On Charity
Before this year, I didn’t get philanthropy. I knew it was important, and gave a moderate amount when disasters like the Sichuan earthquake struck, but still, it rarely felt better to give than to receive. However, it’s been a tumultuous year for charity in China and I don’t think anyone living here feels quite the same about giving as they did a year ago.
In September of last year, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett met with 50 wealthy entrepreneurs in the name of promoting philanthropy but in 2010 donations from the largest state-owned enterprises was only 2% of net income and the numbers for 2011 are likely to be worse for one simple reason: Guo Meimei.
Handsome Boy Modeling School
Editor’s Note: This essay first appeared, in edited form, in the March 2012 issue of NewsChina. Before I came to China last year to start a graduate program, my former professor told me something. “In the United States, when you are in public, you are actually in a private space around other people in their own private [...]
The Kim is Dead, Long Live the Kim
As a China watcher, the most remarkable aspect about the recent death of North Korea’s hereditary Dear Leader is the level to which it has exposed the Chinese media’s divorce from reality. Last night before bedtime, a CCTV news anchor read out a complete list of branches of the Chinese Communist Party, the People’s Liberation Army, Navy and Airforce, and all major government ministries, all of whom “stand in solidarity with our North Korean comrades.” Finally, as an afterthought, she mentioned that the Chinese people shared in the grief of North Koreans, and offered their condolences at the passing of their leader, and their support for his heir, a man qualified only in happening to be his predecessor’s son. How very socialist.
Two hours prior to the anchor’s emotively-worded but utterly deadpan performance (which, along with her tearfully hyperbolic North Korean counterpart, deserve Oscar nominations), I had been discussing humorous cat anecdotes with a few of the Chinese people at my local gym. One of them, coincidentally, was a CCTV presenter, who told us her cat had learned to move its feces from its litter tray and onto the kitchen floor, thereby incriminating her pet dog. My boyfriend joined in the discussion. That afternoon, he had stood up in his office to announce the death of Kim Jong-il, China’s great pal, the guy whom the CCP never gets tired of shielding, and was met with utter indifference. “I don’t care about him,” remarked his deskmate. “I’m busy.”
All China Can Eat
The salmon sashimi platter at Golden Jaguar is never full. Every time the employee behind the counter slides some on, customers swarm around and snatch them all up. Since they don’t know when they might get more, each diner grabs enough for her whole table. The sight reminds me of those Chinese temples with fish that try to jump over each other to snatch a morsel of food, or piranhas at feeding time. If you’re having trouble visualizing the situation, try this:
I was eating lunch at the restaurant with some friends when my roommate remarked that he saw a woman literally pick up the platter and scrape half of the salmon sashimi onto her plate. I decided to see this for myself.
Perhaps it was the furious way diners descended on the sashimi like ravens on a deer carcass, or perhaps it was because I had just finished Jonathan Watts’ fabulous but depressing book When One Billion Chinese Jump, about environmental crises in China and what they mean for the world, but I suddenly had a vision of the apocalypse.
Entitlements
In a recent podcast comedian and celebrity personality Adam Corolla railed against the Occupy Movement generation as America’s new “fucking self-entitled monsters” who “think the world owes them a living.” Corolla bases his insults on the development and creation of a youth culture in America which leaves recent college graduates unprepared for the real world, sets up unrealistic expectations, and rewards the “losers” just for trying.
Corolla has a point. A book entitled Generation Me written by psychology professor Jean Twenge does a far better job of elucidating this trend and understanding it’s manifestations than Corolla’s crass bullying, but his attack and extrapolation that the Occupy Movement is simply about young people “throwing shit at another person’s car” is pervasively misguided.
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