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.
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.
The Foreign Duckling
In China, no matter what I did, how I primped or what I said, I stood out like an ugly duckling. It was simultaneously freeing and infuriating. I was stared at without pretense, and for the first year it drove me nuts. Men, women and babies would stare at me, mouths open, totally unperturbed by my churlish glare. I sometimes lashed out at them—screaming in English, knowing they couldn’t understand, furious that they looked at me like I was some misshapen Frankenstein.
But at the same time, it was freeing to be so different. It was so obvious that I was an outsider, that I didn’t need to make any effort to fit in. As a student Prague, where I studied abroad, I was mistaken for a Czech several times, which was flattering, and made me hesitant to come across as an American, if I could avoid it. In China, despite the perfunctory compliments on my hair, it was obvious that I was a weirdo, and because there was nothing I could do about it, I was freed from any expectation of how I should act, what I should wear, what I should say, or how well I said it. (It’s common for any foreigner speaking a word of Chinese to be excessively praised for their masterful grasp of the “foreign-proof” language.)
Sympathy for the Teacher
In the blissful summer before my junior year of high school, my parents forced me to take an SAT preparation course in the basement of a brown-brick building named The Lyceum. But despite the name, it was not a place of higher learning.
The teacher, a lumbering middle-aged woman, resembled Aristotle about as much as I resembled Alexander the Great. She stood in the front of a makeshift classroom that looked like it doubled for AA meetings and read from an open Princeton Review prep book. She taught us how to divine, through the process of elimination, the correct answer to reading problems even if we hadn’t understood the passage. She reminded us of things learned and forgotten, like scalene triangles and the transitive property. If you had told me, ten years ago in that depressing classroom, that one day I’d be in her shoes, I would have laughed and gone back to sleeping.
Dire Straits
Editor’s Note: This article is a response to Paul V. Kane’s op-ed in The New York Times which suggested the United States reduce its budget deficit by ending military assistance and arms sales to Taiwan.
Few articles have riled me up as much as this one, which exemplifies the misguided conventional thinking regarding China. It is a microcosm of the wishful thinking that permeates the global community at the moment. Here are a few reasons why Paul Kane is wrong.
Geo-political
Taiwan is an old, old ally of the United States, with strong political and cultural ties. Taiwan sends a significant portion of its youth to be educated in the United States. To “ditch” them, as Kane suggests so casually, would severely damage U.S. credibility in Asia.
Gaysthetics
Only in Asia, it seems, is a tradition valuing the androgynous beauty of the meizhengtai (美正太)—the beautiful boy—enjoying a revival. Increasingly, the meizhengtai is seen as on par, if not exceeding, the appeal of his more typically masculine counterpart, the nanzihan (男子汉). While we have our androgynous sex icons in the West, too—Johnny Depp, Taylor Lautner and, though I shudder to say it, Justin Bieber—the sexuality of these people is always kept rigorously beyond doubt, at least in the media.
Here is where East and West divide. Sexual ambiguity in males, unlike androgyny, is not looked upon with favor by either men or women, and appreciation of the beautiful and unapologetically gay man remains taboo. Sure, we had our dandies, our fops and our New Romantics, but there have been countless casualties along the way.
Reparations
The U.S. Senate has approved a resolution apologizing for the nation’s past discriminatory laws that targeted Chinese immigrants, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Well it’s about fucking time. Gee it only took you, what, 129 years? Okay, it’s ancient history, just tell me where I line up for my 40 acres and mule. What? Farmland is in a bubble and there’s too many Chinese people and not enough mules? What do you mean, too many Chinese people? That’s right, you’d better rephrase it. You know, maybe what you’re really afraid of is you won’t be able to tell all of us apart, you racist fuck.
Western Hospitality
On one particularly hot day in Urumqi, I decided to head to a small, hole-in-the-wall dumpling house near the center of the city for lunch. I ordered noodle soup and baozi stuffed with pork and veggies. As my food came, an old, half-drunk Han Chinese man sitting at the table next to me struck up a conversation. As he peered out from over his soup, he began recounting his struggles during the Great Leap Forward.
“When I was young, we didn’t have any meat to eat. People would literally take the bone out of my bowl as I tried to eat it. It was a struggle to survive.” As he was talking, he noticed that two young Chinese nearby were snickering at him. They seemed more interested in the most recent fashion craze than learning from their elders—both had crazy, only-in-China dos, as well as jeans with all sorts of bling on them. “You see these kids,” he said, “they don’t give a damn about the past. They don’t understand what Mao did, nor do they really care. They are only focused on the making money.”
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