Education is the most important investment for middle and upper-class Chinese. It wasn't hard to see why when we saw all of the city workers sweeping the sidewalks all day, the construction workers in fatigues doing manual labor, and the men pulling carts of bricks down the street by hand. The kids that we had our homestays with were the lucky ones whose parents worked hard to make enough money to send them to the best school in the country. The amount of effort and discipline that we saw from the students was impressive. Eight classes a day and a study period made up a fifteen hour school day for these kids. The only day they got off was Sunday because they had a half day of school on Saturday. I don't think that even private schools in this country have that kind of schedule and I know that I would not have been able to keep up with it when I was fifteen years old. These students have a lot riding on their success in school: their parents money, their family's future, and their own future.

I wrote in my travel journal that Gary and Quincy behaved differently than I would expect people their age to act. I've come to the conclusion that the pressure from school and their lifestyle in general have shaped them. I noticed that, at least with the kids Erik and I stayed with, music wasn't very important to them. We asked them what kind of music they liked to listen to and didn't get a straight answer. Music is an important part of most young people's lives here in the states and it surprised me that this didn't seem to be true in China as well. In this country, music is an important outlet for political, social, and cultural commentary and opinions. I wonder if the government has something to do with the lack of interest in music in China. Then again, Andrew said that Chinese music wasn't very good right now.