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An outsider's perspective is valuable. But even in this age of instant
information the outsider could become a poster boy made malleable by
preconceived perceptions and a thirst for contrast.
In the minds of most Chinese, the word "Harvard" is synonymous with
educational excellence - to the point of overshadowing other equally top-notch
Western institutions of higher education except maybe Oxford and Cambridge.
However, the Harvard in the Chinese imagination is not the Harvard by the
Charles River in Boston. It is a myth shrouded in layers of cultural
misperception. When I was a kid, a friend of my father's, one of the very few
who had been to other provinces of the country, described Harvard as a school
with very high walls, where students were not allowed to go outside during the
four years of their study, not even when their parents died. They had to
memorize tons of text from early morning until late at night.
Now that I recall it, the Harvard believed in by this relatively
well-informed person (for that era) was a cross between an ancient Chinese
school and a prison. Had he been shown the movie Love Story, which was made
around the same time and was about a Harvard student, he would have been
devastated: "What? A student could date and get married while in school?"
Even with China's opening up and with the growing exchange of information,
some Chinese people simply cannot resist the temptation of molding China's
favorite foreign university in our own image, which is essentially a school
staffed by thousands of tiger moms. Thus were born the rumors about the 20
statements plastered on the walls of Harvard's library. The statements were said
to include: "If you sleep now, you will have a dream, but if you study now, you
will realize a dream"; "Even though happiness is not based on a person's
performance records, success is the likely result"; and "If you study one more
hour, you will have a better husband."
In 2012, The Wall Street Journal carried an article that quoted Professor
Robert Darnton, who stated unequivocally: "As the university librarian, I can
attest that no such writings exist on any of the walls at Harvard's 73
libraries."
The professor may not know that he has many phantom colleagues who have
penned Chinese best-sellers.
There is a special section in China's publishing industry, usually operated
underground and with retail outlets on sidewalks, that churn out many
inspirational and how-to books.
They tend to have extremely catchy titles, such as Executive Power, which
was supposedly authored by a certain Professor Paul Thomas, who is on the
Harvard Business School faculty. After selling 2 million copies, this volume of
inspiration, which was said to be President Lincoln's favorite book, was found
to be totally phony. There was no English original and Paul Thomas was a name
the publisher created out of the blue. Harvard Mottos is another such book, but
its author seems to have more flesh and blood than Paul Thomas of Executive
Power. Danny Feng is reported to be a Beijinger who has studied in the United
States. After the scam was exposed, Feng said he based his book on an online
post by expanding on each of the 20 mottos. It was a fly-by-night operation,
taking only two months from the book's conception to hitting store shelves.
The trend can be traced back to 2000 when Liu Yiting, the Harvard Girl was
published. Liu's mother, Liu Weihua, wrote a book chronicling her methodology of
teaching her daughter that ended up with the younger Liu being admitted into
Harvard's undergraduate program. The book sold a cumulative 2 million copies and
spawned another book of rebuttal.
In Truth, Xiao Yu wrote that the way Liu was trained, as described in her
mother's book, is traditionally Chinese rather than Western. He adds: "The
reason the myth has held up is the word Harvard. Most in China do not know the
real Harvard and they placed a halo of admiration around it."
At least Liu Yiting is a real person who really got into Harvard and her
mother really wrote that book.
Most of those responsible for the Harvard-related success stories may not
even have a college diploma. Many of those inspirational books were hack jobs by
those with marketing savvy and whose writing consists mostly of copying and
pasting from online sources.
My parents did not write books. But they instinctively used comparison as a
means of motivating me while I was young. "That kid next door is studying from 5
am to 10 pm," or, "He's got all As, but what have you got?"
It dawned on me that my next-door neighbor was actually serving as a kind
of miniature Harvard in my parents' pedagogy. But as a real person he posed many
inconveniences, especially when he started to flunk his courses. But Harvard is
always there, so remote and so impersonal that it can be whatever you need it to
be.
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发表于 2016-7-10 18:05:28