When I first arrived in China, as I returned from teaching each evening I would often see a young man pacing up and down outside the foreign experts hotel with a book in his hand, talking to himself in English.
He was there almost every day. When autumn turned into winter and the evenings became dark and cold, he would stand under a street lamp for illumination and read aloud from the same book.
My elder brother is rather tall – he would declare – and my younger brother is rather clever!
On Tuesday we will visit the British Museum – he would inform a non-existent tour group – and on Wednesday we are going on a boat trip to the Tower of London!
His voice rising to a crescendo, he would shriek to anyone within earshot – I like pineapples very much, but my favourite fruit is banana!
I thought he was a little odd.
Wandering around the beautiful and leafy campus at weekends, I noticed dozens more people studying in the autumn sun, open books across their knees. Sometimes I would see groups of music students sitting under the trees, singing arias from western operas – a dozen different tunes entwining in a crazy fugue, against the raucous rhythm of the cicadas.
And it wasn’t just students who were busy studying. In the early morning I saw groups of elderly women learning complicated T’ai Chi and dance routines using drums and fans.
Other groups were learning sword forms – some using two swords at once. The routines were energetic, and the swords looked pretty real; on occasion I was afraid that a beginner might chop her own head off.
Soon afterwards I began to talk to some of the people practising T’ai Chi, and an 80 year old master – who looked no older than 60 – offered to teach me a sword routine. He, in turn, was occasionally corrected by an even older teacher, a man who could not have been less than 100 years old and was now too frail to use a sword, but instead demonstrated tiny adjustments and refinements with his walking stick.
It seemed to me that the whole of China was constantly studying and learning. It was as if the world’s oldest civilisation was being passed on in front of my eyes. In England, businessmen are very fond of buzzwords and catchphrases, and one of the latest is lifelong learning, supposedly necessary to prepare us for the knowledge society, but China has clearly been practising lifelong learning for centuries.
Modern as well as ancient disciplines get the same treatment. I spent last semester in Xiamen, and while walking on the beach one day, I saw about twenty earnest young men juggling bottles on the sand. It took me a couple of minutes to realise that they were training to be cocktail barmen.
I have long since joined in China’s perpetual learning society myself. I study Chinese and T’ai Chi seriously, but with modest ambitions.
As for the guy under the street lamp, I decided he was crazy after all.
