Remember the movie Chariots of Fire, with the Vangelis music and everyone running on the beach in slow motion, where the Scottish guy refused to run his best event in the 1924 Olympics because the heats were scheduled on a Sunday, but ended up winning an Olympic gold medal in a different event? He was born in Tianjin, lived and served in Tianjin, has memorials in Tianjin, and died of an undiagnosed brain tumour as a P.O.W. in a Japanese internment camp near the end of World War II. We’ve been to his house, which is apparently finally being partly restored.

My only beef with Eric Liddell: Pure Gold, the latest Eric Liddell biography, is that I couldn’t get a feel for what kind of guy he was – what it might have been like to interact with him – until near the end of the book after he’d already died. The author desires to present Liddell as an inspirational Christian role model, and this becomes the book’s tragic flaw. Instead of letting Liddell’s inspiring life and character speak for themselves, the author coats the narrative in an artificial layer of Evangelical-ese, going out his way to over-emphasize and massage the aspects of Liddell’s spirituality that resonate in the popular Evangelical market. In the end, the Evangelical gene pool misses out on some potentially beneficial diversity, and the author produces a biography that reads a little too much like hagiography.*

Liddell comes across as so virtually perfect that he doesn’t seem real. The few token flaws mentioned are so minor and forgivable that they just reinforce the impression of an impossibly high degree of saintliness. It chaps my hide all the more because Eric Liddell’s life doesn’t need an author to compensate for it; his story is plenty inspiring and admirable in and of itself. Being able to see that this was a real man with whom we can relate and connect would make the story all the more compelling.

I finally found a pulse on this book’s Eric Liddell near the end, when the author quotes from an unnamed internee’s personal diary, written soon after Liddell’s unexpected passing in 1945:

He was not particularly clever, and not conspicuously able, but he was good. He was naturally reserved and tended to live in a world of his own, but he gave of himself unstintedly. His reserve did not prevent him from mixing with everybody and being known by everybody, but he always shrank from revealing his deepest needs and distresses, so that whilst he bore the burdens of many, very few could help to bear his.

His fame as an athlete helped him a good deal. He certainly didn’t look like a great runner, but the fact that he had been one gave him a self-confidence that men of his type don’t often have. He wasn’t a great leader, or an inspired thinker, but he knew what he ought to do, and he did it. He was a true disciple of the Master and worthy of the highest of places amongst the saints gathered in the Church triumphant. We have lost of our best, but we have gained a fragrant memory. (285)

This entry, for me, put some flesh and bones on the Eric Liddell of history, and in a way salvaged the whole book for me. I can look back at the stories and imagine a real, living and breathing brother, teammate, teacher, co-worker, husband, and father, rather than merely seeing a stock Evangelical archetype labeled “Eric Liddell.”

Historically, this book opens a window into the lives of missionary families of the day, how family members were often separated by oceans for long periods of time, dependent on written letters for news in an unstable time of civil and world war. The book offers only minimum detail regarding the larger, momentously consequential historical setting of aggressive Western economic imperialism (Liddell lived in Tianjin’s British ‘concession area’) and the brutal Japanese occupation of China. The Chinese people and culture of the time period, and Liddell’s interaction with them, also receive minimal attention. The bibliography is quite impressive; the author obviously did his homework. I just wish he’d backed off a bit and let us hear the story speak for itself.

Rumour has it that there’s an old man who sometimes attends one of the local churches here who actually remembers Eric Liddell, and who likes to give tours to all the related places of interest. Friends of ours did this a couple years ago. We just might hunt that guy down.

———

*(hagiography - an idealized, overly romanticized, and usually partially-fictionalized pseudo-biography intending to present the subject as worthy of admiration and imitation.)

We went for walk today on the canal. Here’s a many-layered Jessica, with an ice-fisherman in the background. There is a city back there… you just can’t see it for all the “fog.”

Jessica is still sick, but managed to get out for a walk this afternoon. It’s her birthday week, so I’m trying to be a good husband. We’re hoping she’s feeling good by this weekend, when we plan to go with friends and skate on the artificial lake up the road.

Unlike most of you, our year hasn’t ended yet. Normally we’d be starting a new semester, feeling as if another page was turned or mile marker laid down during all the Christmas and New Year’s family festivities. But this time we’re missing that feeling; our rhythm is off. Imagine if it was still last semester for you and the big holidays were still coming up, even though it’s mid-January. That’s what it’s like. For us, it’s the last week of school, and then winter break just begins. The supermarkets are packed with people getting ready for the holidays. It’s weird – Christmas came and went, although in a much less spectacular fashion, and it still feels like 2008 hasn’t arrived.

Anyway, Jessica’s 29 now, and still getting hotter every year!

Yesterday we went to the spectacularly named Tianjin Museum (天津博物馆). It was built in 2004 to commemorate Tianjin’s 600th birthday, and focuses on Tianjin’s role in China’s modern history (from the first Opium War against the foreign imperialist aggressors in 1840 to Liberation in 1949).

The museum is well done, all bilingual and with the best (though not perfect) English I’ve seen so far in China. Two especially eye-catching displays are worth mentioning, because they give us a glimpse of the roles foreigners play in China’s historical narrative, and the prescribed view of the current general situation.

You may be wondering about the burning cross pictured above. The museum has a huge mural portraying Tianjin from 1840-1949, and this is a detail depicting the “Tianjin Incident,” which is called the “Tianjin Massacre” in the West. Rumours had apparently spread that the nuns, running an orphanage for sick and abandoned children, were actually eating the children. I suppose it’s not so crazy: strange people in strange clothes take great interest in children no one cares about, the children occasionally die in their care, lose the Eucharist somewhere in translation, and plop the whole situation in the middle of an intense historical context where anti-foreign sentiment is already running high. The situation was just waiting for a spark. Anyway, one thing led to another and the cathedral (pictured top centre), which we’ve seen in real life, was burned in 1870 by rioting locals. Over 20 nuns and priests, and almost double the number of local converts, were murdered. But the price of Western blood was high and France extracted heavy reparations, which, as you can see, China has not forgotten.

Western powers instigated the First Opium War (1839-42), which consequently forced southern China wide open to the mercy of Western economic interests (that’s how the British got Hong Kong). The Second Opium War (1856-60) was the same story in the north, and was fought on Tianjin’s doorstep.

The people of every nation spin their history, and China is no different, though they seem to spin their’s with a certain unapologetic flair we don’t often get in the West.

Here’s the Preface, verbatim, posted at the entrance to the exhibit:

The past hundred years after the Opium War, the Chinese nation had undergone the semi-feudal and semi-colonial miserable experience. During this period, Tianjin historically became the forefront where Chinese and Western civilizations collided with each other. In the life-and-death struggle for the defense of the Chinese nation, Tianjin more than once became the main battlefield in the resistance against foreign invasion. Faced with the challenges of “free trade,” Tianjin blazed a trail to Chinese modernization the hard way, became the center of disseminating industrial civilization in North China, and began the historical journey proceeding from inland rivers to seas and oceans, and from the domestic ferry terminals to the integration with the world system.

The struggle and rise of Tianjin in modern times constituted the theme of the recent development and vicissitudes in China mirrored the two big problems China ran up against in modern times: national contradictions between China and foreign countries and the crisis arising from development at home, and epitomized the brilliant road the Chinese people took in modern times in safeguarding independence, pursuing freedom and greeting liberation.

Tianjin was founded 600 years ago, serving as the customs and trade port for Beijing. The Dagu forts, pictured immediately above, below, and right, were where foreign armies crushed the Chinese defenses and worked their way upriver to Tianjin, and eventually Beijing. The photo on the right shows the what was left of one of the Dagu forts after Allied Forces overran it during the Second Opium War. All the material I’ve seen so far on the Opium Wars includes this photo.

From a display panel:

In June 1840, in the flames and smoke of gunpowder of the Opium War, China was plunged into the abyss of semi-feudal and semi-colonial disasters in history. As a sea gateway to the capital, Tianjin became the first choice of Western powers for political blackmail and military attack against China, and therefore inevitably became the more forefront of resistance of the Chinese people against foreign invaders in modern history. The three heroic and stirring battles at Dagukou, the world-shocking Tianjin Incident, and the Boxer Uprising in 1900 which inflicted heavy blows on the Allied Forces of the Eight Powers, the battle for the defense of Laoxikai — all these showed to the world the spirit of the people of Tianjin to fight the aggressors to the last drop of thir blood.

As you step out of a darker, grey, drab room of foreign occupation into a brighter, red room of military victory and patriotism, you approach the museum’s final display. You find yourself standing before a huge open doorway. On the other side you can look out over railing, before which stands a microphone just like the one Mao used to declare the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 from atop the Gate of Heavenly peace (one local with us knew all the words by heart). But instead of seeing Tiananmen Square like you would expect, a red-toned Chinese landscape reaches into the distance over Great Wall-capped mountain ridges. I think they’re trying to make a point.

CSL, as in, “Chinese as a Second Language,” not, “China’s Sassy Lyrics,” though either works for this song. One of our friends downloaded a bunch of popular Chinese songs for us this weekend. He said if I learn them, I could be the King of Karaoke (K歌之王). This is the “MV” (卡拉OK version!) for “中國話” by S.H.E. You gotta at least watch through the first chorus (lyrics below):

(If the video doesn’t work, you can probably see it here, here, and here.) Or you can listen to the mp3:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The chorus says:

The whole world is learning Chinese
Confucius’ words are becoming more and more international
The whole world is speaking Chinese
What we say makes all the people of the world listen up!

In the verses, they alternate rapping Chinese tongue twisters with little stories of Chinese culture spreading around the world (like, “In London, Marilyn bought a qí páo as a gift for her mother”), and lines like this:

People of every skin color
People with hair of every color
What they’re reading, what they’re saying…
Chinese is becoming the new trend

How many years did we painstakingly practice English pronunciation and learn their grammar?
For a change, now it’s their turn to get their tongues all in a knot!
How smart the Chinese are! How beautiful the Chinese language is!

The black guy at the end, with the Shanghai skyline in the background, says: “Pardon me, where’s the nán xiáng xiǎo lóng?” in typical language student style Chinese (请问，南翔小笼在哪里?).

Our school’s teachers performed this song karaoke-style for last semester’s China Night.

S.H.E. is an impossibly-white, inhumanely-photoshopped girl group from Taiwan. You can see them sing this 2006 hit live here.

See a full translation of the lyrics here (thanks to tammiest@AsianFanatics). You might notice that the karaoke Chinese characters are different from the characters I’ve provided. I’ve used simplified characters (the Mainland’s script); the karaoke video uses traditional characters (the more complicated characters used by Hong Kong and Taiwan).

Ha… are you scared yet? ;)

Pronounced: hǎi dài
Literally: seaweed (kelp)
Means: a derogatory term for Chinese who go overseas to study, but return to move back home without a prestigious degree or highly profitable job skills. This is replacing the more positive term “sea turtles,” which in the past referred to the privileged few who studied overseas and returned with impressive and lucrative credentials. As the opportunity to study overseas becomes more common, the enormous expectations from family that often go with it are sometimes unmet.

This is the nation where there are already thousands of infants named after the Olympics. Why does hosting the Olympics mean so much to Mainlanders? Two keys to unlocking the answers are reflected in this rather cool Olympic-themed ad (1 min.):

When it comes to understanding what hosting the 2008 Olympics means to Mainlanders, (1) nationalized “face,” and (2) Mainlanders’ thick, bright dividing line between “them” from “us” are two crucial pieces of a still bigger puzzle. This post is just my guesses/hunches/wonderings about nationalized “face” right now in China. Soon I’ll post some experiences, half-baked current understanding, and maybe a little venting about the Mainland’s “them” vs. “us” mentality.

Regaining Face at the National/Cultural/Racial Level
That video could have shown equality-enjoying multi-cultural masses working in harmony to help athletes achieve new heights – you know, Olympic ideals and all that. But it doesn’t, because for Mainlanders the Olympics aren’t so much about that. It’s more about Mainlanders as a national/cultural/racial entity getting face. The one possible role left open to us non-Chinese is that of competitors to be rallied against, foils against which bigger face can be realized. I guarantee you the 2010 Vancouver games (which have their own cultural identity issues) will not be showing an all-white version of this video. This kind of “face” makes no sense in Canadian culture, and it’s a cultural sin to publicly strengthen racial and cultural divisions like that.

Maybe you think that’s a little harsh, a little over-interpreted. I don’t think it is. Maybe it’s just my culture stress talking. Or maybe I’m just stating the obvious: that at a very deep level, hosting the Olympics is a huge step toward China recovering the “face” lost to the West at a national/cultural/racial level during the modern era, and that since recovering this face requires a demonstrated superiority over the West, it necessitates the strengthening of an already-thick dividing line between “insiders” (Mainlanders) and “outsiders” (foreigners). For the Mainland, non-Chinese are the national/cultural/racial identity-galvanizing Other.

Nationalized “Face” is Crucial and Powerful
It might be hard to accept that something as ambiguous and foreign as “face” could be this important. If the West has never really needed it and it’s so hard to explain, does it really matter? Yes. I’m not making (most of) this up. Why is China putting men in space and hosting Olympic games when millions live in poverty and the environment is hemorrhaging? From 林语堂 (Lín Yǔtáng)’s My Country, My People:

Abstract and intangible, [face] is yet the most delicate standard by which Chinese social intercourse is regulated.
[...]
Face cannot be translated or defined. It is like honor and is not honor. It cannot be purchased with money, and gives a man or woman a material pride. It is hollow and is what men fight for and many women die for. It is invisible and yet by definition exists by being shown to the public. It exists in the ether and yet can be heard, and sounds eminently respectable and solid. It is amenable, not to reason but to social convention. It protracts lawsuits, breaks up family fortunes, causes murders and suicides, and yet it often makes a man out of a renegade who has been insulted by his fellow townsmen, and it is prized above all earthly possessions. It is more powerful than fate or favor, and more respected than the constitution. It often decides a military victory or defeat, and can demolish a whole government ministry. It is that hollow thing which men in China live by. (195-196)

There is a fascinating, first-person account of China’s last 30 years of change here, which gives us glimpses of the intersection between the Olympics, nationalized face, and today’s China:

… he insisted, saying he just wanted to be there—”one of only a few million Chinese to see the moment.” He was eager for China to get back the land taken from the spineless Manchu dynasty more than half a century before Mao took power. “As a kid, I had the history of the Opium Wars drummed into me,” he said. “It was the biggest humiliation in history. We hated the British for that.” And for what came after. He recalled seeing burly cops—turbaned Sikhs from British India—beating Chinese beggars and prostitutes in Shanghai’s International Concession in the 1930s.

Papa came to Hong Kong to watch the handover ceremonies in the company of old friends. I remember Prince Charles delivering a stiff-lipped farewell speech while a summer downpour dripped from his cheeks and chin. One flaglowering event featured a team of three motley Brits, mismatched in height and gait, and each in a different outfit. One wore a kilt. They made a sad contrast to China’s towering honor guards, perfectly synchronized in their movements and wearing impeccably tailored uniforms. A PLA soldier unfurled a gigantic Chinese national flag with a single fluid motion and a snap so loud and clear you could practically feel it. A burst of pride and vindication swept through millions of Chinese—my father included.

How powerful and crucial is nationalized face? It’s the key to public confidence:

China’s leaders needed the Games the same way they needed Hong Kong. They had to keep earning the public’s confidence—what used to be called the Mandate of Heaven—with ever bigger and better achievements: joining the World Trade Organization, putting their own man in space, building the world’s biggest dam, the highest railway, even the tallest Ferris wheel. At some level all Chinese are driven by the dream of reclaiming their ancient imperial glory.

“Our China” and “Your America”
Mainlanders generally perceive a greater relationship between the status of the nation and its people than Westerners typically do. (This becomes rather ironic if we contrast the role played by the American people with that of the Mainland Chinese public in each nation’s respective political system.) “Our China” and “Your America” are standard ways of talking about countries here; personal and national identities are more intertwined. You can see Mainlanders use these phrases in some of the comments under the article quoted above.

We don’t care much about “face” in the West, not as much or in the same way as Mainland Chinese do, and over here it’s bred on a national level. Mainlanders are highly motivated (and able-to-be-motivated) to regain the national face they lost to the West in the modern era. The national disgrace of the Opium Wars in the mid-1800′s and the perceived continued belligerence of the USA burns hotter and closer to the surface of public consciousness than any of the more recent self-inflicted tragedies from the last half of the 20th century.

And unlike North America’s nations of immigrants, or increasingly culturally and ethnically diverse Western Europe, the line between “insider” (Mainland Chinese people and national interests) and “outsider” (foreigners, foreign nations and interests) is much clearer and thicker. The more powerful China becomes – the more “face” China perceives itself to have – the more the West will need to understand it.

Ways of understanding and expressing love vary greatly within a culture, never mind across different cultures. This morning I stumbled upon an almost unbelievable cultural difference between China and North America. I don’t understand it; I only just heard of it for the first time less than two hours ago, but here it is.

We were in the student’s break room after the first hour of class this morning. Some students had had a Chinese friend who’d just had a death in the family, and they were discussing how the family had dealt with the illness. As I listened, I actually wondered if there had been some major misunderstanding on the part of the foreigners, even though they were advanced language students with years of experience in China, so I spent the whole next hour in class asking my teacher about it.

It turns out that in China, families will often not tell a terminally ill family member that he or she is terminally ill. They’ll make up reasons for why they’re in the hospital, why they need an I.V., etc, and play it off as long as they can, often never actually discussing it with the dying person. Nor will they tell family members living elsewhere that someone has died, or is seriously sick, or is scheduled for a major operation until long (sometimes months) after the fact.

My teacher used the example of her grandfather, who died of a brain tumour. She was a little emotional in talking about it. Her mother is a nurse, and there was no question that his illness was terminal. The doctor, as usual, only discussed the illness with the family out of earshot of the grandfather. The family told the grandfather that he had some other, not-too-serious condition because, she said, they didn’t want him to lose hope (even though there was none) and they wanted him to be more comfortable. They spent more time with him, made him his favourite foods, and tried to make his last days special – but not, she said, for the purpose of implicitly letting him know that he was terminal.

Chinese people are often afraid, she said, that if the person knows there is no hope for recovery, then they will completely lose the will to live, stop eating, that sort of thing. Apparently the sense of duty to and fear of being a burden on one’s family is huge, and it’s not uncommon for terminally ill people to try to hasten their own death or commit suicide outright. She said she thinks many terminally ill people eventually figure it out, when (her examples) they can no longer move, speak, or eat and go to the bathroom unaided. She also said that people don’t have hope for the afterlife like (as she understands it) Western people do. In popular Chinese folk belief, everyone goes to the underworld – a not very nice place that you have to bribe your way through to get out of (hence the burning of paper money). It’s not anything to look forward to or celebrate. So apparently telling someone who has little hope in a next life and who greatly fears being a burden on their family that they are terminally ill is not a very loving thing to do. It’s considered more loving to withhold the information and not let the person worry about being a hopeless burden to their family.

Apparently family members also ‘protect’ one another from distressing, inconvenient bad news. When her grandfather died, my teacher didn’t know until two weeks after the fact because at the time she was living in another city and he family waited to inform her.

I can’t imagine my family withholding that kind of information from me, or withholding it from a family member myself. Exceptional circumstances aside, it just isn’t even a possibility.

Hear that? That pitiful, high-pitched whimpering from a lonely corner in some far off accessories store? That’s Hello Kitty, upset because she’s been conspicuously left out.

Unlike China, for whom hosting the 2008 Olympics signifies an historical milestone in China’s long march from self-perceived humiliated victim of foreign imperialism to top-tier, face-gaining global big-shot, Vancouverites aren’t sure exactly what to make of the 2010 Olympics, or how to present themselves to the world. Enter 2008′s Fuwa rejectsthe 2010 Olympic mascots: Miga the mutating, surfing “sea-bear,” Quatchi the hockey-playing sasquatch, Sumi (really, he’s not Japanese) the Orca-hat-wearing black-bear-legged thunderbird guardian spirit (we’re spiritual in British Columbia), and Mukmuk the virtual (yes, virtual) marmot:

It doesn’t bother me that they’re aimed at kids. And sasquatches, bears, orcas, thunderbirds all have potential for Vancouver, especially hockey-playing sasquatches (Vancouver Island marmots?… not so much). I’m not sure if Sumi, Quatchi, or Miga can speak English, but neither could half of my neighbours, growing up in North Delta. And I actually like the Fuwas, which are so Chinese in so many ways, including, rumour has it, having to have five instead of one because they allegedly didn’t want to make people lose face.

But apparently no one informed Vancouver that China already has five Fuwas and doesn’t need three more. If you doubt me, here are two cute and conspicuously similar Olympic mascot intro cartoons, first for the Fuwas, then for the spiritual mutants, or whatever they’re called:

Now, I know that out on the West Coast we don’t have much distinctive cultural identity – especially if you take the Americans out of the equation and leave no one for us to turn up our noses at – but why more Fuwas? The Fuwas are so Chinese; they just ooze China-ness. But you look at Vancouver’s mascots and it’s like, what, hairy anime? And where’s Hello Kitty? Apparently I’m not the only Canuck who’s not all that impressed.

I suppose this is what happens when a city on the west coast of the New World needs to fabricatedisplay some cultural distinctiveness: we “borrow” from the First Nations cultures that we bulldozed on our way in, yet mysteriously somehow end up Asia-ified anyway. And to be fair, Mainland Chinese understand their relationship to their nation (and therefore the Olympics) differently than Canadians do (that’s for the next post!), and it’s hardly fair to expect the west coast of the New World to have a deep, distinctive cultural identity. Who knows, maybe part of the reason a lot of people are less than thrilled with the 2010 mascots is because they’re uncomfortable with the amount of Asian/foreign influence in Vancouver/Canadian culture already, and these mascots merely reflect that. Or, put another way, maybe the white, English-speaking Vancouverites are having a hard time connecting to Olympic mascots that seem so… foreign.

I felt the hockey-playing sasquatch had potential. You can see more of the spiritual mutantsVancouver 2010 Olympic mascots at their official site.

The next post will explore what hosting the Olympics means to Mainland Chinese (answer: a whole heck of lot more than it does to Canadians!).