Tag Archives: culture

what is a self introduction?

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I want to talk about the cultural work of self introductions, a topic one would think I had actually given some thought to, but alas, no. However, yesterday, insight. And yes, long story short, I’ve been all too American in how I introduce myself for way too long…

This past weekend, I was in Meilin at the Art de Vivre Art Space (圆筒艺术空间) to participate in the workshop stage of the second Coaster Raid, a series of events organized to promote creative exploration of Shenzhen. During the workshop weekend, nine creative groups or individuals met to explore Meilin and come up with artistic interpretations of the space literally at Deng Xiaoping’s back. On October 31 at 19:00, we will reconvene to show our work to the public. The showing is free and open to the public and the riptide team  hope to encourage reflection on and debate about the city. They are particularly interested in generating fresh approaches to seeing, representing, and talking about Shenzhen.

Yesterday, to conclude the workshop weekend, we had a more or less formal presentation of our ideas, so that the discussion could be recorded. The format was simple: riptide organizers, Michael and Gigi asked participants four questions and participants responded. The first question was: Why did you come to the event?

The Chinese participants all indicated they had been invited by Feng Yu, the Meilin organizer of this Coaster Raid. Some even indicated that they had accepted precisely because they knew Feng Yu to be an interesting person and that anything he was involved in was bound to be interesting.   I said that I had come because I had been exploring Shenzhen for 15 years and was thrilled to have the chance to explore with a new group of friends.

As the introductions went on, it became clear (to me) that the Chinese participants were taking self introduction as a chance to delineate the relationships that had brought them to this moment and only then did they begin to describe their projects. Indeed, as far as identifying themselves within the group, I had a strong sense that for the Chinese participants the relationships that had brought them together were more important than their work. In this sense, the common thread that they had come “to play (玩)” makes perfect sense. In contrast, I assumed that I had been invited because of my work and accordingly, an introduction to my work was the point of the self introduction.

I’m wondering if the difference in emphasis, Chinese participants on relationship, American moi on work works to creates misunderstanding even before conversations begin. To my English speaking heart, the Chinese introductions sounded vague and somehow off the point. Similarly, I wonder how arrogant or self-absorbed my self introduction sounded to Mandarin speaking hearts. I asked, but was reassured that, “Your Chinese is excellent.” And me thinking, “Yeah, but my social skills. What about my social skills?”

So now, I’m thinking that it might be useful to listen attentively to self introductions because they elucidate how my interlocutor perceive the purpose and direction of our interactions and, more specifically, collaboration in Meilin. I’m wondering to what extent my Chinese colleagues understand their work to be a means of exploring and strengthening, sometimes testing our various relationships. Indeed, this way of thinking points to the idea that how well and hard someone works becomes an expression of care or respect. It also allows for the possibility that any meeting may blossom into long term and deep friendships and yes, most Chinese self introductions include a variation on the phrase “I hope we can all become friends.”

In contrast, I know that I’m a good collaborator because I come for the work, whether or not it leads to stronger relationships. Thus, at first Chinese glance, I must appear to be committed to relationships, friendly, and conscientious. However, I know that my relationships may come to appear instrumental because once a project is finished, its easy for me to move on to the next work organized set of relationships.

Hopefully, as I wander through Meilin alone and with companion participants, I will learn to balance my impulse to work for the work with an attention to the work of friendship.

classical thinking

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Many have told me that the Yi Jing is always relevant, even in Shenzhen; it’s just a question of knowing how to interpret what is already there. Consequently, I have been wondering how I might use the Yi Jing as a way of understanding Shenzhen.

According to Yuasa Yasuo (2008) divination in the Yi Jing designates the act of knowing the dao or the way. One comes to the Yi Jing when one makes a decision that will determine one’s future, but in order for the divination to be accurate, one must come to with an ethical purpose and clear intention. So defined, divination as understanding is both teleological and practical. On the one hand, the Yi Jing counsels that we interpret any event in terms of both its origin and its telos, which is often unknown, but assumed to comply with the inner logic of the events that will have led to its arising. On the other hand, the Yi Jing provides strategies for harmonizing one’s particular intention with nature and society such that negative consequences of contradiction and imbalance might be ameliorated. Together, divine understanding and action constitute the dao, an ethical unfolding of natural processes, agrarian seasons, social mores, and human intention. Thus, the Yi Jing is a book about time, its possibilities and complications; it not only anticipated Shenzhen by two thousand years, but also provides a moral ecology for narrating both the city’s history and what this history might mean beyond the righteousness of facts.

In other words, interpreting the Shenzhen built environment would be an act of divining the new world order that Shenzheners are trying to realize by constructing the city. What then are we to divine from the self-fashioning of Shenzhen’s urban villages? What are the longings that have been built into an environment that prevents them from being realized? Continue reading →

thoughts on cultural purity

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Yesterday, I lived the disconcerting in between-ness that is my present status in Shenzhen, which in turn has led to thoughts on assumptions about cultural purity and language as a symbol of cultural belonging.

My in between status is a result of the fact that  I am able to function somewhat competently in Chinese contexts. Yesterday, for example, I needed to register at my local police station. When I went to ask  our foreign liaison where I needed to go, she was helping a colleague pay his bills. Indeed, she had a notebook full of the account data that one needs in order to enjoy running water, electricity, heat and gas in a modern society because paying bills is a  task that most Westerners cannot do for themselves in Shenzhen. In this case, I was more “Chinese” than my Australian colleague because I could not only pay my own bills, but also visit the local police station by myself.

Incompetence is one of the defining features of being foreign in Shenzhen. Indeed, the difficulties that Westerners experience when learning Chinese amplifies the mutual experience of difference. Thus, institutions that want to globalize hire liaisons to help foreigners do things like pay bills and register at police stations. In turn, westerners experience the effectiveness of this help as a sign of cultural difference. Smooth interaction means “no difference,” while convoluted and choppy points to incompetence, i.e. cultural  difference.

Moreover, the level of difficulty in navigating from incompetence to competence seems to be a useful measure of lived cultural difference. In other words, relative levels of incompetence marks the experiential distance that we often feel in cross-cultural interaction. Thus, Chinese and Westerners see me as somewhere in between, classifying my relative foreignness based on how smooth my interaction with Chinese people  is. Close Chinese friends frequently comment that I don’t seem foreign at all, mentioning that my accent is clearer than many Cantonese speakers, while many Chinese acquaintances use me as a yardstick to measure how far they’ve traveled the other way.

And yet. I have all sorts of pop-psychological theories about what this level of incompetence does to Western psyches, including the fraying of tempers and increasing rigid ideas about what is “the way things should be done,” but my point du jour is that relative levels of in/competence enable us to assert and maintain fictions of cultural belonging and exclusion simply because we feel relatively skilled in a given situation.The rub of course is that any interaction is a composite of many different skill sets and thus, the skill set we choose as a sign of cultural competence is a means of drawing a line between us and them, even when the line is irrelevant to any issue other than our cultural identity.

Yesterday, for example, there was a middle school student also hanging out in the office. One of the Chinese in the office said to him, “Say hello to Mary Ann. Don’t worry, she can speak Chinese.”

Student looked disbelievingly at me and then back at colleague.

“In fact, her Chinese is better than yours,” she goaded him.

“Really?” he asked her, but now focused more intently on  me.

“Go ahead and test her knowledge (考验),” she continued.

“You want a child to test my language skills?” I interrupted. “What’s that about?”

“Ai,” my colleague said with a laugh, “you’re still a foreigner after all.”

I didn’t pursue the topic because the bill payer had left and I could get the address of the relevant police station. However, this exchange has me wondering about what kind of boundaries my colleague was trying to establish and why. After all, she wouldn’t have sent this child to the police station by himself, but had no qualms about giving me responsibility for going.  Perhaps, he was an Overseas Chinese and she wanted to humiliate him into trying harder to learn Chinese. I don’t know.

What I do know is that it hurt me to have my place in the world – and for many purposes my world is Shenzhen – undermined, especially through an inconsequential exchange such as this. It made me feel insecure because at any moment what I might be trying to communicate could be dissolved simply by calling attention to my real linguistic incompetencies. In fact, the underlying message I received is “you don’t belong here” and short of interrupting the conversation, I’m not sure how else I might have intervened to assert my claim that I belong here, too.

We all share various sets of skills and incompetences, and we all deploy them to construct boundaries between “us” and “them”. Indeed, most of us are comfortable when these boundaries aren’t questioned. So in Shenzhen it seems that generalized Western incompetence in things Chinese and the concomitant Chinese desire to adapt their behavior to Western standards allows both Chinese and Westerners to feel “at home” in the world. Of course, whether or not that home is comfortable or not is another question. And that’s the rub. Because I live so obviously in between “us” and “them,” my in betweenness presents opportunities to those who wish to change these boundaries and threatens those who don’t. Consequently, many of my conversations are nothing more than a negotiation of how I differ from my interlocutor’s perception of what a foreigner is or should be in a given situation.

More hopefully, I am coming to understand my in betweenness as an instructive metaphor for the human condition. The boundaries that define us as people(s) really are where we make them through what we do and do not choose to learn and what we do and do not choose to make salient. Moreover, how and when and why we make these choices constitute invitations to and rejections of our various interlocutors. Thus, even if we didn’t choose where we come from, consciously or not, we choose who we’re with.

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 →

cultural tendencies – what does it mean to be lazy?

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a few nights ago, i had a conversation with two friends, one old and one new about “resignation” and this has led me to rethink possible translations of 懒 (lan usually translated as lazy), especially within educational contexts.

my friends and i had just had drinks with an old married couple, who clearly still cared for each other and this led to a conversation about resigning oneself to unhappiness in a marriage or working towards one’s own happiness, whether or not this meant going through with a divorce at age 70. i mentioned a common mandarin expression, 懒得离婚 (lande lihun) from chen rong’s eponymous novel about a couple who stay married simply because they’re “too lazy divorce”. however, in context, it’s clear that chen rong is talking about laziness as a form of resignation (as in 无奈 wunai) and not as a form of non-cooperation (as in 不合作 bu hezuo).

this conversation prompted me to think about the different cultural valences of “lazy” in english and “懒” in mandarin because i hear chinese parents and teachers frequently complain that their children and students are “lazy”. as a general rule, i have had three interpretions of statements such as “he’s so lazy , he doesn’t love studying and is greedy to play (他很懒，不爱学习贪玩)”. if said by the parent / teacher of a student with high marks, i take the statement as negative boasting or a warning for the student not to become complacent. if spoken by the parent / teacher of spirited underachiever, i have understood the statement to mean the student needs to start studying and stop goofing off. and third, if spoken by a parent / teacher of clearly bored and unhappy student, i have assumed that the student was engaging in some form of let’s-see-if-you-can-make-me-study / get-good-grades passive resistance. i did not, however, associate laziness with resignation, especially when describing students who aren’t studying. indeed, i have tended to empathize with students who don’t study materials that bore them because i often understand laziness to be a form of self-protection.

so insight du jour, thinking of laziness in terms of resignation offers a fourth interpretation about what chinese teachers and parents might mean when they tell me a child / student is lazy. it is possible to think of statements about student laziness in terms of parental / teacher anxieties that a student is resigned to doing badly in school, indifferent to or perhaps unmoved by academic advancement, which in turn easily feeds anxieties about not getting into a good college, which in turn is thought to lead to a bad job (in the best case) or unemployment, which would prevent a happy marriage . . . and so yes, i suddenly see why it might be nerve-wracking to have a “lazy” child / student. i remain skeptical, however, about where the lines between over-achieving, doing one’s best, not trying, and opting out get drawn and more importantly, how parents and teachers recognize these different students responses to school.

p.s. my friend, a teacher has just read this post and commented that as an elementary school teacher in nyc, laziness distresses her as well because through their laziness, students learn that it is okay not to strive.

the importance of moral worlds

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moral worlds matter. not simply because they teach us how to be human, but also (and precisely) because they set the terms by which we treat other humans. thus, not unsuprisingly, we use our moral worlds to identify other humans and thereby place them in relationship to ourselves.

like all western bloggers about experiences of and thoughts on living with / among / against chinese people, i care about chinese moral worlds because those terms are the point of departure for our interactions. call it homecourt advantage. for example, a few days ago, one of my neighbors approached me to ask if i would teach her daughter english. i replied that i didn’t teach outside of a school. she concluded, “well then, maybe you can be friends.”  with your 13 year old daughter? hmmm. Continue reading →

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 →

what exactly is an urban village anyway?

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Shenzhen’s urban villages confound easy categorization precisely because they are sites where Mainland Chinese distinctions between “farmers (农民)” and “city people (市民)” have been constantly negotiated and renegotiated for over thirty years.

In the 80s and early 90s, the question facing the Shenzhen government was: how to transfer collective land to urban work units (to establish urban patterns of property ownership) while providing villagers with a livelihood. The resolution to that problem took the form of “handshake buildings (握手楼)” and village level manufacturing and commerce. These villages were called “new villages (新村)” – as in “Guimiao New Village and Xiangnan New Village, for example. However, the economic success of both the new villages and the pace of Shenzhen’s growth has meant that new villages have constantly bumped up against more intensive forms of urban expansion. Consequently, since the mid-90s, the question facing Shenzhen’s government has been: how to integrate the new villages into the city. Suddenly, the government was pursuing a policy of “[urban] village renovation (旧村改新)”. Of course, the so-called “old villages” were in fact the “new villages” of the past decade. More tellingly, the “new villages” were now called “urban villages (城中村)”, an expression which might conjure images of a massive city surrounding and absorbing a small yet resistant village.

The project to renovate Gangxia [New] Village began in 1998 with a plan to construct the Shenzhen central axis along and through Gangxia. However, it was not until 2008 that the government began negotiating with residents of Gangxia Heyuan (岗厦河园片) to transfer land from villagers to city developers. By that time, Gangxia Heyuan had 580 buildings (mostly handshake buildings) and an estimated population of 70,000 people. Obviously, most of the 70,000 inhabitants were migrant workers and not Gangxia Villagers with landrights and property holdings. Nevertheless, the government had to begin a complicated process of negotiated the terms under which Gangxia Heyuan would be transferred from Gangxia [New Village / Juweihui – and there’s a whole ‘nother story told in another post] to Shenzhen City by way of Futian District.

The crux of the matter was, of course, how to define an equitable transfer because once Gangxia Heyuan became a part of the Central Axis it would cease being an “urban village” and become an “urban center”, with all the symbolic and economic capital implied. Consequently, city reps, the development company, and the Gangxia Heyuan villagers needed to work out the amount of ratio of replacement housing to actual housing and the compensation per meter of housing to which each villager was entitled. In the end, the ratio was established at 1:082 for first floor holdings and 1:088 for second story and above. Compensation was fixed at 12,800 per meter of housing space and 23,800 per meter of commercial space.

Inquiring minds want to know: just how much richer did some villagers become anyway? Well, it depended on how much housing one owned and where it was. A villager who owned one of the 580 buildings, which might have 6-800 square meters would be entitled to anywhere from 475-600 square meters of new housing and 7.5 million to 10.2 million rmb if they only owned residential space and much, much more if commercial. In total, there are figures as high as 9 billion rmb in compensation flying through the rumor mill.

Here’s the rub. All this money seems like a lot until we go back and start factoring in the 70,000 migrant workers and several thousand Gangxia villagers who had unequal access to handshake buildings less than 20 years ago. Thus, because Gangxia New Village included unequal redistributions of handshake buildings and landuse rights, some villagers are now much much richer than others. Rumor has it that one such villager had 6,000 square meters of space, while several others had 3,000 square meters. All told (in hushed voices, of course) Gangxia is rumored to have over 20 billionaires and at least 10 residents with over 10 million in property holdings.

And it doesn’t stop there. None of this takes into account how much the real estate developers are going to earn off the wheeling and dealing that re-building Gangxia into Central Axis luxury condos, high-end commercial areas, and business centers. There are a few non-villagers who will become even richer than the few Gangxia billionaires.

So yes, urban village renovation is not only creating new landscapes, but also accelerating the pace of economic polarization in Shenzhen.

If we include Maoist attempts to ameliorate differences between rural and urban settlements, we’re looking at over sixty years of concerted negotiation of Chinese identity as a debate about rural (tradition) versus urban (modernity). Such that its possible to think of the past 100-odd years of Chinese modernization as a process of rural urbanization and concomitant forms of inequality, legislated, negotiated, and otherwise.

For the curious, the Chinese web has facts, figures, and rumors: here, here, and here.

mirror, mirror – thoughts for the new year

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I have been a curious lightening rod for Sino-American perceptions of each other, especially with respect to the meaning and importance of Shenzhen in all this global restructuring. I have confounded gendered stereotypes because my body signifies an elite position within global hierarchies. As a white, upper middle class American woman, I have been expected to enjoy and choose from the best that the world offers, which is apparently not to be found in Shenzhen. Or if in Shenzhen, I have been expected to stay only for the time it would take to complete a project and then return to where I belong. This past trip to the US, I discovered that my life choices had become mainstream in profound and (often) distressing ways.

The first time I went to China (1995), I stayed three years before I returned to the US. My ability to speak Chinese and decision to study cultural transformation in Shenzhen (rather than Beijing or perhaps Shanghai) shocked most inhabitants. Indeed, they consistently urged me to head north to conduct valuable research. More tellingly, when I went shopping or stopped at a telephone kiosk, venders and recent migrants (even from Beijing and Shanghai) frequently mistook me for either (a) English by way of Hong Kong or (b) Russian by way Window of the World. Once they realized that I was actually American, the same vendors immediately proposed that Yang Qian was (in order of plausibility): Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Singaporean, and Hong Kongese. Only with great reluctance (and then disturbingly cheerful surprise), they said, “You’re Mainland Chinese!!!” At which point, they asked where we had met in America. 

Once I started making annual trips back to the US, however, I realized that my decisions to live and study in Shenzhen were equally shocking to mainstream Americans, who had not heard of the SEZ, its importance in reforming Chinese society, or the scale of what was happening just north of Hong Kong. When I was in West Lafayette, IN, pursuing a Master’s at Purdue (circa 1990), an undergraduate student asked me what the point of studying Chinese was if I couldn’t use it to find a job. Indeed, as late as Spring 2000, members of a job selection committee at a liberal arts college asked me, “What’s so international about Shenzhen?” and then hired someone who studied urban life in Beijing.

The past five years, I have noted how more and more young international professionals are coming to Shenzhen – to work, to invest, to conduct research, and to create art. In Shenzhen, I am no longer strange, but an expected feature of the urban fabric: the foreign investor / English teacher, and also the foreign intellectual, who now appears regularly in Shenzhen’s many international events. Only in conversation, do I still manage to surprise Chinese interlocutors. Likewise, this trip, several incidents suggest how deeply aware not only of China, but also Shenzhen my U.S. family and friends have become. In Seattle, Natasha’s five-year old daughter, Roman is studying Chinese in an immersion program and could speak and write some Chinese. Meanwhile, Natasha and I brainstormed possible collaborations in Shenzhen. On the plane from Seattle to Houston, we met a young college graduate, who chatted in Beijing accented Mandarin and was constructing a multi-national life.  In Southern Pines, NC, my two-year old nephew, Emanuelle watches Nihao Kailan and enjoys saying xiexie. 

And yet. All this mainstreaming seems to be quickly congealing into stereotypes that perpetuate the kinds of ignorance that shaped early perceptions of my presence in Shenzhen. Most Chinese and Americans continue to believe that (a) the US offers a better life than China and that (b) the only reason one would go to and remain in Shenzhen is to become rich. The most glaring example of this kind of thinking is that those in positions to deny visas (to me in Shenzhen) and entry into the US (YQ when we come back) continue to suspect that there is something not quite right about a mixed couple, who have chosen to live in Shenzhen (rather than, for example, West Lafayette, IN). And yes, they act on these impressions. I am still not eligible for a Chinese green card because eligibility is based on investment or Chinese blood, rather than marriage. Immigration officers still bully YQ when we enter the US because we have chosen to create a life in Shenzhen.

All this to say that China and Shenzhen seem to have been mainstreamed in ways that conform low expectations – get in, make a buck, get out, rather than in ways that might encourage new ways of being global citizens. Moreover, all these bucks continue to sustain illusions of American supremacy, not only because more and more of China’s young elites bring their dreams, talents, and money to the US, but also because many who go to Shenzhen do so looking (and therefore) only finding economic opportunity. Thus, both US and Chinese officials continue to read YS and my lack of visible economic progress as suspicious activity.

I’m happy my nephew can say xiexie. I wish he was also being taught that the appropriate form of courtesy is to jiaoren – to call older people ayi and shushu, or nainai and yeye and that too many xiexies often seem overly formal (at best) or sarcastic in Mandarin contexts. Such are my thoughts as we enter the Year of the Tiger.

Hear me roar.

一个朋友一条路: Who can you trust in Shenzhen?

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Friendship is an important topic of conversation in Shenzhen, where people want friends (many) because friends help one do things that can’t be done alone. Yesterday, I heard two stories about making friends, both from young women who are laboring (打工) in Shenzhen. Significantly, both stories were about what work had taught them about how to make friends.

The first came from A Han, who is 18 and working in Xiao Chen’s teashop. At first, A Han didn’t like the teashop because it was boring (闷). Her job was brewing tea and chatting with people while they tasted the tea. Moreover, because people who drank tea tended to be old (not even “older”, just “old”!), they weren’t interested in fashionable topics. In contrast, A Meng described herself as lively, out-going, and up-to-date. Nevertheless, as she has learned to brew well so that the qualities of each tea can be tasted and to make conversations interesting, she has made many friends. And all these friendships are the real benefit of selling tea.

“In order to sell tea,” she explained, “you have to quiet your heart (静心) and take your time with people. We don’t force people to buy any tea, but help them satisfy their taste. In the process, we become friends.”

The second story came from A Meng, 21-year old woman who had been on her own since graduating from middle school at age 14.

When I asked her why she had left home so young, A Meng explained, “I knew I was ready to be independent. So I went to Tianjin with a relative.”

A Meng sketched the seven year sojourn that had taught her about independence. When she was fourteen, her relative brought her to Tianjin and then vanished (人不见了 – as inconclusive in Mandarin as English vanishing acts). She found a job in a factory that included room and board. After a year in the  factory, she went home for Chinese New Year and then headed out again, this time to Wuhan, where she studied to give facials and massages in a salon(作美容). After she finished her course in Wuhan, she came to Shenzhen and has been working in mid-level salons. I met her in the salon owned by the wife of the second son of a village head.

A Meng deeply valued independence and her conversation kept returning to it – independence and responsibility. She compared her level of independence to her cousin (one month younger), who has never left home and therefore even at 21 can’t make a decision without her mother’s help. Moreover, A Meng went on to say, only people who are independent can take responsibility for family and friends. Indeed, the more independent she has become, the more capable she has shown herself to be and this, in turn, has helped her make many friends.

I have been mulling the question of why friendship matters in Shenzhen. Why, in other words, do stories about work end up being lessons about how to make friends? I am beginning to think that friendship matters in Shenzhen because Chinese society in general, but business more specifically because there is a low tolerance for collaborative relations with strangers. Instead, people work to transform relations with strangers into person realtions. Continue reading →