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.)

The author at the Hanging Temple in Shanxi Province.

Over time, my striking strangeness released me from the heavy expectations that I had unconsciously felt for years. It’s a self-consciousness that everyone feels at some point, the feeling that one must look or act a certain way, have certain desirable characteristics or possessions. Yet here I had no desire to look like the hip Chinese students around me, and even if I wanted to, I couldn’t pull off their hair styles, or fit into their tiny clothes. So what was the point in trying to be something I wasn’t? I was so clearly different, that I felt free to be 100% myself, to a degree I had never felt before. I stopped wearing makeup, my sense of style went to hell (partly influenced by the lack of decent clothes). I was influenced by the Chinese lack of political correctness, and said whatever I felt without worrying that it might offend someone.

There are people who have no self-consciousness about standing out from the crowd, and I have always admired those individuals. Growing up I had a friend and a boyfriend who had strong, independent personalities, not afraid to be who they were in the face of a judging public, and I admired and wished to emulate their extroversion. But I am naturally shy and overly sensitive to the perceived thoughts and judgements of others. In China I was freed from that.

It was in this state of utter unpretension that I met JR. I’ve always been against public displays of affection, but as our romance blossomed in this strange foreign country we were all over each other—always with arms around each other, kissing in public constantly, even (almost) buying those hilarious matching t-shirts that Chinese couples love to wear. We did not, however, ever consider wearing matching outfits, another popular style among young love-birds in China.

For several years, this socially-unconscious mindset stuck with me, until I started working full time at an institution where external impressions and appearances—physical and intellectual—matter a great deal.

I’m now building up my wardrobe of nice, professional clothing, I’ve started wearing makeup again, and even did my hair the other day. On top of that I have to be conscious of what I say to whom, and how I say it. There are incredibly opaque rules regarding this in Chinese business, which I dabbled in at Media Soda (a small Chinese PR and consulting company), but I could always count on my foreignness giving me a free pass in case of a gaffe. Now I have to build a professional image in a way I haven’t had to before, and I feel my old self-consciousness creeping back. Add to that the stresses of planning a wedding… and I find myself wishing I could run away to China again.

I got an email today from Angelina’s ESL Cafe, the website that I originally used to find my teaching position in Yanjiao, and I was half-serious when I suggested to JR that we go back. Sometimes I want to run away from the expectations and pressures of our life at home. That’s when I get that traveler’s itch. But then I remind myself that these imperious expectations I judge myself by, whether they are internal or external, don’t matter.

No one really judges us as much as we imagine they do, and if do they happen to judge us for who we are, because we don’t wear fashionable clothes, or say the right things, or throw a certain kind of wedding, or like to spend our Friday night sleeping, or if we don’t have the “right” religious convictions or sexual preferences—then we would all do better to remember these wise words:

“It’s better to be hated for who you are than to be loved for what you are not.”

J.R. Siegel and Allison Lipps are Boston-based adventurers who met in China. Read this piece and others at The Adventures of Mumpus and Grumpus.

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.

But life has its own sense of humor. Nowadays, as an English teacher in China, I see my fifteen-year-old self every week.

English, as any Chinese student can recite for you, is an international language and an important tool for anyone who wants to study abroad, pass a job interview, work in a foreign company, or do business with foreigners.

However, not every student who walks into an English classroom has those goals. Sometimes the goal is set by their parents: “I have decided you are studying abroad so I am buying you English lessons.” Sometimes it’s set by the school: “You need to take this course so we don’t lose our accreditation.” Sometimes the company: “Why are we sending you on business trips when you can’t understand anything?”

Generally, very generally, students like this don’t improve simply because their heart’s not in it. It sounds like self-help mumbo-jumbo but motivation, especially self-motivation, is a key factor for success. These students also have nothing to lose. It’s not their own money so they have no financial incentive; it’s not their own choice so they have no personal incentive.

I speak from experience, of course. That SAT course didn’t help me at all. I took the test and got the same score as I had on a practice test the year before.

What finally made a difference in my SAT score (my stereotypically Chinese parents made me take it again) were two books. They weren’t vocabulary books or test prep books or anything like that—they were just two novels that I fell in love with. I read them hungrily—between classes, during classes, on the bus—and, because I wanted to understand them so badly, I wrote down every word I didn’t know and looked them up in the dictionary. The next time I took the test, my score jumped 70 points.

When I tell this story, students always ask desperately, “What were the books?” But what saved me weren’t the books themselves or the words in them—it was my desire to learn. The books had somehow managed to ignite that desire.

Today, I try to find that passion within each student and tease it out. It’s easier said than done. Chinese students are treated like machines in school, tasked to remember and regurgitate. They are told not to question, not to disagree. They (or their parents) choose a school and a major, usually based on what score they think they can get on the college entrance exam, before setting foot on campus and find it hard to switch if they don’t like it.

A lot of what I do as a teacher is deprogramming. I try to show students that it’s okay to ask questions and it’s okay to not know; that learning is more than memorizing what’s in the book; that some questions—the most important questions—don’t have a correct answer.

I want to help my students, but some of them don’t want to be helped, just like I didn’t want to be helped. Over the years I’ve realized that some students don’t want to learn English—they resent having to learn another language to compete in this world—and the best thing I can do for them is not to make them love learning English but to make them not hate learning it.

Sometimes, when I see that fifteen-year-old in class, I silently apologize to all my teachers—every substitute, every guest speaker—even my gym teachers. I apologize for sleeping in class and rolling my eyes and passing notes and snickering at their lame jokes.

If I could, I’d like to thank them for their patience and generosity and tell them that I know it’s not easy being a teacher. I’d like them to know that I grew out of it; that I, through fate or amazing fortune, became a curious, passionate, and conscientious member of society.

To all of my teachers, I just want to say one thing: you succeeded.

Mixed-race romances are always vulnerable to culture clashes. Both parties were raised differently and consequently have very different ideas of what a marriage should be. But, two years after moving in with my Chinese boyfriend, I really thought we’d come to grips with anything that our diverse cultures could throw in the way of contented, marital bliss. After all, we’d got the OK from his parents—no mean feat for a mixed-race gay couple in family-focused China. I was over the moon that I’d been informally welcomed into the fold, though I was careful to remind myself that we’d need to sweeten the deal with grandkids somewhere down the line. But, all in all, things were perfectly idyllic, and I consequently adored my boyfriend’s parents.

Then they came to stay with us. Again and again and again.

As we grow into adulthood, leave home, go to college, get a job and our own place and finally, hopefully, settle down with a life partner, we foreign devils believe that each rite of passage comes with its own itinerant upgrade in equality. By becoming “homeowners,” we arrive in society and finally attain equality with those who gave us life. Which means, in short, mom and dad have their home, and you have yours. Masters in one are guests in the other.

Well, in China, it doesn’t seem to work that way. Confucius set out very clear instructions on how families worked 2,500 years ago. Female bows to male, younger bows to elder, the son bows to the parents. Period.

Success and social standing don’t alter the family dynamic. You’re not even absolved of complete subservience to your forebears when they die—there are sacrifices to be made. Every year. And you’d better look like you mean it. While modern China may have dispensed with many of the social niceties of Confucianism (my boyfriend, for one, seems to be able to wear any hat he likes when in the presence of a government official), Chinese parents have yet to develop any sense of boundaries with their offspring. The normal rules of social boundaries do not apply. Your son’s home, whether or not he paid for it himself (as my boyfriend did) is your home.

As a result, I’ve never invited my in-laws to stay. There’s never been a need—they invite themselves, typically barely a day in advance, duly arriving laden down with bulk-buy food (that I have implored them not to bring) to add to the stockpile we have failed to diminish since their last visit. The only thing they never bring with them is a return ticket, making it impossible to determine how long we’ll be sharing a living space (two weeks is the norm, but my “mother-in-law” has been known to stay longer). As soon as they’re across the threshold, I have to relinquish all claim to my tiny one-bedroom home in favor of the matriarch. Why? Ask Confucius.

The self-appointed lady of the house proceeds to do all the cooking, cleaning and housework. If I try and intervene, I get dismissed or criticized for “not doing it right.” My rugs are taken up, laminated and concealed under the bed for being “too dirty”; my clothes, down to the most intimate items, are rewashed, refolded and reorganized without my consent, and my kitchen surfaces bear scars from having frozen foods bashed against them at 5A.M. which, for some bizarre reason, is the hour my mother-in-law chooses to begin making breakfast. We don’t get up until 8A.M.

Being a guest in one’s own home may appeal to some—meals are cooked for you, your laundry is done and every surface is cleansed, sanitized and polished without you having to lift a finger. However, what we might expect from a hotel is not necessarily what we want in our own home. We all have a routine. I like my rugs. I like my bed. I like my diet. But to my Chinese mother-in-law, it doesn’t matter what configuration her son’s house is in when she arrives, because when she leaves, it will have been reorganized to her specific standards. In short, neither me, nor my boyfriend, will know where anything is. But she will, and that’s what matters.

I am habitually the first to leap to the defense of Chinese culture, at least the good bits. But this manifest inability for parents to cut the cord and allow their offspring to live independently is taking its toll. China is faced with a generation of children incapable of caring for themselves. Kids have gotten used to food, clean clothes and entertainment magically appearing out of thin air. From infancy and well into adulthood, Chinese parents routinely barge into their children’s lives to do all the hard labor. Otherwise, the more undomesticated kids would likely get scurvy.

The trouble is that I am domesticated. Ironing, cooking, vacuuming—from elementary school onwards, if I didn’t do my chores, I wouldn’t receive my allowance. My boyfriend is hardly a Little Emperor either. He cooks, cleans and even sews, having covertly learned these skills through observation rather than tuition. We manage fine. We don’t need Mom’s help—if anything, her zeal is a hindrance to our relationship, usually leading to rows.

Our apartment has floor space of just under 50 square meters. The only door you can close for privacy is the door to the toilet, and even then, whatever you do in there is audible to everyone else in every other room. This is the reason behind the degree of intimacy in my relationship—there’s literally nowhere to hide your ugly side. This is also the principal source of difficulty in my relationship with my mother-in-law. She knows too much, and comments accordingly.

“Oh, he’s going to the toilet again,” is a particular favorite.

I find her level of interest in her son’s physical condition and bowel movements to be on a par with an overly-devoted family doctor, and struggle to understand why this woman doesn’t concentrate on her own life rather than spend her time attempting to micromanage that of her independent, forward-thinking, financially solvent son.

But maybe that’s the point—for a Chinese mother, a domestically independent child means the end of her parental raison d’être. In China, the absence of a more egalitarian, emotional foundation to familial relationships means that children don’t turn to their parents for psychological support—preferring partners, friends, co-workers or, increasingly, the Internet. Parents handle the practicalities, but you don’t “share” much. If my boyfriend needs a shoulder to cry on, he turns to me. I’ve never seen him hug his parents, or call them when he’s in need of reassurance. Whatever emotional crises aren’t dealt with internally are outsourced to me—he has told me that he’d never call his mother for emotional support because she’d fret too much.

In this regard, my mother-in-law, being retired, has little to do but twiddle her thumbs, at least until the first grandchild appears. I guess I can forgive her wanting to hang on to the mama mantle a little longer. But she’d better keep her interfering, rubber-gloved hands off my goddamn rugs.

“You’re a foreigner. You don’t get it.”

When I hear this I begin to feel like the residents of South Park, who, when beset by the tanned and toned buffoons of Jersey Shore, take up arms rather than be fobbed off with explanations of irrational or unhinged behavior as “a Jersey thing.”

I am not claiming any particular qualification or expertise when it comes to China. Despite devoting seven years of my life to fairly intensive study of the language, literature, theater and cinema I still acknowledge my failings to acquire robust insight. I gave up on improving my spoken Chinese after being shot down by too many bilingual foreigners and Chinese alike, and have stuck to a working knowledge ever since. I stopped reading Chinese novels when I stopped being able to locate works by my few favorite writers. I abandoned domestically-produced theater after one too many badly-acted, overproduced “issues” plays that stepped around actual issues, and as for cinema, if you ask me, China ceased to be of interest since it developed a domestic box office.

But movies remain a passion, and I’ve always been an optimistic sort, refusing to close my eyes and ears completely, willing to take in a Chinese movie on a recommendation from a friend. Enter Let the Bullets Fly by the acclaimed filmmaker Jiang Wen, whose output I enjoyed while in college—particularly Devils on the Doorstep and In the Heat of the Sun, which I believe to be China’s most visually luscious film to date. Anyway, a colleague of mine arrived one morning at work raving about how subtly and ingeniously Bullets got its claws into the quagmire of Chinese politics, insisting it was Jiang Wen’s “masterpiece” and would “redefine Chinese cinema.”

Then the disclaimer: “I don’t think you’d be able to understand the political messages. After all, it’s about revolution, and pain, and suffering. It’s very Chinese.”

Right, because only the Chinese have experienced revolution, pain and suffering and the Blitzkreig was just Europeans horsing around. It’s not that my colleague was some hard-bitten veteran of the Long March either—he was a sheltered, spoiled single child. His parents and grandparents had enjoyed relative prosperity right through the Great Leap Forward, side-stepped the Cultural Revolution, and were now making a fortune through government connections in Sichuan. He was no more qualified to talk about the agonies of war and societal chaos than I was. However, I chose not to take the bait, after all I had not seen the movie, and perhaps it was indeed as inscrutable as he claimed. When he started to rave about its “imagination” and its “visual dynamism” that was “revolutionary in itself,” however, I began to feel antsy—we were told similar things about Tron: Legacy.

Regardless, I dutifully tracked down a pirated DVD copy and last night myself and my partner settled down, cushions aplump, and prepared to be blown away.

Let the Bullets Fly is many things. It’s convincingly acted, well produced, and elaborately staged. It makes the best use of star power possible, sinking most of its budget into names rather than production value. It has a healthy dose of humor, is indisputably Chinese in both focus and feeling, and doesn’t attempt to exploit pretty faces for box office gold.

However, it is the most overt, conservative, and unrepentant love letter to Chairman Mao I have ever sat through, and that includes Founding of a Republic.

Zhang Mazi (Jiang Wen, naturally), master criminal, along with his gang derails a train carrying the soon-to-be Governor Shi (Ge You, doing his Ge You thing) and his soon-to-be-pointlessly-killed-off trophy wife (an excellent and underused Carina Lau) to the poverty-stricken Goose Town. Zhang decides to be governor with Shi as his flunky; the wife is seduced by Zhang (but she initiates it, of course, because a true hero never coerces women into sex); and the gang enter into a turf war with the inexplicably rich local warlord Huang Silang (Chow Yun-fat). Zhang comes over all Robin Hood and distributes money to the poor before encouraging them to overthrow Huang by beheading the latter’s body double in the market square to convince the lumpen masses a new era has dawned. But Huang survives long enough to have a cozy chat on his looted lawn furniture with Zhang before getting inexplicably blown up seconds later in his castle turret. Zhang’s gang, now wealthy, ride the gravy train to Shanghai while Zhang trots off into the sunset, the hero incarnate, pleased at a job well done.

See the clever symbolism here? Zhang Mazi is, like, Mao. And there’s his Communist Party. And there’s Sun Yat-sen, and Chiang Kai-shek, and all our favorites! Mao wins and Chiang gets blown up and the CCP go off to get rich while Mao remains as incorruptible and noble as ever. Even though he blew up a train and killed a bunch of people, half of them innocent, but shush.

For a foreigner not to get the symbolism of this movie, they would have to have no knowledge whatsoever of China’s history in the last century. They would also have to never have heard of Robin Hood, which, as I’m a British man, isn’t likely. There’s no great mystery, as my colleague seems to think there is, why this film was not banned by the official censors. It tells one of the many narratives that the CCP have spun to justify their stranglehold on power. Chiang Kai-shek was pure, lecherous evil (even the name Huang Silang sounds close to Lustful Dead Wolf), outsmarted and outgunned by Mao Zedong, a resourceful military hero with no ulterior motives. The Red Army were simple, determined folk of unquestionable loyalty while the Nationalist troops were either imbeciles (portrayed by a scholar-lackey of Huang’s), psychopaths (a warrior-lackey of Huang’s) or perverts (former rent boy Chen Kun, who puts in a good turn as a torturer). The Chinese people (Goose Town’s population) are the most roundly insulted—brainless, craven idiots to a man, emphasized by Jiang’s frankly racist use of Shanxi, Henan or Dongbei accents for all the townspeople—ripping on China’s traditional dumbasses.

Some foreigners might not get the finer points, like the use of local accents, nods to Jiang’s early work, or quips based on Buddhist sutras. Most of the humor went over my head, apart from the sight gags and a few bon mots, but to say a foreigner won’t understand this Zucker-worthy farce is like telling a Chinese person, “Oh, sure Avatar’s great. But you’ll only be appreciating it on a very basic level. After all, it’s an American film. Americans know about colonialism and oppression. It’s in their history.” Avatar’s box office success in China would indicate that, if the film’s message is impenetrable to the average Chinese, they’re certainly trying hard to understand it.

I appreciate having gaps in my knowledge filled by a willing friend, especially when I ask for help. My partner is wonderful in this regard—while he sometimes assumes my ignorance in certain things, particularly Chinese history, most of the time he simply illuminates something I’ve failed to grasp without my having to ask. Throughout Bullets he was by my side, clarifying lines I’d not quite grasped (there were no English subtitles). But there’s a big difference between sharing knowledge and patronizing someone you know to be at least relatively knowledgeable about your culture. This affliction blights almost all young Chinese who have based their worldview on the curriculum they were exposed to in school, who are happy to toe the CCTV line on internationalism, which is that Chinese have little to learn about the outside world that isn’t directly related to science or technology. They’ve got European and American culture down pat because they’ve read Jane Eyre and eat at KFC.

Humility is an important and increasingly rare commodity in competitive China. Selfishness is its natural replacement, and a self-centered worldview engendered by years of social conditioning easily convinces people who aren’t exposed to alternative ways of thinking that their perspective is always the right one, and that nobody’s as well-informed as they are. Americans, British, hell, everyone suffers in some way from this prejudiced view that outsiders will “not get us,” simply because they’re outsiders. This basically writes off our fellow human beings as unable to constructively analyze their surroundings, to perceive and to develop opinions about what they see and hear in unfamiliar settings. Americans and Chinese are particular offenders in this area, as they are arguably the most comprehensively nationalized people on earth due to their relative distance from their neighbors, with Russians a close second.

In my homeland of Britain, we would consider it rude to presume ignorance—far better to embark on a discussion and wait for them to say something. I avoid cricket, rugby league, and pantomime for this very reason. But I still take my partner along to enjoy all three, and, while cricket has yet to grow on him, he has learned a lot both through my patchy knowledge and what he has observed himself. We expect people to ask if they need something explained, rather than explaining it preemptively. I’ve heard tell of Chinese men, on dates with Western girls who’ve lived in China for years, actually reciting reams of ancient poetry without warning, to “educate” their prospective conquests. If a girl wants poetry written by someone else a thousand years ago read out loud, I’m sure she’ll ask.

I was especially offended by my colleague assuming I wouldn’t comprehend Bullets partly because it is such an obvious film, but also because he knows that I have spent three years living in China, asking questions of him and others, reading news stories, and continuing sporadic research. And, even if I hadn’t, he might have given me the benefit of the doubt that I had at least a nodding acquaintance with its politics, seeing as how I help him edit a political news magazine. The supreme irony was he actually felt he was being helpful, as I’m sure my elderly in-laws do when they ask me if I know who Mao Zedong is, or explain that China has 5,000 years of history.

Lecturing does not educate. Learning is not something you impose on others, though that hasn’t stopped millions of Chinese teachers from trying. Knowledge and awareness must be sought out and developed, nurtured through reading and digestion of a variety of sources. Reciting platitudes like a masticating cow only serves self-importance and narrow-mindedness. I don’t want Chinese people to defer to my knowledge of their culture, I would simply like them to offer insight when I ask, or show an interest, rather than switch into educator mode the minute they spot my skin tone. I am delighted when Chinese friends ask me questions about my own culture, but, aside from my partner, this rarely happens. Because, in China, when you graduate, you know it all. That’s why bookstores are closing here, why iPads are used solely for Angry Birds, and why nobody’s heard of the Kindle. People feel what they need to do with what they learned in school is to recite it for eternity, ignoring the fact that knowledge is organic and ever-changing. I was taught to understand by asking questions, not by absorbing everything people told me like some kind of cerebral sponge. Here is where Chinese education fails and why my colleague, through no fault of his own, patronized me to a degree I felt was so intolerable I’ve sat for two hours to write about it. I am reminded of a remark made by Scotch crofters who were to be evicted to make way for a steel plant in Ayrshire. “We understand you, but you don’t understand us.” This is what I think whenever a Chinese person decides to inform me of a piece of trivia so well-repeated in China that it’s practically a national slogan.

Another quotation, this time from a Chinese source—the former Chinese ambassador to France, Wu Jianmin:

明代郑和七下西洋后的海禁、清朝康乾盛世后遭受100多年列强欺凌以及新中国成立后的大跃进和文革,都是错误地认识世界的结果.

“The curtailment of Admiral Zheng He’s voyages of discovery in the Ming Dynasty, the decline of the Qing Dynasty and subsequent carving-up of China by foreign powers, the catastrophic Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were all consequences of China misunderstanding the rest of the world.”

Internationalism is a two-way street, China. If you want a melting pot, you need to melt a bit.

Editor’s Note: This article has been translated into Chinese and reprinted here. We were not consulted or notified and do not have any connections with the website or the translator. Nonetheless we are flattered and give our thanks to the translator for his hard work.

Yes, I knew what trap meant. But the way those broken English words came out of William’s mouth did not inspire much confidence. My skinny, dweebish visa agent stared at me with a bureaucrat’s humorless gaze. I had just spent the last hour being coached on how to survive a Chaoyang District Public Security Bureau investigator’s interrogation. Tomorrow I would have to walk into the PSB and lie to the Chinese government. If they believed me, I would be free to continue my life in Beijing. If they didn’t, I could be asked to leave China in ten days. My head was boiling in a stew of Chinese corporations, names, and addresses, a fabricated record of my last seven months in the People’s Republic. In less than twenty four hours my life had been turned upside down. How the hell did everything get so fucked up?

—

For those foreign expatriates living in Beijing there are residency registration guidelines that one must follow in order to stay on the right side of the law, as ambiguous a line as that may be. There are three guidelines that are important to remember for registration purposes:

1. Upon arrival into the PRC aliens must register their temporary lodging at the local police station.
2. When applying to extend or change one’s visa the expat must present a temporary residence permit.
3. After the extension of visas aliens must report to the local police station and register temporary accommodation within 24 hours or in a timely manner.

Registration for foreigners living in China is loosely enforced and rarely causes problems for most expats. Indeed many foreigners choose never to register at all. If they do decide to register, it is a simple process of going to the police station with your current landlord and providing proof of residence.

When I first met with my visa agency in late June they told me they could help me extend my tourist visa by converting it into an F (business) visa. My agency would sponsor me and I could enter and exit the country without restriction for an additional six months. It sounded great.

One requirement they asked of me was that I provide my temporary residence documentation which verified my current lodging. Unfortunately, up until that point, I had never registered with the police. I called my landlord and asked if he could accompany me to the police station. He agreed, but would not have time until the weekend. I needed to process my papers immediately so instead I decided to pay my company a small fee to register for me, another one of their very convenient services.

I received my new visa ten business days later and everything seemed to be in order. Unfortunately one small detail eluded me: after receiving my new visa I should have gone back to the PSB to register it. Months later, in September, I would pay the price for this minor oversight.

—

“Can you come into our office tomorrow? We need to talk about your visa.” William called me on a Wednesday while I was at work. I had never met William before and all I knew about him was that he worked at the visa agency. He asked if I had spoken to the police. I had not. We talked briefly about some of the part-time teaching work I had been doing in China. “Remember, if the police talk to you, you cannot tell them you are working in China. Please come in tomorrow to discuss your visa.”

When I arrived at the office in Dongzhimen, William led me into a conference room in the back. A stern woman in business dress and a thick handed, big boned man who looked like a peasant soon followed. They spoke only Chinese and barked things to each other in short bursts. They jumped into conversation without explaining what had happened or why I had been called in. I was hopelessly unprepared for their hostility as I tried to decipher William’s translation and piece together the run of events.

Recently my file had been randomly pulled by the Beijing police who subsequently investigated my residency. Without my knowledge my visa agency had registered my temporary housing at an apartment in a neighborhood called Wangjing, a northeastern section in Beijing known to lodge many overseas Koreans. I was under the false impression that my company had registered me at my actual address, not some fabricated one. I lived nowhere near Wangjing so when the police arrived at my “apartment” it was no surprise that I was nowhere to be found. The police were pissed off and they wanted me to come in to answer their questions and clear up the misunderstanding.

“Listen to us,” William hastily translated. “This is your problem not ours. Our company is not in trouble. You are. You forgot to register after your new visa. We are trying to help you. If you do not listen to what we say very carefully you may make a mistake.”

I was scrambling to understand the gravity of my situation. When I walked into the office that morning I assumed this was some minor misunderstanding. To my knowledge I had done nothing wrong. When the company registered for me I believed I was taken care of, that there was nothing else to be done. Now I was struggling to defend myself with my own agency. I had no idea I had to register again once I received my new visa. I had no idea extending your visa through a service agency was illegal. The button-up woman stared at me in disbelief.

“If you make a mistake. If you answer their questions wrong. If they catch you. They could ask you to leave China in ten days.”

My head was reeling. I couldn’t say a word and just nodded. What followed was an incomprehensible garble of facts which I was expected to memorize for the PSB interrogation the next day. Fact 1, I was not working in Beijing. Fact 2, I did not speak Chinese. 3, I never paid for my visa. 4, The government fee for an F visa conversion was 940RMB. 5, I was in Beijing on behalf of my friend in America communicating with a real estate company regarding a possible investment opportunity.

This was insane! How could I walk into the police station with a straight face and lie to them about me being a real estate investor? I knew nothing about real estate. I was terrified. I took a deep breath. Ok, it doesn’t matter how you got into this situation. You can blame them, you can blame yourself. Let’s just concentrate on getting out of this situation.

I tried to sell myself on the lie. I was helping with a real estate investment. I lived in Wangjing for a month because it was closer to the company. I subsequently moved back to my current apartment because the deal went south. I memorized the company, names of general managers, my address in Wangjing, construction site locations. I fabricated alibis and tiny details to make my story realistic.

“They may say things to try and trick you. Maybe they will ask you for money. Maybe they will tell you that if you lie they can put you in prison. Don’t believe them. Just repeat what we say. If you don’t know the answer just say ‘I don’t know or I don’t remember’. Don’t just say anything. You cannot just say anything or everything will be lost.”

“Everything will be lost” seemed like an apt way to put it.

After the meeting the agency sent me home and told me I had to register my current accommodations with the police that day. They sent one of their representatives with me in case I needed help. I called my roommate and he called our landlord. As we scrambled to the police station I mulled the morning’s events over and over in my head.

My last seven months in China were built on the assumption that I would have some kind of future here. I had made friends, found work, signed leases, and built relationships that were all very important to me. In one morning all of that had been put in jeopardy. It sounds cliché but the future is not promised. Within an hour I felt how tenuous and fragile that future really was.

Inane paperwork aside, registration at the local police station went off without problem. After registering I returned with the agency representative to Dongzhimen where I sat in a waiting room for nearly an hour. It was raining heavily by the time we finally left the company that evening. I was seated in the back of a black car being driven to Wangjing. My agent William was sitting to my right and a middle aged man I had only briefly met that morning was driving.

First we stopped at an office complex near Sanyuanqiao subway station. I was to remember the address and location of the real estate company located in this complex.

“The nineteenth floor of this building. Look,” William pointed at a looming skyscraper on the corner of the intersection. I took a deep breath and tried to imprint all the details of the office complex into my brain.

Next, after circling around the same muddy roads for what seemed like an hour, we arrived at a dumpy wet apartment complex in Wangjing. In Beijing apartment complexes are usually referred to by name. They are massive, encompassing entire city blocks, and navigated using building numbers and doorway entrance placards. The car sat idling outside the apartment complex. William led me through the entrance and into a shabby courtyard flanked by convenience stores, barber shops, and massage parlors. We entered a crumbling staircase and made our way to the fourth floor of a nondescript building.

“Here, you see? This one, room 401. Look at it. Remember it. Do you see? Remember. Remember.” William pointed at the walls, the ceiling, the locked black door of apartment 401. This had been my home for one month. This was where I lived when I registered with the police. I tried to commit everything to memory. I remembered the shitty concrete stairs. I remembered which side the door was on. I remembered how the door handle turned.

“Can we go inside?” I asked.

“No,” William shook his head.

“What if they ask me how many rooms? What the apartment looks like? Do you know?”

“I don’t know. Say you can’t remember,” and with that we marched back down the stairs, past the barber shops and massage parlors, and got back into the idling car with the middle aged man.

The man circled around the apartment once more and then sped off a few blocks down. He slowed to a crawl as we inched past the Wangjing police station.

“This is the police station where you came to register. I came with you,” William continued. “You came here by yourself, nobody brought you here. I was your translator assigned to you at the company. I was the one that helped you find the apartment in Wangjing.”

The middle aged man mumbled something in Chinese. William translated.

“Forget the company. I am just your translator, you found me on your own.” I nodded my head. William listened as the middle aged man said something else. “When you enter the police station, you turn left. There are desks where you register with the police.” Again, I nodded.

That evening I could not sleep. I was to meet William the next morning and we would take a taxi together to the Choayang District Public Security Bureau located near Ritan Park. My brain was bursting with information: alibis, stories… lies. I tried to sell the lie to myself. I really was a real estate investor. I really did live in Wangjing for one month.

My brain played out scenario after scenario. I meshed tiny facts from real life with lies I had acquired earlier in the day. I tried to seamlessly improvise anecdotes about work, about Wangjing, about the company. I felt hopelessly fucked. There was no way I could pull this off. The investigator would see through my lies and throw me in a communist prison cell.

As the night inched onward I began to miss America. I was convinced I would have to return home. I imagined buying a one way plane ticket, rearranging my life, explaining what had happened to my parents. I thought about work, my apartment in Beijing, my friends in America, my friends in China. My future was flashing before my eyes and I was trying to chart it out. Going home, maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe, somewhere deep down, I really want to go home. Maybe somewhere deep down, I’m not supposed to stay in Beijing. What good is this god-forsaken country anyway?

But either way you cut it, I really loved Beijing. Inconveniences aside, language barriers and all, in the last seven months here I had come to love the imagination and scope of the city. The people, fervently moving forward into a vast and optimistic future, the hustle and bustle of a landlocked capital bursting through the 21^st century. It was a culture both foreign and familiar; a culture still reeling from a century of heartbreak yet inextricably proud. I loved all the people I had met here, the friends and relationships, the novelty of acquainting myself with a world so different and yet so similar to my own. As much as I wanted to convince myself otherwise, I was not ready to leave China. At least not like this, not under someone else’s terms.

The next morning I donned my best shirt and tie. I was half-nervous, half-resigned to my fate. Whatever happened was beyond my control. I had all the facts committed to memory. I would be cool and controlled. I would do everything precisely as I had been instructed to. Whatever else happened in that interrogation room was beyond my control.

As our cab pulled up in front of the PSB William dialed into his iPhone. Another car was already out front, waiting for us. We got into the back seat. A chain smoking middle aged man from the “real estate” company nodded hello to me. He and William exchanged a few sentences, then we all exited.

The weather that day was abysmal. The last three days it had rained nonstop. I kept thinking about a fact I had read online that medical school entrance interviews were more likely to turn out negative if it was raining. I crossed my fingers, hoping my interrogator was one of the kind-faced women behind the counter.

After waiting fifteen minutes William and I were called to a desk in the main lobby. The officer was a lean, bespectacled man in his thirties. He had a handsome face that could be disarming one second, and torturous the next. He asked me if I spoke Chinese. I stared at him blankly and handed him my passport.

“What are you doing in China?” was the first question that William translated for me. Luckily the officer did not speak English. I stared straight back at him, stumbling slightly for a second.

“I am here doing business communication for a friend of mine in America. He is interested in an investment in Beijing.” I am not sure whether the officer understood me or not, but I saw a knowing glance cross his eyes. A glance as if to say that my obviously prepared answer was something he had heard hundreds of times over and something he half expected. He jotted down some characters into the police report.

Upon mentioning that William was my translator and that he assisted in helping me find the apartment in Wangjing the officer directed most of the questions toward him. Very little else was said in English other than when I was asked to recite the exact address in which I lived in Wangjing. I picked up some lines of questioning here and there. During one exchange the officer began to yell at William, scribbling violently into the police report and shaking his arm as if to fish the truth out from the sea of fiction.

“You’re lying! You’re lying! It is impossible to rent an apartment for just one month. You’re lying!” I tried not to squirm in my seat but it was becoming increasingly difficult to stay calm. I’m so fucked. I’m so fucked. It’s over. I’m going home.

William stayed calm. He slowly explained that he was friends with the landlord’s wife and that he was able to find me those accommodations through this relationship. The officer took down William’s ID number and the phone number of the landlord. The officer’s anger slowly abated. He scribbled something else into the report.

“And what else? Where did you live after that?” he asked.

I explained in detail the address of my other apartment in Beijing. This was no lie, and it felt good to be able to throw this in the officer’s face. Go ahead, check those facts, call that landlord if you must.

When all was said and done the interrogation ended up lasting twenty or thirty minutes. Nothing was ever asked about the company and no further inquiries were made into the nature of my business communication in Beijing. The only sticking point seemed to be the apartment in Wangjing. For now, it appeared that William’s explanation had satisfied the officer.

The policeman handed me his report, a page full of Chinese recording our testimonials. I was ordered to write “All the above records are true” and then date and sign my name. I obliged. There was now written and documented proof that I had knowingly and willfully lied to the Chinese government. Damn.

On the cab ride to the nearest subway station I asked William how he thought the interrogation went. “I think it should be ok. If there are any other issues the police will call us. Maybe it will take a few days or a week.”

“Do you think they will call us?” I prodded.

“I don’t think so. I think it is ok. If they never call us, that means it is ok.” No news was good news. Let’s hope William’s hunch was right. The taxi dropped me off at Jianguomen subway station. I shook William’s hand and thanked him for everything he had done. Inside I wasn’t sure whether I should love or hate his agency. I remember when we were driving to Wangjing William told me that he was from Hunan province, making note that it was the same province which Mao Zedong called home. In my head, it comforted me to think that William had a guardian chairman watching over him, making sure he and his endeavors never found themselves on the wrong side of the law.

The moment I got home from the police station I messaged a girl that I had been seeing. I wanted to meet her as soon as possible. I wanted to tell her what had happened and how I felt about her. The last two days were like an incomprehensible nightmare. A nightmare that had pulled me from my comfortable routines and reminded me how flimsy and insignificant all my plans were. I was shaken. I knew the future was not promised and I no longer wanted to take the present for granted.

UPDATE: It’s been over a week since my meeting at the PSB office and there has since been no word from the police or my visa agency. I am holding my breath that there will be no news.

A common ritual for expatriates in China is the visa run. Because of the limited number of days a tourist can spend in one “visit” to China (in our case it was sixty days), those staying in China for longer durations must make the trek out of the country and back in to get a new stamp on their passport and reset the timer. Common destinations include Mongolia, South Korea, and Hong Kong, whose special status counts as leaving China. Often it’s used as an excuse to take a vacation every couple of months, and that’s what Michael and I did for our first run to Hong Kong—we made a weekend of it. This time, however, was supposed to be a formality: take the train from Beijing to Hong Kong (a twenty-four hour trip), then immediately get on the return train and head back. Clean, simple, and efficient.

However, there was one snafu to trip us up. We didn’t book our return train ahead of time, and after arriving at the station, we found that the return trip was already completely sold out. The next train from Hong Kong wouldn’t leave for another two days, meaning we would be stuck on the other side of the border until then. This was unacceptable to Michael, and because of obligations back in Beijing, he opted to take a plane ride back the next afternoon, at the cost of around 2000 Hong Kong Dollars (about $256 USD). I, on the other hand, had no such deadline, and so there was another option. Tomorrow, a train would leave from neighboring Shenzhen. I could cross the border on foot, then take the Shenzhen train to Beijing. This would only cost me around 400 HKD ($50 USD). “That sounds pretty good,” I say to the attendant.

“It’s a hard seat,” she replies.

“Are there any sleepers?”

“No, no sleeper, only seat.”

On the train to Hong Kong, Michael and I had tickets for a “hard sleeper” coach, meaning that we had bunk beds to sleep in for the duration of the trip. The first time we took a train ride in China, I was filled with trepidation, having read some horror stories online: cramped cattle cars… no running water… angry baijiu-swilling migrant workers who would slit their mamas’ throats for a nickel. And it’s true that the “soft sleeper” cars on the train seemed like wonderlands of luxury (Doors that can close! Western-style toilets!) but the hard sleeper cars were pleasant enough. The train rides were soothing in their own way.

However, on this trip, my only option was to get a “hard seat” ticket, meaning I would have only one space on a bench of seats in a crowded train car to call my own for an entire twenty-four hours. Or I could get a plane ticket like Michael, but I’m not made out of RMB. “Get the seat, Oscar. Come on, get the seat!”

And so frugality won out. I pushed the button.

—

Even with our new plans, we still had an evening to kill in Hong Kong. Rather than staying in a hostel for the night, Michael had another great idea: just power through and stay up until the next day. As I was on a frugality kick, I foolishly agreed. This led to a Lost Weekend-style journey throughout the city, which included eating at the Tsui Wah cafe, getting kicked out of three Starbucks over a period of three hours, and spending much of the night drinking in front of 7-11. (This is not as cheap and degenerate as it may sound. If Hong Kong is the West’s idea of China transformed into a theme park, 7-11s are the concession stands. They’re everywhere, and every night you can see I-bankers in expensive suits and dolled-up club girls standing in front of 7-11s pounding Bacardi Breezers before heading to their next venue. Alright, that does sound cheap and degenerate.)

Around 4 AM, Michael and I head to an all-night McDonald’s where he immediately passes out in a chair. It seems we’re not the only ones doing that, as every other seat is filled with men sitting around, sleeping upright, or staring off into space. The girl at the register comes over to the table we’re at and cleans up the trays and trash left by its previous occupant. She gives a look to me and Michael. “You’re here in Hong Kong to work?” she asks me.

“No, we’re just visiting.”

She looks at us askance, as she sees all the other men in here who are probably “just visiting.”

“Are you from Malaysia?”

I shake my head. “No.”

“Indonesia?”

“No, we’re from America, but we came here from Beijing.”

She takes another look at Michael. I can see the wheels turning in her head. She finally asks, “Are you from Vietnam?”

—

The next day, Michael heads off to the airport, where I have no doubt his trip back to Beijing included buckets of Cristal and back massages from cute flight attendants. I, on the other hand, cross the border to Shenzhen and board my train. After the group of over a thousand people are herded through the station, I take my seat in a compartment that says it’s designed for 150 people; but with the number of people standing around and crammed into the seats, there’s probably a lot more than that. Soon thereafter, another passenger comes in and tries to stuff a colorfully-designed bag three sizes too large into the overhead compartment right above my head. Its gargantuan size means that if it fell off and hit me in the head, the sheer force of the blow would probably snap my neck. Luckily, a conductor comes by and waves him to take it down. Meanwhile, I begin to zone out. It’s been two full days since I’ve taken a shower, and the accumulated fatigue is beginning to take its toll on me. But at least I have a seat, and I’m on my way back to Beijing. The worst seems over.

Hour 1: Having found my seat, more people continue to pour into the train. A girl stands beside my seat to the right, just standing in the middle of the aisle. I wonder if there’s a problem with our seats, but she seems content to just stand there. I begin reading the book I brought on the train, Peter Hessler’s Country Driving. I consider the poetic nature of reading about traveling across the Chinese countryside while actually traveling across the Chinese countryside. However, it’s interrupted by the girl to my left, who starts playing music from her cell phone like it’s a boombox. It’s a Jay Chou song that I don’t recognize. This continues, and when there’s a pause, a boy on the other side of the aisle plays another Jay Chou song from his phone. I don’t know how common this is, or if this is some sort of Chinese flirtation.  It’s cute for about six or seven minutes.

Hour 2: Train attendants walk up and down the aisles with carts of snacks and fruit to sell. This is something I have seen before. However, one of these hawkers carries a tray of beads with him, and plops it down on a table. He gets everyone’s attention, and starts launching into what must be a sales pitch, talking at lightning speed. Basically this man is the human equivalent of those SkyMall catalogs on planes. This would be the first of many attempts to hawk his wares to his captive audience. If this were a market, I would just walk away; but here, to walk away would mean walking through the nearest window of a speeding train. Later on, I will seriously consider this.

Hour 4: The police on the train check everyone’s identification cards. I’m the only one who pulls out a foreign passport. Phone Girl points and talks to Standing Girl in Chinese. “That’s why he doesn’t understand! He’s a foreigner!” These are the only words of Chinese I comprehend during the entire ride. Phone Girl and Standing Girl talk to each other, and then Phone Girl stands up and gives Standing Girl her seat. My theory is that these two are friends who bought one ticket together and are switching off for the duration of the ride. I consider this ludicrous, but then some passengers will end up standing for the entire duration of the trip. This breaks my brain.

Hour 6: I get over my fear of potentially losing my seat to the pack of standing passengers and attempt to use the restroom, navigating around the crowd and the woman passed out near the sinks crouching in a puddle of water. I am sure you have an intellectual conception of what one train toilet used by over three hundred people over a period of twenty-four hours must be like. It is times like these, like the Hundred Flowers Campaign, where intellectual notions are quickly outstripped by reality. Also like the Hundred Flowers Campaign, I feel like purging. I resolve to not eat or drink  for the rest of the ride, in the hope of avoiding a return trip.

Hour 7: Phone Girl and Phone Boy keep switching off Jay Chou songs. When Phone Girl plays, she also sings along to the sound of her phone. It would be nice, I suppose, if I weren’t stuck between these people for what seems like the entirety of Jay Chou’s career. I begin to hate Jay Chou, and if you must know, I loved Initial D.

Hour 10: Almost halfway there. In Country Driving, Peter Hessler describes a factory manager writing an ad for workers. “Must eat bitterness,” the ad says. This is a literal translation of the word 吃苦 (chiku), which means to endure hardship. I consider for a moment that while I feel broken down and beaten by the cramped quarters, the poor hygiene, the constant noise and distraction, and the marathon of physical and mental endurance that comes with experiencing all of these, everyone around me seems content to bear these conditions. In reading about Chinese cultural mores, Western writers often mention how it seems ingrained in the Chinese mindset that pain and suffering are inevitable, and so one must just endure it—eat bitterness. I consider, as my editor George Ding put it, the consequences of uneven economic development without social development. It’s a moment of self-reflection. The moment soon passes.

Hour 12: The train stops. It’s too dark to read any signs about where we are. More passengers come onto the train, and considering there weren’t enough seats already, it seems that cartoon physics will soon need to be applied to fit these people on the train. Seeing a fresh batch of customers, Mr. SkyMall launches into another sales pitch, carrying a tray of plastic things that look like dinosaur sponges. I have no idea what they could be, and without understanding what he’s saying, I will never know.

Hour 13: They don’t shut off the lights. They don’t even dim the lights. The Pentagon’s internal review of enhanced interrogation techniques revealed several methods which fall under that umbrella. 1: Yelling. (I dread the return of Mr. SkyMall.) 2: Loud music and light control. (The interrogators at Camp X-Ray preferred Slayer; here, it’s Jay Chou.) 3: Environmental manipulation. (Because the lights are never turned off, looking outside the window is literally looking into a black void of darkness. I have no idea where we are. I could be in deep space.) 4: Sleep deprivation. (Well, duh.) 5: Stress positions. (Does being stuck in a hard seat for twenty-four hours count? I think it should.) 6: 2o-hour-long interrogations. (Ditto.) 7: Controlled fear. (Well, six out of seven ain’t bad.)

Hour 14: It is literally the middle of the night. Mr. SkyMall returns. This time he’s selling anti-radiation bracelets. The box features a smiling white couple on the cover. I begin to wonder whether they’re laughing at me.

Hour 15: Dehydration and fatigue, compounded with the clouds of cigarette smoke wafting in from the other side of the car, have induced a hallucinatory experience. Everyone around me seems to stop speaking Chinese. Instead, they’re speaking English, except I no longer understand English. Does that make any sense? Every time I start drifting off, I hear a snippet of speech above the cacophony that sounds like I should understand it, except I don’t, and its only purpose is to keep me awake and confused. This persists for the rest of the trip.

Hour 16: I begin to consider welcoming death. I attempt to maintain my sanity by constructing this article line-by-line in my head. (The original “train draft” version of this piece concluded with an elaborate revenge fantasy where I re-enacted the ending of Inglourious Basterds on Michael.)

Hour 19: For a couple of hours, I manage to get some sleep, as my body feels like it’s just shutting down due to sheer exhaustion. I am awakened by Mr. SkyMall walking the aisles, selling more crap. This time, it’s toothbrushes, which are the only products he has which seem to make logical sense to sell on a train. The train makes another stop, and Phone Girl and Formerly-Standing Girl leave. They are replaced by an older woman, a younger man, and a little girl. When the woman holds the girl on her lap and looks out the window, the light makes her look exactly like that one famous Dorothea Lange photo of an Okie family.

Hour 21: During the ride, I’ve been keeping George and Michael informed of my progress on the train. “Don’t worry, it will be over soon,” Michael texts as if I’m losing a battle with terminal cancer. George adds, “You should write an article about your experience.” Across from me, a baby throws up all over itself. Spittle and vomit drip down to the floor and onto the mother’s shoes as she tries to clean the child up. Beside me, the Okie family are eating sunflower seeds and tossing the shells onto the floor. To be fair, they’re aiming for a tray of trash, but the floor keeps getting in the way.

Hour 23: At the rear of the compartment, a small audience forms as two of the passengers, an old man and old woman, put on a show. The woman sings in what I think is a traditional Chinese style. Kids run down the aisle towards the wailing. It’s difficult to see through the crowd, but I believe there are puppets involved. Even Mr. SkyMall stops hawking his wares for a minute to let the show go on. It’s a genuinely interesting moment.

Hour 24: Sweet, sweet release. The train pulls into the Beijing West train station, and as the doors open, people flood out of the car and merge with the masses outside. It will still take me an additional hour to get back to my apartment, but at least I’m back on familiar ground. I know I should have no right to feel as if I’ve really eaten bitterness, considering how everyone else in that compartment handled the experience, but stepping off the train I really do feel like a war veteran coming home. “Poor kid, you had to ride the subway for an hour? Let me tell you a story about the night train to Beijing…”

I wonder if the censorship bureau understands this parable because one thing everyone in China should know by now is that if you ever come across a website that terminates your Internet connection, start digging.

Recently, many writers have been weighing in on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and the 20th anniversary of an event that’s received much less publicity. NPR has three interviews with writers from three very different generations: Jiang Rong, 63 (“I criticized China’s politics, but not directly. What I criticized was deeper, and that was acceptable to the authorities.”), Yu Hua, 49 (“[I use] absurdity to describe absurd times.”), and Guo Jingming, 25 (“I don’t know much about my parents’ generation, and I don’t want to know.”), who, for better or worse, are representative of their time and the events that have shaped them.

Currently, the fastest way to get your Amazon.com connection terminated is to click on the link to Zhao Ziyang’s memoir.  In all fairness, China has been surprisingly open about the things you can read on Amazon. But this apparently strikes a nerve, even though the government has formally and publicly dismissed the memoir:

“Our Party and government long ago reached a clear conclusion about the events in China of the late 1980s, the political disturbances then and all related issues,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu, speaking hesitantly, told a regular news briefing.

Ironically, by not offering a reasonable account of the events in June, the government is basically making Zhao’s take on events the only primary source from within the Party.  The memoir, however, is banned in every place in China except Hong Kong.  Look for it on counterfeit book carts starting next week.

In the past week, more and more sites, including Twitter, Flickr, Hotmail, have been blocked.  The Guardian has some guesses about why. The Washington Post has also been blocked, perhaps because of an op-ed by Dan Southerland, Beijing bureau chief for the Post in ’89, that gives his account of that night. The New York Times also has a passionate op-ed by Ha Jin about why he chose to live in America and write in English.  Excerpt:

To some Chinese, my choice of English is a kind of betrayal. But loyalty is a two-way street. I feel I have been betrayed by China, which has suppressed its people and made artistic freedom unavailable.

Both are worth a read but the crown goes to Ma Jian, author of Beijing Coma, who wrote one for The Guardian.  It is a condemnation, told though experience and stories from eyewitnesses. (Yes, I know some of these links will be blocked—use a proxy.)  Excerpt:

“It happened right here,” he told me, “just by these white railings. A tank charged down Changan Avenue, and sprayed tear gas into the air. There was a big crowd of us. We were coughing and choking. We rushed on to the pavement, and I was squashed back against these railings. A girl dropped to her knees. I was grasping the railings with one hand to stop myself falling and with the other I offered her a handkerchief and told her to use it as a mask. Just as I was leaning over to hand it to her, another tank roared up and careered into us. Thirteen people were crushed to death but I only lost my arm. The tank commander knew exactly what he was doing.”

In these few days leading up to the 20th anniversary we are bound to hear more voices speak out in the Western media about what transpired that night.  We’ll hear stories, calls for openness, attacks on the government’s response, appeals to the disinterested youth of today.  But the question that worries the Chinese government is, will any of it be in Mandarin?

June 3, 2009 – EDIT: More op-eds from the New York Times by Yu Hua, Yiyun Li, and Lijia Zhang.

—

It all started with some small talk. I got into a cab at Xidan after the buses had stopped running, and the cabbie, who was the talkative type, decided to make conversation.

“Did you participate in the moment of silence?”

It was a hard question to answer, though it shouldn’t have been. The answer was “No.” Simple as that. But I equivocated. I told him that I was in a mall during the moment of silence and that I saw some people observing it (which was all true), what about you? He said that he was on the street, standing beside his car, honking his horn. I asked him why and he said dismissively that the state had ordered him to.

If he had said that he had lost someone in the quake, I would have let it go. And maybe if he had said that he thought it was the right thing to do, I wouldn’t have pressed him. But from his insouciant answer I thought that maybe he thought the whole forced outpouring of guilt as absurd and inconvenient as I did.

So I said: “I think it’s bullshit that they are closing entertainment venues because of the earthquake.”

“Why?”

“Because KTV and roller coasters have nothing to do with the earthquake. And the government doesn’t have the right to tell me how to mourn. If I want to pray for the victims, then go out and have fun with my friends, I should be able to.”

He glanced at me like, “Are you serious?”

“You can’t have fun while others are suffering. There are mothers, childen—buried. These people don’t have homes anymore!”

“I understand that, but every single day someone is suffering somewhere…”

We were driving north from Xizhimen. On our right flashed the Beijing Film Academy. There were no cars in front or around us so the cabbie hazarded a look in my direction and said, “你是中国人么?” (“Are you Chinese?”) Usually this question is meant as a joke, but that night it seemed less than facetious and more than idle curiosity. It seemed like a veiled threat.

This time I replied honestly: “No. I grew up in America.”

“No wonder.”

I didn’t ask him what he meant by that. In my six months here in China I had never felt so American as I did in that moment. No, I don’t mean “American”—I mean “not Chinese.” I had never felt so un-Chinese as when he asked me that question. But he was right, try as I might, I couldn’t understand the situation from a Chinese perspective. I was connected to China ethnically and could understand it intellectually, but where was my emotional connection, and did I ever have one in the first place? These are all questions I pondered afterward. At the time, I pressed on.

“You’re right. I’m an American. You know about 9/11. We had one national day of mourning but that was it. But after, you could still go to the amusement park if you wanted to.”

“That was terrible, but at least those people had homes they could go back to. There are millions homeless right now.”

“What about the floods in Myanmar? There are many more victims but no moments of silence.”

“But they aren’t Chinese.”

“Chinese people die every year of floods too.”

“But that is a few hundred people at most.”

“So it’s about the numbers?”

The cabbie drove faster and faster, his hands shook on the steering wheel, which caused the car to sway.

“These people are starving! Trucks can’t get through, they can’t find these people, and they are dying!”

“But what about the famines during the cultural revolution? Millions died then.”

He was exasperated. He laughed in the way you laugh when dealing with irrationality.

“Maybe it’s different in America—I don’t know, but in China this is the first time since ’49 that the government has acknowledged tragedy publicly. It shows that they are caring more about regular people. And I’m not talking about me—I’m fine. I’m talking about the peasants.”

“I agree that the government is making changes, and that it is great they are acknowledging the tragedy, but I wonder if they don’t get something out of it.”

“Of course they are. No one talks about Tibet anymore, not even the Western media. The government is instituting these things like the moment of silence and the ban on public recreation. If they didn’t the people would begin to wonder—do they not care about us? But most of this stuff, like the donations, are voluntary. Usually companies will force their employees to donate a certain amount of money but not this time. You give what you want. I’d say—and I’m just guessing, I don’t have the numbers or anything—that 30% are doing it because they have to but 70% are doing it because they want to.”

The conversation continued like a Platonic dialogue. The cabbie was a smart man, I could tell. He might have been thinking up his points on the fly (while trying to keep the car from scraping the median), but he had his information. When we got to my apartment I thanked him for giving me something to think about.

—

It is meaningless to compare human misery. Numerically, culturally, or socially.

I cited 9/11 when I argued with the cabbie but the nature of 9/11 was different. 9/11 was a conscious attack perpetrated by an outsider; the horror of 9/11, other than the casualties, was mostly psychological—it was an attack on American soil that reminded those of us not alive for Pearl Harbor that America is not invulnerable. This is a feeling I don’t expect most of the world to understand, because America is one of the few nations that have not had to fight a war on its own soil (I am talking about America in its fifty-state form and thus discounting the Revolutionary and Civil War).

Likewise, it is hard for me to understand what this government intervention means to Chinese people. How would I have felt if the government halted recreational activities after 9/11? Would I have taken it as concern or a violation of civil liberties?

Perhaps Americans are inoculated against disasters. We give our hurricanes names. We endearingly refer to the places most frequently destroyed by twisters Tornado Alley. We distance ourselves, watching the devastation from a helicopter’s point of view. Or we do what we do best—turn it into a media event, oversaturate the news so that people get tired of hearing about it. Katrina was apparently a big deal but I couldn’t believe Kanye said that shit about Bush.

Or maybe disasters just don’t effect us as much. The worst earthquake in American history was the 1906 San Francisco earthquake which killed about 3,000 people. Ironically, the top 9 events that have claimed the most American lives are all wars, with Iraq inching in on the 10th spot, which is currently held by the deadliest natural disaster in America: the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 which claimed at least 6,000 lives.

But if Americans can be inoculated against disaster through media coverage, so can the Chinese. The Sichuan Earthquake was a great step forward in government transparency (even though, as my colleague Yulin Zhuang argues, the government is using the earthquake as a political tool), and the fact that it claimed so many lives will only help to cement it in the Chinese consciousness. If this openness continues, maybe when the next disasters strike (knock on wood), the outpouring of support will be less and less and the donations fewer and fewer because people will unwittingly make comparisons to this earthquake, and after a while they will become numb.

When I got home I thought about the original question the cab driver had asked me, the one I had lied to. I thought back to 2:28 in the afternoon. I was at the Starbucks in The Place, chatting with a friend when the PA came on reminding everyone about the moment of silence. Some employees, in identical red-and-gold cheongsams, ran past to join the small crowd that had gathered outside to gaze at the large screen broadcasting a montage of the tragedy. My friend and I talked in a hushed whisper. Beside us a young Chinese man was yelling into his cell phone, and behind me three Chinese wives bowed their heads and clasped their hands in prayer. And outside, perhaps incredulous to find the streets empty, a car sped past, its engine roaring, going as fast as it could.

“What kind of job?”

“I dunno. Any job.”

“Do you think it will involve English?”

“Maybe, I dunno.”

I began to interrogate my other students. One after another, class after class, I got the same answers. Only a score of students had any kind of goal–mostly “study abroad someday”–and none of them had a concrete plan. As far as I’m aware, out of the nearly 350 students that I’ve taught, the ones who will actually study abroad can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

I thought, perhaps it was what the students were studying. After all, they were entirely Business English majors, which is useful but doesn’t suggest a specific trade to go into. I volunteered to run an extracurricular English Corner at school, met other students with different majors and asked them the same questions. I received the same answers.

I’ll be the first to admit that my generation is infamous for being directionless. Generation X was all about pushing boundaries and challenging assumptions; Generation Y is perhaps best transliterated as Generation Why Bother? Apathy is the hallmark trait of my generation. Most young people in the States, however, have a general sense of direction. They have a pie-in-the-sky dream that they’d like to accomplish someday, or an area of interest (anthropology, Japanese culture, model trains). While it’s true that few of them will actually get a job relating to those interests, they have a vague idea of what they want to do that guides them in a certain direction.

Youth in China seem to lack that same sense of direction. If they do have a dream, it’s mostly of material possessions–they want to have a car, a house, and the latest cell phone that does everything except wash your dishes. If they do have goals, they’re usually the ones their parents have laid out for them. They go work at jobs that their parents find for them by leveraging contacts, they major in subjects that their parents tell them to major in. I never took a formal survey, but I’d estimate somewhere between 30-60% of my Business English majors were studying English primarily because their parents had told them to.

That said, there are those who have specific goals–the self-driven individuals who say, “this is what I want” to their parents and to their friends and who lead lives of their own choosing. Perhaps my sampling space is simply skewed–after all, those kinds of motivated people might be ones that already have mastered English. Perhaps my impression of normalcy is skewed, as I run with a fairly off-beat crowd in the States. Still, I’ve met all sorts of people in my time here, and the ones who walk to the beat of a different drum are rare.

There is no simple explanation for why there seems to be a nationwide epidemic of apathy. Some possible explanations include:

• The extremely competitive job market, which makes it difficult to find any job. Many candidates possess equal qualifications on paper, which makes personal connections much more important.
• Lack of realistic job training in schools–many who graduate with a degree are still not qualified to work in that field.
• Lack of extracurricular activities in education leaves many with academic credentials but no real job experience upon graduation.
• Cutthroat competition and lack of intellectual property rights enforcement stifles innovation/imagination. Why bother developing a new idea when someone is just going to copy it?
• Education and social indoctrination focuses a great deal on not losing face–the quest to not look foolish makes many people leery of trying to begin with.
• Lingering Confucian respect for elders, which includes doing everything they tell you without question, inculcates a habit of passive obedience.
• There’s always someone better: the crowning achievement of Chinese youth is the National University Entrance Examination, which limits definitions of achievement to a few narrow fields. Only a few students can do very well, most end up crushingly aware of their own mediocrity.
• Family sacrifice–parents give up a great deal to send their children to the best schools they can, which puts enormous pressure on students. They are unwilling to go against the wishes of those who have given up so much for their own benefit.
• Learned helplessness–from a young age children are not in control of anything important with regard to their own lives.
• There is no social stigma attached to still living with your parents in your late twenties, which makes young people less inclined to try and assert their own independence.
• Lack of career counseling leaves many students unaware of potential career paths. The bottleneck of the National Entrance Examination means that students don’t have a chance to start customizing their skill sets until after they enter college.

I suppose the major difference between the United States and China lies in the reaction to authority. Gen Y asks, “Why should I listen to you? Why should I want the same things you think I should want?” But Generation China asks very little. After all, mother and father know best.

This, however, was a happy occasion, and not the open conflict it sounds like. Spring Festival, which marks the Lunar New Year, has arrived once again in Beijing, and the Chinese are celebrating it the way they always have—with massive amounts of fireworks.

According to legend, gunpowder was accidentally discovered 2,000 years ago by a cook in the kitchen. Sufur, saltpeter, and charcoal were not uncommon in field kitchens of that time. The prevailing theory is that gunpowder was discovered in the 9th century by Taoist alchemists searching for the elixir of immortality. Regardless, by the 12th century it was being used to make firecrackers for religious purposes: the loud bangs are said to scare off evil spirits. Evil spirits are also known for being both small and not able to jump, which is why there is a large lintel at the entrance of traditional Chinese houses.

Starting in 1994, fireworks were forbidden within the city limits of Beijing, for reasons of safety. If one wanted to set off fireworks, one had to go outside the 5th ring road. Three years ago, however, the government lifted the ban and allowed fireworks (of restricted explosive power) to be set off within the city. I was not here for that Spring Festival, but I’m told the night sky was as bright as day and the festivities continued well into the small hours of the night. I was present for Spring Festival last year, however, and I was left speechless at the display.

My house lies near the center of Beijing, with views that face both north and south. In every direction, there was a never-ending stream of fireworks exploding all across the horizon, lasting nearly all night. Every family buys a few fireworks and goes outside at various times to set them off. My uncle spent almost three hours riding his bike home on New Year’s Eve, a trip that normally takes 30 minutes. Every street was packed with people setting fireworks off in the middle of the road, taking turns and without a single pause. Huge crowds gathered in parks and other open spaces. To give a sense of how many fireworks are set off, there was approximately 54 tons of debris picked up over a ten hour period the morning after. Used cardboard boxes and tubes are piled high outside each apartment complex and the pavement is scorched black in places.

There is a downside to the sparkling lights and riotous glee. Each year, hundreds are injured during Spring Festival. In 2007, there was 1 death and 715 fireworks-related injuries in Beijing. There has already been one death this year—a man named Zhang who, after drinking heavily, decided it was a good idea to set off large fireworks. Things are getting better, however. So far, officials report that injuries are down 42% compared to last year. Almost all the accidents are due to substandard illegal fireworks produced by non-licensed factories or improper use. The Chinese government does its best to close down these factories—checkpoints were set up on all major highways leading into Beijing to inspect for illegal fireworks. Over 3,000 boxes of substandard fireworks were destroyed in Beijing alone this year. Regulation of the fireworks industry has gotten more reliable over the past decade, meaning that much fewer substandard fireworks are being produced and distributed. Production is left primarily in the hands of licensed professionals. The thousands of street stalls that are set up in the city are monitored to ensure quality.

Regulation, however, comes at a cost. Due to taxes levied on officially licensed fireworks, many residents turn to underground sources. Illegal fireworks are cheaper, and often pack a much bigger bang than officially permitted fireworks. “Ten years ago, 1,000 RMB could buy a lot of fireworks. These days, 1,000 RMB buys you hardly any,” says Belinda, 23, a native Beijing resident. “If you go to the outskirts of the city, the fireworks there are ten times cheaper and also much bigger.” Despite the dangers, Beijing residents are still enthusiastic about the holiday, and adamant about celebrating it. Fireworks are an integral part of Chinese New Year, part of the Chinese cultural identity—imagine Christmas without Christmas trees or Santa Claus.

Spring Festival is a roving week-long holiday that changes each year, as it follows the lunar calendar. It marks the turn of the Chinese calendar, ushering in the new spring. It is a time for family, functioning in a similar way to Christmas and Thanksgiving in the U.S. Far-flung relations return home for a banquet—this year, the Chinese Ministry of Railways estimated that 178 million people would use the trains during the holiday. For many of China’s millions of migrant workers, this holiday marks the major payday of the year and is their one chance to return home. Many will stand on overcrowded trains for up to 30 hours or more to get back to their families. The vast majority of Chinese families spend Lunar New Year’s Eve at home, watching the annual New Year’s Gala on CCTV; a variety show that mixes music, comedic skits, intricately choreographed dance routines, acrobatics, and more.

Arguably the best part of Spring Festival for children, however, is the red envelopes of cash—called yasui money. Yasui money is traditionally given to children by their older relations. The red envelopes are meant to stave off bad luck and ill health. Unlike the West, gift-giving events in China such as weddings or New Year’s traditionally occasion the presentation of cash in small red envelopes rather than presents.

Yasui money has an old story behind it. The characters are, when literally translated, the ones for “to press” and “age.” The story goes that in ancient times there was an ogre with a black body and white hands named Sui (a different character from “age”). This monster would only appear once a year, on the night of the Lunar New Year. It would go around to children’s beds and stroke their heads three times. The child would awake crying and burning with fever. Several days later, when the fever abated, the child would have turned into a simpleton. Villagers would gather together on that night with many lanterns and candles in order to protect themselves and their loved ones from the monster. In one village, there was a family surnamed Guan. Afraid of the monster, the parents tried to keep their child awake all night. The child began playing with a piece of red paper, folding and unfolding it in various ways with some copper coins. In the end, he wrapped up eight copper coins in the paper and left it by his pillow when he finally fell asleep. The parents Guan, however, did not relax their vigil. All of a sudden, the door banged open and a gust of cold wind blew in, extinguishing all the lights in the house. The monster Sui came with his white hands and reached out to touch the child’s head. All of a sudden, he saw a gleam of light from beside the child’s pillow. Startled by the sudden shine, he fled from the house. The light was, of course, from the copper coins. The Guan family told their friends and neighbors about this method of scaring off Sui and thus the tradition of wrapping money up in red paper was born, as well as the term yasui; more freely translated as “to suppress the demon Sui.” Over the years, the character for the monster Sui was no longer used, and the modern character for age was substituted.

The first day of Spring Festival is the most riotous, but the fireworks last all week. Chinese typically get one to two weeks off work for Spring Festival, and they make the most of it. The volume of fireworks this year seems to be smaller than last—the novelty of being allowed to set off fireworks is dying down a bit. Still, the celebration of Chinese Lunar New Year far surpasses any Fourth of July display I’ve ever seen. Chinese people still retain a childlike glee and fascination with fireworks which promises that the traditional Lunar New Year celebrations will always be both loud and bright.