Author Archives: Mary Ann O'Donnell

龙年元旦: Thoughts on why not to hate [Dashan or Chinese students]

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I’ve been thinking about the three poisons (ignorance, attachment, and aversion), but especially about aversion because we frequently cite aversion as a reasonable response to the world as we find it. When we look to explain aversion, we shift attention from whether or not aversion itself is a problem to the question: is our aversion justified or not?

Consider, for example, the quora question, “Why do so many Chinese learners seem to hate Dashan (Mark Rowswell)?” Mark Roswell provided a succinct analysis of why westerners feel aversion toward Dashan:

“In short, the reasons seem to be as follows:

1) Overuse – people are sick and tired of hearing the name Dashan;

2) Resentment (Part A) – Dashan’s not the only Westerner who speaks Chinese fluently;

3) Resentment (Part B) – Being a foreign resident in China is not easy and Dashan gets all the breaks;

4) Political/Cultural – People wish Dashan had more of an edge;

5) Stereotyping – The assumption that Dashan is a performing monkey.

Yes, yes, and yes. But. If we’re giving our time and energy to figuring out why we hate Dashan, then we’re not giving or time and energy to (1) finding ways of politely acknowledging a conversational gambit and then adroitly changing the topic to one of common interest; (2) working through our own ego investments in speaking Chinese well: ‘Why,’ we wonder, ‘aren’t the Chinese complimenting moi?’; (3) being happy for someone else’s good fortune; (4) being the critical change we want to see in the world in general and China in particular, and; (5) becoming more proactive in our own lives. Continue reading →

年30

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We ate, we walked, and enjoyed flower market vestiges. May everyone have a wonderful Year of the Dragon!

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out with the old…

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I walked along the old Shenzhen Bay Coast today. Reclaimed land to the south, old Shekou to the north.

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Whatever happened to knowledge as, well, knowledge?

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Robin Peckam of Saamlung directed my attention to a recent article, The 20-Kilometer University: Knowledge as Infrastructure. The article presents Urbanus’ proposal to turn the 20 km corridor from Luohu to Shenzhen University into an open university campus, with university functions distributed throughout the city. The design aims to create an unconventional civic center in which “learning” is a metaphor for civic engagement or inhabiting the city. Inquiring minds want to know, what’s wrong with that? Continue reading →

train station blues

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The Spring Transport (春运) continues. The railway has moved waiting areas outside the station, and people with placards announce departures and lead travelers into the appropriate terminal. The place names — Chengdu, Wuhan, and Nanning — remind me how large the country and diverse Shenzhen’s immigrant population.

I also visited the Luohu Commercial Center, where the English spoken by the various shopkeepers caught my attention. It seemed as if copied out of a stereotype of Hong Kong movie because it was so standardized, “Missy, copy watch. Missy, DVD.” In English, speakers shared the same accent, vocabulary, grammar, and inflections despite the fact that they spoke different Chinese dialects and had different levels of formal education. Some spoke Cantonese, others Mandarin, still others conversed in Hakka and I think I heard Chaozhou language, but the English had smoothed out into something recognizably “Luohu”.

So, I’m thinking about the way that situations — like immigrating to Shenzhen or working at the Luohu Commercial Center, for example — mold us into expected types, making it easy for our diversity to be discounted because rendered superfluous. I’m also wondering how we train ourselves to see beyond expected type, not only when interacting with others, but also when presenting ourselves because the differences actually make us interesting.

china’s 2011 clinker production capacity

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It’s true, in searching for statistics about how much cement has been used in Shenzhen (I keep hoping some social statistically minded engineer will do the calculations), I stumbled across China’s cement web. One of the articles, relevant to aforesaid search, was the clinker production capacity of China’s ten largest cement producers in 2011.

As of Jan 1, 2012, China’s big cement ten are, in order: Hailuo (海螺水泥)、Southern (南方水泥)、China United (中联水泥)、China Resources (华润水泥)、Sinoma (中材集团)、Hebei East (冀东水泥) 、TCC (台泥水泥)、Sunnsy (山水集团)、Huaxin (华新水泥)、and Hongshi (红狮集团). Together they have the capacity to produce just under 581 million tons of clinker, annually. Just how much can be built with all that cement? Well, the Empire State Building weighs in at 370,000 tons. This means that ten Chinese cement factories produce the mass equivalent of 1,570 Empire State Buildings.  Continue reading →

Collaboration with Elephanthouse Imagines…

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Yesterday went to the Fotanian Open Studio in Fotan, HK. Good friend, Elia is the creative energy behind Elephanthouse (象舍), encouraging collaboration and participation to repurpose calligraphy — ink and rice paper and water. Recently, she and I began exchanging a traveling scroll on the 往生咒, a chant to help departed spirits crossover to the Pure Land. Our scroll was displayed during the open studio. Pictures, below.

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of submission and changing the world…

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Last night had dinner with friends and learned (1) that Marxism in Mandarin means “materialism”; (2) rumor has it that the Party is promoting Buddhism as a way of preventing the growth of Christianity, and (3) submission empowers us to change the world.

[update Jan 16: realized last night that what I am interested in is a continuum of engagement — surrender-resignation-acceptance-submission. I skipped over the resignation bit in discussion below and that is where I should have headed. Instead, I jumped directly into the differences between surrendering and submitting. Nevertheless, am leaving original post, MAO]

About Marxism: I had been used to thinking in terms of “the dialectic” and “socialism — change the world”. However, when YQ made a joke about China being more Marxist than Marx, the Chinese laughed and I did not. One of my friends asked, “But you’ve read Marx, right?” Me nodding. “Well then you know about 唯物主义 (dialectical materialism).” Apparently, the joke is that Chinese materialism is no longer dialectical just in your face materialistic.

About buddhism, which links to recent post on Hongfa Temple. Friend’s neibu (内部 insider, but specifically within the Party) information is that there are two many Christians in China and, as a general rule, they are more frightening than buddhists. Reference to the Boxer Rebellion. Another mentioned that buddhists accept (接受) reality.

I gleaned three things from this conversational logic. (1) Christians (unlike materialists) change the world; (2) Buddhists are harmless, and; (3) 接受 in this context is surprisingly close to the English idea of submit. Continue reading →

butt-talk public administration

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Yesterday, in the midst of a bout of competitive reminiscing about personal experiences with Party corruption, Western misperceptions of China, and general human idiocy, one of my friends emphasized how ridiculous the world was by saying, “That’s when I finally understood the phrase butts decide the topic (屁股确定话语).”

This was fun. My friend had been telling a story about post-earthquake reconstruction in Wenzhou. Apparently, all the funding, including international relief, had been directed to specific villages, leaving roads between villages nothing more than rubble. However, when word came down that a Canadian official was coming the next day on an inspection tour, suddenly local officials leapt into action, working together to repair the stretch of road between two villages in one night. She clapped her right and against her left palm, emphasizing the unfortunate reality of butt-talk public administration. Continue reading →

三洲田村：Narrating the Shen Kong border

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So, review of Thirty Years of Shenzhen Villages continues from Episode 7 because for some yet-to-be-ascertained reason, episodes 5 and 6 aren’t available on youku net.

In 2005, construction workers unearthed a 10 kilometer section of the ancient tea route (茶马古道). This road once linked eastern Shenzhen to the new territories, more importantly (for the sake of narrating the Shen Kong border), this road connected to Sanzhoutian Village (三洲田村, literally “Peninsula Paddy Village”), where Sun Yat Sen (孙中山) lead the Sanzhoutian First Uprising (三洲田首义). In retrospect, Sanzhoutian became known as the first explosion of the Gengzi Incident (庚子事件), protesting the Boxer Indemnity that the eight colonial powers imposed on the Qing Dynasty.

Sanzhoutian is a rich symbol in Shenzhen history because it provides deep historic links between the SEZ and Hong Kong at multiple levels. Continue reading →