Elite Students: A Silence Between Two Cultures

Most of the third world students I sought to write about are scared--or at the very least, cautious in talking on subjects not involving the types of cuisine they prefer or even what they think about the unfamiliar largelecture style of education at Harvard. About personal life histories--almost all came from elite Westernized families in places like India, Bangladesh and Ghana--they are mostly open, some even voluble. But about polities outside the bonds approved by their governments they hesitate to speak, at least two of them citing fear of their country's secret police organizations or government informers in this country as reasons for their silence.

At times my attempts to interview these elite students became something akin to Philip Marlowe's cracks at finding Rusty Regan. The morning after scheduling an interview with an Iranian undergraduate whose only requirement was that I not bring up the subject of politics, I was awakened at 8:30 a.m. by a ringing telephone. Clearly agitated, the Iranian undergraduate haltingly told me that there could be no interview at all, politics or not. The SAVAK, the Shah's internal security organization which has an agent for every 40 Iranians, was the reason why, the student said. The Shah's people are notorious for reporting on the activities of undergraduates, and journalistic promises like "off the page 10/Dump Truck record" simply aren't good enough guarantees against discovery and retribution.

Apart from the Iranians, many of the students did talk. With all but one or two, however, their fear of giving political offense led them to apparent contradictions. Aaron Poku-Appiah '78, an advanced standing sophomore, is a tall, gaunt Ghanaian, an Ashanti whose English accent has been honed from birth in London, and his summer visits there throughout his high school years. Speaking English was encouraged by his father, an Oxfordtrained criminal lawyer, Poku-Appiah says, because "it enforced the identity of elite people in Ghana."

At any rate, Poku-Appiah says that democracy is without question the best form of government--and he also claims a real sympathy for socialism (although "I am entirely against Communism," he says, speaking of the Soviet system). Like many other third world students I interviewed, he expressed great admiration for Chinese "achievements, if not their government." Yet, abstract beliefs clash with immediate practicalities; Poku-Appiah says that military rule--which overthrew leftist President Kwame Nkrumah's regime in 1966--is the proper form of government for Ghana at present. The junta instills discipline: Poku-Appiah says an endemic problem in the Ghanaian bureaucracy is lateness for work, a crime which in the old days went unpunished. Now the offenders are drilled, required to march up and down by their military employers. This is an improvement, he says.

Asian student who refused to be identified by name or sex or year in school painted a picture of "their" country as very much like the United States, despite that more than half of "their" countrymen are undernourished, illiterate and live as subsistence farmers. The student said that life is not very different here, because "they" came from a city back home--and "they" said that "their" government is working hard to eliminate the country's problems (which "they" left undefined.)

This person is possibly the only nonelite, vaguely middle-class third world student I interviewed; the student's is the only family, for example, which does not hire servants. But the process of Westernization is complete enough with "them," demonstrated by "their" first reason for coming to Harvard: the influence of the United States Information Agency office in "their" city. The student also has apparently imbibed enough American values to say that the smartest students do well and advance through the examination system in "their" country; class differences--between say, the tenth child of a poor peasant and the son of an English-educated civil servant--do not affect the fairness of this kind of system, "they" says. Although not interested in politics, the student does sympathize with China's solution to the causes of underdevelopment, but "they" says it does not appear possible to implement such a solution under "their" country's present system. The Chinese solution, therefore, "they" cannot support.

Understandably, the students I spoke to by and large feel distant from their impoverished countrymen. Poku-Appiah's three sisters all live in London, far from their native Kumasi, married to Ghanaians engaging in things like medicine and building contracting. Omar Rahman '79, from Dacca, Bangladesh, says: "I feel closer to people here than at home--but I'm not at home here either. I guess I'm somewhere in between. Rahman, whose mother is a biochemist with a Ph.D. from Yale and father holds an M.S. as an engineer from lowa, grew up speaking four languages (Bengali, Hindi, Urdu and English)--although the most technical discussions were reserved for English. His school, like that of every elite student I talked to, made a practise of sending its graduates out of the country; Rahman says that out of around 40 graduates 25 went abroad his year--although most went to Oxbridge (colonial ties still bind), not the U.S. Unlike the Southeast Asian student, Rahman says the USIA was not particularly encouraging about his chances. Right now he is just down the road from an old schoolboy pal at MIT.

Outside of some local papers as sources of transitory information, the family's main source was the Western press: The Times of London, The New York Times and Newsweek among them. He remembers that arguments in his family were settled by refering to the international edition of Time--from that, he says, there was no appeal.

But Rahman is beginning to wonder about those habits; he says he even sometimes reads Soviet publications now, just because he knows that a lot of what the West puts out isn't so. And his experience here, only half-a-year old, has made a big difference: even coming from an elite, he is on full scholarship--$6000 a year is a little steep--and that means washing dishes in the Union as a part-time job, something which he says he would have once found "degrading." While expressing no anger at Americans, he notes evenly that "what people throw away in a meal here a whole Bengali family could survive on for a week." He says he feels bad that he doesn't really identify with his people and their traditions and that being in America has done this to him--he wants to learn, and regrets that he has been into the Bengali countryside so little. Rahman will go back to stay someday, hopefully as a doctor--but he says that "people there hate you if you're Westernized, they think you're snobbish.'

Rahman too exhibits the strange conflict about politics that the students I interviewed displayed: an avowal of disinterest in politics coupled with clearly "political" opinions in the abstract linked, in turn, with a fear of talking about the subject in the particular. Rahman left Dacca on August 21, and says he knows next to nothing about what's going on there now: there have been two military coups since he left, but he isn't moved to discuss them for publication.

Coming from a science-oriented student--even one who is now interested in Marx--this is believable. It does not make quite as much sense that Vivek Haldipur '78, an advanced standing student in economics from New Delhi, India, would also be reticent in talking about things in his country's recent history, but he is. He was in India when last summer's state of emergency was promulgated by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Although Haldipur says he doesn't like labels, he describes himself as a Fabian Socialist--a Shavian type of belief which blends the benefits of elite technocracy, democratic liberties, and collective ownership--who is majoring in development economics because he wants to go back to his country and help in solving its long-range troubles. But on the current situation he only smiles gently and declines comment.

Haldipur is a calm and intense long-back-haired son of an academic civil servant, Columbia educated. He is the most politically committed foreign student I spoke to. His father was a "self-made man," Haldipur says, a member of a country family which settled, as poor people, in the city, a man who went to school so long that it created rifts with Haldipur's grandfather. Haldipur himself went to England on a two-year scholarship after a private school education in India--to Atlantic College in South Wales where there were students from "30 or 35 countries." Having lived mainly in the West for the last three years he feels little sense of being patronized. One American pharmacist (in the Anglo-Indian style he calls them "chemists") felt called upon recently, Haldipur says, to read out loud every direction on a bottle of prescription medicine to him. "I felt like reminding him I could read, but I let him have his fun," Haldipur says. He says he realizes that the pharmacist meant no malice.

Still, Haldipur's hopes are not in America. He says that ordinary people and the elites have more day-to-day encounters in India. "You don't have to go to a party to meet people in Delhi," he says; "the guys selling cigarettes are quite happy to talk." Contact with the great mass of his countrymen, he says, is what he misses most while he's here; and he sums this Indian virtue up in the negative, contrasting it with the U.S. and calling it "lack of impersonality." He is the only elite third world student who said to me, unqualifiedly, that "I very strongly identify with my people," and he was the only one to really bemoan what he and I termed the lack of solidarity among Third World students at Harvard.

A visiting scholar at the Yenching Institute from Hong Kong, Louise Ho, said to me that she--born of a mainland Chinese capitalist father and a Hong Kong mother--felt good on the one hand because she was travelled and cosmopolitan; and bad on the other because "I'll never really have a home--I'll always be most of all an observer." She was brought up with the idea, she says, that her family, displaced by the 1949 revolution, would eventually go back to Canton.

In contrast to Ho, I guess that I will take the word of my interlocutors and assume that they will all return to what might be "home." But like Ho I think they will feel more like outsiders--as Rahman said, "between"--in the world of the foreign diplomats, manufacturers and financiers, and equally, in the world of what should have been their own culture.CrimsonSandy O. Steingard