpacking in China. The subtitle of the book is The Middle Kingdom of the 21st Century with the United States, Europe and the Fate of the World in It’s Looking Glass. Jeff presents this interesting examination of China and the incredible change underway using the vehicle of a 44 day trip across, over, and around a country the size of the 50 United States, but with a population 3 times the size of the U.S.
I recently conducted an internet-enabled interview with Jeff which I’ll roll out in two parts. In part 1 Jeff talks a bit about himself, the inspiration for his trip, and about life in China. In part 2 I asked him questions about schooling in China and the Chinese approach to science education.
Science in China’s Classrooms, Museums and Daily Life
A Personal Account of an Oklahoman Teaching in Beijing
With Bob Melton, OSTA and Jeff J. Brown in Beijing…
Bob Melton: First, can you tell us a bit about yourself? Your author bio states you are from Oklahoma and are a graduate of OSU. Can you flesh that out a bit? What about your teaching career? When did you become a member of OSTA?
Jeff Brown: For as long as I can remember growing up, I wanted to be a veterinarian. As a child, I spent days hanging out around anthills and just loved exploring animals in nature. I was also nuts about astronomy and my parents let me have a pretty decent chemistry lab in the utility bathroom at home. I was burning and blowing up stuff at a very young age. In keeping with Richard Dawkins’ evolutionary model, I think I inherited a big fat science meme. This passion was fueled even more when my parents got a divorce and my father struck out to be a sheep farmer and orchard grower. So, I graduated from John Marshall in OKC, but spent many days of my middle and high school and university years working on an Oklahoma farm, while riding a horse. As far as becoming a veterinarian, I was doomed by my non-conformity. This was after all 1972-76, when we had to sign in and out to just go visit a girlfriend in the dorms. We had to leave her door wide open and a Miss Trunchbill-Nurse Ratched floor monitor of a troll would walk by menacingly every minute or two, just as a reminder. Thank goodness for cars! I sued OSU for police brutality, won damages and caused a big revamping of the corrupt campus police department. So, I was way too outside the accepted mold for a very conservative vet school to ever accept me
I ended up getting a BS in Animal Sciences at OSU, convinced I would go back and take over my dad’s place. I then got an MS at Purdue in Ruminant Nutrition and my research was published in the Journal of Animal Sciences. I was all set. But a funny thing happened in grad school. The large Brazilian student body at Purdue adopted me and inspired me to go south to seek my fortune as a farmer there. It did not pan out, but the spark of travel lust was ignited in my soul and that trip to Brazil changed my life forever. I learned I was very good at learning languages (Portuguese) and there was a whole lot of Planet Earth out there just waiting to be explored. To realize this dream, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Tunisia 1980-82 (dairy extension agent) and the rest is history. I did not move back to the US for 21 years, spending 10 years in Africa and the Middle East, seven in China, five in France, nine back in Oklahoma and now three back in China. During all these cross border itinerations, I also learned Arabic, French and Chinese, while traveling to 85 countries.
Back in the US, I got tired of the workaday business world and decided to reprioritize my life, getting alternative certification as a teacher. I taught middle school science at ASTEC in OKC, 2008-10. During that time I joined and continue to be a member of OSTA and OESE (Oklahomans for Excellence in Science Education). Even though I am halfway around the world, I believe their work is incredibly important and I want to support them. My wife, younger daughter and I then moved back to China in 2010 and I have been an upper elementary teacher at Daystar Academy since.
BM: What can you tell us about life in Beijing? How does it compare to living in some of the other places you have lived? Why China?
JB: Africa and the Middle East have very low population densities and life is very Mediterranean in philosophy. It’s kind of a Tom Sawyer-Huckleberry Finn daily pace. In that part of the world, people work to live, not the other way around. Like Americans, the Chinese take the opposite approach: they live to work. For some reason, they seem to handle this workaholic way of life without all the stress found in the United States. I think it has to do in part with the population density. Believe it or not, there are more people living in our city district in Beijing than the entire state of Oklahoma. We’ve got five million “neighbors” here in a few tens of square kilometers and Oklahoma, from Black Mesa to Idabel has 3.8 million. Beijing, my humble berg, has 20 million souls. Throw in Tianjin, its sister provincial port city to the east, and together, they have a few more million people than the entire state of Texas. All this incredible intensity of humanity everywhere you turn, what I describe in my book 44 Days, as “eyeballs to elbows”, creates so much white noise in one’s life, that all the workaholic stress seems more attenuated, or at least “normal”.
Why live in China? It is simply an unforgettable opportunity. We are in the midst of history being made, what I describe in 44 Days as “hanging on for this wild adventure in the bowels of the new century China beast”. China will soon be the world’s top economic power. You can just feel it, as well as the optimism of the people, in spite of the myriad day to day problems, such as pollution and consumer/food/occupational safety.
BM: What inspired you to take this 44 day trip around China? And what did your family think about you taking off on this adventure?
JB: We moved here from Algeria in 1990. Tanks were still in the streets and armored personnel carriers still cruised non-stop, as a result of the Tiananmen Square movement. It was like a ghost town, eerily subdued, almost sleep walking, and all still very much hungover after the decade long, socio-political cannibalism of the Cultural Revolution, 1966-76. But that post-Tiananmen interlude didn’t last long. China quickly took what it started in the eighties and plunged into socio-economic, “Star Trek” hyperdrive. It was barely controlled chaos, a true gold rush experience, wild, crazy and seemingly beyond description. Living and working here in the nineties felt like packing a week into every day on the streets. When we left in 1997 to move to France, it was like going through detox. China life back then was that intense, almost like a surreal drug trip. I reflect a lot on the nineties in 44 Days. It is very relevant to China’s ongoing development and social evolution.
When we came back 14 years later, the experience and change were so utterly profound, almost extraterrestrial. The frenzy of activity is still here, one’s daily life is still saturated with all that white noise, but all of the rough edges, the consuming, confrontational, paranoid ambiance that was still carrying over from the Cultural Revolution, has dissipated. In the nineties, living here was like a three pack a day nicotine habit. Now, the Chinese have evolved so much as a people and the infrastructure has improved logarithmically, that life here today is comparatively mundane. So, that’s the genesis of 44 Days: I just had to get out and see for myself what it was like outside the confines of Beijing, after 14 years of blinding transformation. I had traveled extensively in the interior in the nineties, so I was in a good position to make the comparison. What I experienced took my breath away. This is a big country, the same size as the 50 United States, with 56 ethnic groups and some of the wildest, roughest terrain on Earth, so there is a lot to see. My wife and daughter went to France while I traveled for 44 days, so they made out alright. From a personal safety standpoint, China is a very safe place to live and travel. I never once was worried about being attacked or robbed, even late at night on dark streets in strange metropolises.
BM: I find it interesting that you post the itinerary and the expenses on your website. So, is it particularly difficult to navigate around China and make these kinds of travel/lodging arrangements?
JB: It used to be a nightmare in the nineties just to travel outside Beijing in all the chaos and disorder. Now, it is amazingly easy to get around this country of 1.3 billion people. Cheap hotels and fresh, home cooked Chinese food are everywhere you turn. I call China ‘The World’s People Mover” and they do it to the tune of tens of millions every day. I’m a backpacker and like experiencing life on the streets with the salt of the Earth locals, but you can get around in luxurious comfort too, which was a pipe dream back in the day. As an incurable scientist, I posted all that empirical data as proof for my readers.
BM: Some of us still have perhaps two mental images of China , one is of China as very rural, picturesque, and somewhat ancient, the other is as very congested, modern and swarming with people. Are both images accurate?
JB: Bob, that’s a very astute observation. China is in fact both. Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou each have 20 million inhabitants, Chongqing over 30 million. Cities the size of Chicago and Houston are a dime a dozen. Each of the 34 provinces averages 40 million citizens. But like in science, averages can distort reality. I traveled in the western deserts and highlands (3,000 meters above sea level) that make up over 54% of the Republic’s surface area, yet have only 6% of the total population. So 94% of the people are essentially packed into the coastal plains and the Yangtze River Basin, which all told, is 47% of the surface area. So, it’s like squeezing 1,200,000,000 people east of the Mississippi River, leaving 100,000,000 to live out west, along with Alaska and Hawaii. Some days during my journey in Western China, I felt like the last man on Earth, something difficult to wrap my head around, as I thought about big, bad, bustling Beijing down on the coastal plains below.
(end of part 1)