I want to be a professor. People pursue this profession for different reasons: academic prestige, intellectual curiosity, or simply the ceaseless challenges. Not me. Don’t align me with them. About my own reason I am always hesitant to voice, for I don’t want to sound like a prig, or even worse, a hypocrite. But I do need to voice it, at least here anonymously. I want to be a professor because I want to teach. Physics, in particular, which is the subject I’ve studied for over a decade. Through the carefree undergraduate and the painful PhD, I had developed the habit of questioning everything, including myself, and in this case, the possible sinister motive behind this seemingly benevolent desire to teach. But after a considerable amount of inner struggles and moral diggings, I came to the conclusion that there is nothing more to be learned, than the fact that I simply want to teach. Perhaps education is just that.
For this reason, after my PhD in the US I immediately set off applying for a university faculty position. I fancied I would interact with my students daily, and bathe myself in their young curiosity and poignant vice, and reciprocate with my sound yet useless platitude. I sent out a job inquiry to a university in the industrial city of Wuhan, my hometown in China, and one day later, received their positive response.
Dear Dr. L,
Thank you for your interest. We hereby invite you to our end-of-the-year conference for overseas scholars. All your traveling expenses will be covered.
Best,
Dr. F,
Dean, The School of Physics, Wuhan University
There I went, and after three days, walked away with the hostile reassurance that my research was useless if not backed by top journals. That students were merely tools, stationed like chess pieces in the lab, the auditorium, and outside the buffets where the professors enjoyed themselves. And that in the land where I spoke my mother tongue, I could feel more disconnected than ever. Coming back home, I let out all these frustrations to my mother and yelled till I was hoarse. The poor woman, having injured her ankle earlier, lay on the sofa helplessly, bearing my complaints. Only afterwards did I remember to give her the scarf I bought for her—with the university’s p-card.
I will start my story, not from the smooth-talking conference receptionist and his pandering smile, nor from the redwood-pillared auditorium where bald men in grey suits gave dry speeches in turn, we participants listening and drifting to sleep. No, I won’t start my story from these, for I was sick of them and had sneaked out of the conference. I had walked towards the center of the campus, passing a winding stream where a pavilion stood on look, and feeling pebbles pressing against my soles. I walked till I was surrounded by the din of the students. An electric scooter wooshed past me, bearing a guy and a girl in tattered jeans. The girl held tightly to the guy’s waist. Her head bent low, her ponytail flying.
The sun was bright, so I went into a sports field and did some pull-ups and dips. A group of firemen was also there, their gears and boots bundled up in reflective jackets by the bar. One of them was doing single-arm pull-ups, another counted for him. “Impressive,” I said in Chinese as I approached. The one doing the pull up looked embarrassed and dropped to the ground. The one counting, probably the squad leader, gave me a sideway glance. I picked up this social cue and retreated to another corner of the field. From afar, I saw the firemen now put on their full gear and race barefoot against each other, the squat leader standing with his arms akimbo at the finish line. After the race, the squad bantered with him, and his laugh came out quick and true. The scene was harmonious from a distance; it’s just somehow I didn’t seem to fit in there.
The next day I woke up early. My stomach twitched, and I went to the toilet repeatedly. Today I was supposed to present my research to the department, so I went through my PowerPoint one more time and went out for a walk. The sun had not yet risen. I walked among the silhouette of pines, recited my script, timed it, and each time nailed it. I then went back to my hotel room, took a shower and felt better. In front of the hotel stood a volunteer. He was young and extremely embarrassed when I talked to him. I asked him if he had eaten, he blushed and said no, so I sneaked out from my buffet a hard-boiled egg and a bottle of yogurt, put them in a plastic bag together with a napkin, and gave them to him. I cried afterwards in my bathroom, partly from nerves about the presentation, partly from the fear that, in my attempt to bridge the inequality, I had accidentally impressed it more strongly in the boy’s mind.
I was taken by a bus through the expansive campus to a modern complex that is the school of physics, and led by a pretty female volunteer to the schools’ auditorium. I gasped as I stepped into the auditorium—it was full of students. Spotlights lit the red-carpeted steps, upon which I and other invitees descended like actors and actresses. I half-expected flowers to be tossed at our feet.
In the front row sat again the men in grey suits, their pink name cards folded crisply on their desk. Our name cards were behind them. I sat and looked back to the swarm of students and felt an urge to pee.
The Dean opened the event. “Welcome ladies and gentlemen to our 30th Annual Global Forum. Today we are honored to have several reverend officials with us.” The grey suits stood up and bowed, their bald heads gleaming in the spotlight. “And also, visiting scholars from abroad.” We stood and bowed too.
I whispered to my neighbor. “I thought it’d be just a regular classroom. Didn’t expect a full auditorium… and so many students. I can’t believe so many are interested!”
He leaned back into his chair and eyed me. “A bit nervous for the newbie, uh?”
I frowned at this expression. “Yes, a little. I just don’t want to let the students down.” I took out my laptop and went through my slides again, wondering if I can add a few jokes to connect with the younger generation.
He chuckled. “You’ll get used to it.”
Finally, the Dean finished his platitude. The officials walked up on stage. Cameras clicked on bland faces. Then they were led out. The students poured out after. We followed.
The door of the building’s main entrance had been swung open. Outside, the officials were getting into chauffeured cars. Cold wind swept through the hall. Posters flapped. Students thonged like bees around a table bearing bread crumbs and fruit peels.
I stood examining one poster about the use of telescopes in detecting gamma-rays in star collisions, when I overheard one student complaining to another. “How early we needed to get up for this bullshit. My god! I can’t wait to get back and catch up on some sleep. ”
I turned around, looking for the source of the dissent, but my search was interrupted by a clicking of heels. A pretty lady had walked over to me. “Dr. L, it’s chilly here,” she said, “Come with me, we have a space prepared. It’s more relaxing than this hall.” She turned out to be the departmental secretary, and her clicking heels and black stockings led me and other invited scholars to a private lounge. It was indeed warm and there were long tables lined with cakes on ceramic plates. We sat on sofas and talked over cakes and tea.
My nervous bladder had prompted me to the toilet again. When I came back, the lounge was empty. I rushed to the auditorium but was stopped at the door by two men.
“No, it’s over. No need to check in again.”
“What? The conference is over?” I asked.
“He’s not a student, you fool. He’s a speaker.” One whispered to the other. Confusingly, I was led in, and before I could sit down, I heard my name announced.
“Let’s welcome Dr. L from the United States to start off our presentations!”
I hurried to the stage and spoke into the microphone. “Thank you, Dean, for the invitation and thank you all for coming.” I looked ahead, trying to make out students’ faces, but met only the blinding stage light. “Really, thank you all for coming. For I know it is early in the morning, and to be honest,” I paused, thinking about the complaints I overheard outside, “If I were you, I’d rather be sleeping in my bed than sitting on this uncomfortable chair sleeping through these long lectures.” A few laughed. The Dean didn’t laugh.
“Perhaps my research would wake you up, or maybe entrance you into a sweeter dream.” I clicked on my PPT. The slides slid in. “For as a physicist, I care about dreams and imaginations, and it’s my job to imagine the universe and its constant expansion into the eons of darkness. Hadn’t you thought about it as a kid? I had. ‘What is out there?’ I had asked my physics teacher in high school. ‘What is out there in the darkness, where nothing but an inkling of sparks live?’ My physics teacher, a stooped old man who taught high school physics for thirty years, and had sent hundreds of students to the best universities in China, smashed the top of my head with his exercise sheets and told me, in half jest and half seriousness, to focus on the questions in my GaoKao exam.”
I paused and drank some water, the auditorium was quiet. “So I was glad I had made it to college, just like many of you are right now, with a fresh mind, and a thirst for knowledge. I have chosen cosmology, because there I found, my imagination could run free, like a kid in a vast playground of the universe, whose space is forever expanding and accelerating. This expansion of the universe is what I have studied for the past six years and I want to show you today what I learned from it.”
With this introduction, I was confident I got the students hooked, so I pressed onwards, pausing occasionally to explain the technical terms, leading the students through my rehearsed acts and climax like in a play. Therefore, it came as a surprise to me after I stepped down the stage and found the back of the auditorium was nearly empty.
“What happened to the students, did they not like my presentation?” I asked my neighbor.
“What do you mean?”
“They all left!”
“Why, they were never present. They left right after the first session, right on the heels of those senior chaps.”
“What? So none of them came back to our talks?” I remembered the complaints I overheard, and the mix-up at the door when two guards mistook me for a student and told me I didn’t need to come back, that “it” was over. Whatever “it” is, it ended when the officials left the auditorium. So that was the main show, a full stadium for the officials, and we—the researchers and the students—are the unconscious actors and actresses in the playwright’s script. I told my suspicion to my neighbor; he did not seem very surprised, and just shrugged in response.
After my presentation, I was sent to a gaunt man to discuss my job application. He was wiry, dark skinned, and wore thick glasses, a perfect image of a scholar forged by the Chinese system. Fifty years ago, such a man toiled on a farm; now he sat in an office. He explained to me how this would work. I needed to first apply for a competitive grant from the government. Only when I got the grant would they offer me a tenured position. Otherwise, the position would be untenured and I had to keep publishing papers to keep it. I remembered a story where a young Chinese assistant professor stabbed and killed his superior, because his publication had faltered and he was warned of losing his job. I shuddered at the thought.
He read my CV, frowning.
“I wanted to study the thermal expansion of the universe.” I quickly explained.
“No. Let me be blunt—I don’t care what you do.” He shunned my CV down on the table. “If I were the reviewer, I’d have a hundred files like this on my desk, each claiming they’re the next Einstein. You think I read them? No. I just do the numbers.”
He held up a hand to stop my objection, and said, “No nonsense, please. That’s the game. You got to play it. You’ve got one PRL?”, he raised one finger, “When I applied for this, I had three Science. And mind you, that was five years ago. It’s bloodier now.”
“It’s not easy for me to publish that much as a theorist,” I said.
“Not easy? I have seen theorists with five PRL and they were still tossed into the trash. Nobody does theory now. You want a shot? Pivot to industry. Follow the money. Take W—Top school, poor on papers, still got in. Why? This champ graduated from MIT. Stamp alone sells. Yours says Yale. Use it.”
I thought about my Yale diploma, which is still lying in its USPS postal package. I had refused to pick it up from the rigid graduation ceremony where everyone must wear a suit. The university mailed it to me anyway. I brought the package unopened back to China.
“I don’t see where I graduated affects my research.” I said coldly.
“You still don’t get it, do you? You’re not a scientist anymore. You are—and will be—a salesman. And the product you want to sell is you. You use everything you’ve got to pitch it. Diploma, name, shoes if they shine bright enough!”
“With all due respect Sir, I prefer to let my research speak for myself.”
“They don’t have time to read your damn research! And I’m skipping my lunch talking to you because—I don’t know—maybe I see someone foolish as myself when I started this job. Listen to me. This grant? It’s your only insurance. Get it, or else you are disposable to the university.”
His honesty both embarrassed and defeated me. “Maybe you are right, Sir. Say I apply for this grant, what should I write? What did you write?”
“I wrote about computational modelling, basically building a rip-off COMSOL solver.”
“Why, but that’s software developing. That’s not doing research!”
“That’s how you get money,” he sighed. ”The US has shut its door. COMSOL is banned by their export control. So the CCP throws money at anything made in-house, even knock-offs.”
“Sir, I am not against it, it’s important. But tell me, if I don’t do research, I wouldn’t publish. How can I be made a full professor after the tenure track if I have no publications?”
He looked at me curiously. “Of course you do both. One for the country—software. That gets you the money. One for the department—papers. That gets you the title. You just need more students. Mind you, unlike US, the students are cheap here. Three hundred yuan a month. You can burn through ten.”
I thought about the lavish buffet I had this morning, which is 99 Yuan, paid by the university for each guest. If I did the math correctly, it is one third of the stipend of the boy standing outside the hotel since dawn, the same boy who had told me that he came from a rural countryside near the city, who worried about today’s economy and worried that he won’t be able to find a job after his PhD. He had hoped to get a job in Huawei and send half of his monthly salary back to his parents at home, and if he had enough savings, he could bring them here to the city to live with him.
Swirling with the image of the boy in my head, I got up, pushed my chair back, and intended to leave. But my departure was cut short. Someone tapped on my shoulders, I turned around and met the eager eyes of the secretary. She took me, with her slender hands, forcefully to her office. It turned out that she needed some pictures for the press release. She only had pictures of the government officials and forgot to take photos of us researchers, so she would like me as a model for several staged lab visits.
It was funny she mentioned lab visits, because although I had repeatedly requested that to the Dean I was not shown one, and the only professor I talked to told me he was not interested in my research, and told me students are cheap here. So there I was, with my only chance of visiting the lab, granted by a secretary who wanted fake photos.
She took me around the floor and picked one that had the most bustling inside. Once we went in, her smile vanished and she ordered the students to leave their desks and stood around the optical tables, “pretend you are doing something, quick.” She said, “You, the tallest, come and join Dr. L here in a conversation, talk anything.”
My face was hot and I couldn’t look the student in the eyes. I tried to play along, and asked the student what he was doing before our intrusion, how he liked his group, what his hobbies were, were the stipend enough. The student was honest and I started to like him. I asked him what the optical fibers on his table were for, and we bent over the table examining the maze of lenses he had built since his first year. But we didn’t enjoy our discussion for long, for the secretary’s camera had stopped clicking. She cut the student off and dragged me away.
The conference was closed off with a dinner banquet. In a private dining room, I sat with eleven other attendees and the leaders of the department around a big round table. This was where everyone was supposed to know each other in the personal, brotherly way. In China, this is done through the aid of beers and distilled spirits, which I was very familiar with. When I was a kid, my dad, who was just promoted from a civil engineer to a manager, had to drink with the government officials and labor brokers to sign deals. He came home swaggering and drunk, and beat my mom. I remember my mother crying, and I was hiding in my room. This was why I was so determined to do physics in college. I wanted to work with inanimate objects, and I wanted nothing to do with people. Despite that, there I was, in the banquet, as if life had played a joke on me. I was not moving forward, but went in circles and back to my drinking dad, only now I was my dad.
But I am going ahead of myself. The dinner had not yet started because the Institute head had not yet come. The girl next to me shifted on her chair listlessly, and after texting on her cellphone for a while, started to badger me with questions I didn’t like. That was after I made the mistake of telling her I was working with a famous Stanford professor.
“You are working with him, no kidding! I adored him,” she said. “He just published another paper on Nature Photonics, don’t you know?”
“Yes, I was on that paper.” I said.
She was amazed, “How did you get your name on it? I wish I could work with him. Oh no, I was asking too much, wasn’t I? I would be satisfied just with seeing him once in a conference, just once!”
“To be honest, I don’t know if that paper is that good. It’s mostly rehashing old stuff.” I tried to explain to her the delicate assumptions hidden in the bulk of his text, but stopped midway, because I noticed the girl’s attention had been dragged back to her cellphone.
A waitress came and, and with her shrouded hand, turned our swirling table gracefully, and served among a dozen laden plates, the main course of the night—a whole roast suckling pig. The Dean, with his ruddy face and fat arm, nodded to the waitress contently and took a sip from his glass of red wine. He then asked us to go around and introduced ourselves and our studies.
Halfway during our introduction, the institute Head barged in. He sat down at the center seat we saved for him. “You had no idea how refreshing it is to hear all you talking about research,” he said.
Unlike the Dean, he was lean, his back straight, and thick black hair on his head shooting out like arrows. He gulped down a cup of tea, and proceeded to talk with great efficiency in a rural accent. “Only a quick stay here I am afraid, before I jump back to the other table. Important people there. They bore me though. University ranking, departmental KPI, governmental funding. Have you heard? Our last funding, from the military, millions of Yuan, but boy the confidentiality. The poor dude had to work in a basement for months with no windows, literally a cell. He must miss his mom. Ha! I’m boring you all here too. Forget what I said, let’s eat.”
The institute head was the only person I admired in this room. I had talked with him previously on the phone. He was the one that recommended me to the department. His wife had also called me.
“I know you want to invest yourself in Chinese education,” she had said. “I wanted to talk to you personally because I know how you feel. You may not believe this, but J (her husband, the head) was exactly like you when he was deciding to come back to China from the US. That’s fifteen years ago. He had done very good research. He could have got a job anywhere, but no, he insisted on going back to China. We had two kids then, and I, as a mother, wanted the best of my kids, so I fighted with him, but he’s too stubborn. J wanted to put himself in building a Chinese university, just like you. And he did. And you could as well. Both J and I really like you.”
Unfortunately J, the head, had left our room early to rejoin the other table. Soon after, the Dean stood up, so did the secretary and the other departmental leaders. They left their seats and went around the table in circles, toasting each invitee in turn.
I must have looked very surprised, for the girl next to me said, “Don’t you know? That’s the drinking culture here. They closed the banquet by rounds of toasting like this. Of course you don’t know. You come from the US, don’t you? You have stayed too long outside to keep in touch. Many outlanders were shocked the first time as well.”
The secretary reached me first. She had let her hair down, and smiled at me drunkenly. The red wine had flushed her face. And she asked how I liked the event and whether I wanted to exchange personal contacts. The dean, with an equally flushed but chubby and less appealing face, caught up. He started to talk about Marxism, and socialism, and only half way through the conversation I learned that he was actually a society major and knew nothing about physics. The two stood before me, and started to discuss among themselves the recent party policies. I toasted their wines with my bottle of water, and excused myself out of the room. On my way to the door, I squeezed through an oblivious crowd of attendees, the alcohol on their breath nauseated me. I pushed one to the side. He squealed like a pig, slipped onto the floor, then laughed foolishly to himself. I looked around the room, the glasses were clicking, men were having their arms on each others’ shoulders. One bent over the table, trying to chop a leg off a roasted duck. His knife kept slipping and his tie was off. The image of the young boy came to me, standing outside the hotel, his hair disheveled in the winter wind, his neck unscarfed, and he took awkwardly the eggs and the bottle of yogurt from my hand. I sat down weakly at a chair near the door, feeling myself back in the bar in the US, where everyone else was drunk and dancing to the music, their hips swinging, hands held high, waving, while I sat uncomfortably in the dark corner, and drank water and heard nothing but the loud music and felt my body as cold as a corpse.
On the last morning, I packed my bag and was ready to leave, but faced the dilemma of what to do with the p-card the university had given to me. There was 500 Yuan in it, almost twice the graduate student’s salary, which I could spend on the university campus. Other conference attendees also had it. On the second evening, an attendee came back with four yellow backpacks, and said it’s the most expensive item he could find from the souvenir shop. Other attendees clustered around him, followed him back there, and each came back festooned with the same yellow backpacks. I had held my contempt against them, intending to not ever spend a single Yuan in my p-card, but on this last day, I changed my mind when a cleaning lady came into my room with a moving truck and started to scrub everything in my bathroom.
“Sorry, I had to do this early because the next round of guests would come soon,” she said.
“It’s okay. I am just about to leave.” I saw her bending down to wipe the bathtub, and said, “Say, it’s tough work, does your lower back ever hurt?”
She looked up at me and nodded, “Why, yes. But I got used to it.”
“My mom suffers from that as well. She is a teacher, sits too long.”
“I am the opposite, I stand too much.” Her eyes smiled, her hands wringing the cloth dry. “Your mother was lucky to have a caring son like you.”
“Can I give you this card? It has 500 Yuan in it, I don’t need it anymore.”
A pause, while she looked at my outstretched hand confusedly. Then she stood up, dried her hands on her apron, and shook her head. “No I can’t. The company policy.”
“What if I buy something from the shop, like a bottle of oil, detergents, could you use them at home?”
“I would, I really would! But I can’t do it. I would be fired if it were found out.”
I received the same response from the ladies at the souvenir shop. The only difference was that those ladies were more cheerful, and they laughed with each other at my strangely charitable gesture. “Why don’t you buy something for your mom and dad?” one of them said. So I looked through the shelf and bought a scarf for my mother and a beanie for my dad. I left the rest of the money in the p-card and returned it to the receptionist.
Two weeks’ later, the Dean phoned me.
“The government has released its guideline on the Young Oversea funding scheme for this year,” he said. “We should get you ready for the application. The deadline is in March.”
“Perhaps I didn’t make it clear last time. I won’t apply this time. I see little chance of me getting this grant.”
“Hey, that’s not true. I had thought you wanted to apply with us. We have had our committee meeting today, J sees huge potential in you. You are our top candidate. Don’t devalue yourself.”
“I was told I had not enough papers.”
“Nonsense. Who told you that? Forget about it. Just remember, not all people graduated from Yale.”
“Yes, thank you for reminding me of that.” I said grudgingly. “Anyway, I appreciate your offer and the conference experience, but I’m out.” I did not apologize, and the Dean hung up with an abrupt click on the line. And with this click, I had conceded myself as an academic failure: I had failed to publish enough papers in my six years of PhD, and at the same time, choked myself with too much idealism in this ivory tower that was built on the shoulders of the giant materialistic world.
Francis' Life 