But what I enjoyed the most out of this month’s American GQ was most definitely Andrew Corsello’s excoriating article on Ayn Rand, who is GQ’s Writer of the Year for her “influence.”

To briefly explain my stance on the polemical Objectivist: I don’t buy her arguments and I was never very impressed. One of my father’s libertarian colleagues gave me my copies of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged with a note about cultivating the young mind that my father boasted of so often. They were decent reads to while away the summer hours of high school, but even then I thought it was more like pulp fiction than either Dickens or Rushdie, especially with the many cheap tricks it pulled (evidently if you want your son to grow up strong, resolute and masculine, give him the initials HR – and if you want your daughter to grow up strong, resolute and masculine, the initials DT will be fine too.) So many of my friends whom I had previously thought of as sensible people remarked how “unique” the Randian world view was though. My own political views disagreed and my aesthetics vomited, but until college there wasn’t much confrontation on the matter.

Fast forward to 2007 when Ann Coulter and the neoconservative punditry was working at a fever tilt spewing hatred and bigotry. The USC Objectivist Club, always hosting crockpot panels on how the West should nuke terrorists into cinders or how everything blue and green was bad all while trying to pass it off as academic discussion and debate (there is no such thing as debate with an Objectivist; there is only his or her linear thinking), was reaching out to the USC Young Republicans to co-sponsor a week they wanted to call “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” which would culminate with the hosting of Ms. Coulter herself. I was mordantly annoyed by this and tried to rouse my own tepid Academic Culture Assembly board members to stand up and fight for the “academic integrity” that the Randian lunatics were hijacking and calling their own, but in the end we let it slip by. I still wish that I had sent a letter in to the school paper’s editor or something.

But I don’t have to worry about voicing my opinions about Objectivism, Ayn Rand or her two puerile fiction pieces anymore, as Corsello did it all for me. I can hardly put it better myself, so here’s a sampler:

A weirdly specific thing happens with the books of Ayn Rand. It’s not just the what of the books, but when a reader discovers them—almost always during the first or second year of college. Rand grabs a reader at a time of maximum vulnerability and malleability, when he’s getting his first accurate sense of how he measures up in the world in terms of intellect and talent. The longing to regard oneself as misunderstood and underrated can be powerful; the temptation to project oneself as such, irresistible. But how? How to stand above and apart?

Enter Howard Roark, the heroic and misunderstood architect, square of jaw and Asperger-ish of mien, who at the end of The Fountainhead blows up his own masterpiece after a bunch of sniveling “parasites” and “second-handers” tinker with the blueprints.

GODDAMN!

Then enter Atlas Shrugged’s John Galt, the heroic and misunderstood engineer, square of jaw and Asperger-ish of mien, who, after persuading “men of talent” to retreat to his Colorado aerie while the country goes to seed (in order to show the “mediocrities” left behind what life is like without their betters), delivers a 35,000-word speech decrying bureaucrats and regulators.

SIXTY PAGES, BITCHES!

Finally, enter Objectivism, the name Rand gave to her moral defense of “reason,” individualism, and unfettered capitalism.

SCOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!

The days during which that 19-year-old has Rand’s worldview vectored into his cerebral cortex are feverish and sleepless. Days of beautiful affliction during which the intransigence of others—roommates, a coed the patient has been hitting on, professors, parents, everyone—are shown to be the product of their shortcomings, their idiocy and sublimated envy of the patient’s intelligence and talent. Days during which the infected comes to see himself and Roark/Galt as avatars of one another: superheroically mirthless protagonists in a drama of historical import. It’s the damnedest thing. One day you’ve got a bright young kid dutifully connecting the dots of his liberal-arts education; the next, he’s got Roark and Galt in the marrow and has become…an insufferable asshole.

And a fairly good example of such an asshole:

does that moniker “Ayn Rand Asshole” strike you as a contrivance? Do you disbelieve the proposition that a person could read Atlas Shrugged almost purely at the level of injunction—taking the things John Galt says and does as straight as a biblical literalist takes the eye of the needle?

Then meet Michael Malice. No, really. That’s his name. He’s a New York City author and blogger who calls himself both a genius and an “elitist anarchist.” What’s that mean? It means that if a panhandler asks him for a little money or food, Malice says, “I could, but then you might live longer, so you see my dilemma.”
…

Malice also owns the domain name…eh, forget it. You’ll just think I’m making this stuff up. Here’s the interview transcript:

mm: It’s funny you should call me an Ayn Rand Asshole, because I happen to own the domain name assholism.com.
gq: Ah, now you’re fucking with me.
mm: Really. I own it.2
gq: Really?
mm: I really do.
gq: If that’s true, you are not a Randian Asshole. You are the Ayn Rand Asshole.
mm: Well, an asshole is just an assertive person you don’t approve of, right?

Oh, wait, I DO have something to say:
This kind of dead certainty is something you should be rewarded with after you have assessed all factors and been able to reach the best conclusion. This is almost never possible, but I’ll concede that some people are good enough to do it. But most Randians aren’t. Too many of them mistake a blind and lazy kind of self-confidence for this kind of enlightenment. This sort of cockiness lazily passes over analysis and argument and skips to the part where one professes the righteous correctness that helps to fuel his or her own compensatory narcissism.

A Randian would then get on my case about hypocrisy and using an elitist attitude to attack Rand’s support for elitist attitudes. But they’d forget one important difference: I don’t eat babies.

I’ll leave the rest for my own notes. But I do encourage you to read Corsello’s wonderful, vindictive, and visciously delicious article from top to bottom. By the way, I may agree with the bare bones of Corsello’s economic-tie-in, but I’m going to reserve judgment on more conspiratorial matters until I read some of the rest of what those libertarians are touting for myself.

I thought about what a previous teacher had told me – that in Shenzhen, free and guaranteed education is only given up till secondary school. After that, there are only enough high school seats for half of Shenzhen’s teenage population, and so 50% of them end their schooling right after middle school. I was curious about this, but thought that it might be because of the sheer number of “undocumented” citizens lured by Shenzhen’s economic promise who do not figure into population counts or policy changes. Perhaps this was why no more schools could be built. It seemed to me an oddly regulatory move in a city of supposedly rampant capitalism.

With this in mind, I asked Gong Laoshi what he thought – would there really be a population decline in the next few years? He shook his head again. “They are wrong, I think. But the real reason they are like this is because for them, fewer teachers are easier to manage,” he said. I recalled again the relatively centralized financial flow of Shenzhen’s education budget. I may be wrong about this – Joe, if you’re reading this feel free to correct me – but I had understood that in the States, public schools receive their funding after district residents file their taxes. The portion of those taxes designated for the local school system then eventually winds up at that school. I don’t know the extent to which an entire city government has to involve itself in this affair, but if Los Angeles Unified is any indication, it may end up being pretty complicated as well. Still, some amount of the process remains localized. In Shenzhen, it seems that taxes are taken out of wages before they are delivered, meaning no individual taxes are filed (Mandy, please correct me about this if I am wrong again) and that those taxes which are paid to the government are paid by large employer groups, which seems to grant weight towards the top of management for budget concerns. If Shenzhen’s education system does indeed approach their budget from a more top-down perspective than schools in the States do, then I can see how they would want to artificially keep the number of teachers down. But I still don’t think it’s a good policy decision for anybody but the government office.

“Some teachers have to send money to the government to ask them if they can pass the test,” Gong Laoshi laughed. I wasn’t sure if he was joking or if he meant that those teachers were desperate or just outright bribing the Education Bureau. “And then there are young, beautiful women teachers…” he laughed again. I laughed too, a little uneasily. “Do you understand what I mean?” In any conversation where I am switching between two languages with every other sentence, this would usually have simple connotations, but I wasn’t sure. “Eventually Shenzhen would only have young, beautiful women teachers?” I hazarded. He didn’t say anything and just went back to eating.

The pensive quiet after that persisted into today’s lunch. Usually I eat with the other English teachers, but today everyone seemed to be whispering to each other in small groups. Over every office there is a tense silence, and some teachers occasionally wipe at their red eyes with a kerchief. Coming home without having passed is a dreadful thought for both younger and older teachers alike. One muttered morosely “if I fail, my parents will be so disappointed” under her breath. An older teacher who had been looking forward to having the time after the test to cook a nice meal for her son learned that she did not pass today and I found her in the office long past work hours, quietly slouched in her chair with her son at her side. I taught five classes today, an unusually heavy load for my work week, so I wasn’t in our office much – but I did eventually learn that none of our teachers had passed the exam. I’m not sure if that means none of our department’s teachers, or none of Yucai Third Middle’s teachers. Either way, I really wonder about the fairness and efficiency of this system, especially given the actual market need for more teachers and the 50% of students for whom it will exclude from further education.

I think I should probably bake some more cookies.

…Lee, who came to the U.S. from Taiwan in the 1980s, said she resented Lim’s characterization of traditional script as obsolete. “Chinese characters are so beautiful, why would you give that up?” she said. “How could 5,000 years of history go away that easily?”

Simplified characters were introduced in the 1950s by the Chinese communist regime to improve literacy rates among the country’s mostly rural population.

At the time, anti-communist politicians and refugees fled and settled in Taiwan, where they continued the use of traditional script.

Before diplomatic relations were established between the United States and China in the 1970s, the traditional form was commonly taught here. To switch to the simplified form says something about Taiwan’s place in the world and who speaks on behalf of Chinese culture, said David Lee, past president of the Arcadia Chinese Assn.

“In the heart of Taiwan, it’s a crisis because the Taiwanese feel they are so small, there’s nothing they can compete with China, not militarily, not with population,” Lee said. “But if there’s something they can . . . insist upon, it’s culture and the language. And script is part of the culture.”

Personally I have invested all my time into learning simplified text, and even though I am mostly still illiterate in this country, it is always an ironic relief to see Mainland China’s 简体字。 Only here am I ever able to use what I’ve learned – not in Taiwan, not in Hong Kong, and not even in any Chinese community or establishment anywhere in America. This feeling of linguistic isolation really gets to me when I look at menus and signs written in Traditional script in America, as if even despite my best efforts I never will broach even the slightest bit back into that cultural heritage.

Even when I passed the immigration and customs border from Shenzhen to Hong Kong, I remember breathing in a warm feeling of recognition and belonging when I saw the sign “Welcome to Hong Kong” hanging from the bridge awning – and then breathing it out in a sigh of disappointment when I saw it repeated in Traditional script underneath. Chinese-Americans don’t have a shared sense of community spirit yet – as evidenced by the article – and we are each different in how we relate to our heritage, but for me and the importance I place in language and the written word, this is my Chinese-American dilemma: implicit sensations of belonging and exclusion, always confusingly wrapped into each other in the same current of cross-purposes whenever I see Traditional script.

It sounds like I am a proponent of Simplified for selfish purposes. I won’t deny that, and I won’t deny Traditional its beauty or the implicit meanings and connotations that it richly holds which I won’t ever be able to understand to the same level that I can analyze an English text (sadly). But languages have turning points where they change and evolve – English itself softened its angular Teutonic inflections after the Norman conquest of England, which forced French influences upon it to such an extent that even Middle English is drastically different from Old English. And even after that, major events served to twist it even further into its modern form today, and Modern English is also proving to be very malleable.

I think I know literary scholars who would be on both sides of this argument: those calling for the preservation of the cultural richness of Traditional, and those who would be excited to see the evolution of a new dynamic iteration of language (whether or not Simplified is that, I don’t know, but it’s a change at least).

Gently serene Guan Laoshi nodded. Tiantian, one of our office’s younger teachers and the subject of congratulatory office teasing for her upcoming marriage, stirred at her food quietly.

We probably started talking about TV after that.

This underlying sense of shame and redemption is something that no American pundit I have ever listened to understands, but every Chinese person with any amount of cultural self-respect (I’m looking at you, Arcadia – just having a lot of boba cafes isn’t good enough) feels deeply. It’s why everyone is looking forward so much to watching the celebrations for the 60th Anniversary of China’s founding tomorrow. It feels a little like how it felt when the Beijing Olympics were being broadcast. What! Celebrating 60 years of Communist rule! the rabid right would accuse…except nobody here really thinks at all about that. In fact, I’m dead certain that most Chinese remember quite well how bitter life was during most of those sixty years. It’s probably because of that hardship that everyone anticipates the ceremony and significance of tomorrow. The past was terrible, but at least we are here now today. And today we are strong.

A strength in no small part defined by military might, of course. I remember in 1999 when my parents watched China’s 50th anniversary celebrations from satellite television. They made me watch it too – I was 12 and quickly bored by all the tanks, planes and regiments that seemed to endlessly parade past Jiang Zemin’s dorky hand-wave. I had no idea that this thing I was having to sit through would be debated endlessly by American talking heads in the years to come as a demonstration of aggressive Chinese militancy, but I would certainly feel it in the 7th grade when Cory Greene asked “hey Chinaman, why’d you down our plane?” after the Hainan Island Incident and when my ears would burn upon hearing freshman Poli Sci majors try to sound important by speculating when the inevitable Chinese-American war would erupt in college dining halls. “What! Why would they think that!” flustered Nana when I mentioned this American paranoia to her. “Well…I guess, maybe, they did it on purpose too, to show the world they are strong,” she amended after a few moments of thought. “But still! It is also just a celebration! They are all being silly.”

In fact, I swear I once heard one of those talking heads on TV comment on how the Chinese seemed to be holding true to their promise of a 21st century “peaceful rise” based solely on how they had not “attempted any demonstrations of military antics like those parades before in the past.” The guy thought the Chinese were deliberately avoiding prancing around with guns in hand for these last ten years just to keep a low profile. I wonder what he’ll think when they do it again tomorrow, haha!