This is maybe the best Sexy Beijing so far, all about the public couples’ dancing in China’s parks (a daily sight for us) and different generations’ attitudes toward marriage.
I’m afraid the Macarena ladies of Tianjin just can’t compete with those hip-hop moms in Beijing.
Apparently there are now three genders in China, with the third being a relatively recent addition. Can you guess who? The photo below is what I copied off the board when my teacher explained it.
Keep guessing. I’ll explain in a minute. (Hint: “男” means male and “女” means female.)
In North America, if one spouse looks like a supermodel and the other ‘has a nice personality,’ it looks a little odd and/or suspicious to us. We’ll at least take notice. I can’t think of any marriages off the top of my head that transcend economic class lines. We (North Americans) start practicing for this in the junior high dating scene and keep at it all the way through college; best-friends and boyfriends/girlfriends are sorted and paired according to their relative degree of (imagined) sex appeal. And unlike our professors’ generations, education levels are more even between spouses. It gets a little more complicated after the school years, but the system is set. Generally, we aim roughly for a spouse who’s more or less our social equal.
But in China – according to my teachers – this is decidedly not the way to go, particularly as far as the men are concerned. A man feels the need to be a little higher than his woman, socially speaking. And this brings us to the chart from class in the photo:
My teacher just arbitrarily created these particular categories to make a point; she’s not saying that Mainlanders divide their society into four sections. But Mainlanders do typically plot each other on a well-defined social hierarchy; knowing one another’s relative social position is a necessity. Everyone knows where they stand status-wise in relation to everyone around them. This also came out in one of Jessica’s dating discussions with some local university students.
This idea that the man ought to be of higher status than his wife and that his superiority should be routinely affirmed by the methods of social interaction is rooted in the traditional Chinese concept of manhood, which involves (as my teachers described it) him coming home from work, sitting in front of the T.V., and ordering his wife around, who brings him whatever he wants while she slaves away cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and mothering. She should take orders and serve meekly, especially in front of her husband’s colleagues (when ‘face’ is at stake). They call Chinese-style chauvinism 大男子主义 – “Big-Man-ism” – and apparently Shandong province and Koreans are notorious for this. It’s part of the “feudal” pre-Liberation (1949) sexism that values men more than women (重男轻女; lit. “man heavy, light woman”).
Although my female teachers look down on this chauvinistic attitude, I seriously wonder who would generally be more attractive to the average Zhou Chinese female: a man of equal education and job prospects, or a man who’s a step up. I’m not talking about “gold-diggers” here; I want to know if a higher status male on average commands more genuine masculine attractiveness than an equal status male.
Now of course you ought to realize I don’t know anything about this myself; I’m just passing it along because it was interesting, a little funny, and a fascinating place to start asking culture questions, if you’re into that sort of thing.
The third gender? Women with Ph.Ds. These “A”-class women are so far outside the traditional definition of “woman” and have such trouble finding husbands and realizing the female roles of wife and mother that our teachers joke that they’re like a third gender.
Mainlanders – or at least a lot of powerful and influential people in China – want very, very badly to dominate in the Olympics.
““An astonishing amount of manpower, money and goods have been poured in, so much so that it’s inappropriate to be revealed publicly,” said Lu Yuanzhen, a professor of sports sociology… If the country’s athletes do not perform up to expectations, he added, “the entire nation and its people will lose face.”"
“The training regimen of foreign athletes by no means compares to ours, meaning the hours devoted to training, and the number of dives into the water. Chinese divers are professionals, which means they practice all day long, while Australians and Canadians might be a bank clerk or a dentist, who only spend two hours practicing after work.”
If you’re a North American or Western European and you haven’t heard this yet, you’re way overdue: “T!bet Through Chinese Eyes” by Kishore Mahbubani (Newsweek).
Popular advertising, like garbage, sometimes reveals embarrassing insights into any nation’s culture, China included. But in China, advertising often appeals to our less-than-noble human impulses in more honest and straightforward terms than is typically seen in North America. Take these two housing developments, for example: “Be a foreigner’s landlord!” and “Only for the elites who are influencing the world.” (They were eventually forced to change the ‘foreigner’s landlord’ billboards.)
One of my interviewees recently said,
…the Chinese people are extremely concerned with [the Olympics], however, Heaven isn’t helping out. After the Great Sichuan Earthquake happened, a lot of Chinese people lost confidence.
This is apparently a rather widespread, popular sentiment. Lately there’s been an unusual amount of firecrackers going off, especially in the evenings. It’s normal to hear the occasional wedding or funeral, but for the last two weeks or so it’s been more often than usual. So we asked around, and it turns out there are two different current firecracker-lighting concerns.
We only have sketchy details on the first one. Apparently this is the time of year when the Ghost King (鬼王) of Hades (阎王) – or something along those lines – comes to steal people’s virgins/children/unmarrieds (not so clear on the details). Parents are giving their children peaches to eat because “peach” (桃子) sounds like “escape” (逃), and they’re lighting off firecrackers to scare away the evil spirits.
But this year there are are additional firecrackers. People are trying to ward off China’s bad luck (运气). Rumours are circulating via text messages and the internet about how this is such an ill-fated year for China, with so many disasters coming in a year with so much at stake (all the national face and worldwide prestige invested in the Olympics). Turns out people are blaming/fearing the number 8 and, believe it or not, the Fuwas.
The number 8 is usually considered a lucky number because “eight” (八; bā) sounds like fā (发) from “get rich” (发财). People pay extra to have it in their phone number or on their license plate. The Olympics are scheduled to start on 2008-08-08 at 8:08:08pm (Take that!). However, people are saying that this year, 8 is a very unlucky number. The most popular reasons involve playing numerology with the dates of this year’s disasters:
And forget 666 as the Sign of the Beast. 888 is the sign of the (now evil) Fuwas! All but one of the Fuwas has associations with a disaster (talk about wolves in sheeps’ clothing!):
Global Voices Online has translated a Chinese blogger’s take on all this, which also neatly summarizes the 8/Fuwa superstitions.
And in case you’re thinking this is all superstitious nonsense, we both came down with colds after sleeping ‘under the stars’ on the Great Wall. Turns out the Chinese lunar calendar for that weekend said, “To avoid catching a cold, avoid sleeping outside at night.” Ha! So there!
P.S. – And in case you were wondering what the 2008 Olympics are really about, that translated blog post from Global Voices Online is quite revealing:
…But we should not associate these disasters with the Olympic Games. After all, the Olympics are China’s glory, the glory of the Chinese people, and the honor we’ve earned…
P.P.S. - I bring this up not to make fun of people, but just to point out how a lot of Mainlanders are personally invested in the Olympics and their country; a lot of people here care a lot on some level about the country as a whole.
P.P.P.S. – Don’t forget to click the Chinese characters to see the pronunciation and definition!
How China hopes to win more gold medals than the USA:
“In China, it’s the women who have traditionally racked up the medals. At the 2000 Games in Sydney, the Chinese women won five more gold medals than the men. In Athens in 2004, the women won 19 gold medals, while the men won 12. By comparison, American women accounted for 12 of the nation’s 35 gold medals in 2004.
‘Women know how to eat bitterness,’ says tennis coach Sun Jinfang.”
China Night (中文之夜) is an annual variety show that the students and teachers at our school put on, mostly just to give the students a fun way to use their Chinese. This year there were songs, games, comedy routines, dancing, a play, skits, crosstalk; it was really funny – I think partly because this year we could actually understand what was being said. The audience is mostly people associated with the school and their friends, plus some local university students.
Some of the acts were hilarious. In one game the students had to blow out ten candles as fast as they could by speaking vocabulary words that require aspiration (words starting with f, p, etc.), which they had to think up on their own and weren’t allowed to repeat. Another game used a line of ten people, with the first person acting out a vocabulary word for the second person, who then has to act it out for the third person, and all the way down until the last person has to guess what the vocabulary word was. One sequence that started out with “elevator” ended up with “squatty potty with no toilet paper.” We weren’t the only couple singing ridiculously cheesy love songs; the host and his wife sang the “I love you like mice love rice” song (老鼠爱大米).
Mouseover the photos to see the captions. Click them to see them bigger. We didn’t take any of these.
We sang a sappy duet (梁山伯与茱丽叶) and tried to ham it up for fun. It makes allusions to both Romeo and Juliet and the ‘butterfly lovers’ Liáng Shānbó and Zhù Yīngtái, Romeo and Juliet’s ancient Chinese equivalent. Like the Shakespeare play, they want to get married but the family says no and they end up dying. But they become butterflies fly away together after Zhù Yīngtái jumps into her lover’s tomb while on the way to her arranged marriage. (You can read more of the story here.)
Here’s the lyrics with a rough translation:
| 梁山伯与朱丽叶 / Liáng Shānbó & Juliet | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 我的心唱首歌给你听 歌词是如此的甜蜜 可是我害羞我没有勇气 对你说一句我爱你 为什么你还是不言不语 千言万语里 千言万语里 我爱你 你是我的茱丽叶 把爱 我爱你 你是我的罗密欧 美丽的爱情 |
My heart sings a song for you to hear The lyrics are so honey-sweet But I blush, I don’t have the courage To you to say the words ‘I love you’ Why do you still not speak? A thousand words in ten-thousand languages A thousand words in ten-thousand languages I love you, you’re my Juliet Hold love… I love you, you’re my Romeo Beautiful romance |
|||||||||
(You can see karaoke music video here.)
We both write, but Jessica only writes when I bribe her. See all of her posts here.
Pronounced: guāzǐ liǎn
Means: Melon-seed Face. One of the ideal Chinese face shapes.
Albert at Laowai Chinese introduces two ideal and two undesirable Chinese face shapes: The Four Faces of Chinese People (women, really)
- 2012/03/22
Eating Bitterness: an intro to the unprecedented Chinese migrant worker phenomenon
If you're unfamiliar with the urban migrant phenomenon in China -- as in, the people who make the stuff you buy and their lives -- then China’s Urban Immigrants: A Diet of Bitterness is a fine overview with lots of links for further reading.
"Chinese metropolises are now home to an estimated 200 million rural-to-urban migrants . . . who occupy a precarious place in the urban hierarchy: while urbanites appreciate their labor, they are less enthusiastic about the migrants’ presence in their cities."
For more on this topic you can browse our Migrant Workers category, or if you like documentaries, see these reviews of two good documentaries on migrant workers:
- 2012/05/10
Chairman Mao enshrined -- literally
When one of my young, very privileged Party-family students passionately told me, "Chairman Mao is like a god to us!" I understood he meant it as a simile. And the god metaphor is common when discussing Mao and his Cultural Revolution personality cult. But as it turns out, in some incredible irony, some other Chinese mean it literally. I heard about this before, but this is the first time I've found pictures -- Mao actually enshrined in a local temple: Mao Temple in China – Chairman Mao Becomes Local God.
For more about Mao and the Mao Era, you can browse these topics:
- 2012/05/08
A deeper look into the dynamics of living with Chinese propaganda
Two insightful posts from Seeing Red in China, which is probably my current favourite China blog, about living in an aggressively and explicitly propagandized environment, and how Chinese try to deal with it. The propaganda still works, but in ways different than us foreigners probably tend to assume. Without further ado:
I tell [my daughter] that she must not be afraid to take a clear moral stand. “If you see someone is being bullied,” I said, “speak up for that person.” “Be the keeper of the good.” [But] Chinese parents would have to think twice, three times, or even lose sleep, if they are to instill these values in their children, because these qualities won’t serve them very well in the Chinese society.
We've written lots on propaganda, mostly the Chinese kind, including translations of the propaganda we've encounter in China. You can find it all in our Propaganda category.
- 2012/05/06
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