I used to unconsciously assume that modernization = Westernization. After all, it’s our technology and science that grew out of our worldview, our Industrial Revolution… Surely societies can’t absorb all that and remain unWestern. Surely adopting these things must make their culture almost unrecognizable within one or two generations…

I don’t know if Kishore Mahbubani engages in wishful thinking or accurately describes reality when he says that, although many Western ideas, values, and assumptions have seeped into virtually all non-Western minds, “the hearts and souls of other civilizations remain intact” (112). Before we’d come to Taiwan, I would have assumed that sentiments like that were just wishful thinking. Now, after a year of observations (which certainly doesn’t make us experts!), conversations, work, play, and readings I’m not so sure he’s wrong to see this kind of Western influence as essentially a “veneer” (112).

Michael Harris Bond makes an important observation, I think, in Beyond the Chinese Face:

It is worth noting in passing that modernization began in Western countries earlier than it did elsewhere. It entailed just as dramatic changes in these Western countries as it did (and will) in other countries. To confuse modernization with Westernization is to confuse process with origin. Western countries are also changing under the impact of modernization. The question is whether all countries are converging (or developing toward the same end point) (112).

Mahbubani and Bond both refuse to equate modernization with Westernization, and I’m tempted to agree with them. A year ago I would have called Japan ‘westernized’ and I bet that’s probably accurate regarding certain aspects of the culture. But the hearts and minds of the people? They are different for all our influence, no doubt. But Taiwan was influenced in similar ways by the USA during the same era and I can’t call the Taiwanese westernized. Even the young, trendy, rich kids that drink coffee in knock-off $tarbuckses, play guitar, and dress and pose like they stepped out of a Hollywood movie still seem much more like wannabes than truly Western. It’s kind of sad actually, both that they would seemingly want to ditch their culture for ours, and that for most of them that’s an impossible goal. Their mothers are Chinese, and most of them will never step foot outside Asia. Even the little kids we teach, who prefer McDonald’s and KFC to any kind of Chinese food, struggle to perform exercises in class that cater to typically Western modes of thinking rather than Asian modes of education. When it comes to our same-age friends here, many of whom are young, trendy, and traveled, the more we get to know them, the more we realize just how much like us they aren’t.

But regardless of my anecdotal impressions, some research apparently bears this out:

Yang Kuo-shu’s studies on the modernity of Taiwanese people show that traditional and modern attitudes do not exist in opposition to one another. Those who are modern are not necessarily non-traditional. …The Oriental culture appears to be producing a marked variation in the profile of a modern person from what one would find in a Western culture (Bond, 114).

Even a few generations after WWII, I’m betting that the Japanese are more Asian than Western and will continue to be so for a long time. Which, if you think about it, is amazing given their 20th century history. Mahbubani says of his experience with Asian students that come to the U.S. for study that Japanese university students have the toughest time adjusting. He attributes this to the cultural cohesion from which they come.

Still, I have a hard time imagining a non-Western society adopting technology or entertainment developed in the West, by the West, for the West, in response to Western cultural needs/desires, and not being somewhat “Westernized.” Form and meaning aren’t the same thing, but I wonder if that relationship is tighter than we often think, especially when the forms are in part predetermined by the meaning. How will our communication technologies, which increase our individual autonomy and our interpersonal alienation in the highly individualistic West, affect individuals and relationships in more relationally-oriented and interdependent cultures? Bond talks about how the Chinese are conscious of the struggle between modernization and cultural identity, and seems to suggest that “selective adaptation” may be a real possibility.

I don’t know, but it’s interesting to observe as we live in times and places of rapid change.

Bowing to peer pressure (everybody’s doing it), we bring you our first 12 of 12: 12 pictures from our life on the 12th of the month. Click Neil to show/hide the day’s photos.

 
 Edited to add: Here’s the growing list of others who did 12 of 12 today.

We joke sometimes about the Chinese conquering the West in one way or another. People who study population demographics often note that the white populations are being “bred out” by Hispanics in America (a fact that makes my old roommate – a Mr. Estrada - smile) and by Middle Easterners in Europe. With these ethno-cultural populations increasing their demographic prominence in the West as the white population diminishes, what will the world’s single biggest ethnic group do to compete? Breed us out? Nah, they’re going to think us out. There’s a reason people call Vancouver’s University of British Columbia the “University of Brilliant Chinese.”

…striding through campus on his way to class at the University of California, Berkeley, Hu hears Mandarin all the time, in plazas, cafeterias, classrooms, study halls, dorms and fast-food outlets. It is part of the soundtrack at this university, along with Cantonese, English, Spanish…

Playing with some stats and using Berkeley as an example: blacks, Hispanics, and whites are all underrepresented at Berkeley relative to their percentage of the state population. Asians? In undergrad they’re triple their state proportion. I’m not saying it’s genetic or anything, but check out the fun stats from this recent IHT article:

This fall and last, the number of Asian-American freshmen at Berkeley has been at a record high, about 46 percent.
…
What is troubling to some is that … does not mirror the ethnic face of California, which is 12 percent Asian, already more than twice the national average. But it is the new face of the state’s vaunted public university system. Asians make up the largest single ethnic group, 37 percent, at its nine undergraduate campuses.
…
At Berkeley, 3.6 percent of freshmen are black, barely half the statewide proportion… The percentage of Hispanic freshmen at Berkeley (11 percent) is not even a third of the state proportion (35 percent). White freshmen (29 percent) are also below the state average (44 percent).
…
Asian-Americans make up less than 5 percent of the population but typically make up 10 to 30 percent of students at the nation’s best colleges…

And according to advocates of race-neutral admissions policies, those numbers should be even higher.

In my freshman English class, a guy from Malaysia got the top marks. The year we graduated, a student from China took all the top academic awards.

Who works the hardest? Chinese.
Who’s getting the best grades? Chinese.
Who makes up an increasing and disproportionately large part of the student population at elite American universities even though current admission practices work against them? Chinese.

If you can’t beat ‘em? Join ‘em. But Mandarin is hard – you should start now. :D

Tonight we learned how to play mahjong (má jiàng) with Lao Zhao, something we’d talked about doing for a long time. We brought some snacks, including some small pieces of fruit cake for him and his wife to try – they hated it. All the more for us! We learned the names of all the pieces, how the game works, and played some rounds. He has a real mahjong table, with little drawers to stash your money and swing-out cup holders for the tea. We used a can of $1 coins for money (about 3 cents US each; they look like pennies). By the end of the night Lao Zhao had won $1, Jessica broke even, and I was $1 in the hole. But we each won a round (Jessica won two), and had a lot of fun. It forces us to count faster in Chinese, too. The basics at least aren’t all that complicated, but you have to be able to read Chinese numbers: 一二三四五六七八九. It’s like a card game with blocks, where you hold 16 cards in your hand at once and draw from more than one pile It’s the same word in Chinese for playing cards or mahjong tiles: 牌. You want to end up with sets of three of a kind or three in row, and one matching pair. There’s three “suits” plus some other tiles. And there’s all kinds of extra things. I’ll be pretty happy if I can manage to remember the names for everything and the gameplay next time we play. We’ll be back to Lao Zhao’s for more practice when we get the chance.

Pronounced: m� ji�ng
Means: mahjong

Two of our student’s parents run a video production company, and they offered for us to do the narrating for a video. I was the man voices; Jessica had the narration and the girl voices. It was fun, and Jessica is like a pro – her parts sound like a real actual voice talent person and she didn’t even blink reading the Chinese names. Mine sound like the people talking are sleepy. We got the script last night but we didn’t know what the video was about. And then, in the first paragraph, we read,

Taiwanese are able to enjoy a complete sense of bliss and satisfaction here, with visual, audio and tentacle pleasures to their bodies and minds.

Blissful and satisfying tentacle pleasures? Just what exactly did we agree to help promote?! Octopus spa therapy, anyone?

I tried to tell Jessica you can’t mess with people’s scripts and she has to say “tentacles,” but she wasn’t buying it.

It ended up being about some kind of design school exhibition where they make everything out of foam. I talked about special foam hangers and design theory. Jessica did the intro and outro and talked about the school and the designers, and foam Christmas trees.

There were a few other edits we made, the next best coming right at the end when Jessica concluded: “They say that the simple life is to have fun – with heart!” It originally said, “…have fun with a heart,” but we told them that’s not quite the same thing.

I hope we get to do more of this – it’s fun and easy, and Jessica is actually really good at it. She sounds like the real deal. They’ll be putting it on a website eventually, so we’ll post the link when we get it.

What better way to spend New Year’s than in a big tub full of naked guys?

We had an awesome time this New Year’s on an overnight trip with some friends to Wūlái, a mountain village with hot springs. The place where we stayed was a cable car ride farther up the mountain from the village, and ran over a waterfall. The mountains were all covered in dense sub-tropical forest, the air was fresh, and the resort had pools full of colourful fish and hiking trails. Nine of us were there for the hot springs and dinner the first night, and six stayed overnight. We stayed up late eating Christmas goodies that Jessica baked, learned to play cards in a fun combination of Mandarin and Chinglish (great practice for us), tried a bunch of new foods, and best of all got to spend time with friends.

Among that new foods we tried were little whole shrimps in the shell, 3-4 inch whole fried fish, mountain pig sausage, mountain deer, papaya soup (helps make you ‘up’ if you’re a woman), sticky rice cooked and served in bamboo tubes that they slice in half lengthwise with the rice on one side and hot sauce on the other, and hot spring eggs that are boiled and then plunged into freezing water to give the yolk a certain gooey texture, among many other things.

I’ve been sick since before Christmas, and tomorrow I’m getting some regular lab work done. It was kind of funny on the trip because I felt good enough for most of it until the last afternoon. We were going down the cable car to spend some time in the village before heading home. I was dizzy, all my limbs and head were numb, and the cable car was packed. I remember praying ‘Please don’t let me puke in the cable car. Let me get out and find a nice corner somewhere.’ I had a spot on the floor picked out and an action plan ready, who to shove and whose bags to kick if I had to hurl. But I made it out (just barely, I think) and sat down on some steps for a bit.

We had so much fun talking and getting to know everyone better. There are pictures here and a short video here.

新年快乐! Happy New Year! For 06-07 nine of us went to Wulai, a resort town up in the mountains outside Taipei for some hot spring soakage and hiking. We had so much fun, and the area is really beautiful. In these photos you’ll see meals and food, hanging out in the room at night eating Christmas goodies and learning to play cards in a fun mixture of Mandarin and Chinglish, some hiking photos, big colourful fish, and the waterfall. And Joel in the hot springs with the guys.

You can read about this trip here:

• Happy New Year from Wulai!

You can also see a short video. Scroll down to read or write comments!

Pronounced: xīn nián kuài lè
Means: Happy New Year!