16 August 2007

Thoughts about China

I have one day left of HBA and it's causing me to reflect on my experience here--to try to sum up what I actually think about China. So here are a few more musings...

First:
My friend Ke Ren was taking a test and wrote (in Chinese) a sentence that began, "Taiwan is a country that..." The teachers correcting the test circled "country," penned in a large, red question mark and wrote, "地方. (Place.) Better." Ah, China!

And then on a more serious note:
Yesterday I went to a lunch with James McGregor, a (the internet says) "journalist-turned-businessman and former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in China." He spoke frankly and somewhat critically about China--and sitting at lunch with him and our teachers, I wondered first if they understood what he was saying (in colloquial English) and then if they were offended. Today, I asked Wang Laoshi, the head of our third-year program, what she'd thought of the lunch. We had an hour-long discussion about the U.S. and China's understanding of each other.

I thought that Wang Laoshi's most interesting point was that U.S. citizens have one common value: they believe that everyone should have his own opinion. In this, they all have the same opinion. Chinese also have one common value: they believe that everyone should have the same opinion, namely, that every individual should prioritize China's economic development and progress. The question then, boils down to, which opinion is better? Being an American, I jump to the first: everyone should have his own opinion! But then I ask myself: is this really better? Or is it, for the most part, energy-wasting and prideful posturing? Being here in China I've come to believe that some aspects of Chinese society are actually better than American society. Every individual here "重视," or prioritizes, family. Grandparents help raise grandchildren. Children look after elderly parents--and not with resentment but with love and affection. And although you might not notice at the marketplace, where haggling seems every-man-for-himself, citizens are almost all willing to put country and family before their own well-being.

I asked Wang Laoshi, "What about women's rights here?"--a pet issue of my own--and she said that, although traditional culture does call for men earning money and women doing most of the housework, as more and more women enter the work force more and more men are washing dishes. She told me that she didn't think that the old way of thinking was so much a manifestation of sexism as a practical division of labor (Before modern contraceptives, a lot of women would spend time at home having and raising children out of necessity; it made sense for them to keep the place clean too). When women work, men still believe in dividing the work (she said) fifty-fifty: and if this means that they babysit and vacuum, then so be it. Wang Laoshi told me that she thought that Chinese husbands had great respect for their wives; from what I've seen firsthand, this seems true.

And Democracy? She said that a two-party system wastes a lot of time squabbling over unimportant issues like Bill Clinton's "di san zhe" (other woman). She asked why China would want a government that worried about gay marriage to the detriment of education policy. In a one-party system, the government really focuses big issues (namely, the economy) that will affect everyone.

Wang Laoshi is a teacher who I greatly respect, and whose understanding of American culture is deep: she has lived in Boston and taught at Harvard, and she has a foreign (we think American but aren't sure!) boyfriend. She's sharp, witty and frank. I'm not sure whether or not I support the Chinese way of looking at things, but it's interesting to at least think about issues from a not-U.S. perspective. I guess I've got a week more to really take advantage of that!