Still Killing Us Softly, with Chinese Characteristics

For years in my writing courses in the US, I’ve used an assignment that involves close analysis of print advertisements from popular magazines. Typically, I begin the lesson by showing Jean Kilbourne’s Still Killing Us Softly—a short film that provides students with a good introduction to reading the imagery and ideology of advertising, with a primary emphasis on the impact of advertising on body image for women.

The assignment can be eye opening for students. It is often the first time anyone has asked them to pay attention to advertising, despite the fact that they live in a world inundated by it. And they generally impress me by having better skills at interpreting images than in noting the subtle details of literary texts. I usually feel a sense of idealism when I teach the unit—an awareness that I’m accomplishing something more at such moments than merely teaching students how to write academic prose. I’m teaching them how to be observant citizens and how to think about what they see.

Last week, I attempted a similar lesson with my students at Wenzheng College. If anything, such instruction seems more vital here than it is back home. My students are all very personable but also nearly all lacking in critical thinking skills. They still have committed to memory dozens of classical Chinese poems they learned as schoolchildren; however, when prompted to answer discussion questions after a reading assignment, they tend to read verbatim from the text. They look at me with puzzled expressions when I ask them not to quote from the text but instead to use their own words and think for themselves.

No doubt, these tendencies stem from traditional Chinese educational values that have their roots in Confucianism, a trunk that survived the axes of the Mao era, and branches that endure today despite the dizzying pace of social change. Chinese education favors memorization over analytical skills, rote learning over problem solving, and hierarchical deference over open discussion. In these respects, my students closely resemble preceding generations of Chinese students. In other respects, however, they are quite different—unlike any students ever seen in China before.

The source of this difference is two-fold. The students I’m teaching are products of China’s one-child policy—a policy that has stemmed the country’s population growth but also altered the structure of the Chinese family in the process. China has become a nation of only-children, and the traditional gravitational pull of the family has shifted away from veneration of the elders toward adoration of the child. By chance, this has happened at exactly the same moment that the opening of the Chinese economy has given birth to a Chinese popular culture driven, as it is in the West, by advertising. The intersection has produced what might be called the first mass consumer generation in China.

It is difficult to conceive of just how much Chinese society has changed over the course of my students’ own lifetimes. They are all about twenty years old. They were born into a China where, beyond the propaganda of the state, advertising was virtually unknown. They have come of age in a China where it is completely unavoidable. In the epilogue to her history of the Boxer rebellion, Diana Preston recollects visiting China in the years immediately after Deng Xiaoping initiated his economic reforms. Looking out the window of her bus in Beijing, Preston saw streets almost entirely void of cars, filled instead with bicycles whose riders were uniformly clad in drab Mao suits. The parents of my students lived in this world, but for the students themselves, the scene that Preston describes bears no resemblance at all to the China they have come to call their own and which I am witnessing now with my own eyes. The ubiquitous presence of advertising is among the most obvious signs of change in China. It has infiltrated every available space: it’s on the sides of busses, on billboards lining the roads, on t-shirts and ball caps, on TV and the Internet, and on the glossy pages of the Chinese editions of fashion magazines imported from the West.

As I do when I teach this lesson in America, I stressed with my Chinese students that advertising sells not only products but also a system of values. This concept has a special resonance here in China, for it’s not only the foreign companies that have cracked the Chinese market. For better and for worse, foreign values are part of what’s being imported as well.

I didn’t need to look too hard to find advertisements to use in the lesson; a single issue of the Chinese edition of Cosmopolitan supplied me with everything I needed. Despite the text in Chinese characters, Chinese Cosmo differs little from her elder sister in America. I selected twenty advertisements for the students to analyze, with each advertisement selling something beyond a product: ideals of beauty, success, happiness, power, and sexuality. The ads often tell a story about how to achieve these ideals but never raise the question of why Chinese people ought to abandon one set of ideals in favor of the consumerism of the West. I doubt that anything in my students’ education has equipped them to raise such a question, much less to answer it.

Not surprisingly, given the nature of Cosmopolitan, the ideal of beauty is emphasized above all others on its pages, and this ideal of beauty is a hybrid of Chinese and Western standards. Many of the ads feature models of European descent in ads that were created for Western audiences and reconfigured with a few Chinese characters. And while many other ads do display Chinese models, these models bear little resemblance to the Chinese women that I see on the street and in my classroom. Instead, they are Chinese women with wide eyes, full lips, wavy hair, and exceptionally pale skin, skin so pale that it surely was produced with significant digital altering of the images.

Repeatedly on the pages of Cosmo, the visual message is that white is right and beautiful. It should be noted that this association is not a Western invention. It originates in part in feudal Chinese standards of beauty in which pale skin was a marker of the aristocratic status that could keep a woman out of the sun. However, the rise of a consumer culture marks the first time the ideal has been package as products fit for mass consumption. At least a dozen ads appear for products that promise to whiten a Chinese woman’s skin. Those who named the products lack the sense of either irony or shame: Perfect White C, Pond’s White Beauty, Chinfie Whitening Emulsion, Bi-White, White Glamour.

Nearly all of my students are young women—more than ninety percent in fact. This made the discussion seem all the more relevant to me. As the students closely examined the ads I had distributed to them, I moved about the room and talked with them. I was struck by the degree to which the association between white skin and beauty had been accepted. Nearly all the young women agreed that paler skin was more beautiful than darker skin, and most stated that that they would eagerly buy a product that could lighten their own skin. None appeared aware that many of the whitening agents contain high levels of mercury and are thus far more likely to poison them than to alter their pigmentation.

I mentioned to the students that this identification between white skin and beauty in China could be damaging to women’s self-esteem, for it has elevated an image counter to nature to the position of an ideal. No doubt, this is great for business, for if we seek something that we can never have, we may come to believe that beauty and in turn happiness are just one purchase away. But for Chinese women, the new consumer culture has brought along with it new anxieties as well. Increasingly, Chinese women may come to resemble their Western counterparts in terms of the body image problems that Jean Kilbourne discusses. A young woman that I saw at Auchan one day embodied the point. She was a girl with a lovely face but an anorexic frame, with legs thinner than my arms. Surely, the Chinese people knew starvation in Mao’s time, but he needed no assistance from them to achieve it. In this sense, the glossy images of fashion magazines may have a power to move minds that surpasses even the Little Red Book.

Between the time I started writing this entry and the time that I’m finishing it, I evaluated the ad analyses that my students composed. Many of them merely described the ad at face value, producing a paraphrase rather than an analysis. Some even noted how much they wanted to buy the product after seeing the ad. This was disappointing but not surprising, for these students have little experience with critical thinking.

However, in the subsequent class meeting, there was a moment that made the whole exercise worthwhile. We were discussing the changes in Chinese society brought on by the opening of the economy. In a nation that experienced much depravation during the twentieth century, the standard of living in China has dramatically improved—at least for those living in the coastal cities that have experienced the most rapid economic growth. But the benefits come at a cost, as at least one of my students recognized. Her English name is Chanel, chosen in honor of her favorite Western perfume, a choice that has made of herself a kind of advertisement. During the discussion, Chanel said the changes in China were generally for the best but troubled her nevertheless. When I asked her to elaborate, this was her reply:

“I worry that we might forget what it means to be Chinese.”

That indeed may be the heart of the matter.

Yangzhou: The Mostly Intestinal Tour

After living in Suzhou for four months and visiting places like Hangzhou and Yangzhou, I’ve reached the conclusion that the suffix ‘zhou’ must stand for a town near some significant body of water with a trinket shop occupying no less than 75% of dry land.

Last weekend, my friend Yimen invited me to come along on a visit to Yangzhou to see her high school roommate Qian Hong Juan. We toured some traditional gardens. All Chinese gardens have begun to look more or less the same to me, and I’ve no enthusiasm for them now, though there were some lovely smoky shades of red on the Japanese maples and a sad, pale winter sun setting behind the white tower at Thin West Lake.

On Friday night, we went to a dance with Qian Hong Juan and one of her friends. I, the only waiguoren in sight, made a spectacle of myself by dancing alone for a while unrestrainedly. The Chinese tend to think collectively even on the dance floor. For about half the songs, they all moved in unison to patterns that remained a mystery to me. There was also one hip Chinese guy with spiked hair, a penchant for striking poses stolen from fashion magazines, and a lone glove that hasn't been seen in America since Michael Jackson was at his pre-pedophilia peak in the mid 1980s. And then there was the Karaoke contest for which the dance would break up every few songs, though only one of the contestants could come close to holding a tune. If only I hadn’t lost my voice to a cold and could sing in Chinese, I might have taken that contest.

The food on this outing surely rivaled the worst that I’ve eaten in China, and it’s actually I wonder that I haven’t gotten sick. On our last day in Yangzhou, we ate in a small restaurant that would have earned a sanitation grade F in America. Filth covered the floor, and the owners—a tired-looking couple with no other customers in sight—had the lights shut down to save power and add to the dismal mood of the place on an overcast day. An orange tomcat wandered about at will and hopped up into the frame beneath the table and cried for us to feed him. We obliged and tossed our fish bones onto the floor and watched him greedily tear at the bits of meat that remained. After we finished eating, I saw the woman sitting on a stool outside wiping her child’s behind in broad daylight. This left me wondering if the news had reached her that it is wise to wash one’s hands before handling food. The sight filled me with a nausea that still remains more than a week later.

Though I had no appetite, Qian Hong Juan wanted us to eat some Yangzhou delicacies with her before we returned to the bus station. She bought some goose meat at a street stand that featured long plucked goosenecks fixed to the glass. A man hacked away at the body of a bird and tossed the pieces into a plastic bag for us. Then Qian Hong Juan stopped at another stand and picked up a bag of pig’s head meat. Finally, we took our street food into a small restaurant and ordered a couple of dishes, including one called “ants climbing a tree”—ants cooked up with cellophane noodles and with a sauce that reminded me of the scent of insecticide.

Qian Hong Juan insisted on picking up the tab for everything, even though she’s a cash-starved veterinary graduate student immersed in a thesis project that entails killing large numbers of rabbits for murky reasons and without pay. I appreciated her hospitality, but the culinary combination, along with the memory of the woman wiping the child in the street, was nearly too much for me. I ate very little and had to exert great willpower to refrain from vomiting on the table.

Sometimes I worry that I’m unable to read the cultural signs and commit faux pas in etiquette. But there are also opportunities to indulge freely in behavior that would drive my father into fits of rage were he here to see me. For example, in China, meat is often served with the bones still in place, and it’s perfectly appropriate to spit them out on the table. In this instance, however, I’m sure that restraint was the proper course, for table vomiting is surely frowned upon across cultures.

And Eight Inches off the Legs, Please

A few weeks after I arrived in China, I did something that I hadn’t done in twenty years: I paid someone to cut my hair. The last time I’d done that, I was still living with my parents, who would bribe me into the chair by threatening to withhold things like car privileges, college tuition, heat, and food if I refused. Eventually, I decided that my hair was more important than their support. I moved out, let my hair grow long, and paid my own way through school. For the occasional trim, I relied on my girlfriend or her mother.

Later, when Sandy and I got married, I worked a small scissors clause into the vows. This required little work on her part at first, for I didn’t cut my hair at all for two five-year spans. But there are few things sadder than a man’s ponytail streaked with gray, and, in recent years, the clause had begun to cause Sandy to do some real work with those scissors. Surely this contributed to the stresses that led to our present separation.

Hence, I found myself alone in China, with my hair growing up rather than down in the insufferable Suzhou summer air. People were staring at me constantly, and I feared that my afro might be part of the problem. Something had to be done. I hoped that a haircut might make me look a little more Chinese.

Fortunately, there’s a barbershop that shares a parking lot with the Dongwu hotel where I live. My friend Liru had offered to come along and serve as interpreter. However, I declined and decided to go it alone, figuring that the only way I’d ever learn the language was to try to speak for myself, even when I lacked the words. Considering the resulting butchery, this was probably a mistake.

But language wasn’t my biggest obstacle. Although it’s a little embarrassing to admit it, for decades I’ve had a fear of being touched by strangers. I once went five years without having my teeth cleaned, so frightened was I by dental hygienists. Something about women putting sharp objects inside my body under bright lights felt akin to torture to me, with the rinse jets standing in for water-boarding. Since barbers keep their sharp objects on the outside, I felt up to the challenge this time.

Even so, my aversion to the touch of strangers was definitely tested in the barbershop. Not only did the barber cut my hair; he also washed it in a little sink in the back of the shop. It felt very odd to have somebody else’s fingers kneading my soapy scalp, and I had to squelch a strong desire to burst out laughing. I managed to suppress the urge, for this barber was not to be toyed with. He was a poor advertisement for himself, with a haircut that made him look like Suzhou’s answer to Moe, with me playing Larry. I knew he’d say “wei shenme ni” (“why you” in Chinese) and slap me if I got out of line. Or turn me into Curly.

Back in the chair, I felt like he was cutting away my bangs altogether, which gave me a view of just how much my hairline has receded in recent years and a sense of what I would look like if I were bald. Here, the language barrier did work against me, for I’d yet to learn the Chinese word for “stop.” Then an old Chinese man came in and sat in the chair next to mine, a man with a completely bald crown and little tufts of hair above the ears, a man needing a haircut no more than Mr. Magoo. He taunted me by his presence, a mirror into my own hairless future. Then I had to squelch an impulse to cry. Fortunately, the barber did leave some bangs after all, and I left feeling weak-kneed and looking a little butchered but not so bad as I had feared.

However, any expectation that a haircut would help me blend in was quickly deflated. The next morning, I rode my bicycle to the Couple’s Garden—a garden that my guidebook had assured me was immune to the crowds that ruin the mood of so many of its peers. It proved an unfortunate choice, and not only because a newly separated man ought not go alone to a place with such a name. The garden was packed with people, most of whom followed flag-waving guides giving the history of the garden through dueling megaphones. I climbed onto a rock to escape from the crowd only to hear the word “waiguoren” (foreigner) coming out of one of the megaphones. I looked down to see a group of Chinese tourists looking up at me, taking pictures. It was only then that I realized I needed to tell the barber to take eight inches off the legs, color my hair black, and dip my whole body in a bath of skin dye. Someone else could handle the plastic surgery.

Now, as I enter my fourth month in China, I feel much less self-conscious about my status as an outsider. Winter has come to Suzhou, and the cold air has driven out the humidity, allowing my hair to grow back generally down rather than up and out. I’m sure people still stare at me, but I don’t notice it so much anymore. Besides, I’ve discovered that there are some advantages to being different. One of my American colleagues here remarked that I am the third tallest man in China. Numbers one and two—Yao Ming and Yi Jianlian, respectively—are currently away in America playing in the NBA, which leaves only me. I’ve been exploiting this advantage by playing more basketball than I have since I was a teenager. In the US, I'm a pretty average player, but here, my height makes me exceptional, and it's a boost to my ego to delude myself into thinking that, just shy of 40, I'm really good. I know, though, that one game in the US will quickly disabuse me of the notion. For now, I'll just enjoy the sensation, along with all the other pleasures that a year in China can bring, even for a freakish waiguoren like me.

Xiao Xin

My tongue falters
on slight perils:
stones in the path,

low-hanging boughs,
waters that rise
without warning.

“Xiao xin,”
the Chinese say—
meaning “small heart,”

knowing that hearts
are brittle things
that break over trifles.

Inside the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace

Perhaps history always reveals as much about how we conceive of ourselves in the present as it does about what occurred in the past. Two exhibits on the Taiping Rebellion that I visited recently in Suzhou and Nanjing bear out the point.

As I doubt that one in a thousand Americans has ever heard of the Taiping Rebellion, a short overview will be necessary. We Americans tend toward historical myopia. When we speak of our own civil war, we call it The Civil War, neglecting the fact that in overlapping years civil war was decimating China, a civil war so costly in human life that it makes our own look like a bloodless skirmish by comparison. With a death toll of between twenty and thirty million from 1850-1864, the Taiping Rebellion has no peer in history. So what did the short and bloody Kingdom of Heavenly Peace mean to the Chinese then, and what sense do they make of it now?

The Taiping Rebellion germinated in 1837 with a dream. Hong Xiuquan, a Confucian scholar whose roots were in the Hakka minority rather than in the majority Han, had failed the civil-service examinations for the third time. A combination of illness and stress produced a delirium in which Hong envisioned himself a part of previously unseen family, the son of a bearded patriarch and the brother of an elder divine son.

In small numbers, Christian missionaries by this time had already begun without much success to seek converts in China. Christian tracts had been translated into Chinese, and in these tracts Hong found the means to make sense of his own dreams and deliria. The father and son that he had met in his dreams were none other than Jehovah and Jesus, and he himself was the younger brother called by God to establish a heavenly kingdom on earth. It was a fervor wed to violence from its inception when Hong shouted out in his delirium his dictum to “kill the demons.” In time, those demons would take on very earthly shape in the figures of the Qing emperor and the ruling elite, and the path to the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace would be cut with the sword.

At his zenith in the mid-1850s, Hong had established a capital at Nanjing and controlled a region of seventeen provinces in central and southern China. Not all Taiping soldiers, however, were true believers in Hong’s odd religious vision—a hybrid of Chinese hierarchy, Christian scripture, and fevered imagination. Instead, what drew many into the cause was shared hatred of the Qing, a dynasty already bloated by decadence and loathed by many Han Chinese for its foreign Manchu origins. That Hong, too, was not a Han hardly mattered; the usurper in power generally makes a better target for scorn than does the one of the rise.

What is most striking about the exhibits at the Suzhou Museum and the Taiping Museum in Nanjing are the omissions. Both exhibits present the rebellion as a kind proto-Marxist peasant revolution. No mention at all is made of the religious vision that motivated the rebellion and sustained it through the end. If ever a regime could be described as a theocracy, it would be Hong’s Heavenly Kingdom, yet one would never know this based on the museum displays. This is the most glaring omission, but by no means the only one. The exhibits note neither the routine brutality of the Taiping nor the hypocrisy of its leaders. Despite its rhetoric of egalitarianism, some were certainly more equal than others in Hong’s Heavenly Kingdom. Expropriated property was to be communally shared, yet Hong and his high lieutenants lived in luxury. The heavenly king ordered sexual segregation, preventing even wives and husbands from sharing a bed, all the while establishing his own imperial harem. Common people who violated the policy were bound to wind up with their heads severed from their bodies. Opium addicts, homosexuals, Buddhists, Taoists, Qing sympathizers, and perceived Qing sympathizers all exposed their necks to the same blade.

The distorted presentation of the history of the Taiping is not surprising, for the original distorter was Hong himself. As his kingdom began to crumble in the early 1860s, Hong cloistered himself in his Nanjing palace and rewrote the Bible. Any passages in the Chinese translations that did not fit his vision he revised or cut, claiming that the original source had been in error. He also made sure to add numerous references to himself, giving the unsuspecting reader the sense that Hong embodied the fulfillment of a prophecy, even if that prophecy originated only in his own mind.

The curators of the museum exhibits have done something quite similar, though toward political rather than religious ends. They have given us a Hong of the mind, a hero of the people whose attractive frame can only be seen when the field is swept clean of most of the facts. In the long-standing thinking of the Party, the feudal Qing were bad, and, in opposing them, the Taiping must surely have been proletarian and good. Much must be forgotten to tell the story this way, but that is the story the exhibits present. There is no space in such a tale for Hong in his decline, when the heavenly king’s work with his distorting pen closely resembles Hitler moving about non-existent armies on maps in the Fuhrer Bunker as Berlin fell. Many rogues of history have been undone by hubris. Can there be any greater act of pride than to proclaim oneself sired by God and to found a state based on that premise? Or to assume the arbitrary power of truth and wield it in defiance of reason?

Nanjing Wedding

You may want to take deep breath before you read the next sentence….

I got married this weekend. Actually, it was a mock wedding at Zhongyuan, a garden that my friend Yimin and I visited in Nanjing on Saturday. The garden included a teahouse with four young women playing classical Chinese instruments. After the performance, a man came out and explained that they would now have a traditional wedding ceremony. I think he was supposed to be the bride’s father. He threw three red balls to men in the audience, and one of them fell to me.

The bride—one of the women who had been performing a few moments before—was led onstage wearing an elaborately patterned Chinese dress and an embroidered veil that covered her face and neck. We three potential grooms were then ushered onto the stage, and the host read some words in Chinese affixed to white labels on the red balls. My inability to understand Chinese greatly impairs my ability to narrate this story, but my cluelessness is, in the end, the outstanding feature of the tale. Naturally, the text eliminated my two competitors, and I was left alone, the lucky groom. The other musicians led me off stage and dressed me in a Chinese gown and hat, forcing me to remove my Washington Nationals cap in the process.

I was the only foreigner present, so the audience found my selection to be quite a hoot. The host was making some wisecracks at my expense, but I couldn’t understand them—I just heard everyone laughing. Yimin told me later that he’d made a joke to the effect that he hoped I wouldn’t try take off my pants as the women dressed me in the Chinese gown.

Once I was properly attired, the wedding began. To his credit and my salvation, my new father-in-law could speak enough English to give me cues at each stage of the ceremony. My bride and I held onto opposite ends of a red cord and bowed to the four cardinal directions. Then we walked around in a circle together, still clinging to our cord. The ceremony concluded with me lifting the veil from the bride’s face. Fortunately, she didn’t scream in horror at the sight of me, but, despite that auspicious sign and the bride’s beauty and musical talent, I didn’t think it would work out. The cultural and linguistic differences were simply too great, so I got an immediate annulment. In closing, the host asked me to address the audience, and I made an absurd statement—the only kind that my Chinese skills will allow:

“Xiexie. Wo jiao Weilian. Wo shi meiguoren. Wo hui shuo yidiandian hanyu. Wo xihuan kan shu.” (Thank you. My name is William. I am American. I can speak a little Chinese. I like to read books.)

The crowd roared in approval, and the musicians stripped me of my Chinese garb. What little dignity I posses had already been gone for quite some time.

Waiguoren

Shuffling down Shi Quan Jie
with hair on their knuckles
and flesh bloating their knees,
with bodies stuffed into shops
and wallets fattened on kuai,
waiguoren have taken over the town.

Cameras chained to their necks,
skin reeking sunscreen and sweat,
they’ve swept gardens of charm
and plucked the lotus of blooms
and dipped painted toes in the tarn;
waiguoren have taken over the town.

On rank nights, pleading fresh air,
men pin their wives to sheets white,
and slouch toward shadowy bars
where the ex-peasant girls wait
selling shares in free-market touch;
waiguoren have taken over the town.

In temples buying off Buddhas,
swaggering drunk in ex-pat pubs,
they’ve laid claim to the canals
and poled the red-lantern punts
into mirrors and harbored there;
together, we’ve taken over the town.

Suicide by Bike?

I did not come to China to die, though, during the turbulent months of the past year, the thought did cross my mind, drawn as it was to the dark irony of arriving with two oversized suitcases and returning home as ash in a small box. Things are better now; life here has fallen into a pattern that makes the present tolerable, and the future has even begun to assume a vague shape. But one simple fact makes me wonder if Thanatos might not still be at work within me: a few days after I arrived in Suzhou, I bought a bike.

Don’t let the photo here fool you; it was taken on the campus of Suzhou University—the one place in this city where the odds of getting killed while riding a bicycle are less than even. The causes of the danger can be simply stated: congestion and chaos. Like almost every place I go in Suzhou, the streets teem with people in motion. Buses and cars speed down the narrow lanes with so many drivers laying on their horns that the sounds merge into a loud irrelevancy. Mothers weave in and out of traffic on their e-bikes (battery-powered mopeds that are nearly as common as their foot-powered cousins) toting their toddlers on handlebars. A few young riders type text messages on their cell phones as they go. And cyclists crossing streets don’t wait for a gap to open in traffic; instead, they create one by rolling forward on the faith that drivers of buses and cars, when pressed by the threat of blood, will ultimately stop.

The chaos doesn’t stem from a lack of rules or infrastructure. The city is flat, and the streets are neatly laid out and nearly all straight and well paved. The traffic lights at every busy intersection include counters that anticipate the next change of light. There’s a general understanding that traffic moves on the right side of the road. And many streets include wide bike lanes that cyclists in the US would figuratively die for; here, they literally do.

No, the problem isn’t with the lack of rules; instead, it’s in the refusal to observe them when doing so becomes slightly inconvenient. Take the bike lanes, for example. Despite the high volume of riders, the lanes would function beautifully if they were used as intended. However, if the sidewalks are too crowded, pedestrians will walk there, and if the roads grind to a halt, taxis and cars will stage a coup and use their bulk to claim the bike lanes for themselves. And one cannot ride for more than thirty seconds without encountering someone on a moped or bike going the wrong way.

So far, I’ve managed to avoid disaster, though I have had a few close calls. The closest came one day when I was riding alone to Jinji Lake. My building manager rode past me on her e-bike and said “ni hao.” Since an exchange of ni haos is the only communication in Chinese that I can participate in with full confidence, I eagerly turned toward her to return the greeting. When I looked back at the road ahead, someone on a e-bike was bearing down straight in front of me, no more than ten feet away. It was a near-run thing, with both of us making reflex swerves that fortunately took us in opposite directions.

And did I mention that no one wears helmets here? The Chinese not only don’t wear helmets; they also have an unhealthy contempt for anyone who does. I recall this summer my friend Liru with her normally kind face contorted into a sneer telling me that she had seen three foreigners ride across campus wearing helmets. There are many ways in which I cannot make myself Chinese, but this I can do something about, so I’ve been riding the Chinese way, with my skull exposed. It may cost me my life, but at least it will spare me some unnecessary derision.

I’ve been thinking about what all of this means with regard to cultural difference. In Columbia, Maryland, the town where I teach in the US, there’s a community initiative to encourage civility. People there have “Choose Civility” bumper stickers on their cars, though I have seen the drivers of some of these cars weaving with maniacal fury on Route 29 and giving the finger to old men who are moving too slow. The advocates of the civility initiative present it as a universal principle, but is that necessarily so? Perhaps in a country like the US that is comparatively under-populated, civility is a nicety we can afford. In China, with its billion-plus filling every nook, a Darwinism of space has taken hold, and not just on the roads. Show any sign of passivity in a line at a store or fast food joint or bank and you’re sure to be standing there all day.

I must admit that I’ve begun to take some pleasure in this socially sanctioned aggression and disregard for the other. In a month, I’ve gone from having my feelings hurt by the guy who bumped me on his moped and didn’t turn back to say duibuqi to cutting people off on my bike with the best of them. And in lines, I simply lean forward and fall to the front, reveling in one of few ways that my freakish size is a decided advantage. I do worry, though, about how such changes will play out once I return to the US, where I am soft-spoken and generally polite. Assuming that I do make it back alive, when you see me again, you’ll have to be patient and give me some time to adjust. For the first couple of months, at least, I have a suggestion that will ensure we don’t come into conflict over this, even if it makes P. M. Forni shudder. Just get the hell out of my way.

Yi, Er, San, Si, Yi!

Now, these words I do understand. I even know the characters for the first three—my only characters to date: – = … One, two, three, four, one…

During the first two weeks of the semester, I heard the words shouted in unison by thousands of voices, by baby-faced girls in camouflaged clothes marching along with their boot straps unlaced, by young men with boyish figures and the bills of their infantry caps hanging down over their eyes, by upperclassmen with crisp uniforms and straight spines doing their best impersonation of a drill sergeant.

You see, this is how college life begins for incoming students in China. They cluster together by the thousands all over campus and pretend to be soldiers for two weeks, complete with high-stepping in column and standing at attention in line and even some target practice with real guns, all done under the hot lamp of the late-summer sun. It’s an army of small soldiers, many of whom to my eyes scarcely appear to be out of middle school.

There’s something in me that wants to resist such behavior made collective, whether under duress or not. I recall walking once with a friend at Lake Elkhorn and seeing some ducks pull themselves out of the water and waddle across the grass in perfect column. I remarked to my friend that if I were a duck, I would walk ten feet away out of principle. I’m even troubled by cheers at sporting events, when people shout such seemingly innocuous words as “Defense!” or sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” together. I make it a point to stretch in the sixth inning and remain pinned to my seat in the seventh. The trivial content doesn’t particularly matter to me. It’s more the sense of witnessing the individual voice swallowed up by the crowd that’s unsettling. I can’t help feeling that some vaguely fascist force is at work.

For the incoming college student in China, the collective behavior is most definitely made so under duress. If given the choice, few students, if any, would voluntarily subject themselves to the rigors of the training. But they are not given the choice, and two weeks of sweat and soldier-play are part of the price of admission, no less than tuition and a high score on the entrance exams. This was not always so. I read that the required training grew out of the government’s desire, in the wake of Tiananmen, to make college campuses less hospitable grounds for dissent and to foster instead a spirit of national pride and shared purpose.

Despite my unease with all of this, I’ve tried to keep an open mind, and I actually do see some benefits for the students, though, in terms of the policy, the perks are subsidiary if not accidental. At my college in Maryland, several instructors advocate a teaching approach called “first-year experience” that emphasizes the psychological needs and interpersonal challenges of incoming students as they adjust to college life. The military training in China might be viewed as an extreme first-year experience measure, and the effect on students is apparent. They enter with a sense of cohesion that American students lack. Like the average American student who has gone away to college, Chinese college students are living away from home for the first time. But they begin classes with a new sense of family. Their peers are not classmates but something akin to brothers and sisters, a kinship forged not by blood but by the shared experience of overcoming physical and psychological adversity. They begin college knowing that they have accomplished something—together.

American colleges have a rite of passage at the end of a student’s college career—the graduation ceremony—but nothing that rises to the requirements of that phrase at the beginning. All offer some kind of orientation, but that typically consists of a crash course in college policies, with little to help students gain a sense of connection to one another. In a culture that purportedly values individualism, perhaps it is fitting that many college students arrive as individuals, alone. This was certainly the case for me when I first enrolled in college. The university held a three-day orientation that consisted of lectures about the college and help with registering for classes and a folder of policies that I never cracked. I knew my roommate and few other students from my high school, but I didn’t know why I was there and lasted only one semester. This was my transition from childhood to quasi-adulthood, and it was isolating—an isolation that in some ways has been sustained to the present. I can’t help but wonder if two weeks of military training at eighteen might have made me, for better and for worse, a different person.

This is not to say that the effects on Chinese students are entirely positive. Perhaps the price of cohesion is the loss of the individual voice. The first sets of essays in my writing classes have been painfully dull to read. I feel like I’m reading the same essay over and over again, and in a sense I am. Their rite of passage has encouraged students to move and speak in unison and perhaps think in unison as well. And the atmosphere in the classroom is strikingly formal, with patterns not far removed from military drill. When I call on students in class (and I must call on them, for no student will voluntarily answer a question), they rise from their seats and respond with downcast eyes. They will remain standing until I give them permission to sit down again. Sometimes, when I write on the chalkboard, I’m surprised to turn around and find the last student to speak still standing. As I write this, we are on a week-long break for the national holiday, and I’m filled with anxiety. Did I give the last student I called on permission to sit down? If not, will I find her still standing there when we return, disciplined past the point of absurdity?

White Boy

I regret to inform you that my comprehension of spoken Chinese has not improved much during my first month back in Suzhou. My formal study of Chinese consisted of the same three-week class two summers in a row. During the seasons between, I forgot everything I learned the first time and have essentially been spinning on a linguistic wheel.

My tutors Liru and Yuanyuan are always patient with me but must find me incredibly dense as they repeatedly teach me the same sentence patterns and words. It is as if my ability to learn a new language is confined to a small box in my brain that is already full. I can only let in new words if I squeeze a few others out. My cause is not helped by my sense that all languages must share the same box. One of my friends, Yimin, expressed to me an interest in learning Spanish. I deemed myself up to the task of teaching her, for, while my Spanish is poor, it is infinitely better than my Chinese—or at least I used to think so. A few days ago, I found myself stumped by the most elementary Spanish, unable able to recall the Spanish word for “I.” Apparently, there’s no space left for “yo” in my box now that it’s been supplanted by “wo.”

I’d estimate that I understand about one percent of the Chinese words I hear, and that’s probably being a little generous. I’m sure the percentage would go up several points if I could get everyone in the country to agree to speak about twenty times slower, but I know that the odds of that happening are not good.

Recently, riding in a van to go get my residence permit, I listened carefully to a conversation in Chinese. I was able to pick out four words—wo (I) xiang (want) dongxi (something) meiyou (not have)—which, when strung together, make a little sense. The problem was, however, that they were not strung together in the conversation. Instead, on average, there were about one hundred words I didn’t recognize between the ones I did.

Ineptitude with the language is just one of many things that set me apart here. I’ve come to loathe the tourist strip on Shi Quan Jie and spend most of my time in places where I am the only foreigner in sight. This is desirable in many respects, as I came here to experience the culture, not to seek comfort in the familiar. However, the weight of difference can be quite burdensome to bear. It is in my skin, in my height, in my curly brown hair and my blue eyes, in my tone-dead English tongue and ears—everything about me is touched with the taint of “the other.”

Fortunately, I’ve been able to keep a sense of humor, even when my sense of difference leads to auditory hallucinations. On three occasions while walking in public places where I seemed to be the only non-Chinese person present, I overheard conversations that went something like this: beibian xianglian guoji canjin yaba WHITE BOY meikong haoyou chou yangqu ceng. It seems highly unlikely that the phrase “white boy” actually came out of the speakers’ mouths, but the experience suggests that sometimes what we hear has more to do with what we feel within than with what we sense from without. Anxieties can take such a powerful hold that they project themselves into the world. Perhaps laugher is the only way to counter such anxieties, the only way to stumble along with them without weeping.

Two Live Kills

Yesterday, I went to the market with teacher and friend Liru. Along the way, I saw a kitten dying by the side of the road. It had not been hit by a car but rather was either sick or simply starving. I wanted to put the kitten in the basket on my bike and take it somewhere so that at least it would be cool and comfortable and out of the sun. Liru convinced me that there was nothing I could do, so I left the kitten to die. I’ve not been able to stop thinking about it, though, and my response seems to be about something more than the lonely death of a particular cat. It is in addition my discomfort with the way we seal ourselves off from the suffering of others, whether those others are animals or people.

In quick succession, I experienced another jolt when we went into the market. I’ve walked through several of these markets since I’ve been in Suzhou—bustling places packed into narrow lanes, with rows of colorful and sometimes unfamiliar vegetables, old women and little girls shelling buckets of beans, pails full of slithering eels, mesh baskets stuffed with live turtles and frogs, cages of chickens and ducks decked in their soiled feathers, bloody chopping blocks and piles of fish heads and guts—but this was the first time I purchased any meat. Liru picked out a live chicken, and a man killed it and plucked it on the spot. I had to look away and have felt nauseous ever since. Of course, I know that all meat I eat comes from an animal that has been killed, but I’ve never actually witnessed the killing before, sheltered as I have been by clean wrappings and chilled grocery story bins. Later at my apartment, Liru stir-fried the whole bird—head, feet, and all, with every piece bearing a bone.

All of this made me recall why I had become a vegetarian when I was 19, more a visceral than intellectual or even emotional response, so sickened was I by the images of Chicago slaughterhouses in Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle. I did not eat meat for 17 years and only resumed doing so to accommodate my wife’s celiac diet. And I’ve never prepared any meat by myself and even would ask Sandy to cut it for me when we ate it so that I wouldn’t have to confront a slab of flesh. Now that I am here alone, perhaps I should go back to vegetarianism.

To people like Liru who have grown up on a farm, my reaction must seem like mere hypersensitivity; she would no more give thought to the life of a chicken than to the life of a carrot. But yesterday’s experiences leave me feeling a kinship with the Buddhists who attempt to refrain from harming any sentient being. It strikes me as callous to let a cat die alone by the road or to pick out a live chicken as if it were a stalk of celery, to look at these creatures as if their lives do not matter, when, perhaps, they matter no less than my own. I don’t think this is hypersensitivity. It is simply refusing to lose the capacity to feel.

Have You Eaten?

I met Daoerji last summer in a gift shop on Shi Quan Jie. He’s from Tibet—a man just shy of thirty with hair that brushes the top of his shoulders, kindly black eyes, a few small Tibetan characters tattooed on his forearm, and garbled English that was still far superior to my infantile Chinese. We struck up a friendship and began some informal tutoring in his shop. Several nights a week, I would bring my textbook and recite the vocabulary words, and he would correct my pronunciation, which was almost invariably wrong. In turn, he would read passages from his English textbook, and I would correct his pronunciation, which was almost invariably wrong. Whenever I entered the shop, he would greet me with a smile and say, “My teacher.” There was warmth and welcoming in those words, and even if I were in reality more the student than the teacher, that shop came to feel like a kind of home to me.

One thing puzzled me about Daoerji. After the initial greeting, he would always ask me if I had eaten. Given that I went into his shop in the evening, the answer was usually “yes” and provided no cause for further thought beyond wondering about his strange fixation on my diet. However on one occasion, I had skipped dinner and answered “no.” I was actually quite hungry, and I got the sense from Daoerji’s sympathetic expression that he was indirectly asking me to join him for dinner. I had visions of us walking into an obscure Tibetan restaurant that I never could have found on my own, a place dimly lit where portraits of the Lamas hung from the walls and the air was full of incense and the servers were monks in red robes who viewed eating as a form of prayer.

Minutes passed, and minutes merged into an hour. I kept reciting my vocabulary as customers came in and diverted Daoerji’s attention. A few of the customers looked over my shoulder to see what I was doing and became my informal instructors. A girl of no more than ten took up the cause and gave it up as hopeless after a dozen words. A prostitute from the brothel-bar next door came in and helped with a dozen more and didn’t charge me the service. Finally, with my stomach grumbling, I left the shop and went to find something on the street to eat.

It was only when I got back to the US that I discovered the source of my misunderstanding. One of the phrasebooks I’d bought noted that “chifan le ma?” (have you eaten?) is a common greeting in many parts of China. It is a question that requires a genuine answer no more than “how are you?” does in English, and one that never holds the promise of a memorable meal in a Tibetan restaurant. What I take from all this is that merely accumulating words will never take one very far in learning a language. Context is everything, and words without context invite confusion—and sometimes lead to an empty stomach.

Transcontinental

If you’ve never taken a long flight before, I can assure that you cannot imagine the misery that this entails. I left Baltimore at 10:30 on a Sunday morning and arrived in Suzhou more than twenty-four hours later by way of New York, Seoul, and Shanghai. The long stretch was between New York and Seoul—more than fourteen hours with my long legs cramped in economy class. For the first seven hours, I was able to read without too much discomfort. It’s the last half of this stretch that got to me and led me at the twelfth hour to pound on the emergency exit and beg the pretty Korean Air flight attendants with their matching hair pins to kick me into the clouds.

However, in retrospect, I can see an unexpected benefit. I departed feeling melancholy at the thought of leaving everything familiar behind for so long. As the flight dragged on, physical discomfort drove out the psychological pain. Emotions become a luxury to discard when the body begs for reprieve. I arrived at last in China thankful to have my feet on the ground and would, in fact, have been happy to land in hell. I have never like taking medication, so the first thing I did upon arriving was to toss my antidepressants into the wind. If any problems of this sort arise while I’m here, I’ll just book another long flight

By Way of an Introduction

Writing, like all forms of language use, is inevitably social. Even when I am writing only to myself, I am bound to others by a common tongue. However, uncertainties concerning audience have made it difficult for me to begin writing here. I imagine that the friends and family to whom I send the link will eventually grow weary of what I’m posting here, and I will ultimately be writing only for myself. This leads me to wonder why I don’t simply keep my thoughts to myself in a Word file as opposed to posting them in a blog on the World Wide Web. I don’t have an answer to my own question.

I will be in China for ten months teaching English at Suzhou University, making some attempt to learn the language, and exploring as much of the country as I am able to see. I invite you to share the experience through the entries I post here. I will try to give you a sense of what it is like to live here and my impressions of the people and the culture. Hopefully, I can occasionally make you laugh as well.