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it has just been waiting for me |
13 April 2008
Woke up today in the Sunday morning quiet and realised the power was out... from what I could make out the entire school's electricity had been turned off, but this was the first I knew of it. I will be very irritated if it isn't back on this evening, as it means no hot water, no cold fridge, no light, no electronics of any kind etc. Particularly frustrating however as I had intended to spend today in the office, planning next week's lessons. But the computers are off. Wanting hot food and a connection to the outside world I decided to go out instead.I've now been in China for about 8 weeks, and I'm not sure if it feels like a long stretch of time or a short one. I always say that about things I've been doing. I find it difficult to comment on what I'm involved in at the time: only afterwards do I begin to really assess the meaning of what I've experienced. Last night I sat down with the guidebooks and tried to think about South Korea and Japan, and what on earth I will do between finishing in Qingdao and the rendez-vous in Tokyo. I don't like the uncertainty of traveling. Call me boring and a homebody if you like, but not knowing where I will be sleeping, and having to make specific travel connections at specific times makes me very anxious. I'm at my most comfortable with an established routine, with a safe little base camp where I can rest and get myself together. I like a little variety within that, but I feel the urge to return to a familiar space that is all my own. So just trying to think about getting about through one country to another makes my head spin. More so, perhaps, because I will be alone. The presence of other people makes it easier. In the meanwhile... what, I wondered last night, have I learnt about China? Lots of small things, I suppose. I don't know if I've made any great cultural discoveries. And, as I said before, it's hard to form conclusions about a society when you're still inside it. I think that might be one of the most important things about this country actually. What is striking in China is not so much what is there, but what is absent. Perhaps the best way to describe Chinese society is to borrow a phrase I heard used by actor Richard Dreyfus to describe his experiences with antidepressive medication (an odd loan of words I know): it is as if everything is letterboxed. The excesses of a fully capitalist society are removed. In fact, perhaps that is not such an odd parallel at all: just as the ups and downs of Dreyfus' mind were removed by the drugs, the intense elements of society are removed by the influence of the state. Everything is sterilised, processed, edited for content. It's how the system works. Things are safe, and at times almost ridiculously innocent. And at times it can feel like a pleasant change to the cynicism and worrying excesses of the 'free' society. To the jaded foreign mind, Chinese people seem so clean-cut. Almost childlike in their behaviour and preoccupations. Cooperation and buying-in are universally expected. Perhaps as a scoietal trait this is not exclusively Chinese: we are told that all east Asian societies stress the importance of the collective over the desires of the individual. However, we have only to look at Japan, as a 'free' country far more comparable to our own, to see that even within an Asian model which places importance on conforming to the group, greater individuality, particularly in self-expression through dress, interests and media consumption, is quite possible. But in China, where access to cultural product can be so restricted, and sometimes so distorted, the bewildering array of Nipponese subcultural self-expression is noticeably absent. One of the areas of Chinese culture where this innocence and traditionalism is particularly evident is that of love and relationships. The Chinese seem immensely preoccupied with marriage as the ultimate personal success. Television advertisements are full of images of happy couples enjoying their own moments of marital bliss. The white wedding, with all its related paraphernalia, may be fading from the collective consciousness of the European societies who invented it, but it is alive and well in China. Wedding shops proudly display the sorts of frilly white dresses which went out of fashion in their motherland many years ago. People marry young. To the students in my classes, having a boyfriend or girlfriend is just about the most exciting/embarrassing thing they can think of. Couples walk through the parks, holding hands and photographing one another endlessly. It is all a far cry from hypersexualised western society. Billboards show smiles, rather than legs. Clean-cut happy couples, rather than the groomed, over-sexed models who beckon from the advertisement hoardings of the western world. But ay, there's the rub. As with all societies which appear just a little too clean-cut, there is an ugly underbelly to all the 'niceness'. The innocence of many Chinese people stems from the alternatives to the 'nice' lifestyle being forbidden. If people here seem almost childlike in their behaviour and outlook, it is because they are prevented from experiencing the kind of individualism that makes the denizens of the 'free' world cynical and jaded, but also vigorous and endlessly imaginative in the pursuit of new ways of seeing the world. In the end, it always comes back to that old confrontation: whether freedom of behaviour, expression and ultimately mind (with all the danger and ugliness and confusion that come along with them as the expression of the complete range of human nature, from the hideous to the sublimely beautiful), is preferable to a controlled thought environment, where we are protected from the nasty, but in the same movement, much of the good as well. If we were a pill to take the edge off life: a pill which would remove its horrible and degrading lows, but also its fantastic, dizzying highs, enabling us to live our lives in 16:9 false security, would we take it? utterly utter [
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