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.

….Except this still isn’t the way I wanted them…Ryan, can you tell me sometime how you embed your Flickr photo albums into your blog posts?