Mantis vs. Culture

No travel guide would be complete without the trite advice to be open to other cultures that are “not wrong, only different.” This vain reminder ought to be known to be smug and unctuous. Unless forced against their will to travel for business, overseas visitors are traveling in a foreign country precisely because they want to see new things and experience a different culture. A diner knows not to pick an ethnic restaurant, for example, unless his very intention is to find different foods eaten with different utensils.

Travel guides have to be know-it-alls though, and so they cannot share an experience without preaching how unique and praiseworthy every aspect of the foreign culture is, how Americans and others could only fail to see so because of their narrow, Western perspectives. Part of my mission is to refute this uncritical assumption. I am by no means down with foreign culture, up with America. I will spend many pages slicing other cultures to ribbons, but I also turn the point of my pen against the complacent absurdities and excesses cemented in my native land, where relevant to the topic. My need to write this came after my wide-eyed openness to Chinese culture became exhausted, my intention to see things as “only different” could no longer cohere with reality. Scanning their faces in shock, I could find no native neighbor who could comprehend my exasperation in language or in essence. How could I question this thing that the locals took for granted? Blank-faced, my Chinese companions would answer me, “That’s China.”

I believe I have been fair in my writing, but I have also been honest. If the crowds in China pushed me while grunting like beasts (a regular thing), I say so. When the young people behaved so much more innocently and charmingly than their sexual American peers, I give them credit for it. I am not shy to use humor and drastic realism to make points best made by humor and realism, and my exaggeration is proportional to the actual thing. In fact, in most cases where it appears as if I am exaggerating, I am only reporting. Marco Polo said that he had not even told the half of what he had seen in his travels; you might say I’ve included the other half. I have included my impressions of all aspects of Chinese life, so that means that the typically mundane features as the flat plain in comparison to the astoundingly high peaks of absurdities I witnessed. Be prepared to travel through both.

I have dispensed with the carefully chosen travel guide snapshots of the country and provided a good long peak behind the curtain. I will not hide China behind politeness and delicate phrasing, which were depleted in me by the fervent nationalistic pride for a nation that I did not believe deserved its boasts. I have not “focused on the good,” but I have not excluded it. This is one man’s complete, honest commentary and critique of his experiences in China, not a crafted survey of cultural highlights and historical knowledge.

I would rewrite the trite admonition of a travel guide to read “In America, we drive on the right, and in England they drive on the left. That is different. In China, I saw children defecate on both sides of the street. That is very different. Differences between cultures cannot always be classified as East versus West. It is often a question of decency versus depravity.” Please forgive my crassness. That is what I regularly, really saw. I do not “dwell on the bad” either, but I have included it without excusing it. I have plenty more to share other than talk about the filth I saw in the streets. I mention this at the start to forewarn of the shameful sights I wished I had not seen but could not ignore in my daily life, nor avoid in a full telling of my time overseas.

I might make it sound like I have made it my mission to wage a one-man polemic against China, using caustic criticism as my weapon. No, that is not right. I have the need to unburden my heart of the grievous experiences, but I want to preserve and honor the friendships of the Chinese people who were so generous and welcoming to me. Perhaps I will fail in this. I have strained to make my trenchant points against my timid hesitations. I did not want to speak criticisms that would likely seem undue to my Chinese friends. In China, I was often on the receiving end of hospitality and kind attention that I have never known in America. I met simple people who had no cultural pretense to guard themselves with, and so eagerly sought to engage with me in smiling conversation. Some of them were thrilled to meet me only because I was a young American with a “charming” smile and an interest in China. We struggled to communicate, but our words were so often naked and genuine. I cannot say the same for my home culture. I have enjoyed no such celebrity or welcome in the places familiar to me. And though I have failed to carve out a place for myself in American society, I can say with confidence that if I had found comfort enough in China I could be living there now, making quick friends among people who often admired and accepted me with open arms.

So, who am I? How did I come by this Chinese experience? And what makes it worth reading about?

As I alluded, my name is not noteworthy. I have no credentials or credits to speak of. My time in China was lived as a not atypical expatriate, a foreign English teacher in a small (by Chinese standards) city. My account is noteworthy in that it is representative of a foreigner’s experience in the heart of the mysterious Middle Kingdom, and in so far as the words are written with precision and penetration. I describe- with my own voice- what it was like to live in the real China. I never ventured into very rural Western China, and I only spent a week traveling in the South. Most of my time was spent in the East, not many provinces removed from the coast, towards the center of China’s shifting population mass. I saw the major cities and toured several provinces- getting a sense of urban, modernizing China- but mostly I lived in Anhui province, splitting my time between two cities that do not have much reputation in or outside of China.

I refer to it as the “real China” because that is how a Chinese professor described it to me. He rightly discussed how most foreign visitors rarely make it out of Beijing, Shanghai, or the other major cities to push into the interior and see the cities that most Chinese live in, the places most representative of developing China. I saw mega-cities, growing urban zones and outlying towns, and even a few farm villages, but the majority of my experience was lived in the real China, cut off from ex-pat communities and tourist areas. I got a strong sense of what it was like to live the Chinese way, with the infrastructure and amenities that the Chinese were used to.

This then is not an ex-pat’s self-indulgent adventures around the magnificent, wonderful, and exotic locales of a foreign land. It is a condensed, topical view into the real thing, a place at once ordinary, bizarre, and surreal, a place I have found every American I have discussed it with to be fascinated by.

Instead of giving a walk-through tour of a historical home, pointing out interesting trivia and names and dates, I have written what I experienced as a real guest in the home- how the hosts lived, how they behaved, how they talked, what we ate. I am not alone in my Chinese experiences, and most of them will be confirmed by any ex-pat who has spent enough time there.

I have met Americans who simply shook their head when asked about China, or who made no secret of their resentment of their former foreign home, but also I met those who were more than happy to be there and had found a place for themselves in China. I was hoping to be in the latter group. Disappointed, I do not think it fair to air my bitterness as a man who turned out mostly jaded like the former group. I am telling the truth about China, gathered from my individual experiences being immersed in the real thing. To tell the truth, I have to overcome my reservations about revealing the bad of my friends’ home culture, and I also have to cut through the two main excuses that were given to cover every frustrating problem of my friends’ homeland.

First, spoken testily, was “You don’t understand China.” This conceit imagined that foreigners’ complaints were the result of ignorance, narrowness, dullness, or cultural misunderstanding, not from a genuine moral offense, which I believed they were. I argue throughout that the greatest threat to China’s sensitive ego is when foreigners do understand China, when they get to see her for what she really is. I will say what the real experience is like for a common visitor or foreign resident, so sensitive readers who want China to be exalted as a mysterious and ancient civilization should be advised to look elsewhere.

Second, I regularly heard the natives say with a shrug, “That’s China.” They would smirk at infants peeing in public, crowds pushing and scrambling to get through the queue for the bus, or cars whizzing past elderly women hobbling aimlessly through a busy intersection and say, “That’s China.” I realized that they could either dismiss things cutely or confront the craziness, which would mean having to carry the weight of the distressing sights on their conscience. I have elected to do battle with the anguish on my soul. I will not let my sorrows fester in silence. These stories are worth telling, and I believe the arguments and cultural criticisms are valid and incisive- for Chinese, for Americans, and for all others who need another’s eyes to help them see their own culture.

My experiences, my observations, my opinions, and the details of my time in China are written out in the following. I have written truthfully- at times humorously so, sorrowfully so, and uncomfortably, offensively so. Let the reader be advised and weigh my account for what it is worth.

Mantis
A D 2015