Teacher builds trust through language

Shared Future and Shared Lessons

In March, Heath led a group of 32 students on a two-week trip through Beijing, Zhengzhou and Kaifeng in Henan province, and Xi'an in Shaanxi province. The journey was made possible through the Young Envoys Scholarship (YES) program, launched in 2023 with a goal of bringing 50,000 young Americans to China for exchange and study over five years.

For Kennady Pack, who began learning Chinese at age six, the trip turned years of classroom study into something tangible.

"They (Chinese people) were so surprised — they'd freak out over the fact that I could speak their language, and they'd want to take videos and pictures of me, so it's really awesome," Pack said.

The itinerary included shopping and walking the streets of Beijing, climbing sections of the Great Wall, mingling with Chinese students on campus, and standing before the ranks of the Terracotta Warriors in Xi'an. But for Pack, the trip's real power was seeing, in person, what she had only studied in textbooks.

"It was super cool, especially because I've been learning since I was little, so being able to see it with my own eyes was surreal, and it's just so much cooler in person. You can't read about that kind of stuff and fully experience it," she said. "I thought it was so cool over there, and it was so technologically advanced, like they have such cool things, especially at their schools."

Her classmate Damian Lambert said the language skills he had built in Heath's classroom transformed the trip from sightseeing into genuine connection.

"I was able to have conversations with them, and I was able to interact and learn, and it was just really fun being able to experience that part of it compared to just going and seeing stuff and not knowing what's going on," Lambert said. "It's just been a lot more fun getting to learn more about the history and even more culture that's got China to where it is today."

Heath's philosophy is that real fluency comes only through meaningful conversation, not memorization.

"If you only memorize words, you will always stay at the novice level. If you memorize sentences, then you'll be maybe at the intermediate level," he said. "We want all of our students to be at advanced level, where they can talk in paragraphs. The paragraphs are the vehicle where you can exchange ideas with another Chinese person."

That philosophy was tested directly in March, when the group visited Beijing Bayi School and saw firsthand how different a Chinese student's daily life can look.

"They were able to see that life for a Chinese student was very demanding, a much longer schedule, but it was interesting and fun, and so they were surprised by that," Heath said. "There's a big change whenever you learn another language, another culture. Both sides have fun and are benefited."

Pack agreed the experience reshaped her expectations. "Honestly, it was a little different than I expected, just because the day-to-day life is just so different from our lives," she said, "but I thought it was so cool over there."

Over the past year alone, roughly 60 of Heath's students have traveled to China through the YES program. That firsthand experience, he said, has changed how his students see the country.

"My students have really benefited from this program to really, for the first time, understand how China is much more advanced or much more free than they thought, because of Western media," Heath said. "They started to really appreciate more about Chinese culture, language, but most importantly, how open and friendly the Chinese people are."

This year, Heath's course has centered on Chinese history. Next year, the focus will shift to contemporary China.

"I think it's very important to understand history," he said. "Chinese history is very important because it has thousands of years, and if you are dealing at all with Chinese in business or in conversations, if you have an understanding of Chinese history, the Chinese people will look at you differently and respect you more because you understand something about their culture and their history."

Of all the history Heath teaches, one chapter looms largest in his mind: what is known in China as the "century of humiliation", the period from the First Opium War in 1840 to the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, during which foreign powers repeatedly invaded and exploited a weakened China.

"I think the most important misunderstanding between Americans and Westerners at large with China is the most recent history, which is the century of humiliation," Heath said.

He walks his students through how the unequal treaties of that era stripped China of territorial control, ceding cities such as Hong Kong, Shanghai and Tianjin to foreign powers.

To make the scale of that loss visible to his students, he poses a hypothetical.

"What if China was much more powerful than us, and they came over and decided, well, we want half of San Francisco, we want part of Los Angeles, we want New York, and you have to give it to us, because we want to sell drugs to you and make money from you?" Heath tells his students.

Their reaction, he said, is: "No, really?"

His research turned up an uncomfortable detail closer to home that many Bostonians who made fortune of selling opium to China.

"The Americans are not without fault. They probably weren't as bad as some other countries, but the Americans are also at fault of taking advantage of the Chinese," he said.

Heath has come to see this gap in historical knowledge as one of the central obstacles to US-China understanding. While Chinese students grow up learning about the burning of the Old Summer Palace and the foreign incursions that followed, most of their American counterparts know little about this chapter.

That gap in knowledge, in his view, causes mistrust. "If they (Americans) only listen to Western media, they would say the Chinese are terrible, they're doing this just to take advantage of us. They're doing this because they don't like us. No, that's not the reason," Heath said. "They (Chinese) are doing it because they need to protect themselves from being taken advantage of again."

On the March trip, Heath shared the century of humiliation with the 13 parents who accompanied the students. "They had never heard the concept," he said. "It's meaningful to see parents change their mindset on what China is all about."

For Heath, his effort pays off in the way Chinese people react. "Whenever I've had a discussion about this in China, the Chinese people look at me differently, and I think that they know that I am sincere in my willingness and wanting to be a friend and to teach my students good principles," he said.

He believes that kind of trust is essential to good diplomacy and good foreign relations. "I think that it's very important for me to help Americans understand. If they understood history better, then they would not repeat it or create more misunderstanding."

liazhu@chinadailyusa.com