The Good Old Days

My students are reluctant to buy their textbooks.

"Too expensive!" they wail. And yes, £20 might seem a lot to pay for a book if I didn't know how much had gone into writing it -- the years of close collaboration, the research, the thought. I tell my students about the textbook authors I've met, how hard they work, how little they profit from their labors. Unfortunately, my students are not sympathetic.

When I mention the students' reluctance to buy textbooks to my colleagues, they are not sympathetic either. One of them tells me about a Chinese student in London who illegally photocopied all of her textbooks to save money, adding "It wouldn't have bothered me so much if she hadn't come to class with a Ralph Lauren handbag."

It may be a mark of advancing age that I compare these kids to their parents and find them lacking. Over twenty years ago, I knew their parents' generation, and what a contrast. They were leaner, more intense, and tougher in every way, but more than anything else, they valued books. I know I shouldn't make the comparisons I'm making, and I know that I'm comparing apples with oranges. The overseas Chinese students I knew in the eighties were not just a whole different generation, they were the cream of the cream. Few Chinese students were allowed to study abroad back then, and those who did were generally hand-picked or had won scholarships, having competed with thousands to get them. When they got to Japan, the first thing they did was buy books. They couldn't get over the fact that nothing was censored, and they were staggered by the variety. With the internet just a glimmer in the horizon, you had to get your books the old-fashioned way back then: already published and printed for you.

When I was teaching in northern Japan, I remember two Chinese acquaintances looking around my tiny apartment. "You have many books," they sighed happily. They didn't care that I wasn't wearing designer clothes, that my television was fresh off the junk heap -- or that my books were stacked in piles on the floor and my one small table because I didn't have a bookcase to put them in. The main point was, I had the books: I was rich.

While I appreciate much about China's economic growth, I miss those days. I miss those earnest, make-do-or-do-without bookaholics who burned their candles at both ends. I miss the days when books were precious items you saved up to buy; when you hoarded them, discussed them, and read them over and over. When you wrote your name in them -- neatly, carefully -- only loaning them to friends you could trust to handle them gently. When your wealth was not measured by how fancy your clothes or electronic gadgets were, but how many books you had.

"I don't want other people's things," one girl sniffed when I told her where she could find used books. "I want new things." She has a shiny new mobile phone that looks like it does everything but housework. If I could afford her shoes, I'd treat myself to a whirlwind thrift shop blitz. In my mind's eye, I line this girl up with Yingying, a literature student I knew back in the eighties. Yingying was bilingual in Chinese and Japanese; she could talk knowledgably about modern Japanese writers and the works of Saul Bellow and John Steinbeck. She had a good collection of much-loved books. And she never turned up her nose at used things: she competed with the other foreign students (and me) for good junk heap finds and combed used furniture stores for bargains. Compared to my spoiled princess of a student, Yingying won hands down.

I was wallowing in similar good-old-day musings when one of my students approached me before class the other day. "Teacher," she said, pulling a book out of her bag and putting it on my desk. "I buy used, Amazon." She patted it proudly. "Grammar book too. Almost new, and cheap."

I watched as the other students admired her find, pulling out their mobile phones to record the ISBN of the grammar book. This generation may be vastly different, but a bargain is still a bargain.