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:

• Cultural Revolution
• Great Leap Forward
• Liberation

More than once I’ve found Andrew Hong’s Chinese Culture category to be a good source for easy introductions to basic, relevant Confucianism. Here’s the latest:

Confucianism – and the mandate of heaven (part 1)

Confucianism has a strong focus on the leader as the chief means for bringing about peace and harmony. And one important dynamic that shapes the Confucian leaders’ understanding of their place in all things is the concept of the Mandate of Heaven (tianming, 天命). And this concept continues to influence how Chinese leaders understand their role today. . .

I assume Confucianists would find plenty to pick at in these brief introductions – heck, I don’t even agree with some of his theology and exegesis – but if you know next to nothing about Confucianism, this is a handy place to start.

When it comes to talk about bodies, the Chinese play by a totally different set of rules. They are often brutally blunt by Western standards. And North Americans are often way over-sensitive by Chinese standards. Personally, I think they both have a point. But either way, any North American coming to China can expect to eventually be hit with direct comments about their appearance that no one except mean schoolyard bullies would say in their home countries — except usually the Chinese aren’t intending to be mean. We’ve had plenty of our own humourous and tear-producing encounters with this aspect of Chinese culture, and some are listed at the end of this post.

Anyway, an American friend of ours in Tianjin just shared this picture of a pack of men’s underwear over Facebook, which she took in a shopping center near her apartment. Whether this particular example reflects typical Chinese talk about bodies or merely a lack of translation skill, it’s a fine anecdote for illustrating this particular painful (to North Americans) cultural difference:

The Chinese on the package says (mouseover for pronunciation):

肥佬纯棉轻柔舒适三角裤
Fat guy, pure cotton, soft, snug briefs

Who says there’s no honesty in advertising?*

(*But then why isn’t he wearing the underwear in the picture?)

We’ve both written on this kind of thing before:

• 关心 talk: so offensive it’s funny
• Comfort Zone Violation #379 – Naked English Practice? (by Jessica!)
• Please stop paying attention to my… (by Jessica!)
• “No offensive” (by Jessica!)
• Too fat! Too thin!! Everyone’s got an opinion. (by Jessica!)
• Chinese “compliments” — English student edition

According to one of my one-on-one students who loves to monologue about Chinese politics, members of a certain ethnic and religious minority in China keep setting themselves on fire (see here here here here here here here here here here here and here) because they are greedy, ungrateful, and just trying to squeeze more money and privilege out of the benevolent government, which is already giving them a better deal than they deserve, and oh for the life of ethnic and religious minorities in China, they have it so good. (I generally avoid politics with my Chinese students and don’t bring it up, except for one time.)

Of course I’ve heard and read that opinion before; it’s part of the prescribed script in Mainland China. But when I heard it passionately delivered again this week by a 17-year-old ESL student from Shenzhen, some previously unconnected China anecdotes came to mind, reminding me that in China, people do empathy differently.

A policeman stops an ambulance with patient en-route to the hospital so a government official can come down the road unimpeded by traffic. [Link]

I’m wondering if — and if I were still in school this might make an interesting research project — collectivist cultures paradoxically tend to result in a lesser degree of personal empathy or ability to empathize, or in an alternate distribution of empathetic emotional energies (relatively more to in-group and less to strangers), or something. I’m not the first to wonder that, of course. Visitors to China who stay long enough often get conflicting impressions: locals can seem both incredibly attentive (to friends, family and connections) and shockingly callous (to strangers), depending on the situation. A quick google search turned up this article, which:

focuses on the propensity of Chinese young adults (age 30 and younger) to help strangers, investigating how the shift from collectivist values to individualism and universal morality may make young Chinese more likely than older Chinese to help strangers.

Obviously in China, as in any country, there would be multiple contributing factors to this kind of thing.

Anyway, let’s get on with the irresponsible use of cultural anecdotes. :)

If I wasn’t already familiar with China, I’m sure my jaw would have hit the floor when my student went off about the greedy T!bet@n self-immolators. Petty, selfish monks and greedy farmers, lighting themselves on fire like that! After asking him a few questions, it became clear that my student had never thought (and didn’t think it relevant at all) to find out from the people themselves why they were doing it — that was apparently unnecessary to understanding the situation. I don’t expect him to agree with the monks’ complaints or approve of their actions, but I was appalled at his apparent total lack of empathy. And that reminded me of many other startling lack-of-empathy anecdotes — not all of which are so serious:

• The Factory Girls author describes staying in one of her subject’s crowded village homes. The parents wake up extra early one morning for some reason and precede to talk at full-volume as if it doesn’t occur to them to be considerate of a house full of sleeping people.
• Brutal advice-giving and ‘help’ in tragic circumstances, for example, after a miscarriage, when the family members blame the mother directly for transgressing traditional Chinese pregnancy customs (of which there are legion);
• The apparent lack of a Good Samaritan ethos in traditional Chinese culture (which contains a whole string of specific anecdotes);
• Some forms of personal talk, where people draw attention to and comment publicly on aspects of each other that the other person probably doesn’t want commented on: you’re getting pretty fat, you’ve got some bad acne, etc.

None of these actually prove anything, of course. You can cherry pick and present anecdotes of any society to make it appear any way you want, but that doesn’t mean your anecdotes are truly representative. Anecdotes don’t prove anything. They can helpfully illustrate things if they are used appropriately, but I’m not even claiming that here. These are merely what came to mind when I heard my student’s take on the self-immolations.

But thinking it over also reminds me of situations where locals displayed attentiveness above and beyond what I would expect to see in North America; where people seemed way more “tuned-in” to others than I usually am. Two specific instances that immediately spring to mind involve two different couples (Chinese guy, American girl) where the husbands/fiances were way more tuned in to their wives/fiancees than I expected — they put the average American boyfriend to shame, and probably made their fiancees’ foreign girl friends jealous. All that to say, my student’s comments got me thinking about how empathy works in China, and how in at least some ways, they do it differently than we do in North America.

Referenced stuff:

• 关心 talk: so offensive it’s funny
• The Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.2): explanations, excuses, & scapegoats
• “Mao’s Great Famine” and China’s moral landscape
• A 16-year-old privileged Beijinger in Canada on this day in history

I know, I know — it’s “Inuit” not “Eskimo” and the whole ‘lots of words for snow’ thing doesn’t really hold water. But still, there are lots of ways to say “fake” in Chinese, and you can learn them! See: Chinese Words for “Fake”: 山寨 vs 盗版 vs 假冒

Conventional wisdom says that politics and religion don’t make polite small talk topics — they’re too contentious and people routinely fail to disagree respectfully. But there’s a third equally volatile, if perhaps overlooked, small talk landmine: parenting. And if you thought the disparity of good parenting opinions was wide among foreigners, imagine the scathing looks of scandal and judgment exchanged between foreign mothers and Chinese ayis across the preschool classroom. You can read a sample here: Everything is Dangerous: Taking care of children in China.

Foreign mothers and ayis generally make no attempt to talk to one another. During the slightly calmer snack break, ayis congregate around the table of children eating to keep a constant vigil as the mothers retreat to the back walls for a hard-earned chat with their girlfriends. The resentment is clear from both the ayi and the Chinese teachers, who delight in any chance to scoop up the plate of a fumbling child or help push in a chair, all the while staring daggers at the negligent chatting mothers. It was abundantly clear what was on their mind: they were doing it right, and we Westerners had a lot to learn. And maybe, in a way, they were right.

Parenting differences between Chinese and foreigners routinely generate loads of mutual amusement and scandal. Here’s a few of our own amusing experiences:

• Foreign Baby in Tianjin Pt. 2 — a rock star in the family
• “You’d better put socks on that baby or else…”
• Recent market conversations…
• Foreign Baby in China (topic)

From Nankai Rob’s Chinese New Year 2012 post “Spring Festival Time. . .Lock and Load“:
“…parties are held on a scale so massive that Caligula would have nodded in approval, and enough recreational munitions are set off to make the Battle of Waterloo feel like a suburban bar mitzvah. You’ll notice my careful word choice here: “recreational munitions” rather than “fireworks.” “Fireworks” as a term carries with it more celebratory, even innocent connotations, but you can’t define Chinese celebratory fireworks by the intent behind them. Certainly they’re set off with great excitement and joy, but you can, after all, also lob a grenade into a dumpster with great excitement and joy, and most of what is being set off these days qualifies for inclusion in the dumpster-grenade category. So: recreational munitions.”

For more about the genuinely stunning Chinese New Year fireworks phenomenon with photos and video, see:

• Happy Rabbits! Chinese New Year 2011 fireworks from Tianjin, China!
• Photo Gallery: Tianjin 2009-2010 Fall & Winter
• A little taste of Chinese New Year in our neighbourhood
• Fireworks

Happy Chinese New Year!

Interesting observations at China Law Blog about how Mainland Chinese students studying in the USA — in contrast to Chinese from other countries — are apparently generating a lot of anger among the American students: Chinese Students In America. It’s Bad Out There.

It seems that Mainland Chinese attitudes toward education don’t play well among their American classmates. For example:

“They cheat all the time. It is pretty unbelievable how often I have seen them cheating. I am always complaining to my professors about this, but they usually just act like they are too important to deign to deal with something like this. Just come watch a test being adminstered and it will be obvious. They are allowed to get away with it because they pay the foreign tuition rate.”

“One student told me of how all the students not from China agreed not to speak one day to see what would happen. There was no class discussion and the teacher asked them not to do it again.”

In China, Christmas Eve is actually called “Peaceful Night” (平安夜 — after the Chinese translation of the song “Silent Night”), but peaceful is the one thing it definitely isn’t. Here’s a short post about Christmas Eve in urban China, from a foreigner who’s witnessed it go from nothing to the spectacle it is today in just a few short years: Some Thoughts on “Ping An Ye” (Silent Night)
An here’s a Chinese perspective, translated into English: Christmas in Shanghai

For more about the odd creature Christmas Eve has become in China (with pictures!), see:

• Christmas Eve 2009 – Tianjin, China
• Merry… something, from Tianjin! :)
• Christmas Eve… with Chinese characteristics

In China, you should expect shenanigans. They’re such a part of daily life here that I sometimes wonder if the whole country would simply grind to a halt without them. Here’s an example from our previous year.

Our last apartment was rigged to get free electricity, and it turns out that this is apparently really common. One woman’s interesting-in-a-car-crash-sort-of-way first-hand account of attempting to rectify a similar situation in an apartment she’d bought makes a fine example. Sometimes you can’t do the lawful thing even if you want to because no one cares, even the people in charge of enforcing the law. It reminded me a little of our situation.

Like many apartments built in the same era, there’s an electricity box above the door in addition to the regular meter. There’s an electric key, like a USB stick, that you take down to an office and pay to have credits put on. Then you return home and briefly insert it into the slot in the box above the door to recharge the red, digital number showing on the outside. In our first apartment we did all this ourselves, but in this second apartment, the landlady wouldn’t give us the electricity key. When we first moved in we pushed her quite a bit to turn over the key because I wanted to avoid the hassle of having to contact her every time we were out of electricity. But she never produced the card, always making some excuse that didn’t add up.

But the red digital “3″ above the door never changed, no matter how much electricity we used. And the electricity never ran out. For two years. When we paid rent (every six months), the landlady would just look at the meter and calculate the cost of the electricity we’d used, and we’d pay her, all of us pretending together like we didn’t think anything was amiss. I seriously considered calling her out on the way she was simply pocketing the money we paid for electricity. I don’t mind paying electric bills, but if our money wasn’t going to go where it should then I didn’t want to throw it away.

We asked our more tactful Chinese friends how we could go about it (ask for a receipt?), but none of them could think of a way to do it that was likely to produce the result we wanted. So in the end, since success was doubtful but 麻烦 wasn’t, we didn’t bother, and that always bugged me. But after reading the translated account linked above and finding out some of the likely details of this kind of electricity theft, I’m glad we let that sleeping dog lie. I guess. Anyway, that other story is kind of funny:

“Who Is the Guilty Party?”
In less than half an hour, a slight man wearing the work robe of Electricity Bureau arrived. Within a minute of opening the electricity meter, he was done. Seeing suspicion in my look, the man said: “Rest assured. Wires corrected and the seal replaced. I’m from the Electricity Bureau myself and have done this job often. There will be no problem.”

I was curious: “You are often asked to change wires?”

He said frankly: “Illegal changes are naturally more than corrections. I do all. 500 yuan for an illegal change, not a penny less. For corrections I can give better prices.”

I saw a big wad of seals in his bag and suddenly understood: When the electricity meter was changed in the first place, the seal must have been removed; why did I see one that was intact? The only answer is: the Electricity Bureau’s staff must be the thief who steal what they are guarding (监守自盗). Who knows, perhaps the one who changed the wires last time was the same man today?

More stuff about living in a Chinese apartment:

• How to fix the drain gas problem in your Chinese apartment
• The Dragon has Raised its Head (and it’s driving us insane!)
• How your Chinese apartment affects your relationships with locals
• The Best Decisions We Ever Made in China (#1): ditching the laowai ghetto
• Baking with the neighbours & a word about Chinese apartments
• Negotiating rent in Chinglish – Round One
• How to: Stay warm before they turn the heat on
• Our current home by the numbers
• Hunting Tianjin apartments, armed with Chinglish