mapping the moral world

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the title of this post is actually larger than the scope of my speculation about where the moral self resides.

yesterday evening at dinner with friends, we talked about the difficulties that young people face in high school. shenzhen students, it was agreed, face the pressure of tests. however, in general, their social worlds are simple and relatively innocent. in contrast, western high schools tend to have less pressure to perform well on tests, but many more social challenges of the sex, drugs, and rock and roll variety.

this is where the conversation became interesting.

my friends insisted that smoking pot was one of the worst things a student could do, leading to all sorts of depravity. i don’t advocate smoking pot, but did point out that it seemed to me less reprehensible than cheating on exams. counter point: my friend said that everyone cheated because the scores were so important. cheating was therefore understandable, even if it wasn’t necessarily wise. smoking pot, however, showed a student’s selfishness and lack of concern for family and friends.

what interested me in this conversation is where my friends and i drew our moral lines. i didn’t have problems with behavior that i believe affects the individual, but did draw the line at breaking rules that protected a group of people; cheating, for me, is a question of ethics where smoking pot seemed a more personal question. in contrast, my friends saw pot smoking as a repudiation of responsibilities toward family and friends, while cheating was a “reasonable” response to exam pressures.

our common point was that ethics is about responsibilities toward others in our lives. we differed in the groups we chose as our ethical point of reference. more interestingly still was my friends’ idea that care of the self (by not smoking pot) was in fact an ethical question because one’s body belongs to family and friends and not primarily to some self.

all this begs two interesting questions: (1) just what is a self and (2) how we determine who constitutes our ethical horizons.

the cultural work of tests

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grafitti-3

Originally uploaded by maryannodonnell

the gaokao is over and shenzhen feels more relaxed. it’s as if the entire city has sighed and thoughts turned to summer. of course, the zhongkao still hovers darkly, but for the rest of us, life is good.

this gaokao season, i’ve been thinking about the cultural significance of tests and testing because so many students have asked me about the SATs and TOEFL. these students are particularly interested in perfect marks and, in order to achieve those scores, are willing not only to spend weeks of their summer locked away in cram schools, but also to retake the tests 5, 6, and yes 7 times. inquiring minds want to know: why is a perfect score so important? Continue reading →

wutong mountain

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wutong mountain

Originally uploaded by maryannodonnell

Went to a wedding yesterday at the Wutong Restaurant (梧桐山酒楼) in Shatoujiao, Yantian District. The wedding itself was fun and I’m grateful for the opportunity it gave me to visit Shaotoujiao, one of the more interesting parts of the city.

Shatoujiao is famous because its the location of Chung Ying Street (中英街), which explicitly actualized the One Country, Two Systems policy with Chinese stores on the southern side of the street and British stores on the northern side. For the historically minded, you can also look at boundary stones from the March 16-18, 1899, when the boundary was marked at the end of the Second Opium War. Chung Ying Street is also one of Shenzhen’s 8 contemporary sights (a direct quotation of Xin’an County’s 8 classic sights). Continue reading →

shenzhener identity, reconsidered

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This post about razed Shenzhen childhoods is inspired by an ongoing conversations with Melissa and several other post-80 young women (80后女性).

Melissa came to Shekou in the early 80s, attending elementary and middle school before going abroad. As I have indicated in other posts, Old Shekou and Old Shenzheners were different. Melissa was part of the Old Shekou group, those who came with China Merchants to establish the Shekou Industrial Zone between the years 1978 to 1988 (the year of the Shekou Tempest). In contrast, “Old Shenzheners” were those who came to build Shenzhen in the early 80s, when “Shenzhen” referred to the area from the Dongmen commercial area to the Shanghai hotel (at the western border of Huaqiangbei).

To paraphrase Gregory Bateson, the differences between an Old Shekou family and an Old Shenzhen were differences that have made for different lives. Melissa’s story is that of growing up with the Shekou spirit, which was progressive and liberal. I have written much about Shekou because Old Shekou people hoped to build a new society and it was, if anywhere in was in Shenzhen, Utopian. In contrast, Old Shenzhen (especially through Liang Xiang) has been more explicitly associated with the rise of the city’s explicitly materialist cultural.

Nevertheless, despite the opposing ideological significance of 80s Shekou and Shenzhen, I’ve spoken to several young post 80s women with similar life histories – came with parents to Shenzhen / Shekou in the 1980s, read books in parks, went for walks along the beach, enjoyed the city’s clean environment and small population, and did a lot of studying in high school before leaving for college (either abroad or Beijing/Shanghai/Guangzhou).

Interestingly, all speak of the same 近乡情怯 experience, which seems to have started as an inarticulate feeling toward the end of the 1990s and has grown into an expressed and discussed sentiment in the new millennium. The Shekou / Shenzhen that they remember are very different from the contemporary city. Shekou in particular has become a vexed symbol of past dreams. Today, Shekou is relatively backward, but more importantly has been absorbed into the surging mass of urban Shenzhen. At the same time, the city’s parks are smaller and more exotic (how many imported palm trees does one city need?), the skies are grayer, and the streets are now considered unruly enough that families don’t feel comfortable allowing middle school daughters to wander off by themselves. In other words, these post 80s women, whether they still live in Shenzhen or elsewhere, speak of a growing alienation from the city.

Ironically, their’s is precisely the generation that many once predicted as who would be true “Shenzheners” – people who identified with the city, rather than with their hometowns. People who would have an unproblematic relationship to Shenzhen as their “hometown”. This was in fact the generation for whom the city was built. Continue reading →

revolutionary shenzhen

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the revolution haunts shenzhen. revolutionary promises, kept and disregarded, successes and defeats erupt in conversation in part because we are still only sixty years from the revolution and in part because so many revolutionaries came to shenzhen a mere thirty years ago. the present only feels worlds away from mao. in fact, traces of socialist dreams still infuse everyday life.

just yesterday after yoga, for example, i chatted with a classmate named ‘ming’. i had thought he was shiny bright ming, but it turns out he was ‘free airing of voices and expression’ ming (大鸣大放). mao had encouraged free airing of views and expression at the beginning of the anti-rightist campaign (57-59) and my friend ming was born in 1958 and named accordingly. indeed, off the top of his head, he could name four friends, who shared his name. Continue reading →

magic moments

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shenzhen buses have televisions, which broadcast pre-recorded programs which coble together news reports of major events (such as the expo in shanghai), as well as produced clips of famous skits (小品), imported western comedies (home video moments of children jumping and cats in baby carriages), strange competitions (in which restaurant staff compete to set a banquet table the most quickly), and top ten music video countdowns (which are often repeated and always interrupted midway to announce bus stops).

i understand these programs to be negotiations of the tension between ongoing propaganda campaigns (it was on a bus that i first heard of the campaign to conserve water in shenzhen, for example) and approved-yet-profitable popular culture (the buses also provide advertising blitzes for movies and pop singers). that is, these bus programs are useful indications of both what the party thinks shenzhen people should be thinking and what actually engages shenzhen people’s minds. consequently, when these programs added clips of magic tricks – card tricks, woman sawed in half tricks, vanishing boat tricks, multiplying cheer leader tricks – to their programming, i began wondering about when and why the manipulation of appearances had become so popular in a city that is explicit in its support for and origin in science.

[side note: shenzhen was an explicit realization of the four modernizations. as such, it has used scientific (科学) to describe what in the u.s. we would call “rational” as in “rational development (科学的发展)” and “rational management (科学的管理)”. “scientific” is also a term of commendation, as in: she does things in a rational/scientific way (她做事很科学).]

so what follows is speculation on why magic in shenzhen, now. Continue reading →

a character is a universe

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today, i met chang hongcai, a calligrapher. teacher chang’s studio is located in liuxiandong (留仙㓊),an artist colony of sorts. the liuxian village head has rented out (at cheap cheap prices) an entire six story factory to a group of artists, who use the building as studio space. importantly, these artists are not struggling emergents, but established artists whose work is shown throughout china and the world. teacher chang, for example, is a highly respected calligrapher whose work hangs in some of china’s top museums.

we talked about many things – tea, the book of changes, and taichi – but all topics departed from and returned to calligraphy as the essential philosophy of china. according to teacher chang, how one holds the brush, each brush stroke, the actual meaning of the character, all this together forms a universe. he used the character “one (一)” to develop his point:

to write a proper yi one holds the brush with the entire body, arms loosely held as in taiji, one’s qi flowing. the brush stroke itself (and it is one fluid motion) actually follows the contours of the symbol for yinyang, stretching beyond the limits of a line and returning into infinity as the brush circles, pauses, and then quickly flicks back into itself. according to teacher change, the process of writing is itself chinese philosophy; calligraphy cannot be rushed, but must be cultivated, like breathing.

teacher chang also spoke of 势 (shi) or immanent tendency of a stroke. his explanation of 永字八法 (the 8 methods in the character yong) focused on how each stroke was in fact in motion. a heng, for example, was pulled like a bow and a gou was kicked back, strongly and decisively. a stroke that just ended because the brush was lifted, was a stroke that had been cut off, was empty. fullness came from the motion of the stroke, which had its own rhythm and spirit. in fact, when teacher chang helped me see a character, he emphasized the moving brush such that it seems possible to understand shi as traces of the calligrapher’s spirit; her body, her hand, her knowledge, her state of mind, her understanding of the world – all this comes together in the stretch and flick of ink on paper.

practicing calligraphy helps us center the mind and cultivate a good attitude because the idea that “a character is a universe” reminds us that we constantly (re)create the world. indeed, that is all we ever do.

low carbon lifestyles…

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the current dearth of sexts hasn’t stopped chinese text message snark. the latest mocks poverty and environmentalism:

现在无房无车无妹子的三无宅男，有了一个新称号——低碳哥。

there’s a new nickname for men without a house, a car and a girl — low-carbon bro.

of note, the “three withouts” in this message are possessions – a house, a car, and a girl. once upon a time in shenzhen, “three withouts” referred to status: no shenzhen hukou, no job, and no home… so an interesting shift in nomenclature. we seem to have gone from seeing the importance of status to seeing the disgrace when one lacks possessions. it could also indicate the extent that those without status are no longer seen at all and the new butts of these jokes are not the truly dispossessed, but unemployed college graduates.

tea update

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tea with a li

Originally uploaded by maryannodonnell

i have been raising a teapot (养茶壶) these past months, but had hit something of a snag; instead of boasting a lustrous patina, my pot looked muddy and unkempt. fortunately, this weekend, i went to the teashop and learned about “teapot beauty treatments”.

apparently, teapots have pores that like their human counterparts get clogged, leading to dull and blotchy skin. however, if one keeps pouring hot water on them and then lightly polishes them with a smooth scowering pad to remove the tea scum, then the luster returns and the teapot really does look better.

so yesterday, i spent way too much time polishing my teapots (yes i’ve bought more than i need) and now really understand 养 in the way of taking care of a chia-pet, which in turn has me thinking about the intersection of ethics and aesthetics — when we take the time to take care of our immediate environment, we do make the world more beautiful.

fat bird winking…

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one of the more useful of chinese colloquialisms remains “one eye open, one eye shut (睁一只眼闭一只眼)”. it means knowing what’s going on, but ignoring it. for example, last night fat bird performed an abridged version of “happy academy” for the leaders of shenzhen university (well those few who accepted an invite). the play’s more controversial parts (castration as part of the scientific method, for example) were edited out for that particular performance. however, every other day this week, the original version has been performend as written, with drag queens and castration complexes abounding.

the thing is, no one is surprised by any of this. among the performers and the audience there exists an implicit common sense to calling the abridged version the “official version” and showing it to officials, while calling the original version “the rehersal version” and showing it to everyone else.

i haven’t thought enough about this to hypothesize what the cultural logic of one open eye might be, but in terms of practice, the open eye falls somewhere between “managing/ overseeing (管)” and ignoring (不理). indeed, one of the cultural compentencies of successful shenzheners is know which activities will be strictly regulated, which ignored, and which of those can exist in the hazy space between.

theatre is one of the spaces where there is more room for winking; newspapers and television programs are much more strictly regulated than (in order of increasingly lax regulation) radio stations, novels, and theatre, especially in the context of a university performance, which is not open to the public (except by word of mouth invitations). in other words, the more popular a cultural medium is, the less likely for officials to walk past with one eye closed.