June 2008 (1/3): Life around Beijing, 北大 and two main observations on today's China as a civilization

(Studying very hard, ft. 大家）

(On the bus, ft. Paraish)

(Studying on 北大's grass, ft. 可爱的 小Laura)

(Studying on 北大's grass, ft. Dee, T and Rebecca)

(Studying on 北大's grass, partial view on the nameless lake)

( 北大's campus life)

(北大's bicycles!, ft. 小Laura)

The month of June sailed in smoothly with most of us starting to get used to a few things:

1. Having to study extra hard (believe it or not, putonghua is definitely not easy to learn, mostly in the beginning! Advice to those thinking about learning it: 加由!!! Formal mandarin gets easier once you get the hang of it, so don’t give up!*).
2. Being stared at (obviously);
3. Being generally confused about what taxi drivers were trying to tell us/ their ARR!!! (‘儿!!!) accent being a hundred times more intense than whatever Beijinghua we were taught in school;
4. Being able to see at all time in our vision field, wherever we would be in Beijing, at least one “Beijing Olympics 2008” flag/post/store or advert. Only once we acknowledged that as a fact and tested it did we realize how mad this really is in such a big city!;
5. The caucasian ones in the programme (that is to say, the ones with white skin) being generally treated better than those of East Asian, African, Indian or Hispanic origins (that is to say those with yellow, black, brown and erh.. tanned? skin) amongst us;
6. Seeing girls walking in the streets with umbrellas on sunny days, as well as “whitening” products instead of “tanning” products being sold in beauty stores;
7. Witnessing heavy smoking, spitting, etc. in public areas.**
8. Eating 北大’s cafeteria food. OK, so that is an half-lie - most people did, but I didn’t. I gave up my “breakfast tickets” after Paraish made me try a smelly jelly thing which I was lead to believe to be algae - but that ended up really being a sponge full of burner gaz from a portable stove (I’m just kidding Paraish; that’s not the reason for which I gave up on the set breakfast. I just did because it was served waaay too early in the morning for me to bother). The truth is, I had to give up Chinese dishes after getting heavy, can’t-get-out-of-bed food poisoning twice in the first month. Sadly, I am intolerant to MSG, and it is added in large quantities everywhere in Chinese dishes. Thus, I had to stick to simple things: fruits, veggies，饭， 豹子, and these amazing♥ cone-sushis from the 7/11. I must conclude this point by adding that, however surprising it may be, I did not suffer at all from Chinese cuisine ... for the following reason: as the season permitted it, I fell deeply in love with lichi. ------- True, I had tasted it before (in North America, we have the canned version - which is TERRIBLE - and for like 3 weeks we get these not-so-fresh not-so-good ones being sold at gold price in Chinatown. Clearly, the Chinese consider their lichi like the French see their wine - they only export the second-rate quality, and keep all the good stuff for themselves!). Therefore, those I ate in Beijing were not even comparable in any way to anything I had ever tasted anywhere else. I was told that those sold in Beijing markets came from the Fujian province, while those exported are from Guangdong and Guangxi. Granted, I’m not an expert; still, I’m pretty sure I could tell the difference between the two qualities anytime, even if I was wearing a blindfold, with my hands tied behind my back, and while being held upside down above a pool full of crocodiles (or something else that would increase the difficulty - Indy J style). The Beijing lichi is just so fresh, plump, juicy and fragrant, it is out of this world. You think I’m exaggerating? Well, Sung dynasty’s poet Su Shi/Su Dong Po (蘇東坡) wrote a poem while he was being exiled to Hainan Island in the 11th century, where he declared that “if he could have 300 litchis to eat every day, he could reconcile himself to banishment anywhere”***. Just wanted to say: well, I feel you, dude.

(北大's cafeteria food, ft. Leah, Paraish and Shiao Jiun)

These day to day things having been stated, I can’t really talk about life on campus in itself, as I was either spending it in class, at the gym or at the library. Therefore, I’ll talk about the stuff that I did when not studying - which is, let’s admit it, way more interesting to read anyways! On June 1rst, I visited the Summer Palace with my friends Charlotte and Little Tsunami (Shiao-Jiun). It was a great time just walking around this huge, huge “palace” - which basically consists of all the buildings standing around the 800 meters-diameter Kunming lake, as well as those built on the South Lake Isle (And I though I had seen everything with the size of les Jardins du château de Versailles...!)

.

(At the Summer Palace, ft. Little Tsunami (right) and me)

(A girl wearing Dowager Cixi's hairdo, Summer Palace)

(some more Summer Palace's badass-ness)

(Summer Palace, with the bridge leading to the South Lake Isle)

(Having fun at the Summer Palace grounds)

(Dowager Cixi's jade boat. Yes, completely made of jade. I mean, why the hell not? I never fly anywhere myself, unless it is in my personal diamond-made plane, of course).

(At the top of the Summer Palace, ft. Charlotte)

(At the Summer Palace, ft. Charlotte (left) and Little Tsunami (right))

(The "Asian peace sign" when taking pictures: what was once a joke is now an habit that doesn't go away)

(Sky view of the Summer Palace, Northen part of the Kunming lake)

Although the place was packed with tourists, to me it felt there was still something from another epoch that hung in the air - you know, like the presence feel when entering a room that has just been left vacant by someone in a hurry to run away from something? Call me crazy/naive if you must - but I felt that some key elements to the solving of enigmas in Chinese History, left unanswered by drastic political changes, lay there somewhere - in bare view to the human eye, perhaps; but looked at by people who cannot see it.

This particular presence or feeling - which I have so far failed to define with words (so I'll just call it the "present absence" for the sake of this entry) - accompanied me all week. In fact, I think it really started two days prior, when I went to the 798 Art District with 小Laura and Rebecca.

Let me first make a few notes about the 798 Art District:

1. Most of all: Wow! Seriously.
2. The district is in fact a huge chunk of the Chaoyang District where old SOEs factories stood, disaffected since the mid-1980s due to the economic reforms of 邓小平. Started off as an initiative of Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1995, it quickly became an studio/exhibition space for vanguard Chinese artists, who had been living like nomads since the mid-1980s as their art was ‘not particularly favored’ by the central government.
3. (and finally, if I was making a list of the reasons for which I would like to move to Beijing right now, this would definitely be in my top 3! It is also the direct reason why I studied modern Chinese Art later on).

(798 Art District: What I like the most about this picture is not the piece of art in itself, but the effect it gives out when you see that I am reflected in it)

(798 Art District: ft. Rebecca)

There was all sorts of art movements present at the 798 District: obviously, the very present and very sellable Mao Kitsch, Cynical Pop, and forms of satires of Total Art; but also a tendency towards returning to pre-communist China, with things such as traditional ink paintings (à la Xu Beihong’s horses, see below). However, the piece of art I saw there - the particular oeuvres that touched me - are those that seemed to scream to me: “what the hell just happened”?; those that gave off the vibe of a feeling of loss, although it is quite evident the artist doesn’t seem to know exactly what it is exactly that he has lost; those that were looking for something desperately, without knowing what it was.

(N.B. I have not taken the following pictures:)

(马六明 (To Add a Meter To An Anonymous Mountain))

(Zhang Huan (Shanghai Family Tree))

(Feng Zhengjie (Mao-lyn Monroe, Kitsch Mao No. 12))

There was another instance, although quite different in essence, where a similar feeling of loss struck me. A day or two after the Art District and the Summer Palace, I also had the chance to attend a few events in the setting of the New Beijing International Movie Week, which took place during the first week of June (June 1rst-8th). There is one screening that particularly moved me. It was a movie made by a German (or Swede? can’t remember) expat called “Cycle of Change”. It was about how he had spent his life living in Beijing Hutongs up to the age of twelve (when his family moved back to Europe); and how he had come back 15 years later to find out that his Hutong neighborhood had been destroyed (replaced by modern skyscrapers, like the 3/4 of Beijing), which made so he could not recognize anything about the city, nor about his past.

OK, so you may think right now that the “present absence” feeling I’ve been talking about in this entry is equivalent to: “Cultural Revolution+Modernization = loss of infrastructure and other physical elements of patrimony = loss of cultural identity”, but that is not it. I’m not saying these things do not exist, nor that they are not significant: clearly, what I would like to call a “feeling of identity loss” due to the Mao years or subsequent rapid modernization was clearly present in pieces presented by artists both at the 798 District and during the Movie Week. However, the “present absence” I am talking about here is something that I believe has roots in the ‘inherently Chinese’ political, social and religious/philosophical culture, not in the Communist Revolution over the last 60 years. Whilst the “feeling of identity loss” is due to the loss of things that are known -(for example, Mao’s initiative in taking down all the "chinese gates" [don't know what they are called, can someone help me??] in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution), the “present absence” refers to the feeling of loss of something about which everything is unknown, apart from the fact that it was there before and is now lost. I’ll make the distinction between the two more clear analogically.

When someone leaves a room or a space he has been living in for a long time, that person is bound to leave behind elements that gives clue 1. that he was there, and 2. about who it is that was there. For example, think about the last time you moved into a new apartment: if the the person before you left the walls of the bedroom painted electric pink (with green monkeys holding yellow hearts, for the sake of it), this gives you two pieces of information: 1. there was someone living there before you (who painted the walls/modified the space); and 2. that person was most likely a total freak.

However, there are assumptions upon which your analysis is built: that is, you could not have come to these two conclusions were you not to know: 1. that humans were the only beings that are in the habit of painting walls and 2. that the color electric pink is not considered as a favored color for a bedroom to most average “normal “ people, and thus that the person who was in this room before you was slightly eccentric. In other words, were you a to be from Alpha Centauri and coming into this room for the first time, you would not be able to pick up the clues to these informations, because you would not have the right precedence/knowledge to pick upon these clues. However, as you are (I assume) a human being, you would definitely be able detect that someone was there and who/what before you in this room, because humans across races and civilizations all possess this paradigmatic view/set of knowledge.

This analogy outlines how such a thing as a “present absence” can come to be. I’ll now make an Historical analogy using elements from the Occidental civilization’s “Middle Ages” in order to explain “present absence” in the context of the Historical experience of a cultural group/civilization. Before I lay it out, I would like to specify that this analogy has its flaws (that is to say, I’m in no way stating that the Chinese current History is the equivalent of the Middle Ages!!!), but is interesting enough to be mentioned.

The Middle Ages are often referred to as the “Dark Ages” of Occidental Civilization today because they are seen as a disjuncture from ancient Occidental knowledge and philosophy in the favor of a feudal system based on the principles of an omnipresent Church. However, at the very essence of Occidental civilization lays the philosophy of Aristotle, Socrates, Plato and their followers; the writings of Tite Live, etc. and the pure and applied mathematics of Pythagorus****. Were we to attempt to summarize all these thinkers's message, set of values and paradigmatic view (i.e. way of perceiving the world) in a single definition, it would be: the use of Logic in order to assess what links a cause to a consequence; as well as the prioritization of Reason in order to build a set of value and a therefore (what is considered as) a well-working society. These two concepts are, in a nutshell, what glues all elements of Occidental civilization together.

During the Dark Ages, the majority of the books containing the work of these thinkers were stored away amassing dust in libraries kept by the Church: and thus their existence - and their content - was kept away from the common people’s cognition*****. However, Logic and Reason were still there (even though their use had been frowned upon in many matters, such as the socially acceptable explanation of the origin of things, as well as what happens after one's death). Why? Because they lay at the very base of Occidental identity and essence; and thus they were the core entrenched elements in the definition of the "Occidental" civilization (that is to say, elements of their civilization and worldview that occidentals considered as standing in contrast with other civilizations they were in contacts with******).

If it wasn't the case, if the prevalence of Reason and Logic was dead within the Occidental man of the 15th Century, then events such as the Renaissance would have never been able to take place. There are two main elements of proof I’d like to highlight for this latter point. First, when ancient hidden books were suddenly “found again” (when the Roman Catholic Church started to face internal problems due to the 15th century Schism), people would have never picked out the fact that antique literature is in any way significant to them were they not judging significance on the premisses of the prevalence of Logic and Reason. A second element of proof I would like to mention concerns things that were discovered during this period not because they were read in ancient books, but because they were genuinely discovered through scientific research, i.e. through the use of Logic and Reason. To illustrate this later point, I’ll use something we Occidentals have all read in our High School History books: that is, the “discovery” of the concept of Heliocentricity. What we are taught in school is something along the following lines (at best): this concept had been developed 500 B.C. by pythagoreans and further in 190 B.C. by an Hellenistic Mesopotamian astronomer; therefore, when the books hidden away in abbeys’s libraries re-emerged, the concept of Heliocentricity was found again. What we all learnt in High School is all good clean fun; but the sad thing is, that it is not the truth. Indeed,-if you dig the fact a little bit deeper, you realize that the reasoning upon which the pythagoreans and Seleucus of Seleucia (that Mesopotamian dude) based their theory of heliocentricity doesn’t hold the candle, because their reasonings were based upon philosophy rather than on science.******* Therefore the concept of heliocentricity, as defined and explained by Nicolaus Copernicus in the 16th Century, was a “true discovery” in itself; however, the scientific reasoning he used was based on ... you guessed it: Logic and Reason. To write "On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres", Copernicus simply did the empirical observation of astral movements and then used deduction to come to conclusions.

The heliocentricity example illustrates that in the Occidental civilization, the set of values and the worldview built around the precepts of Reason and Logic would have taken more than a few centuries of Christianity Rule to be extinguished. It is therefore in my belief that whatever it is that was loss to today’s Chinese - whatever it is that created this gap, this “present absence”, they will be in a situation where they are able to find out what it is someday, and therefore find it again. Just because it is not in view right now doesn’t mean that it is not there. Indeed, the legacy of this thing lost still clearly shines in today’s China, be it through the fact that:

1. Confuscian society structure endures, even though modernization is taking place and another worldview and sets of values (i.e., the Occidental’s worldview [discussed previously] and its value on individualism) are promoted;
2. 老子‘s doctrine is still highly popular, even though it is based on the premisses of tradition, not on those of promoted Occidental worldview’s Logic and Reason.

Now that I have made a distinction between this, “present absence” and the “feeling of Identity loss”, you'll know where I'm from when I talk about my more common empirical observations regarding current infrastructure modernization - because it is caused by the latter concept, but also has consequences on the first.

In my next entry I'll start with the pre-Olympic, Beijing-based frenzy [There was also significant pre-Olympic frenzy construction in Qingdao, which was hosting the water sports competitions, but I only went there in July, so I’ll talk about it in another entry]. Beijing pre-Olympic frenzy was nothing short of spectacular. Just to give you a pre-taste, in the space of a weekend in mid-June, for example, the old-styled newspaper-paper subway ticket sold by an old lady who doesn’t speak english behind the counter suddenly became a Credit Card-like plastic ticket sold by an automatic machine that has language options. Also around mid-June, dirty streets with no public garbages at all suddently became filled with public garbages with 3 sections: trash, recycling AND ashtrays (that one really made me laugh) whose 3 sections were soon equally filled with, well, trash.

On this, I am out.

Peace,

洪丽月

(fulfilling my tourist duty/standing "at the center of the Universe")

Footnotes:

• * I will not lie: spoken mandarin, however, is definitely another story!!!
• ** Personally, Chinese hygiene in public places never really affected me. I just made sure I didn’t walk in the smoke clouds/spit of other people, shrugged it off, and passed my way. I see this as a different cultural perspective of hygiene - nor worse (even though this could be argued), nor better (for I think occidental cultures can sometimes go over the top with their “antibacterial frenzy”) than mine: just different. I would also like to add: have you noticed by now how most 白人民 who went to China always seem to have to make a negative comment about Chinese hygiene? Well folks, here is my 2 cents on this regard: the place in the world where I witnessed the worst public place hygiene standards? Downtown London. Somewhere near Covent Garden station, there exists a street where the existence of few too many heavily packed clubs makes so that drunk english(wo)men resolve to relieving themselves outside on the pavement instead of facing the long queue line to the ‘loo. To me, the simple fact of walking on this street late at night (or early in the morning, depending how you see it) was the same feeling as the one I would have gotten had I fell face fist in used cat litter. Peeing in public phone booths also seems like an authentic English cultural asset: I cannot recall how many times I’ve stepped in a pool of pee trying to make a call while living in England, whilst it never really occurred to me anywhere else.Now that I have stated my view, you will understand the point that I want to make in regards of the whole “Chinese toilets” discussion made by foreigners, that is to say: I have nothing to say about it.
• *** http://books.google.com/books?id=7CK8LFCcvtcC&pg=PA301&lpg=PA301&dq=su+tung+po+lytchee&source=bl&ots=PVFJnykb1q&sig=Gwwyc7rc5w8RnFRB2YypfW3tTzQ&hl=en&ei=_okBS4SACoaMnQf0l92LCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CCQQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=&f=false at p. 301
• **** There are, obviously, way more thinkers at the roots of Occidental philosophy and civilization than those I mentioned AND they are not all Greek (not to mention, the Greeks borrowed knowledge themselves from the mesopotamians, the egyptians, etc.). I'm just boiling it down here for the sake of the argument.
• ***** During the Dark Ages, there were also bits and pieces of clues that proved the continuation of the prevalence of Logic and Reason. I’m talking about such things as-St-Augustin’s religious philosophy; or, if you dig a bit more, how we can find the roots of what is called today “christian values” in the logic reflections of Aristotle regarding leading a life of virtue as well as his writing on “Frienship” (the latter being at the roots of Immanuel Kant’s “treating people as ends, not means”).
• ****** If you are interested in this concept I recommend reading the works of philosopher, Kyoto Prize winner and famous McGill professor Charles Taylor, in particularly his text "Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, which you can find here.
• ******* Read ch. 13 of Aristotle, “On the Heavens (book II)” for a good example of the philosophical reasoning behind heliocentricity.