16/8/99

Standing tall in China

    You're lost, helpless, alone, somewhere in the middle of China, you have no money and no one speaks your language. People have nightmares about such a thing, but Bryna Franklin is not the type to freak out.     For one thing, Bryna is never helpless, and this is the
planet where she was born, so wherever she is, she is never lost.
    One day she's hanging out by the dunes in Ashdod, and the next, she's searching for her luggage in Chongqing airport. No-o-o-o-o problem.
    If there is one word for this 67-year-old American-Israeli, it's unflappable.
    "Some friends had been teacher's assistants in China for six months, and they came back with some wonderful stories. I thought, I could do that." All she knew about China was what she once read in Pearl Buck's “The Good Earth.” And she had never been a teacher.
    "I wanted to use my ability to achieve something, to learn, to grow, to develop. It seems so logical to me! Afraid? Never! Fear is so limiting. Like, people said to me, what happens if you get sick? I hadn't thought about getting sick. If I don't get sick here, why should I get sick there?
    "I was 62 at the time, and 62 is a funny age to be. You ask yourself, what do you want to be, one of these people sitting on a park bench? Shopping didn't interest me, cards I don't do, a television I don't have, a computer I don't use."
    So an English teacher in China she became.
    "It was 1994, and China was the really hot place to go. I get there, I land in Beijing, and everyone is -- Chinese. I was basically the only Caucasian. I lost a suitcase, I had to find a flight to Chongqing, and buy a ticket, and all I had was travelers checks and dollars. And all the signs are in Chinese."
    Welcome to China, Bryna.
    "I had to figure out how to change money. How? You just do it! I went all over the airport and finally saw someone handing out money: I realized that's the place. It's not complicated."
    There was more of the same in Chongqing. "There was supposed to be someone from the university waiting for me. There wasn't."
    At this point, lots of people would burst into tears of frustration and uncertainty, but "I don't even understand that kind of fear. The worst mistake is not trying."
    She got the job at Szechuan International Studies University because her predecessor proved a little too faint-hearted. "There was a teacher from Australia. He stayed one night and flew out the next day."
    In China, as in Israel, English is taught from the fourth grade. "But the teachers are not native English-speakers, they're Chinese. Students learn by rote, by filling in blanks in books. They don't have the opportunity to speak, and the teachers will only correct pronunciation and grammar."
    It's the blind leading the blind: Chinese teaching English pronunciation to Chinese. But thanks to Bryna, there are all these Chinese speaking English properly -- with a St. Louis, Missouri, accent.
    "By the end of my semester, my students spoke better than their Chinese English teachers. They could make jokes in English, they started dreaming in English."
    More than merely teaching language, Bryna instilled four principles in her students: confidence, self-discipline, responsibility for learning, and most important, respect for tradition: "They must not become so Western that they lose the beauty of their own culture and tradition. And that's what's happening in Israel right now."
    China is undergoing a sort of post-Cultural-Revolution revolution. For a decade beginning in the mid '60s, English, and all things Western, were anathema. Then the country swerved, and exposed itself to the outside. "It's a major, major transition, especially the women: they became bilingual, while their mothers are illiterate."
    Their hunger for education is evident even here. "There are 400 Chinese students in Israeli universities," she notes.
    Bryna has lived here for six years, but for most of four years she has worked in China. She speaks neither Chinese nor Hebrew. Frankly, she could speak no English either and still get along swimmingly.
    Such as when she befriended an old woman in the city of Yuxi. "She was as small as I am considered tall, very Chinese, with the Mao uniform. She'd never seen a foreigner. And every day we walked through the city, arm in arm, never saying a word to each other. We didn't need words."
    She was perfectly confident getting around on her own, thanks to pure common sense. "If you get on a subway, you can't get lost because it will always return to where you started out. You go to a restaurant, and you look at the food, and you point." She cannot comprehend why anyone would be daunted. 
    It sounds like the classic tale of an Israeli in hutz la'aretz (abroad): she's barely in China long enough to unpack, and she meets someone in the street who knows her.
    "I got on a subway and a young man says, 'I know who you are, you came to Beijing yesterday.' He worked at the airport." A billion people in the country, and Bryna meets the same fellow twice.
    Another quintessentially Israeli experience -- with a twist -- was meeting a landsman. "I was doing volunteer work at an orphanage in Qianjin, and I met a woman who said, 'oh, I'm an Israeli too. I was born on the Golan Heights.' So I said to her, 'did you know there's a congregation in Beijing?' And she said, 'by the way, what religion is it?' And I said, 'Jewish, of course.' Turns out she was from the Golan before it was part of Israel." A Syrian. They became fast friends.
    Bryna encountered only respect and admiration for Israel. "People would put a finger to their heads to say 'smart, smart.' During the time when China was the pariah of the world, during the Cultural Revolution and before, Israel was there, training their pilots. It never hit the newspapers. But in Beijing, everyone knew Israelis were there. They have a very long memory.
    "I was there as an Israeli, I would give lectures comparing Israel and China." For example, collectivism. "It's like Israel 50 years ago. Students were asked what they want to do when they graduate, and 90 percent said 'I want to serve my Motherland.' This would have been Israel at the founding of the state: I want to serve my homeland."
    Bryna floats with the tide. At present she's back in Ashdod, only because she's not somewhere else. After her 10-month stint in Chongqing, she found herself teaching in Guangzhou (Canton). Then she was an office manager. Back to Ashdod. On to Tianjin. "I was urged to stay and become Chinese," says the tall, pink-skinned, grey-eyed Bryna. She cannot imagine where or what she will be next.
    "The Chinese are into being; the Westerners are into doing," she says. Bryna is into both.