Thursday, January 31, 2013

Festivals, Fireworks, CCTV and Me


During our third glorious day in beautiful Yangshuo, we were preparing to return to our hotel.  We were exhausted from a day of riding bikes and rafting down rivers with our surly boatman.  Crossing the narrow street to find a cab, we were startled when James, a very friendly man who worked at our hotel, started to tell us about the festival that included fireworks.  Normally, I have no great love of fireworks, but in a nation that revels in huge, ostentatious shows of wealth and power, prides itself on inventing fireworks and has unlimited budgets for public displays, fireworks are not to be missed. The finale of the 4th of July fireworks in Washington, DC? That's the warm-up for any holiday, fesitval, or sale on fireworks in China. 


"渔火节在阳朔. 妳们的行文采写我了! The fish fire festival of yangshuo - CCTV interviewed me! "


Sure enough, these fireworks did not disappoint.  The sky was lit up with thousands of tiny flickering red lanterns, glass-like glimmering shards, waves of vivid neon hues and the flashes of cameras as everyone attempted to capture the magic. I have seen dozens of firework displays during my time in China, and this was the 2nd best one I had seen ( the 1st being the Spring Festival Lantern Day in Dalian, China).  I was so caught up in the fireworks, I didn't notice a TV crew slowly edging its way towards me until they were next to me.  They asked if they could interview me, and despite my misgivings that it would turn into a "Coerce/trick the foreigner into saying that China is better at __________ than _____________" interview, I acquiesced. 



Q: Where are you from? 
A: The United States
Q: What is your name? 
A: Su Mei En
Q: It is very good to have a Chinese name!
A: Thank you
Q: Did you come to Yangshuo just for the festival?
A: No, but I am very happy that I saw it
Q: What did you think of the Chinese fireworks?
A: Chinese fireworks are very beautiful!
Q: Do you have fireworks like this in your home country?
A: Not often
Q: Are Chinese fireworks better than American fireworks?
A: They are both very good
Q: But which country has better fireworks? Don't you think China's are better?
A: Yes, Chinese fireworks are very impressive
Q: Very good! Chinese fireworks are very famous.
Yes, I caved.  But in all honesty, their fireworks are better, and as the interviewers pressured me into answering the question, I heard a tone of subtle anxiety in their voices, waiting for my answer as to whether their firework display, an object of national pride, was better than the American version.  The longer one lives in China, the more one notices the undertones of these moments.  China is a country based on a culture of face (a complex version of reputation), and so rankings and public opinion matter a great deal to them.  Especially in their comparisons of China to the United States.   The fact is that the United States looms larger in the collective Chinese consciousness than China is in ours. 

Chinese people are brought up on a very unique brand of jingoism. Their values are taught in their elementary morality class, where they are taught the morals and beliefs as determined by the communist party. They are taught only the history that is relevant to China or history that makes other selected countries look bad, resulting that in all of my time teaching, I had yet to meet a single Chinese high schooler who knew what Guatemala or Serbia are, much less where they were on a map. This is not to say that the students were not intelligent, on the contrary, those students were exceptionally bright and eager to learn, just the victims of an education system that was created to serve the party interests. They are taught calculus and the superiority of the Chinese culture throughout history, and the aspects of their culture that support the current government, but not world history or sociology. They are taught in excessive detail the atrocities of the Japanese, while their own government's atrocities toward them are briefly mentioned as "the difficult years."  As such, there are gaping holes of information in their knowledge base, creating a Middle Kingdom-centric perspective.

Yet despite all the attempts of the government, most Chinese people know that all is not as CCTV and their government says.  Chinese people want clean air, clean water, food safety and less corruption.  The Party claims that a poor environment is the cost of a successful economy, but it hasn't been lost on the Chinese people that other countries have managed to succeed economically without destroying their environment to the point where it is unsafe to drink domestic water and breathe the air. 

At the same time, white skin and big eyes, foreign attributes, are considered to be the epitome of beauty, and Chinese magazines are filled with pictures and advertisements of products featuring foreigners and foreign products. Foreign products are considered to be of better quality and higher status, prompting an unfavorable comparison with Chinese products.

These are an uncomfortable facts that the party tries to reconcile by censoring and limiting the amount of foreign movies and TV shows, and by exhorting China's strength and wealth. In TV shows and movies, foreigners are almost always portrayed as either stupid or evil, and always lose to their Chinese counterpart.  In period movies, set in a time hundreds of years before the United States was founded, an American will inexplicably show up, to be taught the wisdom of the Chinese way. On the Chinese version of Iron Chef, they will pit master intense Chinese chefs with gleaming knives against rotund jolly french pastry chefs, and give them live snakes as the chosen ingredient. 

Therefore, any conversation with a new Chinese friend comes peppered with questions of comparison: Do you like Chinese food? What food is better, Chinese food or foreign food?  What do you think of Beijing, is it better than cities in the US? Even though these questions are subjective, based on opinons, there are clear right and wrong answers.

It is a dance, one that one has to play carefully: I love Chinese food, but I miss my hometown food (NEVER say you don't like Chinese food). I like Beijing, but I prefer Dalian and Washington DC because Beijing is too crowded. (throw in another, well-established beautiful city in China so as to show that your feelings on Beijing are not China-based, blame it on it being crowded- it doesn't insult Beijingren.) When they invite you to eat, they will inevitably want to take you to a foreign restaurant, but one must decline, saying something along the lines of  "We are in China, we should eat Chinese food!" When I first came to China, I broke all of these rules.  All the time. I had no idea.  Once I had a better understanding, I still often rebelled against the idea that I should say things I didn't agree with or think to make other people happy.  But soon I realized I didn't have to do that, I would be honest about things that made them happy, and not voice the negative things, (ie: Q: Do you like chicken feet? A: I know it is very nutritious, but I prefer fruit.)  Maybe it isn't the American way, but I wasn't in America anymore. 

The next day, I was happily surprised to see that my interview was cut to only one line: "Chinese fireworks are VERY beautiful!" 









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