West goes East

When medical student, Lisa Teoh, discovered her family still owned their ancestral home in China, she decided that the building should be used by the local community. It's now the base for a cultural exchange between British and Chinese medical students. Delilah Khan and Jiawei Liao explain

Beitang village

Delilah's first impressions

"What, no boys?" one Chinese student exclaimed at seeing eight girls before him; the only British guy in our team had yet to descend the escalator. I surveyed the group of Chinese boys as critically as they were scrutinising us. For some reason they had assumed that Tamara and Rachel were boys.

"But who are we going to play basketball with? The girls were looking forward to 10 blue eyed western boys to fall in love with." I sighed inwardly and wondered what I was doing here.

We were in Guangzhou, China, as part of the Bu de Tang teaching project, 2004. Back in 1999, a second year medical student named Lisa Teoh discovered that she had family in a provincial rural village called Beitang, in southern China. She also found an ancestral home (Bu de Tang), which had more than 100 rooms in it. Since then she has set out to try to use this archaic but magnificent building to help the local community.

Chinese and UK teachers

In 2000, she wrote in the studentBMJ about her ideas to transform this building into a hospital or a school.¹ But governmental restrictions meant that the building couldn't be converted into a school and now, four years on, medical students from Bristol and Leeds use it as a base. They teach English at the local school in Beitang instead. A group of Chinese medical students from Sun Yat-sen medical school stay with them at the house and act as teaching partners to help build a bridge between Western and Chinese cultures.

In 2003, the project had to be called off for the year. Guangdong province, where our project was situated, had been hit by the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). This made us more determined to run the project the next year, but access was tricky. Officials in the province insisted that we should not go to Beitang as it would be "unsuitable to our foreign tastes." In hindsight, I think that they would rather we stay at the richer Guangzhou schools and not waste our time educating the children of farmers. Fortunately thanks to careful diplomacy from our Chinese friends and lots of smiling and offal eating they came to the resolution that "foreigners were stubborn," and the project could proceed.

Bu de Tang house

To see the differences between industrial and agricultural China, we taught at both Yuying primary school in Gaungzhou, a city, staying in the Sun Yat-sen University dormitories, and then made the 13 hour journey to rural Beitang's Shenzao primary school. Along with our Chinese partners, we took a class each and ran a summer school covering topics the children wanted to learn about.

Perspectives from China: Jiawei's thoughts

The first day in both Guangzhou and Beitang were impressively diverse. In Guangzhou, the apparatus in the classroom was as advanced as that found in Sun Yat-sen University, one of the top 10 universities in China. A laser projector and multimedia equipment were available in each classroom, which was a contrast to Beitang, where we had no more than a blackboard and chalk.

The children in Beitang were quite shy and nervous. They did not seem able to express themselves, even in Mandarin. They would talk privately in their own dialect, Hakka, and stop as soon as a teacher approached. In comparison, the students in Guangzhou would speak loudly and directly. They would run around the playground wildly and not spend their breaks between classes taking notes off the blackboard like their counterparts in the country.

City kids

In the metropolis, children have more opportunity to explore the new world. They are continually being brought into contact with new and exciting ways of thinking. This gave them greater confidence: they nicknamed me Mr Gay Gary in the first lesson.

The situations in rural parts are self perpetuating; the availability of information is limited. Most of the children had never surfed the internet; thoughts and concepts were still localised. Despite this they were struggling to change the situation by studying hard.

The name of the school in Beitang, Shenzao, means "to cultivate advanced intellectuals," and the meaning of Bu de Tang is house. Near the school, the plaque for Bu de Tang has a symbolic light bulb hanging in front of it. It represents bringing the light of learning to less fortunate children.

Bu de Tang house

"Each time I looked at my class, I felt my responsibility. I know some of my students had to walk up to two hours to come to my class. It is hard to imagine how important they consider the project. They taught me a lot about life and spirit," said Zhang Mei Yan, a Chinese medical student.

It was touching to hear one of my pupils describe her future aspirations; she chose the English name Wind. Wind told me, "It is my dream that one day I could leave the countryside in order to further my education in a university in the metropolis. My parents told me that if I can make it they will be proud of me. We would no longer need to be peasants any more. I want to live in a city."

Teaching the country kids

Delilah's thoughts

Introducing western ideas into a country that is not necessarily receptive to them can be dangerous. We, the British students, were mindful that politics and capitalist ideology were not to be discussed in the classroom. We did not want to give the children unrealistic expectations, especially the ones in Beitang. Although we wanted to encourage them to get an education to raise their standard of living, we realised that it would not be possible for many of them to leave rural China. They live under a government that holds different views to ours; our way was not necessarily the Chinese way, but we could adapt and take parts of each other's culture.

Jiawei remembers

As our relationships developed, we started to make jokes about the stark differences in our cultures. The children saw us dance to Britney Spears and sing Christmas carols in July. And we compared the differences in our lives with the British medical students. We were of the same age and doing the same course but had such different life experiences. The British medical students did not seem to work so hard: they had time to go to clubs and attend parties. We never go to clubs as we think this is where bad people are. In China we spend most of the day working, starting at 8 am for lectures and often studying well into the early morning. We compete with 1400 students to get the top jobs in the big cities so we must do well. We live in dormitories of eight ­students to a room and are never alone. British students have their own rooms and sometimes their own houses - what luxury. We have so little space that we have our desktop computers on our beds, and everyone knows everyone else's habits.

Symbolic light bulb throwing light on learning

Not only did we gain from the experience, the Chinese medical students did too. Allen Li Zilun said, "At the beginning I was afraid to communicate with [the British students] in my rough English. Since this was my first chance to speak English to a native speaker. Now, I find there is no problem, since we are both young men, and we are both medical students. We have a common language. I know my English is still considered Chinese-English, but I don't care about it. We could understand each other. That's the most important thing."

Delilah Khan fourth year medical student, University of Bristol
Email: dk0424@bristol.ac.uk

Jiawei Liao third year medical student, Sun Yat-sen University, China
Email: garyliao2002@163.com

Please contact us if you would like to sponsor the rebuilding of Bu de Tang or for more information about the project.

studentBMJ 2005;13:177-220 May ISSN 0966-6494

1. Teoh L. China initiative 2000. StudentBMJ 2000;8:248.