My Time as a Human

Chinese people absolutely adore sappy, sweet, sad love songs and movies and if you ask any Chinese person for their favorite movie you’ll almost always get the same response: “Titanic“. Yes, the big cheesy American film. One of my Chinese kung fu brothers has watched this movie more times than he can count.

But the image of two young lovers leaning into the wind isn’t what stuck with me about my experience. Walking through China I felt like I was climbing on board the Titanic as the nose was plunging into the dark ocean. Every person I talked to was running past me, trying desperately to find a way off the boat. There I was, strolling around with my head up and an inflatable life boat under my arm asking, “hey, where’s this great band I’ve heard about”?

I asked about wéi qí (Go) playing. Some people had heard about it, but almost no one knew how to play. Traditional music? Maybe I could try the big theater in town. Kung Fu? I am training with an absolute treasure of China. Master Lǚ has incredible skills earned over a lifetime of intense practice and he’s one of the only heirs to a fascinating branch of Kung Fu. These skills can only be passed down orally and through direct instruction. The small group of people I train with, the people who will carry this knowledge to the next generation if it is to survive at all, are almost all foreigners: American, Canadian, French and Japanese students. His old Chinese students, from a time when his school was huge, are running businesses now. No one in China has any time to mess around with anything that doesn’t make money. They are running for the lifeboats.

It disappointed me greatly, but I can’t blame the Chinese people. Their lives have been wrecked by revolution, violence and starvation for decades. Now that they have a chance to get out, the air is thick with poison and the food and water are equally questionable. Money is the life boat that can literally save the lives of their family and they will stop at nothing to get it.

Fairness

But pollution and poisonous food aren’t the only reasons people want to escape. Even more so is the sense that there is a complete lack of fairness. No matter how hard you work, if you don’t have the right connections it means nothing. The people I talked to felt that in Germany, Canada or the US they would have a fair chance to earn a living through hard work without having to be related to someone in power. They felt like the laws would be fair. They felt like things that weren’t working could be fixed because they could gather with people and make change.

I grew up in a place where I’ve been taught to believe that if I don’t like something I can work to change it. That ideas is deeply, deeply ingrained in me. It’s still difficult for me to think about being completely paralyzed, as many feel they are in China. I’m not talking about petitioning a Senator to make big change, I’m talking about feeling like a street is dangerous and should have a stop sign, and knowing that I can get the community together to get that fixed. Or that I can get a group together and get some land to start a small community garden. If you can’t talk to the people in power (or they don’t have to listen) and you can’t form or gather in groups, there is nothing you can do that won’t get you shot or imprisoned.

In the end, I don’t think China will sink. Many will die in the icy water. The fortunate few will escape to western countries and live out the last days of prosperity there before those places sink. Ultimately China, like the US before it, will slowly make efforts to clean up the disastrous mess they’ve made while building the empire. In a couple of generations, the children or grandchildren of the people who escaped will be looking for a way to get back on board. If I’m still alive I’ll be happy to teach them all of the culture, kung fu, and wéiqí I’ve been saving for when they are ready.

There are a lot of things you can’t get in Fuzhou, China but what’s much more interesting are the things that don’t even exist as concepts. I remember reading a great science fiction story about a portal between two universes where the civilizations on each side realized that they couldn’t exchange physical items but they could exchange ideas. Like the idea of paint. When you think about it, it’s pretty ingenious. Without the idea of a coating that you can spread over a surface to protect it and make it fuchsia, there would be no quest to figure out how to make it.

Here in China, I was desperate to find a way to learn the new vocabulary being taught in our classes. I couldn’t seem to use a simple list, and I remember how powerful flashcards were for learning. Of course, to make flashcards you have to have to scribble on little blank cards. The concept of the notecard… doesn’t exist in China. Trust me, I’ve looked and asked everywhere. Of course, when I think about it, why would they? Notecards are something that was very useful in America when people had piles of addresses or recipes. While Americans filed piles of neat little paper cards the Chinese people were all still farming. By the time everyone here in China was building offices, they had computers to keep track of their addresses. The only reason notecards still exist in America is because people found thousands of completely different uses for them. Like making flashcards. Eventually I found an art shop with thick water color paper and a rusty paper cutter in a back room of my school. The other students marveled at my bizarre way of learning and, as they laughed, they picked them up and used them.

There are a lot of other things that don’t exist as concepts. My friend Fay Lee could not be convinced that the thing I described, something called, “paper towels” could possibly have any use. Toilet paper was clearly just as good. “Look, I know it seems strange and wasteful and, well, just plain doesn’t make sense but… they’re thicker. And sometimes when you clean certain things you don’t want to use the same towel again.” She wasn’t buying it.

There is one concept, though, that brings foreigners to hysterics almost as fast as the Daoist driving. When I arrived this semester, just in time to start classes, I heard through word of mouth that classes were starting a week later. There was no reason given, and I would have sat in a room by myself if I hadn’t bumped into another student to hear about it. I heard a rumor that it was because some admin through that not enough students had arrived in town yet. My friend Martina Zucker scheduled travel after having a school administrator, after a lot of pushing, give her a date for final exams. When the time came, the exams were randomly pushed back and Martina had to either miss them or tell her parents to stay home in Germany and cancel all of her plane tickets.

Then, suddenly, after many complaints and a huge increase in foreign student enrollment, something completely unprecedented happened. An otherwise normal day of classes ended with the teacher suddenly passing out neatly printed calendars, with nice photos, on cardstock. We couldn’t believe it. We… didn’t believe it. There were dates marked for vacation time and the start of classes. (Nothing about exams.) After some wonder and cautious delight I quickly asked, “wait, so are these really the dates these things will happen?” “Well,” my teacher replied, “of course they are likely to change. They are already talking about pushing back the start of classes next semester.” So in response to our desire for a schedule, they gave us, well, something resembling a notecard.

There’s something that so many Chinese people tell me about myself that makes me very sad. I know that a lot of different flavors of people from many different countries travel the world and they all have their own motivations. They also have their own hangups, preconceived notions and cultural expectations of how things are supposed to work in the world. I’ve worked really hard to stay completely open to whatever situation and culture I arrive in, observing and interacting with, as often as possible, more curiosity than judgement. I feel like this is the best way to extract the beauty in differences between the way that cultures have evolved. Ultimately, this allows a greater understanding of what got them where they are and, ultimately, how I came to be who I am.

Yes, it seems crazy that African people are cooking inside their huts with no ventilation. They’re “doing it wrong”. But it turns out that if you move the cooking outside, the smoke from the stove doesn’t rise up through the roof. If the smoke doesn’t rise up through the roof it doesn’t keep away the termites and, in literally a matter of days, they’ll go into a feeding frenzy and you’ll have no roof on your house. Every part of a long established culture is woven into a network, an integrated ecology of systems, methods and beliefs that impact each other in uncountable and unpredictable ways. Certainly more ways than can be quickly discovered by an outsider who immediately attacks each separate piece of a place that is unlike their own.

There was an Australian who wrote a long post on an expat board recently about how angry he was that, in China, peasants were allowed on trains, especially standing in the first class area. He had several people agree with him. His idea of how an experience of riding on a train should be was in conflict with the reality of another world he had chosen to enter.

He was also unable to take a moment to revel in the countless fascinating implications of this. Those peasants are now able to move quickly from place to place, filling roles essential in the rapidly growing cities of China. The growth of industry couldn’t happen without them. By “them”, of course, I’m talking about people who are exactly like every other person in China only a few years ago. Everyone was a peasant and only recently have the Ferraris appeared. The difference between the two was not desire and hard work but location and opportunity. He might as well complain that there are Chinese people in China, and too many mountains.

With every conflict between your expectations and the reality of another place or culture there is also this fantastic moment to see yourself for the first time. There is a moment to wonder why it bothers you that people walk shirtless down the street when it’s hot. If you think about it, it’s quite practical. There is no health or safety concern. But if it’s tugging at some part of you that you didn’t realize was there, now you can go talk to it and ask for its justifications. You may not decide to change your belief or action, but for the first time you can transform what was formerly an unconscious decision implanted by culture into a choice you yourself have made.

I used to live in a large old house with seven unrelated housemates. In America, this is not very common. When people would step into the house they all had the same first response. “Wow this place is amazing!” Next came, “how many people live here?” Then their brains kicked into gear. A new choice was suddenly visible that had not been before. They had to think about how they lived and why they lived that way. After a moment of thought they would end with either, “I could never live like this” or, “are there any rooms available?!”

So when I talk to Chinese people and again and again they tell me how absolutely different I am from every other western foreigner they meet (and some of these people meet quite a few), I would like to believe that they are referring to my amazing ability with chopsticks. Unfortunately, it seems like my desire to understand, instead of blame people from other countries for doing it wrong, is much more rare than I could have ever imagined. I can only hope that this myriad of travelers looking out from their carefully sealed cultural boxes, with the fingers they use to point, complain and laugh, accidentally punch a few holes in those boxes.

Image links to photographer’s site

Chinese mothers stand around the bulk bins in the supermarket
they pick out peanuts
and place them into bags
one.
by.
one.
they choose only those that are perfect
from the massive pile
to bring home.
how could any son or daughter
appreciate
or understand
this incredible love?