Should life be about simply accepting what is and striving to live harmoniously in relation to set conditions largely beyond our control (like fate, hierarchy in human relationships and society, and animistic/pantheistic forces)? Or, should people concern themselves not just with what is, but how it should be? Or can be? Or was intended to be?

I have no idea how accurate these thoughts are regarding Chinese people – I’m just wondering out loud – but it seems that Westerners and Easterners in general answer these questions very differently. My default impulse is to reject the way things are and attempt to make them the way I think they should be. Apparently, Chinese people don’t typically feel this way.

In The World’s Religions (1991), Huston Smith contrasts the ancient Hebrew’s understanding of anthropology and the created world – an influential part of the West’s worldview heritage – with that of their contemporaries. This got me thinking about aspects typical of a Chinese approach to life. Smith says regarding non-Hebraic ancient near east worldviews:

If one’s eye is on nature preeminently, one does not look beyond it for fulfillment elsewhere. Neither – and this is the point – does one dream of improving nature or the social order that is its extension, for those are assumed to be ingrained in the nature of things and not subject to human alteration. The Egyptian no more asked whether the sun god Ra was shining as he should shine than the modern astronomer asks whether the sun is expending itself at a proper rate; for in nature the accent is one what is, not what should be – the is rather than the ought (284-5).

Not so for the ancient Jews:

What divides the Hebraic from the Chinese view of nature does not come out until we note a third verse in this crucial first chapter of Genesis. In verse 26 God says of the people he intends to create: “Let them have dominion… over all the earth.” …[The] opposite sentiment is in the Tao Te Ching:Those who would take over the earth
And shape it to their will
Never, I notice, succeed.
If we propositionalize the three key assertions about nature in the opening pages of Genesis –
God created the earth;
let [human beings] have dominion over the earth;
behold, it was very good…
- we find an appreciation of nature, blended with confidence in human powers to work with it for good, that in its time was exceptional” (278-9).

In Beyond the Chinese Face: Insights from Psychology, Michael Harris Bond describes the “Chinese belief in the naturalness, necessity, and inevitability of hierarchy” as one of several defining themes for the Chinese as a whole:

It is self-evident to the Chinese that all men are born unequal. An efficient society requires a broadly accepted ordering of people. The alternative to hierarchy is chaos (luan) and anarchy, which are together worse than harsh authority (118).

From what I can see (not much at this point!), it seems that Chinese typically favour hierarchy not because they necessarily prefer it. Questions involving hierarchy vs. egalitarianism, from this perspective, are questions about the unalterable nature of existence, not personal preference. Reality is hierarchical, and since reality doesn’t care that much about your personal preference, living is not a matter of trying to change the world to suit your personal preference. Hierarchy is accepted. If your personal preference is for peace and harmony and stability, then you lay down the pursuit of other personal preferences in an effort to live in accordance with “nature and the social order that it its extension” (Smith, 285). It is self-evident to the Chinese that all men are born unequal. An efficient society requires a broadly accepted ordering of people. The alternative to hierarchy is chaos (luan) and anarchy, which are together worse than harsh authority (118).

It’s weird. We eat noodles with chopsticks just about every day. But yesterday a group we were with cooked American-style spaghetti for a change, with sauce and all that. And instead of putting it on plates and using forks and spoons, we put it in bowls and used chopsticks. It’s a strange thing – it seems totally normal to us to eat all the other kinds of noodle dishes with chopsticks. But I was eating spaghetti with chopsticks thinking, man, this is funny. I’m not saying it’s a rational reaction… it just is what it is. Just another, “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto Chou-chou” kind of moment.

Anyway, if you want to share a small taste of our life, eat your spaghetti with chopsticks next time. (Hint: use a bowl not a plate, pick it up, and hold it close to your face.)

Issues
If you want people to read your blog, you have to have issues, preferably personal issues that masquerade as concerned citizenship. And you need to complain about how certain people are mean and/or stupid and are messing up the world. And say things that make people mad. And tell everyone how think. Sort of like what I’m passive-aggressively doing right now. This is especially effective if you’re young, white, and rich, and maybe a little paranoid.

We make a conscious effort not to do that on here too much, and we’ve sworn off politics – our blog is doomed! But by golly if this one didn’t just burn my biscuits…

Beauty
In parts of Africa fat women are sexy. In Japan, it’s slender men. But in the West? We like ‘em fake. We might think this is normal and no big deal. Call me paranoid, but I think living with stuff like this really messes us up. From CampaignforRealBeauty.ca:

And, of course, we can always ask questions about emotional manipulation, reverse psychology, and why a company that makes beauty products would care to fund something called “Campaign for Real Beauty”:

I’m convinced that the media to which we expose ourselves affects us deeply. But bigger questions remain, like “Where does a person’s worth and value really come from?” And, “How do we decide what is ultimately, truly beautiful?”

 

I don’t see any big nose foreigners. Do you see any big nose foreigners?

No, there hasn’t been an outbreak of bird flu or SARS. But today we were sick with bad coughs and colds, and in Taiwan when you’re sick you wear a mask as a courtesy to everyone else. You don’t want people coughing and sneezing in crowded subways cars or all over their students in class. It’s not uncommon for people to wear masks while working, playing piano in church, driving, or just about anything. We don’t really notice them anymore when friends or co-workers wear them. I wasn’t sure how people would react with foreigners wearing masks, since I assume most foreigners don’t. But my students didn’t even seem to notice, and I was looking for a reaction from them.

Tomorrow morning we’re having one of our regularly scheduled practicum meetings, and Mingdaw has decided to combine it with a trip to a really big wet market that apparently has something distinguishing about it. It’ll sure be nice to get out!
 

We’re having our first real experience of gift-exchange where we can sort of see how it affects the relationship. We brought 老趙 and his wife (the couple that runs the fish soup place down the road) some stuff from Canada when we returned from our summer stint in Vancouver (Purdy’s chocolate, a calendar with pictures of B.C., some dulce). The next time we visited, he had a pile of homemade shrimp 餃子 (dumpings) for us, and on the next occasion, some Japanese desert things for us to take home. A month or so later we’d given out our other gifts to everyone else and still had some left over, so we brought them some beef jerky. Taiwan has its own style of jerky, but it’s different from North America. Since then the last couple times we’ve stopped in to chat they’ve all but forced us to sit down and eat something. We’re trying to refuse several times like we’re supposed to. Tonight on the way home from work makes the third time in a row. I wonder what we’re getting ourselves into, but it sure is fun. It tastes good, too.

Udpate
The reason we haven’t posted much about what we’re doing lately – and might not for a while yet – is because we’re not really doing anything. Eating, sleeping, working, and homework consumes all day every day. The only sunshine we expose ourselves to is on the two-minute walk to work.

That’s no way to live, and I think I’m about to revolt. It could be a lot worse – we’re not really complaining – but we’re just big fans of direct human interaction.

Anyway, the forcast calls for a bunch of “Chinese culture posts” rather than “fun stuff we’re doing posts,” but it should only be like this for a time. We’re loving the reading, it’s just the not-doing-anything-else part that’s starting to wear on us.

Vote for Pedro Chou-chou!
We entered Chou-chou in KittenWar! – where people upload pictures of their kittens into a “cuteness war.” It pits kitten against kitten by displaying a pair of photos, and random web surfers click who they think is the cuter of the two. I can’t believe I’m writing this after all that “we’re so busy” stuff. Anyway, as of this post Chou-chou is 7-4-4.

Here’s some mostly mindless, and only slightly insensitive anecdotal culture fun. If that other culture stuff is too dense, then this video is for you! =) An American Jewish girl in Beijing explores the Chinese-people-getting-English-names phenomenon. What she uncovers here in 5 minutes is just scratching the surface. (My favourite is Smacker.)

We’ll eventually post some other “Sexy Beijing” shorts where “Su-fei” interviews an elderly couple and a rural couple couple about marriage.
 

Pronounced: ti�n y? sh�
Literally: stuff duck style
Means: “Stuffing the duck” refers to a traditional (and much despised) style of Chinese teaching in which the teacher attempts to cram more content than is humanly possible into the students’ memories. Similar to our “drinking from the firehose,” where the sheer volume of content leaves no room for creative thinking.

 

“To really know a thing, we have to know all of its relations,
like individual musical notes embedded in a melody” (175).
What makes you “you”? By what criteria do you define and identify who “you” are?

Defining You? Here’s some options

For many people who compare cultures and worldviews, the characteristic differences between Eastern and Western answers to these questions are old news. What Richard Nisbett has done is provide clinical evidence to support these perceptions.

…Westerners and Asians literally experience the world in very different ways. Westerners are the protagonists of their autobiographical novels; Asians are merely cast members in movies touching on their existence (87).

The ways we conceptualize our “selves” make a huge difference in the way we see, understand, and experience life.

To the Westerner, it makes sense to speak of a person as having attributes that are independent of circumstances or particular personal relations. This self – this bounded, impermeable free agent – can move from group to group and setting to setting without significant alteration (50).

In the West, your unique characteristics are what make you who you are. Your identity stays the same regardless of where you are, who you’re with, or what you’re doing. Unless, of course, crucial life experiences have hampered your psychological and emotional development and you need a therapist to help you work through your “issues.” In the West, your identity and worth doesn’t and shouldn’t depend on anyone else.

But for the Easterner (and for many other people to one degree or another), the person is connected, fluid, and conditional. As philosopher Donald Munro put it, East Asians understand themselves “in terms of their relation to the whole, such as the family, society, Tao Principle, or Pure Consciousness.” The person participates in a set of relationships that make it possible to act and purely independent behaviour is usually not possible or really even desirable (50-51).

In East Asia, your relationships determine your identity. Your relationship roles weave together into a fabric of identity known as “you.” Richard Nisbett quotes Henry Rosemont:

…For early Confucians, there can be no me in isolation, to be considered abstractly: I am the totality of roles I live in relation to specific others… Taken collectively, they weave, for each of us, a unique pattern of personal identity, such that if some of my roles change, the others will of necessity change also, literally making me a different person (5).

Problems with perspective

I have a hard time wrapping my head around this – imagining different ways of conceptualizing my self. I have to rely on concepts we used in premarital counseling and marital intimacy courses, like differentiation (the ability/process of learning to maintain and express your personal identity while in close physical and/or emotional proximity to another). It makes me think of the counseling courses, “self-actualization,” “self-validation,” “dysfunctional,” and the emotional immaturity and personal insecurity of college kids who try to find their identity and value in how their boyfriend or girlfriend feels about them. We assume, in the West, that your source of identity and value should come from within – from yourself (does this even make sense??) – and should not be dependent on other people.

But those are evaluative tools and assumptions based on a distinctly Western concept of the individual. Does it even make sense to say, “The concept of self in Eastern worldviews is inherently ‘dysfunctional’ because it encourages ‘other-validation’”? It certainly appears that way sometimes – I can think of specific Chinese individuals who have been plucked out of their Chinese social networks and transplanted into North American cities. Their methods of relating seem highly dysfunctional according to Western criteria. I just don’t know if it makes sense to evaluate Eastern concepts of self according to Western criteria.

We in the West haven’t exactly cornered the market on healthy relationships. Does the East Asian concept of the person, far from being “dysfunctional,” reflect a more proper understanding of interdependence and the nature of human experience? Nisbett provides an illustrative anecdote from the classic “See Spot Run” primers:

Dick and Jane and their dog, Spot, were quite the active individualists. The first page of an early edition from the 1930′s …depicts a little boy running across a lawn. The first sentences are “See Dick run. See Dick play. See Dick run and play.” …But the first page of the Chinese primer of the same era shows a little boy sitting on the shoulders of bigger boy. “Big Brother takes care of Little Brother. Big Brother loves Little Brother. Little Brother loves Big Brother.” It is not individual action but relationships between people that seem important to convey in a child’s first encounter with the printed word (49-50).

I’m assuming that our Western model of self- vs. other-validation probably doesn’t fit in China (and I have my own issues with that model anyway). Can we adequately evaluate Chinese conceptions of self without first understanding them on their own terms?

Now, most of you probably know that, in our family, the preference for seriously strong, extra hot, extra spicy, or “kick-you-in-the-mouth” kind of food experiences belongs to Joel. Tonight, I had a combination of all four of the above categories rolled into one small food experience.

One of our student’s mothers was at the school this evening, and asked if I’ve ever tried sashimi. Well, I hadn’t, though I quite enjoy all the sushi I’ve tried thus far. So, she grabbed a plate and put a couple of pieces of raw fish on it, and mixed together some soy sauce and (before I could say, “only a little please”) the biggest clump of wasabi I’ve ever seen.

Now, I’ve had wasabi several times before…and (being one of those seriously strong, extra hot, extra spicy, kick-you-in-the mouth flavours that are Joel’s domain) I am not a huge fan. Not only that, but this clump of wasabi had to have been bigger than all the amounts from all of my previous wasabi tastings rolled into one and then multiplied by ten. But, I thought….hey, it can’t be that much stronger. Not to mention that I was now sort of obligated to try it and it was too late to adjust the wasabi quantity.

So, I gamely grabbed my chopsticks, and maneuvered the first piece into my mouth. At that moment, my sinus cavities erupted into a blazing inferno, my tongue, lips, and even my teeth felt as though they’d been dissolved in acid, and I burst into tears….all while simultaneously trying to look not nearly as startled as I felt. Fortunately, my benefactress wasn’t watching as I tried the first piece. She did however, catch the identical repeat reactions that occurred as I ate both the second and third pieces. While laughing almost hysterically, she asked me “ni bu xihuan ma?” (“you don’t like it?”) and I answered (honestly, believe it or not…and in Chinese, believe it or not!)…”No, it’s okay! But really, really hot! I need a drink of water!” She and Yang Mama (our boss’s mother, who works at the school with us) thought the whole thing was quite amusing, and kept laughing even as I coughed, hacked, sniffed, tried to catch my breath, and tried to regain my composure.

So there you go…the story of how I got assaulted by the wasabi, and the story of how – even though I’ve now tried sashimi – I still don’t know if I like it or not. Because really, the only thing that my senses recall of the experience was being smacked across the face, kicked in the mouth, and generally punished by the wasabi. To be honest, I’m not even sure there was any fish involved…at least, I sure don’t remember it. :D