Seville, Spain -- It may not be the most opportune time academically, but I´m spending a long weekend in the south of Spain with four wonderful Gates people. ¡TeamSevilla!, as I affectionately call our posse, consists of the group that went to Paris in November minus one. (By the way, I love the fact that the characters ¡ and ñ have their own buttons on keyboards here.) In the less than 24 hours since landing, we´ve largely adjusted our lifestyle to the rhythms of Andalucia, which basically means doing everything late: 10 am is wakeup time and 10 pm is dinnertime, and so far we have had every meal alfresco. Midday temperatures top out in the high 60s, so it´s not exactly sweltering, but compared to Cambridge it feels glorious.
The timing of this weekend is also a little bit strange because next week I have final exams for the French class that I have been taking all year. So after adjusting my brain to Spanish, I will be hurriedly switching back to French. The oral part of the exam will consist of me making a 5 minute presentation to my class au sujet du Cameroun on Wednesday, and I´m a little bit afraid I might inadvertently throw some español in there. The Spanish has been coming back with relative ease, and I´m feeling like the stereotype that Spanish is an easier language has some truth to it.
By coincidence, three of my courses at Cambridge have been turning to the subject of Islam in the last week or so, so it´s quite interesting to be here in what was the northern outpost of high Islamic civilization. Today we visited the Alcázar, a glorious hodgepodge of palaces and gardens whose showpiece building was constructed by Muslim artisans in the employ of Mohammed V, the 14th-century sultan of nearby Granada, for his buddy the Christian King Pedro I. Pedro was known as Pedro el Cruel or Pedro el Justiciero (the dispenser of justice), depending on whom you asked, and he had a colorful life to say the least. His father was quite the philanderer, leaving Pedro to compete with a slew of half-siblings, some of whom he unfortunately had to dispatch to keep his grip on power. Later, when Mohammed V was briefly deposed, Pedro lured his friend´s successor over for a dinner party at the Alcázar, where he captured the illegitimate Sultan and his retinue. Mohammed V was restored to his throne and received his rival´s head as a gift from Pedro I. Hey, at least the Christians and the Muslims were getting along back then. But the gory history aside, the Alcázar is a magnificent place, and it provided me with what must have been the most shutter-happy hour of my life.
Stay tuned for more on Andalucia, and hopefully some good pictures when I get back to the UK.
27 February 2009
22 February 2009
wraps, cambridge, and the scale of my competence
Not that long ago I received an e-mail from a nice young lad from the Williams College class of 2011. To fully convey the horror of getting an e-mail from an '11, I told my Cambridge friends who graduated from Williams in '08 to imagine receiving an e-mail from somebody from the class of 2015. This young, young sprout e-mailed me on the advice of the Williams chaplain, who remains one of my favorite people on Earth. My ego hadn't been this tickled since, a year or two after graduation, I was informed that I still had a "following" at Williams after I left.
This sharp, fresh-faced child is now in charge of WRAPS (Williams Recovery of All Perishable Surplus), the campus food salvage program that I ran for most of my time at Williams. WRAPS was the first domino in a series that led to my job in Alaska. This distant successor of mine, who was almost certainly born after Ronald Reagan left office, is hoping to expand WRAPS in some interesting new directions and wanted advice and some background on the history of the program.
As I offered my recollections of the founding and expansion of WRAPS to this charming lad, who had yet to be conceived when I began my schooling, it led me to reflect on how different my identity is at Cambridge than it has been anywhere else. I realized that the core of my "extracurricular" life has always been community service and activism, from Williams right on through to Alaska. Somebody reading my resume might be puzzled to discover that in late 2008 I suddenly decided to stop trying to feed the hungry, save Darfur, and teach English to immigrants, and instead got into planning dinner parties and serving as treasurer for an overprivileged posse of grad students. There's a possibility that I might be getting involved with the British version of food banking, but that's the only hint of my old pastimes and may not pan out anyway.
I have a few theories on why this is. Theory #1, the Happenstance Theory, is that there is no real underlying reason at all: I just got sucked into doing what I'm doing early this year and thus there's no time for anything else. I certainly never would have set out to be an MCR social secretary, but I was a "keen" participant in early events and was recruited by the outgoing committee, and that was that.
Theory #2 is the Poverty Lobe Exhaustion Theory. Since I spend all of my studying/class time thinking about poverty, underdevelopment, etc., all the room in my brain for that stuff is taken up and therefore I need to do something different with my personal life. There could be something to this, but it's inconsistent with my last two years in Alaska, so I don't find it convincing.
Theory #3, the most sophisticated explanation and probably the one that makes me look best, is the Wendell Berry Theory. My grad school admissions essays and fellowship applications of yore often referenced Wendell Berry, the author-farmer-environmentalist who wrote that "our understandable wish to save the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence." In other words, if you're going to try to help, you better know what the fuck you're doing.
When I encountered Berry's thinking in an environmental studies course at Williams, it immediately resonated with me; Berry helped me understand why I instinctively shied away from the kind of activism preferred by many of my peers in favor of locally grounded projects like WRAPS. Even my Save Darfur activism had a specific local goal: divesting Alaska's Permanent Fund from firms that are bankrolling genocide. My most successful projects in Alaska had laser-focused objectives, such as helping community organizations and tribes access federal dollars for summer feeding. You can see why the work of Bill Easterly, the economist who thinks that grand development plans are doomed to fail, is also attractive to me.
The Wendell Berry Theory suggests that I'm not doing any community service or activism at Cambridge because I know that I don't know or understand this community enough to be of much service to it. This may not be the right attitude to project at, say, a job interview... but I think it is one of the emerging core values of my still-young -- younger than that kid from Williams! -- career.
This sharp, fresh-faced child is now in charge of WRAPS (Williams Recovery of All Perishable Surplus), the campus food salvage program that I ran for most of my time at Williams. WRAPS was the first domino in a series that led to my job in Alaska. This distant successor of mine, who was almost certainly born after Ronald Reagan left office, is hoping to expand WRAPS in some interesting new directions and wanted advice and some background on the history of the program.
As I offered my recollections of the founding and expansion of WRAPS to this charming lad, who had yet to be conceived when I began my schooling, it led me to reflect on how different my identity is at Cambridge than it has been anywhere else. I realized that the core of my "extracurricular" life has always been community service and activism, from Williams right on through to Alaska. Somebody reading my resume might be puzzled to discover that in late 2008 I suddenly decided to stop trying to feed the hungry, save Darfur, and teach English to immigrants, and instead got into planning dinner parties and serving as treasurer for an overprivileged posse of grad students. There's a possibility that I might be getting involved with the British version of food banking, but that's the only hint of my old pastimes and may not pan out anyway.
I have a few theories on why this is. Theory #1, the Happenstance Theory, is that there is no real underlying reason at all: I just got sucked into doing what I'm doing early this year and thus there's no time for anything else. I certainly never would have set out to be an MCR social secretary, but I was a "keen" participant in early events and was recruited by the outgoing committee, and that was that.
Theory #2 is the Poverty Lobe Exhaustion Theory. Since I spend all of my studying/class time thinking about poverty, underdevelopment, etc., all the room in my brain for that stuff is taken up and therefore I need to do something different with my personal life. There could be something to this, but it's inconsistent with my last two years in Alaska, so I don't find it convincing.
Theory #3, the most sophisticated explanation and probably the one that makes me look best, is the Wendell Berry Theory. My grad school admissions essays and fellowship applications of yore often referenced Wendell Berry, the author-farmer-environmentalist who wrote that "our understandable wish to save the planet must somehow be reduced to the scale of our competence." In other words, if you're going to try to help, you better know what the fuck you're doing.
When I encountered Berry's thinking in an environmental studies course at Williams, it immediately resonated with me; Berry helped me understand why I instinctively shied away from the kind of activism preferred by many of my peers in favor of locally grounded projects like WRAPS. Even my Save Darfur activism had a specific local goal: divesting Alaska's Permanent Fund from firms that are bankrolling genocide. My most successful projects in Alaska had laser-focused objectives, such as helping community organizations and tribes access federal dollars for summer feeding. You can see why the work of Bill Easterly, the economist who thinks that grand development plans are doomed to fail, is also attractive to me.
The Wendell Berry Theory suggests that I'm not doing any community service or activism at Cambridge because I know that I don't know or understand this community enough to be of much service to it. This may not be the right attitude to project at, say, a job interview... but I think it is one of the emerging core values of my still-young -- younger than that kid from Williams! -- career.
15 February 2009
mid-lent term dispatches
The atmosphere in Cambridge has been noticeably different during Lent Term, the middle third of the academic year. It seems like everyone is hunkering down and working much harder, yours truly included. Certain Michaelmas Term luxuries, such as attending lectures for classes I am not taking for credit, are now largely a thing of the past. At least eastern England at this time of year is damp, cold, and gross, so it doesn't feel like we're missing anything.
An unpleasant class. One of the changes in format in our program during Lent Term has been semiweekly student-led seminars. Last week a classmate from Sudan conducted a seminar that was supposed to be about NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and civil society in Sudan. As many of you know, I was an activist with Save Darfur while I was in Alaska. My Sudanese classmate is a very pleasant guy, but occasionally he has made comments that have made me bristle. During his presentation, he spent relatively little time on the topic and mostly tried to debunk what everybody knows is going on in the Western part of Sudan.
He used many of the tropes that the Sudanese government uses to defend itself, including:
(1) referring to Darfuris are "rebels" and never once using the word "civilians";
(2) asserting, without evidence, that the Janjaweed militias are a "myth";
(3) cataloguing crimes and abuses perpetrated by employees of international organizations working in Darfur--which undoubtedly have happened--while never mentioning the hundreds of thousands of murders and rapes in Darfur, the millions of refugees streaming out of the country, or the burned villages;
(4) suggesting that the Darfur atrocities have been fabricated by some kind of Western activist-government-media conspiracy against Sudan.
As far off the mark as I think he was, I didn't know if challenging him directly on the facts during class would be the right approach. Perhaps fortunately, I didn't really have a chance, because he went on long enough that there was very little time for Q and A. From talking to some other classmates afterward, I got the sense that everybody knew the score. One recommended that I look at it as an "anthropological experience." I don't know if I will try talking to him about it in a less public setting, or even if it's worth doing so. If my German classmate were a Holocaust denier, I don't think I would bother trying to reason with her. The best approach I can think of for now would be to say something like, "that's not how I understand the situation in your country at all-- I'm just interested to hear more about where you're coming from?"
Cambridge has balls. Luckily even in the middle of Lent Term it isn't all work and no play. On Friday I attended the somewhat misnamed Springball at Churchill College. Springball is a very early preview of Cambridge's famous May Balls. If you thought formal hall sounded decadent, you ain't seen nothing yet. May Balls are all-night parties put on by most of the colleges, mostly during one week in mid-June (they were in May a long time ago, hence the name), and they are nothing if not celebrations of excess. Think of them as a cross between prom and Project Graduation, marinated in booze. Ticket prices vary widely, but a middle-of-the-road May Ball starts around £100 (about $145). The more prestigious balls are very hard to get into; the ball at St. John's College once made a Time magazine list of the 10 best parties in the world.
Churchill's Springball is nowhere near that level, but it's a pretty crazy party nonetheless. I went with a large posse of Gates people, many of whom are at Churchill, and we stayed from 8 pm until the bitter end at 3 am- which is very early by Cambridge ball standards. The food was generally pretty bad (surprise!), though I was a big fan of the donut stand. Activities included multiple concerts and dance floors, sumo wrestling in big padded suits, massages, an inflatable obstacle course, karaoke, and laser tag. I lost one of my cufflinks in the ball pit, and one of my friends -- who worked the second half of the ball in exchange for attending the first half for free -- miraculously found it at the end of the night and got it back to me.
You will surely be hearing more about May Balls, as I'm going to be attending two. One is an Oz-themed ball at Jesus College, which is where many of my Development Studies classmates are. The other is, obviously, Emma's ball. Fortunately I have no part in the planning of our ball, which got some bad publicity recently for a poorly chosen and subsequently withdrawn theme: "Empire." I didn't find the theme all that upsetting, and I do believe the intent was to "reflect the style and fashions of both Britain at the end of the nineteenth century and the diverse countries and cultures with which Britain was then entwined," but I'm irritated that the committee was so politically tone-deaf.
The contrast in subject matter above is not lost on me, and on Saturday I talked on the phone with my friend Kate, whom I'll be visiting at her Peace Corps post in Cameroon in late March. We shared a laugh over how a sentence like "I lost my cufflink in the ball pit" could be so completely foreign to her day-to-day life. Though I'm completely immersed in it right now, I am sure that Lent Term in Cambridge will seem alien to me too when I'm where she is.
An unpleasant class. One of the changes in format in our program during Lent Term has been semiweekly student-led seminars. Last week a classmate from Sudan conducted a seminar that was supposed to be about NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and civil society in Sudan. As many of you know, I was an activist with Save Darfur while I was in Alaska. My Sudanese classmate is a very pleasant guy, but occasionally he has made comments that have made me bristle. During his presentation, he spent relatively little time on the topic and mostly tried to debunk what everybody knows is going on in the Western part of Sudan.
He used many of the tropes that the Sudanese government uses to defend itself, including:
(1) referring to Darfuris are "rebels" and never once using the word "civilians";
(2) asserting, without evidence, that the Janjaweed militias are a "myth";
(3) cataloguing crimes and abuses perpetrated by employees of international organizations working in Darfur--which undoubtedly have happened--while never mentioning the hundreds of thousands of murders and rapes in Darfur, the millions of refugees streaming out of the country, or the burned villages;
(4) suggesting that the Darfur atrocities have been fabricated by some kind of Western activist-government-media conspiracy against Sudan.
As far off the mark as I think he was, I didn't know if challenging him directly on the facts during class would be the right approach. Perhaps fortunately, I didn't really have a chance, because he went on long enough that there was very little time for Q and A. From talking to some other classmates afterward, I got the sense that everybody knew the score. One recommended that I look at it as an "anthropological experience." I don't know if I will try talking to him about it in a less public setting, or even if it's worth doing so. If my German classmate were a Holocaust denier, I don't think I would bother trying to reason with her. The best approach I can think of for now would be to say something like, "that's not how I understand the situation in your country at all-- I'm just interested to hear more about where you're coming from?"
Cambridge has balls. Luckily even in the middle of Lent Term it isn't all work and no play. On Friday I attended the somewhat misnamed Springball at Churchill College. Springball is a very early preview of Cambridge's famous May Balls. If you thought formal hall sounded decadent, you ain't seen nothing yet. May Balls are all-night parties put on by most of the colleges, mostly during one week in mid-June (they were in May a long time ago, hence the name), and they are nothing if not celebrations of excess. Think of them as a cross between prom and Project Graduation, marinated in booze. Ticket prices vary widely, but a middle-of-the-road May Ball starts around £100 (about $145). The more prestigious balls are very hard to get into; the ball at St. John's College once made a Time magazine list of the 10 best parties in the world.
Churchill's Springball is nowhere near that level, but it's a pretty crazy party nonetheless. I went with a large posse of Gates people, many of whom are at Churchill, and we stayed from 8 pm until the bitter end at 3 am- which is very early by Cambridge ball standards. The food was generally pretty bad (surprise!), though I was a big fan of the donut stand. Activities included multiple concerts and dance floors, sumo wrestling in big padded suits, massages, an inflatable obstacle course, karaoke, and laser tag. I lost one of my cufflinks in the ball pit, and one of my friends -- who worked the second half of the ball in exchange for attending the first half for free -- miraculously found it at the end of the night and got it back to me.
You will surely be hearing more about May Balls, as I'm going to be attending two. One is an Oz-themed ball at Jesus College, which is where many of my Development Studies classmates are. The other is, obviously, Emma's ball. Fortunately I have no part in the planning of our ball, which got some bad publicity recently for a poorly chosen and subsequently withdrawn theme: "Empire." I didn't find the theme all that upsetting, and I do believe the intent was to "reflect the style and fashions of both Britain at the end of the nineteenth century and the diverse countries and cultures with which Britain was then entwined," but I'm irritated that the committee was so politically tone-deaf.
The contrast in subject matter above is not lost on me, and on Saturday I talked on the phone with my friend Kate, whom I'll be visiting at her Peace Corps post in Cameroon in late March. We shared a laugh over how a sentence like "I lost my cufflink in the ball pit" could be so completely foreign to her day-to-day life. Though I'm completely immersed in it right now, I am sure that Lent Term in Cambridge will seem alien to me too when I'm where she is.
10 February 2009
le week-end en suisse: fondue, trains, and beer in plastic cups
I'm not going to lie-- Geneva is a snooze. Take a city in a country obssessed with order and stability, and make it the world's capital for order and stability, and what do you expect to happen? But I had been warned of this by various people, including Cheryl, the friend I traveled to Geneva this past weekend to see. A little bit of backstory: Cheryl and I met several years back in DC thanks to a mutual friend who noticed that Cheryl had done a Fulbright in the Philippines and I was about to do the same. So I knew going in that this wasn't going to be Carnaval, and shortly after I landed I explained (reassured?) Cheryl that my motivation was 95 percent hanging out with her and 5 percent seeing Geneva.
That's not to say we didn't have a whole lot of fun. Cheryl took me to some unexpectedly grubby places that served beer in plastic cups, we ate fondue by the lakeside, we had a minor scrape with the law for riding a night bus around 3 a.m. without a valid pass. We meandered around the city and a charming suburb called Carouge. Aimless wandering is not my usual travel mode, but I really enjoyed it.
We also went to a film festival that, quite coincidentally, was showing lots of Filipino movies. The film we saw was a fictionalized documentary of a Filipino "reality" show that shamelessly moves in on a family in the aftermath of the murder of the oldest son. The movie had a lot to say about the artificiality of television, the mutual manipulation of the family and the TV crew, the schadenfreude of the viewing public, and the Philippines' complicated views on homosexuality. Parts of it were deliriously funny. After the first 20 minutes, which were almost entirely footage of people bawling, I leaned over to Cheryl and remarked that "this is either awful, or brilliant, and I can't decide which." The verdict: brilliant. I feel bad saying it, but neither of us were expecting that level of sophistication in a Filipino film. The audience received it well and had a lively Q and A afterward with the director, who had flown in from Manila.
On Sunday, thanks to efficient high-speed Swiss transportation, the two of us plus another friend of Cheryl's got to see a fair bit of the country. Through some Swiss friends, Cheryl got her hands on all-day rail passes that were valid anywhere in the country for just 30 Swiss francs apiece(about $25). I don't know if I have ever been to another advanced country that suddenly and completely switches languages part way through. Most of the country speaks German, but the Western quarter (including Geneva) speaks French, about a tenth of the population speaks Italian, and a few places speak some language I'd never heard of, called Romansh. Even the trains seem to obey the invisible linguistic borders; at some point between Geneva and Bern, the screens inside the train announcing the next stop switched from French to German.
We spent a few hours apiece in Bern (pronounced "bearnn"), a small and picturesque capital city overrun with fountains and clocks, and Luzern (Lucerne), which I had expected to be bumpkin-land but was surprisingly slick and urban instead. A short selection of photos:
Wall of the Reformation, Geneva. The city is proud of its role in the Reformation and was for a time the home of John Calvin. Among the figures honored on this wall is Roger Williams.
Cheryl and me in Bern. Yes, I am pretending to take a bite of her head, because at the top of this fountain is a statue of a guy eating babies. Apparently there is something sick and twisted hiding beneath that placid Swiss psyche...
Swiss timekeeping at its finest.
That's not to say we didn't have a whole lot of fun. Cheryl took me to some unexpectedly grubby places that served beer in plastic cups, we ate fondue by the lakeside, we had a minor scrape with the law for riding a night bus around 3 a.m. without a valid pass. We meandered around the city and a charming suburb called Carouge. Aimless wandering is not my usual travel mode, but I really enjoyed it.
We also went to a film festival that, quite coincidentally, was showing lots of Filipino movies. The film we saw was a fictionalized documentary of a Filipino "reality" show that shamelessly moves in on a family in the aftermath of the murder of the oldest son. The movie had a lot to say about the artificiality of television, the mutual manipulation of the family and the TV crew, the schadenfreude of the viewing public, and the Philippines' complicated views on homosexuality. Parts of it were deliriously funny. After the first 20 minutes, which were almost entirely footage of people bawling, I leaned over to Cheryl and remarked that "this is either awful, or brilliant, and I can't decide which." The verdict: brilliant. I feel bad saying it, but neither of us were expecting that level of sophistication in a Filipino film. The audience received it well and had a lively Q and A afterward with the director, who had flown in from Manila.
On Sunday, thanks to efficient high-speed Swiss transportation, the two of us plus another friend of Cheryl's got to see a fair bit of the country. Through some Swiss friends, Cheryl got her hands on all-day rail passes that were valid anywhere in the country for just 30 Swiss francs apiece(about $25). I don't know if I have ever been to another advanced country that suddenly and completely switches languages part way through. Most of the country speaks German, but the Western quarter (including Geneva) speaks French, about a tenth of the population speaks Italian, and a few places speak some language I'd never heard of, called Romansh. Even the trains seem to obey the invisible linguistic borders; at some point between Geneva and Bern, the screens inside the train announcing the next stop switched from French to German.
We spent a few hours apiece in Bern (pronounced "bearnn"), a small and picturesque capital city overrun with fountains and clocks, and Luzern (Lucerne), which I had expected to be bumpkin-land but was surprisingly slick and urban instead. A short selection of photos:
Wall of the Reformation, Geneva. The city is proud of its role in the Reformation and was for a time the home of John Calvin. Among the figures honored on this wall is Roger Williams.
Cheryl and me in Bern. Yes, I am pretending to take a bite of her head, because at the top of this fountain is a statue of a guy eating babies. Apparently there is something sick and twisted hiding beneath that placid Swiss psyche...
Swiss timekeeping at its finest.
This tower is part of the 14th-century wooden Kapellbrücke (chapel bridge), which is Luzern's most famous landmark. Again, stereotypes about the Swiss are confounded: instead of taking the shortest route across the river, the bridge zigs and zags. The shop called "Joe's Souvenirs" (I am not kidding) inside the tower was also a rude awakening.
05 February 2009
cambridge gives wen the bush treatment
I don't think this was as well covered in the US media as Monday's snowstorm in the UK (really people? does the whole country need to fall apart over a few inches of snow?), but a strange thing happened in Cambridge on Monday. Chinese premier Wen Jiabao was giving a speech here about the global economy after meeting with Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister. Toward the end of the talk, a heckler in the audience called Wen a "dictator" and threw his shoe at him. My knowledge of the Chinese government is pretty limited, but my understanding is that Wen is at the helm of the Chinese bureaucracy, while the President, Hu Jintao, is the head of state. Throwing shoes at government leaders, of course, has a history going back at least as far as... the month before last, when President Bush got the same treatment in Iraq.
I didn't manage to get a ticket to his talk, so I wasn't there to witness the event personally. It should go without saying that the incident reflects poorly on Cambridge as a place for a free and civilized exchange of ideas. What was most interesting to me, though, was seeing the reactions of my Chinese and non-Chinese classmates, primarily through the flurry of facebook commentary that followed. The general reaction among the non-Chinese students was bemusement, similar to the way I think most young Americans reacted to Bush's "shoeing." The act was violent but posed little real threat to the speaker; the primary source of the gesture's force is its breaching of the deferential treatment usually accorded to heads of government.
Chinese students reacted quite differently. Here is a passage from a comment written by a Chinese Development Studies classmate of mine: "Apparently, this lad is just one of the young people here who are ignorant about the history and reality of China, yet filled with blind ideologic passion. If you hate Communist Party, you have no idea how much the Party has evolved. If you love a free Tibet, you are ignorant about the brutal and ruthless theocratic regime of serfdom once ruled by Dailai [sic] Lama, the 'smiling budda.' If you hate China, yet you chose the wrong person to make this 'heroic' move, whom happens to be probably the most respected and beloved leader in China, across all age groups. It can only be viewd by Chinese as an insult and humiliation, which put shame on the guy himself, which I don't care, but also cast shadow on this great University." A Chinese friend of his remarked that it was "a shame to Cambridge." My friend later added: "I just reviewed the video and found that Wen made very sincere bows to the audience, saying 'this is not a courtesy. This is my due respect for knowledge, teachers and professors, as a humble student. ' What a shame for this scum showing up today, humiliating this great university."
I bolded certain words in those passages because I think they point to something very, very vital about Chinese and other East Asian cultures that a lot of Westerners fail to understand, to everyone's detriment. I wrote about the importance of avoiding shame and "losing face" in Filipino culture in my previous blog-- almost three years ago to the day, in fact. This economy of honor and shame is linked primarily with the self and one's family in the Philippines, but in China it's also very much tied up with national identity. So throwing a shoe at the Chinese premier is committing a certain kind of emotional warfare even against our Chinese friends. I seem to recall that a few years back, early in Hu Jintao's presidency, the White House declined to host a full-fledged state dinner when Hu came to visit Washington and a lot of Chinese people regarded it as a deep insult. I'm not saying that Westerners always and everywhere need to do whatever it takes to avoid hurting China's pride, but we've got to start understanding this stuff better, especially as China continues its climb as a world power.
I have found many of my own preconceived notions about my Chinese friends to be wrong. Recently one of our professors lectured on development and the media, and naturally media censorship in China was a topic of discussion. I think I had been expecting, or perhaps wishing, that I was attending class with some young Chinese Patrick Henrys or Tom Paines. That turned out not to be the case. While not necessarily endorsing the current state-run media, they presented a nuanced view of government control that gave nods to stability and gradualism. I was similarly surprised when a Vietnamese friend (again 3 years ago this month) expressed some gratitude that the communist government there keeps a lid on things, while the democratic Philippines has been rent with political unrest and violence. I realized that in my ideology I might have more in common with the George W. Bush of his second inaugural address than I care to admit.
I didn't manage to get a ticket to his talk, so I wasn't there to witness the event personally. It should go without saying that the incident reflects poorly on Cambridge as a place for a free and civilized exchange of ideas. What was most interesting to me, though, was seeing the reactions of my Chinese and non-Chinese classmates, primarily through the flurry of facebook commentary that followed. The general reaction among the non-Chinese students was bemusement, similar to the way I think most young Americans reacted to Bush's "shoeing." The act was violent but posed little real threat to the speaker; the primary source of the gesture's force is its breaching of the deferential treatment usually accorded to heads of government.
Chinese students reacted quite differently. Here is a passage from a comment written by a Chinese Development Studies classmate of mine: "Apparently, this lad is just one of the young people here who are ignorant about the history and reality of China, yet filled with blind ideologic passion. If you hate Communist Party, you have no idea how much the Party has evolved. If you love a free Tibet, you are ignorant about the brutal and ruthless theocratic regime of serfdom once ruled by Dailai [sic] Lama, the 'smiling budda.' If you hate China, yet you chose the wrong person to make this 'heroic' move, whom happens to be probably the most respected and beloved leader in China, across all age groups. It can only be viewd by Chinese as an insult and humiliation, which put shame on the guy himself, which I don't care, but also cast shadow on this great University." A Chinese friend of his remarked that it was "a shame to Cambridge." My friend later added: "I just reviewed the video and found that Wen made very sincere bows to the audience, saying 'this is not a courtesy. This is my due respect for knowledge, teachers and professors, as a humble student. ' What a shame for this scum showing up today, humiliating this great university."
I bolded certain words in those passages because I think they point to something very, very vital about Chinese and other East Asian cultures that a lot of Westerners fail to understand, to everyone's detriment. I wrote about the importance of avoiding shame and "losing face" in Filipino culture in my previous blog-- almost three years ago to the day, in fact. This economy of honor and shame is linked primarily with the self and one's family in the Philippines, but in China it's also very much tied up with national identity. So throwing a shoe at the Chinese premier is committing a certain kind of emotional warfare even against our Chinese friends. I seem to recall that a few years back, early in Hu Jintao's presidency, the White House declined to host a full-fledged state dinner when Hu came to visit Washington and a lot of Chinese people regarded it as a deep insult. I'm not saying that Westerners always and everywhere need to do whatever it takes to avoid hurting China's pride, but we've got to start understanding this stuff better, especially as China continues its climb as a world power.
I have found many of my own preconceived notions about my Chinese friends to be wrong. Recently one of our professors lectured on development and the media, and naturally media censorship in China was a topic of discussion. I think I had been expecting, or perhaps wishing, that I was attending class with some young Chinese Patrick Henrys or Tom Paines. That turned out not to be the case. While not necessarily endorsing the current state-run media, they presented a nuanced view of government control that gave nods to stability and gradualism. I was similarly surprised when a Vietnamese friend (again 3 years ago this month) expressed some gratitude that the communist government there keeps a lid on things, while the democratic Philippines has been rent with political unrest and violence. I realized that in my ideology I might have more in common with the George W. Bush of his second inaugural address than I care to admit.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
