This last week in Hong Kong went by in a flash. Packing, mailing, and e-mailing things amounted to a whirlwind of things that kept me from being able to write a few more posts that I wanted to tack up here, but hopefully I can get to it later after I return [...]]]> I’m going home!

This last week in Hong Kong went by in a flash. Packing, mailing, and e-mailing things amounted to a whirlwind of things that kept me from being able to write a few more posts that I wanted to tack up here, but hopefully I can get to it later after I return to the States. I want to continue writing in this blog; after all, I’m going from one adventure in China to another adventure in medicine!

The next two months will make a great transition from one to the other too, as I’m not staying idle. Things are going to be even busier – we’re hitting the ground running, and dashing all the way from Washington State to Los Angeles, Singapore, Indonesia, and back again quite a few times. (It could be said that my itinerary amounts to the most inefficiently planned summer holiday ever, but optimistically, it will be fun!)

But before I tackle those things, I’ve still a plane ride to prepare for and goodbyes to say. Continuing my general privacy habit of not posting much about my family interactions in China, I can still say that I’m entirely grateful that I had this chance to get to know my mother’s family, most of whom stayed in China, and that I was able to begin communicating with them for the first time in my life with the Mandarin I’ve learned this year. Last night I had a three-hour long conversation with my aunt and uncle here. “You have gained a lot of experiences from being in China for a year now!” they commented in Mandarin. “But you must be looking forward to going home to all the things you are used to!”

“It’s not the cultural things that I’m looking forward to the most, though,” I tried to reply. Whether people spit in one place and don’t in another, or whether the cost of living is high in one and not in the other, are all things that I can grow accustomed to and don’t mind so much. To me, the best thing about coming home is going to be that I can fully interact with the world again in a language I’m adept in. I never realized how important this was to me until it was taken away; it was like I lost a limb or, in a more apt comparison, like I lost one of the five senses that I perceive, understand, and engage the world with. I have now an entirely different and amazed respect for American immigrants who entered the country with English skills comparable to my Mandarin or worse, and made themselves a home and a life here, and the example foremost in my mind of course is that of my parents.

Mom and Dad, I know a little bit more now what it must have been like when you first touched down, and I’m amazed by the successful and enriched lives you’ve built for yourselves and for us. I’ll see you very soon!

The first stage of cultural exchange is commonly called the “honeymoon” period, the time when baby expats get moonstruck by being in a brand spankin’ new place. But when I first got to China, I didn’t feel particularly excited. It could have been a [...]]]> (Hopefully, I’ll have pictures inserted throughout this long-ish post soon.)

The first stage of cultural exchange is commonly called the “honeymoon” period, the time when baby expats get moonstruck by being in a brand spankin’ new place. But when I first got to China, I didn’t feel particularly excited. It could have been a lot of things… maybe it was because I’d been to Beijing before, or because I had just left a relationship at home, or because the tepid identification I had with Chinese culture was making me feel dissonant instead of secure, or something else, or a combination of these and other ethereally uneasy feelings. The point is, I never felt that “wow!” when I first got to China.

And after that point I never really left China either, barring the occasional culture-twisting trip to Hong Kong. So when Hong Kong cousin William and his wife Kim invited me to spend a week of the Lunar New Year vacation in Malaysia with Kim’s family, I thought it would be a nice change of pace.

And as soon as I stepped onto the dull tarmac at Kuala Lumpur’s Low Cost Carrier Terminal airport, I could feel it. The change was in the air, which weighed heavy on my suddenly damp clothes. Shenzhen had been decidedly nippy at 11 degrees Celsius, but Kim’s brother Thye, who picked me up at the gate, mentioned that the Malaysian weather always stayed around a nice 35, give or take a few degrees depending on the time of year. I asked him if a 33 degree winter actually felt any different. “Yeah, the sun doesn’t hurt as much,” he replied.

As we drove under the clear blue sky along the (left side!) of the highway flanked by green hills and oil palms towards a reunion with the rest of the family, I noticed that the ad billboards here kept up the polyglot practices of the airport we had just left. Product placement flashed by us in combinations of Malay, Chinese, English, Arabic, and Devangari. Now, normally when I see English in a place like Hong Kong it’s like finding water in a desert. I can read again! But to have four other languages on top of English, too? Awesome!

The excitement finally beginning to flutter in my chest didn’t just come from liking linguistics, too. Running through the mall with Thye to clock in a belated appearance at his family’s New Year banquet, I saw more shades of brown than I had seen for months, even possibly ever. It wasn’t just skin tones either: maybe a third of the population was decked out in varying degrees of head scarves. Malaysia is a majority Islamic country after all, and the Malay (Muslim) majority exists side-by-side with one of the world’s most substantial Overseas Chinese populations and a large Indian contingent as well, each even having their own established political parties and seats in the Malaysian Parliament. Something about this diversity just jazzed me up like I hadn’t felt for a long time.

I ended up staying in Kim’s parents’ place, which was a large airy 3-story suburb house across from which was Thye’s. It seemed that the neighborhood was like a gated community of Overseas Chinese. We had arrived on the night right before the Lunar New Year, and even though the Chinese are 26% of Malaysia’s population, that is sizable enough to give the entire country a set of official holidays and festive moods. Our sleep kept getting interrupted by the bangs and pows of fireworks exploding to herald the year of the tiger.

In these Chinese enclaves, with red lanterns and the kind of intricately detailed teak wood furniture that I can never accurately describe in words but you always know is Chinese when you see it, I sensed an authentic culture preserved to a degree I’d never encountered before. Maybe it’s because the Malaysian Chinese possess both the cash to maintain their arts and letters as well as an immigrant reverence for the old country, and their dislocation shielded them from the ruinous revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries on the Mainland.

Which isn’t to say that the Chinese haven’t had problems in Malaysia. From what I hear, there are plenty of tensions between the Malay population and the other ethnicities, mostly the Chinese, and extremely intense affirmative action-type laws ensure that Chinese must cede many positions to ethnic Malays just to ensure that Malaysia retains its Malay character. But at least there weren’t any ethnic massacres like in Indonesia. Amongst the Southeast Asian countries, it seems to enjoy a relatively harmonious peace.

That’s what we had in mind for the next few days, at least. We drove up the North-South highway from Kuala Lumpur to Penang Island and stayed there for a few days. According to Kim, Penang is known for its authentic Malaysian food sold in “hawker” stands next to which you eat at plastic tables under umbrellas shading you from the daylight heat. We got to do that a few times too, and my tummy was much obliged. I also played in the resort sand by the beautiful beach with William, Kim, and Aidan, their 2-year old. (Playing with a 2-year-old is the most awesome thing in the world. Your worries just melt away!)

Now, I know that Penang in particular is a tourist destination so it’ll obviously have a lot of different people coming in from all over the world, but as I floated around in the pool and lazed about the open-air lounge, I of course kept marveling at how diverse the people were there. It honestly had been a long time since I’d seen anything like it. Why was that? I wondered. Oh yes – I’d been in China all this time. At that moment I realized how incredibly homogenous China is, and how much of my good vibes over Malaysia’s diversity really came from my relief at seeing other diverse peoples again. The next thought: Am I more used to identifying as a minority than I am as actually Chinese?

At this point in my wicker chair ruminations, Dad sent me a link that I browsed through on my iTouch. It was very well-timed, as it was an interview with Martin Jacques that included a segment about China’s homogeneity in the context of its imminent rise. I could think of plenty of my own experiences that demonstrated it, like the time I had been with my American friends in a Bao’An District skate park and two 12 year old boys came up to ask me if I were a hunxue, or half-blood, just because I was with all the white people. The substance of Jacques’ interview (and his book) is actually mostly geared towards pointing out incorrect and arrogant Western perceptions of China, which I appreciate very much, but this homogeneity gives him pause as well:

Martin Jacques: Well, I think that China will in time project itself in all sorts of ways around the world. I think in that sense it will have some of the characteristics of a global power, whatever that global power is. But it will be also expressed in different ways. One of my greatest concerns about the rise of China—in fact, my greatest concern, not one of them, but my greatest concern—is the question of the attitude of the Han towards cultural differences, different ethnicities. Because, as you point out, it’s certainly true—very unusual, quite different from any other populace, nation like India or Indonesia or the United States—the Chinese overwhelmingly consider themselves to be of one race: the Han. This is a product of a long—once again, back to the civilization-state, 2,000 years and longer of a sort of ethnic construction of China, which has seen the Han-ization of China. Now, in a way, for China, that’s been a great strength, because it’s essentially held the country together. That’s why it’s never divided, that’s why it was nonsense in 1989 ever to predict that China would break up. It was never going to happen, for this reason. But on the other hand, the negative side to this is the Han have a very weak conception of cultural difference and the respect for cultural difference. And the reason they have such problems with the Uyghurs and the Tibetans—and it’s very, very serious; I mean, we’ve had really serious racial riots in Lhasa last year and Urumqi this year—is because, essentially, the Han notion of handling other ethnicities is to Han-ize them. To assimilate them. To civilize them.

Scheer: Yeah. I mean, they claimed they were doing the Tibetans a favor.

Jacques: Yeah, of course. You know, we’re raising—and in some ways they have been …

Scheer: It’s what you Brits tried to do in India, right?

Jacques: (Laughs) Yeah. Yeah, we did, and not just in India. But, you know, to raise the Tibetans or the Uyghurs up to the level of the Han, and thereby Han-ize them, that’s of course what’s happened, historically, with the Mongolians and with the Manchus and so on.

People are always talking about China’s 56 ethnic minorities…yes, they exist, and yes, they’re culturally different, and yes, China handles it sensitively (perhaps too sensitively sometimes, judging by the policies that essentially amount to consenting segregation of Uyghur children from Han children in Bao’an District schools here) but come on, they’re all ASIAN. To actually quote the words that some Chinese people have told me, they are all yellow (a guard once explained to me how there are four types of people in the world: black, white, brown, and yellow). Another guy in Beijing once told me that America always had to invent enemies abroad because they had no cohesive racial identity, and that China was always automatically united because everyone was yellow.

Remembering these interactions and then reading what Jacques had to say made me realize something well enough to finally put it into words, at last: the Chinese do not distinguish between the Chinese people and the Chinese nation. There are drawbacks to homogeneity but also a big, gigantic plus: an enormous feeling of cohesion, pride, and almost familial relationship with your other citizens. I have heard two things: the first is that while people in the West see strangers as “in” or “out” of social “boxes,” people in China see strangers as merely removed from them by a few nodes in an interconnected network and therefore think in terms of “near” or “far” instead of “in” or “out.” Secondly, I have also heard that nations can be categorized by how they emphasize three factors: blood, language, and citizenship. The United States considers you an American if you possess citizenship and, for the most part, English proficiency. The Japanese require all three before they consider you one of them. The Chinese care only about the blood.

After Penang, we spent a lot of time wandering about Kuala Lumpur’s malls and bookstores, pushing Aidan around in his stroller and waiting for the grandpa generation to make up its mind about where it wanted to go for dinner. All the while I kept noticing the display of diversity. Islamic women in headscarves sashaying around in extraordinarily capitalist malls buying items from Indians who rubbed shoulders and joked around with Chinese people all while speaking English (who were they speaking English for, I wondered?).

Of course, one could say “Andrew, don’t be stupid, you’re making a big deal out of a nonissue. After all, it’s not like Western capitalism is mutually exclusive with other cultures; just look at Dubai.” Sure. But what is interesting about that is that I’m in Malaysia, walking through megamalls that successfully rose again after the entire economy collapsed with George Soros’ shorting of the Malaysian ringgit while pillaging the Asian Tiger economies in the early 2000s. After that disaster, what did they do? They went right back to capitalism, albeit this time with protective regulations. Those measures aside, it still seemed to be an admission that progress and modernity automatically equate to the Western model. For all of this cultural diversity, I wondered, does it all just amount to the same way of life? Do Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Taoists all just go to H&M for their clothes and Baskin Robbins for their snacks? Is all we are walking and advancing towards just a multiracial mall complex?

Which is where a reading of Jacques seems to yield revealing insights again. He contends that “modernity” does not equate to “Westernization,” and that when China fully rises, we will see a different model, a second successful one that nobody conceived of before in the West:

Scheer: Why use the word rule? You know, “When China Rules the World”? Do you mean it in the sense that they will take over, they will tell us what to do?

Jacques: No, but I mean it in this sense: that when a country of power becomes globally hegemonic, it basically sets the rules. It designs the major institutions. It has a huge reach, not just economically, but politically, culturally, intellectually, morally, militarily.

Scheer: Yeah, but the Chinese are in many ways becoming more like us. Would these rules really be so very different? …

Jacques: No, I think this is, to be quite blunt about it, balderdash. I mean, it’s certainly true that the Chinese are learning English, but they don’t learn it to speak in China, they learn it to speak with foreigners who speak English; it’s an interlocutor language. ….And while it’s certainly true that China has learned heavily from the West over the past 30 years in terms of technology, in terms of markets and so on, at the same time it remains profoundly different. And this is the point about modernization. People think of it as a process of Westernization. Well, maybe in part it is a process of Westernization, but only in part. Because modernization is also shaped by history and culture, so if your history and culture is very distinct and very different from that of the West, which in the case of China it most certainly is, the result will be a very different kind of society, a very different kind of identity.

After a few days I bid my goodbyes to family and set off for Shenzhen again. Vacation was over and it was back to teaching. Many American teachers here in my program are now feeling a little blue, having had a taste of the outside world again and seeing what they’re missing out on by staying in China. I suppose that for most of them, the novelty of China is starting to fade away. Thankfully, I feel better than I did before, as my problems were in my head and my travels only helped to clarify them. How do I develop a more stable and cohesive self-identity in subjecting it to the unknowns that I have always been associated with, and how can I find a way to fairly view both Chinese and Western societies? Seeing more of China, and seeing its reflection just outside of its borders too, helped. My language skills are better now than they’ve ever been, too. More about that, another day.

But [...]]]> The English office doesn’t have a printer. I’m not really sure how an entire school functions without ever printing anything out, but I’ve gotten used to it. I keep all my lesson plans and notes in digital files, or I scribble them out into a notebook. Saves trees and ink, I guess.

But for tomorrow’s plane flight, I figured I should first print the tickets that my…grandmother’s cousin’s daughter-in-law (an aunt, right?) emailed to me. Where to go? The first time I had ever needed something printed was when I got my wall decorations – a bunch of resized album covers – done up. I spent a lot of time cutting the blasted things out and precisely taping them together but they’re still up on my walls today, so not a bad investment of $250 RMB, I guess.

It had taken me a few tries to find a place that would do it. Mostly because the dictionary entry that I had looked up for “print” steered me in the wrong direction. The girl at the first shop looked at me like I was crazy when I used it to ask her about printing. I later found out that I had asked her if her shop did block engravings.

That time I had eventually found a place that helped me through it and didn’t mind my tortured Chinese. After a few miscommunications the shopkeeper had settled down with me at their computer benches. After he attempted a few questions with Mandarin that even I could tell was heavily accented and I replied in nonsense sentences that I didn’t understand him, he had good-naturedly pushed a bowl of soggy peanuts in my direction and invited me to eat them while the printing was going. I thought that maybe months later he would recognize me again, which would help the process along a lot. I wouldn’t have to do the I’m-Actually-A-Foreigner dance all over again.

But when I got there, the guy wasn’t working today. Instead there was another dude who glanced at me and asked what I wanted. “想把一张图片打印，” I said. He grunted and took my flash drive from me. He looked at me quizzically a few times, but probably just because I was speaking a little softly. That’s my usual tendency and I normally try not to do it, but this guy didn’t seem too friendly today. Which meant that he wasn’t going to be interested in prancing around in a “oh you’re foreign” conversation. I knew enough Chinese, I realized, to get through this transaction and get out of there without having to offer a “其实我的中文还很差” confession. I’ve found that in these scenarios, I unconsciously speak more quietly. I think it’s so that if the other person can’t understand me, they’ll assume it’s because I’m speaking quietly, and not because my Chinese sounds really foreign.

Sure enough, I was out of there in half a minute.

I walked away a little uncomfortable. While other expats would probably be excited that they could get through an entire conversation or transaction with only Chinese, every time I do it I feel like I’m flying blind. I’m always worried that the other person will start speaking at a level I can’t keep up with or comprehend, and then if they do then I’ll have to own up to being foreign – and every time that happens it feels like my cover’s been blown. It’s not so bad if the other person seems friendly (and most are) but the few times that they don’t seem interested I just feel foolish.

Maybe a personality profile is wiser to this than I am. When I was researching character types for my fiction writing, I looked into the enneagram business. Here’s what it says about a particular personality category:

Behind Fives’ relentless pursuit of knowledge are deep insecurities about their ability to function successfully in the world. Fives feel that they do not have an ability to do things as well as others. But rather than engage directly with activities that might bolster their confidence, Fives “take a step back” into their minds where they feel more capable. Their belief is that from the safety of their minds they will eventually figure out how to do things—and one day rejoin the world.

(From The Enneagram Institute.)

I’ve been thinking about this description’s relevance and, if it is, what the implications are.

Flight’s tomorrow. Fuzhou is a much different place from Shenzhen. I’ll deliver the whole spiel – historical and familial – another time.

An easy option was to look around the Sea World area, a few miles south of my neighborhood. As all Shenzhen expats know by now, our Sea World does not [...]]]> After my last class of the morning I decided to go exploring. Heck, it’s a nice sunny day and I need to get out.

An easy option was to look around the Sea World area, a few miles south of my neighborhood. As all Shenzhen expats know by now, our Sea World does not have dolphins or otters but instead bars and expats. It is also quixotically not by the sea, but instead does offer a grounded old Russian cruise liner, the insides of which have been gutted and converted into bars. Around this landlocked ship has sprouted a strange square of classy teppanyaki restaurants, assorted Western culinary sins like Dunkin Donuts and KFC, and much-too-obvious escorts hanging on the arms of white guys.

I’ve been a little wary of frequenting this place before, even though most of the other CTLC teachers seem to dig it. There’s something about how it works that makes me feel awkward. Like the time I went to one of its bars with some of my American friends here. I find it strange to see a mostly white clientele being served by a mostly Asian waitstaff – and a mostly female waitstaff in short skirts and go-go boots at that. Even the male guards who came in to break up the one bar fight that began while we were there (fun story in and of itself, that) were wearing stupid little sailor hats (it was a nautical-themed bar on the boat). And here I am, the only Asian face amongst Team White, feeling an odd mixture of guilt and disgust every time a Chinese attendant in a dumb costume brings me a drink laden with sycophantic servitude.

But at 1pm today it was a bright sunny day and most of the ridiculous antics of the night wouldn’t have begun yet, so I went to check it out. Besides, I’d been craving those Western culinary sins.

Now, a funny thing usually happens with me when I’m ordering food or drinks at a cafe. The clerk register will usually greet me in rapid Chinese, and I will usually try to go with it until my fluency erodes (my knowledge of the flavor spectrum for milk tea is improving, but give me a break). When it does, the clerk will become visibly confused and sometimes impatient, and there is not usually enough time for me to go into the whole “I’m foreign” spiel when there’s a line behind me. I’ve worked out the perfect method at Starbucks, though, where I come up to the counter and go “请来一杯green tea latte.” It’s polite to the clerks (”hey he’s trying”) and they know enough English (hey, it’s Starbucks) to hear from my own spoken English that I must be foreign after all. Things go smoothly after that.

Not being able to speak your first language gets old after a while, though. It’s like I’m always trying to pretend to be a native-born Chinese speaker (and always coming across as a retarded one). So it was with some relief that I could order my four-piece chicken meal with just a “你好” and the clerk, used to attending to ridiculous foreigners in the ridiculous Sea World, just smiled and went on as if it were perfectly normal to have a China boy not speak Chinese. Normality. Something I’ve been missing and was glad to find today, even if it were in such a ridiculous place.

After sampling coffees, teas, and donuts to the point where I realized I couldn’t leisurely sit around and read if it meant stuffing yet another blissfully sugary donut into my face, I picked up and left. Before the night came and again turns Sea World into a strange nocturnal zoo.