Cliques in My Schooldays

English 100

Educational Narrative

Feb. 1^st, 2009

       If not because of this paper, I may never think about the question “do I ever have a clique before?” which occurs to me—“what is a clique?” Clique is a word from old French. Wikipedia defines it as “an exclusive group of people who share interests, views, purposes, patterns of behavior, or ethnicity”. If we translate it into Chinese, it could be “Xiao Tuan Ti(小团体)” which means small group , but lacking of group cohesion in a sense; or “Bang Pai(帮派)” which means small faction, but it sounds too serious to get the factional fighting involved. Then Professors Fengbin Wang and Wenpin Tsai, two Chinese scholars—call cliques “Xiao Ji Ti(小集体)” in their book[1] , which means small collectives. As you may have noticed, there is “small” in all of these three translations, which implies a kind of negative meaning “exclusive” in Chinese; at least when the adults hear it they may frown slightly and judge it by the first impression. From this point, I suddenly understand why most of us Chinese students don’t realize that we were in cliques but call them all friends or buddies instead. Under the influence of the CCP(Chinese Communist Party) culture, what we have always been advocating, is collectivism; as it said “Unity is strength”, that’s also what we learned from books and in school. We started to cultivate our team spirit since we went to kindergarten, we must act collectively and stick together through thick and thin, and we would be blamed for engaging in “some cliques”.
 
      However, who doesn’t have a clique anyway? As humans, we do have our very own social circles; it changes as time goes by, from kids to teenager to adults, especially when we were students. And those circles were exactly cliques in some ways. Looking back to my interpersonal experience in schooldays, cliques did play an important role through my lifetime. 

      I lived in a small city in the east of China which was relatively conservative compared to big cities. I had always been to key (top) schools in my city, where they offered better teaching quality, study environment, and more hardworking and excellent students. In my memory, there were not too many different types of cliques in my school; in contrast to western countries, I can say the amount was very little. As I mentioned, this is about culture, about some stereotyped thoughts-- Chinese are used to following the mass, so being cool or unique is not always good. Chinese have the traditional virtues of “working hard and living plain”, so students spending time on clothes is meaningless. Chinese students are just kids in ivory tower, so they should just devote themselves to studying, blah, blah, blah... For example, my school had the rules of wearing school uniforms everyday or as much as possible, if a girl didn’t follow that rule, but dress up very pretty instead even wearing make-up, she would probably have a tough school life—being judged by other classmates esp. girls, lecturing by the teachers, and changing back to the uniform eventually—who would be so brave to do that? Apparently, cliques on clothes were out of the question in my school. So what do Chinese students care about and make us a clique? It really depends. In my experience, from primary school to middle school to high school, my cliques changed a lot, from several to less, explicit to tacit, along with the development and changes in this great country. 

     If there’s really such a clique culture existing in China, I believe it pops up mostly in the primary school. Because kids are frank and straightforward, they won’t hide their feeling whatever good or bad ones, and they don’t use tricks. That’s why it’s easy for them to hook up or split up. I had quite a few cliques back to that time. The main two groups were “playmates” and “leaders”.

     It is quite easy to get what the two cliques are. The “playmates” group was primarily my playmates. As a kid, I was fond of playing with my girlfriends. I was very good at rubber band skipping, rope skipping and shuttlecock kicking, kind of queen among the girls on these. And these entertainments were also extremely popular among girls; we were obsessed with them, and also enjoyed them so much. We would play together as long as we had a chance, during the class break, or in the PE, or after school, maybe at weekends. Most of these group members were just classmates, but a couple of them are more than that. We lived near each other, so we spent more time together--walking to school and back home, hanging out at weekends, many visits to each other’s apartment on holidays, and we became very good friends. We almost did everything together except studying.

     The “leader” group was much simpler ; the members were just my work partners. I was the class monitress and Chinese course representative throughout the six years in primary school and there were quite a few subordinates below me, which made us a class leader system. We might have different assignments, but we often get together to discuss all kinds of class affairs. We might not know each other very well, but we understood each other for taking the same responsibility as leaders. During the 5^th grade, I became one leader of the Young Pioneers group committees in the school, which means I had another “leaders” group then. I also had meetings with them to deal with some school events. 

      It was an honor to be a leader, but at that time, I was just a kid too, not all of the classmates would obey an equal peer. I worked a lot and still offended many classmates because of this position, which made me sick of being subordinate and having powers. Then things went quite different in the coming years--middle school. I always kept myself a low key dealing with everything. During this early period of adolescence, I once had one or two close friends; we almost told each other everything. However teenager girls were just insecure and fickle, we thought we knew and believed each other, but it was not true. The friendship was gone very soon. So precisely speaking, I was not in any cliques during the middle school. I had classmates to talk to, but no intimate friend. With increasing pressures on study, I was automatically keeping distance from the others, focusing on study. If “lonely nerd” can be a clique on one’s own, I think I belonged to that minority. This situation lasted for a while; I maintained an unconcerned attitude to surroundings. It was not until the second year in senior high school that I started to have a clique again. After coming back from one exchanging-year in Switzerland, I felt myself more mature after experiencing a lot in another country, especially on relationships. Maybe we didn’t have to have a close friend in a short term. Maybe we just need to know more interesting people making us feel better in the life stream. That’s what I thought, then the clique came up; I call it “bus fellows”.

       Apparently, high school was far more different from primary school. In my school, you could barely see or feel cliques. Everyone was so independent even we still went to the same classroom and meet the same class everyday. People were kind of cold and incommunicative. We didn’t really care about anything else except for studies, since studying took up most of our time. We might always have someone around, but that person could just be a companion; we might know everyone in our class, but it’s possible we had never spoken to some of them. In circumstance like this, “bus fellows” and “basketball boy” became two typical cliques. And I was in the former one.

      “Bus fellows”, were always my classmates or schoolmates. We took the same bus to school and back home, we were chatting all the time, about everything, the homework or test, a movie or a star, news or gossips, and so on. We didn’t have to have similar interests or personalities, we didn’t even have to care about the topics we were talking; we just need to have free talks, to get rid of the study stress, to get to know other people’s mental world, to promote ourselves. It was also a chance to find a bosom friend by accident among these familiar faces, which could be quite a nicety of life …

        So now, looking back to that question again--“what is a clique?” I get some different answers .Throughout my schooldays, I think, not only did cliques work as small social circles, but also they tell the choices we made as we become mature, choices to what kind of people we want to be and what kind of life we want to have. There are no regrets but learning from the past and looking to the future. Second, cliques are more part of culture, they see from generation to generation growing up. Time flies, culture changes. People are becoming more and more open-minded, even non-mainstream could become popular and that’s what is happening, isn’t it? So cliques, as an important part of teenager or popular culture, what will happen to them in the future? Will they still exist at that time? I just hope they will not confuse us, because we will be already very old and out of time then.

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[1] Fengbin Wang is the translator of the book Social Networks and organization written by Martin Kilduff (U.S.) and Wenpin Tsai(China)