The Two Taras: Same Name, Very Different Lives

November 16, 2010 — -- Meet Tara and Tara, two twenty-something, college educated women pursuing their professional and personal dreams. One lives in China and the other lives in the United States.

Tara Tang, 25, starts her morning every day with sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves and soy milk before heading to work as a lawyer with Lenovo, a China-based multinational computer technology corporation.

Tara Walsh, 29, eats her oatmeal every morning before heading to work as a kindergarten teacher at a charter school in the Washington, D.C. area.

For both women, career is a passion and they have worked hard to get where they are. Both spent six years in college.

Tang said that her goal is to be general counsel for a major company. The starting salary for an attorney like her is $12,000. In the United States, a starting attorney makes almost triple that, $35,000.

She said that her family always stressed the importance of education.

"Imagine how many people we have and how many vacancies the university can offer, you know. The supply and the demand is totally crazy so everybody has to study very hard," Tang said.

In China, the number of university graduates like Tang soared from less than one million in 2000 to more than 5 million by 2008.

The Chinese curriculum is tough, placing a strong emphasis on memorization. Families become consumed preparing children for the gaokao, or high test. The nine-hour test determines which students get into Chinese colleges and universities.

Over in the United States, Walsh said that she was aware of China's emphasis on education.

"I think that culturally they have an expectation of good grades and standards for school, and that education is really valued and is a reflection of your family as well. I don't think every culture in America values education the way that we should and the way that we need to be so our economy is competitive with China in the future," Walsh said.

The fight to get into university in China is tough, but the fight to get a job after university is equally so.

Many recent grads with impressive white-collar degrees are forced to live in tiny rooms, hours outside the city in villages known as "ant tribes."