Tag Archives: musing

houhai monuments–found objects

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temporary nursery, houhai

it’s been over six months since i last walked this particular section of houhai. the road has been laid and now traverses the entire site. they’re even planting trees as part of shenzhen’s ongoing efforts to become a garden city. i snapped away, aware that houhai has yet to disappoint me; something there always fascinates. indeed, houhai has been central to found objects. i found teapot there, brought most of the other objects there, and have retuned to photograph the unmovable objects i have stumbled upon there.

lately, i’ve been thinking about my houhai fascination and suddenly realized that i am drawn to objects and sites that seem monumental, in all sences of that word. large, of course, so large that the scale of transformation slips away from my efforts to conceptualize it. but also, evocative of time and its passage. the monument commemorates some past event, keeping particular memories at play in shared worlds. indeed, the monument holds time in place, so that we might create a shared worlds.

and yet. the objects i photograph only gain their monumentality in digitalized retrospect, although sometimes i actually print an image. but on any ordinary day, the objects come and go, without comment, changing what houhai might mean, begging the question of whether or not houhai participates in a shared world before something “permanent” is constructed. on houhai, only buildings and streets are named. the rest vanishes.

today, in addition to the trees, i’ve uploaded a few houhai monuments, from the past few years.


mound, houhai april, 2006

韩流: caught in the undertow

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A funny thing happened on the road to Heyuan. In order to keep passengers entertained, the bus company had installed a television screen and DVD system. At first, I entertained myself by composing an essay about the obvious irony of watching a Korean drama how a young girl marries up and going to visit poor people. But 15 minutes into the trip, I stopped thinking about social ironies and found myself following the intricacies of romance in an arranged marriage between an 18 year old high school student and a 28 year old district attorney.

I can’t say “The Bride is 18 ((新娘１８岁)” was either intellectually compelling or even socially redeeming. The plot hinged on the question, could two radically different people get married and become a loving couple? The answer was yes. Yes because the groom understood compassion and how to teach a recent high school graduate how to be a human being. Yes also because the bride didn’t want to go to college but wanted to be a housewife.

These past few years, I have been vaguely aware of the popularity of Korean pop in China, especially music and drams. Indeed, I have listened to friends talk about their favorite dramas and even watched part of “Wish Upon a Star”, staring An Jae Wook (安在旭), who was a breakout Korean star in China. My students listen to K-pop stars Rain, se7en, and BoA. However, I never considered buying into the Korean Wave (韩流 hallyu in Korean). I classed them with Brittney Spears, Justin Timberlake and other young American popstars—cute, manufactured, well-dressed, cute, photogenic, and did I say cute?—but not really for me.

And yet.

After a four hour trip to Heyuan and then a four hour return to Shenzhen, I was still six episodes from our heroine’s happily ever after. I got off the bus, said goodbye to my students, and then felt compelled to do something I never thought I would: I bought the complete Bride just to watch those last six episodes. I was caught in the undertow.

I confessed to a good friend, who told me that Korean dramas are formidable (厉害). A business associate’s wife, she continued, is totally addicted. After breakfast, the wife is said to make herself a pot of tea, turn on the television, and cry along with her favorite stars.

So to understand how I and other 40-somethings might get hooked on k-dramas, I took an unscientific survey of my friends. One said that k-dramas are good to watch. The sets are fashionable, the costumes are beautiful, and the actors are really attractive. Another added that the shows are really relaxing because you don’t have to think when you watch them. Yet another added that she liked to follow k-dramas because they’re realistic. At this, I raised a disbelieving eyebrow, “Realistic?”

“They talk about urban life. And young people’s hopes and dreams. Not like Chinese dramas.”

My husband watched an episode with me. He thought that the attraction lay in the main characters’ rebellion against social norms, without actually breaking human ties. “Asian people,” he said, “live in relationships. But sometimes we just want to do what we want.”

“Yes,” another friend mused, “it’s that the shows always end with reunion (团聚). Real life isn’t like that. It’s comforting to see everybody come together, no matter what their differences were. And the actors really are attractive.”

Perhaps that’s all it is. Pretty people living beautiful lives. An easy distraction. A coffee break conversation. But then, again, I wonder. How could a contrived melodrama about a girl who gives up college to be a housewife hook me? It wasn’t the story. Not the pretty faces. Not even coffee break conversation. But I’m also sure that simply turning off the TV won’t make me immune. I want. Want powerfully. And in those shows wanting brings about its own reward. Forever.

九街：an ethnographic post-script

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remnant gateway to the xin’an fairy town walking museum

one of the earliest articles i published was “becoming hong kong, razing baoan, preserving xin’an: an ethnographic account of urbanization in the shenzhen special economic zone” (cultural studies 15(3/4), 2001, 419-43). i argued that hong kong appeared in shenzhen urban planning as both the origin and telos of modernization. as origin, hong kong capital, know-how, and connections jump-started manufacturing in shenzhen. as telos, hong kong’s glossy skyline provided a model for urbanization. at the same time, contemporary hong kongers were integrated into guangdong society through narratives of hometown and tradition; according to this story, everyone in shenzhen and hong kong were all descendants of xin’an county natives. in this way, hong kong was inscribed into the history of the prc and hong kongers into local history.

hong kong was originally part of xin’an county, and this fact shows up in hong kong histories. however, xin’an county ceased to exist as an administrative unit of guangdong province in 1913, when the nationalist government renamed it baoan county. consequently, histories of shenzhen identify baoan as the city’s rural predecessor. thus, various levels of shenzhen government have found it necessary to stress the common spatial origin of the two cities precisely because hong kong and shenzhen have distinct temporal origins.

at the time i was writing up those earlier fieldnotes, the slippery twists of socialist nostalgia fascinated me. a shared origin – xin’an county – structured this nostalgia, where hong kong’s postwar history (1950-1979) became the past that shenzhen (rural baoan) would have had, if not for cold war politics that isolated the county from global markets. indeed, locals offered hong kong’s prosperity as evidence that socialism had delayed modernization in shenzhen. in order to prove that xin’an county was the origin of both shenzhen and hong kong, it was necessary to engage in acts of historic preservation – at the tianhou temple in chiwan, the pengcheng fortress at daya bay, and old nantou city.

in anticipation of the return of hong kong to chinese sovereignty in 1997, the nanshan district government collaborated with an overseas chinese investor to restore some buildings in “nine streets”, creating a walking museum. nine streets is the contemporary name for nantou, a market town that had been the xin’an county yamen. nantou was the yamen where, after the conclusion of the first opium war in 1842, representatives from the qing and british empires met to sign the papers that made hong kong island a crown colony. indeed, nantou was the xin’an county seat for roughly 600 years, from the ming dynasty until 1953, when the communist government moved the county seat to shenzhen market, which would in turn give its name to the new special economic zone in 1980.

the idea behind the walking museum was to demonstrate the historic links between shenzhen and hong kong. thus, for example, the nanshan district government designated nine streets the nantou old city (南头古城) historic area, which was the actual name of the market town. in contrast, the museum was called xin’an fairy town (新安故城). ironically, the gateway for the museum still looms in front of the nantou city wall.

from the museum’s opening, few people came to explore the restored pawnshop, opium den, brothel, gaol, and yamen. instead, most went to the restored temple to guandi (关帝), the god of wealth to burn incense and pray. at first, the temple was explicitly used as the gateway to the museum, and visitors could purchase tickets there; museum staff tolerated but did not encourage supplicants. however, nine street residents soon dominated temple and, during my latest trip to nantou, the museum had closed and the temple had a resident monk who was reading fortunes in the god’s shadow. rooms that had once held exhibitions about shenzhen and hong kong’s common history had been transformed into alcoves for new gods.

another historic transformation: when i was doing the research for that long-ago paper, i had been unable to gain entrance to an old orphanage, which had built by italian missionaries at the turn of the 20th century and was located in jiujie. however, on this trip, it was possible to visit because it had become the center of the patriotic catholic church of shenzhen. the deacon lamented that the church had been razed and they were now using the orphanage instead. i was struck by the building’s similarities to macao’s churches.

i invite you to take a walk through nine streets, once upon a time the yamen of xin’an county. note that the temple was moved outside the city wall in order to attract visitors. museum designers also intended to make the old ming-era gate the first element of the walking tour.

开平碉楼: fortified homes

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the other day, i went to zili village (自立村), li yuan (立园), and chikan town (赤坎镇) in kaiping city (开平市), one of guangdong’s famous 侨乡 (overseas chinese homeland). as a tourist destination, kaiping is famous for its towers, known as 碉楼, which were fortified structures designed to protect families from local bandits. according to anthropologist zhang guoxiong (张国雄):

“Before the Ming Dynasty, presentday Kaiping lay at the administrative intersection of three
counties, Enping, Xinhui and Xinxing. This situation enabled local bandits (土匪) to flourish
and hide out there. Public security was a mess. Liangjin Mountain in Kaiping was just such a
nest for local bandits, whose activities reached the towns of Chikan and Tangkou. Kaiping’s
predecessor was Kaiping Dun. During the Ming, the character “dun” refered to a military
installation. We can imagine that the central government had dispatched a garrison to Kaiping to
manage the problem of public security. They hoped this would be a place of unhindered traffic,
and that peace would be restored. Kaiping became a county during the first year of the Shunzhi
reign (1643). It was precisely to counter these social problems that the are was called Kaiping
(开平), which meant “restore peace (开同敉平)”. From this we can see, public
security problems were endemic to the area (loose translation from his book 开平碉楼)”.

these problems continued through the late qing and into the nationalist period. local architecture reflected the need to build for safety from bandits. however, the infusion of money from overseas chinese changed and intensified this kind of protective building. from the mid nineteenth century on, men from kaiping began immigrating to the united states and canada. significantly, because exclusion acts prevented them from bringing their families with them, they sent remittances home, often with the specific intent to build a safe tower, where their families could live. it is estimated that from the mid-nineteenth century over 3,000 towers were built, with intensive construction happening from 1912 until 1937, when nearly half the towers were built (1,490).

in fact, the remittances themselves became the cause of increased piracy. from 1912 until 1930, roughly the same period as the most intensive episode of tower building, there were 71 reported instances of bandit attacks in kaiping, including three attacks on the county seat and kidnapping the county magistrate.

early chinese immigrants to the united states worked for low wages in dehumanizing conditions. indeed, chinese migration satisfied american needs for low wage workers without attempting to give workers the benefits of american citizenship; in chinese, the remitances were called “血汗钱 (blood and sweat money)”. all this to say, kaiping people found themselves quite literally in a global crossfire between local bandits and north american immigration policy; there was no safe place for them and their families, together.

indeed, global politics continued to shape the possibilities of kaiping family life. the cold war brought with it u.s. attempts to undermine asian communist leaders, especially mao zedong. beginning in the early 1950s immigration restraints loosened, culminating with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. these changes allowed for the migration of kaiping family members, most of whom abandoned their towers for chinatowns and suburbs overseas, despite the fact that the communist party had actually succeeded in pacifying local bandits.

today, kaiping’s fortified homes seem disconcerting monuments. to departure. to social unrest. to history’s ironies. to ostensive luxury. the towers, the tiled floors, the defensive infrastructure, including weapons, the intricate wood carvings, the marble tables, the obvious wealth boarded up and hidden behind concrete walls and rusting metal shutters distressed me; a fortress can’t protect a dream.

on jan 31, 2002, the state administration of cultural heritage of the people’s republic of china (the awkward and official translation of 中华人民共和国国家文物局) nominated the kaiping towers for inclusion in UNESCO’s world heritage project. they have also uploaded a website that brings together tourist information, annecdotes, and historic analysis about the towers and the overseas chinese who built them. please visit.

objectified space

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two questions have prompted me to specify what i want to achieve through the found objects project.

lesley sanderson posed the first question at the cruel/loving bodies exhibition, “look at you work critically and decide what you are trying to do.”

sasha welland then asked me, “why do you pick up the objects and photograph them elsewhere? why not just photograph them in place?”

a preliminary answer to these questions. in the found objects series, i map shenzhen from the perspective of the object. in constrast, i have tended to photograph large objects in place, calling attention to the construction of shenzhen through specific objects. how might this latter project be different from simply photographing places, which i’ve done all along?

while trying to get onto the houhai land reclamation project in shekou, i took pictures of discarded objects on that walk. i also photographed baskets left on a street.

赤湾: selective naturalizations

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relatively isolated from the rest of shekou, the geography of chiwan has recently undergone massive restructuring as outgrowths of containers replace mountains as the defining feature of the landscape.

shenzhen port consists of nine terminals: shekou, chiwan, mawan, yantian, dongjiaotou, fuyong, xiadong, shayuchong and neihe.

团聚：out and up

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the u.p. went global and caught me unawares.

i open this story with a picture of me and my cousin david. this post resonates with a previous entry about tianmian. there i tracked the relationships that placed me in shenzhen in a particular way. here i sketch the geneology that specifies me as american. both entries share an impulse to transform discomfort about the relative privileges i enjoy into ethnographic knowledge. this discomfort, whether voiced or not vexes my work to date. i hope that narrating these awkward moments will illustrate the complexity of documenting shenzhen.

about a week ago, my uncle emailed me to say that my cousin david would be in china and wouldn’t it be great if the two of us could meet up. surprise. my mother is from iron mountain, in the u.p., where i used to spend summer vacations. my siblings and i swam, ran around, hung out with relatives, learned to play smear, argued with relatives, ate fresh vegetables from their gardens, had swordfights with sparklers on the fourth, and still had two more weeks to endure with relatives. i stopped going my sixteenth year because i was given the choice of going to michigan or staying home. so, my uncle’s email abruptly reminded me that not only do i have an extended family, but also that those folks are busy creating and participating in global networks. just like me. gulp.

david looks like my mother in ways that i don’t. surprise again. more importantly, his personal trajectory out of the u.p. makes him like my mother in ways that i am not. my mother and david embody connections between the rural midwest and upwardly mobile suburbanites. when we would go back to the u.p. all those summers, my mother was going home to people she recognized and who recognized her as being fundamentally the same: same small high school, same kinds of wage labor, same catholic church, same teachers, same cold winters, same rural environment. david went to that high school and church, his father and brother work(ed) those jobs, endured those winters… the difference from the u.p. relatives that my mother and david share is that they both got out by working their way up. and today’s story is in the prepositions. out and up: my mother through nursing and david by way of the marines.

in contrast, my siblings and i grew up in upper middle class suburbs, moving from house to more expensive house, with the expectation of a college education and yet bigger houses for our children. that all of us now live in smaller houses than when we were children is another story. at the moment, i’m thinking that when we went to the u.p. all those summers ago, my siblings and i embodied class and cultural differences that we weren’t capable of finessing, although there were times that affection and horseplay overcame the ruptures. it wasn’t simply that we symbolized my parents’ success (my father was also an out and up story from pittsburg), but also and more fundamentally it was that we lived in a world from which our cousins were excluded. we went to michigan; they didn’t come to new jersey. these differences became more painfully obvious with each passing year, until my simblings and i opted out of going back. and so, even if the reunion with david caught me offguard, that it would happen outside the u.p. might have been predicted.

we talked about what we and our immediate families have been up to these past twenty-odd years. most of his family remains in the u.p.; mine is scattered throughout different east coast suburbs. indeed, leaving jersey, especially for new york, is itself a fascinating story of the lived snobberies and upward mobilities of my siblings and friends. and yet… the snobberies and upward mobilities of my family and friends have been reproduced in shekou. local investors, travelling businessmen, and government officials bent on globalizing shenzhen have together reproduced places where middle class american suburbanites easily lunch and dine. david and i had dinner at gypsy’s one of the comfortable, seaworld (海上世界) restaurants that cater to displaced westerners in shekou. i like the food, which is fresh, eclectic, and yet so very, very familar; it tastes like good food from my hometown burb and provides the particular counterpoint to the generalized tastes of macdonald’s and papa john’s, which are also located in the seaworld plaza.

this meeting has started me re-thinking these fieldnotes.

on the question of a shenzhen identity: i am native to the idealized version of global culture that is being built in seaworld. this culture is not broadly u.s. american, but a vision of upper middle class suburban forms of consumption. developers and real estate agents market aspects of this vision to sell new houses (bigger and better, like the houses of my childhood); local officials judge the success of reform on the numbers of white collar workers who can afford to eat at restaurants like gypsy’s.

the different trajectories that brought my cousin and me to seaworld highlight the way that exporting this version of prosperity functions to restructure domestic american class relations in international terms. on the one hand, the seaworld version of prosperity has enabled me to find jobs and live comfortably in shenzhen. on the other hand, it has also provided opportunities for my cousin to move out of and up from the u.p. crudely but nevertheless provocatively seaworld helped ameliorate our previous antagonisms, which we still don’t talk about.

this leads to the question of who is excluded from this world; my relatives in the u.p. remain excluded from this world, although one or two may find a way in. david and my mother remain the embodied bridges between these worlds. at the same time, most of china’s rural poor are also excluded from this world. this is important, seaworld marks not an amelioration of the class differences that separated me from my u.p. relatives, but rather an extension of those differences into a new domain. i am not suggesting that chinese society wasn’t marked by class differences before reform. instead, i am reiterating a point long made by postcolonial marxists: displacing our class differences onto new societies has neither resolved class tensions in the u.s., nor improved class antagonisms in china. instead, class conflicts in both china and the u.s. have been amplified, even as the beneficiaries of this inequality justify their actions in terms of globalized meeting grounds, like seaworld, as places where cultural difference is overcome.

in local newspapers, the class difference manifest in the architecture and various uses of seaworld is glossed as “incentive”, presumably to move out of and up from the rural hinterland. formally, at least, the structure of the incentive reproduces the lived differences between rural and suburban americans. i am not sure whether or not my siblings and i inspired my cousin to join the marines and go to college; my gut reaction is that the comparison although annoying was less important than the physical and social unpleasantness of both manual labor and being denied what is considered valuable, including tasty food, an interesting education, and opportunities to travel. as chinese friends who are on their way out and up remind me: there really are better lives than they used to lead.

finally, i find myself wondering at the understandings, experiences, and practices that compel us individually to move out and up, rather than collectively forward.

旧村改新：initial observations

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this is another thoughts-in-progress entry. these past few days, i have been trying to organize thoughts about the 旧村改新 (old village make-overs), a recent government initiative to clean-up shenzhen’s new villages (now understood as “old”). this was part of the reason for posting on luohu; i actually took that series of pictures last december, but the juxtaposition of new luohu village, the era of two cities building, the new housing development, and the renovated train station point to issues that come together in the make-over initiative. so if you haven’t yet, you may want to first take a walk about luohu.

the point, of course, is simple: there are many shenzhens and they all abut one another. indeed, it’s as difficult to miss new villages, which have a distinctive layout and architecture, as it is to overlook a high-end housing development. these different urban forms actualize the different development trajectories that shenzhen’s villagers and white-collar migrants have pursued. that is to say, even if we bracket for the moment the question of whether or not shenzhen has deep, imperial history, nevertheless, it has been over 25 years since deng xiaoping began reform and opening just north of hong kong. architecture styles and urban plans actualize different moments in this process, providing a material history of the city. with the village make-over initiative, the government seems determined to remove traces of historic difference, even as cultural officials continue to moan about shenzhen’s lack of history. below is a picture of the arch at the entrance to huanggang new village.

the old village make-over initiative first came to my attention over dinner last year, when friends were discussing the government’s decision to raze 18 mid-rise buildings), right at the huanggang cross-border checkpoint. the topic came up not because those at the table disagreed with the make-over process, but because this was the first time china was simultaneously imploding 18 buildings. the event was know as “china’s first blast (全国第一爆).the buildings belonged to yunong village (渔农村). if memory holds, the conversation focused on the technology involved, the need for a modern area to face hong kong, and the avarious fearlessness of villagers, who continued to errect illegal, rental properties.

this past year, i have watched construction teams lay the foundations for a new yunong with something of a jaded eye. this is not the first time that the municipal government had directed a movement specifically at shenzhen’s urban villages. and in a certain sense, it often feels like a more of the same kind of project.

in 1991, the government initiated the rural urbanization movement (农村城市化运动) with the goal of integrating all villages into the municipal government and giving all shenzhen peasants, citizen status. this was called the double transformation. this movement finally ended in august 2004, when baoan and longgang districts announced that all villages had been redistricted and all villagers had been given a new hukou. shenzhen was thereby the first city in china to have neither villages nor villagers within its borders.

for officials determined to turn their city into a global, international city, the end of rural shenzhen was a major milestone. indeed, in this area shenzhen has been heralded as a national leader. these administrative changes, however, did not irradicate the visceral spatial differences between shenzhen villages and the surrounding city.

in order to deepen the integration of the villages into the fabric of the city, shenzhen officials turned their gaze to the built environment as a sign of rural-urban difference. consequently, the following year, in 2005, the government decided to start the old village make-over initiative. crudely, this entails razing what are known as “handshake buildings” and replacing them with modern residential developments. handshake buildings are so-called because they are so close to each other that neighbors can reach out their windows or across their balconies and shake hands. the initiative includes building plazas and public areas, as well as different kinds of housing developments. i include a picture of a row of handshake buildings, huanggang new village.

compare with an image of the new urban dreams currently under construction in huanggang:

the old village make-over initiative was formally approved on october 28, 2005. it is a special five-year plan to improve the urban villages (城中村), speed up urbanization, promote the unification of infrastructure within and outside the sez, realize the joint planning and harmonious development of urban villages and other areas in the city, and to advance the architecture of a global, modern, and key city, errect a harmonious and efficient shenzhen. the curious can check out the full old village make-over plan online.

nevertheless, the question of make-overs and everyday life only became interesting the other day, when i was in shuiwei and huanggang, two of the futian villages that abut the hong kong border. frankly, i was impressed with the layout of shuiwei’s culture plaza, which boasts a funky (if derivative) outdoor stage, a curious rocks museum (the rocks are mainly from guangxi), and a library. i also had tea at a colorful hong kong style teashop, where the milk tea was strong and rich. suddenly, i wanted to move from tianmian, which is conveniant but not like shuiwei. (the lack of tasty but reasonable restaurants in tianmian is a bone of ongoing contention. after all, one of the defining features of the urban villages has been the quality and price of the restaurants.)

my desire to move to shuiwei points to an underlying fact about new village life; the primary source of income for most villagers is rental property. this has meant that villagers have built as densely and as highly as possible, with little concern for the overall environment. it also has meant a density of cheap beauty and massage parlors, restaurants, places to play mah johng, food markets. indeed, since the mid-1990s, as most of shenzhen’s factories have been pushed outside city limits, the importance of rental property and services to village economies has grown. the main residents of the villages are low income migrants, usually from the countryside.

it seems that the ratio of villagers to migrants in the villages concerns the government. the villages maintain their own militias (民兵) that act as a police force within village borders, shifting social regulation from the state to these quasi-governmental organizations. according to futian government statistics, for example, there were 19,353 villagers registrared in 15 administrative villages (there are 20 natural villages in futian.) those villagers provided housing for 572,143 migrants. a ratio of 1 villager for every 29.5 migrants. (these figures do not include unregistered migrants, some of whom live in illegal housing, but others who live in the underground walkways that connect villages to the city proper.) these migrant laborers are precisely the persons regularly identified in the press and popular opinion as causing social unrest. outside the sez in baoan and longgang districts, the villager to migrant ratio is even higher. thus, this research suggests that the greatest challenge facing the make-over movement is a contradiction between the villagers’ economic interest (as landlords) and the state’s interest in maintaining social discipline.

i conclude with a picture of the home of the shuiwei militia (水围民兵之家).

个人魅力：thoughts in progress

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it has been a weekend of meetings and rain, which means few pictures, but many words. it was also a time of unexpected insight into the importance of charisma. i’m not sure yet where this might lead me theoretically. nevertheless, it seems worth writing down how i came to this insight because that may allow me to track which of my assumptions are blinding me to something everyone around me is taking for granted.

the school i work for is changing its name and leadership. previously, the school was a branch of a famous beijing school. on sunday may 28, the school announced that it will be working with one of shenzhen’s most famous and successful principals to develop an elite program. throughout the speeches given both during the meeting and afterwards at lunch, it became clear that the school board understood previous failures to be failures of leadership. one of the board members summarized the situation as, “we didn’t have a shepherd, but we’ve always had high quality sheep. now that we’ve got a shepherd, everyone can relax” this sentence suddenly clarified for me what actually took place the day before, when yang qian and i met with tian qinxin, wang hanyi, and dai yu for lunch and three hours of conversation.

tian, wang, dai, yang, and i are not only involved in theatre production, but also friends of long standing. these friendships provide both companionship and the social matrix in which fat bird nests. this is important. the kind of charisma that seemed stressed this weekend was the ability to both nourish these relationships and use them to create theatre.

in the early 90s, tian qinxin worked in a shenzhen advertising agency and yang qian was a new functionary in the recently established nanshan district ministry of culture. both had escaped from beijing to shenzhen. yang qian had just given up on his first marriage and the possibility of doing journalism; he turned to playwriting to express through fiction truths that just-the-facts often missed. in 1994, tian qinxin’s ex directed yang qian’s play “intentional injury” for the chinese national experimental theatre. she was in shenzhen recovering from that break-up. for half a year, tian qinxin and yang qian got together to drink, smoke, and talk about theatre and lost opportunities. the two also worked with xiong yuanwei on one of shenzhen’s first theatrical productions, “i love mozart”. xiong yuanwei produced, tian qinxin directed, and yang qian played a “fat white hooligan”. (the expression “fat and white” refers to corrupt officials who do nothing but stay out of the sun and eat.) yang qian finally encouraged tian qinxin to quit her job and return to beijing. he decided to stay in shenzhen, however. tian qinxin is now the only woman director at the chinese national theatre and has won all of china’s top theatrical awards.

yang qian and i met dai yu in 1997, when zero sun moon produced “eternal return” as part of the hong kong handover celebrations organized by nanshan district. (i wrote about the szm years and “eternal return” in “Zero Sun Moon: The Cultural Politics of Seeing Performance,” Theatre InSight 10:1 (Spring 1999), 27-32.) that fall, dai yu left shenzhen to study playwriting at the chinese theatre academy, where tian qinxin has taught. today, dai yu is a functionary in the shenzhen ministry of culture. she was the one who helped yang qian register fat bird with the municipal government. most recently, she arranged for fat bird’s inclusion in the 2006 cultural industries fair.

wang hanyi is tian’s partner and collaborator. the two came to shenzhen because as part of the cultural industry fair, shenzhen municipality invited tian to stage her play 生死场 (place of life and death) at the shenzhen grand theatre.

so on the day that life and death premiered in shenzhen, the five of us gathered to discuss the possibility of making theatre in china. the conversation circled around the question of how to make theatre in an environment where “reforming” china’s main theatre troupes means “no longer providing financial support”. although she has not publically commented on the reforms, tian qinxin has an interesting position in this debate because her recent (very influential) kunqu production of “peach blossom fan (桃花扇) with the jiansu performance company (江苏省演艺集团) has been heralded as an examplar of why reform works. in this case, the head of the company invited her and other outside artists to nanjing to create a financially viable piece. and they did. so whatever she thinks about reform, her work is now offered as an example of the benefits of reforming state subsidized art institutions, specfically theatre troupes.

tian qinxin emphasized that by establishing fat bird, yang qian had opened a possible site for making theatre in this new environment. indeed, it was early in the reforms and so he had a chance to take advantage of new conditions in ways that other people didn’t. dai yu commented that for this to happen, yang qian would have to become more active. he couldn’t continue to keep himself aloof from society and pursue “pure art”. tian qinxin agreed, that in order to have the opportunity to do art, it was necessary for yang qian to pay his dues and create popular works.

just a few notes on what “paying one’s dues” might mean in practice. in part it means doing things you don’t want to do, like creating popular pieces that don’t actually inspire you. it means garnering awards so that you can convince officials you are in fact legitimate. it also means, going from friend to friend and asking them to contribute some money for the production. wining and dining all the folks that you need to in order to get it up. going door to door to door in order to sell tickets (and tickets must be sold so that you can pay back your friends, otherwise you’re incompetant). going university to university arranging to have the play performed for students, who are the biggest and most receptive audience to new works. implicit in all this is that one pays dues in order to become big because only these people have the influence to make the kinds of work they want to make.

wang hanyi then pointed to the traditional model of chinese opera troupes, where all the members supported one main performer. that main performer was the star of any production by the troupe. she pointed to mei lanfang as an important example of that kind of star. when it was time to stage a large production, which had several main roles, several troupes would collaborate and then break up afterwards. it was the 个人魅力 (charisma) of the central character that enabled a particular troupe to both attract an audience and to keep the troupe together. tian qinxin agreed that individual charisma was fundamental to accomplishing anything in china, not just theatre. “after all,” she said, “we have idolized emperors for 5,000 years. the point is to use this to make theatre.”

at first, i didn’t follow the logic that jumped from making theatre through a critique of yang qian, who was called a little master, aloof, and lazy to a discussion of traditional chinese opera troupes. no one else seem lost, however. indeed, yang qian thanked them for their advise. but in retrospect, it now seems that for tian, wang, and dai, yang qian had a responsibility not simply to lead the troupe, but to make it happen. they believed that the troupe was yang qian, and his decisions would shape whether or not all other fat bird members could make theatre. in this context, each of their comments became reminders that if yang qian was to make theatre, he needed to take charge of the troupe in a direct and personal way; he needed to become a shepherd, so to speak.

perhaps i am working with a different folk conception of “individual” than are my friends and husband. for me, the individual is expressed through doing what he or she wants; cooperation is the practice that links individuals in creative activity. however, at lunch yesterday, there were two understandings of cooperation in play–one between friends and one between leaders and troupe members. both forms of cooperation were important. my idea of the individual tends to preclude consideration of groups, but dai yu reiterated several times that yang qian needed others to accomplish his goals; he was too “independent” or perhaps too willing to maintain his independence vis-a-vis others. i also tend to downplay the importance of charisma in these forms of cooperation. yet, according to tian qinxin 个人魅力 (geren meili) was fundamental to the success or failure of theatre specifically, and social projects more generally.

it now occurs to me that “force of one’s personality” might be a more colloquial translation of what was at stake in her comments. she assumed that collective activity could only be achieved through the force of an individual’s personality, including the ability to pay dues, endure, and inspire others to follow one. she also assumed it was desirable to become this kind of a person. is that the difference between how i was hearing and they were speaking? not so much a cultural difference as individual preference? i don’t want all the responsibility that such a position would entail.

another discription of what makes a good core person/leader: 三个硬 (the three hards). a leader should have hard earlobes, so they know when to listen and when not to; a leader should have hard shoulders to shoulder responsibility; and a leader should have hard hands, so they can take charge and not let go.

yet another example: a friend told me that if there was a fire, leaders would leave first and then everyone else. if the leaders didn’t escape, no one else would. i asked if this was policy. no, my friend replied, it would just happen naturally. we chinese would wait for the leaders to go and then follow.

questions to think about: how might these descriptions fit into the category of “natural leader” that americans throw around? and should i go back to my weber?

an after-the-fact update. sunday night, tian, yang, and i had dinner with wei ping, a functionary still working in the nanshan district ministry of culture. wei ping lived in the same dormitory as yang qian in the early 1990s. she also participated in the “i love mozart” production. during dinner, tian qinxin reiterated many of the points she had made before. wei ping echoed these thoughts and than added it would be relatively easy for yang qian to make fat bird fly because he had “人缘 (renyuan)”. renyuan also belongs to the set of ideas/words/assumptions that make up a good leader. basically, i understand it to mean that if you have 人缘 your life is smoother because people like you and therefore are willing to help you. tian qinxin concurred and then told us about how many dinners she had to host in order to coax the jiangsu artists to work with her. yang qian, she concluded, shouldn’t be so aloof from other people. he wasn’t willing to pay his dues. if you did this work with sincerity, she emphasized, even relationships that start out with instrumental intentions might become happy collaborations. renyuan could transform awkward situations into opportunities; this capacity was in fact a pre-equisite for doing collaborative art like theatre.

May Day

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Yesterday was May First, International Labor Day. China celebrates international workers by taking a week off (May 1-7). In fact, we only get three actual days vacation. In order to make up the extra two days, we work the weekend before our long vacation. So work a seven-day week, then play for seven days. These adjustments can be somewhat jarring to those accustomed to weekends always off. More importantly, however, not everyone is off. Migrant laborers are still at work, serving those who have time off. May Day it seems now celebrates white collar workers, who take vacations with their families. This rather banal insight bears repeating. May Day has become a time when office workers and middle management rest from their labors, signalling the shift from socialist to neo-liberal values in the People’s Republic.

I am not the only one to notice or even comment on this shift. Indeed, tracking the transformation of Maoism has become one of the hot topics throughout academia. That’s why it’s important to note that this process has meaning both inside and outside the PRC. It’s not about the Chinese, but about how all of us live together. What does it mean to think globally and act locally? What kind of world might that be? Just recently a Chinese academic told me that various cultural bureaus now encourage the study of Western, rather than Eastern, Marxism. Apparently, there’s much to learn from those who theorize Revolution; less to learn from those who tried it. A sobering thought as I head off on vacation.