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cultural misunderstandings
I just read this in a book review:The books that tend to sell well in the US and the UK are similar memoirs about the abominations of the Cultural Revolution, the Great Famine and the Great Leap Forward (Wild Swans by Jung Chang having led the way, perhaps).
“Americans do not know much about China, so everyone takes advantage of the same familiar elements: Chinese restaurants are called either Panda or Great Wall. Reading about China, then, people anticipate pain and persecution, they expect to see wounds, little realising that this is but one facet of China,” wrote Berlin Fang, a columnist for the Southern Metropolis Daily newspaper in Guangdong
I find it interesting because foreigners have the same complaints about what appear to be Chinese folks' misconceptions about our culture. Locals—usually not the ones who have actually traveled to the States—think that American men are always trying to get laid and have no respect for women. Likewise, they think American women are easy and always eager to crawl into someone's bed. American children are disrespectful, Americans all have guns, but we are also all rich and live easy lives in the lap of luxury back home. I have been asked more than once if white people hate black people in the US. To all this, the best I can say is also "this is but one facet" of America.
The best remedy for these kinds of misunderstandings is continued dialogue. It's so trite but it's true. A lot of the dialogue about racism has been stifled in the States by people who just want to move on without airing out the dirty laundry or by people who are too scared to talk about sensitive subjects. If we can approach another culture with humility, if we can be honest about our ignorance and open to seeing more than one easily accessible facet of that culture, we stand to learn a lot.
Chinese Food Pagoda
Those of us in the West grew up with the food pyramid, a visual aid that illustrated how many servings of each food group we should be consuming daily to have a healthy diet.
I found it amusing to learn that there is a Chinese food pagoda:
Honestly, if I were to make something like that up, it would seem like a tasteless joke. But there it is. And for your reference, a lot of other countries have their visuals: a top is used in Japan, while a flag is used in Thailand, among others.
As a side note, I find it slightly alarming that the American food pyramid has been altered within the past few years.
It's old news to anyone who followed the "controversy" at this point, but the new food pyramid makes it more difficult to distinguish the proportions of food you should be eating. Apparently, beef producers in the States didn't like the old pyramid because it made it more obvious that one should consume less meat than grains and veggies, and probably less meat than one is already regularly consuming. The new pyramid also does no better than the old one in explaining to people that simple carbohydrates and refined grains are pretty unhealthy. The biggest thing the new pyramid has going for it is the running man, and you could have just as easily slapped him on the side of the old one.
Trailing Wives
When I read two articles about an interesting subject in two days, I feel compelled to blog about it.Yesterday at lunch, I mistakenly picked up the "Parents and Children" edition of City Weekend Shanghai, but the front cover featured an article on women reconciling their identity as successful businesswoman with their new identities as mothers. One woman, the author, gave up her career in the US to follow her husband to Shanghai, where she devotes herself to taking care of her two little sons. With an ayi to take care of all the household chores, she has nothing to do but care for the children. With the birth of her children, she became a trailing wife—one of the spouses that follow her partner to another country where she can't work. She aspires "to one day be as comfortable in her Juicy Couture sweats as in her Armani suits." (No, I don't know why she had to specify the brands of clothing she wears. I think it's distracts from her point. She could have just said "sweats" and "suits;" the alliteration would have even been pleasing. Instead, as the reader, I am left wondering if she has such a shallow sense of self that mentioning she buys overpriced velveteen track suits makes her feel like a better person.)
The second woman profiled also gave up her career when her sons were born in Shanghai, but she opted for the life of a mompreneur, opening up a children's play center here in Shanghai. In this way, she could spend time with her own children while still working outside the home. She still relished her identity as a career woman, but modified it to meet the realities of being a mother. (I looked for a link for this article but couldn't find it. You can read other articles about parenting in Shanghai on the City Weekend site.)
I read a similar article in the Wall Street Journal about a woman from India who moved to the US with her husband as a trailing wife. It seems like they don't have any children, so she has all her waking hours to herself. At first, it was difficult for her to spend all her time waiting for her husband, but then she realized she had all the time in the world to do the things she never had time to do before—cooking, writing, reading, and wandering around New York. "I think that perhaps my dependent visa has changed me, I no longer need to be exhausted to be happy," Meeti Shroff Shah concludes.
The last article reminded me of the first part of the cinematic triptych Tokyo!, if I can draw a comparison without undermining Ms. Shah. In it, a kind-hearted woman who lacks ambition finds her calling as a chair. Yes, a chair: the wooden kind with spindly legs that you would expect to find at a dining room table. She spends her days making paper cuttings, reading books, and watering the plants in the apartment where she lives. She claims to have never been happier, all the demands she couldn't meet having been removed. She has a very defined task and she is up to it; all the little things she enjoys doing when she is alone are secret pleasures, easily realized.
My mom was a trailing wife throughout my childhood. My dad's career required him to relocate every year or two to another country, and my mom was the one who packed us up and took care of us every time. She did teach and hold other odd jobs, but being a mother and a wife were her most obvious priorities. In the end, her dependence on my father backfired and she was left with nothing.
I don't think my own personality would have ever permitted me to be a trailing wife, and I don't understand how women who invested so many years and so much energy in their careers can give it up. Likely, I'll never be faced with that choice. I'm still trying to get my feet planted firmly on this path I've chosen, and Beau seems content to do whatever comes his way. We might actually have a dynamic opposite to that of the expat couples in the articles I've just read, except that I am not earning enough money to support both of us and a family. Yet. ;)
上海
我刚刚知道我可以用电脑打中文字。太可惜，我不能打台湾用的字。我应该要多学中国大摞用的字。It's Golden Week, so I don't have to go to work for ten days. I have A LOT of time on my hands.
Here are some more quotes about Shanghai:
"If God allowed Shanghai to endure, He owed an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah." —Unkown
“A city with forty-eight storey skyscrapers built upon twenty-eight layers of hell.” — A Chinese journalist in Bernard Wasserstein’s Secret War in Shanghai
"Beijing is a great Chinese city. Shanghai is a great city, which happens to be in China." —Post in an online forum
That last one leads me to a personal interjection: I really don't like it when people say Shanghai isn't "real China," like you can have a more authentic experience of life in this country if you go hang out in Farmer Wang's rice paddy. Shanghai is maybe not a typical Chinese city—though I think even that is an unfair description—but it certainly is not a typical city in England or the US or India or Mozambique. Shanghai is a special Chinese city. It definitely boasts all the conveniences of modern Western life (except deodorant sticks...), but it shouldn't be underestimated just because it has a couple dozen McDonald's.
Which leads me to another thought. Moving here was perhaps the easiest transition I've ever made in my life because this is the third or fourth place in Asia that I've lived or visited extensively. I am pretty comfortable using the subway system, getting in a taxi without being fluent in the language, eating street vendor food, and buying toiletries with Chinese labels at Watson's pharmacy. So while each city I've visited definitely has its own personality, its own energy, there's enough overlap that traveling between the biggest cities isn't really stressful at all.
Shanghai eternal
I spent many hours online looking for this quote, only to find it where I thought it would be all along:I have seen places that were, no doubt, as busy and as thickly populous as the Chinese city in Shanghai, but none that so overwhelmingly impressed me with its business and populousness. In no city, West or East, have I ever had such an impression of dense, rank richly clotted life. —Aldous Huxley
What intrigued and attracted me most about this description was that it was written in 1926 but it might be even more true in 2009.
Here's the rest of it:
"Old Shanghai is Bergson's elan vital in the raw, so to speak, and with the lid off. It is Life itself. Each individual Chinaman has more vitality, you feel, than each individual Indian or European, and the social organism composed of these individuals is therefore more intensely alive than the social organism in India or the West. Or perhaps it is the vitality of the social organism - a vitality accumulated and economised through centuries by ancient habit and tradition. So much life, so carefully canalised, so rapidly and strongly flowing - the spectacle of it inspires something like terror. All this was going on when we were cannibalistic savages. It will still be going on, a little modified, perhaps by Western science, but not much-long after we in Europe have simply died of fatigue. A thousand years from now the seal cutters will still be engraving their seals, the ivory workers still sawing and polishing, the tailors will be singing the merits of their cut and cloth, even as they do to-day, the spectacled astrologers will still be conjuring silver out of the pockets of bumpkins and amorous courtesans, there will be a bird market, and eating houses perfumed with delicious cooking, and chemists shops with bottles full of dried lizards, tigers' whiskers, rhinoceros horns and pickled salamanders, there will be patient jewellers and embroiderers of faultless taste, shops full of marvellous crockery, and furriers who can make elaborate patterns and pictures out of variously coloured fox-skins, and the great black ideographs will still be as perfectly written as they are to-day, or were a thousand years ago, will be thrown on to the red paper with the same apparent recklessness, the same real and assured skill, by a long fine hand as deeply learned in the hieratic gestures of its art as the hand of the man who is writing now. Yes, it will all be there, just as intensely and tenaciously alive as ever-all there a thousand years hence, five thousand, ten. You have only to stroll through old Shanghai to be certain of it. London and Paris offer no such certainty. And even India seems by comparison provisional and precarious."
