Rian Dundon, an American photographer who lived in China for 6 years, is trying to fund a new book of photography called Changsha. He is currently fundraising through Emphas.is, which is like Kickstarter for photojournalism. There’s a month left to support the project. We talked over e-mail about his upcoming book.

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Why Changsha?

Hunan is where I first landed when I moved to China. It was completely by chance. My girlfriend had a job there and I tagged along.

But this book isn’t just about the city of Changsha per se. As a write in the introduction, “From Changsha I followed people to other cities and provinces. I visited Yunnan and Guangdong, worked for a period in Beijing, and traveled extensively between Changsha and other prefectures in Hunan: Zhuzhou, Changde, Xiangtan, Jishou. Not every photograph in this book was made in Changsha City, but each can be traced to the connections I built there.”

Is this your first book?

This is my first published book. I have other work from China, shot mostly in Beijing and Shanghai while I was working in the Chinese film industry a few years ago. My next book will be of that material.

Can you tell us the story behind one of the photographs?

This picture was shot from backstage at the Night Cat gay bar near downtown Changsha. It was made in 2007, shortly before the bar closed down. Invisible from the street, the Night Cat was located in an old auditorium on the second floor of a used electronics market.

At one time the theater must have been an impressive venue—its wide stage and wrought iron balcony betrayed a former glory—but its makeshift decorations and empty seats betrayed another reality: lack of funds. Outside, a giant poster of Halle Berry dressed as Catwoman directed patrons past a row of stolen cell-phone dealers and up to the bar where teenage La-La girls and dance-boys would be waiting with menus.

There were always more employees than customers at the Night Cat, a common sight in a China where labor is cheap and competition fierce. I used to hang out backstage at the bar, photographing the workers between sets. Most were migrants from smaller cities, or the countryside where being openly gay is not really an option. In the relative liberalism of Changsha they were able to live somewhat of an open lifestyle. After the bar closed most of the Night Cat’s employees dispersed to other cities, in search of similar positions at other bars and nightclubs.

What did you shoot on and why did you choose to go with black-and-white for the images?

I learned photography in the darkroom. Black-and-white is default; for color I need a reason.

It’s all 35mm black-and-white film, hand processed in my apartment bathroom sink.

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Dundon says he came to China on a whim, didn’t speak the language, but ended up catching the bug. He quickly fell in with the local crowd and caught glimpses of their life with his camera. He says in his introduction:

At first, when I didn´t speak the language, I would hang out in pool halls and practice counting balls in Chinese. I couldn’t talk but I knew how to play and I knew how to swap cigs with the hustlers and lookers-on. Later my Mandarin came and I could go to dinner with people or hit the karaoke clubs.

And on the pictures he’s chosen to include:

More than anything, the stories I´m presenting in this book are about the ways that ordinary people do what they have to do to get by. Dealing with forces beyond our control, in the end we all make the same kinds of decisions about our day-to-day survival. The people I know in Hunan are bit players in the unfolding epic of China´s development. But where the processes of modernity encroach on ones ability to provide and abide, the basic demands of life and family become a negotiation guided by pragmatism, never politics.

There’s still time to support the project. Below are some more images from Changsha.

Daisey’s defense, on the other hand, was that “the tools of theater” are different than the standards of journalism—that his performance was a theatrical piece in which the insertion of fiction and the heightening of the drama of a situation based on reality, but not exactly reality, were legitimate aesthetic tactics.

The situation is complicated further by the fact that TAL has featured and celebrated a number of works of creative non-fiction and memoir from writers like David Foster Wallace and David Sedaris (of “China is Icky” fame), works which claim to be based on real experience but do not attempt to back up their claims to objective reality in the same way that mainstream journalism does. And the line of argument here is that we as an audience do not necessarily demand that kind of justification because there is an understanding that memoir and subjective recollection mediates reality in a number of unstable ways—we accept that because the interesting thing about those pieces is the mediation, not its claim to truth.

In his montage book Reality Hunger, David Shields borrows from Alice Marshall on this issue: “Our personal experience, though it may convey great truths, most likely won’t be verified by security tapes later… Autobiographical memory is a recollection of events or episodes, which we remember with great detail. What’s stored in that memory isn’t the actual events, but how those events made sense to us and fit into our experience.”

That’s what Daisey is talking about when he talks about using the tools of theater and the tools of memoir; in those kinds of subjective stories, the facts may not matter. We are drawn to those stories not because of the verification of every single little truth-claim but because we want to be in the presence of an authentic experience, and we understand that in drama there are ways in which one must lie in order to tell the truth. However there is, of course, a line that’s crossed in the public consciousness when it comes to the limits of that memoir-instability—Shields invokes it with the James Frey/A Million Little Pieces situation, where a novel gets passed off as memoir, and where suddenly the truth-claims again become the point of focus because the public feels as if it has been duped. As Shields puts it: “Oh how we Americans gnash our teeth in bitter anger when we discover the riveting truth that also played like a Sunday matinee was actually just a Sunday matinee.”

When it comes to assessing the damage caused by fabrication in the name of art, this feeling of being duped—of being betrayed by a work that we thought was real—is perhaps inconsequential in the larger scheme of things. The fact that it feels like such a betrayal speaks to Shields’ observation that, “We want to pose something nonfictional against all the fabrication—autobiographical frissons or framed or filmed or caught moments that, in their seeming unrehearsedness, possess at least the possibility of breaking through the clutter.”

Viewed in this light, Daisey creating a situation where he shares a real human moment with his interpreter and he touches her hand seems not that problematic—that’s drama. But Daisey claiming to speak to Chinese workers who suffered hexane poisoning, or claiming to have met with secret union workers in clandestine Starbucks meetings seems far more problematic. Why?

We can look to the lacunae present in the defenses of Daisey for the answer. There are two major lines of inquiry here:

1) There’s the claim that, of course, like any good piece of theater, there are distortions for the sake of drama, and no one expects them to be entirely true. This is the memoir disclaimer, as noted above. After all, the real Richard III wasn’t a hunchback, but Shakespeare made him one; Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher’s Zuckerberg isn’t a mirror image of the real one. That’s certainly true. As I noted in my review of the HBO film Game Change, no one should be going into a film like that expecting to receive true knowledge about who Sarah Palin really is.

What separates that from the Daisey situation is that those kinds of biographical stories are rooted in the collapse of the totalizing force of the Great Man theories of history; we as audiences, in these spaces, recognize that any attempt to fully understand the big players in any kind of historical narrative are going to be biased, are going to be incomplete, and are going to already be a kind of fiction. When we see those people in those dramatized spaces, knowing their outsized impact on the world stage, we already recognize them as becoming figures larger than and separate from life.

This is not the mode that Daisey invokes, at least in the Chinese Foxconn segments. When he speaks of Steve Jobs (which was not part of the TAL excerpt), it can certainly fall in that mode, but as Alisa Solomon points out in The Nation, “The thread TAL used lines up with clichéd, unexamined assumptions about the scary and heartless Chinese system. That’s not to say that high-tech sweatshops shouldn’t be exposed and combatted but that Glass did not question Daisey’s exaggerations because he was not disposed to.” Daisey got past Glass because he told him what he wanted to hear, and Daisey’s theatricality tells his audiences what they want to hear, too.

We have become inherently skeptical regarding any Great Man narrative; but in considering the stories of everyday life, of systems and processes, we are more predisposed to regard those elements as possessing a kind of truth because they must, by their nature, invoke a claim towards objective reality to be compelling. We recognize the “reality” of Great Man stories is to be found in their broad strokes, but the “reality” of everyday life, of the struggles of the masses, feel like they rest in the details, in the truth of the little moments. To distort and manipulate those moments (as opposed to the expected biographical distortions of Great Men) seems to betray their invocation in the first place.

For example, one of the first red flags that TAL’s ”Retraction”  noted was when Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz, who knew a thing or two about Chinese culture and its economy, heard Daisey mention meeting workers at a Starbucks—a detail that rang false to anyone who actually knew how Chinese workers lived. That small detail is perhaps a minor fictionalization in the grand scheme of things, but its inclusion in the first place betrays a potential lack of understanding that an outsider brings to his observations of a system, and casts doubt on the value of that narrative if it is possessed by such a lack of understanding. There’s a reversal of this situation in Peter Hessler’s book Country Driving, when he follows the operations of a Chinese factory and reads a wanted ad for workers in which they are expected to “吃苦”, to endure hardship, to “eat bitterness.” That minor detail, showing what managers expect of workers, or that there’s even a specific word for those conditions, provide far more insight than Daisey does.

More than that, Daisey’s embellishments and fabrications betray a lack of confidence in his own story. Writers such as Hessler and Leslie T. Chang, and photographers like Edward Burtynsky have managed to capture the actual experience of the Chinese factory worker in all its rhythm and detail and drama—compelling experiences, all of them. The fact that Daisey (as Solomon notes, a man who “had parachuted into China for a couple of weeks without any experience there or any journalism background”) felt the need to embellish the everyday plight of a foreign culture for the sake of drama feels every bit as insulting as Jason Russell of Kony 2012 feeling that in order to activate the empathy of his audience in regard to the plight of the people of Uganda, he needed to lens it through a vignette with a cute little Caucasian child.

2) The second justification for Daisey’s actions runs from that same line of thinking—that the fudging of the facts and the exaggerations and fabrications were in the service of a greater good, not just to activate people’s empathy but to engage their activism: drama for the sake of positive change in the world. It’s certainly part of Daisey’s intent; the transcript for The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs on his website ends with sections titled “The Rest of the Story is in Your Hands” and “Change is Possible,” and Daisey wasn’t going on MSNBC just to talk about his own geekery; he was telling people what he saw at Foxconn factories.

The “greater good” stance is an end-justifies-the-means argument, and it’s a dangerous one. It’s the core essence not of theater, but of political theater, and I’d think anyone who has weathered the political discourse of the past decade would be skeptical of any attempt to mobilize large-scale change based on fudged facts and fabulations. The tools of theater may be different from the tools of journalism, but Daisey used them as one would use the tools of empire. More specifically, as Shields quotes Ron Suskind quoting a Bush 43 staffer: “You believe that solutions emerge from the judicious study of discernible reality. That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

The reason why people revere the concept of speaking truth to power is that we know that most of the time it’s the other way around. It’s power speaking to truth and doing violence to that truth. It’s what you can hear in Daisey’s piece, in the way it claims to represent the subjectivity of an everyday guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing, he’s just asking questions—and yet ends up in the position of power in the drama he’s spinning, delivering pronouncements of truth. There’s such a cloying smugness in the moment (revealed to be unverified and most likely fabricated) when Daisey encounters a group of underage factory workers and asks us: “Do you really think Apple doesn’t know? … [D]o you really think it’s credible that they don’t know?” To which I ask: do you really think Daisey doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing? Do you really think it’s credible he doesn’t know?

These things matter. It matters if, as in Kony 2012, you make it seem like a warlord’s power base is expanding when he’s actually on the run. It matters if, as Daisey does, you use the tools of theater and then use the fiction constructed with those tools as a foundation to legitimize your claims of expertise to speak on shows that try to use the tools of journalism, as on The Ed Show on MSNBC—or This American Life, for that matter.

I understand why Ira Glass did what he did with his retraction. It’s blood atonement, pure and simple. Over the years Glass’s show has reported harrowing and poignant stories from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine. They’ve produced one of the most cogent narratives of the global financial crisis, and more recently their reporting on Georgia drug court judge Amanda Williams may have led to her stepping down. A retraction on this scale, and especially the way Glass goes about it, comes with more than just a hint of scapegoating for TAL dropping the ball, but the urgency and anxiety and anger within reflects a recognition that credibility is easy to lose and difficult to regain. If it requires the brutal evisceration of Daisey, then it’s time to bring those tools out. In an inversion of The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, “Retraction” may not have been the story we wanted to hear, but it’s the one we needed to hear.

When Daisey twisted the facts to serve an agenda, however noble that agenda was, he spoke as empire does. And what Ira Glass did to him? Sic semper tyrannis.

I am going to tell you some things that may shock you. Richard III was not a hunchback. Salieri played no part in Mozart’s death. On a related note, Facebook is not Mark Zuckerberg’s revenge against a world of human relationships that he realized he could never really be a part of. When I was in college, I was in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged); and every night I, Caitlin Cashin, declared that one of my fellow performers was a preeminent Shakespearean scholar with a bachelors degree knowing full well that neither of these things were true.

You see, in the theatre, and in many other creative forms that attempt to tell stories, we find that when one has approximately two to three hours to recount a complex story with a number of intriguing personalities and important points and events to convey to an audience that has payed upwards of $50 per seat, one must streamline the product.

Every production has something to say, some particular perspective—an agenda, if you will; and, ideally, every aspect of a production is working toward illustrating and driving home that agenda in the most concise and effective way possible. Most productions fail to achieve this—it is a rare and serendipitous thing. The very suggestion that a piece of theatre has somehow “conned” its audience is absurd. You mean Willy Loman didn’t kill himself so Biff could collect the insurance? Shakespeare didn’t set Julius Caesar in fascist Italy? I demand an apology!

Two people are at fault here. It was stupid of Mike Daisey to lie on air, I completely agree with that. He should have said from the beginning, “Look, Ira, this is a piece of theatre. Everything I’ve described has happened to somebody—somebody told me these stories, but they’re not all my personal experiences. But I don’t think that should diminish their impact.” It seems like Mike Daisey hasn’t really thought too much about his position as an artist and the particular nature of the monologue or at least he’s not very good at talking about it, but a lot of artists are bad at talking about their work.

I feel sorry for Daisey. I think he created a piece of art that really spoke to people and made them think and that he was terrified that this journalistic integrity he was suddenly being held to would destroy the positive impact of his piece. I agree that he was stupid to lie to Ira Glass, but I don’t think he deserved to be humiliated and to have his work invalidated on NPR for it.

Ira Glass should have had the presence of mind to decide that since The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is theatre, they don’t have all the facts, and since This American Life frequently features fiction, poetry, and other creative works (which, I assume, are meant to influence and inspire people in spite of their fictitious nature or complex relationship with factual truth), he should present The Agony and the Ecstasy as one of the many creative works presented on This American Life. At the very least, he could have used his retraction not as an opportunity to publicly disgrace a man who actually got people to pay attention to where their Apple products come from, but as an opportunity to discuss journalism, truth, the creative work, their social impacts, what we expect from these things and how we define them, and why we have those expectations. But I guess that’s really Radiolab territory.

Mike Daisey wrote in his blog:

Many consider this week’s THIS AMERICAN LIFE episode one of the most painful they’ve ever listened to. In particular the segment with me is excruciating—four hours of grilling edited down to fifteen minutes. I thought the dead air was a nice touch, and finishing the episode with audio pulled out of context from my performance was masterful.

That’s Ira’s choice, and it’s his show. He’s a storyteller within the context of radio journalism, and I am a storyteller in the theater.

What does tearing down Mike Daisey (or KONY 2012) on the basis of journalistic integrity achieve? It’s not as if thousands of Americans, inspired by Mike Daisey, were prepared to storm in and put an end to Foxconn—an action that would have destroyed tens of thousands of jobs for Chinese workers—until they tuned into NPR.

Maybe Mike Daisey lied, but he got people to care about real problems. I know it’s a very complex problem that will require a complex solution, but how are we supposed to find that complex solution to our participation in this problem if no one gives a shit? The goal of a creative work like The Agony and the Ecstasy is to inspire, provoke, and compel people to think. The onus is on you, the audience, to pursue that thought when you leave the theatre. I’m sorry to hear Ira Glass doesn’t know that.

The problem is not that this performer has lied to us in his monologue and about his monologue. The problem is that institutions like the news, television, education and the government—institutions that are meant to be based in factual truth and merit, and are supposed to have the public’s best interests, are not and do not. They are increasingly based on personal agendas and increasingly theatrical in attempting to achieve their goals.

Don’t be angry that you get theatre when you go to the theatre, be angry that you get theatre everywhere else.

We now know that Daisey fabricated certain details in his one-man show, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, for the noble purpose of keeping media attention on factory conditions in China. To this end he appeared on television programs, op-ed pages, and, yes, “This American Life.”

Let me say now that although I appreciate artistic license and understand the virtue of employing falsehoods in the service of a greater truth, lying to media outlets that stake their reputation on journalistic accuracy is crossing a line. Why didn’t Daisey just say that he was an artist and not a journalist when this all began? Did he think the reality of the Chinese manufacturing industry was not shocking enough to pique the American public interest?

I think most of us who’ve lived in China a while, who are bombarded everyday with negative headlines and the latest anti-China rhetoric, just want reporting on China to be fair. China is neither heaven nor hell. Factory workers are neither 12-year-old ingenues waiting to be saved nor world-weary workers waiting to commit suicide. They are human beings, with complex reasons for working at an industrial campus that sits on a square mile and employs hundreds of thousands of people—an industrial campus that itself exists for complex reasons.

The main problems with reporting on China, and the views they engender, is lack of depth and lack of context. If you’re trying to help a situation, you should probably understand it first. Otherwise you end up with things like the Great Leap Forward. Sure, people like Mike Daisey and Jason Russell of KONY 2012 fame can succeed in drumming up attention for an issue, and there’s a certain value in that, but by not offering a full and nuanced picture of the situation, they might end up doing more harm than good.

Thankfully, in the third part of the episode, Glass talks with Charles Duhigg, who wrote a series for the New York Times on Foxconn, who offers the context for the messy morality of Chinese manufacturing.

Most people would blanch at the thought of working a 12-hour assembly line shift, not to mention back-to-back 12-hour shifts, but Duhigg points out that long shifts are precisely what some workers want. However, others feel coerced into doing it. Most people would blanch at living in a cramped dorm room with 12 or 20 other people but (and this is my personal addendum) Chinese college dorm rooms regularly fit six or eight students.

Duhigg then makes a critical point that everyone who talks about China should keep in mind (emphasis mine):

I do not think that you would find any factory in America where you would find those same conditions and you would not find any Americans who would tolerate those conditions. That being said, I think that China is a little bit different and that the expectations, particularly as a developing nation of workers, are a little bit different. I don’t think holding them to American standards is precisely the right way to look at the situation.

This is the crux of the problem. Though Americans wouldn’t tolerate those conditions in their own factories, they are content to tolerate them in Chinese factories. Indeed, many Chinese are content to do the same. One of the greatest ironies in this globalized world is the rabid Chinese consumption of Apple products which one segment of the population makes for almost nothing and another segment of the population buys for hundreds of dollars in markup.

The sad fact is: factory conditions aren’t harsh because the issue isn’t getting enough media attention—factories conditions are harsh because most of us are perfectly content to let someone else live a hard life as long as it isn’t anyone we care about. Most of us are perfectly able to swipe and tap and drag our touchscreens without a care as to which factory tempered the glass, which workers assembled the phone, and what solvents were used to clean the screen.

But Duhigg is right. Too often Americans judge others by their own standards, a habit encouraged by reports that fail to properly contextualize their facts. The issues go beyond “we need to help them” or “why can’t they be more like us?” Duhigg points out that factory conditions are harsh behind the profit margins at the manufacturing end are so small, and yet Apple succeeds in making hundreds of dollars in profit off each phone. Who is the real enemy here?

If you truly oppose poor working conditions, then you should demand that Apple demands more from its suppliers. As Duhigg puts it:

If Apple demanded x and said, “we’re willing to fire you if we don’t get” then x would happen immediately.

If you truly oppose poor working conditions, then you should be willing to stop buying the products and supporting the companies that contribute to them. You can’t lament poor working conditions, then in the same breath complain that the iPhone is too expensive. Duhigg again:

It’s not my job to tell you whether you should feel bad or not…

Do you feel comfortable knowing that iPhones and iPads and other products could be manufactured in less harsh conditions, but that these harsh conditions perpetuate because of an economy that you are supporting with your dollars?

You’re not only the direct beneficiary [of those harsh conditions]; you are actually one of the reasons why it exists. If you made different choices, if you demanded different conditions, if you demanded that other people enjoy the same work protections that you yourself enjoy, then, then those conditions would be different overseas.

We are all implicated, though we might not feel like it. Call it the banality of consumerism. But we are also empowered because in the end it’s up to us and the choices we make.

If there is a silver lining to this whole incident, it’s that Americans might not be so quick to believe everything they hear about China in the future. Mike Daisey’s embellishments are now national news but there are many smaller though no less damaging elisions or, to use Daisey’s phrase, “shortcuts” that occur in the media everyday. I’ve written about a few in the past, in particular the New York Times piece that implied the Chinese government was monitoring phone calls (which was also debunked by a journalist willing to do some simple fact-checking).

They say people learn lessons from being tricked. Maybe this instance will allow Americans to glimpse some of the complexities behind Chinese society. Maybe they will begin to see that China is like everywhere else, neither heaven nor hell, but just a kind of restless purgatory. If that’s the real lesson we learn from Mike Daisey, I can support that.

China is a police state. Why? Because the police are paid more than the teachers—a definition straight from the mouth of V.I. Lenin and one of the few I wholeheartedly agree with. Blame my Trot father for that.

Even if you don’t agree that the above definition, you will surely agree that China’s police force and its bungling subsidiary, the chengguan, are an ever-present feature of life here. I have seen uniformed police and chengguan attending concerts, guarding swimming pools, and hanging around my community watching older residents play cards.

I have no clue how many plainclothes police officers I have encountered during my time here; the only ones who gave themselves away were a pair whom I saw bust two guys on Shanghai’s Nanjing Road back in 2004. They tazered the men, then beat them up on the ground, in full view of the crowds of shoppers. The only others I can say for sure I’ve spotted are the ones meandering around Tiananmen Square, dressed like a child’s drawing of a spy.

Bottom line, the Chinese police—sorry, the Public Security Bureau’s operatives—are everywhere. They’re lauded on television for their heroic defense of the common man and a recent poster campaign in Chaoyang declared, “The People’s Chengguan Love The People.” Maybe this is an attempt to win back the dignity of the Party’s lowest-level enforcers, who routinely beat street vendors (sometimes to death) and are among the most regular clients at my local brothel-cum-massage center, according to the receptionist.

The omnipresence of the police was once a cause for comfort, despite the times I’ve nearly been mowed down while cycling by vans brimming with armed officers, no doubt on their way to kindly assist some elderly petitioners exercise their civil rights. I used to sing the praises of having police everywhere to my regularly-mugged friends living in London and New York. “At least in China,” I would say, “I always feel safe. Beyond the odd pickpocket, you’re in no personal danger from crime, at least in the big cities.”

I’m sure people have written theses on why crime rates are, according to all indicators, low in China. Without having statistics at hand, I rarely hear Chinese friends trade their crime horror stories, unlike my friends back in the UK, who thrive on tales of break-ins, armed robberies, bomb factories and drugs cartels operating out of nearby housing estates.

While it may be true that the worst crimes in China—the murders, the domestic abuse and the rapes—are as common as anywhere else, but take place behind closed doors and the fog of media censorship, when it comes to opportunistic crime—mugging, breaking-and-entering and assault—things seem pretty tame in the country’s capital. Understandably, as the streets are swarming with police officers day and night.

There are exceptions, of course. A friend of mine witnessed a recent acquaintance stabbed to death on the street in Dalian in an apparently motiveless act of violence, until he was later informed that the victim was heavily indebted to a local drug dealer. While a horrific crime, the same story is repeated a dozen times in cities across the world on a daily, or nightly, basis, and doesn’t single China out as a hotbed of violent crime.

However, I am extending an invitation to anyone who has ever required the services of the police to step forward and describe their experience. How many expats have ever dialed that hallowed number: 110? The propaganda in the subway tells us that upon dialing 110, police officers will arrive at the scene within moments to deal swiftly and efficiently with whatever disturbance or crime is in progress. But I’ll bet that most of us, whether out of concern for our ability to communicate with said police officers in Chinese or out of concern of causing a fuss over nothing, have never dialed 110. Perhaps we’ve just never needed to.

Last year, I had to call 110 twice. And here’s how China’s brave boys in blue (or khaki) responded.

The First Incident

The first occasion was after working a late-night shift last summer, when a British colleague and I were headed home on our bicycles. Cycling past a bakery a few blocks from my apartment, we almost ran over an unconscious man lying stretched out on the sidewalk. He was young, well-dressed, clutching a briefcase and there wasn’t a whiff of alcohol on him—he was simply lying prostrate, apparently unconscious or asleep. We checked for a pulse and to see if he was breathing, and he seemed fine, so we attempted to wake him, as he was dangerously positioned. However, calling out to him and shaking him failed to elicit a response—perhaps he was drugged or had fainted. Passersby had by this time begun to gather, and every one of them told us to leave it, “bie zhao mafan,” literally, “don’t look for trouble.”

We were in a bind. I didn’t want to leave this person to have his legs broken by the first electric bike to come along. However, I also didn’t see that he was in any immediate danger. Had there not been a crowd, I may have just taken their advice and abandoned him, but a combination of their callousness and my own self-consciousness at being an ambassador for my culture, made me take the middle road and call the police.

I was straight through to a young gentleman, who got the details of the situation, its location, and my cell number. Once I had double-confirmed everything, I hung up, stepped back, and considered how this would look to the officers I was assured were on their way. A young, fairly good-looking Chinese man is unconscious in the company of two foreigners. In those pre-Yue Yue days, my first thought was that we would somehow become implicated. A call to my (Chinese) boyfriend cemented this position. “You’ll have to give a statement,” he said, “and you might get into trouble. You’ve done what you needed to do. Now go home.” The thought that, as we’d checked his pulse, our fingerprints would be on him also unnerved me. Suddenly the locals’ warnings to not zhao mafan seemed less callous.

Here’s my confession: I cycled home. It was a warm evening, he wouldn’t die of exposure, and we’d moved him off the road so he wouldn’t get run over. The police later called to confirm my identity and to tell me some officers had found the guy, and that was the last I heard of it. A follow-up would have been nice, just so I’d know the guy was okay, but as far as I could see the matter was dealt with and I’d acted in a reasonable manner. Easy peasy.

The Second Incident

Then came the second incident, which was far more terrifying. My boyfriend and I were awoken a couple months ago at 4AM by an incredible ruckus outside our apartment. I live in a small, slightly decrepit 6-story loufang with my boyfriend. It’s not the most secure of places and the magnetized main door is easily yanked open with brute force. We could hear banging, as if someone was hammering on our front door and the bannisters in the hallway. The noise continued for several minutes, by which time we were convinced someone was trying to force their way into one of our neighbors’ apartments. Then everything suddenly went quiet.

I snuck out of bed and peeped through the spyhole in our front door and could see what looked like two heavily-clothed men standing on the landing outside, one of whom appeared to be peering into the peephole of our door, which made me start backwards. Now, the stairwell lighting is broken in our apartment building, so I can’t swear that these two figures were genuinely there—it could well have been a trick of the light, and when I returned to the peephole shortly after my boyfriend called 110, the stairwell was empty. Regardless, something seemed to be happening in our apartment building in the dead of night, something which we couldn’t handle by ourselves.

It wasn’t the incident itself that shocked me, so much as the reaction of the police when we called in what could have been a life-threatening situation. Their response was markedly different from the unconscious-guy-in-street incident.

First, they asked my boyfriend to go outside and see if there were any men roaming our apartment building. He, understandably, declined to do this as he felt that one slight person was unlikely to overpower two beefy assailants hell-bent on gaining access to his apartment. Then the police asked us why our telephone number didn’t seem to be registered at the address we had given. Frustrated, my boyfriend explained he had retained a previous number when he moved, which elicited condemnation from the police, who then told us, grudgingly, they’d send a car to check things out.

Half an hour ticked by. My boyfriend and I sat up in bed, frozen with fear, listening for more banging or footsteps on the stairs. Then the police called back to say their patrol car had circled our community. We had been keeping watch for flashing lights the whole time and no vehicle had come anywhere near our community since we’d made the call—a fact my boyfriend patiently explained to the officer on the phone. This prompted a second tongue-lashing about our “unregistered number,” after which the police said they’d send “some more officers” to check the building, and would call back.

They didn’t do either. Needless to say, we, and most of our neighbors, didn’t sleep a wink the rest of the night.

Happily, everything was fine in the end. We heard a loud hammering from our upstairs neighbor which sounded enough like the frightening commotion of the previous night to reassure us we’d merely misheard. Why our neighbors would be engaging in metalwork at 4AM was a question we didn’t want to ask ourselves, or them. As for the figures in the stairwell, I’ve convinced myself that they weren’t there at all, that I merely fell victim to fear.

However, the police didn’t know all this when we called them in desperation. Someone could well have been attempting to force their way into our apartment. The police first lied about sending a car, then attacked us for not registering our phone at our current address, and then repeated this cycle of lies and blame in their second call. They clearly had no interest in putting police personnel at risk for the sake of two laobaixing shivering in fear in their apartment building.

I Won’t Be Watching You

Since the events of that evening, I’ve come to a few conclusions. The Chinese police are only heroes when they can round up some prostitutes, or tazer unarmed drug dealers, or shoot protesting students. In the face of genuinely lethal situations, they’re either conveniently absent or hopelessly ineffective. Do I now believe the Chinese police, for all their shortcomings, will protect me if I’m genuinely in danger? Definitely not. I now wonder if they ever sent officers to check on that young man by the roadside.

There’s a great joke about a Party official who gives his local police force a week track down a rabbit that’s been causing mayhem in the woods. The police play mah jongg for a six days, before going into the forest and coming back with a bear. They tie the bear to a chair and slap him, asking, “Are you a rabbit?” until finally the bear breaks down: “Yes, yes, I’m a rabbit!” Then they close the case to everyone’s satisfaction.

Lin has since become Linsanity, a subject for Saturday Night Live skits, or 林书豪 in your Tudou search. He is the current, brief king of New York City, whose Giants just won the Super Bowl and whose favorite basketball team features two high-paid All-Stars in Amar’e Stoudemire and Carmelo Anthony. Less than a year ago the Knicks made the splashy signing of Anthony on the belief that he would become king of NYC if able to deliver a championship after years of disappointment. Basketball remains the only big four sport (basketball, baseball, hockey, football) in which a major New York team has not won a title over the past twenty years.

In a metro area holding seven major franchises, Lin may have the largest dedicated cheering section between Chinatown residents and the usual Knicks fans. Until recently, fans were mordant about the home team’s chances. After injuries and a slumping start, Madison Square Garden’s reception to a winning streak was understandably joyous, especially one led by their undrafted point guard.

During his coming out party this past week, television cameras kept turning to the MSG crowds. The cameras paid particular attention to Asians in the audience. Nothing has been said, probably because nothing needs saying. Asian-Americans should be joyous to have a player to call their own, and they certainly look that way on ESPN. Yao Ming and Yi Jianlian were nice, and, in Yao’s case, transformative in some respects, but they were not of the Chinese-American community and certainly not of the broader Asian-American community in the United States.

Another reason Lin’s Asian-ness and its relationship to the crowd has not figured more prominently in the discussion are the overlaps within his underdog identity, split in some way between a) going undrafted, b) his Harvard degree, and c) being Chinese-American. Figuring out what goes where is difficult in this case. The second and maybe bigger reason is that his wide embrace by fans and players highlights that pro basketball’s racial sensitivities have not moved much beyond black/white.

Yao Ming did face real racial discrimination when he entered the league, most notably from fellow big man Shaquille O’Neal. But O’Neal’s foolish comments were more akin to a childlike encounter with foreignness and not indicative of a sharply racial divide like the Palace of Auburn Hills brawl. How the NBA chooses to market Lin, and how he markets himself, will depend on a discussion of race the likes of which the league has previously only undergone regarding African-American stars.

Yao Ming was generally liked during his NBA tenure and popular enough to be a long-time All-Star and spokesperson for Apple and McDonalds. But there was little difference between his initial role as Imposing Chinese Giant and the career arc that followed. Yao was foreign and big, but he was also a consistently good player. If Lin can keep this level of play going game in and game out, he might be able to do what Yao never did: make a legitimate imprint on American sports and pop culture. 林疯狂 could be here to stay.

Some trends to watch for in Jeremy Lin’s new life:

• No one likes the shooter; will Lin’s superstar and super-rich teammates like Anthony, Stoudemire, and the hobbled Baron Davis continue to cheer him on when they return and find that some of their shots are in Lin’s stat column? I have heard comparisons made between Lin and Jason Williams’ rookie year with the Sacramento Kings, but keep in mind Williams wasn’t taking shots but primarily creating them. The announcers were practically egging Lin to shoot, but a few awful halves and that may change.
• Lin’s appeal split amongst the various Chinese communities in the U.S., Taiwan, and mainland China. Let the tug of war for Jeremy’s love and self-identity begin!
• Linning: to the delight of headline writers everywhere, Lin rhymes with everything.

Until answers (and more “-in” headlines) arrive, we here at The Hypermodern look forward to Jeremy Lin’s next twisting layup.

It’s amazing how many near-death experiences can be squeezed into a two-hour stint within the confines of an elementary school in China. The most mundane, some might say instinctive, actions can have drastic consequences if not carried out correctly. Going down stairs, washing hands, walking across the room— all scenarios require elders to enforce China’s unwritten safety regulations, whether for the child in their own care, or a classmate in the care of another, less attentive ayi. Every movement of the child must be watched, and commented on, in order to ensure their survival. The extent to which these ayi hover over the children entrusted to them makes me wonder, are they more concerned with the child’s safety, or with simply appearing concerned?

Four days a week I had a front row seat at the kindergarten where I would attend classes with my employer’s daughter. The ayi crowd always put on a show for each other, engaging in an unspoken contest of who was most attentive to the needs of their employer’s child. Amateurs simply forced their child to sit in their lap during class. More seasoned caretakers went to much greater lengths to prove their worth. The children under the watch of these women may as well have stayed home, as they weren’t going to have any sort of independent learning experience on their own. When it’s time to clap, the ayi grabs her charge’s hands and claps for them. When it’s time to eat, the ayi places the child in his chair, pushes him up to the table, and all but chews their food for them (while incessantly wiping their chin and reminding them to eat slowly and drink carefully).

Any journey up or downstairs invites a whirlwind of comments on the proper way to use a staircase. Daredevil foreign kids who hop down the stairs will quickly be intercepted by an ayi (not necessarily their own) who points out that by behaving so recklessly, they are endangering not only their own wellbeing, but also the wellbeing of everyone around them.

There is also a wrong way to wash your hands. Most children stand in a trance as their ayi does the washing for them: turning on the tap, squirting the soap, rubbing their hands together. This is the correct way. The wrong way goes something like this: a two-year-old attempts to go through these steps on her own, and gets water on her sleeves. This results in a gaggle of concerned ayi flocking to the poor, damp child and shoving paper towels up her sleeves to keep her arms dry. There is, of course, also a lecture in store for the neglectful mother who has failed to appropriately educate her daughter.

The charges of the most attentive ayi have become so crippled in their ability to do anything that they fear even traveling across the classroom without an ayi’s hand to clutch.  The most traumatic event for one of these children is when the ayi excuses herself to run to the bathroom while the child is seemingly distracted by some activity. The screaming and crying that erupts when the child notices the ayi’s absence usually only lasts a few seconds before the frantic woman scurries back in.

Foreign mothers and ayis generally make no attempt to talk to one another. During the slightly calmer snack break, ayis congregate around the table of children eating to keep a constant vigil as the mothers retreat to the back walls for a hard-earned chat with their girlfriends. The resentment is clear from both the ayi and the Chinese teachers, who delight in any chance to scoop up the plate of a fumbling child or help push in a chair, all the while staring daggers at the negligent chatting mothers. It was abundantly clear what was on their mind: they were doing it right, and we Westerners had a lot to learn. And maybe, in a way, they were right.

In a crowded, competitive society in which children are taught from kindergarten to study hard for one big test at the end of high school which profoundly influences their higher education and career, perhaps the children left alone to learn from their own mistakes are precisely the ones left behind. But what does this mean for foreign children in the care of an ayi, the children who will go on to international schools and never be placed in the Chinese education system? I couldn’t help but have flashbacks to myself as a kindergartner—scraped knees, my self-styled hair in some bizarre up-do, making messy art projects that I no doubt thought exquisite at the time—and feel that these children were somehow missing out.

In a speech delivered from Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, the President announced:

I’m directing the State Department to accelerate our ability to process visas by 40 percent in China and in Brazil this year.

The White House has also expressed hopes that 80% of non-immigrant visa applicants could be interviewed within three weeks of getting their application. According to China Daily:

Charles Bennett, minister counselor for consular affairs of the US embassy in Beijing, told China Daily earlier that 50 more American staff members will be deployed to the embassy and US consulates in China this year.

In addition, more interview windows and buildings will be built and the embassy is considering allowing people to arrange an interview date as early as two days after he applied, he said.

But don’t be fooled. Despite the bilateral enthusiasm surrounding these new initiates, the push to expedite visas for Chinese nationals has less to do with improving Sino-US relations than one thing: cold hard cash.

According to the China Tourism Academy, 70 million Chinese traveled overseas last year and spent a total of $69 billion abroad, making them the third largest overseas spenders after Germans and Americans. 2012 could see those figures increase to 78.4 million and $80 billion, respectively. That’s a lot of money. Indeed, Chinese tourists are already making their presence felt in England, Spain, Japan and South Korea, and the Obama administration is eager to get a bigger piece of that pie.

Continue reading at Project Pengyou.

“You’ve hurt me. Do you know I’ve already folded three, four hundred stars for you? My friend tried to introduce me to some guy but I refused. I didn’t realize it before but I like you. I like only you. Will you be my boyfriend? I cannot just be a normal friend to you anymore. Either accept me or I will leave.”

This was the first time to my knowledge I had ever hurt a girl, and it was an experience I was not quite ready to take responsibility for. The Chinese place great emphasis on grand gestures and confessions. To many girls, you are not officially in a relationship until you make the ultimate confession and ask her formally, “I like you. Will you be my girlfriend?” It doesn’t matter if you’ve already had sex, or if you’ve never said a word to each other. The act of confessing, the grand, sweeping scale of expressing your feelings which have been so deeply bottled up, is the only way to consolidate a relationship.

To an American this idea might appear inimical; talk is cheap, actions are real. When you pay attention to a girl, when you ask for her phone number, when you take her out to dinner—this is how Americans say “I like you.” Conversely, when someone only calls when they’re drunk, when they only hit you up for sex, when they haven’t introduced you to the rest of their friends; these actions also clearly delineate the nature of your relationship.

To most Westerners there is no need to be so painstakingly clear cut about things that are plainly obvious. There are no brazen, under the stars, confessions. Even the use of this word “confess” seemed antiquated, dramatic, and old-fashioned when I first heard my Chinese friends use it to describe how their relationships began. “We were just friends, but one day he confessed himself to me. After that we were boyfriend and girlfriend.”

What is it about the act of confessing that allows Chinese people to mentally enter into a relationship, at times willfully ignorant and absent of any significant action or contact? My temporary American roommate skyped with a Chinese girl eight times. After their first real life meeting they had sex in our apartment shower while a mutual friend waited in the living room.

My roommate had told her many times in the heat of the moment that he liked her. Then one day in Sanlitun, while they were walking together on the street, he answered a phone call from another girl. This other girl was just a friend, and he was simply having a normal conversation with her, but the way he ignored his companion must have carried some weight. The present girl became angry and began to scream. “I thought you loved me!” She proceeded to chase and berate him as he, mortified, walk off to the nearest subway station.

This poor girl is not crazy and my roommate is not a horrible person; they are just both victims of a cultural misunderstanding. Could something like this happen in America? Probably. But my wager is that one would be hard pressed to find an American girl that didn’t fully comprehend the nature and extent of her relationship with a guy, purely based on their past actions together.

Culturally rooted misunderstandings often cause scenes like this. When one party expects much more than the other party is willing to give it often leads to heartbreak and anguish. There are many things men like. I like Italian food, I like beer, I like movies. When I say I like a girl, it usually means I would like to have sex with her. It sometimes means I would like to date her, and it even more rarely means “I love you!” In China, this “like” is not so casual. It is a big thing to “like” someone. When you say “like” in China, you better be ready to live with the consequences.

There is a word in Chinese called 乱说 (luàn shuō), the literal translation is “chaos talk,” but it generally means to make irresponsible remarks. To a foreigner this can be quite a dangerous and sensitive issue as we are not always fully aware what kind of talking is irresponsible. Americans talk about a lot of things. We are sarcastic, we lie, and we are insincere. We put on many faces to many different people depending on the social situation and the way we want to present ourselves. Americans are naturally attuned and groomed from an early age to filter out this bullshit. We sometimes take it for granted that others can do the same.

In China, not so. There is very little sarcasm in the average Chinese conversation. There is very little subtext or misunderstanding. Chinese is blunt, straightforward, and to the point. Perhaps this is why the candid and direct “I like you” confession is that much more important to a Chinese relationship.

As a kid I had to learn many of these linguistic and cultural differences the hard way. I was always the butt of jokes and taunts when I first moved to America because I had no sense in determining when peers were pulling a fast one on me and when they were being sincere.

“Is our bus late?” I would ask my neighbor while waiting after school the first day.

“No, it only comes on Fridays, you should walk home,” he replied.

I believed him and began to walk home, only to realize halfway down the street that the rest of my friends were laughing at me.

As Americans we grow up organically learning these subtle jokes and quips in the schoolyard. As a culture we are hypersensitive to falsehoods and insincerity. Perhaps this is why Americans value action over words. Perhaps conversely, this is why Chinese place as much emphasis on words as on action. To say something in Chinese is to mean it. There is little innuendo, pretense, or sarcasm. People say what is in their hearts and they stick to it. If you don’t, you are just a bad person or a liar. I find this way of communicating at times both refreshing and frustrating.

When I casually told my friend that I liked talking to her, I had no idea that my words would eventually break her heart when I could no longer live up to those expectations. When a person chooses to endear themselves to someone, it is at that same moment that one also chooses to hurt them. If you cannot continue to live up to the expectations you create, you will ultimately let someone down.

Perhaps I am partially to blame for making irresponsible remarks and being insensitive. I have been on the other side of this as well. When I thought I had made it obvious that I was into someone, they simply brushed it off because a heartfelt confession never left my lips. Things aren’t codified unless you express them in words. Feelings, emotions, actions; they are all just dust waiting to be caught in a beautiful slew of passionate poetry and long-winded platitudes.

In America, what we say is just filler in anticipation for what we will one day do. In China, what you do is largely a pretext for what you will one day confess.

The bus tour of the Korean Demilitarized Zone—the four-kilometer-wide ribbon of land that bisects the Korean Peninsula—left from downtown Seoul at eight in the morning but had begun raining long before. The travel agency was clear about the dress code: “No faded or torn jeans, sandals, leather pants, shorts, sleeveless shirts, sweatpants, slippers, or military-style clothing.”

I assumed the dress code was for our safety but Ms. Lee, our friendly tour guide, explained that if we wore ragged clothes, pictures of us could be taken and used as propaganda: proof that people in the South couldn’t afford nice clothes. I didn’t know what to make of this sudden concern for national image. Surely the North Korean propaganda machine could just as easily download pictures of poorly-dressed South Koreans.

As our bus cruised along Freedom Highway, Ms. Lee gave us some statistics about the North. Soldiers spent 10 years stationed at the border. If they performed well they could earn a trip home. When Kim Il-sung was in power, everyone had jobs and universal health care—things weren’t bad at all.

She patiently catalogued the horrors of the ongoing separation: families torn apart, the occasional bursts of violence across the border, the widespread starvation and destitution in the North. Then she did something strange: she asked our group of bleary-eyed tourists if we had any ideas about how to resolve the situation. I thought it was a rhetorical flourish but she repeated her question and added, “If you have any ideas, please let us know.” It was unclear whom she meant by “us”—the tourism agency? The South Korean people? It seemed unlikely that any novel ideas would arise from our humble bus, and even less likely that any sensible suggestions would be passed up the chain of command to the relevant ministries. I couldn’t help but wonder if tour guides in Gaza posed a similar question to their travelers.

When we reached the DMZ, we boarded a military bus and were acquainted with a new set of rules: no chewing gum, drinking water, or standing up in the bus. Cameras were allowed but we could only take pictures at specified locations. We signed a waiver that basically said, whatever happens, happens. And we had to abandon our umbrellas, leaving us defenseless against the rain.

We drove to a parking lot and walked through a concrete building, called the Freedom House, to the Joint Security Area. It was just like all the photographs. Three longhouses painted robin egg blue. A concrete slab between the buildings indicating the Military Demarcation Line. Three South Korean guards, facing the north, fists clenched, frozen in perpetual war.

As the MP on duty led small groups of us into the MAC Conference Room for pictures, a group of tourists appeared in front of Panmungak, the North Korean building that stood across from the Freedom House. As they waved to us, I remembered what Ms. Lee had told us on the bus: “When you get to the border, do not touch anything. Do not stare. If people wave at you, do not wave back. And most of all, do not point.” When s0meone asked why we couldn’t wave, Ms. Lee kindly reminded us, “The North Koreans are not a reasonable people.”

I noticed that the group on the North Korean side carried umbrellas and took pictures liberally. Some of them wore shorts, though even they heeded the no leather pants rule. “They are Chinese tourists,” the soldier accompanying us said. The Chinese tourists waved enthusiastically but we kept our hands at our sides. I imagined a picture of our stoic tour group on a North Korean propaganda poster: people in South Korea are antisocial.

Drenched in rain and watching the waving crowd just north of us, separated by six soldiers and a gulf of understanding, it was hard to see the Korean situation as anything more than a wound that man had inflicted upon himself—the bitter fruit of a few men squabbling for power, of twisted ideology and hollow nationalism. In any other place we might have called out to them, waved and smiled to affirm our common humanity. But across this imaginary line that man had drawn over the unwitting earth, they seemed a world away.

An American in our group asked why the Chinese tourists were allowed to wave and take pictures.

“They are in violation of the rules but the North Koreans know we won’t shoot,” our soldier answered.

“What will they do if we take pictures?” asked the American.

Our soldier thought about this for a moment. Then he simply said, “I don’t know.”