Last Friday I went to the Yew Chung International School of Beijing with Amy, my daughter-in-law.

Seventy five years ago an optimistic young woman, Madame Tsang Chor-hang, barely graduated from a teacher’s school, emerged from a calamitous time in China and founded Yew Chung in 1932. It grew into the Yew Chung International School in Hong Kong and then expanded to Shanghai in 1993 and later to Beijing in 1995. Now, Yew Chung International School Silicon Valley in Mountain View California emphasizes E-Learning which means that there are now no longer any geographical constraints to learning.

The director says that “Yew Chung has pioneered an exciting new paradigm in international education that leads students to an inner transformation whereby they become both Eastern and Western. There are now massive opportunities for improving the human condition but we need to develop new concepts, new instincts and new politics of decision-making whereby we are first a global citizen, second a national citizen, and third a local citizen.”

The web site goes on to say that global education emphasizes global awareness. Teachers and administrators, who are informed and committed, empower students to realize they can make a difference…to go out into the world with a “common purpose and a deep commitment to resolving global issues confronting the planet.”

Wow…!

Students have to have a foreign passport. The school offers the International General Certificate of Secondary Education affiliated with Cambridge to students in years 10 and 11. It offers the International Baccalaureate to students in years 12 and 13.

Amy teaches modern history to 9th, 10th and 11th level students…mostly children of business people, embassy workers and workers in other organizations. The students come from all over the world…her 11th year history class that I sat in on had an Indian, Singaporean, Korean, an Italian-Chinese, a Malay, an American Chinese, a Caucasian American, a French and a Thai.

I was truly amazed. Both by the students and by Amy. Amy is an excellent teacher…giving energetic narrative to complicated historical events…and the motivations behind them. The students were even more amazing. So well-trained…so eager and ready to learn. All classes are small and taught in English…not the first language for most of these students. Mandarin is a mandatory subject and all students become bilingual in Mandarin/English.

The staff is truly global. Examples: Dr. Sandy Pike is the secondary coordinator and biology teacher. Her father was a British Medical Officer who lived in Hong Kong, England and New Zealand. She got her degree in biology in Hong Kong, then did 18 months of missionary work and teaching English in the bush in Zimbabwe. She left the mission a few days before it was overun by rebels when all her friends, teachers and students were murdered. She stayed in South Africa for awhile after she met her husband (the physics teacher) and they have taught all over the world…Africa, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and now Beijing. One science teacher is a white South African who has been on staff for 4 years. One teacher is a Black from Ireland (not black Irish), another is a Chinese-Canadian, several other Canadians, a few Caucasian Americans, some from Australia and New Zealand, Koreans…the list goes on.

A dream job in a dream school.

In the airport, while waiting for my luggage to show up, I scanned the crowd of people in the waiting area and had no trouble spotting Josh…three heads above all others. Eye candy for me! This is the first time I have seen him since we left our sublet in Brooklyn in January 2006!

So now I am ensconsed in Josh’s high-rise two bedroom apartment in “Lido” which is a relatively new neighborhood off the 4th ring road (there are 6 ring roads) in the neighborhood of the Lido (Holiday Inn) Hotel on the east side…not far from the airport. Beijing has 15.4 million of China’s 1.3 billion people! But traffic is relatively minimal here and not much honking…and as in most of China (and most of the rest of the world for that matter) there are no lanes and we get a real kick out of watching the intersection below from our 11th floor windows. Turning from no-lanes into absolutely the wrong “lanes”, they are so hesitant…so careful not to bung up their new new cars. (Josh says that 6,000 new cars appear on the roads in Beijing every day!) Every few minutes all cars stop…tied up in the middle of the intersection…until someone moves and it begins to unravel. No road rage. No one is upset that someone has turned in front of them. There could be a lesson here for the U.S. where everyone expects the rules to be followed and noses get bent out of shape if not.

This part of the city where many expats live is a striking contrast to the hutong near Tianamen Square in the center of the city where I stayed last time I was here in 2004. I found french pastry and great coffee in the Parisian Baguette up the street and the citibank ATM was very generous with me.

Waiting for Amy to get home from teaching in her school, Josh and I discuss Chinese commodities. I had lugged a duffel full of bath sheets and body cream to Beijing. The towels cost almost a $100 each here. I bought six at a Macy’s sale in Portland for $89. Travelers expect luxuries to be ridiculously cheap here. But, Josh says, goods made in China are shipped directly to foreign markets. The locals don’t get them…unless they are traded back into China which results in a very high price…like the towels. Nuts.

Josh took me to a great Korean restaurant my first night here while Amy finished preparing for her last day of school before the Chinese New Year holiday break. Then he turned on the little green and white froggy whose ears blow steam next to my bed. We are living on the edge of a desert, Josh says, so we keep the humidifiers on.