Tag Archives: musing

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.

architectural patriotism

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Today is my last day in NYC. Tomorrow, I head to North Carolina to visit parents and then back to Shenzhen. My immanent departure has me wondering about if I’m going home, or not. I’m wondering because I say “I’m going home” about North Carolina and Shenzhen and not New York, which I go to but I feel more “at home” in New York than in either NC or SZ.

What’s up with that?

In Shenzhen when people express pride in the city’s architecture, I agree that some of the buildings are great. Indeed, I walk the streets photographing those buildings in various stages of construction. And, as mentioned earlier, this attention to Shenzhen details has taught me to care, both for the city in particular, but places in general.

However, being in New York this month has reminded me about the deep structure of architectural patriotism. New York is the one American city that moves me to unthinking patriotism. I see a building and think, “great city”. See another, “oh yeah, best city in the world”. Turn the corner and marvel at sunlight flickering across baroque facades, “is it any wonder we’re the world’s capital?” I ask myself.

My response to New York is visceral. Carnal. Second nature, so to speak. When outside Yew York, I don’t think about it, don’t fantasize about particular streets, don’t plan summer weekends in central park. But when here, each building hails me, each street tempts me, and each neighborhood anticipates my pleasure.

Before I came, I met with a former student, who left Shenzhen to study in New York, where he has learned to miss the street vendors of Yuanling (“who really do have the best street food,” unquote), the heady rush of Shenzhen nightlife, and the infinite possibility that all the construction continues to promise. He loves New York, too. Just like I love Shenzhen. And yet. Pretzels and falafel don’t bring him home, even as 米粉 still does not comfort me when I am most distressed.

More to the point, I’m wondering about the social uses and abuses of my sentiments. These unthinking responses to New York both affirm my identity and limit me. In New York, I have a stronger sense of who I am than I do in either Shenzhen or North Carolina. New York gives me a confidence that I do not feel in either of my physical “homes”; New York also gives me a hopeful certainty that no matter what happens today, tomorrow yeah, I’ll walk down the right street and all will connect.

Nevertheless, this unthinking rightness about my place in the city also confirms my prejudices and ignorance. In New York, I don’t need to see the dignity of Yuanling vendors, the odd differences in Fengshui architecture, and the unexpected (yes, to me) twists of Mandarin (let alone Cantonese-inflected Mandarin) conversations because all that messy otherness exists comfortably beyond my sentimental peregrinations. In Shenzhen, however, I see all this and thus rarely mistake my feeling of ease with a true perception of the world. Indeed, even when I’m feeling wonderfully situated, I’m watchful. Careful. Precise. All this attention because I sense and sometimes approach another river, that unthinkingly flows through my friends just as deeply as New York flows through me.

Yet what my life in Shenzhen has taught me unconditionally is that we are all also sojourners, some of us more obviously than others.  Even if still living in the town of our birth, most of us intuit that this place isn’t “home” because it isn’t what it was. Again, the distance between childhood and contemporary homes is more obvious in Shenzhen than in New York, but even North Carolina is erecting new buildings and neighborhoods that have radically restructured the landscape and in turn, transformed the meaning of “hometown”.

In Buddhist Mandarin “return home (回家)” means to return to one’s true nature. Accordingly, we are all “homesick,” yearning to return to our place of true belonging. And now I’m wondering if home can’t be other than where I am, why does it feel like life is elsewhere?

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 →

why shenzhen?

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yesterday i gave a presentation on the shenzhen book of changes project. one of the questions that i was asked afterwards was, if shenzhen is so environmentally compromised, why do you love it?

i answered that i had experienced hospitality and generosity in shenzhen. indeed, that my husband and friends have all taught me how to be a better human being. and then, as i was walking away, i realized something else. i don’t think of myself as loving shenzhen. i think of myself as walking the city to understand what is happening here. i think of myself as an offering a highly subjective, partial english-language glimpse of the city for those whose only access to the city would otherwise be through journalism. i certainly hope that people who read noted come to shenzhen to learn and to understand and to participate in the life of the city; in other words, i hope that my blog might direct people to interesting and meaningful encounters with the city, rather than function as a substitute for personal experience.

all this to say, i bring a quality of attention and conscious intention to my inhabitation of shenzhen. this orientation has enabled me to see the beauty of shenzhen, land reclamation, fake foods, dank slums and squatter encampments, notwithstanding. so perhaps, yes, i have loved shenzhen more than any other place. but  it may be more accurate to say that learning to be attentive to shenzhen is teaching me to love where i am, today.

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.

in nyc this summer

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i am in nyc for the summer and will be blogging about stories i hear about shenzhen, here. i’m curious about the pattern and frequency of knowledge about / experience of shenzhen because globalization seems to me a question of uncanny immanence. we think tend to think that globalization is obvious – a korean zen center in the lower east side or a parc guell in yantian district, but then, suddenly, during the circle talk, i learned that a teacher’s brother is based in hong kong four months of the year and yes, spends time in shenzhen. there, in the lower east side, among all that obvious globalization hovered immanent connections and spectral possibility.

and a housekeeping note, which follows from being in nyc and the joy of being able to blog without a proxy and concommitant time lags. i am playing around with blog format. hopefully, by the end of the summer, i will have a new look and more integrated tag system / virtual filing system. then i can return to shenzhen and subverse posting. unless, wordpress is unblocked…

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 →

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.