Our first major international experiences were in Africa, and we still have a special interest in its places and peoples. This 24 minute video goes where the kids “think all white people are Chinese” and talks to an interesting cast ensemble: the ultimate Chinese migrant workers who’ve discovered that the real Africa isn’t exactly like the one they were sold in China, an Angolan government official who loves China’s “no strings attached” policy with regard to where the aid money goes, Angolan construction “helpers” who can’t pronounce their Chinese co-workers’ names, and some articulate young Angolans who believe that despite what it looks like, China’s involvement is not really helping their country.

(From The Current via CDT):

How authentically Chinese is a Chinatown in Angola? They have lǎowài singing Hotel California during drunken karaoke sessions.

Related Articles:

• Deciphering the Sino-Africa saga
• Audio slideshow: Africans in Guangzhou
• Uganda through the eyes of Mainlanders
• China colonizing Africa?

Daily Public Drama
Yesterday, around 11am. We hear the yelling even before we step into the Vancouver Skytrain car. A man and a woman, both of whom look like they’ve spent the last fifty-some-odd years getting kicked around at the margins of society, are loudly cursing each other out in uncreative but effective terms. Their crowded fellow passengers appear tolerantly disinterested, but many discreetly pay attention from the corner of their eyes, including Jessica and I as we sit down; they look like what people call “junkies,” who can be unstable and unpredictable.

The train starts to move, more yelling, I look away. Suddenly Jessica says, “Wow he just slapped her!” I look up just in time to see a 20-something man, who is sitting directly behind the violent man, reach over the chair and force him down into his seat, pinning his arms: “I don’t [expletive] care what your [expletive] problems are!” He angrily tells the man while refusing to loosen his grip. “You don’t [expletive] hit a woman! I’ll hold you here ’til the police come, I don’t care!” Someone’s already hit the silent alarm, and in less than a minute we arrive at the next stop where Skytrain security escorts the pair off. The rest of us, including the colourfully-spoken Good Samaritan, continue on to the next stop.

A Cross-cultural Difference
Most aspects of this scene we witnessed yesterday on Canadian public transit — people causing a ruckus, foul language — are unremarkable in both Vancouver and China. But one aspect that was unremarkable for the passengers in the Skytrain car would seem suspiciously out of place in Tianjin: a stranger unhesitatingly intervened on behalf of a person he doesn’t know but who is in distress. Like Vancouver, China also has occasional public situations that cry out for the intervention of a Good Samaritan, but for a lot of different reasons, Mainlanders won’t usually intervene.

I experienced almost the same situation in Tianjin. I was riding a crowded bus when a man started kicking a woman, whom he’d been arguing with. No one did anything. I stepped in between them but looked away, not engaging either one; it was a passive-aggressive intervention but it forced the guy to stop. If I hadn’t stepped in, it would have been the same as all the other times we’ve seen women or children beaten in public, or traffic accident victims laying in the road — some would have watched, but no one would have moved quickly (if at all) to intervene.

A Cross-cultural Problem
The problem — well, one of several problems — is that when Average Joe Canadians like yesterday’s Skytrain Good Samaritan go to China and encounter certain inevitable situations, they’ll instinctively want to intervene and be appalled at the Chinese public’s unapologetic apathy. They’ll feel they should intervene, that it’s the right, good, and moral thing to do. Allowing a woman or child to be beaten in public or an accident victim to lay unassisted in the road (all of which we’ve personally witnessed) seems wrong to them. But in China there are different rules for playing Good Samaritan, and well-intentioned would-be Good Samaritans could be entering a world of trouble; there are reasons why people in China are hesitant to help.

How do you be a Good Samaritan in China?
My point is not to demonstrate, however dubiously, that foreigners are somehow generally more moral than Chinese. The title “Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics” points to a goal that I think will benefit both foreigners and Chinese: working out how to act as Good Samaritans (intervene in certain public situations) in a way that, although perhaps necessarily steps outside the Mainland’s current social norms, is sensitive to and makes sense within a Chinese cultural context.

Chances are that Western foreigners in China will find themselves in situations where they want to act, but acting in those situations is precarious. Rather than just telling them to not act (and thus violate their consciences… at least, those foreigners in China who actually have consciences), I think it’s better to ask how to act.

What does a Chinese Good Samaritan look like? How would he or she intervene? The questions contains two necessary assumptions: (1) that the person is Chinese (or a culturally-informed foreigner), and (2) that they will act as a Good Samaritan when the situation calls for it. How can a Mainlander act as a Good Samaritan without getting into or causing too much extra trouble?

The best answers to questions like these will come from cultural insiders, not outsiders; only Chinese people have the necessary cultural insight to create the best answers to these kinds of questions. But since we lǎowàis have to live and act in China, the question is still relevant for us, too. Ideally, of course, Chinese and foreigners in China would explore solutions together (just don’t start holding hands and singing Kum Buy Ya, or I’m out).

This goal is no doubt beyond the scope of a single blog post, but I hope we can at least start people thinking and maybe collect a few good ideas.

Related Articles:

• The Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.2): explanations, excuses, & scapegoats
• The Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.1): examples
• About sharing the uglier sides of our China experience
• Judging China

Our friend Shannon, an English teacher in Tianjin, was interviewed by a former student for a project. The student wrote an article in English about Shannon and it’s posted on her blog: “Her Laughter Lit the Cafeteria”

After interviewing neighbours in Chinese and writing up their profiles, it’s fun for me to see it go the other way and have a 外国人 be the interviewee.

Marriage markets are much less sinister than the idea sounds, and one made the news yesterday: “In China, panicked parents fish for mates.” We’ve made a few trips to Tianjin’s marriage market, which always has friendly crowds and makes a great place for language students to practice.

See photos of our personal encounters with Tianjin’s marriage market here, here, and here.

I know: “fun” and “the Cultural Revolution” don’t go together. But here are some translated jokes and snippets of conversations from the Cultural Revolution era that make word-plays in Chinese.

You can also see some colour photographs from the Cultural Revolution and read about former Red Guard’s reactions to them in a Shanghai gallery here.

This April 2009 review of Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem (狼图腾) explores both the intended and unintended meanings that account for the popularity and controversy of this national bestseller.

For me personally, the Mainland’s grandparents and great-grandparents are China’s most interesting generation. As soon as I could string a few sentences together I was trying to get our neighbours to tell us about their stories and experiences. But Xinran, the author of China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation, is Chinese, and this means she can go light-years farther in an interview than I can with my novice Mandarin, mere beginner’s cultural understanding, white face, and 大鼻子。

In China Witness she’s interviewed twenty people, all at least in their 70’s, in order to “help our future understand our past.” She had to deal with the expected hurdle of actually getting her interviewees to share their own stories, and this led to some interesting remarks about individual and collective Chinese identities, generational differences, the importance of remembering these particular chapters in China’s modern history and their connection to individual and national dignity, and the real danger of those experiences never being shared. Everything that follows comes from the book’s Introduction.

“This book is a testament to the dignity of modern Chinese lives.
[. . .]
“For Chinese people, it is not easy to speak openly and publicly about what we truly think and feel. And yet this is exactly what I have wanted to record: the emotional responses to the dramatic changes of the last century. I wanted my interviewees to bear witness to Chinese history. Many Chinese would think this a foolish, even a crazy thing to undertake — almost no one in China today believes you can get their men and women to tell the truth. But this madness has taken hold of me, and will not let me go: I cannot believe that Chinese people always take the truth of their lives with them to the grave” [p.1].

“…China’s freedom of speech continues to be hedged with idiotic obstinacy, ignorance, and fear.

“But I can wait no longer. Thanks to the destruction of the Cultural Revolution, and the ongoing censorship of the media and control of school textbooks, China’s younger generations are losing with earlier generations’ struggles for national dignity. The individuals who fought for twentieth-century China are mocked and dismissed for their unquestioning loyalty to now outmoded revolutionary ideals. As they search for new values against the uncertainties of the present and the debunking of the past, many young people today refuse to believe that, without the contributions of their grandparents and great-grandparents, the confident, modernising China they now know would not exist” [p.2].

“After almost twenty years of interviews and research as a journalist, I am worried that the truth of China’s modern history — along with our quest for national dignity — will be buried with my parents’ generation” [p.2-3].

“When I said that I would talk to them in person, my interviewees began to get cold feet; even to pull out completely. More and more subjects became out of bounds; some asked not to be filmed, or taped; others asked me if I knew what might happen after the interviews were published. I could tell that they were torn between the yearning to take this opportunity — quite possibly the last of their lives — to speak out, and the anxiety for the possible consequences. Could I get hold of a government permit to speak to them? several people suggested. Or an official “interviewee protection” guarantee? As if the decision to talk about their lives was one for the Communist Party, rather than the individuals themselves, to make.

“All of which only confirmed what I already knew from two decades of working as a journalist in China. . . .the Chinese people have not yet succeeded in escaping the shadow of three millennia of imperial totalitarianism and a twentieth century of chaotic violence and oppression, to speak freely without fear of being punished by the prevailing regime” [p.7].

“For the last hundred years, the Chinese people have been hesitating between affirmation and denial of the self . . . Very few people can understand and define themselves as individuals, because all their descriptive vocabulary has been colonised by unified social and political structures. A person can readily respond to external stimuli — to political injustice, to frustrations at work, to the praise of others — but only rarely succeed in making independent sense of themselves” [p.9].

(You can buy China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation here.)

Related posts:

• Sharing Chinese New Year’s with the neighbours (Mr. Song & Mrs. Li)
• Meet Mrs. Shǐ – Striving Hard for a Stable Future
• Meet Mr. Lù – a living Léi Fēng
• Defining “You”
• Objects and Their Contexts
• Heros – and the Greater Good

“Political Confucianism” is the official ideology of choice in Mainland China, where some influential people are explicitly seeking to re-re-instate perennially useful Confucianism as China’s “state religion.” Here’s an explanation aimed at a Western audience by Wang Rui-Chang. For more introductory information, see “China: Dem0cracy, or Confucianism?”. There’s also “China repackaging Confucius” and “China unveils its ‘soft-power’ campaign: Canonize Confucius, no mention of Mao” as easy first introductions.

By coincidence, I also just today found this photo collection from the 1973-74 campaign to denounce Confucius.

Chinesepod just released their first episode of “The Menu Thief” — a funny language-learning episode well worth the four minutes.

Many a Chinese language student has pillaged local restaurants for language learning material. I did it myself during my first year and translated a menu from a local “dog meat specialty house,” which you can download. It was an eye-opened, to say the least.

Once a wàiguórén, always a wàiguórén
We’re so used to hearing it that I didn’t think about it at the time: my ESL student from Beijing was using wàiguórén (外国人; foreigner) to refer to the white people in a Vancouver shopping mall this weekend. Then while we were shopping for Chinese DVDs a group of college-age Chinese girls passed us. One of them said in Mandarin to her friends, “Those foreigners are speaking Chinese!” I’d heard that Mainlanders sometimes talk this way even when they’re the foreigners, but this was my first time hearing it for myself.

Is there a term for this? “Middle Kingdom syndrome” or something? These people talk like they already own the whole world! ;)

Yellow people
One time the retired guys on the neighbourhood bike repair corner stopped me and Jessica to have a discussion about our respective colours: “She’s white, and we’re yellow, but what are you?” (I’m a white guy who was once mistaken for an Indo-Canadian.)

When Mainlanders call themselves ‘yellow’ the meaning has several connotations: the ‘yellow earth’, ‘yellow emperor’, Yellow River, yellow skin; China and Chinese are ‘yellow’ but not in the same way as the older, racist American ‘yellow’.

Whites are stronger, African Americans are faster, Africans more energy-efficient
Last week a Chinese guy we know here in Vancouver matter-of-factly unpacked his theory about the differences between races: whites are bigger and stronger than Chinese, but African Americans have stronger joints and that’s why they’re faster than whites and Chinese. Africans are skinnier and can live on less food. Chinese generally have weaker constitutions than everyone else.

Of course some of the ways Mainlanders can treat outsiders provokes my culture stress, and “racist” is occasionally an accurate description of some commonly heard conversation. But I love the way people sometimes discuss perceived racial differences (or any topic considered sensitive in the West) in that bluntly Chinese matter-of-fact way without malice and with zero regard for Western political correctness. It makes me chuckle at both our cultures. Talk that’s totally innocent in China is a cultural sin where I grew up, and using it can be a total gas for people like me from the socially liberal West Coast.

Anyone else experience funny Chinese racial talk?

Related Posts:

• Aiya, Wen-ge-hua… 哎呀，温哥华……
• Please Stop Paying Attention to My…
• 关心 talk – so offensive it’s funny