My two best non-Chinese friends here, Aaron and Dan, are brilliant wunderkinds with amazing language skills, lovers of rooftops, unexplored restaurants, and fine whiskies. They are also both journalists. And while I delight in their company and learn much from their conversation, I rather wish I had stories to write too. Yes, there is that whole ethnography thing I’m supposed to produce after this is all over, but it just isn’t the same. As convenient as it would be to have a tidy narrative that combined penetrating socio-political insights with revealing glimpses into personal moral worlds, human life doesn’t tend to organize itself so neatly, and that, for better or worse, is what I have chosen to devote myself to studying.
Shit.
If anyone wonders why I mention my research only in passing, it isn’t just because of my IRB (the university committee that presides over the safety and anonymity of human research subjects) paranoia, and it isn’t because I don’t care; it’s because I hardly think about anything else. I spend hours every day writing up fieldnotes: scribbling down tv news reports, advertisements on the bus, and fragments of conversations or thoughts; in addition to everything that goes on at my "office" and what is discussed in meetings and conversations there.
I have to write everything down, or as much as I can remember, largely because I don’t know what will turn out to be important. Culture and societies are complicated and humans are mysterious beasts, and I am regularly told by people who have done fieldwork before that I may not even know what the focus of my research is until I start writing up. This is irritating, to say the least. If you are like most people, you probably like to feel like you understand what you are doing and that that thing is useful and/or meaningful, and you might even expect to produce something tangible every so often: I wrote this/made this/put on this show/ran this project. If you are like this, you probably shouldn’t go into anthropology where your raison d’etre is simply to drift about, trying to get the sense of a place and a people through immersion and flaneurie: watching, listening, interacting. I’m not a journalist; I’m not writing a story about the who what where why and how, I’m aiming at something more nebulous and abstract. As the wonderful French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once said:
Looking and seeing is not about identifying, it’s about getting inside.
I couldn't agree more.
Still, I get discouraged. I go out with Aaron and Dan and they talk about current world events and political history. I talk about the article I just read in a Chinese tabloid about a college student who pushed her friends into prostitution. Aaron is working on a series of articles remembering the Long March of the CCP, and Dan just finished pieces on desertification and the life of a mayor in an up-and-coming southern Chinese city. I have absolutely nothing to show for the past nine months but a stack of fieldnotes and a brain all tied up in knots.
It isn’t that I regret for a second taking this path: I think ethnography is fascinating stuff and that anthropology provides a vital perspective for living in this modern world. While the general field of consumer rights and advocacy interests me little, the way the ideas are playing out in China is intensely compelling; while I may not understand it well, not one of my countrymen understands it better.
But I do have to remember the high-minded ideas that brought me here when I feel like I’m just going through the motions and I must remember too that awesome people like Dan and Aaron wouldn’t hang out with me if they didn’t think that on some far off day I, too, will have something concrete and meaningful to contribute.
I have more to say on this topic but must get back to planning focus groups, bitching about the heat, reading articles that may have nothing to do with anything, and daydreaming about my next visit to the tailor. It is both a challenge and a privilege to live this life. I really can’t complain.
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