Tag Archives: exegesis

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.

hearing meaning in chinese and english

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yesterday, enjoyed a wonderful bbq with friends of friend. the conversation vered here, as it so often does in shenzhen to: how did i learn chinese?  the assumption behind the disbelief that i speak chinese is that it is difficult to learn chinese. i hear the same distancing shock when chinese people are surprised by the facts that i eat with chopsticks, navigate the public transportation system, and successfully bargain for goods.

it is more difficult to go from english to chinese than it is to go from chinese to french or spanish because english shares so much with the romance languages and very little with chinese. when i learned french, for example, it really was just a question of learning how to translate, once i knew the rules, i just needed to practice execution. were there details i din’t get? yes. do i still struggle with proper use of the subjunctive? yes. do i have difficulty navigating all those gendered nouns. yes.

and yet. did i already understand the use of the past tense and the importance of conjugation to making meaning? yes. did i have vague familiarity with french history and culture? yes. did my u.s. humanities education prepare me for themes i would find in french literature and philosophy? again, yes.

at first glance, then it does seem more difficult for an english speaker to learn chinese than it may be to learn french. the structures of english and chinese share little in common. and, given the tendencies of u.s. american education in the 70s and 80s, i was also unfamiliar with chinese history and culture, as well as great themes in literature and philosophy. all this to say, i understand the difficulty that native speakers of either english or chinese encounter when we attempt to crossover that divide.

nevertheless, learning chinese became easier when i realized that we share many linguistic features but not only use them, but also listen for them differently.  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.

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.

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.

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 →

计划赶超变化–a new era in Shenzhen development

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赶 is often translated as “to overtake”, but can also mean “to drive away”. It first appeared in Chinese political discourse in 1957 when Mao Zedong responded to Nikita Khrushchev’s statement that “the Soviet Union would overtake the United States in 15 years” by saying that “In 15 years the PRC would overtake England”.  In 1958, Liu Shaoqi supported the Great Leap Forward with the idea of “Surpassing England and overtaking the United States (超英赶美)”. Indeed, in Shenzhen’s previous incarnation as Baoan County, there once were two communes named Surpass England and an Overtake America, respectively.

In many of the online interpretations of 赶英超美 (here and here, for example) Reform and Opening (改革开放) is offered as the correct policy for achieving surpassing and overtaking. This scenario is one way of understanding both the importance of Shenzhen (first and largest experiement in reforming and opening the planned economy) and why it is often experienced as “not Chinese”. Indeed, residents have often asked me how similar the United States and Shenzhen are.

赶 reappears in Shenzhen popular discourse in the late 80s and early 90s in the expression “plans can’t keep up with change (计划赶不上变化)”, which comments sarcastically on the governments inability to implement its urban plans. In Shenzhen, for example, the overall plans have been done in 15 year bursts. This has meant that what is planned isn’t built for years. More often than not, village developers and others have taken advantage of this situation to errect their own buildings. Thus, in the 90s, I frequently heard the expression “计划赶不上变化” to explain this situation.

During the 80s and 90s, de facto independence from government plans in Shenzhen resulted in a kind of pioneering exuberence that was often called “the Shenzhen spirit (深圳精神)”, but also found expression in slogans such as “little government, big society (小政府，大社会)” that moved with Shenzhen mayor Liang Xiang to Hainan in 1986 and which continues to inspire debates about changing the relationship between the government and the people (here, here, and here).

However, in conjunction with urban village renovation [administratively located in “Urban village (old village) renovation offices (城中村（旧村）改造办公室)]，the government has  recently begun razing buildings that were erected on these unused sites, justifying their actions (with or without compensation depending on various) with respect to the plan. This means that Shenzhen may have entered a period of that could be called “plans overtake change (计划赶超变化)”, whereby neighborhoods of several years are being razed to make way for roads and other public infrastructure (the subway) that have been planned for years.

I am interested in how “plans overtake change” because it describes several of the important contradictions that over time have taken root and flourished in Shenzhen.

Continue reading →

the meaning of work and the pursuit of 幸福

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I have been thinking about the familial as opposed to the personal value of work in Shenzhen. More specifically,I have been thinking about how happiness (幸福) is tied to family life and thus, how work is understood in terms of how it contributes to and/or impedes the creation and maintenance of families. For example, when people talk about why their jobs are important, they do so in terms of how it contributes to family life, rather than in terms of personal satisfaction. Thus, a “good” job provides a stable income and respectability for a family. If the job allows an individual to pursue and develop interests, so much the better. But if not, individuals may still derive (some) satisfaction from their jobs insofar as these jobs allow them to fulfill their responsibilities to their families.

This insight has allowed me to rethink how my students and their families understand my role in their lives (helping them get into top schools so that they can launch into good jobs), as opposed to what I think my job should be (helping them get into schools that will help them further explore, discover, and develop their passions so that they can find satisfying jobs).

1. The purpose of education: If the social value of a job is familial, it means that the goal of education is to prepare students for well-paid, stable and respectable jobs. These means that in an increasingly technology driven world, education would focus on the sciences and mathematics, despite (and often at the expense of) students’ interests in the arts and humanities. In contrast, if the social value of a job is personal, it means that the goal of education would be to help students figure out what their passion is and how to perfect it, whether or not that particular passion was economically viable.

2. The gender of the job: If the social value of a job is familial, it means that family roles become one of the most important criteria for choosing a career. Fathers/husbands must find jobs that allow them to provide for their families. Likewise, mothers/wives must take jobs that allow them to take care of the family. This means that men often end up taking jobs that they don’t like and women often don’t pursue jobs that they might enjoy in order to maintain family stability.

3. Who decides what one does: If the social value of a job is familial, it also means that parents, spouses, in-laws, and lovers all have a say in what one does because what one does is understood to be an expression of one’s commitment to these relationships. For example, a man who pursues an engineering career has expressed both the potential and the desire to take care of his family because engineering is a proven middle class job. In contrast, a man who pursues a passion for painting has demonstrated neither the potential nor the desire to care of his family because earning a living from painting is difficult. Likewise, a woman is rarely evaluated in terms of her success, but how that success impacts family life. For example, after a woman has a child, the child’s welfare comes before her job. Moreover, problems that children have are often explained in terms of mothers’ inability to manage both work and family responsibilities, regardless if the mother works long, underpaid hours to help meet ends meet, or has chosen to pursue a demanding career, which requires long, well paid hours to meet professional goals.

4. There is more sympathy for folks who are trying, but failing to fulfill their responsibilities to their families through respectable jobs than there is support for folks who trying, but failing to fulfill their family responsibilities by pursuing their interests. Thus, men find their interests are limited by their ability to earn and women find their ambitions are constrained by household responsibilities.

5. Insofar as creating and maintaining a family is considered to be and bring about the highest happiness (幸福), it’s an open question as to how helpful it is when I encourage students to follow their dreams rather than to obey their parents’ instructions.

Hmm.

Shekou Tempest Updates

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Twenty years after the Shekou Tempest, reporters interviewed the two protagonists, Li Yanjie (李燕杰) and Zeng Xianbin (曾宪斌). In retrospect, it seems clear that the two were already walking different roads, which headed to two different versions of contemporary Chinese society, one neo-traditional and the other neo-liberal, both with a nationalist twist.

Li Yanjie continued and deepened his neo-traditional ethical teaching and, over the past ten years has re-emerged as a cultural critic. On his blog, he occassionaly contemplates the meaning of life in highly poetic prose that receives enthusiastic accolades from his readers.

For young people, love is a sweet word. From ancient times to the present, how many people have added to its beautiful colors and poetic imaginary! In those beautifully moving romantic poems, we can frequently feel the noble and healthy way that our Chinese people love.爱情，对于青年人来说，是一个甜蜜的字眼。古往今来，曾有多少人赋予她以美的色彩、诗的意境啊！在那些优美感人的爱情诗歌里，我们常常可以感受到我们中华民族高尚、健康的爱情格调。

Ormosia blooms in the south, but who knows how many branches this year?

Please pick several, as ormosia most symbolizes love.

红豆生南国，春来发几枝，愿君多采撷，此物最相思。

After a few more examples of romantic poetry, Li Yan Jie continues:

But how many young people today don’t know anything about this. After watching a few foreign films, they intentionally imitate those scenes of embracing and kissing, and some even are like this in public during broad daylight. 可是，现在有些青年人却不知道。看了几部外国故事片，就专门模仿那些拥抱、接吻的镜头，有的人大白天在公共场所也这样。

And then he concludes:

To maintain the purity of love, we need lofty ideals of love and to  pay attention to romantic civilization. 爱情的格调要高，还得注意恋爱文明，要保持爱情的纯洁性。

Complete post, here.

Zeng Xianbin’s neo-liberal ethics blossomed into a career as a real estate development planner and professor at the Qinghua University Professional Management Training Center ( 清华大学职业经理人培训中心).  I have been unable to find a blog under his name, but that may be because he sells video-cds of his lectures, and they aren’t cheap.

What is interesting is that Zeng Xianbin transformed his career as a journalist into that of a lecturer, much like Li Yanjie. And, like Li Yanjie, Zeng Xianbin has focused on living in the new era. However, unlike Li Yanjie, Zeng Xianbin has understood each of these changes to be an opportunity and pursued them as such. Indeed, his first opportunity was his comments on and understanding of how Shenzhen reformed public housing by gradually eliminating subsidized housing in favor of a housing market. He now provides ideas for how to use the market to provide suitable housing for low and middle income families.

Even more interestingly is that both men have shifted their ethical focus away from society and placed it firmly on the individual. Ethics has become self-expression, which may be more properly be understood as a kind of self-control (自治能力), whether in the pursuit of love or  money. Which returns me to much earlier thoughts on Confucian businessmen or 儒商。