Tag Archives: memory

local historian, liao honglei

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How we evaluate the meaning of Shenzhen’s emergence and increasing prominence, both nationally and internationally, often hinges on when we entered the SEZ maelstrom of frenzied development and nouveau riche ambition.

Local historian Liao Honglei (廖虹雷) concludes a post on the thirtieth anniversary of Shenzhen’s founding with the following words:

It’s been thirty years. I remember what thirty years in Shenzhen have given me, I also can’t forget what the thirty years before Reform and Opening left me. What has been the greatest gift of these sixty years? “Life” — two completely different lives. The first thirty years constituted a difficult, pure, honest, and bitter but not painful life; the second thirty years constituted a nervous, struggling, deep pocket, wealthy, and sweet but not optimistic life. (30年了，我记得深圳30年给我什么，也不忘改革开放前30年给我留下什么。60年给我最大的礼物是什么？“就是生活”，两种截然不同的生活。前30年是一种艰苦、清纯、扑实，苦而不痛的生活；后30年是一种紧张、拚搏、殷实、宽裕，甜而不乐观的生活。)

As a local historian, Liao Honglei is sensitive to the disparagement in phrases such as “Shenzhen was just a small fishing village” because he knows that before the SEZ, Baoan Shenzhen was not simply a “one college graduate town” or “border town with only 300,000 residents”. He remembers the first experiments with cross border culture — in the 1980s, Shenzhen made famous al fresco dining (大排档) and night markets (灯光夜市), which were local graftings of Hong Kong’s Temple Street and Western Vegetable Streets (庙街 and 西洋菜街). As well as when and how Shenzhen adopted Hong Kong protocols for the institution of joint ventures, stock issuances, and futures trading. And, of course, the language that came with this change — illegal booth owners (走鬼), settle a matter (搞掂), did you get it wrong (有没有搞错呀), bye bye (拜拜), and bury (pay for) the check (埋(买)单).

Liao Honglei’s blog, 廖虹雷博客 is a wonderful resource for anyone interested in Shenzhen’s history. On the one hand, the gritty details of lived experience permeate each post, taking into account how profoundly the establishment of Shenzhen transformed Baoan lives. On the other hand, he calls for the active inclusion of pre-1980 Baoan culture and material history as the basis of any kind of Shenzhen identity. Liao Honglei is a rare Shenzhener: an organic intellectual who advocates the recognition of Baoan as one of the SEZ’s true and necessary roots. Moreover, he actually knows this history, rather than has generalized a Lingnan type past onto the territory. Thus, on his reading, Shenzhen is not just an immigrant town, but also and more importantly, a hybrid mix that has a responsibility to acknowledge and to nurture its diverse origins.

Mulberry Child released!

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Based on her eponymous memoir, friend Jennifer Kwong’s independent film, “Mulberry Child” is now complete! Jennifer tells how growing up during the Cultural Revolution shaped her relationship with her American daughter. Check out the trailer and be inspired.

memory work

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yesterday on the bus, a large and friendly man approached me, asking, ¨do you remember me?¨

after i replied, ¨no,¨ he began to tell me all sorts of facts about me. he knew where i had gone to graduate school, he knew my previous research topics, he knew my husband´s name, and yes, he had seen that long ago sztv documentary about the two of us.

¨don´t you remember me?¨ he asked again.

i tried, ¨i´m old and tired,¨ but he was not assuaged. so i assured him that i believed we had met.

¨you lived in chaoxi lou,¨ he said confidently.

over fifteen years ago, i lived in chaoxi lou for less than two months. and we met then?!

¨yes,¨ he continued happily. ¨i was a student and you were fatter and older looking. in fact, you´ve changed so much i wasn´t sure it was you. i wanted to hear your opinions about taiwan because you had lived there.¨

humbling, this unexpected encounter because suddenly i´m thinking about all those i have forgotten. how much of my life is being carried around in the hearts of others?

uncanny, this encounter because i´m also wondering how many of the defining moments of my life only live in me?

all those fragments of encounter that i have enshrined in my heart were enshrined as dialogues and exchanges, but maybe they´re only bits and pieces of my selective unconscious at work. maybe nothing occurred as i recall. indeed, i have no way of confirming the reliability of my memories and by extension, the person i claim to have been and therefore have become, today.

additional upside to this encounter? i won´t forget him again…

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 →

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.

深大南区：the map is not the territory

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the map

Originally uploaded by maryannodonnell

Once upon a time, this territory was ocean. There were oyster farms and fishing boats. And the people who lived here had single story homes that came to represent the poverty that these maps and plans would end.

The effort it takes to force territories into maps pulses through each inch of the houhai land reclamation area. Lines imagined elsewhere are being bulldozed, pounded, and moulded into six-lane highways and ten-lane expressways. Beside these roads climb glass buildings and residential developments with exotic gardens – palm trees, English grass, a goldfish pond, which is drained and cleaned once a month.

This is the territory – unmapped, but not unsung: Beneath the grey sky and rising walls of a high-tech research compound, a woman washes vinyl advertizing sheets for indigent tenting, paths veer in hidden enclaves that serve as public toilets, and a child plays on a piece of flatboard that has been placed protectively on top the mud.

Shenzhen’s poor are poorer than they were 15 years ago, when squatters had enough space and privacy to build small shelters beneath the lychee orchards that have also been imaginatively disappeared.

May the new year bring new possibilities.

of memories and the public sphere

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This is a longer version of a response to Elliong Ng’s post on Sensitive Anniversary, Edited Memories, which takes up the Peking Duck’s lament:

I find it heartbreaking that here, in what 20 years ago was the vortex where it all took place, there remains in the minds of the young no image of the men and women who died in the crackdown, no stories of the bravery or even of the daily turn of events, the “Goddess of Democracy,” the sort-of hunger strikes, the meeting of Wu’er Kaixi wearing his pajamas with Li Peng, etc. Instead, it’s basically a void, interrupted with a few government talking points and state-issued photos, like those of pre-”Liberation” Tibetan serfs with their limbs hacked off by evil landowners. And I say, What can I do? And I answer, Write it down, and do your tiny, microscopic bit to keep the memory alive.

I think the question of what older people want the next generation to know and how we want them to know are interesting questions because there are important differences between establishing and nourishing a vital public sphere and sharing memories with our children and their friends. Most of us reminice with people our own age, rather than with those of us younger than ourselves. In contrast, we rely on social institutions to teach some version of history – schools, the news media, paperback novels, and hope that our children and their friends will come to some understanding of events. Continue reading →

仙湖植物园: Fairylake

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yesterday, seema and i went to the hongfa temple (弘法寺) in honor of grave sweeping day (清明节). the temple is in the eastern part of the fairylake botanical garden.

during the early eighties, anthropologists noticed that there was a religious revival in china, with many temples being restored. however, in 1985, when construction began, hongfa was the first new temple built since 1949. another shenzhen first. indeed, construction work began five years before china’s first macdonald’s opened in dongmen.

i was struck by the bright orange glazed tile roofs and took a lot of pictures. during imperial times, glazed tiles were used exclusively on the buildings of the imperial palace or the homes of nobles and high ranking officials. chinese architects used yellow (orange), green, blue, and black tiles. each color had symbolic meaning. the yellow (orange) tiles signified the emperor and were only used on the roofs of royal palaces, mausoleums, gardens, and temples.

during the 1980s in shenzhen, architects used glazed tiles to adorn homes, walls, arches, hotels, museums, and restaurants. these remnants of an earlier aesthetic, which is often dismissed today as being “provincial (土)” encourage speculation about how early shenzhen residents borrowed from the past in order to imagine and create the future. on the one hand, the use of glazed tiles speaks to a democratic impulse–what’s good for the emperor is good for the common person. on the other hand, they also speak to totalitarian ambitions–i want to be king. indeed, the experience of freedom and release from convention that early shenzhen residents once described to me as that “shenzhen spirit” seems rooted in this contradiction.

an example from fieldwork, many years ago. in 1996, my mother visited and we went to beijing. we wanted to visit the beijing university campus, however, it was early july and so there were active restrictions on who could and could not enter. that same year, same month, i walked into the shenzhen municipal government without signing in. the guards knew me and waved me through. i then went to my friend’s office to continue interviews about population and urban planning.

this, of course, remains shenzhen’s central contradiction. on the one hand, many of china’s earliest critical magazines and journals were published here. on the other, shenzhen continues to produce some of the most dogmatic propaganda. on the one hand, there is a great deal of choice because everything here can be bought and sold. on the other hand, because choice is reduced to market choice, the political significance of many items is effectively blunted.

most visitors to shenzhen see either the limitless possibility that markets promise or the lack of social movements. in this way, shenzhen is either praised as an examplar of the benefits of capitalism or condemned as lacking any kind of public culture, depending on whether the visitor’s point of view. it seems to me more helpful to think about how this contradiction has been lived in the everyday life.

people who have come to shenzhen do experience a loosening of the conventions that govern behavior inland. however, this loosening has produced many individual efforts to bring about new possibilities for themselves and their families, rather than collective change. what remains to be seen is how this might open itself to a more egalitarian society, rather than remaining an egalitarianism defined by the idea that everyone has a chance to get rich.

urban form and memory

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joshua kauffman and gwendolyn floyd

the bienniale opens tonight. well, bienniale the third. but it’s my first. i missed the previous two. i’ve been hanging out at oct loft with fat bird and silo, and these past few weeks, with gwendolyn floyd and joshua kauffman, co-founders of regional, which they define as “an interdisciplinary design and research network that performs and applies original analysis of global society, culture and commerce, uncovering and developing opportunities for profitable innovation and meaningful cultural intervention.”

their installation is called “foreground”, which was built out of bamboo. the design is derived from GIS data of a recently removed shenzhen mountain ridge. over the past twenty years, shenzhen has aggressively reclaimed land from both its eastern and western coasts. in everyday conversation this process is called “moving mountains in order to fill the ocean (移山填海).” with foreground, floyd and kauffman have respond to this transformation by using bamboo to re-construct a mountain that no longer exists. the contrast between the structure and the ground actualizes the difference between shenzhen’s pre- and post-urban topographies, creating a visible and material history for the area. more importantly, the installation enables bienniale visitors to imagine the lay of shenzhen’s land before urbanization and, in doing so, re-imagine how the city might reproduce itself in the future.

at least i hope so. one of the illusions of land reclamation and disappeared mountains is how quickly they vanish from consciousness. when i go to houhai and look out at the new landscape i have to think, and think hard, to recall something about what was once there. most of the time, however, i end up taking another round of photos and then doing a little side by side comparison. that was then, this is now.

its hard work to keep the city’s past and present simultaneously in mind. usually, i depend on the material world to do that for me. the old buildings, certain parks, particular roads–these hold my memories, which i enter by way of an evening walk. to the extent that it remains in place, shenzhen keeps my memory intact. but the city keeps getting razed. or rebuilt. or refashioned. and as the buildings collapse and new edifices rise, or factories get a facelift and industrial areas are upgraded, i forget. or rather, i loose access to memory. all that stuff are also doors to memory, and when a building gets razed, i am locked out of my past.

click for images of gwen and joshua’s work in progress.

thoughts on rainy days

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for those not in shenzhen, you are probably blissfully unaware that 4 typhoons have landed nearby over the past several weeks. this means it has rained almost everyday this month. and not little tiny avoidable raindrops, but heavy raindrops that blow horizontally and thus bypass even the largest umbrella. so i haven’t been able to get out and take pictures.

i have, however, been wandering around some of shenzhen’s new hotspots and am struck, once again, by the difference a decade makes. it really is a different era here from ten years ago. yesterday, i saw the latest harry potter in a small, intimate theatre with 40 fat reclining sofas (and mediocre popcorn. the children next to me had the sense to bring kfc.) today, i went to yoga class in wonderful studio with truly wonderful teachers, some who have practiced in india. i then had dinner with a friend and her son at a japonese restaurant. if memory serves, ten years ago i avoided movie theatres because they were often haunted by men who watched with a date chosen from the ladies lined up outside the door. there was no yoga anywhere. and we ate mostly cantonese food; sometimes food from other parts of china, but ten years ago, the cuisine had a definate regional bent.

it’s as if suddenly all the talk about building a global city has come true. the socialist dreamers who came in the 1980s and early 90s have successfully built a city for a middle class that has only recently emerged.
indeed, all the recent cultural activity is no doubt part of this massive yuppification of shenzhen.

or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that those socialist dreamers have built a city for their children, who really do belong to a different world. it is however an open question as to why they belong to a different world. friends who look to japan and korea say it’s possible to be both traditional and modern; china has failed because of socialism. at lunch two days ago, a friend (now in his early 50s) said that people born after 1970 don’t have any tradional characteristics. he blamed the cultural revolution for cutting off contemporary china from its roots. that’s why, he said, china is modernizing like this.

like what? i asked.

without history. shenzhen is the perfect example of new china because it doesn’t have any culture or history. but it’s not even the best copy of the west. china is a fractured (分裂) society. we have no standards to guide us. japan and korea, he continued, have managed to preserve tradition and modernize.

his comments made me re-think the question of master narratives. not the fact that master narratives are imaginary and therefore not real in a material sense. after all, rarely does reality conform to what we think. but rather the fact that without a master narrative it’s hard to make value judgements; why is x better than y? tradition seems to me a legitimate answer to that question. socialism once provided another answer. today, my friend is trying to figure out what happens when all the master narratives have been shown untrue; what can the people believe? how will they recognize the good life? and in what kind of world is shenzhen a desired way of life?