Sap up the wrap-up (or not...)

I'm writing this post from Shiyan's house in San Francisco. I made it back to the states on Friday, and I've been hanging out here and trying to get over my jetlag ever since.

The last couple of weeks in China were a bit of a waste. We ended up staying in Beijing, only returning to Harbin for a weekend to get our things and say goodbye to our roommates. Beijing can be a fun city, but the morale in our program was way down. The language pledge had completely disintegrated and everyone was just looking forward to going home. Then two of the kids got put on suspension (and one got kicked out for next quarter) for smoking pot, and the administration's handling of the whole situation just made us lose any respect that we may still have held out for them.

I could have left pretty easily, but I decided to stick it out until my program ended, mostly because the perfectionist in me couldn't leave my courses unfinished. Also, I figured that I had come that far, so I might as well stay through the end of finals so that if I wanted to apply to another Chinese language study program in the future I would have a transcript to show them. That being said, I did leave as soon as humanly possible -- I was in a cab to the airport ten minutes after finishing my last final.

My experience in China has definitely been worthwhile, but I have mixed emotions. I never really fell in love with the culture, although I have been able to understand it a bit more. As with every culture, there are things that I admire and things that just rub me the wrong way. For one thing, it's impossible to live here and not stand in awe of the work ethic of the people I meet. I know it's a stereotype, but most of the people I've met here really do work very hard and very efficiently. I know that American students, myself included, plan a lot but also let a lot fall through the cracks. It's just taken for granted that we've got a lot going on, so sometimes things just don't get done. That is definitely not the case here. It's actually made me a bit embarrassed to think about how stressed out I feel about school when most of our Chinese roommates here have three times the course material to cover. I think a lot of what I'm having trouble with now, my roommate probably mastered in high school.

But having said that, one of the things that I just can't stand is the general tendency toward conformity. The culture prescribes a certain path of success, and most people do their best to follow it. Personal happiness is not as important as getting a good education, getting a well-paid and stable job, and marrying someone of the right social status. I guess the idea is that if one follows this path then personal happiness will be the end result, but I can see that it doesn't always work that way. When I asked my roommate why she chose her major, her answer was that, despite her complete lack of interest in the subject, she chose it because it could get her a stable and well-paying job. But what's the point of putting so much effort into getting a job like that if she's just going to hate getting up and going to work every day?

Every time I bring up this argument, someone is sure to point out that it is an American's luxury to say that they are only going to go for a job that they enjoy. In China, there are a billion other people ready to replace you, so finding a stable source of income is better than most other options, even if the job is not enjoyable. That does make sense, but it seems that mainly people just don't have the balls to go out and find their passion. There are plenty of ways to make money, not just the conventional ones, especially in a country that is changing so rapidly. But that's the thing, despite the huge changes that are taking place (or maybe because of them), the Chinese people I've met still cling to the most stable path and are afraid to explore or take risks. Our roommates even freaked out when my other American suitemate and I told them our plans to go to Sun Island to go running one weekend early in the quarter. They couldn't believe that we would go, by ourselves, to a place we had never been to before in an unfamiliar town without really having exact knowledge of how to get there. We explained that, worst comes to worst, we could always just take a taxi back to campus if we got really lost. But they were just amazed that we were doing something that that they considered so bold. And keep in mind that these two particular girls are definitely much bolder than lots of their classmates that we've met; that's part of the reason why they've been able to live with us rude foreigners so long and not be completely freaked out. But the whole thing just brought to my mind the nagging question: how do they ever see new things if they are afraid to go anywhere that they haven't been before?

That and many other interactions with our roommates gave me the impression that, by American standards, Chinese people my age are both very old and very young. Very old in the sense that they are unwilling to take risks or make big changes and prefer to stick to what is the safest. Very young in the sense that they are so sheltered from a lot of life experiences (which is not surprising, as most college students have spent their entire life studying). Many hold off on relationships until much later than American students, and the relationships that do exist seem to be very formal and a lot more proper than what I would expect of young adults. But even outside of the relationship sphere, there seem to be a lot of things that our roommates just didn't get. When we watched movies that weren't very formulaic romantic comedies, they were very confused why people would sometimes act in ways that didn't make logical sense. We tried to explain that in real life many people don't always act completely logically, but they just got confused and said that those kind of movies didn't make much sense. The same thing with music. They loved the kind of sappy pop and boy band music popular with American pre-teens, but as soon as I played something not quite so upbeat, they didn't get it. My roommate couldn't even understand why I liked Ella Fitzgerald, let alone Billie Holiday.

I guess I would be making a huge error in realistic cultural appraisal if I tried to make too much of a judgment based on my roommate's music tastes. But I do think that you can gain some insight about a country by taking a listen to their music. China's music right now seems to be mostly crappy love songs borrowed from Western pop. Even when people try to be "hip" and different, they still copy. My friend Angela has spent almost two quarters working on her thesis on the Beijing hip-hop scene. When I asked her what she found, she said she found that almost all of it was crap. She found some OK music, but most people were just copying what they thought was cool, without any real soul to the music or innovation in their performance.

This leads me to something that has completely baffled me about China. They have an amazing culture building on tens of thousands of years of history, but so many people seem happy to just throw that away in an attempt to modernize by copying the west. Even in memorializing their cultural sites, they turn them into huge tourist attractions with neon lights, overwhelming commercialsim, and huge obnoxious tour groups that take away from any historical or cultural understanding that could otherwise be gleaned from the spot (with the notable exception of the Terracotta warriors in Xi'an). But if more people just used that history and built from it, they could come up with some really cool results. There's a reason that Asian fusion cuisine and incorporations of Chinese culture into art, architecture, and fashion have really taken off worldwide. But a lot people in China itself are content to just completely copy a Western model in the name of development. They want the most Westernized buildings, clothes, music, and entertainment that they can get, because that is considered "modern." But it just comes out wrong. As my American suitemate in CET said, it's as if they are trying on another culture that just doesn't fit.

OK, OK. So, reading back over this post so far, it makes it seem like I had a horrible time and hated the place. Maybe it was the 100th person to call me fat that finally made me snap (let's leave the Chinese female body image discussions to another day - I don't want to bore you with another 20 pages on that frustrating topic). Or maybe all that benzene has finally gotten to me. Who knows. But I actually do think the whole time in China was a good experience. CET was the best-run language program (on the academic side of things) I've ever been in, and I do think my Chinese has improved by leaps and bounds. By the end I was also really starting to get an appreciation for the nuances of Chinese language and characters, whereas before I just found them to be nuisances. Now I think I'm over that hump, and it's actually really exciting to learn how a character evolved or why a common expression came to mean what it does.

I also met some really great people, despite the circumstances. In many of the other places I've travelled, it's been uplifting to meet other people who want to make positive impact on the world. But when I came to China, it seemed like a lot of the foreigners I met just want to make a positive impact on their account balance. But in the end, I did meet some people whose motivations were less suspect. I don't know what I would have done without my suitemate Olivia; we tried to keep each other (relatively) sane. And for all the complaining I've done about the world views of our Chinese roommates, we really did get along great, and they tolerated us much better than I would have ever expected, despite all of my cultural gaffes. Plus, you've just got to love a place where you can get almost anything, from home-cooked dumplings to queen-sized beds to MP3 players, in a six-story building with over hundred different vendors on each floor. Or where you can walk into a back alley and into someone's old house to find the best restaurant in town.

But I still lack the emotional attachment to the place that made me so sad to leave Guatemala and Mexico at the end of my time there. I have the feeling that having improved my Chinese will be useful somewhere down the line, but I'm not sure if I would really want to live in China.

On the one hand, I think China is the one country to which I've travelled so far where I wouldn't feel guilty coming to work in the corporate world. Although I'll admit my experience is limited, I think it would be fair to say that most of the Chinese people I've met want their country to be developed. In Mexico and Guatemala there were plenty of people who raised the perfectly valid question of "why develop?" A lot of people felt that the way "development" was being carried out threatened their lifestyle and their culture and made them subservient to international superpowers like the United States. So I know I wouldn't quite feel right if I were to go to one of those countries and work as an agent of development. But China has welcomed international companies at all levels, and from what I can tell, most people seem to see the influx of foreign personnel as a good step for their country. So I think I could go to work there without feeling a crisis of conscience.

On the other hand, there's just so much about China that still frustrates me. Maybe it's just an inability to adapt to a culture that is so incredibly different from my own. Perhaps with time I'd see things differently. Hey, at the rate of construction everywhere, in 10 years the entire country will probably have changed so much as to be almost unrecognizable. But if, with time and patience, I couldn't get over some of my hang-ups, I wouldn't want to be one of those people who just sticks to the foreigner-oriented spots in an attempt to cling onto American life at all costs, while missing the whole point of living in a foreign country.

My stint in China this time around was an attempt to experience the country much more intimately than many foreigners do. I learned a lot, but in the end, I'm not quite sure how successful I was. That's not a very exciting conclusion, but it's really all I have to leave you with. So, thanks to all of you who've actually made it this far with me.

I'll let you know what happens next.

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