If we do ‘math with Chinese characteristics,’ then we can say it’s been “60 Glorious Years” since the end of China’s civil war and the beginning of the current dynasty. Here are some interesting reflections from two very different Mainlanders who’ve lived through it all.

A poor Chinese lantern maker, born in 1934:

In my lifetime, we’ve been through so many political movements. All national ones which were no concern of ours, like the 1954 Suppress the Counter-Revolutionaries, the 1957 Anti-Rightest movement, the Cultural Revolution, sending intellectual youth to remote country areas, stuff like that. But I never stopped making lanterns. I never though making revolution meant getting rid of festival traditions! I always thought the reason I was brave enough to carry on with my craft in secret was because I wasn’t educated, and had no idea what feudalism, capitalism and revisionism meant. I didn’t know about Party principles, or what the revolutionary Four News were meant to be. I wasn’t the only one who didn’t understand that. Most ordinary people had about as little education as I did. In fact, how many of those anti-everything revolutionaries with their movements for this and that understood what is was all about? Making revolution was just a pretext for people to settle private scores. If those movements really had been good for China, then we wouldn’t have been poor for so many years. People today wouldn’t be so fixated on money, and wouldn’t ignore traditional arts like they do. [pg. 220]

From an interview with an American-born Chinese female general, born in 1930, who worked 40 years in military education:

Xinran (the author): After the end of the feudal Qing dynasty, China never stopped changing — from Empire to Republic took just a few years, and the change from GMD to CCP also happened quickly. Especially in the cities, regime change was really rapid. It’s like you said, in Shanghai people’s political outlook changed in twenty-four hours. How is it possible, in your view, for ordinary people to cope with such rapid change?

General Phoebe: Ordinary people don’t care. You change the dynasty or the emperor, it’s all the same to us. We’ll follow any emperor, so long as you don’t stop us going about our business . . . I think they got used to things, and didn’t care. It’s “I’ll obey anyone, any authority, who’s good to me”.

Xinran: Political authority is like a god for an awful lot of ordinary Chinese.

General Phoebe: Authority is very important, not just for a nation, but also within the family. The patriarch of the great Chinese family is an authority who cannot be disobeyed by family members. A family without an authority figure will quickly disintegrate; the children and grand-children may scatter, and some will begin to fight between themselves. Within the family, the main head of the family is basically a ruler. If he or she is an enlightened and wise one, then they can deal with all family relationship problems, and guarantee that future generations have family rules to follow – rules which can make those family ties indissoluble and keep generations together. When that authority weakens, then other family members may involuntarily gravitate towards a new authority, and this may bring conflict in its wake. Interestingly enough, we can see the reappearance in national history of the traditional cultural consciousness of the great Chinese family, as the “cells” of family life penetrate the bone and marrow of the nation. [pg.282]

(Quoted from China Witness: Voices from a Silent Generation by Xinran, a collection of extended personal interviews with members of China’s most fascinating generation.)

P.S. – This is more about people than politics. Please remember that in the comments.

Related Posts:

• Chinese women & high heels
• Mainlanders and their past; Mainlanders and their selves — from China Witness by Xinran
• Why Mainlanders are taking it personally, racially, and facially – the short answer
• What do the Olympics mean to “their China”?

If you’ve ever secretly harboured politically correct guilt over the impression that Chinese people “all look the same,” I’m here to absolve you with this little secret: …they do it on purpose, at least sometimes. See for yourself in this collection of photos showing how, after selecting soldiers of the same height, they’re training them to march in step for the Oct. 1 celebrations.

But people often resent being cloned, and it turns out some university students are apparently starting to chafe under the expectation that they forgo their summer break to practice for the Oct. 1 parade.

(A little more on Chinese people’s special appreciation for human symmetry here: What do the Olympics mean to “their China”?)

Dear Vancouverites,

Ever wondered what all the Chinese people around you are talking about? Given the amount of Chinese people in Vancouver, you may wonder this occasionally.

From what we’ve overheard, most of the time it’s not that interesting; they’re just talking about mundane daily stuff like everyone else: when to meet or where to go or what to eat, etc. But occasionally you get funny stuff like, “Those foreigners are speaking Chinese!” (referring to us, and I’m a white Vancouverite born and raised), Mandarin radio English-teaching spots that use the example of a marijuana bust to illustrate “the jig is up,” or really random stuff like what we overheard this weekend.

We were hiking in the forest near Deep Cove in North Vancouver when a Chinese couple passed us going the other way. They were in the middle of a conversation and as they passed the man said, “In China and Taiwan they don’t have big heads like in other countries.”

Do lǎowài have big heads? In Tianjin we’ve heard lots of remarks about foreigners being tall, having “high” noses, even having “three dimensional” faces (I was seriously impressed with that woman’s English vocabulary), but do we have big heads, too? No wonder people stare at us. ;)

Related Posts:

• A “foreigner” in my own country, “yellow” people, and other funny Chinese racial talk
• Aiya, Wen-ge-hua… 哎呀，温哥华……

An interesting set of photos covering the preparations, both official and personal, for China’s 60th anniversary celebrations, which are more important to China than the Olympics.

Shanghai Scrap compares experiences at Shanghai and U.S. hospitals, and locates the root of the dissimilarities not just in the different medical systems, but in deeper cultural differences in the approach to health care:

“I’ve never really been able to put my finger on what – precisely – it is that makes Chinese hospitals such culturally foreign experiences for expats … And, conversely, what makes American hospitals so foreign to Chinese.

Part of the problem, I think, is that I’ve always thought about this in terms of health care systems. But what … I really should have been thinking about health care cultures.”

Here’s an introduction to 婆媳关系 – the notoriously thorny and traditionally abusive Chinese mother-in-law/Chinese daughter-in-law relationship – from the perspective and personal experiences of an American woman married to a Chinese guy.

Jessica also wrote on this a while back, too: How to treat your mother-in-law’s son

You’ve maybe heard of the infamous online struggle sessions/witch hunts by thousands of online Mainlanders, usually criticizing and chasing down the personal details of someone guilty of offensive crimes for the purpose of giving the accused as much retribution as possible. Now there’s a documentary short (also found here) explaining the phenomenon and summarizing the biggest cases. Personally, echos of Red Guards and lynch mobs are a little too loud for my taste (Red Guards 2.0?) but “human flesh search engines” are not always used for punitive mob justice, and either way it’s an interesting cultural phenomenon.

Howard French’s latest Shanghai gallery features the inhabitants of a disappearing Shanghai. Photos here; essay here.

“…much has disappeared. The pace of redevelopment in Shanghai … has accelerated greatly, as the city hurtles toward its hosting of the World Exposition in May 2010.

Some of the neighborhoods where I did my early photography have already been demolished and in some cases already rebuilt, their old inhabitants long since scattered.

Fragments of other neighborhoods barely cling to existence, meanwhile, like doomed convicts, knowing the end is near.”

In three weeks we’ll leave for another couple years in China. Looking back over the last eight months in Vancouver, B.C. (unavoidably longer than we’d planned), I can see some things now about my re-entry adjustment (a.k.a. reverse culture stress experience) that I couldn’t see at the time.

After almost three years in Taiwan and China focusing on Chinese language and culture, we were initially out of our element when we came back to B.C., as we expected. I was a little hesitant, for example, to jump right back into city driving, among other things, but it didn’t take too long to function more or less normally again. Soon I was driving all over the place in Vancouver’s notorious traffic and it was second-nature.

But I’m realizing now that when it comes to people, like hanging out and stuff, I didn’t feel fully at home or totally relaxed or 100% not-more-awkward-than-normal until around six months in, maybe even later. I can look back now at particular social events and see how things weren’t normal for me — not that it was so bad or I couldn’t function, but that I didn’t feel totally myself and wasn’t as effortlessly engaged with people as I would have liked to be. In a few early instances I was a total dud, and I’d much rather blame reverse culture stress than my personality! ;) It feels much easier now after almost eight months, but of course we’re leaving again in a couple weeks. I guess that’s just how it goes. Hopefully when it’s time for 老二 to come along we’ll get to do it all again!

Related posts:

• Homecoming Saboteur: the cultural shock of returning home
• How to: Confuse the traffic in your hometown
• Temporary return to Vancouver – Day 5

A Taiwan-American couple who were grad school classmates in the States sent their first kid to preschool in China, and are now are sending the second one to preschool in Taiwan. As you can maybe imagine, cultural differences create a little friction when it involves your kids. The mom (bi-cultural Taiwanese) outlines a few in a blogpost:

1. Authority of the teacher
2. Individual verses corporate nature
3. Use of material resources
4. Language
5. Competition

See Hayden’s Preschool and Hayden’s preschool (part 2).