Target audience: Westerners who are interested in understanding Chinese culture, who look at today’s China and today’s Chinese and wonder, “Why do they act the way they do? How do they see the world?”
Abstract: The author gets nostalgic about being groomed for life as a cog in the machine, witnessing the early days of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” and being the embodiment of culture clash.
Keywords: China, Chinese history, culture, Guangzhou, 2008 Olympics
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Two thousand and eight torsos cloaked in identical silver robes with red accent stripes slowly turned in perfect unison. Four thousand and sixteen arms rose up and in one swift motion swung down in complete synchronization, landing 4,016 open-fist blows to the top of 2,008 drums.
Boom!
The 2,008 torsos turned again, this time in the opposite direction, and the 4,016 arms followed, again moving as one with machine-like precision.
Boom!
And on they went, at an ever-quickening pace but always in step with each other.
Boom!
Boom! Boom!
Boom! Boom! Boom!
With the world tuning in for the opening moments of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, this was the self-portrait China proudly put on display: a giant mass of humanity, young, strong, and moving with a precision and synchronization both awesome and intimidating. As the drummers pounded their instruments, they chanted a line from the Analects of Confucius: Friends have come from afar, how happy we are.
Their words were difficult to make out amid the echo, but it was hard to miss the real message pulsating across Beijing National Stadium and into TV sets around the world. Watching at home some 11,000 miles away in Durham, North Carolina, I turned to my wife and said, “If world domination ever comes down to synchronized anything, the rest of the world is so screwed.”
“Good thing I married a Chinese then,” she replied.
Early Indoctrination
It’s fitting that China chose this tour de force to open the event that was to be the exclamation point for its return to prominence. Whether it’s building the Great Wall or the great mall of China, the country’s biggest asset has always been its immense population. Before you can tap the collective energy of one-fifth of the world’s people, however, you must first get nearly 1.5 billion human beings to move in the same direction. It’s not hard then to see why the group has always trumped the individual in Chinese culture, a way of thinking that permeates life from an early stage.
Upon entering elementary school in Guangzhou, the major city on China’s southeast coast, my classmates and I marched out to the school assembly square in our identical school uniforms each morning to join the other students in calisthenics. We were encouraged to move in unison following the motions of our class leaders and to the sound of a woman’s voice counting against the backdrop of a lethargic piece of music blaring from a crackling speaker. At 2 p.m. each afternoon, all the students would sit at their desks and perform eye-relaxation exercises, with the same voice counting to a slightly different piece of lethargic music over crackling intercoms in every classroom. When the teacher entered the room and said, “Hello, class,” we would all rise simultaneously, stand perfectly erect, and reply in one voice, with gusto, “Hello, teacher!” Once class started, we would often be called upon to read chapters from our literature textbooks aloud, together, with as much synchronization as fifty-two 6-year-olds could muster. When a fellow student earned praise from the teacher for a standout accomplishment, we showed our collective approval with three succinct claps, no more, no less.
These early preparations for future careers in professional synchronized drumming weren’t the only life lessons my classmates and I absorbed in school. Our textbooks imparted nuggets of truth in the form of ancient Chinese idioms, children’s stories from Western literature, and tales of revolutionary martyrs who gave their lives so that we won’t have to live under the oppressive regime of landlords and the Guomindang. We learned the value of labor and felt honored to be entrusted with the responsibility of sweeping the school grounds before class each morning and watering the plants in the school arboretum during our afternoon siesta. We learned to respect the authority figures in our lives, whether it’s our parents or our teachers, because they provided for us and looked after us, and because they were authority figures. We learned to revere our elders and to serve the people as the great patriot Lei Feng had done, so whenever we saw an old lady walking back from the street market, we would burst into spontaneous civic service and help her carry her shopping bag, even if it was just a small nylon string satchel containing a couple stalks of greens.
Outside of school, I lived in a bustling mega-metropolis of more than five million. Guangzhou was on the leading edge of the changes that would come to define China in the new millennium, though I was far too young to comprehend the significance of what I was seeing. In 1978, a year before I was born, the Party had decided that instead of being bourgeoisie, free-market economy with sufficient government controls in place was actually “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The great experiment of economic reform and opening up to the West ensued in a handful of cities. Guangzhou was one of those test tubes, in part because it was far away from the interior of the country, making it easier to quarantine any corrupting influences.
It was a time of optimism and excitement. Vibrant street markets and small private businesses were springing up left and right, exuding the energy of a people who, for the first time in memory, were beginning to have the money and the access to acquire goods once available only to the very rich and well-connected. Newspapers were full of stories about people who set up their own shoe stores or fish stalls and quickly joined the ranks of the “ten-thousand-aires.” A relative from Hong Kong gave us our first color TV set in 1984, and one day in 1985 dad brought home our first refrigerator, which he transported from the other side of the city on the tailgate of his bicycle. Motorcycles were becoming a more common sight, and a friend of the parents of a friend of a friend supposedly had even bought a used car, not to be turned into a taxi cab but to be reserved for his own personal use, which seemed like such an unnecessary extravagance.
For all this, we should thank the Party, which — as we learned from our textbooks, TV shows, and songs on the radio — resisted Japanese invaders, chased out foreign imperialists, liberated our grandparents, and was now leading us toward prosperity, as the ubiquitous green dwarf Wanbao-brand refrigerator in everyone’s home could attest to. Just a couple years earlier, you had to go down to the neighborhood canteen to get ice-cold sugar water for relief during one of the many planned power outages at the height of summer. Now you could make ice-cold sugar water in your own home!
Land of the Exotic Chicken Spices
In 1987, dad, a scientist, went to train in America. Mom and I joined him there a couple years later, though it took us two tries to get our visas from the U.S. embassy. On the first attempt, a tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed laowai behind the counter at the embassy told us, in Mandarin so shockingly flawless it could have come from a Chinese, “I’m sorry. I can’t approve your visas because I think you have immigration intents.” A month later, a couple additional guarantee letters from dad’s employer in the United States apparently convinced a different laowai at the embassy that we weren’t planning on staying forever in his country. Around early evening on March 31, 1990, we landed at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, and my first meal was an eight-piece bucket from Kentucky Fried Chicken — original recipe — that left me smacking my lips at this blend of wonderful and foreign spices. No wonder we became the envy of our friends and relatives back in China when we got permission to come to America.
My astonishment at the Colonel’s secret recipe and other typical objects of culture shock (ginormous fridges, for one) subsided soon enough, but it took longer to understand the more fundamental values of American life that clashed with the truths I had known up to that point. Americans’ irreverence toward authority and tradition was particularly puzzling to someone who had started learning at an early age to respect those things. The American embrace of individuality seemed self-absorbed, and the way American parents allowed their kids to seemingly pursue whatever they wanted to felt like the perfect way to spoil children who didn’t know any better. And what’s with all the hate for Chairman Mao and the Party? Did Americans not know that they saved China from foreign invaders? That they gave the Chinese people peace and stability after decades of chaos? That they enabled us to make ice-cold sugar water in the convenience of our own homes?
I’ve spent the past twenty-two years reconciling the clash of cultures and ideologies between the two countries I call home. Along the way, I came to appreciate the perspective this duality gave me, pursued a career that was not the one my parents had hoped for, and developed a cynicism about governments, politics, and resolute convictions. China spent those years becoming more like America. A few months after the Beijing Olympics, my family and I returned to China for the first time in thirteen years. The China I saw then bore little resemblance to the China of my childhood. Capitalism was no longer the grand experiment, but rather the fervently embraced way of life. Coffee shops and KFCs flourished in every city we visited. The bicycles — for so long a symbol of China — and even the motorcycles had given way to fleets of cars. The plain, monochromatic mode of dress that was already fading away during my childhood was nowhere to be seen, replaced by everything hip, fashionable, and easily found in any mall in America. And no one made ice-cold sugar water anymore.
If you looked closer, however, you could still spot vestiges of the culture from my early years. One morning during our trip, my wife and I went walking around Shamian Island, a tranquil square mile of greenery and colonial architecture that houses foreign embassies in Guangzhou. While we sat outside a Starbucks and sipped our orange apricot lattes, a familiar sound drifted our way from down the street. I looked up and saw little kids in identical uniforms streaming out of an elementary school in an orderly fashion, stepping to a marching tune. Once they were in position, a lethargic piece of music blared out of the speakers, and a woman’s voice started to count. The students launched into calisthenics, trying their best to move as one.
The rest of the world is so screwed.
