People here have been complaining that the younger generation always fancy for an easy and better life while they can't do any practical work well. My father cannot find anyone among his Masters and Doctors to sketch simple documents and has to do it himself. The old archivist, who will retire next month and whom I'll then succeed, keeps saying that a conservatory graduate who majored in Artistic Management and interned here last year messed everything up in documenting archive articles and she had to rework what she did.
The contempt over career-oriented education in China produces among college graduates more theorists than actual doers. They usually learn how to do what only after they are assigned a job. And then, they get tired of simple and repetitive office trivialities before becoming aware of the significance of his/her work in the whole situation and doing better accordingly. Indeed, since unfairness in promotion is too often heard of and witnessed, many are never interested in doing better and redirect their (sense of) accomplishment to daily life. Which is not bad anyway.
Thus there's a lack of "educated" people willing to do "low" but important office jobs such as proofreading, hence no surprise to see omnipresent wrong characters in books. (I guess it's not a lot better in America: The book I'm reading now -- The Daughter of the Maestro by Floria Paci Zaharoff, the daughter of Mario Paci, the conductor of the precursor of Shanghai Symphony -- published by iUniverse, is missing a lot of punctuation marks.)
Archive managing is another example. Everyone knows that, for a Chinese symphony orchestra with a history of (nominally) 130 years, its archivist has to be a double-professional in music history (general as well as in the specific context of Western music in China) and archive managing. But I am neither. More ironically, while I also provide bilingual program notes for every event hosted by the orchestra, would-be musicology graduates seem all to aspire to become full-time scholars secured in the purity of the academia. They seem to say: "Writing for the public? No, it's too simple to display our proficiency." as if they, musical professionals since they started schooling, really know what the lay-world wants. Therefore, while I'm never quite able in music analysis, real professionals don't care. And the public is ill-treated.
Still, there're friends who say I should've sought a better job. The music circle here, after all, is not a nice place to be in, and the status quo of the orchestra is far from exciting. Name me anyone who's familiar with music history, able at archive managing, bilingual (not in this style though), learned in musicology, good at writing for the public, and -- most importantly -- willing to do all this for a monthly salary of less than $700 in an uninspiring, state-owned ensemble (SOE?), I'll leave immediately.
