在后海骑冰车 (ICE-CYCLING AT HOUHAI)

One lovely crisp winter day last weekend I dragged my old classmate Ding Ding (who has a real English name which I just can't get accustomed to using) out to Houhai, having heard an appealing rumor that there one could rent some sort of ice-bike to traverse the lake's frozen surface.

It was true! After paying $1.5o to enter, we had an array of vehicle choices. There was the ice bike, as above, seating two and available in a variety of colors. There were ice skates. There were two-seater sleds propelled by vicious-looking ice picks.

(yes, there was also cotton candy, along with popcorn, roasted sweet potatoes, and kettle corn)

There was at least one sheep-drawn carriage:

For the kids, there was a mini-carriage pulled by a robot dressed in children's clothes and sometimes bearing the head of the sheep. It boasted a speaker that blasted shrill chorals and seemed only able to move in circles. Ding Ding and I both found it extremely creepy. This was as close as I was willing to get for a picture.

There were also at least two repurposed bumper cars which, though mechanized, didn't move very fast. I attempted to sort the different types of vehicles by quality and assign them by proportion to different segments of the population: elites, workers, cadres, the burgeoning middle-class. Ding Ding (below) threw popcorn at me until I shut up.

It was the best day I've had in weeks. Why don't we have these things in the States?

BECAUSE MARK SIANO SHOULDN'T HAVE ALL THE FUN*

We can't all be Mark Siano, but if we have a father who is handy with photoshop (thanks pops!) and a friend willing to take academic glamour shots of us on the streets of Beijing than we too can have our own promotional posters.

This photo, and those below, were taken one cold day in the historic hutong Nanluoguxiang, a pedestrian street and moderately cheesy tourist attraction near my home in central Beijing. Fulbright had demanded pictures of all of its grantees "doing research" for our conference in March and so I asked Wu Jie to take a few. I was hoping for a shot where I was foregrounded, looking intellectual, and there was a blur of frenzied consumers behind me. Unfortunately there weren't many people out that day strolling in the cold and so Wu Jie had me pose in front of a few shops, reflecting on the wondrous array of consumer goods. Of course my research has nothing to do with knit hats or Fidel Castro dolls, but I tried to pretend.

Wondering what astute observations I was recording on the notepad? I just kept writing 研究, the Chinese character for "research," over and over again and imagining what a jerk I must look like. Now I know. And I kind of like it.

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*SOME of the fun, certainly, but not ALL of it.

ON THE COMFORTS OF AUTOCRACY

Watching The Founding of the Republic got me thinking about how people feel about their leaders and the way they lead. It made me think of three things in particular, which I will share with you sequentially, for human brains remain more random and sometimes even more interesting than the internet.

1. The Sylvia Plath line “Every woman adores a fascist” in her poem "Daddy". Could this explain why I kind of want to stroke Mao’s shellacked coif?
2. The Erich Fromm book Escape From Freedom, which posits that it is terrifying to be in control of one’s own destiny and appealing to submit to an autocrat.
3. A scene from the Chinese television series 蜗居 (Narrow Dwellings), in which Su Chun tenderly asks his wife Hai Ping to treat him dictatorially. Screenshots and translations are below.

Don’t be too democratic towards me

I wish you'd treat me a little more dictatorially

People living under a dictatorship

have a sense of security, a feeling of dependability

[nuzzle and cut to bedroom scene]

Personally I’m a big fan of democracy, even if I wish it worked better sometimes, but I simply refuse the facile logic that everyone craves freedom. I also think one must account for statements like the above, even if one sees nothing vaguely comforting about living under a dictator. My travels and studies have not convinced me that people all over the world are fundamentally the same; quite the contrary: I think people all over the world are profoundly different from one other, across axes of culture, ethnicity, gender, and class, but I also think it doesn’t take too much to try and bridge those gaps and understand how and why. I don’t think it is too difficult to imagine the appeal of autocracy (a relatively enlightened one at least). Democracy takes a lot of work after all, and it would be nice if instead we could all just relax and leave it up to a godlike, all-knowing figure who could really lead us through troubled times, rather than relying on poll numbers to figure out how to fumble on through. The fact that such persons do not exist are one reason I won’t be rooting for a dictatorship any time soon.

This does not preclude, however, that some people might actually prefer living in a dictatorship, or at least see it as inevitable and tolerable. In the lead up to the Iraq war, it was treasonous to even whisper that maybe, just maybe, democracy wasn’t for everyone, and even if it was the best system, maybe it couldn’t be forced. I wish I could say that Americans have learned something from our failures there but I fear that instead many are just blaming the Iraqis for not taking advantage of the marvelous opportunity they were presented with.

Assumptions of the inherent superiority and “naturalness” of democracy, in the sense that it is assumed that democracy will always flourish when given the opportunity because people, by nature, love freedom, are embedded not only in foreign policy but in scholarly work. Although I tried to separate my own research project from this discourse, I still suspect that one reason I got funding was that many people are forever seeking out the sprouts of democracy, insisting that in some pocket of resistance somewhere, the Chinese people are asserting their rights and that this will inevitably lead to regime change. This is not my own opinion.

The parents of one of my teachers here, now in their late 60s, have been making frequent trips to Beijing from their home in the north to take care of her while she is pregnant. Each time they come to town they insist on visiting Mao’s mausoleum at the south end of Tiananmen Square. I would have thought one viewing of the Chairman’s embalmed body would be enough for a lifetime but my teacher tells me that it really means something to them to visit, that they have very strong feelings for the man.

There’s a well-known dictum that Mao's actions were 70% right and 30% wrong. I don’t know how this number was arrived at, but Chinese people are invariably delighted that I've heard the formula; saying it aloud is a failsafe method of winning a toast in your honor and just about any banquet.

Regardless of the numbers, and even, apparently, regardless of a great deal of misery (many history books now judiciously state that Mao “erroneously” started the Cultural Revolution), Mao Zedong has an undeniably strong place in the hearts and minds of the older generation who were raised memorizing his words, singing his songs, collecting badges that bore his image. He was George Washington, Johnny Appleseed, and Pokemon all rolled into one. For visitors of this generation to Mao’s Mausoleum, being so close to the man, even in death, must be quite a feeling.

China’s current leaders can never hope to inspire such devotion, but as long as they can keep delivering big growth numbers, corresponding infrastructural development, and a smattering of social welfare programs to even out the growing inequalities, their positions should be perfectly safe. I get the sense that sometimes people here just don’t want to have to think about the government -- they just want it to do its job -- and as of yet, that job doesn’t include safeguarding political or civil rights. They think we Americans are the one with a cult of personality, fawning all over our tall, young, handsome, charismatic president. Do you think any Chinese person would ever wear a Hu Jintao t-shirt with a clever slogan?

It would make an interesting social experiment at the very least - though not one I’d be willing to end up in jail for.

建国大业 (The Founding of a Republic)

I dug into my collection of mostly pirated Chinese DVD’s this sickly week and, in one dizzy 48-hour period, watched the following: Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, Jean-Luc Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her & Made in the USA, Oliver Stone’s W., recent James Bond film Quantum of Solace, and the Chinese blockbuster epic The Founding of a Republic. I spent the following 24 hours coming down, my mind a dense mass of jumbled images and tangled thoughts about consumer culture, Chinese nationalism, American imperialism, and the effects of technology on interpersonal relationships. Don’t think that because I’m a PhD student I’m smarter than you. Who else but academia would have taken me?

According to the Chinese lunar calendar, the coldest time of the year is this week and the one preceding it, the last fierce gusts of winter as the year of the ox readies to gives way to the year of the tiger. As predicted, this week has been all bitter winds and single-digit temperatures. I am typically a fan of winter until it gets REALLY cold, and even then I wouldn’t mind so much if not for the maddening cabin fever. I like very much to walk about and look at things but this is less fun when I can’t feel my fingers.

It would be ideal if I could take advantage of this weather to get all settled in my new fieldsite, but my “boss” there, who has taken a rather maternal attitude towards me, has forbidden me to come in until the weather warms up a bit. Auntie Zhang and Uncle Mu have taken the predictable stance that I should avoid going outside at all so as not to catch cold or fall on the ice and even many of my friends of my own age have been sending me texts of concern saying pretty much the same thing. But the sky is so blue and the air is so fresh! I think, and then I go out walking and get so cold so fast that I duck into a shop to warm up and come out with yet another item of apparel bearing a neck bow.

Although cautioned against it I’ve still been going out daily, at the very least to the gym or the grocery store, until a recent bout of food poisoning trapped me completely. I’ve always had a rather masochistic work ethic and feel slightly decadent just lying around watching movies but I could only spend so much time pacing my room and cutting my bangs. Besides, watching Chinese movies is almost work, especially if the movie in question is the highest-grossing domestically produced film in history and takes as it’s subject the years of civil war leading up to the victory of the Chinese Communist Party and the establishment of the PRC.

Star-studded, big-budgeted (allegedly much of the funding came from the central government) and released to coincide with the PRC’s 60th anniversary last October, The Founding of a Republic was a blockbuster times a historical epic riding a tide of national optimism. The film was also hotly anticipated by the local expat community, most of whom were cynically curious about just how history would be officially spun.

What stood out most about the film, however, was just how impressive the casting was. Mao imitators seem to exist in China in almost Elvis proportions, as the image below implies.

I doubt there is much in the way of opportunities for Mao impersonators at used car sales or quicky weddings but there is no shortage of historical television dramas touching on various episodes of the leader’s life.

The performer who played Mao Zedong in the film, Tang Guoqiang, was a dead ringer for the big guy and managed to convey a great deal of the charisma and intelligence he surely possessed.

If he also came across as entirely beneficent and pure of heart that was more a factor of the script, which often placed him in scenes like the one below, where he and Zhou Enlai give piggyback rides to Mao’s daughters through a field of flowers.

More realistically, Mao was portrayed, as were many of his comrades, as incessant chain smokers. I was particularly amused by a scene in which a few of the top brass are forced to recognize that reform must proceed slowly when they realize that one thing capitalists are awfully good at is providing junkies with their fix:

Characters of little historical significance were often played by huge stars in tiny cameos. Jackie Chan, in heavy make-up, played a reporter in one small scene; in another Zhang Ziyi played a delegate to the women’s committee commenting on the flag design to be chosen for the new nation. The effect was slightly bizarre, like Brad Pitt suddenly showing up to fix the clock in Independence Hall in a film about the founding of the United States, or Julia Roberts in a brief cameo as Betsy Ross.

The most confounding casting choice of all was to put an Australian man, speaking with an Australian accent, in the role of the American Ambassador. How the hell did that happen?

In any history, however politically motivated, it is typically important to pay as much attention to what is omitted as what is included. The Founding of a Republic side-stepped many a sensitive area by leaving out individuals and moments that may have provoked discomfort or in any way dampened the patriotism the film attempted to stoke in its viewers (assuming few of you are scholars of Chinese history, I’m going to leave out what they left out). What remained was a vivid, rousing story with struggles and glories where the good guys win and the bad guys go to Taiwan.

Well not quite. One great surprise of the film was that Chiang Kai-shek (head of the Nationalist government or KMT), long reviled as a cruel, power-hungry dictator and a puppet of the Americans, came off as a guy who basically meant well but was too weakened by the corruption of his regime to challenge the mighty tide of Communist reform.

It may have been difficult to portray him any other way, as the audience knew from the start that he was going down quick. In the face of his inevitable defeat, the villain becomes tragic. That, to me, is one of the most troubling inherent flaws of historical drama of any kind: the way it makes events seem obvious, necessary, predestined and makes our view of them omniscient. I hope kids these days are still getting at least some of their history from books that add, rather than subtract, complexity and ambiguity. Failing that, I hope they at least are getting their history from films that don’t portray American ambassadors as possessing Australian accents.

SNOWMEN WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS

The modern Chinese snowman, seen all over Beijing recently during this coldest winter in 40 years, is an artifact of a unique relationship of workers to the product of their labor; a socialist innovation turned now towards a seemingly limitless future. The ephemeral quality of the snow-built base, coupled with the man-made, non-biodegradable materials used in decoration, promise to reveal a startling contradiction in the first thaw of spring, but this is of little consequence for a nation in the throes of perpetual growth.

Several prominent characteristics differentiate the Chinese snowman from its foreign cousins. To begin, this snowman is commonly found, not in parks or suburban front yards, but in public places, alongside crowded thoroughfares, a true snowman of the people.

Even more significant are the Chinese snowman’s accessories, created not from the natural world, but from the produce and detritus of consumer culture. The creators of the snowman above made innovative use of promotional flyers, folded in complicated ways (nodding, if derisively, at Origami and similar regional traditions) to create a colorful ensemble and express the bright outlook of many urban Chinese, for whom the future is filled with ever more wonderful things.

Not all Chinese snowmen share this optimistic expressiveness. The siamese snowman pair below, though possessing scarves of folded and wrapped newsprint half-buried in a fresh layer of snow, gaze mournfully towards a 烟酒 (yanjiu, or cigarettes and alcohol) shop, bathed in the green glow of the shop’s exterior sign. These snowmen, lacking arms or mouths, and with eyes buried or battered by snowfall, seem to symbolize those left behind in the nation’s great rush to get rich, those for whom the small, suicidal comforts of cigarettes and booze are some of the only pleasures that remain.

Uncharacteristically bleak as these snowpeople may be, they retain the classic national form: one round hump topped with a head; arms optional. Chinese citizens immigrating or traveling abroad have been known to reproduce this rendering, as the photo below, depicting a snowman built in Dec 08’ in Seattle by the stellar instructor of Mandarin, Chang Hong, and her husband, aptly demonstrates.

Why does the Chinese snowman take this form, rather than the 3-part body formed of large stacked snowballs that has become the Euro-American ideal? Can this be understood as resistance to the aesthetic imperialism of “The West”? As an attempt to assert a pre-existing tradition of snowman building which owes nothing to those colonial powers who hungered not so long ago to carve up the great Chinese nation?

Above is an example of the author’s Platonic ideal of a snowman (minus the feather boa, which rarely appears in the author’s Platonic ideals), also dating from the Seattle snowstorm of 08’. This snowman’s shapely curves, long arms made of branches, and sparse but lavish accessories, make it a classic of the form. The fact that such a construction is universally recognized as a snowman, even by Chinese visitors with contrasting cultural templates, is evidenced by the willingness of the excellent Chang Hong to pose alongside it.

From a materialist perspective, the differing national traditions of snowman-making have little to do with aesthetics and much to do with persistent labor formations. The Euro-American snowman is a product of inorganic solidarity, or specialized labor. While the work of snowball-rolling may be divided (often resulting in noisome disputes over who has responsibility for which segment), credit is also divided by task and allotted to individuals (points being awarded for innovative noses or unusual additions, for instance). The Chinese snowman is a contrasting example of organic solidarity, or undifferentiated labor, characterizing work which is often collective and rarely individuated. The single headed hump which has been shown in several iterations here, remains a product of a socialist economy, albeit one with many capitalistic elements. As such, the Chinese snowman is testament to the continuing influence of Marx-Mao Thought in a socioeconomic regime officially classified as 中国特色的社会主义 (socialism with Chinese characteristics). Long may it reign.

感冒了

It is in following the long tradition of delivering globally-relevant news via the medium of bloggery that I have called you all together today to announce that yes, I have a cold.

Of course it wouldn't bear mentioning, even in this lowly format, were it not a very special and unique cold, picked up not just anywhere, but in Xi'an, one of the cradles of Chinese civilization. I have it on good authority that this cold was the very same one that led to the death of the mad Emperor Qin, and which would have infected his entire army, were they not, due to great foresight on his part, made entirely of terracotta.

The demon cold made its first appearance the morning after I returned to Beijing, Uncle Mu and Auntie Zhang greeting it with a mixture of care and concern (Chinese herbal tonics and meals delivered to my room) and the satisfaction of having their long-held medico-physiological views validated (because clearly I became sick due to skirt wearing and a fondness for drinking tea late at night, NOT because I came in contact with thousands and thousands and thousands of people and their germs over the last week).

Christmas in Xi'an was a surprise. Nothing really happens on the holiday in Beijing, aside from some folks taking it as an excuse to go out to dinner or go window shopping, but then Beijing is a bit odd for not having a city center where people in search of the 热闹 ("hot noisy" or the bustle and novelty that is considered a desirable characteristic of public spaces) naturally congregate. Tiananmen Square, the geographic and historical heart of the city, would be the natural choice but assembling there is hardly encouraged. Xi'an, by contrast, still has its ancient city wall, and within it, the old bell tower, under which labyrinthine pedestrian tunnels direct torrents of tourists and urbanites. On Christmas Eve, clearly anticipating that these would be choked by seekers of the hot and noisy, the authorities blocked them off and closed the center of the city to auto traffic. I love pedestrianized areas but this was something else entirely. The streets were filled with revelers wearing santa hats, devil ears, santa hats w/ devil ears over them, rabbit ears, at least one witches' hat, and clusters of peddlers selling all these random goods. On the Muslim street I watched a young couple wearing garish green and purple masquerade masks feeding each other tofu from a street vendor; in less densely crowded areas teenagers carrying cans of silly string and/or aerosol fake snow chased each other around and passers-by got caught in the crossfire. Traveling south there were makeshift carnival-esque games where you could win a giant stuffed animal for your sweetheart, and down at the south gate there were fireworks, pale blue christmas lights wrapped round every leafless tree, and red paper lanterns set aloft with burning wicks inside to drift about in the starless sky.

I was curious as to what was going through people's heads as they engaged in this strange Carnival/Halloween/Christmas spectacle but I'd had a long day and was about to have yet another one. The wine deal, while not disastrous, was stressful and difficult, and I wasn't crazy about being in the middle. I won't say more than that I learned a lot.

I've been here more than 3 1/2 months now and have been expecting this cold for quite a long while but that didn't make me any more patient when it finally arrived. I stayed in for two days pouting and power-watching a Chinese tv series and then I had to escape. On the 30th I visited my new office, went out for sushi with a friend, and then met another at the LAN club, a garishly decorated place with a house band of African American guys from Atlanta, the most amazing bathrooms I've ever seen, and a very generous ladies' night. I drank vodka tonics with Leslie, an old classmate from IUP, and we explored some of the deserted theme rooms, particularly favoring the dark neo-colonialist fantasy "library".

I received my punishment in the morning, realizing that the night had spoiled me for any New Year's Eve festivities. I hadn't planned on anything in particular but I knew that if I stayed home I would be absolutely miserable thinking about and missing my friends. I know a lot of people don't like NYE because they feel pressure to find the best party and have the most amazing time but I don't care, I just want to be around the people I love and celebrate the very simple pleasure of clearing the slate and starting fresh. Besides, who doesn't like a good party?

I chose, like many before me, to suffer the consequences and hustled down to the Treehouse, which, while a little smoky and loud, was a fairly happy place to be. I talked Sophie into making me a ginger hot toddy and tried not to let my nasty mood infect the good atmosphere. I should qualify that NYE isn't a very big deal here, outside of the expat community. Clearly all are aware that the Gregorian calendar year changes but it isn't the calendar anyone cares about. We still have a month and a half until the year of the tiger begins and that is when the big celebrations will occur. There also is not a huge tradition of drinking or bars here; it is still, for all the changes of the last three decades, a very family and kin-focused society, and those institutions which draw individuals away from family networks to interact with strangers or friends are viewed ambivalently at best.

Still, people can be wonderfully open and friendly here, even if they are wary of many of the changes that my red-haired self, leaving a bar after midnight alone, might portend for society at large. I left the Treehouse shortly after midnight and walked to Gulou to catch a cab. My driver, a slender man with a deeply lined face probably in his early fifties, drove silently after grunting in acknowledgement when I stated my destination. I directed him to pull over across the street from my complex and we waited, watching the dashboard dumbly, for the receipt to print out. The driver tore it off and our eyes met as he handed it to me. 新年快乐 (xin nian kuaile = happy new year), I said to him, reaching for the receipt. 新年快乐, he replied, smiling with tired eyes.