acrobatic catchup

It’s my lunch break and I don’t have long to type, but it’s been a few days since you heard from me and I imagine that if your names together begin with an H and a Y then you might be a bit anxious for a more substantial update – so I’ll just try to get down as much as I can (hi, mum and pop).

So right, like I said the other day, acrobats, at Beijing’s Tiandi (Heaven and Earth) Theater.  I’d seen these types of performances before on television with my parents, but it was a lot different and way more breathtaking in person.  Seeing a human bend into ridiculous contortions on TV is easy to reconcile in your mind as more media magic, but when it’s happening right in front of you, you might start to consider it more carefully.  Some people were satisfied to consider just the sexual potential therein (hi Kami, this is what you get for stalking my blog).  But seeing a dozen girls jump on a bicycle and spread their arms to look like the many-armed Boddhisatva of mercy Guanyin jarred me because it seems that for these performers, there is no mercy.  Their training has to be rigorous and unforgiving to get them to this point, and after one child acrobat fell off the shoulders of one guy standing on top of another, we all winced thinking about the chastising he would probably get after going off-stage.  It was the only error of the performance, and immediately afterwards they cut the music, tried it again, and successfully tossed the child onto the standing human totem pole.  In dead silence.  Maybe this is why Guanyin and her concept of divine mercy is so revered by the Chinese.

(Which do you think is more important – justice or mercy?  I pick mercy as a personal preference knowing full well the value of justice.  My choice reflects the direction I’m taking my life and career in, and I think my family as a whole leans towards that end of the spectrum as well.  It would explain why so many of us enter the medical field, and why generation after generation we keep finding ourselves repelled from China, from one revolution to another.)

Anyway.  No mercy for the Chinese acrobats, but at the same time, sublime perfection in their combined performance. The jumpers lept through rings stacked two meters high, the climbers adroitly hopped between poles, and the bicycle girls all somehow managed to avoid crashing while mimicking something celestial.  It made me feel that despite – or probably because of – their individual sacrifices and sufferings, the Chinese people can be proud of being Chinese because they know that in the uniquely agonizing purity of their labor they can achieve superhuman feats.  (I wonder if this sort of ethic was born from Mao’s communism, or whether Mao’s communism was born from it.)  But this pride is very necessarily a collective feeling, because the sheer majority of individuals in China never get to this point.  The victory of a few automatically belongs to all, and justifiably so because the intense competitive pressure from such a vast population, like a pressure cooker, is what created such transcendents in the first place.  From my talks with a few other Chinese-Americans who have advised me on the worst of what to expect when it comes to treatment here in China, I’ve been told that a common reaction to our new citizenship is disbelief – not so much that we are or became American, but that we are not of and are no longer bound to China.  “But you are still Chinese, so you should speak the language,” many ABCs have been flatly told by intractable local Chinese.  After seeing the acrobats, I think I understand a little more what we as wayward huaqiao have lost, even as we gained personal freedoms and individual opportunities.

Anyway, that was Monday night, after which a ton of the other teachers went to the beer gardens and got uproarusly drunk.  I returned to the hotel and talked about postcolonialism with some Vassar kids.  Go figure.

The next day I went with those guys to the 798 art district – our only day off (we’re back on the job now today).  I’ll post about that later, along with some pictures of it.   I have to run back to Chinese class now!