Female prisoners look at lists of books in Campbell County Jail in Jacksboro, Texas, on March 20, 2018. Photo: IC

"I believe that the nature of human beings is kind, but the driving force of being kind needs to be guided, that is why I want to share this story with your readers," Jiang Lan, a teacher who taught Chinese at a prison in the US, told the Global Times.

Jiang, a Chinese-Canadian, became a teacher at Bard College in New York in 2012 after earning a PhD in classical literature at the School of Chinese Language and Literature, Soochow University in 2009. 

She said she was invited to be a teacher as part of the Bard Prison Initiative (BPI), a Bard College program that provides college opportunities to people in prison, after inmates submitted a petition asking that Chinese language classes be expanded to include classic Chinese literature.

"My family was against my choice and worried about my safety, but I was very curious about my potential students, and wanted to go on an adventure," she said.

Strict environment 

According to Jiang, she needed to go through very strict security before entering the classroom. 

"I was immediately surrounded by a monotonous and strict atmosphere when I stepped in the door. The place did not have any green plants just electric steel fences, and of course, guards armed with guns," she noted. 

"But, when I finally met my students after passing by many doors, my upset mood was swept away because they did not match the evil image that I've seen in movies. Their appearance was not so different from that of normal college students except they all wore dark green prison uniforms. They were all seated by the wall in a well-behaved manner."

"After calming down, I started my first class, Intermediate Chinese III. I didn't have any electronic equipment, all I had was a textbook, All Things Considered: An Advanced Reader of Modern Chinese, a blackboard and chopsticks," Jiang said.  

Facing challenges

Jiang said she was not the first Chinese professor in BPI, so she had to be familiar with the project's Chinese language curriculum and tie her classes in with those of the previous Chinese professor. 

"My students could read a long Chinese article well but they did have some weaknesses, including the inability to pronounce the fourth tone and the lack of basic knowledge about Chinese characters. 

"I arranged weekly homework for them, which was to recite Tang Dynasty (618-907) poems to train their pronunciation of the fourth tone and to copy each character of the poems 20 times to familiarize them with the structure of Chinese characters," she explained. 

Reciting the poems proved easy because the poems rhymed and the beautiful words inspired the students to want to explore the true meaning behind them. Copying the characters proved difficult, however, since the task was monotonous and took a lot of time. 

"A student named Jared was opposed to copying the poems. He did not finish his homework for almost two weeks. The reason he gave me was 'we can still speak Chinese well without writing such dull homework.' I told him that if he didn't finish his homework, there was no reason to come to my class. Jared got angry but after his classmates warned him that time not spent in class had to be spent in his cell, he came to terms with it," Jiang said.  

In the end Jared came around, he even told Jiang that he wanted to minor in China studies while talking sociology courses. 

 "'Sorry, professor, you are right. I need to copy the characters so that I can remember their structure,' he said, apologizing to me somewhat shyly," Jiang said.

"I was very relieved about Jared's progress. According to the requirements for an undergraduate degree, students who get an 85 and above in my class can move on to the next stage of their studies. This time, he got a 92," Jiang explained. 

'Knowledge is power'

In 2015, the program made headlines after the BPI debate team defeated Harvard at the National Debate Tournament Finals that year to the surprise of the whole world. 

Jiang said the BRI students were very hardworking. They had four Chinese classes a week and each class lasted three hours. Even then, the students did not want to rest, but wanted to learn more. 

"I had a student named Brian. He has muscular dystrophy and he can not move the fingers on his right hand very well, but he still insisted on finishing the copying homework even though I told him he did not have to. 

"Although they are always seen as prisoners in the eyes of the prison guards, us teachers do not think like that. The diligence of these students drives me and each BPI teacher to make every effort help them learn more, because knowledge is power," she said, noting that the recidivism rate of BPI students released from prison is zero and many of them have found jobs. 

"'Everyone makes mistakes. They do and we do. Definitely, the mistakes they made are more serious, but people have a long life, and I want to give them the chance to start again,' one of the investors of BPI once told me," Jiang said.  

"If I was invited to be a Chinese teacher again, I would say 'yes,'" she added. 


Newspaper headline: Second chances