Watching Family Guy last night, we hit the episode where Tricia Takanawa says: “Hi! I’m here with Stephen Hawking, the only white man I’ve ever met who knows math better than me.”

We laughed. And then we almost cried.

Because here are some (translated) examples of the algebra that my son’s seventh grade (Year 7) class — that’s age 11 and 12, for the avoidance of doubt — are doing in Chinese school.

“If is a seventh degree quadrinomial, find the value of .”

“If , find the value of .”

“Where , find the value of .”

“If the polynomial is a fifth degree quadrinomial, and the degree of the monomial is the same as the degree of the polynomial, find the value of .”

IF you are mathematically literate, which I’m not, these sums are actually not that hard.

Just typing these out makes my head hurt.

But here’s the thing.

IF you are mathematically literate, which I’m not, these sums are actually not that hard.

And that’s despite the fact that they use things like absolute value and variables in exponents, things that we do not introduce until A-level in the UK, as you can probably tell from my oh-so-mathematically literate use of the term “things”.

What it appears to me that the teacher is doing — and, as I’ve mentioned in my previous post on Chinese maths, I only studied maths to the age-16 level in the UK — is familiarising children with the kinds of operations they’ll need to use in much more complex contexts later.

She is drilling the concepts in, and, in doing so, taking the fear out of these apparently massively complex sums, and enabling them to eliminate noise.

Incidentally, I dread to think what level maths you need to be a high school maths teacher in China.

In China, maths is not supposed to be easy. It is supposed to be hard.

So why are Chinese 11-12 year olds so far ahead of Anglo cultures on maths?

First up, in China maths is not supposed to be easy. It is supposed to be difficult. It is intended to prepare you for doing physics, maths, engineering or computer science at university, whether or not your talents lie in the arts.

Further, concepts such as absolute value (||) are introduced at the most basic level, with drilling, and then ramped up very quickly.

Over roughly half a UK term, the class went from introducing the notion of absolute value, with simple sums and verbal multiple choice questions ensuring they understand the rules, and introducing the notion of exponents in the same way, to introducing terms like “coefficient” and “degree” and working with them in expressions such as this, not to mention similar sums using .

Chinese Year 7 middle schoolers spend 45-48 hours per week in class, 10-12 hours of that doing maths, and 5-15 hours doing homework, around 3 hours of that on maths.

Then there are the school hours.

As I understand it, Chinese Year 7 middle schoolers spend 45-48 hours per week in class, 10-12 hours of that doing maths, and 5-15 hours doing homework, around 3 hours of that on maths. British Year 7 middle schoolers spend roughly 30-32 hours a week in class, around 3 hours doing homework, and around 5-6 hours doing maths.

They also get less holiday time, though not, I think, that much less. There is one long break around Chinese New Year and Spring Festival, another in the summer, and the state holidays.

Further, very able children will do extra maths on weekends and after school to get ahead. Less able children will also do extra maths on weekends and after school to enable them to keep up.

I am not, for the record, saying this is a model one should emulate in the West. But some kind of halfway house might not be a bad idea.

If your Chinese is good, these types of sums are much easier to do in Chinese than in English.

And then there is the language. Believe it or not, if your Chinese is good, these types of sums are much easier to do in Chinese than in English, because the language is easier. The single-character building blocks that make up the expressions are largely consistent, and the syntax is more natural than in English.

A “fifth degree quadrinomial” is a “five-power-four-term-expression”. “Degree” is “power-number” (AKA: “exponent”).

BUT all the words I’ve had to render here as polysyllables are monosyllables, with simple root meanings, so that big clunky ugly stream of scary words is actually only five fairly simple syllables. In Chinese, the whole expression “a fifth degree quadrinomial” takes less time to say than the single word “quadrinomial”.

A polynomial is a “many-term-expression” (but only three syllables, of course), a monomial is a “single-term-expression”, a trinomial is a “three-term-expression”, and so on.

Further, one common meaning of the character I’m rendering as “power” here (次）is “time(s)”. You’ll see it used, for example, on signs saying that you can only have one “turn” on a machine. Though, of course, like all common Chinese characters, it has a stack of common meanings, whether used on its own or as part of a “word”.

Now, the boundary between a word and a phrase in Chinese is a topic of academic debate, on which I am in no way qualified to comment, but “five-power-four-term-expression” is a block that feels, to me and to our teacher, like a single word.

There is some evidence that Chinese people’s brains work differently from people whose brains are adjusted to alphabetic languages, particularly when they are doing maths.

And, finally, without wanting to sound like some nineteenth-century Victorian pontificating in a racist fashion on “the Oriental mind”, there is some evidence that Chinese native speakers’ brains work differently from native English speaker’s brains, particularly when they are doing maths.

The visual bit of the brain lights up more when doing arithmetic for native speakers of Chinese than it does for native speakers of English.

I would suggest that one reason is because characters are visual: the more complicated characters are made up of lots of mini-characters, so the visual element of the brain is engaged a lot more at all times. And as the ONLY way to become literate in Chinese is to write the characters out lots, and lots, and lots of times (there are apps that allow you to do this on a touchscreen, but it’s still visual-kinetic learning), the visual region of the brain gets used a LOT.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly given how much more difficult maths vocabulary, and even counting vocabulary, is in English than in Chinese, English speakers need to use the word-processing part of the brain a lot more when doing maths.

A few examples? To illustrate they drew a square and began dividing it up. Then children had to solve using that square, and make a triangle that solves the same problem.

The books use number lines and diagrams in contexts that seem to me positively counter-intuitive, by which I mean that for my aged native-English brain with its set neural pathways, I find they confuse rather than simplify the issue. They also use geometry in contexts where, I think, we wouldn’t.

It IS harder than the Chinese average. But not, I suspect, very much harder, on the grand scheme of things.

One final note. This is maths from an academic elite school, probably top ten in the province and top five in the city.

And, no, I didn’t do this deliberately. It was the only school that seemed enthusiastic about having a foreigner on board, so that was where Zac went.

Which means poor Zac is studying alongside some of the brightest children in a province with roughly twice the population of Australia or New York State.

So it IS harder than the Chinese average. But not, I suspect, very much harder, on the grand scheme of things.

I’d really welcome thoughts on this from people who, unlike me, know maths and/or Chinese well. Also from anyone who’s currently got a child of a similar age in a non-elite Chinese school.

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The lesser spotted tween, and its larger relative, the greater spotted teen, are elusive creatures in urban China.

You might glimpse one between 6 and 7am, neat in their tracksuits on their way to school, then again between 5.30 and 7pm, returning to their homes.

On Friday nights, you might catch one in a restaurant or, if their parents are indulgent, gaming in an arcade.

Parks? Only for babies.

The Saturday supermarket run? You might see a kindergartener, or possibly an 8-year-old.

At the cinema on Saturdays? Nary a tween in sight.

As Zac will observe in the boys’ section of our local H&M, “I don’t think kids my age actually choose their own clothes.”

All of which is to say that, when we get an invitation for a playdate with a twelve-year-old girl, we jump at it.

I’ll call her Li Jing.

I float a couple of alternatives. How about the cinema? That is, of course, too frivolous for China. How about the science museum? No.

Li Jing goes swimming on Sunday mornings. Would we like to come to the water park?

I float a couple of alternatives. How about the cinema?

That is, of course, too frivolous for China. How about the science museum?

No.

It needs to be swimming, because that is what Li Jing does on Sunday mornings.

And, further, as I suspected, it’s not a water park.

It’s a swimming pool. And, yes, there is snow on the ground.

“Can’t we do something else?” Zac asks. We have been rather spoilt by tropical and Mediterranean waters.

“No,” I say. “I tried. It’s swimming or nothing.”

Young women will wear micro-minis, lacy tights, towering heels and skintight tops on the street, and no one bats an eyelid. When these same fashionistas go to a swimming pool, the closest they’ll come to a bikini is a tankini.

Thank god, I think, as I buy a vile pink swimming hat for me, and a vile baby blue swimming hat for Zac, that we’re British.

For Britons, like the northern Chinese, will traipse to the pool in the depths of winter with nary a quibble. We OWN the word “bracing”.

I only have a bikini, no swim shorts, so I sling a long vest top over it as my best available substitute for a one-piece.

I can’t quite get my head around the northern Chinese attitude to modesty. Young women will wear micro-minis, lacy tights, towering heels and skintight tops on the street, and no one bats an eyelid.

When these same fashionistas go to a swimming pool, the closest they’ll come to a bikini is a tankini, perhaps with a frilly skirt.

The changing rooms? Oh god.

But for the matron, who takes my ticket and exchanges it for a pair of pink plastic shower shoes, everyone is nude. (It says something about the temperature, at least by the door, that she is wearing not only a sweater but her coat, and no doubt thermals too.)

Now, I’m not shy about my body. I have gone sufficiently native that I can pull down my knickers, squat, point my bare backside at a communal longdrop toilet and pee alongside Chinese women without a jot of embarrassment.

I can even, like the Chinese, converse in said position, as I will realise to my horror when I do exactly that to a fellow Brit who walks into a communal hutong loo in Beijing.

But the full nudity is a bit much for me.

“The horror! The horror!” he says, of all those naked male hairy bodies and dangly bits. “CANNOT UNSEE.”

In the communal showers, women stand naked but for the pink plastic sandals.

Women engage in lengthy, solo beauty rituals – I’m guessing they are students, and the showers here are better than those in their dorms. Two girls take it in turns to exfoliate each other’s backs.

Towels are for drying, not for covering, so women walk between the showers and the lockers, fully nude but for Barbie pink sandals, women of all shapes and sizes.

Well, almost all shapes and sizes.

I’m sallow, or, as my landlord put it, inspecting my skin with interest, “You’re yellow too! You’re not white at all!”, so my skin colour does not stand out.

But I’m tallish, with relatively broad shoulders and a bodyshape that could currently be described as athletic but running to seed. It’s not a Chinese body type. And my short hair makes me more unusual.

It’s worse for Zac, who is fairer than I.

That means he’s not only the only laowai but the only child in the changing rooms, and, being far, far paler than any Chinese, a fascinating white ghost into the bargain.

Staring, as in the rest of Asia, is culturally normal, and not rude, whether or not you are naked.

“The horror! The horror!” he says, of all those naked male hairy bodies and dangly bits. “CANNOT UNSEE.”

Zac starts doing the boy thing. AKA bombing, jumping, swan dives. The lifeguard looks surprised, but approving. This doesn’t happen much here.

The temperature at the pool hovers somewhere between bracing and character-building. Like most Chinese “leisure” facilities, it really exists for athletes and lesser mortals who want to get fit. (Exercise, from communal dance classes to bodyweight machines in the parks, is ingrained in Chinese culture, even in the frozen north.)

It is Olympic-sized. Three lanes.

“Can he swim?” a guy asks me, as Zac ventures beyond the barrier to the deep end.

“Yes,” I say. “He’s swum in lakes, rivers, sea…”

It takes me a while to realise that the guy is the lifeguard, because he’s actually swimming.

Zac starts doing the boy thing. AKA bombing, jumping, swan dives.

The lifeguard looks surprised, but approving.

This doesn’t happen much here.

Li Jing and her mother show up. Thanks to a confusion over times, we have been early, which is fantastic, because it means I haven’t had to make conversation while naked, but also catastrophic, as they’ve been standing outside waiting for us.

I manufacture a need to pee so that I can get back to the changing room and imbibe the blissful warmth of the communal shower, and sneak another trip into that blessed cloud of steam under the pretext of fetching my camera.

A swimming play date, frankly, is intrinsically awkward, and made more so because we do not really understand what swimming means in Harbin.

Adults do lengths. Kids do lengths.

And, lord knows, you need to do lengths to warm up.

In fact, I manufacture a need to pee so that I can get back to the changing room and imbibe the blissful warmth of the communal shower, and sneak another trip into that blessed cloud of steam under the pretext of fetching my camera.

It gradually becomes clear, as Zac grabs floats, and splashes water, and sits in strange positions on his floats, and I set the kids diving for keys, that Li Jing has never played in water.

They are the only two kids in the pool.

Li Jing quite enjoys it. But is also quite bewildered by it.

And it slowly dawns on me that, for the first time in his life, Zac has met a child who doesn’t know how to play in water. He’s not really used to the idea of kids swimming lengths. And, lest we forget, she’s a girl.

“What happens to the kids who can’t do maths? Or…” I explain dyslexia to her. “Do you HAVE that in China?” “Yes,” she says, flatly. “They go to special school.”

We talk, a little, about the differences between school in England and China. “School in England starts at 9 and ends at 3.30,” I say.

Li Jing’s eyes open wide. She would rather be in school in England than in China, she says.

Later, huddled in the shallow end with my arms crossed across my chest, and wondering why Zac’s not shivering when his lips are blue with cold, I talk to Li Jing’s mother, whose English is rather better than my Chinese (not difficult).

“Does everyone have to do that difficult maths?”

They do. Kids who are good at maths do extra classes to get them ahead, on weekends and after school.

“What happens to the kids who can’t do maths? Or…” I explain dyslexia to her. “Do you HAVE that in China?”

“Yes,” she says, flatly. “They go to special school.”

“Li Jing goes to geometry class on Sundays. Because Zhansheng is good at maths, would he like to come? They can go together…”

We are planning to head to the science museum after lunch.

But Li Jing’s mother has a suggestion. “Li Jing goes to geometry class on Sundays. Because Zhansheng is good at maths, would he like to come? They can go together…”

I bluster. I’m not even going to float that one past Zac until we’re out of hearing range. And, looking at the algebra Zac’s doing, I can’t imagine what extra geometry could possiby entail.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “We can’t. We are going to the science museum.”

And then I feel slightly sick.

I have known, of course, intellectually, that almost all urban Chinese tweens have a full schedule of classes every weekend.

But the penny has just dropped that if Zac is going to have a social life with his peers outside the classroom, it’s going to be in the form of classes.

If he wants to play basketball with his friend who likes basketball, he’ll need to go to his basketball class. If he wants to see Li Jing, he’ll do either swimming, or geometry, or her other two classes on Saturdays.

The science museum is excellent: interactive, educational, architecturally impressive, with fantastic hands-on exhibits for kids of all ages.

The oldest child we see there? Eight.

Picture: simplyswim.com.

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For the first week of Chinese school, our routine has been: wake up at 6am, breakfast, dress, and leave the house at 6.40 to make the bus at 7am.

This is a routine that Zac adapts to better than I. He is not a morning person, but he is adaptable.

I am not a morning person, and I am not adaptable. Left to myself, I’d go to sleep around 1 and get up around 8.

Further, I’m physiologically incapable of having an early night.

It’s odd. I don’t get jetlag. I can pull an all-nighter with the best of them, whether for work or pleasure, and function OK the next day.

I can sleep pretty much anywhere – on bare planks, on rocky riverbeds, on a bamboo platform built for smoking deer, in temperatures above 40 and below -15, at altitudes above 5000m and below sealevel, on planes, trains, boats, buses, even sawngthaews. I can pull a shawl over my face and snooze through a desert sunrise, yes, even the attendant flies, or hunker down in a tent in the snow.

I’m not an insomniac. I’m not a light sleeper.

But even as a small child I’d read under the covers with a torch until all the house was asleep.

And I simply can’t go to sleep early, unless I’m physically ill.

I mean, obviously Zac and I will get up when required. A 6am bus, a 2am start to see sunrise from a summit, a 5am start for a Himalayan high pass, an early dive boat? All fine.

Neither our world travel lifestyle nor Zac’s various schools have ever required waking up significantly before 8am on a regular basis. Nor has anything, really, in my life.

I did an arts degree, which meant I only needed to get up for tutorials.

And I’ve worked from home for the vast majority of my adult life, which means that things like meals and showers and shopping and laundry are a way of breaking up your working day, rather than things you have to slot in before or after work.

I’ve never really had to do the commuter routine, where you get up early, eat your breakfast, get dressed and madeup for work and make the Tube, for more than a very few months.

And, oh boy, did I hate that.

I mean, obviously Zac and I will get up when required. A 6am bus, a 2am start to see sunrise from a summit, a 5am start for a Himalayan high pass, an early dive boat? All fine.

Staying out till dawn reviewing bars, grabbing an hour’s sleep then making an 8am flight? Working late then rising early to break the back of a deadline?

All of these things are perfectly doable.

But… 6am wakeups? Five days a week? As a night owl that’s just…. well, inhuman.

By 6, the corner shops are open, the food stalls are up and running, commuters are awaiting their buses to work, and the elderly have completed their tai chi and are now shopping for fruit and veg.

The Chinese, however, are early risers, especially in the north. Get off a Chinese train at 5am, and you’ll have a lot more trouble navigating the heaving taxi rank than you will finding breakfast, while the street markets will be underway well before dawn.

By 6, the corner shops are open, the food stalls are up and running, commuters are awaiting their buses to work, and the elderly have completed their tai chi and are now shopping for fruit and veg.

Further, with the exception of the homeless, everyone is not only up but fully coiffed and groomed, with nary a crease in their clothing nor a hair out of place.

But for the poorest of the rural poor, the Chinese do not do scruffy. Even Chinese punks look neat. It is also very rare to see a Chinese person looking visibly tired.

All the same, when Zac’s class teacher tells me that the bus he needs to take to get to school on time leaves the end of our street at 6.30am, my stomach, quite literally, sinks in a slightly nauseous sense of disbelief.

We are going to need to have a routine. And not just any routine. But a really, really hardcore Chinese routine. 6am was bad enough. But this is going to be worse.

I figure if I get up at 5.30, I can get myself showered, begin the caffeination process and have his breakfast on the table and a smile on my face for 5.45.

“OK,” I say. “How are we going to do this? We’re going to need to leave the house at 6.15, which means I’m going to need to get up at 5.30am.”

While Zac’s going through the epic challenge that is Chinese school, I figure that I need to be not only human but non-shouty in the morning.

He’s under enough pressure navigating his first ever secondary school, an enormous campus and the minutiae of the playground as an ethnic and linguistic minority of one, not to mention coping with A-level maths in Chinese and Chinese language lessons with bright Korean grads, without being yelled at to get his bloody shoes on every morning. (And, yes, the bright Korean grads do make a fuss of him and feed him biscuits, but all the same…)

I figure if I get up at 5.30, I can get myself showered, begin the caffeination process and have his breakfast on the table and a smile on my face for 5.45.

“I’ll get up at 5.30am too,” Zac says.

“I’d have thought you could get away with 5.40,” I say.

I really need those ten minutes as humanising time. It is hard work being “nice mummy”. It doesn’t come naturally to me at that time of day. (My spawn, he tells me later, finds the fixed grin and the mantra “I’m so proud of you, you’re doing really well!” absolutely terrifying.)

“No,” he says. “It’ll be 5.30.”

“So…” I say. “What does that mean for bedtime? 8.30? 9?”

Most Chinese middle-schoolers, whether boarding or at home, go to bed between 11 and midnight, after homework, and get up between 5.30 and 6. I, however, have feeble Western ideas about the amount of sleep that rising teens actually need.

“I suppose we could try for 9,” Zac says. “8.30′s just too early.”

I don’t know how Chinese mothers do it. Every single professional, urban Chinese mother works the sort of hours we associate with junior doctors or highly paid bankers.

There’s a lot of stuff on the internet about living like a local. Our family routine is very much less strenuous than a typical Chinese family routine, but rather closer to living like locals than many visitors come.

And, frankly…. It’s brutal.

I am extremely glad to have the experience, but, in all honesty, I don’t know how Chinese mothers do it.

Every single professional, urban Chinese mother works the sort of hours we associate with junior doctors or highly paid bankers.

The factory workers? They leave what will typically be their only child with their parents, head across the country and work even longer hours, from dormitories.

I suspect Heilongjiang’s rural poor get plenty of downtime in the many long months when snow precludes working in the cornfields, but looking at their tumble-down houses I’d guess shivering features more highly than rest and relaxation.

Because even our truncated hours are brutal.

English children typically study between 4.5 and 5.5 hours out of their 6.5-7 hour school day, meaning that the Chinese school day is, in terms of class time, roughly twice as long as ours.

Zac leaves the house at 6.15ish – we will precision-tune this down to 6.21-6.23am — gets his bus at 6.30 to the second, gets to school at 7.15 on the dot, starts class at 7.25, has lunch, the occasional half-hour playtime, then quiet study with his peers.

And then he walks ten minutes across his enormous campus to start his Chinese as a Foreign Language with the grads and young adults at the uni at 1.20.

Class finishes at 4.30, he’s on the uni bus at 4.40, I collect him from his stop at 5.15, and we’re back home by 5.35. The buses are timed with such precision that I recognise the drivers of three other university buses that pass by our stop at 30 second intervals before Zac’s.

On the days when he stays in middle school, like a Chinese child, he studies until 5.30, catches the bus at 5.50 and is dropped to our door by minibus at 6.30 on the dot, or more than 12 hours after he left the house.

When he does Chinese school hours, he’s in class from 7.25-5.30, with half an hour for lunch, half an hour for playtime on some days, and 5 minute breaks between lessons. That’s at least nine hours of study time, more typically closer to ten.

English children typically study between 4.5 and 5.5 hours out of their 6.5-7 hour school day, meaning that the Chinese school day is, in terms of class time, roughly double ours.

That means, for the avoidance of doubt, that a Chinese kindergartener of five will have done seven 9-hour days back to back. Plus a little homework.

By this stage, an urban Chinese mother will have done at the very least ten hours at work, plus commute, remaining perfectly coiffed throughout.

If she runs a shop, a store or a restaurant, her hours may well be considerably longer: if she works in a bank, she’ll have been in work from 7.30 until 6.

If there is a holiday mid-week, then both parents and children will have worked and gone to school on the Saturday and Sunday to allow them to take the days around the holiday as a block.

That means, for the avoidance of doubt, that a Chinese kindergartener of five will have done seven 9-hour days back to back. Plus a little homework.

You would think, of course, that 6.30pm would be time for downtime. It isn’t.

It’s time for cooking, housework and homework.

Chinese families cook. They cook simply, they may store food, but they cook.

Walk into any small business during lunch-hour – a neighbourhood internet cafe, a corner shop – and folk will be cooking.

And in the home, it is almost always mum who cooks.

And, because we live in a sixth-floor walk-up (our lovely landlord is one of very few in Harbin that will take leases of less than a year, or payments of less than 6-months upfront plus deposit), I’ll do between 24 and 60 flights of stairs in a day, and Zac will do 12 to 48.

Dishwashers, like ovens, are a rarity in China. All but the very poshest of flats will typically have a two ring hob, a sink, a fridge, a washing machine and perhaps a dishdryer and a pressure cooker.

Want roast duck? You go to a roast duck shop.

Cleaners do exist in the People’s Republic, for socialism in the Chinese manner has no aversion to home helps, but we have such a small flat that the notion of hiring a cleaner feels somewhere between pointless, slatternly and decadent, not to mention linguistically incredibly difficult.

For the long periods in Harbin where there’s snow and black ice on the ground, our tiled floors need quite phenomenal amounts of mopping.

And, because we live in a sixth-floor walk-up (our lovely landlord is one of very few in Harbin that will take leases of less than a year, or payments of less than 6-months upfront plus deposit), I’ll do between 24 and 60 flights of stairs in a day, and Zac will do 12 to 48.

Further, because Zac wants home-cooked food when he gets back from school, rather than a trip to the restaurant – child-free Chinese eat out a lot, and every other storefront on our street is a barbecue, hotpottery or noodle joint churning out cheap, delicious, filling food – I need to cook, and then wash up.

In the way we live, cooking has been optional: a pleasant choice, rather than a compulsory activity. I cook if I feel like it, or if Zac wants to eat in but doesn’t want to cook. If neither of us feel like it, we eat out. Here it’s non-optional.

And this needs to be fitted around homework. For, in the second week of his school career, Zac’s teacher has established that his maths is good enough for him to do the same homework as everyone else in the class.

That means, we will rapidly establish, that a leisurely trawl around the supermarket after school to see what we fancy eating that night eats into valuable homework time.

That’s downtime. It’s a hell of a lot more downtime than Chinese children get. Zac gets at least one hour of downtime every day, sometimes more. And he takes breaks between his different homework subjects.

Faced with a choice between 9pm bedtime and an evening devoted exclusively to Chinese vocabulary and Chinese maths homework, Zac extends his bedtime to 9.30.

When he gets in from school, he’ll have a snack and wind down. Most Chinese children have a quick dinner and go straight to homework at this stage, but I’m not enough of a tiger mother to even float this. (Most of Zac’s friends at school “like computer games, but don’t have time to play them”.)

I’ll help out with Chinese vocab learning, provide moral, and, often, Google support as he assails the dreaded maths, and join in on Skpe lessons with our Chinese teacher, most of them, currently pertaining to maths.

Then I’ll cook. And, from 9 to 9.30, or earlier, if we’re lucky, we’ll watch movies or TV shows as we eat our dinner.

That’s downtime. It’s a hell of a lot more downtime than Chinese children get. Zac gets at least one hour of downtime every day, sometimes more. And he takes breaks between his different homework subjects.

Hell, the little slacker even manages to start a Stencil project and check his email once in a while.

By the end of week 2, he’s putting himself to bed at 9.30 precisely, asleep within a second of lights out, and up and perky at 5.30am precisely. At 5.35, when he gets home, he’s still energised and bouncy. At weekends, he sets an alarm for 6.30am so as not to slip out of the routine.

Zac adapts to this routine. He adapts to it incredibly well.

The question of a sneaky day off school never even comes up, because he knows damn well that he’s learning and that if he misses a single day he’ll fall behind and need to make it up (and I suspect he’s actually enjoying the challenge).

By the end of week 2, he’s putting himself to bed at 9.30 precisely, asleep within a second of lights out, and up and perky at 5.30am precisely. At 5.35, when he gets home, he’s still energised and bouncy. At weekends, he sets an alarm for 6.30am so as not to slip out of the routine, but will stay up until 11 or so.

Me?

Oh dear god.

I should point out that I’m not undisciplined.

I’m freelance. I hit deadlines.

But…. 5.30am? That’s just inhuman.

And at 8pm, like clockwork, all exhaustion passes to be replaced by that bane of all night-owls, the dreaded second wind. I could stay up for hours! And hours! And, sickeningly, I know I’m going to.

By 11am, at which point I’ve been up for five and a half hours – yes, FIVE AND A HALF HOURS — I’m flagging, exhausted, eyes sagging, vision blurring, barely capable of functioning, yet far, far far too caffeinated to sleep. I’m not so much working as jabbing pointlessly at buttons and staring at a to-do list.

By 4pm I’m so highly caffeinated I’m twitching like a bunny rabbit while yawning all the same. Around 7pm, a wave of zombie tiredness strikes, but, of course, I can’t sleep, because I need to chat with Zac, cook, clean and help with homework.

And at 8pm, like clockwork, all exhaustion passes to be replaced by that bane of all night-owls, the dreaded second wind. I could stay up for hours! And hours!

And, sickeningly, I know I’m going to.

I CANNOT get to sleep at 9.30, or 10.30 for that matter. I waste hours on the internet – there is no English language reading matter in Harbin, unless I order it from Amazon, and Zac has lost his Kobo — knowing full well that I really should be in bed, feeling physically sick at the prospect of tomorrow’s ungodly start, but still staying up.

Some time between 11pm and midnight, or maybe 12.30, my lids start to droop, I switch the light off and I sleep.

And, without fail, my eyes snap open 30 seconds ahead of my 5.30am alarm. I’m knackered.

But I’m awake.

I try a couple of times to go back to bed after dropping Zac at his bus. I even change into pyjamas. I make great progress on my Game of Thrones book set, but I do not get any sleep.

I will jolt awake at 5:29:30 with a sense of panic, for sure. But then I will drift back to sleep, and nap till the decadently late hour of 7am, 8am, or maybe even 9.

When I whined about this on Twitter, a sleep expert assured me that 6.5 hours sleep was all I needed.

Now, here’s the thing. If you’re a night owl, 6.5 hours sleep from 1.30 to 8am is fine. But no amount of sleep is enough to compensate for the horrors of 5.30am, even if your body won’t let you sleep before 11.30pm.

If it’s 5.30am, it’s not a full night’s sleep.

I measure out my weeks in terms of 5.30am starts left to go. Though Monday dominates Sunday, and, if I’m honest, even Saturday night, it’s actually Tuesday that’s the worst.

On a Wednesday, I realise that simply by managing this wakeup I have broken the back of the week. Thursday? Well, that’s only one more to go until the weekend.

And Friday? That’s just FAB.

Because I know, as I drag my exhausted-but-weirdly-awake frame from bed to bathroom, and get Zac’s breakfast on the table yet again, that tomorrow I can sleep in.

I will jolt awake at 5:29:30 with a sense of panic, for sure. But then I will drift back to sleep, and nap till the decadently late hour of 7am, 8am, or maybe even 9.

Because, unlike Chinese mothers, I don’t have to take Zac to a full morning-to-evening schedule of classes every weekend…

We are really not doing the Chinese school thing right.

As Arnold Schwarzenegger once put it, we lack discipline.

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Handwriting has never been a strength of Zac’s. He’s a lefty, and started writing aged three.

Then, because current British thinking is that young children should be left to “experiment with mark-making” by themselves – which is ideal if children are “mark-making”, rather less so if they’re actually writing – he wasn’t taught how to shape his letters until he was six.

By that point he’d been writing for roughly half his life.

Further, once instruction did begin, he was taught how to shape his letters the right-handed way, not the left-handed way.

Then I had a go at helping him do things the left-handed way, with worksheets, but he doesn’t like to angle the paper, because it looks weird, and, further, I’m right-handed.

All of which is to say that, between his method, the school’s method and my stab at the left-handed method, his handwriting’s a complete mess.

He’s copying down the lyrics to The Carpenters’ Yesterday Once More at the same rate as the rest of the class. Who seem a little surprised by his unfamiliarity with this seminal classic of American music…

While we’ve unschooled, he’s written almost entirely on the computer, which has done wonders for his actual writing by taking the handwriting element out of the equation.

And stints in English and Balinese primary schools didn’t dent his tendency to print things, although, being older and so more coordinated, he printed things more neatly than before. Calligraphy didn’t take, either.

One week learning English in Chinese middle school?

He’s writing cursive. Painfully neat, but also fairly fast and fluent cursive.

He’s copying down the lyrics to The Carpenters’ Yesterday Once More at the same rate as the rest of the class. Who seem a little surprised by his unfamiliarity with this seminal classic of American music…

As surprised as his teacher will be when he has never heard of that worldwide celebration, International Children’s Day. .

Asked to write an essay, he writes, well, an essay. “But I think I did it wrong,” he says. “You’re supposed to parrot. Not even paraphrase. Just parrot.”

It takes Zac a while to get to grips with the nature of learning English in Chinese schools. Asked to write an essay, he writes, well, an essay.

“But I think I did it wrong,” he says. “You’re supposed to parrot. Not even paraphrase. Just parrot.”

For this is how English is taught in Chinese schools.

You fill in the “right” word in some slightly stilted sentences, or select the right word from a multiple choice sheet, or do a multiple-choice listening comprehension.

You practise a series of essays using sentence and paragraph templates, filling in the gaps with your own interests/hobbies/favourite subjects.

And, fundamentally, you rote learn the template. Divergence from the template is….

… Well, getting it wrong, frankly.

One reason why so many Chinese students, even the most able, struggle when it comes to getting into Anglo universities? Any variation from the required template, let alone initiative, independent thought or creativity, are actively frowned upon in English class from primary on.

“But, why now?” “Because it’s embarrassing. I’m the only English speaker in the school and everyone’s handwriting is better than mine.”

“What’s with the joined-up writing?” I ask him, as we look at his notebooks from school.

“I’ve just started doing it,” he says.

“Why?” I say. “I mean, it looks lovely. But, why now?”

“Because it’s embarrassing. I’m the only English speaker in the school and everyone’s handwriting is better than mine.”

No one has taught him cursive. He’s taught himself.

Largely, it appears, by copying his Chinese peers’ uniformly neat and excellent handwriting.

And, further, he would like me to buy him Tippex.

Go figure.

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I knew, of course, that maths as taught in Asia is some way ahead of the UK (and, for that matter, most of the West).

I had vaguely suspected that maths as taught in mainland China might also be some way ahead of maths as taught in the rest of Asia.

But I’d expected that Chinese 11-year-olds would do the sort of maths bright students cover in the UK at age 13-14, or possibly age 15.

Maths isn’t a strong suit of mine, but I did study it at the advanced level until the point when I could stop, and got the top grade in our age-16 exams.

So, while I realised I might have to refresh my memory of various topics when required to “help” with the homework, I did, at least, expect to be vaguely familiar with whatever Zac was learning in his Chinese school.

Further, because in unschooling Zac’s covered quite a bit of advanced maths, however patchily, I figured he’d have a reasonable start at doing maths in Chinese.

Given this is the no-calculator test that our brightest and best 11 year olds sit when they finish primary school, I wasn’t entirely wrong about this.

But nor, honestly, was I right.

After accompanying Zac on his 7am bus, which brings him in at the frankly ungodly hour of 7.45am – and that still, horrifyingly, makes him late for class – I repair home for a scheduled class with Huaze, wondering all the while whether the school would actually bother to call me if Zac were, say, found sobbing hysterically in the bathroom.

I figure that, if there’s one subject apart from English – which, obviously, doesn’t count, given he’s a native speaker – in which Zac can ever hope not to be bottom in his Chinese school, it’s going to be maths.

And, therefore, that that’s the area where we need to get his literacy up first and foremost.

So Huaze and I plough through what I understand to be his maths textbook and endeavour to break it down into manageable keywords.

By which I mean identify as many high-frequency keywords as possible that share characters in common, so that he’s building key vocab without being overwhelmed by too many new characters.

This takes a lot of time because — well, because Chinese uses an awful lot of technical maths vocabulary, whose dictionary translations I don’t understand in English.

I had only expected to have to learn the Chinese words for English words that both of us already knew. Or at the worst for English words that I already knew.

So it comes as a very, very rude shock to my system that, in his first week of Chinese school, poor Zac is studying rational numbers, the definition of rational numbers, and specifically a) something intuitive called “opposite number” and b) something rather less intuitive called “absolute value”, a concept that, prior to Google and Twitter assistance, I had firmly assumed was some sort of “Chinese thing”.

Absolute value, for the record, is not a Chinese thing. It’s an international thing.

But I hadn’t heard of it because we don’t introduce it in the UK until advanced, and optional, post-16 maths.

In case you care, absolute value is represented by these special line brackets – | |. It expresses the distance from zero and it’s always positive.

Zac is required to operate with this doing sums and word problems involving negatives, positives, “non-negatives”, “non-positives”, fractions, decimals, and multiple series of interlocking brackets, all at the same time, with answers including ±, and lots of explanations using algebra which he finds helpful but I do not.

Well, I think brightly, after more Googling. At least they’re not doing equations with it. Because equations with absolute value typically produce multiple possible answers, not all of the simple ± variety either.

I mean, there’s no way they can expect 11-12-year-olds to do equations using absolute value, can they? That would just be insanely difficult…

There are certain linguistic peculiarities about doing maths in Chinese that make it, well, not exactly easy. (Research suggests that the Chinese use a different part of the brain to do maths from English speakers, which could be one reason why doing maths in Chinese gives me a headache.)

On the plus side, China uses Arabic numerals, just like we do, except when problems are written out as word problems, and Roman letters for the variables in equations, just as we do.

Chinese geometric terms are often pleasingly logical (three-angle-shape, long-square-shape, equal-side-three-angle-shape, six-angle-shape…) — because the roots of Chinese are, well, Chinese, you don’t have to mess with Graeco-Roman terminology like you do in English.

Further, the Chinese use Western measurements in the standard Roman abbreviations, except when problems are written out as word problems. Chinese measurements are relatively intuitive – “thousand-metre” is a kilometre, even if “part-metre” is a decimetre, not a centimetre.

It is helpful, rather than unhelpful, that the character for “metre” is also the character for “rice”, because it means we don’t need to learn yet another bloody character and (not always a given in Chinese) both sense of the character are pronounced the same way.

On the down side? Well….

Fractions, while written the same way, are enunciated as “four under three”, rather than “three over four”.

Chinese does not say “two to the power of three” but “two-of three-times-square”.

Whether a number is increasing or decreasing by a percentage, it always “increases”, though when it decreases, it “increases” by a negative percentage. When reading numbers out, you have to express “zeroes” that we leave silent.

And then there’s the whole 10,000 thing. Whereas we count big numbers in thousands and multiples of thousands, Chinese counts in “tenthousands”.

So a million (1000×1000) is not a million but “one-hundred-tenthousand”, two hundred thousand is “two-ten-tenthousand” and their big number is neither a million nor a billion but 亿 (10,000 x 10,000, or hundredmillion).

Adding to the joy of nations, 亿, like “one” （一）, is pronounced “yi” (the two words sometimes also have the same tone, though not when pronounced together).

When it comes to decimal places, these are expressed logically enough as fractional parts — albeit fractional parts that count in tenthousands rather than thousands. The first decimal place is a “ten-part”, the second decimal place is a “hundred-part”, the fourth decimal place a “tenthousand-part”, the fifth decimal place a “ten-tenthousand-part”, and so on.

All of this is the sort of thing that makes it quite difficult to follow along in class. But it isn’t the half of it.

Chinese maths is taught rigorously by concept, and the concept drummed in by true-false word problems about the concepts being introduced, which are not dumbed down.

It’s not, actually, a bad approach for any child who’d like to study sciences at university. But it’s an incredibly hard one to catch up on, because it requires a lot of technical terms to have been learnt already. Some of these use common characters. Others don’t.

Chinese children are expected to be competent in arithmetic and number bonds, again drilled into them over years of practice, with numbers up to 17, the first few powers of the most common numbers, the most common decimals and fractions, and how the decimals relate to the fractions. It means they’re very good at computation.

A Chinese child will know – that is to say will have learned through repeated drilling – not only how many millimetres in a centimetre and how many centimetres in a metre but how many millimetres in a metre and how many decimetres in a kilometre, etc.

At least 10 hours of the 50 hour school week that Chinese middle schoolers undergo is devoted to maths.

And, further, quite a lot of the maths involves copying down word problems using Chinese characters from the board and then solving them.

Which is easy if you can write Chinese characters as fast as a Chinese middle school child. Rather less easy if you can’t.

Still, by his third day of school, Zac’s actually copying sums down from the board into his notebook, and doing some of them.

Meanwhile, Huaze and I are sweating blood over Skype trying to find a way to chunk down the impenetrable wall of characters Zac faces on a daily basis into a manageable list of words.

A Chinese middle school Year 1 maths textbook doesn’t use the baby syntax that Chinese as a Foreign Language texts use. It’s horrible stacks of clauses, generally without either endings, word breaks or pronouns to give you a clue as to how they fit together, just the odd 的 or 得 – and fewer of those than you’d hear in speech because it’s written, and formal writing at that.

We spend an excruciating half-hour on a problem to which we both know the answer, trying to establish why it means what it does (a word meaning “explain/show” has been used in two senses: first as a request to “explain” and secondly in reference to the placement of a point on a number line “the point representing X on the number line…”).

There’s an absolute heap of maths vocab that we haven’t thought to cover in Zac’s patchy preparation for this massive endeavour. Whole stacks of words for “correct”, “explain”, “demonstrate”, “if…then…”, “in … the case of”, “let it be…”, “work out”, “calculate”, “solve”, “statement”, “proposition”. And I do mean stacks of words.

It takes us at least an hour per page, often longer.

And then I grab a taxi, and head off to collect my spawn. And every time I take the taxi, I wonder if I’m going to find a bloody, tearful puddle at the other end. And, amazingly, I don’t.

“Mum,” Zac says, as we plough through yet more maths vocab. “You realise we don’t actually use that book much in class?”

“WHAT?” I say. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” he says. “The impression I get from the kids in class is that this is basically a posh boarding school that’s quite hard to get into.”

At the time, the significance of what he’s saying doesn’t register. All I really know about the school is that it’s a good school, that takes foreign students, teaches English in English and has some foreign language support.

It takes, literally, weeks for me to, well, do the maths, to work out from reactions when talking to locals and from the attitudes of the kids in school, that this is probably one of the top five schools, certainly one of the top ten schools, in Harbin.

That’s a city bigger than London, the capital of a province with over 40 million people, or roughly double the population of all Australia – and able students from all over the province are shipped into Harbin to board at the best schools.

By the very fact that it gets any children at all into Shanghai Jiaotong and Beijing Tsinghua universities, two of the top universities in a country of 1.6 billion people, this is an academic elite school. (The Ivy League, by contrast, serve a population less than 20% of that.)

The maths in any Chinese school is going to be difficult for any Western child, not only because the literacy required is high, and the teaching style is different, but because the maths itself is harder.

The maths in an academic elite school? The maths that’s taught to some of the most able children out of a population of over forty million, in a society that thrives on academic achievement and takes maths very seriously?…

“I think the book’s kind of easy,” Zac says. “I think that’s the standard textbook all schools use. But they all seem to do different, harder worksheets. And what we’re doing in class is a lot harder than what’s in the book.”

To my eternal discredit, I ignore this. It CAN’T be much harder than what’s in the book. He must just think it’s harder, because it’s in Chinese.

Ignorance, as they say, is bliss.

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We’re both fairly quiet in the taxi to the school.

What had seemed like a really good idea at the time – put Zac in a Chinese school for a term or so so that he could improve his Chinese – now seems more and more unnerving.

Not least since Huaze, out of the goodness of her heart, has shared a list of the Chinese characters that Chinese children learn in primary school – more than 2300 of them.

Neither of our Chinese is good enough, at this point, to appreciate the full horror of this, though I, at least, am terrifyingly aware of how very little Zac knows simply as a percentage.

What I don’t realise is this. Zac’s peers haven’t just learned over 2300 characters. They have learned, and know, many, many thousands of words made from those characters, and, probably, many words and characters above and beyond the prescribed list (some of the characters we know, for that matter, are not on the primary list).

I’ve been so proud of Zac’s ability to read a couple of pages of Chinese text – without pinyin!

It hasn’t yet dawned on me that we’re still at the level where our playground Chinese texts have word breaks added to make it possible for us – real Chinese text, of course, is a stream of characters without spaces, with only paragraphing, full stops and the occasional other mark to help.

Nor has it dawned on me that our playground Chinese texts feature deliberately dumbed down grammar, moron-level foreigner-friendly constructions.

I mean…. It’s two whole pages of CHINESE! That’s hard, right?

I’ve been so proud of his stilted little essays with their imperfect grammar, lovingly input on his computer, his painstakingly neat handwriting, perhaps to the level of a less-able Chinese urban kindergardener, or a rural child just entering Grade 1.

I’ve cheered him up after doom-laden encounters with the primary word list by pulling down vocab lists – from US college courses! From British GCSEs!

But, the fact remains that, although he’s some way beyond the level required to gain an A* at GCSE Chinese – not least because he’s comprehensible to native speakers – he’s pretty damn close to functionally illiterate.

Ulp.

But we’re in this now. We’re committed. He, and, I realise, I too, are going to have to give this our best shot. Because he is going to need an absolute tonne of support.

Work? Yeah, that’s going to have to wait.

We toddle up to the first floor for more paperwork with Mrs He. Mother’s Chinese name. 山婷.

Father’s Chinese name? Oh god. He doesn’t have a Chinese name, so they leave him off the form.

Last school. I condense Zac’s alternative schooling history and go with his London primary, for ease. Shacklewell, I say.

What’s the school’s Chinese name? I pause. They need something Chinese to put into their system.

“Xia-ke-jing,” I say. It’s a blend of Chinese sounds and Chinese meaning that I’m very proud of, until I have to write the character for jing (井 – “well”, a nicely elementary character that I can actually cope with), because my tones are off.

They think Zac should study half the day in the middle school with his peers, half the day in the university with other foreign language learners.

That sounds good.

“What about uniform?”

His class teacher will arrange that. Books, too.

He can have lunch at the university. No, no, I say. He needs to have lunch with his peers. And play time with his peers.

Fine, says Mrs He. But today he’ll need to have lunch at the university. I’ll be with him.

And off we trot to the other side, a long ten minutes across this enormous university campus, through grounds still full of snow and black ice.

His teacher greets us warmly. There’s a Chinese lesson in progress, and neither of us have any clue as to what’s being taught.

Oh! He’s starting class.

But he doesn’t have books! Or a uniform!

No problem. She’ll buy them at the weekend.

There’s something else they don’t have. I don’t know what it is, a “zhuozi” – Zac doesn’t know, either.

Oh! A desk.

Oh god. Neither of us even know the word for desk.

Oh god, oh god, oh god.

He can use the teacher’s desk.

She shows him where the loos are.

And, in he goes, with neither pen, nor paper, nor books, in his jeans and winter coat, to a class of 40-odd Chinese kids, all neat in their matching nylon tracksuits, to sit at the back of the class at the teacher’s desk and – well, follow along as best he can, I guess.

It IS immersion, after all.

I look through the meshed window. He seems alert, focused, interested – and unintimidated. Result!

I go off for a sneaky fag, and immediately get lost. It dawns on me that one constructive thing I could do while I’m here is teach Zac his way around.

The school building is split. One wing holds the senior high students, aged from 14-16, with labs on the ground floor, third graders on the first floor, second graders on the second floor, first graders on the third, teachers on the fourth; the other wing is for the junior high students, but follows the same pattern.

There are nine classes of 40-50 children — small classes for China — in each year group. The form rooms are clearly labelled: 初一，初二， 初三，高一， 高二， 高三 etc. Zac’s in 初四.

Right. Well, that seems easy enough.

I pop back up to the form room. They’re on a break between lessons.

Zac is barely visible. He’s almost submerged beneath a pile of excited, hyperactive, curious, puppyish Chinese children.

It’s rather sweet. And he seems to be not uncomfortable with it.

I go to the staffroom. Is there a timetable? Yes, there is a timetable. But it’s handwritten in Chinese.

An English teacher translates it for me, and I write it down.

It appears that most of the mornings will be spent on English, Chinese and maths. Such fun stuff as there is — the science, the history, the geography, the art — happens in the afternoon, when Zac will be at the university.

Heyho.

Can I have a maths book? If I have a maths book, we can look at the characters with our teacher and try and learn some of the relevant words.

Zac’s learned the most obvious words – operations, fractions, numbers, basic geometry, positive, negative and the like. But, clearly, there is more than that that he’ll need to cope…

They’re studying “rational numbers”. OK.

A blare of walkie-talkies, and the kids file down to lunch, teachers stationed every ten metres to control the chattering crocodiles. I extract Zac, and we head to the university canteen, where someone lets us use their card to buy lunch in exchange for cash.

“The Chinese teacher’s handwriting is TERRIBLE!” Zac says accusingly, over jiaozi and noodles.

Even Chinese institutional food, for the record, is delicious. It’s extremely hard to have a bad Chinese meal in China, provided you’re not vegetarian or squeamish.

“Ummm….” I say, wondering how to break this to him.

Probably the thing that most surprises me about Chinese culture is that in a country which has historically valued conformity, rote learning and obedience to rules in everything from literature to painting, the traditional art of calligraphy is one of individuality, of broad expressive brushstrokes, of extreme creative freedom. The fluid, splashy style of some Ming dynasty calligraphy sits so insanely at variance both with our Western ideas of calligraphy and their tedious twiddly porcelain that I will never, ever understand it.

“I suspect her handwriting is actually very good,” I say. “She’s probably using calligraphy. Or joined-up writing, anyway.”

“I can’t read it,” he says. “Not a single character.”

Oh god.

It is, with hindsight, blindingly obvious that in a Chinese school teachers will use cursive, the equivalent of joined-up writing, when they write on the board.

But I hadn’t considered the handwriting issue at all.

Just like English, Chinese print has a range of different fonts, and the characters can be quite wonderfully graphically designed in logos. Fonts are easy enough to cope with, given practise, despite the fact that characters can look very different in their different fonts (氵 is very commonly found on the left-hand side of the character, and I’ve seen fonts where it looks like a twig sprouting branches: despite the fact it’s called “three drops of water” some fonts simply join the drops up).

As in English, people have many different styles of handwriting.

Now, reading handwriting is easy enough when you only have 26 lower-case and 26 upper-case letters to worry about. Or, for that matter, where you’ve only got 35 of each, as in Cyrillic. I imagine Arabic being slightly fiddlier, because the way you write the letters changes according to their position in the word – but character-based languages are a whole new ballgame.

When you have thousands of, often, incredibly complex characters, reduced to their simplest legible form in cursive by omitting parts that only a native – or someone as literate as a native, should such a person exist – seems to know can safely be omitted, and you only know a bare few hundred of them, and you don’t know the words that they’re writing either, it’s…

Well, it’s damn near impossible, frankly. Not least because as a learner you are taught a painstakingly specific stroke order which is then, once you’re literate enough for cursive, thrown out of the window.

Oh Jesus.

I’d thought, initially, that Zac could just focus on the spoken comprehension and not worry about the literacy too much. But it’s simply not possible. To do anything, he needs the literacy. You can’t be in middle school and illiterate, d’oh!

Aaarrggghhhhh….

“Did you understand much?” I ask.

No. No clue. “OK,” I say. “To make your time in Chinese classes worthwhile, why not copy the characters down from the board anyway? That way, you’re developing your handwriting.”

We go for coffee and lemon juice in a nice little coffee shop on campus. It feels rather civilised.

We’d understood from the middle school head that there was a 13-year-old Korean in Zac’s Chinese as a Foreign Language class, but the young adults who are waiting there are all…. well, young adults.

There are two Korean girls in their early 20s, who’ve studied Chinese at university. A 16-year-old Korean, rising six foot, with a Hoxton fin and black framed specs, who’s been in school here for a couple of years. A 23-year-old Korean, so dark and stocky that he looks north-eastern Chinese to me.

And, umm, Zac. Aged twelve. And here, as at school, in an ethnic and linguistic minority of one.

They’ll share their books, which look considerably harder than the ones we’ve been using, but one hell of a lot less daunting than the stuff being taught in middle school.

He has neither pen nor paper, because we thought today was a meeting, rather than the start of school. The class is 听 (listening, or comprehension), his second 听 of the day – for yes, Chinese is such a difficult language that native speakers continue listening comprehension classes into high school (and hate them).

Obviously, Chinese as a Foreign Language is taught in Chinese, and the textbooks are all in Chinese.

But new words are spelt out in pinyin in the vocab lists, and translated into English, so at least he has that to help him. And the characters go up on the board in neat stroke order, not in cursive.

I race around the campus trying to find a shop. Oh. There’s one across the freeway.

I buy a notebook for Zac, a notebook for me, and a stack of pens, and bring them back to class.

He’s focused, and alert. That’s one of my key worries gone. I thought he might be glazed, but he’s not. Which, given he spent much of his time in his English primary school glazed, is strike one for Chinese school.

And then I go for coffee.

Mrs He appears at the end of class. She wants to talk about buses. We need to get the bus at 7am tomorrow, the two of us. There isn’t a middle school bus, so he’ll have to take the university bus, then run very quickly to his classroom so as not to be late.

Class starts, in Chinese middle school, at the ungodly hour of 7.25am.

She chalks up characters on the board. It’s a map of the bus stop, in Chinese.

We don’t know the names of the roads she’s referring to, nor do we know the characters. It’s near us. Good.

I repeat them back, write them down in pinyin, and hope to god that Google Maps comes up trumps.

Does Zac have a mobile phone?

He doesn’t. I’ll get him one, I say.

More stuff about buses. He needs to learn the “paizi”. Paizi? Oh, the registration number.

I’m to come in with him.

OK.

Oh! I see. An entire fleet of coaches are pulling up in the parking lot. Yes, he does need to know the registration number.

That’s our bus. That gold one there. It’s full of staff from the university, and, almost inevitably, we end up taking someone’s usual seat.

I make smalltalk with our neighbour, who’s not a professor but a teacher. Zac doesn’t.

There is nothing in his notebook from class. He’s written nothing in his text books. He’s comprehended nothing of his comprehension, though he did have a reasonable idea of what was going on in something I’ve never heard of called HSK.

This was always going to be a sink or swim exercise, I think. And it’s painfully clear that he’s going to sink not swim, because, for all that this school (highly unusually) offers language support, I have sent him in woefully, woefully under-prepared.

I grapple with a whole raft of sick, stressed emotions. I’ll come in with him in the mornings, pick him up in the evenings. Get him a mobile phone so he’s contactable.

Show him around the site so he’s not wandering lost on that horrible cross-campus commute: the campus, in both area and population, is more than 30 times the size of his 400-child London primary.

Be constantly positive, which, given I’m not a morning person, will require getting up at least ten minutes before him to have a smiley face on and breakfast on the table, not to mention having dinner on the table every evening.

And, perhaps if I look at the maths book with our teacher, we can break all those godawful characters down into handy keywords for him.

“I think you’re doing brilliantly well,” I say. “It’s such a huge achievement, coping with school in any foreign language, let alone Chinese. I’m really proud of you.”

Frankly, I think to myself, understanding anything is a huge achievement. Not running screaming from the room is a huge achievement.

Because, even in the light version which he’s experiencing – 7.25-4.30, not 7.25-5.40 – Chinese school is very, very much harder than Everest Base Camp.

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There’s not a lot to Beidahu: two hotels, some half-built condos, and a ski centre, an hour and a half’s drive from the centre of Jilin city.

But we don’t need a lot. And, thanks to this wonderful offer, we have a room in a Chinese five-star hotel.

With bath robes, slippers, a tub, a fake log fire, views over the slopes, a bar with Western spirits and a restaurant with a Western-Chinese breakfast.

And… there’s a ski park!

A U-pipe, followed by a great long series of bigger jumps and little jumps, which Zac descends with brio — and only wipes out once!

There’s a cafe on the mountain top, itself a winter wonderland in the fresh, soft, late March snow.

There are a welter of runs, for skiers of all persuasions, many of them almost deserted, some of them pleasingly fast.

Though I’m not entirely sure that an ungroomed – indeed ungroomable – gully through trees and over bumps is exactly what most nations would class as an intermediate ski slope, Zac nails it.

I don’t. But I do make it down in one piece.

It’s wonderful, Beidahu – or maybe we’re just lucky with the weather.

Everything’s open, the snow is fresh, there’s barely a lift queue, and though Beidahu lacks the high mountain scenery I love in the Alps, or the splendid isolation of our last day at Yabuli Sun Mountain, the skiing is pretty darn cool.

My little adventure down a “powder run” – the Chinese version of off-piste, and some way above my capabilities – ends in a long walk back through the trees with some boarders from Changchun, and Zac never quite gets to ride the T-bar lift…

But, as we bus it back to Jilin to spend the night before our train back home, we are, both of us, glowing and happy.

Sore thighs and all.

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Harbin Xi railway station sits way out in the west of town. It’s an enormous red brick affair, a grandiose arch that towers over windswept, snowclad plazas, its waiting room a blaze of dominant glass.

The Chinese government completed it last December as a stop on a brand new line that runs from here to Dalian, the most northerly port to survive this savage winter with its sea still liquid. North of Dalian, the waves stop, the salt sea clots and the foam turns into floes.

Harbin Xi (HaXi) station is so new it doesn’t even figure on Google Maps, so new that the stores are almost empty, so new that signs direct you to a metro that does not yet exist.

They have been building Harbin’s metro, on and off, since 1973, when tensions with Russia were high enough for the army to dig a web of shelter tunnels below the city

They were supposed to finish the first line in December, to tie in with the new station: by 2020, Harbin will be one of 40 Chinese cities with its very own metro.

So new is Harbin Xi, in fact, that the apartment blocks and malls around it are not yet finished. It sits like an island in a whirl of construction, an island of bricks, concrete, cranes, and girders that will merge, inevitably, into the rest of the city, like globs of seaweed meshing in the Sargasso Sea, great fantasies of pink concrete, topped with domes, towers, minarets and crenellations.

What are they waiting for? The metro?

It’s a strange city, Harbin. An urban sprawl, but on the edge of nowhere, a city born from railways.

But for the river, there’s no barrier to its expansion across these empty, rolling plains. New blocks spring up in isolation, and sprout siblings. Luxury, designer living enclaves, complete with malls, on a road that feels as if it goes to nowhere, but is just another suburb in the making – framed by vast hoardings advertising lifestyle dreams in Chinglish.

And more people, it feels, are coming to this city every day. Unless a crash comes, and the cranes, like in Dubai, just freeze, one day, in mid-air, and everything stops: unless (until?) someone stops believing, the economy stops growing, and the house price bubble bursts with a bang that will shatter the world.

Harbin Xi station might look and feel like a vanity project, but it’s not so simple. The new high speed rail line connects up the major cities in three Chinese provinces, home to well over 100 million people – that’s more than Mexico, more than five times all Australia.

Over ten million people live in Harbin, more than in all of London or New York: over six million people live in Dalian, more than in Los Angeles, Singapore or Finland.

We’re headed to Jilin, the second city of Jilin Province. A tiddler by Chinese urban standards, its population is a little larger than New Zealand’s.

It used to take more than five hours to cross the 200-odd kilometres between the two cities. Now it takes barely two. It used to take nine hours to travel 900k to Dalian from here. Now it’s barely five.

The propaganda has it that this is the world’s fastest alpine bullet train, capable of travelling at speeds of 350kph and higher in temperatures from -40°C (-40°F) to +40°C (+104°F), the range that’s needed in this savage climate, with its long biting winters and brief scalding summers.

And in a world where the average educated Chinese citizen trusts their government roughly as much as we trust ours – well, that could be quite something.

Trains in China do many things. They transport goods and people from place to place. They open up the country to its own citizens, and foreigners, too. As vast construction projects, they drive economic growth. And, in environmental terms, they help mitigate the increase in air traffic and aviation emissions.

But, most of all, with a line like this, and a station like this, the high-speed railways tell a story: a story of the triumph of Chinese engineering, Chinese science, Chinese construction and Chinese power.

Underlying this? Anything the Japanese do, the Chinese can do it better. (And if you’re not au fait with some of the reasons China and Japan don’t get along, I recommend you read this post.)

Every science museum we’ve visited in China has sections devoted to high-speed rail, sections to the space programme – the National Railway Museum in Beijing has a bullet-train simulator for kids to drive.

A fast, slick train like this – or even a fast, slick train like the Maglev in Shanghai, which will travel at 400kph if you catch it at the right time of day – tells you you’re in a superpower.

Yes, still. Yes, even after the Wenzhou disaster.

And the train we’re taking is super-special. It’s not just a high-speed train. It rides on high-speed rails. No “snow on the line” excuses up here in the Siberian north: these rails are ice-proof in temperatures as low as -40.

There’s barely a queue at the ticket office.

I could, in fact, have bought our tickets the same day, a rare thing in China. The halls are hardly empty, but still they echo: there are spare seats aplenty, capacity for growth.

And it’s a splendid train. Slick, modern: we’re riding second class, which is close to first class on any train I’ve ridden in Europe.

There are uniformed hostesses and conductors, an upscale snack trolley with a smartly-clad salesman, though still a hot-water dispenser to fill up your bottle of tea or hydrate your packet noodles…

It’s every bit as smart as the brand new train we took from Beijing to Shenzhen, leaving frozen lakes and birch forests in the morning, and arriving in a city where we could wear sandals and short sleeves before dark. (That’s like travelling New York to Florida, Adelaide to Brisbane, or London to Belgrade in a day – by train.)

But…

There’s no speedometer. Like every Chinese bullet train, there’s a digital display in every carriage. Like every Chinese bullet train, it shows our destination.

But this is the only bullet train I’ve ridden in China which does not show the speed. We average a little over 100kphedit: 150kph to Jilin.

And I wonder, as we amble out in search of our ski bus, whether the emperor really is wearing clothes.

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A bit of English language Googling around bilingual schools in Harbin finds a site for teachers of English as a foreign language, and a job advertised at a bilingual school.

I Google around the school’s name in English, plough through a lot of investment sites, and eventually dig up the Chinese language site for the school. Or, rather, the school group, which seems enormous.

According to Google Maps, never reliable in China, it’s about 7k from here, which is further than I’d like, but still doable. And, since it looks like local options aren’t going to work out, this sounds like our best, if not our only, bet for Chinese school in Harbin.

My plan C? Walk around the university area until we hit an affiliated school that wants some English teaching and will take Zac in exchange for that.

But this one looks good, if huge. From what I can tell, they get kids into Beijing Tsinghua and Shanghai Jiaotong universities, which has to be a good thing, right?

I show Zac the website. He thinks it looks OK.

And I pick up the phone.

“Hello!” I say. “I’m English. My Chinese is not so good. We live in Harbin and I want my son to study at this school. He is 12 years old. Do you speak English? Or can I speak to an English teacher?”

She doesn’t. But there’s someone who does! RESULT!

It’s a Chinese-style bilingual school, which is to say that kids have lots of English lessons, and that English teaching is done in English, not Chinese. Everything else, she explains, is in Chinese.

Would we like to come and see the school? Well, d’oh, yeah! I Skype the Chinese address to my phone, we trot down six flights of stairs, out into the snow, and grab a taxi.

It’s enormous. A decent-sized university campus, in fact, with its own roads, still deep in snow. The blocks seem to stretch back miles.

Like almost every other school I’ve come across on my explorations in Harbin, this one seems to have moved to a gigantic campus out of town.

It takes us almost half an hour to get out of the city centre and onto Haping Lu, a long, fast road that runs through apartment blocks into an expanse of huge sites stranded amid snow and larches, our driver pulling over every so often to try and locate a block number, or ask directions.

There are factories. A university. An institute. More factories. What looks like a disused ski slope. A school – no, not that school! We want THIS school! – and then we’re at some lights, and turning, into something that describes itself as an “Institute”.

It’s enormous. A decent-sized university campus, in fact, with its own roads, still deep in snow. The blocks seem to stretch back miles.

“Sorry about this, Zac,” I say. “I think I’ve got the head office address by mistake. Let’s just go in and find out.”

It seems…. so big! We head through the insulation curtains, past gaggles of students loitering at the cashpoint, to reception.

“Hello!” I say. “I’m looking for the middle school.”

The lady thinks I want to study at the institute. No, I don’t want to study at the institute. I want my son to go to the middle school, but I think the middle school is not here.

Oh! The middle school is here!

We need to go to the fourth floor, room 404. That way.

I cast a wary eye over Zac. He seems less intimidated by this place than by the last school. That’s good.

Zac can study at the language institute. “No!” I say. “He’s 12 years old! Too little! I want him to study at middle school! With the 12 year olds! With his friends! In Grade 1.”

Mrs He, who seems to look after foreigners, is an assertive lady of rising 60, with the classic English approach to people who do not speak her language, which is to say she says everything very loudly and clearly in Chinese several times over until you understand.

It doesn’t, in fact, work badly. It gives me a headache, but I get everything she says.

Zac can study at the language institute.

“No!” I say. “He’s 12 years old! Too little! I want him to study at middle school! With the 12 year olds! With his friends! In Grade 1.”

Can he speak Chinese?

“Yes,” I say. “He understands more than I do but he doesn’t like to speak it.”

Mrs He asks Zac a couple of baby questions – his name, his age, how long he’s been studying Chinese – which he answers in a tiny voice to her satisfaction. Can he write Chinese?

“He knows about 300 characters,” I say. “But he writes on the computer.”

Mrs He shakes her head and purses her lips. Writing Chinese on the computer is not the same as writing Chinese.

Did he go to school in Kunming? No, we had private lessons, with a teacher. We were only there a month.

“But,” I say, in words that will come back to haunt me. “He’s able to do the maths. He’s very good at maths.”

She calls the middle school. A flood of rapid Chinese directions – a building with a red something, over there, to the right, behind something. And a number to call when we get there.

And off we trot, down the side of the campus, down a road lined with little shops, restaurants, even a coffee shop with smart green chairs, trying not to go arse over tit on the black ice.

“What was it she was saying about your jeans?” I ask Zac.

“She was saying they’re too thin,” he says. “I need to wear more layers.” Say what you like about the Chinese, they’re never backwards in coming forwards.

Do they have other foreigners? I ask, rowing rapidly back from my initial enthusiasm for complete immersion in an all-Chinese environment. “Oh yes, yes,” she says. “Lots of foreigners! Korean! Russian! Lots of foreigners!”

It’s about a ten minute walk from the university end of the campus to the middle school, a collection of substantial five-storey buildings with a snow-covered playing field.

It’s the tail end of playtime – they have playtime! Wow! That is, I’ve heard, unusual for China – and a couple of littlies are playing tag beneath the basketball frame, while big boys in green tracksuits shovel snow.

Zac’s face lights up at the sight of the kids playing tag.

OK, I think. This could actually work.

In we go, to an echoing, enormous hallway, and down a corridor to the head’s office.

She’s a lovely, warm woman, who seems genuinely pleased at the prospect of having Zac in her school. Do they have other foreigners? I ask, rowing rapidly back from my initial enthusiasm for complete immersion in an all-Chinese environment.

“Oh yes, yes,” she says. “Lots of foreigners! Korean! Russian! Lots of foreigners!”

She gives us a tour of the school. Line after line of labs – chemistry labs, biology labs, physics labs, computer labs. A library. A quiet reading area. A piano. Classroom after classroom of kids sitting neatly in their tracksuits, studying quietly.

Class sizes seem small for China – there are 40-something kids to a class, rather than the standard 60. Though, if there are any Koreans and Russians in the school, they don’t look anything other than Manchurian.

The heads still snap round at the unkempt white child, and his unkempt white mother, but Zac seems to feel it less this second time around.

What time does school start? 7.20! JESUS. And it finishes at 5.40pm. That’s over 50 hours a week. The commute’s going to add another hour or so to every day, and then there will be homework.

And… We’re done. What do we think?

It’s a no-brainer. Not only because the head seems actively keen to have the laowai in her school – for, I suspect, a combination of curiosity, Chinese hospitality and sound commercial reasons — but because to request time to think would probably cause offence.

He’ll start… I consider “tomorrow”, then bottle it… on Monday.

The head seems disappointed when I call Huaze to clarify a few things, not least because I could probably clarify them in Chinese, but speaking Chinese for more than a minute or so gives me a headache, and I’ve spoken a tonne of the bloody language today already. It doesn’t, it seems, give Zac a headache.

The uniform? His class teacher will arrange that. Yes, they can assign a child to keep an eye on him while he settles in, and they’ll try and find one who speaks some English. Yes, I can have his timetable. He’ll need a card for his lunch money. His teacher will arrange that. She’ll also arrange the books.

What time does school start? 7.20! JESUS. And it finishes at 5.40pm. That’s over 50 hours a week. The commute’s going to add another hour or so to every day, and then there will be homework. In the European Union, adults aren’t supposed to work more than 48 hours per week.

So… Back we go to Mrs He.

Mrs He enquires whether Zac will be boarding. We don’t even need to look at each other to answer that one. Hell to the no!

Mrs He enquires whether Zac will be boarding. We don’t even need to look at each other to answer that one. Hell to the no!

Through high-volume repetition, Mrs He teaches me the words for school fees, registration deposit, book fees, uniform fees and bus fee. The deposit is 1000 kuai, the fee for a term is 5500 kuai, uniform and books will run me maybe 1000 kuai, and the bus fee another 1000 kuai. Oh, and he’ll need money for his lunch card.

I don’t have the cash on me, I don’t have a Chinese bank account from which to transfer money, and, unlike most Chinese bank accounts, which will typically allow withdrawals of thousands of kuai daily, my English card will only let me take out 2500 kuai per day. I explain all this. Can I pay the deposit now and bring the rest when I come next week?

Yes. Do I have a car?

No, I don’t have a car. I could bring him in a taxi?

No, a taxi won’t work. He’ll need to take the bus. Some complicated question about a specific type of bus. I don’t know which bus. I don’t know all these bus words! Why not the public bus?

No, no, the public bus won’t do. The university bus?

We resolve to leave the bus issue until next week – it’s clearly a cause of great concern for Mrs He, for some reason. I also need to bring photos when we come next week.

Ah! Forms! Oh god! Chinese forms.

I am actually putting a child into Chinese middle school – not primary school, but MIDDLE SCHOOL — when he cannot even write his name.

With a sick and sinking feeling, I realise that, though both of us can say, read and type our newly-acquired Chinese names, neither of us can write them.

I am actually putting a child into Chinese middle school – not primary school, but MIDDLE SCHOOL — when he cannot even write his name.

I can’t write any but the most moron-level Chinese characters. Zac, who has been learning characters by writing them, although writing connected prose only on the computer, can. So it’s up to him to do the form, as the girls in the office input our details into the computer.

Mother’s name. Shan Ting (山婷) – “Mountain like in high mountain, Graceful as in…. Graceful, yes, that’s right”.

I know my first name has 女 as its left radical, and that the second character has a lid, a box, a stalk and some lines, but that’s not going to help me write it. I find a text with my Chinese name in it, and hand the phone to Zac so he can copy it, but Mrs He has already written it for him in beautiful, looping cursive.

Child’s name. Shan Zhansheng (山战胜） – Battle Victory Mountain. Oh! He can remember it. He’s just not sure which way the sail of the yacht-shaped radical in the second character (战) should face or what radical goes with 生 in the second one (胜）.

At least both of us can write our surname – 山。That would have been highly embarrassing.

Mrs He corrects him on the second character in Chinese. “Month like in month!”

“The month-side,” I say, helpfully, naming the character as it is called when it’s a part of another character.

Sex – male. He copies this (very basic) character. Nationality – English. He knows that one. Date of birth – easy enough. It’s remarkable how fast his writing speed comes on with a terrifying Chinese teacher standing over him.

Interests? Skiing, I say.

“You just told her ‘chemistry’,” Zac says, accusingly. (Both “skiing” and “chemistry” are transliterated huaxue, and I’m still not at all sure of the tones on “chemistry”, despite the fact I’ve heard the word several times today.)

“Playing the computer,” he adds, in Chinese. This goes down like a cup of cold sick.

We are to come back on Monday, at 9am, with the money. And then all will be arranged.

If we’re going to do more Chinese skiing, it needs to be now. Because, it is slowly dawning on me, while Zac’s in Chinese school, we’re going to be doing very little else but school.

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Among the unremarkable apartment blocks of Ping Fan, an unremarkable suburb of Harbin, sits an unremarkable low brick building, muted against the snow.

This is 731. The base of Unit 731, home to some of the worst atrocities in this part of China during World War II, a place where men, women, babies and children were infected with hideous diseases then dissected – alive, and without anaesthetic, because either mercy killing or anaesthesia might affect the state of the organs the doctors wanted to inspect.

The doctors, scientists and soldiers at Unit 731 froze people alive, limb by limb, allowing frostbite to develop, then gangrene, amputating the gangrenous section of the limb, then repeating the process with the living stump, and moving onto the next limb, until all that remained of the victim was a head and torso.

On the waste not, want not principle, they’d then inject the traumatised, limbless victim with bubonic plague, and dissect them alive to track its progress.

At Unit 731 doctors watched as a mother in a gas chamber threw herself over the body of her baby to try and save him, and took careful notes as human beings were compressed in a pressure chamber until their eyes popped from their skulls.

You’ve heard of Josef Mengele.

But you’ve probably never heard of Shiro Ishii, a medical doctor, a distinguished professor, a genius microbiologist with a photographic memory, a decorated soldier, a Lieutenant-General in the Imperial Japanese Army, and the man behind Unit 731.

The few low buildings that scatter the small site are a fraction of what was once here. The Ping Fan base of Unit 731 stretched over six square kilometres. There were breeding facilities for plague rats, fleas and more. Cells for victims. Laboratories. Dissection rooms…

And, of course, creature comforts for the 3000 men who worked here. Shiro Ishii saw to it that his men had a library, a swimming pool, an auditorium for movies, a brothel in which to rape Chinese “comfort women”, a bar in which to unwind — and, of course, a Shinto temple, at which they worshipped dutifully.

Probably the single most chilling image at the site, in fact, is a photo of the men of Unit 731 at prayer.

Unit 731 was just one of many such bases scattered across Manchuria. From these, the Imperial Japanese Army dropped porcelain bombs full of plague fleas onto Chinese towns, sprayed POWs with plague bacteria from the air, poisoned water sources with typhoid, injected people with cholera and withheld water from them.

Their purpose? To track the progress of diseases spread by biological warfare, and how best to contain them.

Ishii, a father of seven, handed out chocolates full of anthrax to starving children in Manchurian cities. He and his subordinates infected human beings with cholera, smallpox, gas gangrene, tetanus and a haemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola, and started outbreak after outbreak of bubonic plague.

And, because chemical weapons were part of their research brief, the men gassed POWs and civilians, too.

When Unit 731 retreated, they released their plague rats, and abandoned possibly as many as two million chemical weapons. Plague killed tens of thousands of Manchurian Chinese after the war; abandoned chemical weapons injured many and still pollute the soil today.

Emperor Hirohito, the father of Japan’s current emperor, Emperor of Japan both during World War II and until his death in 1989, established Ishii’s unit by Royal Decree, met him at least twice and almost certainly monitored his progress carefully.

Every nation has its own perspectives on the war that shaped and defined the last century.

In England, World War II is a heroic solo battle against Hitler’s armies as an isolated island; in the US, it’s a gallant and voluntary intervention to save Europeans from their own problems. In both nations, there’s a firm and erroneous belief that, while the Red Army engaged in mass rape in Berlin, our own troops didn’t.

In Russia, the focus is on the Great Patriotic War, a war in defence of the motherland that started in 1941. In China, it’s the People’s War Against Japanese Aggression, and it started in 1937 – although Japan occupied this part of China in 1931, and installed a puppet government led by the “Last Emperor”, Pu Yi.

In Japan… Well, the Japanese government didn’t acknowledge Unit 731′s activities until a scant few years ago, and has never paid compensation or contributed to the chemical weapons clean-up. Many Japanese nationalists deny wartime atrocities and pay tribute to convicted war criminals at a sacred shrine: the current Prime Minister Abe has repeatedly hinted that he will do likewise.

Ishii swore his staff to silence. Many of his team went onto stellar careers in pharmaceuticals and even medicine after the war. A bare handful of the men who worked at Unit 731 have expressed their deep regret for the things they did; others have said they’d do the same again.

It’s a surprisingly muted place, Unit 731. In a time of rhetoric between a nationalist Japan and a resurgent China, of competition over oil and islands, the tone is calm, almost dry.

Sombre galleries explore the beginning of Japan’s chemical and biological weapons programme, “inspired”, so to speak, by the trenches of World War I, lay out maps of facilities, recreate scenes in muted silver sculptures, lay out rooms of instruments salvaged from the site.

The focus, here, is on Chinese suffering. No mention of the Russians and Mongolians who died, of the American POWs deliberately infected with disease at Mukden: the names of the dead recorded here are all Chinese.

When the Japanese retreated from Manchuria, they blew up as many of these bases as they could. But not all.

And the world knew. The Russians knew. The Chinese knew. Truman knew.

So, in a world where even the men behind S-21 have finally gone to trial, why have most of us never heard of Shiro Ishii?

In Ishii’s world, the Japanese military code dictated death rather than surrender, the Emperor was a living god and, thanks to the same sense of racial superiority that helped dehumanise 731′s victims to the degree that the men who mutilated and murdered them referred to them as “logs”, Japan could not lose the war.

So when Hirohito surrendered, Ishii was so distraught that he experienced what seems to have been a nervous breakdown.

Not that that stopped him bringing his data back to Japan, hiding it, then faking his own death – until the US caught up with him in 1946.

Ishii’s crimes were not the issue. A war crimes trial would have put the fruit of his labours on open view. And, unlike Mengele’s torture-murders, Ishii’s had genuine value: they had produced a treatment for frostbite, a series of vaccines and, what was of most interest to his captors, the foundations of a world class biological weapons programme.

And, as the US had only started its biological weapons programme in 1942, the military was desperate for Ishii’s data.

So Ishii negotiated immunity from prosecution for himself and every one of his subordinates in exchange for the painstakingly detailed notes of every single murder they had committed, for photos of the diseased organs of vivisected children, for records of the most effective systems for delivering both chemical and biological weapons.

And, of course, they got it. As well, apparently, as money, gifts and “entertainment”.

Which is why you’re unlikely to have heard of Shiro Ishii.

The man who had overseen the live dissections of infants and pregnant women without anaesthetic, who had killed tens of thousands with bubonic plague and typhoid, lived peacefully in Tokyo until 1959 on his army pension.

In Harbin? Here’s how to get to Unit 731. And, if you’re interested in World War II, you might want to read about the last soldier of World War II, who hid out in the Indonesian jungle until 1974.

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