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Memories of Chinese Educationin New England

5/10/2024

 
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Bryant University, Smithfield, Rhode Island
From 2007 through 2011, July meant an early drive to Smithfield, Rhode Island to be dropped off at Bryant University’s scenic, secluded campus. I made myself tea and breakfast in the massive and mostly-empty cafeteria, then headed off to a full day of classes. Usually, this meant Mandarin Chinese language classes in the morning and early afternoon, and various cultural lessons – from calligraphy to kung-fu to cooking – interspersed through the rest of the day.

One late afternoon, a group of preteens and teens kicked a jianzi around the central atrium, waiting for our parents to come and get us. Another day, a girl a bit older than me and about my height leaped, quick and practiced onto a teammate’s shoulders in full lion dance costume, and I found myself wondering if I could squeeze in kung fu practice between play rehearsals and anime club meetings. To this day I still hold a calligraphy brush the way the middle-aged Chinese women at the program instructed me to, laying down the careful brushstrokes that earned me much-craved compliments.
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All this was part of the yearly STARTALK program, held in conjunction with Bryant’s Confucius Institute, which provided and organized programming related to Chinese language and culture for both Bryant’s students and the larger community around the university. Unbeknownst to thirteen-year-old me, STARTALK was actually a federal grant program managed and funded by the US National Security Agency, which supported (and still supports) programming throughout the country in multiple “critical need” languages – as of writing, this includes Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Persian, and Russian.

 The program was created in 2006, as a direct consequence of 9/11 and the War on Terror. Laura Murray, PhD., then the Director of the Foreign Language Program Office at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, came up with the concept of STARTALK, hoping to address a shortage of Intelligence Community personnel proficient in specific language skills considered critical to national security. My young teen self hadn’t the faintest idea the program was founded with the intent to make me a valuable democratic asset for the remnants of the Bush presidency. I had been referred to the program by a well-meaning Spanish teacher who found my sketchbook full of manga-inspired drawings, and apparently assumed that Chinese and Japanese were close enough to the same that I might enjoy the program.

Though I certainly learned quite a bit in the traditional sense – with the help of continued classes and tutoring between summers, I had advanced from the lowest “beginner” class to the second-highest “intermediate-advanced” class by 2011 – in many ways, the lasting value of my time in the STARTALK program was the ways it caused me to recognize and internalize the ways in which I was different from those around me. I remember distinctly how much the students separated into cliques, even more so than at my day-to-day middle and high schools: the “American-born Chinese” students together and barely speaking a word to anyone else, the private school kids who already knew each other from the rest of the year, and the “weird kids” table which increasingly became myself and my friends in the program (many there on recommendation from my mother or me). Many classmates seemed confused or even unsettled by my passion for video games and drawing.
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The confusion and disappointment I felt was when, year after year, I couldn’t go on the two-week end-of-summer trip to China with my classmates, not understanding the cost was far beyond what my family could ever afford, not knowing that my mother was constantly being led on by program staff promising scholarships for me that never manifested. Even back then, without the perspective or new knowledge I have now, I remember feeling hurt at the conflict between program staff lifting me up as a model student without acknowledging my family’s need for financial aid nor my hurt at being isolated among my supposed peers.


I stopped attending the summer program in 2012 when I was admitted into a sleepaway pre-college program that would have conflicted with the dates, and with college applications fast approaching, deemed that more important. The next I heard of it was in 2021, when my mother forwarded an article stating Bryant’s Confucius Institute would no longer seek funding, with the university president claiming they were “evaluating changes in the US-China relationship”; this move followed the University of Rhode Island closing its own Confucius Institute in 2018. The STARTALK program at Bryant appears to have been a victim of this closure, as searching the STARTALK’s list of programs not only does not list Bryant University, it lists no STARTALK language programs of any sort in the entirety of Rhode Island.
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Coming to terms with the end of the program is bittersweet for me. While many of my memories are not happy ones, I still had the valuable opportunity to learn more about a new language and culture in a manner far more in-depth and immersive than what I could access in my standard schooling. On that level, my memories are fond, and I mourn for the many young people still living in Rhode Island who now lack similar opportunities in a state that is, as of the most recent census, nearly 70% White.

In the wake of the US-China tensions that appear to have shuttered the program, I believe it’s more important than ever to provide opportunities to learn positively about different places and cultures. The biggest outcomes would most likely be an awareness and appreciation for different kinds of education and of people. Being in a diverse collegiate setting so young prepared me well for my current life of study and travel.

Submitted by S. Mackenzie “Max” Eastman
MOTAL Doll Scholar
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