Customer Reviews

CHINA TEACHER: AN INTIMATE JOURNAL (New Voices Series)

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American professor and poet J. R. LeMaster has written a powerful treatise of his impressions of his year-long visit to China as a guest professor. His fortuitous visit occurred in the 1980-81 academic year just as China was beginning to open its doors to foreign visitors, allowing him first hand to witness young people just beginning to awaken to new possibilities. The easy-to-read journal format allows the author to include actual detailed descriptions of daily life in China as well as many poignant classroom vignettes. The reader feels his frustrations, his empathy with his students, his appreciation of the Asian culture even though bewildering at times, and his personal battle with cold and sparse living conditions. Through the teaching of American literature, he guides his students, not to memorize in the ancient tradition of Chinese schooling, but to think and integrate ideas of philosophy, psychology, theology, and world history, emphasizing the general inner connectedness of all people of the world. His students, unaccustomed to self expression, gradually begin to respond to his personal warmth, compassion, and gentility. His love of teaching and his students is quite evident as he attempts to break through the centuries of learned stoicism. The author, while presenting in prose, reveals his poetic gifts in the beauty and vividness of detail. Several characters, many reappearing throughout the journal, are so compellingly presented that the reader is left to wonder what may have become of them in the ensuing years. While the book will have appeal to a wide array of readers, I personally recommend this book to all teachers and future teachers who view their profession as a higher calling to reach the highest potential of each student, no matter what culture. Reviewed by Ann Williamson Karaffa, Ph.D.

"China Teacher - An Intimate Journal" took me back to an era that's both remote and real. Life in Beijing in1980 as described by J.R.LeMaster shows like yellowed pictures in an antique photo album, but the accurate account of daily routines, news, and names of people I actually have met assert that this life was once reality.

The journal urged me to re-live that life and at the same time observe it through multiple perspectives concurrently: an American educator trying to navigate a foreign land with no frame of reference, wide-eyed young men and women who had been frequently reminded growing up that an individual was only a screw on the Party machine, a graduate student in Baylor living on her $600 per month pay working as a research assistant for Dr. LeMaster in the late 80s, and a high-tech professional who left China 20 years ago and who calls US home. I remember thinking our American teachers over-reacted to "trivial" things and now I understand that what was the "norm" then in China was shocking, and rightfully so, to a westerner. I remember the thrill I felt when I read Byron and Keats the first time and now I lament that my literature books are unpacked in a cardboard box in the garage. I remember seeing Dr. LeMaster as a teacher and a "boss" and now I feel that I know him as a person.

One of the most touching details in the book for me is when the author and his fellow western teachers realized that first time in their life that they were "minority" and felt isolated and helpless. It takes the same blind faith for an American to go to China 25 years ago as for a Chinese young man or young woman to come to US. It's a point of no return whether you physically returned to your homeland or not. I can understand that the LeMasters kept going back to China after the initial visit because China is the place that they can remake themselves and reconnect to humanity. I recommend this book to everyone who has or will put his/her feet on the part of planet called China. This book will help you experience China as an intimate journey in life.