A grain of salt

I hadn’t had the desire to read Jung Chang’s Wild Swans until her Mao: The Unknown Story came out and caused a heated public debate. Wild Swans seemed to me yet another Cultural Revolution tear jerker which we Chinese had swallowed enough of. Recently, however, I became more and more intrigued by her book on Mao and decided to tackle the Wild Swans first.

The read has proved extremely informative and thought-provoking. For those of us who are so enamored by China’s economic miracle, the book is a somber reminder that very recently, the country was gripped by a mass frenzy called Mao worship. Unlike the other books I had read on that period, Chang’s book expertly intertwined personal tragedies with the various political upheavals in the past 100 years. I found myself stopping frequently to recover from the daze over the scale of the tragedies and ponder whether the country is now able to avoid similar ones in the future.

What made the book especially close to me was the setting of a major part of the story in Chengdu, my hometown. Chang’s parents moved to Sichuan after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and lived in Chengdu as high-level government officials. Growing up in Chengdu I knew very little about its past under the new China. My parents had only mentioned briefly the factional fighting involving machine guns in the Cultural Revolution. Everyone seemed eager to concoct a gentle veneer and ever-spicier cuisine to hide the painful past.

Reading Wild Swans thus felt like perusing a hence-unknown family history to me. I now know that the two major factions that used machine guns at each other were called 26 August and the Red Chengdu; that before the “Three-antis”, the “Anti-Rightist”, and the Cultural Revolution movements, we Chinese were in fact gentle talkers, with none of the current easy tendency to bark and quarrel in public; and that before the marble statue of Mao was erected in the People’s Square in the center of Chengdu, there used to be a beautiful ancient arch gate… Strangely, a nostalgia for a Chengdu I had never known starts to build.

At the same time, it’s easy to see a very emotional Chang behind the texts which could very well made her writing heavy handed and one-sided, drawbacks that the critics accused her new book of. For example, she described her middle school as thus:

“My new school, the Number Four Middle School, was the leading key school for the whole province and took students with the highest marks in the all-Sichuan entrance exams. … In the two exam papers, I got 100 percent for math and un unusual 100 percent “plus” for Chinese. … My clearest memory is of my teachers. They were the best in their field; many were grade one, or special grade. …”

Number Four Middle School being the best in Sichuan? That simply could not and cannot be true. Number Seven Middle School, my alma mater, was undisputedly and agreed by all Chengdu residents (except for alums of Number Four) to be the best high school in Chengdu. Even we had the modesty to agree that a couple of other middle schools in the province cultivated students with higher test scores.

Perhaps Chang’s memory was faulty. Perhaps she exaggerated. Perhaps my alma mater surpassed Number Four after the Cultural Revolution. In any case, I know when I read Mao: The Unknown Story, I need to take Chang’s words with a grain of salt.

The Illusioin of Lonely Planet

We wrapped up shooting at 3am Sunday morning in Old Town Shanghai near the Yu Garden. It was freezing and I was hugging my latte tightly. The water truck was coughing its way through the streets to create the effect of a recent rainfall when I had a revelation –

“See,” I said to a fellow assistant standing next to me while pointing at the lights and the extras that were producing the illusion of a busy happening neighborhood, “we shot in modern skyscraper district like Pudong and in old neighborhoods that are being preserved for tourism purposes only, and then we shop this collage of extreme contrasts all over the world. Audience look at the images and would probably think this represent the intriguing and enigmatic modern China. But how about the majority between these two extremes? We both know that for most Chinese, life is not in glamorous Grand Hyatt or smoking water pipes in old buildings with decaying beauty; rather, life here is in boring apartment buildings with routines of going to work, cooking, trying to make more money, marrying and divorcing, just like everywhere else.”

My insightful observations depressed both of us. We sighed in mutual sympathy – “Hollywood. What do you expect?”

The last two days saw some crew members partying their heads off in hip clubs with African American DJs, some hurriedly getting on a plane back to LA, and others excitedly preparing for trips to Beijing and Xi’an. I cringed every time I heard someone talking about “seeing the real China” as if a few days with Lonely Planet is the holy grail to understanding this country.

Then it’s time for me to sit down and plan my Christmas vacation. I thought of visiting Thailand. I checked mainstream tourist-info websites and those for backpackers. The former told in sweet tongue why Bangkok is a must-see because it epitomizes the modern Thailand. The latter screamed that Bangkok is not real Thailand; for real Thai culture and people one has to go north, go to the countryside.

I sneered at both – how could there be only one real Thailand? I told myself not to succumb to the temptation to arrange my itinerary around images I had seen previously in movies and on the Discovery Channel.

So I did more research. I visited epinions.com and read traveler testimonials such as “we met a couple of Thai people in a restaurant and we had a very interesting conversation. And oh my god what a nice way to know the real Thailand”.

I sneered at their naivety.

But still I had to come up with an itinerary. What do I hope to do - understand Thailand in 10 days? Where to start? Which guide to follow?

I imagined Thailand as this giant animal that could be an elephant but I could only touch its rough skin briefly to figure it out.

After a few more hours of researching, I gave up. What am I expecting anyway? For all my gripes on foreigners custom-fitting China into their own fantasies, I was in no mood to see the “real” Thailand on my vacation, at least not the part of high HIV infection rate, sex slavery and wide wealth gap. For most of us who sample cultures in fast-food fashion during brief visits to foreign countries, travel seems primarily to validate our pre-conceived expectations. It’s a leisured entertainment activity. Why should it be much different from Hollywood?

There’s a bar in my neighborhood in Beijing called Want Travel? and it has all the Lonely Planet guides. I decided this weekend when I fly back to Beijing, I would sit down with the guides and plan my Christmas vacation accordingly.

Squeeze the Bubble

The Chinese government has taken this year's World Aids Day seriously. Most newspapers had extensive coverage of events marking that day before, on and after Dec 1st.

In today's Oriental Morning Post (a Shanghai newspaper), reportage ranged from a new AIDS-themed restaurant that gives out condoms to diners, junior high students volunteering to educate their peers, Fudan University students hosting a debate on whether SQ (Sex Quotient, a new term invented by these students after IQ) can help prevent AIDS transmission, to condom use being more effective than abstinence in combatting AIDS.

My personal favorite, which is also the most prominent article on the AIDS page - High School Freshmen Hears Detailed Instruction on How to Use Condoms to Prevent AIDS.

The article started by quoting the teacher: "There's a small bubble on the tip of the condom. You have to squeeze out the air before use." More quotes: "Open it, push it... Make sure it covers the root (of we-know-what)". The class was the first of its kind to receive the instruction in Shanghai. But the paper reported that "according to stipulations from the Education Ministry, all high schools in Shanghai will be taught how to prevent AIDS, including how to use condoms properly." I wonder if the stipulation applies to all of China.

One of the experts was quoted expressing regret that parents had to be sent letters assuring them that the classes do not encourage teen sex. He said that the parents' worries are unnecessary, and that "the promotion of condom use is normal in developed countries". I don't know much about how they teach American highschoolers safe sex. But I did read about the religious rights, including George Bush, clamour for abstinence rather than condoms.

Time has indeed changed. When I was a highschool freshman in 1987 (was it that long ago?), we had to read the chapter of Human Reproductive System in silence in class, under the stern supervision of our Human Physiology teacher. Now China is quickly catching up with the world. Maybe soon we will also surprass the world, including in condom consumption.

Not So Fast

The positions on a Hollywood blockbuster production seem to me finely defined, and the pros work with great efficiency and precision. Because of that efficiency, people idle on the set when their services are not called for.

Last night in Lujiazui, the skyscraper central of Shanghai’s Pu Dong district, there’s much idling during the night shooting. I had a long conversation with a 40-something European crewmember to kill time. He, let’s call him Paul, had traveled widely and was very curious about China’s development. He asked me many questions on the political processes and the latest cultural changes in China. I played the role of a China expert, which I detest others doing but secretly enjoy when I had the soapbox to myself.

Our conversation took a sour turn when he started commenting on the ugliness of the suburban development around Shanghai – the drab high-rise apartment buildings, the non-stop construction, and the pollution. He then made another typical statement, “Someday the Chinese will realize what they have done and regret having destroyed the past.”

I asked him to elaborate. He mentioned the beauty of the small town near Jiaxing where we had shot on location. He said people used to all live in towns like that, have close relationships with their neighbors and buy organically-grown vegetables in the local markets. Alas, the good old days.

I ventured that people living in towns like that probably had been dying to move into a drab apartment building so they could have their own toilets and avoid neighbors’ gossips. They probably wanted to visit supermarket so they could have more choices even if the choices are soaked in preservatives. Paul replied that people often don’t know what they want; their desired are being manipulated by big corporations!

It’s the same argument made by many expats in Beijing. Many love a casual walk once a year in the old hutong (narrow alleyway) area. But the only ones I know living in that kind of neighborhood are those who can afford a completely renovated courtyard compound with modern toilet, washer and the whole place to him/herself, with rent going at least $3000/month (that’s just my conservative guess).

I’m all for living with style and character, and I have many many problems with China’s development. But I’m wary of preserving the past for aesthetic purposes only. And I’m cynical of the same old liberal criticism from Western Bobos who could afford the high culture, the leisure and the freedom to choose their lifestyle. They seem to prefer China remain the old exotic China in their fantasy, yet somehow have the poverty and lack of economic freedom masked from their comfortable tourist itinerary.

Yes, given enough money and education, we would all live in New York (or Paris or London), read New Yorker, shop at organic grocers, drive to the summer house in upstate New York (or in Connecticut or on the Jersey shores) for weekend getaways in the summer, and buy expensive North Face jackets to wear when we rush to the neighborhood coffee shops to get our lattes in the fall.

Mind you - the most popular chit chat topic last night was the price that the crew members paid for their knockoff North Face jackets at the popular outdoor Xiangyang market.

Trying to change the conversation topic, I asked where Paul lived. Not surprisingly, he lived in Los Angeles and still keeps a house in Europe. He enjoyed hiking and wilderness. As far as I could tell, the North Face jacket he wore was real.

I’d love to have a life like that. But then I wouldn’t have the chance to be a China expert of any sort.