Yi, Er, San, Si, Yi!

Now, these words I do understand. I even know the characters for the first three—my only characters to date: – = … One, two, three, four, one…

During the first two weeks of the semester, I heard the words shouted in unison by thousands of voices, by baby-faced girls in camouflaged clothes marching along with their boot straps unlaced, by young men with boyish figures and the bills of their infantry caps hanging down over their eyes, by upperclassmen with crisp uniforms and straight spines doing their best impersonation of a drill sergeant.

You see, this is how college life begins for incoming students in China. They cluster together by the thousands all over campus and pretend to be soldiers for two weeks, complete with high-stepping in column and standing at attention in line and even some target practice with real guns, all done under the hot lamp of the late-summer sun. It’s an army of small soldiers, many of whom to my eyes scarcely appear to be out of middle school.

There’s something in me that wants to resist such behavior made collective, whether under duress or not. I recall walking once with a friend at Lake Elkhorn and seeing some ducks pull themselves out of the water and waddle across the grass in perfect column. I remarked to my friend that if I were a duck, I would walk ten feet away out of principle. I’m even troubled by cheers at sporting events, when people shout such seemingly innocuous words as “Defense!” or sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” together. I make it a point to stretch in the sixth inning and remain pinned to my seat in the seventh. The trivial content doesn’t particularly matter to me. It’s more the sense of witnessing the individual voice swallowed up by the crowd that’s unsettling. I can’t help feeling that some vaguely fascist force is at work.

For the incoming college student in China, the collective behavior is most definitely made so under duress. If given the choice, few students, if any, would voluntarily subject themselves to the rigors of the training. But they are not given the choice, and two weeks of sweat and soldier-play are part of the price of admission, no less than tuition and a high score on the entrance exams. This was not always so. I read that the required training grew out of the government’s desire, in the wake of Tiananmen, to make college campuses less hospitable grounds for dissent and to foster instead a spirit of national pride and shared purpose.

Despite my unease with all of this, I’ve tried to keep an open mind, and I actually do see some benefits for the students, though, in terms of the policy, the perks are subsidiary if not accidental. At my college in Maryland, several instructors advocate a teaching approach called “first-year experience” that emphasizes the psychological needs and interpersonal challenges of incoming students as they adjust to college life. The military training in China might be viewed as an extreme first-year experience measure, and the effect on students is apparent. They enter with a sense of cohesion that American students lack. Like the average American student who has gone away to college, Chinese college students are living away from home for the first time. But they begin classes with a new sense of family. Their peers are not classmates but something akin to brothers and sisters, a kinship forged not by blood but by the shared experience of overcoming physical and psychological adversity. They begin college knowing that they have accomplished something—together.

American colleges have a rite of passage at the end of a student’s college career—the graduation ceremony—but nothing that rises to the requirements of that phrase at the beginning. All offer some kind of orientation, but that typically consists of a crash course in college policies, with little to help students gain a sense of connection to one another. In a culture that purportedly values individualism, perhaps it is fitting that many college students arrive as individuals, alone. This was certainly the case for me when I first enrolled in college. The university held a three-day orientation that consisted of lectures about the college and help with registering for classes and a folder of policies that I never cracked. I knew my roommate and few other students from my high school, but I didn’t know why I was there and lasted only one semester. This was my transition from childhood to quasi-adulthood, and it was isolating—an isolation that in some ways has been sustained to the present. I can’t help but wonder if two weeks of military training at eighteen might have made me, for better and for worse, a different person.

This is not to say that the effects on Chinese students are entirely positive. Perhaps the price of cohesion is the loss of the individual voice. The first sets of essays in my writing classes have been painfully dull to read. I feel like I’m reading the same essay over and over again, and in a sense I am. Their rite of passage has encouraged students to move and speak in unison and perhaps think in unison as well. And the atmosphere in the classroom is strikingly formal, with patterns not far removed from military drill. When I call on students in class (and I must call on them, for no student will voluntarily answer a question), they rise from their seats and respond with downcast eyes. They will remain standing until I give them permission to sit down again. Sometimes, when I write on the chalkboard, I’m surprised to turn around and find the last student to speak still standing. As I write this, we are on a week-long break for the national holiday, and I’m filled with anxiety. Did I give the last student I called on permission to sit down? If not, will I find her still standing there when we return, disciplined past the point of absurdity?