Category Archives: shenzhen fieldnotes

和平县阳明镇新塘村: field-tripping

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新塘村：new tang village, sunrise

the attitudes of young shenzhers, especially the children of the city’s upper classes, confound their elders, who really don’t know what to do about a generation that hasn’t experienced material poverty. almost thirty years into the shenzhen experiment, a certain material standard of living has become the norm among these children. they expect to have new clothes, pocket money for snacks, and the latest technological gadgets. indeed, if newspaper reports are to be believed, they are a wasteful and lazy group, who take long showers, play online games, and shirk homework responsibilities; in the language of american pop sociology, shenzhen’s young people think they’re entitled not only to what they have, but also to whatever they want.

to counteract their children’s sense of entitlement, wealthy shenzheners tell stories about impoverished childhoods and hungry farmers. these stories are as unsuccessful as those my parents told me: when i was a child, we walked four miles to school; eat all your food because there are starving children in africa. on the one hand, i think these stories fail because children don’t have the experience to imagine beyond their immediate lives. on the other hand, i think these stories fail because children know (even as i knew) that our parents aren’t going to radically restructure their lives to help either starving africans or farmers. instead, these stories aim to change the behavior of children, not to ameliorate social inequality.

nevertheless, adults still try and children still play along. on the 26th and 27th of october, our middle school went on a field trip to greater tang village, yangming township in heping county, in heyuan city (河源市和平县阳明镇大塘村) which is considered an impoverished area (贫困区). according to the heping township officials who hosted us, the official definition of “impoverished” earns less than the national average income but still has enough to eat. usually, families can afford school fees up through middle school, but often have difficulty meeting high school costs, let alone university expenses. according to a people’s daily report the 1,000 odd villagers that make up greater tang village (an administrative territory which is composed of 15 “natural” villages) demonstrate the fact that even if the richest villages are in guangdong province, their are villages that haven’t started getting rich, let alone keep up with the coastal villages. in chinese the expression for these poor cousins is “后无追兵” or “no following soldiers”.

the purpose of the trip was two-fold. our school wanted to give our students a new perspective on the privileges they enjoy as wealthy shenzheners as compared to impoverished students. our yangming middle school hosts wanted their students to be inspired to study even harder to break out of the cycle of poverty. as we discovered during the two-day fieldtrip, many of the yangming students had older brothers and sisters who had dropped out of middle school or not gone to high school in order to begin laboring in places like shenzhen. indeed, a fifteen year-old ninth grader told me she wouldn’t bother taking the high school entrance exam and go right to work after graduation from middle school next june.

the yangming high schools arranged host families for our students and teachers. two of us were assigned to a home, where we ate, slept and were shown the village. yang ming eigth grader, huang shanshan hosted me and my student nicole. shanshan and her family live in new tang village (新塘村), one of the 15 natural villages in the greater tang administrative village nestled between rocky slopes, rice paddies, chicken coops, and family gardens. xin tang village is a hakka (客家) settlement, where paths and shared walls connect the homes to each other, creating a densely populated space. there is a clear spacial division between the village and cultivated areas. indeed, the relative care given to the rice paddies and gardens was striking in comparison to the village proper, where it seemed people took care of inside their homes, but did not care for common areas, which were given over to garbage and scavanging chickens. people seemed to spend a great deal of time outside on paths, working and chatting.

nicole and i shared the only bed in the house; shanshan and her parents slept upstairs on mats. the house was made from local bricks covered by cement, wooden beams supported the ceiling. the first floor consisted of a main room and a kitchen. the main room was divided into two sections, a sleeping section, where the bed was and a social section, with a table, television, and several chairs, some plastic, two made of bamboo. the wash room was a concrete room built next to their pump. for our evening wash, shanshan heated water in the kitchen and then added pump water to adjust the temperature. the outhouse was a separate brick building with a trench dug into the earth. above the trench was a bamboo plank, where i squatted several times a day to relieve myself.

shanshan and her parents moved me with their generousity. they killed a chicken for us and prepared fresh vegetables, eggs, and homegrown rice. when we left, they gave us fresh eggs, homegrown peanuts, and special deep-fried potato cakes for the trip. yangming township gave us a box of kiwi fruits that were locally grown. indeed, their generousity eased the relationship, enabled it to move beyond a tour of poverty. i had feared that the trip would turn the villagers, especially our hosts, into exhibits in living museum and would turn us into tourists. the school had instructed students to give money to their host families as a token of their appreciation, and much thought had been given to what would be the correct amount: not too much so that the families were embarrassed but not so little that they lost materially by hosting us. although the act of hosting didn’t unmake our material inequality, it nevertheless did ameliorate some of the awkwardness of the visit. it certainly reminded me that each of us has something to give and that all of us have a responsibility to accept what is given graciously.

a native of longgang, shenzhen, nicole is also hakka. she enjoyed the trip because it brought back memories of her childhood before her family moved to downtown shenzhen. she grew up in a village like shanshan’s and used to sleep on the same kind of bed. more importangly, she remembered the beauty of the countryside and wondered about why modernization meant the destruction of beautiful places. specifically, as part of shenzhen’s ongoing expansion, her natal village will soon be razed and an upscale housing development built in its place. also, nicole said that she only understood about 70% of what shanshan and her parents said and preferred to speak with them in mandarin, reminding me again of how many variants of local languages (方言) there actually are. after all, heyuan is only a 3 hour drive away from shenzhen.

the belief that youth can be motivated by direct experience inspires this project. more specifically, adults in both places expressed that more communication (交流) between students from both areas would be beneficial. on the one hand, shenzhen youth might learn humility and social responsibility, while yangming youth might learn their are higher goals than working in a factory or restaurant. consequently, our schools hope to establish a hand-in-hand (手拉手) relationship with the yangming first and second middle schools, enabling students and teachers to visit each other.

i hope that this kind of experience might accomplish what exhortations rarely do–inspire us adults to help our children change the world. i know that this experience manifests one, more traditional (in the socialist sense of the word) meaning of the shenzhen experiment, which not only aimed to open china to the world, but also to improve the material wellbeing of all chinese people. in fact, at 63 our school principal is a child of the revolution and she still approaches education with an eye to socialist goals. as a friend of mine said, if china can improve the living standard of all chinese people, bringing stability to its internal affairs, it will have contributed to world peace. one could say the same for the united states and that we start one friendship at a time. i have posted some fieldtrip memories in my galleries.

field of dreams, shenzhen

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unfinished, unoccupied timeshare, the fountain resort

managed by swiss-garden international, the fountain resort (深圳金海滩：假日星苑度假村) overlooks xichong bay in kuichong village, longgang. i suspect, but have yet to confirm that the resort was built as many international resorts in the southeast asia are–to attract both upscale locals and foreigners with hotels and timeshares on the beach. nevertheless, several years after construction, only the hotels are being used. except for one or two houses that have been occupied by a family and temporary workers, the other timeshares are unfinished and unoccupied, abandoned before occupation. and yet. the gardens are immaculate, expectant. when i asked the older resident if he was lonely, he said no because he lived with his wife, son, daughter-in-law, and grandson. what about neighbors? i continued. they come on the weekends, he replied. i thought but didn’t add, it’s saturday and we’re alone here.

if you build it will they come? recent photos here.

ostriches in shenzhen

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the ostriches came to shenzhen by way of the united states, “where,” the farm manager told me, “american scientists spent over twenty years experimenting in order to breed an ostrich that could live out of africa.”

南山区作协：on literary production

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yesterday yang qian and i participated in the second nanshan district writers federation council meeting on literary creativity. yang qian was made a council member and i was made an honorary council member.

artistic federations are quasi-governmental organizations that promote the arts. just recently, for example, when fat bird invited the theatre practice to shenzhen, it was the nanshan district united artists federation (文联) that sponsored the event. federation members assume that a good working relationship between the government and artists is necessary to establish a creative environment. moreover, members assume that the arts are necessary for various reasons. one is to civilize society. another is to educate the public. yet another is to bridge the differences that separate different groups of people. these tasks are regulated by the bureau of dissemination (or propaganda, depending on your dictionary’s understanding of 宣传部). altogether, nanshan has 8 arts federations (戏剧 theatre、影视 broadcast、舞蹈 dance、音乐 music、曲艺 traditional stage arts、摄影 photography、书法 caligraphy、美术 fine arts), which are administratively under the united artists federation（文联), a government department in the ministry of dissemination/propaganda. zhang ruoxue (张若雪) heads the nanshan district united artists federation.

established in 1997, the writers federation specifically supports the development of writing (fiction and non-fiction) in nanshan. federation members come from both government and non-government institutions. several members are independent artists. the chairman of the writers federation, nan xiang (南翔) teaches in the shenzhen university department of chinese, while the secretary (秘书长) is zhang ruoxue, head of the united artists federation. perhaps unexpectedly to westerners accustomed to thinking of social conflict in terms of government and anti-government groups, divisions within the nanshan writers federation (at this meeting at least) did not fall along an official-unoffical axis. instead, the contradiction between high and popular forms of literature was the most salient axis of difference.

nan xiang, for example, gave a long talk on how chinese writers should pay attention to the chinese writer communities outside of the mainland. he also encouraged nanshan writers to pay attention to those foreign writers being celebrated abroad. in this way, nanshan writers could begin to interact with a larger world. ding li (丁力), however, took a strong stance in favor of writing from local experience for local audiences. indeed as each writer spoke about their current projects it became clear that their were two primary kinds of writers, with different funding sources an intended audiences. these groups were metaphorically characterized as the temple (庙堂) and the river and lakes (江湖) writers. “river and lakes” refers to the unofficial worlds of bandits and travelling performers. crudely, the temple writers wrote for an elite audience, including foreigners and looked to the government and (international) agencies for funding to produce high art. in contrast, the river and lakes writers wrote for the mass of chinese readers and looked to the market to support themselves. in this sense, elite artists positioned themselves as more dependent on the government than did the mass artists. during the meeting, elite audiences were more sensative to ideological constraints, while the mass artists tended to celebrate the market as an index of literary value.

a third group, women writers were the palatable absence in all this conversation. outnumbered in representation, they also spoke less than the other council members. indeed, their silence posed the question about multiple fractions within the group, or differences that have yet to be articulated. likewise, the difference between literary criticism and literary production was glossed in conversation. it may be, however, that as china’s economy continues to become polarized between haves and have-nots other social differences seem less important.

below i provide links to sites by or about some of the writers who attended the meeting.

independent writer 丁力 writes about 8 to 10 books a year on his shenzhen experiences. this site is from his “ding li commercial books series”;

shenzhen university professor 钱超英 has written on the new chinese language movement among overseas chinese in australia;

nanshan policeman 肖双红 also writes about his shenzhen experiences;

middle school teacher 严凌君 reports from shenzhen. he also organizes a website for young writers;

independent writer 谢宏 has his own blog;

shenzhen university associate professor of chinese 汤奇云 critiques the relationship between aesthetics and social position in 王晓华’s《西方生命美学局限研究》;

government official and telenovela script writer 张友高 talks about developing characters;

shenzhen university associate professor, 谢晓霞 critiques magazine articles before reform;

haiwang enterprises executive, 吴迪 has written a fictional account of the student soldiers (学生军) who helped build the third line of defence during the cultural revolution;

independent writer, 王十月 blogs about art;

shenzhen university assistant professor, 曹清华 has uploaded his academic papers.

人山人海：national day crowds

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the forbidden city, october 3, 2006

mountains and oceans of people in beijing this national day vacation. my mother noted that the crowds felt differently than the crowds in the u.s. she had just been to disneyworld with my niece and nephew and there, she said, people seemed pushier, here, they pushed. she suggested it might be due to a different sense of personal space. but we chinese don’t like the crowds either, tian qinxin commented, we just don’t have any option. lao fan joked, 1.3 billion chinese and they all come to beijing on the same day.

teaching matters

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second grade english class, green oasis school

perhaps the most fascinating thing that human beings do is make other human beings. in a certain sense, making and re-making each other is all we ever do. this making takes infinate forms and comes in as many flavors, including feeding our children (or not), passing laws (or not), providing humanitarian aid (or not), teasing each other (or not), answering a stranger’s question (or not), and simply returning a smile. as a function of societies, it is most evident in our schools, where we take children and transform them into citizens, again of different form and flavor.

the physical theatre of kuo jing hong

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kuo jing hong directing muhd ghazali muzakir, hosd fared jainal, emanorwatty saleh, and einie shumastri mashari at the shenzhen university black box theatre.

on september 20 and 21, 2006, the theatre practice visited fat bird, performing “play play”. “play play” was developed through the collaboration of of practice director, kuo jing hong and four actors from singapore’s malay theatre scene: emanorwatty saleh, hohd fared jainal, einie shumastri mashari, and muhd ghazali muzakir. the group was in china to participate in the happy asia theatre festival in shanghai.

a serious attention to experiencing the body defines the physical performance/theatre (肢体表演) of kuo jing hong, who has tried to develop and transmit meaning without referencing concepts or narrative. for example, “play play” opens with the actors looking off to a distant point. they have been directed to feel the corners of their mouths rising to the highest point possible, and then to pay attention to how the corners return to their natural position. kuo neither classifies this movement as smiling, nor claims that it symbolizes happiness. instead she is interested in how this movement feels throughout the body; conceptual and narrative meaning, she insists, happens in retrospect, when actors and the audience members try to make sense out of that feeling.

“it’s like you have to prepare a container for whatever comes,” kuo explained, “and it moves through you, but then you have to let it go. you can’t keep it, but you can’t not prepare the container either.” she paused to take a sip of taiwanese milk tea with red bean pearls and laughed. “but it’s so hard. in shanghai, one of the actors got hurt and it wasn’t sure if i would have to perform for her or not. i was so stressed because the role was developed for her. and yet i knew for the audience it wouldn’t matter who performed, for them it would be that show, whether it was me or einie performing. but that’s not how i experienced it.”

and that’s perhaps the point. what gets experienced during one of kuo’s pieces is highly personal, or “abstract (抽象)” as someone commented during a post-performance discussion. moreover, it’s at that moment that the audience picks up the piece and runs with in, making conceptual and narrative meaning out of the piece.

kuo offered the following example that process. “let’s say you’re in the woods and you see a bear. you don’t stop to think what does my increased heart rate represent. you run away. later, when you tell the story, suddenly your beating heart becomes a symbol–but that’s not what it was when you were running away.”

福田区: clearing a space for progress

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razed buildings continue to fascinate me. no doubt because i have now lived in shenzhen long enough to remember when many of these buildings were new; i certainly remember their older uses.

when i first arrived in 1995, the administrative structure of the shenzhen municipality had been recently upgraded from two (city-administrative area) to three (city-district-street) tiers. at the time, each district government added new buildings to the old building complexes in order to house the new departments and officials. at the same time, they began planning for new and improved district buildings, which were finished in the late 90s. at the time, the districts were faced with the tricky problem of what to do with the old buildings and land. they couldn’t sell it because no one dared buy it (what would happen if there was something wrong with the land or building? could the new owner successfully sue the government?). so they began to use the old buildings for government related functions: party schools, military quarters, and such.

in retrospect, it seems that not selling the land may have been the best investment the government could have made.

located at the intersection of shennan and huanggang roads, the land on which the previous futian government building complex stood has become more and more valuable since it was first constructed in the late 80’s and early 90s. in 2005, it was zoned to be a “silicon valley in the heart（空中硅谷)” of “futian’s golden area　（黄金地带”. indeed the government plans to invest 1.7 billion rmb to build a state of the art research center. accordingly, the district government has razed 24 buildings and moved all the residents and businesses that had located there after the government moved to its new location in the late 90s. so here are
pictures of the remains of a previous era.

人的城市: between bridges

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the first fat bird collaboration took place in the summer of 2003, when yang qian, wen rongbing, liu hongming, zhang yuelong and i occuppied famous shenzhen landmarks. at the time, we were experiementing with using the landscape as stage. more often then not, we performed short pieces and then were either sent away (by local security) or ran away (because the police had been notified). think of these pieces as fat bird’s first engagement with shenzhen.

we filmed six of these pieces and collectively called them “人的城市 (mortal city)”. mortal city was both a predessesor and companion to the larger piece “神的城市 (divine garbage)” which was performed at shenzhen university in december 2003. the six pieces belatedly posted to youtube are: shenzhen university; dongmen (1) and (2); seaworld; dogs on a bus and between bridges. between bridges was performed between two bridges and above a pedestrian underpass in nanshan district.

人的城市: shenzhen university

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the first fat bird collaboration took place in the summer of 2003, when yang qian, wen rongbing, liu hongming, zhang yuelong and i occuppied famous shenzhen landmarks. at the time, we were experiementing with using the landscape as stage. more often then not, we performed short pieces and then were either sent away (by local security) or ran away (because the police had been notified). think of these pieces as fat bird’s first engagement with shenzhen.

this piece was performed at shenzhen university in the eves of a building that no longer exists.