In Hyderabad, we’re teaching at a railway school. My mother went to a railway school. When we discovered this cosmic congruence we looked at each other and giggled.

A railway school is a government institution for the children of railway workers. During the worst times of her life in China, my mother went to the People’s Railway Second Middle School. She wasn’t the child of a railway worker—her parents, my grandparents, had been physicians at a city hospital in Guangzhou. But it was the Great Cultural Revolution, the start of the Down to the Countryside Movement, and my grandparents were thrown out of the city by Mao Zedong’s officials for re-education. They were separated from one another, each sent to a distant rural village to work as farmers and to administer medicine in the countryside.

My mother spent her days as a kid barefoot, catching frogs from swamps and cooking rice on tree branches in a stone stove and squeezing past water buffaloes in rice fields. Her parents sent her away to be adopted by family friends, railway workers, so she could go to middle school. When she was twelve she wore a dress with flowers to class. The teacher asked the students to write essays condemning capitalistic acts of narcissism and posted the essays on the classroom walls. Other teachers ostracized students who were bored in class, who weren’t obedient, who had other ways of thinking and different ways of doing and didn’t like to follow suit.

But there was one teacher at the school who noticed my mother’s penchant for math. He thought she had potential. He gave her extra math problem sets to work on after school, and asked other teachers to do the same in their subjects. He encouraged her to join the school orchestra, and convinced the schoolmaster to let her. She became very busy. There were suddenly many things to learn. In her last year at the railway school, she unexpectedly passed the national high school entrance exam with high marks, and was able to attend the top high school in the city.

In her twenties, my mother moved to America. In her forties, she became a doctor in San Francisco. She still remembers her math teacher, thinks about him from time to time, tries to look him up to find him and say thanks.

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The Railway Girls’ School in Hyderabad is, of course, rather different from the one my mother attended in communist China. Amongst government schools in India, I’d say Railway is exceptional, with authority figures like Mr. Prabhaker and Headmistress Jayathi—energetic, devoted, full of good humor. Stlll, at its heart, the pedagogy of the Indian government education system focuses on rote memorization and test-taking preparation. There seems to be very little emphasis on questioning sources, literary analysis, and the kind of individual critical thinking that is so essential in an American liberal arts education.

The thirty girls that Srilekha and I teach are intelligent and full of life. Some are avid talkers, others are quiet and more reflective in writing. Last week we asked them to write stories about their ambitions. It looks like we’ve got some future pilots, fashion designers, doctors, and school principals here in Hyderabad—below, I’ve posted a mini photo story featuring a few of the girls’ responses.

We want to encourage the students to pursue their ambitions. But we want their ambitions to be true ambitions—not dreams, wishes, fantasies. We’ve tried to push the students to think about exactly how they might achieve their ambitions. And what if they fail a test? Or they’re told by a teacher that they can’t succeed? What if their communities disapprove, or their husbands prefer them not to work?

The girls learned how to use a camera last week and are beginning to work on their photo stories. One group is making a photo story about a fictional girl who reaches her goal to become a doctor. We’re asking them to think very carefully about how she will respond to obstacles she might face.

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When my mother became a doctor in America, my family became very comfortable. They gave me a liberal arts education. The things I’ve puttered over in my life include structuring an essay about The Sorrows of Young Werther and learning how to make French onion soup on the burners of my dorm room kitchen.

In India, we’re often asked why we came here to teach in a program like The Modern Story. In America, I’m rarely asked why—many are comfortable enough in their own lives to be able to work for others’ social equality, and cultural tourism itself is taken as a manifest value.

My family, though, did ask why. Why I’d run toward a place that was anything like what they’d run away from. They had run away from the effects of the Great Cultural Revolution in China, the stunting of opportunity and free thought and individual autonomy. Away from a country straining between tradition and modernity, extreme poverty and extreme wealth juxtaposed in the same city. Or perhaps it was that I had the luxury of running away, only temporarily, from what they had worked toward. They had worked for comfort, to live in a place with ubiquitous showers and clean streets, to offer a liberal arts education to successive generations.

And it’s with that education that I began to want to go to India. I felt a kind of restlessness, a large ambiguous attraction to the country.

My mother is fascinated by the western canon. She’s making her way through audiobooks of the Odyssey and the Divine Comedy. I take pleasure in seeing the wooden street carts outside Railway Girls’ School with rusting pastel paint and thin spokes on big wheels. That way, when my grandparents tell me stories from their childhood about buying sugarcane from street vendors, I can picture the scene.

What is your ambition? from The Modern Story on Vimeo.