Concrete. Milk. Space.

School's finally started and life is supposed to have returned to normal. That, of course, depends upon normal's definition.

The migrant workers' bicycle carts, overloaded with their cheap consumer and industrial detritus (see picture above for what detritus looks like), have returned en masse, but the skies are still blue. DVD's are back on the streets, but people are still lining up for the subways...well, sort of. More than the omnipresent TV screens playing and replaying Chinese gold medal performances on public transportation, inside bathroom mirrors(!), and on high rises, it is these things -- the breathable air and the hesitant, nascent civility of Beijingers -- that remind one of the Olympics' lingering, fragile grip on the city. I won't consider normalcy to have fully returned until I'm throwing elbows on the bus platform under a gray sky.

But if normal is to mean “lack of the extraordinary,” I doubt China will ever qualify. This past week, while watching China learn how to walk in space, I opened up the refrigerator to find that Aunt Li and Uncle Shen had filled every available nook of our refrigerator with “safe” yogurt. My guess is that their horde reflex, honed in China's less fecund, more tumultuous decades, has been triggered by the milk scare. This reflex is still extant in Depression-era Americans too. My grandma went into horde mode the months before Y2K. I predict that the day the DOW drops below 9,000 she'll already have a small A&P cache stored in the recesses of her apartment. Apart from the small problem of hording perishable goods, my adopted aunt and uncle here might understand a thing or two. Pretty soon we all might just be buying Chinese milk with American securities.

At least the ex-pats here can provide the axis of normalcy China so desperately needs. This past week, with Chinese astronauts hovering above us, scouring the globe for visions of the Great Wall from space, my new ex-pat classmates and I descended upon an all-you-can-eat (sushi) and drink (anything but Saki) for $8. Six hundred Cathy rolls later, we headed to San Li Tun, Beijing's confused answer to NYC's Meat Packing District, where you pay a 1000% markup on normal beer prices in order to enjoy the tacky lasciviousness and M80-decibel-level to which the fictional Westerners of the Chinese imagination are accustomed.

Our champagne bottles had sparklers attached to them. Beautiful, uncomfortable Chinese waitresses wore dresses no one's mom would ever allow and no one's best friend would ever recommend. I couldn't help but think they wear them thinking the opposite. While there, a friend told me that you can fly into space now for a mere $21,000; leave earth for a while for a few months' work. I couldn't help but think that right then I was escaping both the Eastern and Western worlds for a mere $10 bottle of beer: my own space walk.

We landed back in the Eastern half of the globe abruptly. Right outside the door of the club was a dump truck; next to the dump trunk were three guys with shovels and a huge pile of concrete rubble, almost certainly broken to bits by sledge-hammer-wielding migrant workers earlier that day. Or rather, yesterday, as it was 3:30 in the morning. It's not uncommon to see buildings or even entire cities (cf. the Three Gorges Dam project) being demolished by hand, bricks being removed one at a time from demolished buildings to be used in new ones. It's a remarkable conservation of building materials that would simply be ground up in the U.S. And it costs virtually nothing, labor aside...ok, so it costs nothing. But what are the alternatives? More machines means an efficiency that would lead to incredible unemployment.

Clear of thought as I was at that time, I decided to shovel with them. Below is a recreation of the thought process that led to this decision (concomitant emotions in parenthesis).

[There are anywhere between 100-300 million “peasant workers” hitting roads with sledgehammers, “living in” at factories, and pedaling truckloads of goods and garbage around cities. (Guilt). I don't know how many of these are concrete rubble shovelers who work the night shift, probably the population of Chicago. (Helplessness). So every morning in Chicago, when the city wakes up, three million people in China are heading out into the dark to shovel concrete for an entire night into a truck to get paid the cost of one freaking toll on Illinois' crappy roads. (Antipathy for the Cubs and any Chicagoan with a summer home in Wisconsin). They do this every day, with maybe two days off a year. (More Guilt). My friend Kevin lives in Chicago. He's an English doctoral student and spends most of his time making snarky comments on people's Facebook pictures. (Amusement). There's a Chinese Kevin here somewhere who shovels thirty-pound shovelfuls of rock for entire nights instead of deconstructing freshmen English majors' conceptions of gender and race. (Bizarro Guilt). I'm going to be the Chinese Kevin for the night. (Mild intoxication/patronization).]

I grabbed one of the guy's shovels, and told him to rest. We smoked cigarettes (universal guy bonding here) while we worked, sang folk songs, and started shoveling races.

We talked while we worked. They came from Hebei, the province that surrounds Beijing. They had to work for another six months or so before they could work during the day. I told them what I always tell migrant workers I talk with: my grandfather was a farmer, I know I'll never be as tough or hardworking as he was. I respect them just like I respected him. When he was a child every man carried cigarettes in his work shirt pocket and gave them to other men just like they do in China. That's about it, I've never known what else to say.

In two hours, we loaded an entire dump truck's worth of concrete. We hugged goodbye. I spent their combined day's wages on a cab ride home. I woke up with scabbed forearms, sore hamstrings, blistered hands, and guilt.

Anyone who lives in China must continually navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of guilt and callousness, of class insulation and patronization. China makes you conscious of the moral tightrope we're all on, anywhere. Before China, I never really “felt” Aristotle's idea that virtue is a balance between extremes rather than a simple right or wrong. The “examined life” that leads to a mild, albeit self-satisfied, “white guilt” in the States can easily become despondent inaction and paralyzed hopelessness here in China. The awareness that I and my fellow do-gooders thrive on in the States can be devastating here because of the massive scope of the inequality and your corresponding lack of agency.

But, on the other side of spectrum, a “healthy,” suburban acceptance of inequality (i.e. callousness) can easily reach Nero-style indifference. “Numbness,” is how a Chinese friend describes it; she's witnessed a lot of it, as she spends most of her time with those who “eat fragrant foods and drink spicy drinks.” (As tasty as that sounds, this is not a positive idiom.)

But it's not simply society's upper crust that must fear numbness. A well-known cliché propagated by Chinese and non-Chinese alike is that “human life isn't worth as much in China.”
The truth, or at least validity, of this statement can be derived from study of Chinese history, where China's most impressive public works are also tombs to thousands of laborers who were rolled over in the pursuit higher state interests, whether political, economic, or monomaniacal. For more modern examples, one need only look at the Pickett's-Charge-a-day strategy China employed in the Korean War or even the shockingly callous statements of Zhang Yi Mou's regarding working his Opening Ceremony dancers past the point of exhaustion. (http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/summer08/news/story?id=3543618. [my favorite sentence is where coffee breaks and human rights are mentioned with equal distaste in the same sentence.])


But the ironic laugh of some of my best Chinese friends and respected acquaintances has provided all the evidence I need of this cliché's validity: whether it was the secretary at my NGO coolly joking that a university student at her school who jumped from the third floor didn't really want to die or she would have picked a higher building, my current professor jibing that thousands of people die every year in coal mines but “we don't really care about them right now” or the way one of my other profs chuckled after he told me that “[w]e have a saying written on the walls in every courthouse, if you confess, the punishment will be lighter. Well, we found that actually, anyone who confesses usually ends up with a worse punishment, ha ha ha.”

I believe that anyone who spends much time in China will find it riddled with a ubiquitous, ironic, and sometimes embarrassed, tittering. While the laugh itself may seem quite fragile, it's a powerful defense against engaging with harsh realities that plague this big country and its millions of people. Behind that laughter, bulwarking it, are a slew of truisms (成语, 俗语) that span millenia. Chengyu and suyu are famous quotations and lines of poetry that are the foundation of Chinese language and, arguably, Chinese morality. They are the bane of any Chinese student's existence, and also the bane of any Westerner trying to pursue lines of thought to their endpoints. Once spoken with conviction, a well-placed chengyu can end a debate with its powerful generality. Their power is in their simplicity and the religiousios fervor with which they are believed: it is the religion of the Really Old Farmer's Almanac.

For example, whenever I belabor educated, well-off Chinese friends of mine with the toll their society is taking on my conscience, they invariably end up using Mao's famous response to Western criticism of communist China's inconsistencies, “The whole world is a contradiction” (世界就是矛盾). Ha ha ha. End of conversation.

But easy as it is to assume they're dodging tough questions, I believe their laughter here is a catharsis for the cognitive dissonance wrought on us all by the myriad contradictions of modern China. Most of my Chinese friends know that things aren't ideal, and many sympathize with suffering taking place across their country. The idea that Western conceptions of life and rights don't translate over here is bunk. If it were true, there would be no reason to laugh: anyone who stolidly held that human life was meaningless wouldn't need to laugh, because they wouldn't care. From that perspective, an embarrassed giggle is not callous at all, and certainly a more rational, less patronizing testament to solidarity with the poor and suffering than my blistered hands.

Somehow space, milk and concrete come together over here. Somehow an ironic laugh helps one navigate landmines of guilt and numbness that mark the territory between skyscaper owner and and builder. It's a survival skill that's been far more effective than my years of tortured, moralistic pondering. In the end, I, too, have to shrug my shoulders and agree with the Chairman, the world is a contradiction.

There's a real elegance to those Chinese who live in a world of astronauts and abject poverty and keep their humanity, communitarian version though it may be. (Humanity with Chinese Characteristics?). I'm not going to criticize the tittering and clichés until I can provide my Chinese brethren with a better way to walk the tightrope. To do otherwise smacks too much of Tonya Harding, sideswiping a grace you can't replicate.

相信科学, 反对迷信 Believe Science, Oppose Superstition.

Racing back across the countryside to Beijing from the China-Brazil soccer game in the Chinese version of the Bullet Train, I happened upon this bit of propaganda on a once-whitewashed, now-dilapidated wall: Believe Science, Oppose Superstition. It was the first time I'd encountered this particular brand of governmental encouragement. And upon initial reflection, it made sense that I hadn't seen it before. The majority of my time in China has been spent in cities -- among the quarter of the Chinese population that is not only relatively or actually wealthy, but also “has culture,” which, interestingly enough, means they have rejected much of theirs.

I didn't think much of it until a few weeks later, when a new tutor/friend of mine recited that maxim almost verbatim. She's a graduate student in Chinese History. She also happens to have grown up not far from said-wall. My conversations with her have been quite a case study in what Believe Science, Oppose Superstition both permits and does not permit.

************

When I found out that Zhang Mei Jing was getting her Master's in History, I couldn't believe my luck. One of the reasons I've come here is to study Mencius, arguably the greatest Confucian scholar after the school's namesake himself. Most Chinese know as much about him as Americans do John Dewey, but she knew quite a bit. It was an auspicious beginning.

The first hour of our conversation went as expected: we were liberal arts kindred spirits. She started by bemoaning the fact that history had been relegated to little more than an elective in Chinese education. First through sixth graders don't even take it. She demonstrated her point by calling a couple fourth-grade boys over from the Tony Little Ripoff Playground (definitely not trademarked) next to the pagoda we were sitting in.

“Have you studied history at all in school?”

“No.” She gave me a pursed-lipped, knowing glance.

“Can you name the dynasties in order from the Qin?”

“No.” Another nod in my direction.

“Can you name me an emperor from the Song Dynasty?”

“No.” She was crushed, and totally vindicated.

I had experience consoling teachers in faculty lounge conversations of this ilk before, so I tried to comfort her with the fact that my former American high school students were decidedly more ignorant: once, disbelieving a National Geographic survey claiming that 50% of American high school students couldn't find New York State on a unmarked map, I gave my high school juniors a multiple choice pop quiz, asking them which quadrant of the U.S. (North-East, South-East, North-West, South-West) New York was in. Twenty percent got it wrong.

This commiseration went on for an hour. All of a sudden, things took a turn, and I realized that we were talking about two very different definitions of History: one which encouraged competing views in the (perhaps vain) pursuit of objectivity and one which denied them right out.

It started, as these problems always seem to begin, when I brought up the Cultural Revolution. Hadn't that been the beginning of the end of modern China's love affair with history? After all, what about the saying, If the old doesn't go, the new'll never come? What about the destruction of family histories, the loss of traditions, the smashed heads on Buddhist statues visible all over China?

“Oh, that wasn't an attack on Chinese history as much as it was an attack on superstition.” She went on, excited, eyes darting about as if in some type of conscious rem; something I'd said had set her off. She asked me if I had been one of those foreign teachers who filled up his students' heads with “dissonant thoughts” that led them to disparage their country and lose their sense of nationalism.

This was dangerous territory, so I changed directions. I brought up the propaganda on the wall near her house, and I started wondering aloud what science and superstition meant. Could it be possible that history which doesn't allow for dialog makes superstition out of science?

Needing domestic backup, I called on my favorite Chinese short story, My Old Home, written by the early 20th Century author Lu Xun. An educated, landed gentry comes home after twenty years away to move his mother to the site of his governmental post. In the short time that he's home, he meets his old childhood friend, Runtu, who was the most mysterious, strange, and wondrous child -- full of life and stories. Things are no longer the same. Runtu is now a beaten, pitiable, shell of a man. He greets the narrator, his former friend, in the most obsequious manner, refusing to call him anything but “master.” After much soul searching, the narrator realizes that this state of affairs was unavoidable: It was life as it was. As he's experiencing this disillusionment, he watches with great melancholy as his nephew plays the entire day with Runtu's child, even as he had once played with Runtu – as equals. At the end of the story, as he's drifting down the canal away from home, nephew by his side, he thinks, or as he puts it, hopes.

“I hope that our sons will not be like us, that they will not allow a barrier to grow up between rich and poor, educated and not educated. I would not like them to have a treadmill existence like mine, nor to suffer like Runtu until they become stupefied, nor yet, like others, to devote all their energies to dissipation. They should have a new life, a life we have never experienced.

This hope for my children made me suddenly afraid. When Runtu asked for my family's incense-burner and candlesticks I laughed to myself, to think that he was still worshiping idols and would never put them out of his mind. Yet what I now called hope was no more than an idol I had created myself. The only difference was that what he desired was close at hand, while what I desired was less easily realized.

As I dozed, I thought: hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.”

While I must have read this passage over one hundred times, it's hard for me to read it without emotion.

First, it's amazing that such utterly dehumanizing words like “stupefied” and “devote all their energies to dissipation” could be used, tenderly, to describe human life extant on the same earth my grandparents inhabited. And things would only get worse for Runtu and his children as the 20th Century bore down on them with a misery perhaps unknown in human history.

Second, I've found no better explanation for the indescribable earnestness that is the backbone of Modern China's industrial revolution than Lu Xun's passage here. It is an earnestness that approaches desperation, and is betrayed even in modern China's successes. In this passage, love for country and countryman confronts the great shame of poverty and the horror of estrangement and isolation: a shame and horror exacerbated by the consciousness of Western economic, military, and technological domination. These are memories that have been difficult to erase, even with China's recent, superhuman achievements. I believe this earnestness was present in the opening and closing ceremonies, which, between their astonishing sets, belied a desperation: we must amaze at all costs. From this point of view, the costly Olympic regalia with which the country draped itself for the past three weeks is in a way, grotesque; so too, is most Western commentators' failure to realize this.

Sound ridiculous? When Zhang and I were discussing what moral system would balance out the startlingly vicious capitalism run rampant in many parts of China (a common topic here), she replied, too seriously, that “[f]or the past eight years our morality has been the Olympics.”

But at bottom, it's the narrator's self-awareness that moves me and embarrasses Believe Science, Reject Superstition. I have no argument with science or with the slogan in general. Both China and the narrator were right to bet on technology over traditional superstitions as the road to economic profitability and stability. It's the lack of irony -- on that wall, in the Bird's Nest, in my conversations with Zhang -- that frustrates, especially when they have such a great example in Lu Xun. Irony is what allowed the far-from-stupefied narrator to see Runtu as his equal, if not superior, even as he led his people forward. Lack of irony is what keeps Zhang from seeing the ridiculousness of decrying superstition for the sake of science, but simultaneously denying her students the right to use the scientific method to test and retest competing histories.

But who knows? Perhaps hope's roads are better paved without self-awareness.

Contrarians

China can be a rough place for people who like disagreement. I'm not talking about the macro-level that everyone's familiar with. Rather, it's the daily pursuit of harmony on the individual, micro-level that most interests me.

My first experience with this was when I was teaching persuasive essays to my English Composition students at Hangzhou Teacher's College. I had hammered the students on the basics of the essay, stealing catchy mottoes and lesson plans from my days teaching high school kids in Jacksonville: “Say what you're going to say, say it, say what you said.” It seemed simple, I wanted them to introduce a contrary position, support it, and then add a nuanced conclusion.
It wasn't working, my kids' essays were underwhelming, few of the essays even had thesis statements, the very thing I'd stressed the most while teaching them. Worried that I was missing something, I asked one of my best students about it. She mentioned that this was not the way they had learned to write persuasive essays, in English or Chinese.

“We were taught to write in a way that would allow everyone to agree with what we were saying, even if they didn't. Stating a contrary position upfront is going to turn off half of the readers right away. We don't say the theme of our essay until the conclusion, once everyone's had a chance to hear things they can agree with.”

Lesson for me: Know your audience. After that I told the kids that I was their only audience, and I was going to disagree with anything they said, so they might as well tell me their opinions up front. (I also told them that they would fail if they didn't write thesis statements, but I don't think that had any effect.) Either way, I doubt anyone wrote that way after they finished my class.

This habit of always finding peace in interpersonal relationships can be frustrated for the dirt-seeking foreigner. I thought of this while reading Where's the Grief? (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/opinion/15brooks.html?hp ), David Brooks amazed article on the apparent lack of misery and depression among Sichuan earthquake victims. My first, self-righteous, skeptical reaction was “Yeah, the first person they're going to open up to is going to be a foreign reporter from the New York Times –the darling of the Chinese media." But it was exactly right. In his unsuccessful quest to unearth victim pain and suffering, Brooks wonders aloud in the article if his interviewees were just spouting canned answers, implying that Chinese would be different behind closed doors. I doubt it, perhaps only behind a labyrinth of closed doors.

Brooks made me think about my own natural disaster experience in China. Last summer, through a bizarre series of events, I ended up on a caravan of ten coach sleeper buses (basically an army barracks inside a bus) that was heading east from the “Chinese Appalachians” to the more developed coast. It was a sweaty, shirtless, grueling 20-hour ride, and I wished they had just told me it was full rather than kicking a guy off the bus to let me on. About two hours into the ride, I figured out that the buses had been hired by shoe factories south of Shanghai. They were busing in workers from the countryside, who would normally work their fields during the summer and then head to the coast in fall to work in factories making Reeboks during the winter. But this was July. I asked my bunkmate Hong Guo – a paunchy, squared-headed teenager who was amazed that I spoke three languages (Chinese, English, and American) –why they were heading out so early.

“Oh, there were huge floods all along the Huai river. All of our fields are flooded. So we're just going to Wenling earlier.” Smiling. I searched his face for signs of remorse or sadness. Nothing.

“Oh, I'm really sorry. That's awful. Is there any government aid available for you?”

“Yes. The government is giving out aid to flood victims.”

“That's great. How much do you get?”

“Oh. We haven't gotten any.”

Such a great answer, spoken without a hint of irony. The government is doing what it can. So are we. The same tenor of answer Brooks got when he asked a grieving father for a government appraisal. Does everyone have a natural disaster media response cheat sheet in their back pocket?

But Hong Guo wasn't posturing, nor was his smile faked. The entire bus was raucous the whole trip, more like a high school prom party wagon than a what it was: a bus-load of incredibly poor migrant workers who'd just lost their entire summer's crop, who were leaving behind families in destroyed, dilapidated houses to go make overpriced shoes at under-living wages. The government is doing what it can. So are we. Insofar as I'm right in paraphrasing Hong Guo's responses (and insofar as I can use them to generalize about an entire civilization), I think these are great insights into the Chinese metaphysical survival kit: Confucianism and Daoism, still extant despite undergoing the most effective cultural house-cleaning of all time thirty years ago. Confucius, a precursor of Steve Austin, told you to know your role. Laozi (founder of Daoism) taught you how to deal with it.

It makes sense. In the U.S., we're oversold on our agency (in law, politics, school, social graces (some of us)), and so growing older is one disillusionment after another until only 50% of us vote, most of us can't do simple math, and we all feel deserving of love even though Paul McCartney was quite clear that the love you take is equal to the love you make. Not so China. The Middle Kingdom has built a country that thinks of itself as a big family. Dad does dad things, Mom does mom things, kids do kids things, government does government things. Your dad might be good, he might be bad, but he's still your dad, and you can't change that (he most likely won't abondon that role either, staying around to raise his family even if he has two or three mistresses.) Same with the party. There's little question that this is more efficient than democracy. It's just that we have this annoying obsession with fairness in the West.

Try to explain fairness to a one-hundred year old woman in China. I have. The answer I've inevitably gotten was that no one from that generation could have survived if fairness mattered to them: from emperor, to warlord, to Japanese devils, to Nationalists, to Communists, to State Capitalists; from foot binding, to book burning, to reform and opening. You do what you can. Hong Guo got passionate only once in our conversation, when he talked about his parents and grandparents, “Our parents made themselves like dirt, like dirt, just to survive. With just the slight hope that things would be better for their children. Just so I could be here talking to you today.”

I don't like the word dirt. I like the word kelp. China is the world's largest human kelp forest, with all the beauty and mystery of those shrouded underwater worlds. Everything outside of your role, be it natural or man-made, is treated the same, a tide that can't be beaten but only adapted to. An earthquake is the same as bad government, an annoyance that can't be changed. They don't need the Serenity Prayer here. For balance's sake, though, they might do with some Self-Reliance.

Walls

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.”

Frost, “Mending Wall”

While private ownership is relatively new to modern China, privacy is not. I doubt there is a country with more walls than China. There are few more tangible reminders of the insularity of Chinese politics, history, culture, relationships, psyche than the ubiquitous cement walls that divide and subdivide each city block and therefore, divide people. Chain link fences these are not. They are, bare minimum, seven to ten feet of solid concrete or steel bars, crowned with broken glass, metal spikes, or barbed wire (if you’re lucky). Cheever could never have written The Swimmer here, or, if he had, his swimmer would have had to carry a grappling hook with him from backyard to backyard rather than cocktails (sorry for the obscure reference, blame The Onion and its recent hilarious article on Cheever).

If it seems that I’m reaching for a topic on what is only my second post, I can explain. I live in a small, two-building apartment complex that occupies a tiny niche on the east side of a China-sized city block. The complex has two entrances: the east gate and the west gate. Sounds simple enough, but there’s a catch. The west gate is open twenty-four hours. The east gate is not. It’s a five-minute walk from the subway to the east gate, but since the north and south sides of our wall are sandwiched between other buildings, you can’t just walk around the apartment complex to the other side. To get to the west gate, you have to walk over a mile to the west side of the block and then sneak back through the middle of the block like it’s the Death Star. I’ve actually taken a taxi twice from the east gate to the west gate. When the driver asks me where I’m going, I point out the car window at my apartment, curse politely, and then say, “There.”

When the east gate is open, it’s about as predictable as the DMV. It was closed this morning at 10:30. Frustrated, I asked the guardian of the west gate what the east gate hours were.

He lisped back to me, “It’s open at seven. It’s closed from twelve to one for lunch, and then closes for the night at nine.”

“It’s closed right now and it’s ten-thirty.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

I waited five seconds. He seemed satisfied with his answer, so I didn’t pursue it any further.

* * * * * * *

A few days ago, I posted some pictures of Beijing hutongs: small-alleyed villages, really, that sit in the center of the city. They sprawl all over the downtown—behind, in front of, and around the ancient sites and glassy skyscrapers that dominate the city’s skyline. There’s a ton of life in the hutongs, and sentimental folk, perhaps disproportionately of the white persuasion, get pretty frustrated with the idea that many are being torn down—razed as an offering to modernity. I haven’t quite formed an opinion on this yet (mostly because mine doesn’t matter), but I think a nuanced conversation I had with my friend Ian might be of service. Ian was in Hong Kong at the time...we were on gchat...which I was accessing on my laptop...which was using wireless internet service… from a very trendy coffee shop… in what used to be a hutong.


“Me: i think i want to live in a hutong

Ian: i knew a guy who did that

me: how’d it go for him?

Ian: kind of a jerk*

me: i’d hope to do it without the jerkiness*
Ian: kind of hard

me: really? why? i’m liking living with old retirees right now. would it have to be different?

Ian: i dunno
yes its “culturally” interesting
but i bet a lot of those people would want a nicer apartment too
it’s kidn of like you’re slumming

me: true...”


The (de)construction’s happening regardless of if I can run across China to raise money to save the hutongs or not, so I’m going to connect this digression to the wall conversation.

Anytime there’s a construction site in China, there will be walls around it. Anytime there are walls around it, there will be some sort of propaganda on those walls. I found the propaganda on the hutongs interesting because it makes more concessions than most wall writing, underlying the controversial nature of the destruction/renovation of the hutongs. A few of the more interesting ones were as follows: “BRING ABOUT A SUN-SHINY TRANSITION;” “IMPROVE/PROTECT THE ALREADY BEAUTIFUL ENVIRONMENT;” and my personal favorite (posted above), “FAIR, OPEN, AND IMPARTIAL.”

That last one really struck me, for the wall dost protest too much. Rarely have I seen a wall feeling the need to laud the procedural legitimacy of its own existence. Fairness is usually implied. There’s too much stuff to tear down and build back up in this country for prolonged, open debate on every ache and pain some local has about a demolition project. Normally the stenciled writing on the construction walls says something like “GREEN CITIES AND BLUE SKIES FOR EVERYONE,” “HELP OLD/DISABLED PEOPLE,” or “LET’S BUILD A CULTURED CITY.” Makes one wonder if in some bureau they’ve got packs of controversial stencils, sort-of-controversial stencils, and completely-uncontroversial stencils.

Either way, my wholly unsubstantiated judgment is that the Beijing government is quite aware of the dilemma of tearing down one of the sweetest parts of the city simply because it’s old, unhygienic and lacking basic infrastructure.

* * * * * * * *

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down.”

There are a lot of walls in China, and a lot of things written on them and hidden behind them as well. But something troubles me about extending the metaphor.

In my experience, Chinese insularity doesn’t push much past etiquette, an etiquette that is easily—often willingly—discarded. On a deeper level, many Chinese are just waiting to whisper great personal secrets if given a chance. Of course, this may or may not be alcohol induced. This is true on the international level as well. There is a great longing for communication with the West, for acceptance. That’s obvious when you talk to many Chinese who complain that the Opening Ceremony itself was made for the West, not for Chinese people. I've had government officials and taxi drivers tell me the same thing. They're sick of the old stuff- they want to talk about New China. It's all “too much history that we know already.’’ (Some of that might be self-deprecation. They know it was an unreal ceremony, and therefore saying anything complimentary about it at all would certainly be bragging.)

Yet it’s still a longing for acceptance that has to overcome quite a lot: a language that isn’t easy to translate into or out of, centuries of mistrust and Western domination, a huge population --and the concomitant self-confidence and unselfconciousness that come with being part of a “majority culture“-- that intimidates non-Chinese and provides easy cover for Chinese spooked by unsuccessful attempts to communicate with foreigners. But that longing is still there. It’s as if, behind each wall in China, there’s a person sitting there with a sledgehammer just waiting for the go-ahead to destroy it; one just has to give them that chance – and guarantee that they’ll have someone to welcome them on the other side.

I think, at bottom, that’s why I came to China, it’s why I learned Chinese, and why I’m so addicted to this place. Amazing things can happen when you can help someone get past superficial stuff like everything that makes you you and them them.

Anyway, I hope they destroy the wall that separates my east and west gates first.

"You Don't Eat Green Vegetables for Breakfast? That's Why You're Fat."

As odd as it is that I might be paying more to board with a pair of retired pensioners than to have my own apartment, it is quickly proving itself to be a great investment.

This morning, while stalled for a writing topic, I decided to make myself breakfast. It was the first breakfast I had made after coming home with my haul from the grocery store yesterday, and it had that wonderful, healthy sense of infinite choice you have with stocked cupboards: I could eat any combination of juices, yogurt, breads, cheeses, etc, that I had dutifully stocked away either in the fridge or on one of my (four!) wardrobe shelves. I cut off two healthy portions of fresh French bread purchased from a surprisingly good European bakery down the street, warmed them up, slathered them with generous portions of peanut butter (delicious excess that flouts the meager, butter-type rations we were allotted in our youth), and then covered that deliciousness with a layer of sliced bananas. I then poured myself a glass of (drinkable) yogurt and relished my mature choices: eat your heart out, Total, this was a complete breakfast on a bun.

My roommates-emeritus broke my reverie. “Aunt Li” opened the door a crack and peered in, almost afraid of what was happening in her kitchen.

“You’re cooking breakfast?” She said with a half-smile, amused. She used that sentence as a password, pulling herself into the kitchen.The Chinese word for “cooking” that she used can be translated in a number of ways: making, cooking, preparing. On behalf of myself and of Western culture, I wanted to clear up the ambiguity.

“Well, not making breakfast, just putting together something simple. I usually eat a simple, but wholesome (I was sure to include) breakfast in the morning. This isn’t real cooking.”

“Uncle Shen” followed, boxers and t-shirt, in her wake. Shen is a serious man who makes you think he’s always about to smile – he was smiling now. He has a sort of isosceles triangle-shaped head dotted with tufts of white hair that would typecast him for a Chinese Mad-Hatter. His wife picked up a cucumber with her left hand and a ku gua (a quick google search told me it’s a balsam pear) with her right and continued to lay into my sandwich.

“You don’t eat green vegetables for breakfast?” She said, voice rising, cucumber shaking in disapproval at me like a long, floppy index finger, “You’re going to get fat.”

I wasn’t going to give up. I wasn’t eating a Toaster Strudel here, there was some real nutrition present. “Oh, it’s ok, I usually eat a lot of vegetables for lunch and dinner. Americans normally eat fruits with their breakfast.”

Shen reiterated, “So when do you eat vegetables?”

“For lunch and dinner.”

He seemed satisfied. His wife was not.

“No, that’s not ok. You have to have vegetables in the morning. Is that really all you’re eating?”

“You have to understand,” Shen chimed in, half embarrassed by his wife’s tirade, half serious (so, half smiling), “we’re old. You’re like a child to us.” He opened the pot of porridge that I had unwittingly (and unconsciously) neglected and winced his eyes in a non-verbal sigh of disappointment, as if to say, you could have avoided this whole confrontation if you had just eaten what my wife indiscreetly left for you...Now you’re going to suffer. He grabbed a bowl and began slopping great spoonfuls of slop sloppily.

And so, just as in my childhood, where refusal to take beets, brussel sprouts or other nastiness resulted in a double helping that had to be eaten before you left the table. I went back to my room with a tray laden with two complete breakfasts: my continental breakfast, now cold, lonely, and shamed; and my Chinese breakfast: a raw cucumber and a huge bowl of very tasty, extraordinarily healthy rice porridge cooked with dates, three kinds of beans, and other nutritional things I don’t eat enough of.

It’s a good thing I ate green vegetables this morning, now I won’t get fat.