Category Archives: shenzhen elsewhere

firecracker aesthetics

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Yesterday was 初二 or the second day of the lunar new year and firework play continued with children of all ages setting off bright red crackers and sparklers and colorful blooms.

In the early afternoon, I walked along the City River, where over sixty years ago, the PLA liberated Tianjin. And here’s the point: Walking past aligned rows of apartment buildings,k grey lots of orderly trees, and the straightened riverbank – indeed, the sky seem slotted against the horizon – I suddenly understood the necessity of fireworks. Not only do colorful flames shine bright against the muted landscape, but also disrupt the relentless and massive grid that organizes this spaces.

Rumor has it that the Tianjin Fire Department charged 100,000 rmb for a license to sell firecrackers this year, up from 50,000 from last. I’m not sure what Shenzhen Municipality charges because I didn’t think to ask. But here, in a winterscape of star,k light and modernist squares, I craved red flames and the power to soften hard lines endlessly looming.

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What is harmonious society?

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I am in Tianjin and heard the following definition of harmonious society:

什么是和谐社会？和谐社会就是富人更富，穷人更文明！

What is harmonious society? The rich become richer, and the poor become more civilized!

Yes, one of the joys of Tianjin remains the city’s justifiably famous ability to “talk”. Indeed, the city has a reputation for being the hardest audience in the country, producing some of the sharpest wits in the crosstalk tradition.

春运: Where’s home?

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From Jan 19 through Feb 27, 2011 we float through the happy daze of 春运 or “Spring [Festival] Movement.” Indeed, the scale of Spring Movement merits its own website. Possibly of more interest to anthropologists, the scale of movement provides another opportunity to wonder about how the tension between hometown feelings and making oneself at home shapes Shenzhen identity.

The Municipalitaty estimates that during Spring Movement, Shenzhen’s land, sea, and air borders will be crossed over 9.4 million times, an increase of 700,000 from 2010’s official Spring Movement stats. However, folks have already started travelling and some, like me will leave during Spring Movement, but return after. Or leave before and return during? So again, shakey figures. Should we go with an estimated 10 million holiday related border crossings?

Other facts shed interesting light on the scale of Shenzhen’s Spring Movement. During these five weeks, the city guarantees that everyday, 9,000 buses will be leaving and returning to the city; in addition to the City’s 1,640 chartered buses, another 2,000 charted buses have been loaned to the City; the downtown and west railway stations will fill 960,000 seats before Feb 3; the airport guarantees 500 flights per day.

The point is that Spring Movement is not simply important, but also one of the events that the government takes very, very seriously. Indeed, going home for the holidays is, among my friends, a self-evident good and therefore a necessarily political event; for officials, problems during Spring Movement can be carreer ending. For many migrants to Shenzhen, Spring Festival makes immigration meaningful. Some may have come to try something new and find new opportunities, but most understand (and endure) the process of migrating to Shenzhen in terms of families elsewhere.

A friend explained to me the feeling of eating with her family.

“I used to think it was really annoying to be with my parents because they nag and stick their noses where they don’t belong. However, once in Shenzhen I had to eat by myself. Everytime, I eat alone, I really miss the feeling of being with my parents. As soon as I get home, they rush down five flights of stairs, carry my suitcase for me, and bring me into a warm room with a big table of food. It’s so comfortable and I’m not lonely, not like in Shenzhen.”

And then she sighed because after the holiday, she’ll return to Shenzhen, alone, to continue working at a job she doesn’t really like so that she can continue to send remitances to her parents, who in turn, will save the money for the next Spring Festival reunion.

what does it mean to be a foreigner in shenzhen?

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Yesterday I was a judge in the semifinals of the First Shenzhen Expats Chinese Talent Competition. An interesting experience both because the event itself expresses the Municipality’s determination to globalize and because it reflects the increasing presence of foreigners in Shenzhen. Indeed, the fact of the event points to the new symbolic visibility of foreigners in Shenzhen and the importance of the foreign to Shenzhen’s official representation of itself both at home and abroad. Specifically, the City organized the Competition as part of a search for a foreigner who can both represent Shenzhen’s foreign community (within China) and be a bridge between China and the World. Thus, who wins and how that winner is marketed will tell us all sorts of interesting things about the changing (or possibly solidifying?) symbolic valence of foreigners in Shenzhen.

According to Paul Shen, Executive Deputy Editor-in-Chief of Shenzhen Daily, which along with the Office to Promote English organized the event, there are now 480,000 foreigners in Shenzhen, excluding Taiwanese and, of course, Hong Kong residents. Half a million foreigners in Shenzhen, at least another half a million Taiwanese and Hong Kongese compatriots, in addition to the previously estimated 14 million Mainlanders in Shenzhen. Parenthetically, we can but hope that the ongoing census will give us some sense of the diversity that actually constitutes Shenzhen.

The eleven competition participants came from Norway, Korea, Russia, Indonesia, Columbia, Ghana, Toga, France, New Zealand, Malaysia, and the United States. Ages ranged from 6 and a half to married with children. Technical skills also varied enormously as the Malaysian and Indonesian participants were overseas Chinese, while the Korean, Norwegian, and American competitors were students in Chinese schools, and the rest were adults who had come to Shenzhen for business purposes and were learning Chinese accordingly.

Now, judging other foreigners’ various levels of Chinese disconcerts me because there are so many standards, most obvious of which might be glossed as technical skills – fluency and accent and control over advanced linguistic patterns come immediately to mind. However, there are also more pragmatic standards to consider. Significantly, pragmatic criteria for determining what constitutes linguistic competence are less measurable than the merely technical; interpersonal skills, cultural competence, and knowledge of appropriate historic contexts are abilities that are differently linked to technical prowess. Most foreign language programs (both in China and the United States) evaluate and test technical skills, while I tend to stress the importance of pragmatic skills, in part because my technical skills aren’t so great (yes, when flustered or angry or excited my tones are even less stable than they are when I’m concentrating), but also in part because the ability to appreciate technical skills itself falls into the cluster of pragmatic talents that differentiate speakers.

I have been fortunate to participate in Shenzhen’s performing arts circle and thus have heard technically excellent Mandarin and Cantonese; with an interest in and translator of Chinese literature, I have also read fabulous poetry and stories. I continue to watch movies and theatre and go to poetry readings in my native English and have preferences and standards for evaluating the quality of someone’s English. All this to make a rather banal point, most Chinese, like most Americans are fluent in their native language, but they are not bards. Consequently, I rarely decide to interact with someone simply because they are competent speakers of English or Chinese. Instead, I make friends based on how and what someone has to say – personality and insight, poetry and conviction appeal to me more than do accent and grammar, even when grammar itself is the precondition for performing personality or expressing opinions.

At the competition, one of the Shenzhen Daily student reporters asked me if I was looking forward to the Universidade next year? Had I been thinking more clearly, I would have answered that I’m looking forward to December’s Fringe Festival and next year’s Architecture Biennial. However, I wasn’t thinking, so I said, “No, because I don’t care about sports.” And that’s my point, however obliquely stated. Nationals from many countries constitute the Shenzhen foreign community. Each of us has different reasons for living here – economic, familial, educational, and personal. That we have emerged as a topic of municipal concern reminds us (again) the extent to which we (all humans, not just holders of foreign passports) do not live merely for ourselves, but rather in and through and for the webs and minds and expectations of those around us. A Batesonian moment this competition: human beings co-evolve and thus how we engage each other is the city – politics in the broad sense of social ecology.

人人网–everybody´s(?!) net

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this weekend, a student asked me to join her renrenwang network. i have not been particularly proactive in joining online networks primarily because i spend too much time online as it is. point du jour is that while i was signing up, i discovered that the network included links to the major u.s. colleges and universities, as well as to universities throughout the world. stunning the extent and creativity of these networks. shocking as well the (comparative) extent to which u.s. online networks are not integrating global links.

i know, my reaction makes me sound like an ¨american peasant,¨ but for the past few years i have been increasingly aware how provincial my upbringing and education was. at the time (1983) studying chinese seemed so far outside the norm that my father asked me if studying mandarin would help me succeed negotiating the hong kong stock exchange! and yet somewhen along the line, not only did the world catch up to the internationalism of china, but also surpassed my preparation to live in that new world.

wow. 30 years of reform and opening and it is a whole new world. wow again.

across sandy paths

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wild illuminations swirl

home, in southern pines

more illuminated pines, here.

architectural patriotism

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Today is my last day in NYC. Tomorrow, I head to North Carolina to visit parents and then back to Shenzhen. My immanent departure has me wondering about if I’m going home, or not. I’m wondering because I say “I’m going home” about North Carolina and Shenzhen and not New York, which I go to but I feel more “at home” in New York than in either NC or SZ.

What’s up with that?

In Shenzhen when people express pride in the city’s architecture, I agree that some of the buildings are great. Indeed, I walk the streets photographing those buildings in various stages of construction. And, as mentioned earlier, this attention to Shenzhen details has taught me to care, both for the city in particular, but places in general.

However, being in New York this month has reminded me about the deep structure of architectural patriotism. New York is the one American city that moves me to unthinking patriotism. I see a building and think, “great city”. See another, “oh yeah, best city in the world”. Turn the corner and marvel at sunlight flickering across baroque facades, “is it any wonder we’re the world’s capital?” I ask myself.

My response to New York is visceral. Carnal. Second nature, so to speak. When outside Yew York, I don’t think about it, don’t fantasize about particular streets, don’t plan summer weekends in central park. But when here, each building hails me, each street tempts me, and each neighborhood anticipates my pleasure.

Before I came, I met with a former student, who left Shenzhen to study in New York, where he has learned to miss the street vendors of Yuanling (“who really do have the best street food,” unquote), the heady rush of Shenzhen nightlife, and the infinite possibility that all the construction continues to promise. He loves New York, too. Just like I love Shenzhen. And yet. Pretzels and falafel don’t bring him home, even as 米粉 still does not comfort me when I am most distressed.

More to the point, I’m wondering about the social uses and abuses of my sentiments. These unthinking responses to New York both affirm my identity and limit me. In New York, I have a stronger sense of who I am than I do in either Shenzhen or North Carolina. New York gives me a confidence that I do not feel in either of my physical “homes”; New York also gives me a hopeful certainty that no matter what happens today, tomorrow yeah, I’ll walk down the right street and all will connect.

Nevertheless, this unthinking rightness about my place in the city also confirms my prejudices and ignorance. In New York, I don’t need to see the dignity of Yuanling vendors, the odd differences in Fengshui architecture, and the unexpected (yes, to me) twists of Mandarin (let alone Cantonese-inflected Mandarin) conversations because all that messy otherness exists comfortably beyond my sentimental peregrinations. In Shenzhen, however, I see all this and thus rarely mistake my feeling of ease with a true perception of the world. Indeed, even when I’m feeling wonderfully situated, I’m watchful. Careful. Precise. All this attention because I sense and sometimes approach another river, that unthinkingly flows through my friends just as deeply as New York flows through me.

Yet what my life in Shenzhen has taught me unconditionally is that we are all also sojourners, some of us more obviously than others.  Even if still living in the town of our birth, most of us intuit that this place isn’t “home” because it isn’t what it was. Again, the distance between childhood and contemporary homes is more obvious in Shenzhen than in New York, but even North Carolina is erecting new buildings and neighborhoods that have radically restructured the landscape and in turn, transformed the meaning of “hometown”.

In Buddhist Mandarin “return home (回家)” means to return to one’s true nature. Accordingly, we are all “homesick,” yearning to return to our place of true belonging. And now I’m wondering if home can’t be other than where I am, why does it feel like life is elsewhere?

shenzhen in nyc, literally

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This morning while wandering in China Town, I stumbled upon the “Dapeng Hometown Association” or the hometown association for Dapeng villagers. The Association was established in 1982.

Curious, I went in and ended up speaking briefly with an elderly woman, whose life trajectory speaks to the twisting connections that constitute possible Shenzhen identities. Or outlying identities, as the case may be. Mrs. C explained that she was born in Indonesia, but in 1960 returned to her father’s hometown, Dapeng to escape anti-Chinese policies. In 1964, she swam to Hong Kong, finally settling in NYC in 1985. Mrs. C said she had joined the association because Dapeng was her father’s hometown, although her mother was Indonesian.

I mentioned Xichong and Dapeng Suocheng. She agreed that there was great seafood to be had. We smiled at each other. Mrs. C then took a phone call pausing long enough to suggest that I return to talk with the man in charge of the Association.

Uncanny moment that has me thinking all sorts of thoughts about fated encounters and entwined destinies…

calligraphy in nyc

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This is a post about the relative ghettoization of China studies within the U.S. academy and its concomitant marginalization in U.S. discussions about wither the post Cold War global world. I approach the topic not in search of lofty insights, but with practical intent; how do we learn to talk cross-culturally when most of the time we don’t have enough experience to make comparison meaningful?

Short answer: we need to cultivate wisdom, rather than pursue knowledge. Long answer meanders through musings on practice theory, calligraphy, and globalization. Continue reading →

why shenzhen?

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yesterday i gave a presentation on the shenzhen book of changes project. one of the questions that i was asked afterwards was, if shenzhen is so environmentally compromised, why do you love it?

i answered that i had experienced hospitality and generosity in shenzhen. indeed, that my husband and friends have all taught me how to be a better human being. and then, as i was walking away, i realized something else. i don’t think of myself as loving shenzhen. i think of myself as walking the city to understand what is happening here. i think of myself as an offering a highly subjective, partial english-language glimpse of the city for those whose only access to the city would otherwise be through journalism. i certainly hope that people who read noted come to shenzhen to learn and to understand and to participate in the life of the city; in other words, i hope that my blog might direct people to interesting and meaningful encounters with the city, rather than function as a substitute for personal experience.

all this to say, i bring a quality of attention and conscious intention to my inhabitation of shenzhen. this orientation has enabled me to see the beauty of shenzhen, land reclamation, fake foods, dank slums and squatter encampments, notwithstanding. so perhaps, yes, i have loved shenzhen more than any other place. but  it may be more accurate to say that learning to be attentive to shenzhen is teaching me to love where i am, today.