On Sedaris in Beijing

Last week I attended a David Sedaris reading at the Bookworm, along with seemingly everybody I know within Beijing's closely interwoven expat community. It was a packed house--the event had been sold out for weeks--and the atmosphere was buzzing with excitement at the presence of such an eminent American writer, who'd traveled all the way out to entertain us with his acute observations of middle-class America.

These days, Beijing receives visits from increasing numbers of high-profile Western artists and entertainment stars and business moguls--Mark Zuckerburg recently stopped by, setting off local conversation regarding his Chinese-American girlfriend--but visits from non-China-focused writers remain rare. The previous evening, Dave Eggers had given a talk and mentioned that some of his books had been translated into Chinese, leading me to wonder: What sort of Western-obsessive Chinese reader would find Eggers' unique brand of post-modern, ironic and American self-obsession entertaining? (At least, that from his earlier work.) Similarly, how many locals would find Sedaris' witty remarks regarding middle American couples fighting in Paris amusing?

The answer, it seems, is not that many, seen in the meager handful of Chinese-Chinese in the audience. (There were, however, plenty of Western-Chinese.) Chinese do take to certain fields of Western popular literature: plenty of Times best-sellers show up in Mandarin, and books on finance and self-help are omnipresent. But humor is extremely culturally-specific, and it would take only the most inspired Western culture devotee to bother trying to appreciate this brand of it.

But in this case, Eggers and Sedaris have come because the Bookworm, an English-language bookstore and hub for Beijing's foreign intelligentsia, has paid their enormous speaker sums to drag them over. While China obviously possesses its own rich literary tradition, sadly, the vast majority of us are incapable of appreciating it. Consequently, literary life for the Chinese expat remains fairly barren, other than during the Bookworm's annual festival. Starved for such events as we were, the audience seemed particularly appreciative of Sedaris' presence.

Sedaris' reading went over very smoothly. Most of the stories would be familiar to those who've listened to his 'This American Life' contributions, but he also read out a very funny story that they turned down, about the way self-important Americans pronounce foreign words. He also shared some miscellaneous musings from his diary (excerpt: On seeing a “Marriage is between a man and a woman” bumper sticker on a handicapped woman's car, Sedaris concludes that drivers eligible for handicap spaces should not be allowed political opinions). One story was read off of his iPad, and I feared for the machine's battery life (hold on, glowing orb!). Somewhat oddly, he checked his watch frequently--it looked like something of a nervous tic--but gave the impression that he was keen not to over-run his pricey scheduled reading time. Nevertheless, the crowd gave him a rousing applause at the end of the reading.

What followed was most interesting: Sedaris asked the crowd for advice regarding procuring 'weird' postcards in Beijing, and made several references to his experience of Beijing to date. He had just arrived the night before, and explained that the experience had been quite a shock.

“If I'd come from London, that might have been different, but the fact that I just came in from Tokyo made it particularly jarring,” he said. “I was on the subway and I felt pressure against my back, as if someone was pushing me! I thought maybe somebody had fainted and fell on to me.” The crowd burst into hearty peals of laughter.

“Coming from the airport I'd wondered: 'Why are all these people running into the middle of the street?'” he continued--a reference to China's rather anarchic traffic culture--and the crowd roared madly with mirth.

Sensing that he was on a roll, he turned to a visit to a local supermarket. “At the counter, the lady had said the equivalent of 'Hey Ronnie, would ya pass me some quarters?', and her colleague threw some--overhand, not even underhand--to her.” At this point his face was bright red, a hand half-covering his face, and he struggled to contain himself. “I had to move my head out of the way…otherwise I might have been hit!” The swell of laughter was far greater than anything during the readings, and some audience members struggled to contain themselves.

Now, for some who'd only just arrived in China, or those who have never strayed from their American suburb-like enclaves, perhaps the experiences that he described may have struck them as genuinely unusual. But for anyone who's passed even a few days here, by China standards, the situations he described are extremely mild. As it is, he is staying in one of the country's most exclusive hostels, in it's most Westernized region. If he thought those moments he'd described were 'crazy', I thought, someone should take him out to the city's fringes, where the city's modern surface quickly fades and your average, non-cosmopolitan China emerges. Better yet, take him to the rural southwest, where my travels have brought me face-to-face with roasting dogs on spits and traffic maneuvers that would have looked good in Tron, were they not performed by peasants in bread vans. For someone so capable of spinning good yarns out of the tiniest minutia of domestic life, I imagine that Sedaris would quickly acquire years' worth of material within a few hours.

But the point, I believe, wasn't that the scenes Sedaris was commenting upon were particularly novel to we expats, nor was his delivery especially clever. We were laughing because this was David Sedaris, one of America's most beloved humorists, experiencing a tiny sliver of the many oddities that make up daily life in China, and we were experiencing it through his eyes. Though we ourselves may not normally laugh at such quirks, all of us have at some point and, given Sedaris' fame and innocent, wide-eyed ignorance, are able to indulge in such laughter once again. There was nothing anti-Chinese at all about his tone, or the response of the audience, though I do wonder whether the Chinese audience members might have found the spectacle offensive at all.

Having spent three and a half years here, Sedaris' comments reminded me of how few things that happen in China ever surprise me. I look out on to the same streets that I walked wide-eyed when I first arrived years ago, and all of it now seems so commonplace: the old men in Mao suits chatting outside, the carts of shouting street food hawkers, the freelance recyclers with their bicycle-carts piled precariously high with refuse. All of it, where once so utterly strange, is now the everyday. Even a few years ago, if I'd seen a car pull up on the side of the highway and a man hop out and pee against a tree, I might have uttered “What on earth is he doing?” But at this point, I acknowledge the forthrightness with which he expels his urine and walk by. The ferocity of the crowds that push and shove (in China, one never has to travels far to discover crowds), is met with gruff acceptance, and only the occasional outburst, on my part.

This familiarity extends to individual habits too. That guy in the gym lifting weights in ass shorts and flip flops? I've christened him “Ass man.” The drying cabbage which my neighbor stacks outside his door? Well, what else is one to do with cabbage in winter?! Subtly and only slightly conscious of its happening, we assimilate into everyday life; the cognitive adaptations in our personal understanding of what constitutes 'odd' only become aware to us when new visitors from abroad share their wide-eyed perceptions.

Some of it becomes old very quickly. The same familiar tropes arise, about the hilarity of Chinglish signs (I still find them funny, but only the exceptionally unfortunate ones), and the tackiness of nouveau-riche furnishing and fashion. I generally try to explain the reasons for such phenomena as part of my self-designated mission to broaden others' understandings of China. But it reaches the point where one naturally seeks out other foreigners who've lived here long enough to get beyond these early observations and who seek or possess a deeper understanding of the country. In that way, Beijing's foreign society tiers off somewhat into different levels of China expertness. What many of we young Mandarin-speaking foreigners lack in career experience and salary standing, we seek to make up for this in terms of local knowledge and gossip. Ours is a snobbery of yuppie ethnographers; while many of us would readily admit aspirations to join the ranks of those decidedly non-China savvy elites, we are particularly admiring of those who are able to do so from humble 'foreign explorer in China' beginnings. For many of us, that hero is Peter Hessler, who turned two years teaching English in the Peace Corps in rural Sichuan into a staff writer position with the New Yorker.

But sometimes, it's nice to check the China expertise hierarchy at the door and be united in our appreciation of the vast abundance of things about this society that we find so mind-bogglingly weird. In a way, it's all a bit Jerry Springer-like, where the extreme behavior of the locals makes us feel more secure about our middle-class Western civility. However, it's certainly not one-directional; I've has conversations with Chinese friends in which we've shared laughs over some of the oddities discovered while living abroad (for example: the blandness of English cuisine, the excesses of Japanese etiquette). Finally, it also invites one to ponder how much longer we'll be able to play this role of haughty expat. Who knows? Soon enough, Chinese expats will be doing the same thing, laughing amongst themselves in their literati circles in New York and Delhi about the quaint habits of these 'uncivil locals.' Perhaps they already are.

Two Cousins, Part 2: Beijing Reunion

Recently my cousin Jennifer, a junior studying Chinese literature, visited me in Beijing. She flew in from Chongqing, from various friends’ accounts a dirty, choking, uncomfortably crowded (even by Chinese standards) megalopolis that lays questionable claim to being the largest city in the world. Recently, it’s been in the news for the refreshingly harsh punishments that have been leveled against its well-connected gangsters, including the deputy police commissioner’s sister-in-law, reputedly the ringleader of a gang and dubbed the "Godmother of Chongqing." A stout, homely 46 year-old, she reputedly kept no less than 16 strapping young men as lovers in her own harem.

Jennifer is from a small town in Borneo, and in addition to Beijing’s classic sights, I made it my goal to present her sides of the city that she wouldn’t ordinarily have the chance to experience in Sichuan, but also those that she might not have expected at all. My own travels have benefited enormously from the generosity of hosts in cities ranging from Delhi to Tehran, who showed me around their hometowns and took me to meet their friends, and from those experiences, I’ve come to believe that the best insider tours of a city involve a mixture of natural beauty, interesting conversation with residents and a dash of the unexpected. Over the course of the weekend, I also had the opportunity to bond with my cousin sister, who I’d never seen before outside of the context of family reunions back in Malaysia.

Friday evening: “Old alleys, young chatter”

Having come straight from the office, I beat Jennifer and her fellow Malaysian friend Kelly, who herself is also studying Chinese literature but in Beijing, to Mao Mao Chong (“Caterpillar” bar), one of my frequent haunts. I’ve befriended the owners, recent parents Stephen and Stephanie, and they recommend a couple of house cocktails that feature home-distilled spirits such hawthorn-infused vodka for the girls, who arrive with gift-stuffed bags from Tiananmen square and shopping mecca Wangfujing. Stephen is a former pizza chef from Melbourne and his wife is from Guangdong: together, the two make a solid business pair—he makes the best (probably the only) gourmet chocolate dessert pizza in the city and Stephanie expertly handles all of the troublesome bureaucracy involved in running a small business in China. Across the walls of the bathroom, she has painted in broad Chinese characters the love story behind the bar’s name.

My girlfriend soon arrives and we take our two Malaysians along Nan Luo Gu Xiang, a traditional “hutong” district that has been renovated and sanitized into the closest thing Beijing has to New York’s Lower East Side. It’s filled with tiny boutique salons housed in sloping slate-eaved buildings that sell ironic pins, Cultural Revolution-era kitsch and bohemian houseware, interspersed by bars where hip folk singers with acoustic guitars sing out on to the din of the main street. Over dumplings, the girls tells us of their experience pursuing literature degrees in China: predictably, Chinese college students are more studious than their relatively relaxed Southeast Asian peers, and they find a lot of their classmates to be parochial and quite ignorant of things beyond their national border.

I take them to a rooftop bar housed in a banking tower in the nightlife district of Sanlitun, where a friend is having his 27th birthday party. There, amongst the elegantly landscapes of the garden bar, I introduce them to the eclectic group of expats and locals that make Beijing’s social circles so fascinating: among them AIDS researchers, political journalists, investors and climate change activists. They are particularly impressed when an American friend named John, for whom I occasionally beatbox, delivers a verse of his smooth eco-conscious Mandarin rap. Later, at “Latte”, one of the city’s utterly over-the-top, gaudy silver nightclubs, I escort the girls around like an over-protective Uncle as they observe an energetic array of live singers cover everything from Gloria Gaynor to Black Eyed Peas.

When I ask what the girls think of Chinese clubs, their reaction surprises me.

“Here it’s a lot more civil than clubs in Kuala Lumpur,” Kelly says. “Even though they’re supposed to be conservative, Malaysian youth are wilder.”

--

Saturday afternoon: “Family tales”

After a first day of cultural sites, Jennifer wants to see some of Beijing’s green spaces and I accompany her to Houhai and Beihai, two classic tourist parks that lie along a stretch of lakes just west of the Forbidden City. There, we try to evade the packs of local and American tour groups, some of whom whiz past in rickshaws, snapping photos of “traditional Beijing.” After a winter that lingered months beyond its welcome date, the weather is finally warm and the streets teem with activity: retirees are singing Peking opera on the lake or writing water calligraphy, free-to-join tai chi classes are taking place beneath centuries-old gateways.

Tired from more walking than my sedentary, office-bound legs have seen for several months, I plead for us to rest in the shade in front of a man in his sixties performing various tricks on a Chinese Yo-Yo. There, Jennifer tells me of an older cousin who devoted years of her life to an ex-husband, losing her own identity and falling out of touch with family in the process. When she found out that he had been cheating on her for several years, she left him, but not before finding that she had to rebuild her own separate life once more.

“I think that an ideal woman needs to be self-reliant. She should be able to support herself with her own career, just like those friends you introduced me to last night,” Jennifer said.

It dawned on me that I was having a conversation with my cousin about women’s equality: a topic I have discussed dozens of times with various friends but never before with a member of my family. And while to a feminism-raised audience in the west the topic would sound rather outdated, with her I could still hear the urgency and relevance in her voice. Both in Malaysia and China, where notions of the ideal “passive, selfless” wife remain widespread and associating the term “strong” with a woman can contain both good and bad connotations, Jennifer’s soft soliloquy sounded positively Hilary-like.

She displayed a similarly well-constructed moral compass over the weekend several more times, and each time I heard her deliver such rousing lines, I felt a mixture of both pride and shame: pride in that I have such a passionate, ambitious, responsible cousin sister, and shame that, despite all of my privileged Western education, I haven’t played a larger role in helping shape my cousins’ lives to date. It would turn out to be the theme of the weekend: while I introduced her to some of the city’s sociable, cosmopolitan types—like an Australian-Chinese gay couple who courted in Italy, or a young chef who cooks for the Canadian embassy—and exposed her to the violent theatrics of punk rock and elegant design of boutique hotels, she would provide me lessons in familial devotion and friendship, all the while gently filling in the vocabulary in my non-articulate Mandarin. It was a bit like one of those skill swap gatherings, except free of any weight of expectation.

That evening, over roast duck in a bustling local restaurant, we discussed our two youngest cousins, each of whom lost a parent while in their infancy. Jenny told me about the way that the other kids would tease them, hurling such schoolyard insensitivities as: “You don’t have a dad…that’s why you’re so poor you have to walk to school.” These days, almost all of my cousins have left their hometown for better-paid work, and until she too left home, Jenny would take care of Hua, the baby of our generation, playing the role of big sister and counselor.

“I hope as a teacher that I can both contribute to society but also make a high salary,” she told me at a Malaysian restaurant, shortly before flying back to Chongqing, her eyes flickering. “That way I can help to pay for Hua to continue her studies in the future.”

--

Sunday noon: “Return to reality”

“Going to Chongqing made me not like China,” Jenny explained over tea. “Traffic is awful, people are so uncouth…But Beijing is really different. It’s not as crowded; people are more civil.”

I ask her whether she’d ever consider moving here, but she says that teaching Chinese literature as a Malaysian national would be difficult in China, where they prefer locals. Instead, she’s been talking about going to New Zealand after she graduates, to “experience Western life.” I tell her to go to Australia instead, where she could be close to my parents.

Later, we walk through the commercial heart of Beijing: Sanlitun Village, where the consumer class aspires and acquires its Apple phones and Mango jeans. Arriving at the Opposite House, Beijing’s most famous luxury boutique hotel, I asked a local hostess if we could view one of the hotel’s legendary rooms. Though she tells us that the rooms are all fully booked, the English manager must have found enough authenticity in my English to give us a full tour, and Jenny snapped away with her camera while I schmoozed with the manager. Opposite House is the sort of uber-designed hotel where transparent showers are placed in the middle of the suite, every furnishing is hidden away and the USD $3,500 per night penthouse includes complimentary use of the hotel Maserati. She had never seen such luxury and I enjoyed utilizing my cultural capital to allow her a glimpse of it (something my salary certainly won’t provide anything more than).

“In places like those, I find that speaking English provides significantly better service,” I explain to her as we walk out. “They treat me completely differently when they know I’m Western.”

It reminded me of a humorous story that Jenny had told me earlier, from our childhood years in Borneo. When my brother and I were scheduled to arrive from Australia, Jenny’s mother wasn’t sure whether we would eat the family’s standard Asian diet and as such, had stocked up on bread and snacks before we arrived. Back then, my own family had also treated my completely different because I was Western. To be honest, they still do. But hanging out with my cousin in Beijing, conversing in the language of our shared cultural heritage, I saw those early lines that divided Western upward mobility from family belonging continue to fade away. I’ll never be “one of the cousin crew” – an entire life spent in other lands to date has guaranteed that. But I can still be; indeed, still am: “part of the clan.” And I’ll take that offer any day.

Hong Kong versus Beijing: past and future

One of the shared battles that foreigners in China face is securing and maintaining a valid visa. Almost anyone who’s been here for a while eventually finds him or herself on a “visa run” out of the mainland. And although some people take the path less traveled and head for Mongolia or Southeast Asia, most of us head to Hong Kong, traditional port of entry to China, and these days, shopping haven for those yearning for vegemite or other tough-to-procure Western goods.

It doesn’t take long to feel the difference between Hong Kong and the mainland. Looking to save money, I flew into Shenzhen, a two-hour bus ride from downtown Hong Kong. As soon as you cross the border, the signs change from simplified to traditional characters. And although in southeastern China they also speak Cantonese, culturally they share far more with other mainlanders than Hong Kong Chinese, many of whom consider themselves distinct (read: superior). After all, they only joined the rest of the country 12 years ago, and the island’s British heritage is clearly visible in everything from school children’s blazers (much more becoming than the mainland’s nylon tracksuits) and its men’s fondness for spending their Saturdays betting on horse races.

Having come in from Beijing’s minus ten degree, record-breaking snowstorm, I basked in Hong Kong’s clear blue skies and balminess. At traffic lights, I was stunned at locals’ proclivity to wait for signals instead of dashing in front of oncoming vehicles and, while riding its hyper-efficient subway, their preference for allowing disembarking passengers off before entering, rather than the rugby scrub methodology I have become so adept at in Beijing. In its nightclubs, I was impressed with the confidence that local men displayed when approaching women, using a directness less often seen in shyer mainland boys, and when walking past their neo-classical legislative building, I took cathartic pleasure in the lively protest against an expensive high-speed railway project taking place on its steps. It stood in stark contrast to the tanks and rifle-toting forces outside my apartment during the lead-up to last October’s 60th Anniversary commemoration .

But after my short stay in this most Westernized piece of China, as I headed back into the mainland, visa successfully processed—with its air pollution and anarchic traffic and insecure striving and authoritarianism—I felt excited. For despite all of its shortcomings, there is still something so magnetic and emotionally drenched and compelling about living here at this moment. Having given it some thought, I found that two people best help to capture what makes Beijing, and the mainland overall, the future-shaping place that it is, while glittering Hong Kong, though not going anywhere soon, feels like it’s prominence, and much of what it represents, is cresting.


-- Howard, the New Yorker fact checker: Beijing

A few weeks ago, I was invited to the dinner party of a friend, Deng, a Michigan-raised ABC who is researching Chinese healthcare on a Fulbright fellowship. He also makes a mean gourmet burger. With us for dinner were several other Americans, two doing Fulbrights and a pre-med student in Beijing studying Chinese over winter break. The conversation was quintessential Beijing half-pat—ranging from the quirks of Chinese psychological therapy to Sino-Arab relations, Ivy league grad school applications and irreverent banter, the sort of intellectually heightened but always lighthearted conversation that I love to lounge into after spending a lot of time amongst Chinese peers, stepping more cautiously along culturally and linguistically foreign territory.

Also digging into burgers alongside us was one local Chinese. I’ve found that in such foreign-party situations, the local contingent often consists of Chinese girlfriends. But on this evening, it was a sharply dressed young man named Howard. He introduced himself as a “journalist’s assistant.” It turned out that the journalist he referred to is none other than the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, whose reporting out of Beijing has been consistently excellent. Both Howard and I have studied at Sichuan University. Howard’s English listening is excellent, but while his spoken English is fine, he has a pretty strong accent.

At several points during dinner, Howard made comments that were unclear, largely due to his pronunciation. At one point, through a mouthful of pumpkin, he made a comment that another dinner guest completely misunderstood.

“Oh, I thought you said ant,” the other diner said.

“That’s because I have pumpkin in my mouth,” Howard replied.

There was the slightest moment of hesitation amongst the others around the table, before we quickly moved to confirm that it was indeed the pumpkin’s fault.

It was true. He did, indeed, have pumpkin in his mouth, and that very well may have influenced his pronunciation. But the truth of the matter is that, pumpkin or not, Howard’s pronunciation was unclear because he is Chinese, and English is a second language. There is nothing wrong with this fact. I can only envy speaking Chinese as well as he does English. But he didn’t say: “That’s because I’ve got pumpkin in my mouth and also I’m Chinese, and my English isn’t perfect.”

As Howard would have it: the pumpkin was the reason for the misunderstanding: not nationality, not educational background. Because Howard, as he listened to our slang and pop culture references with remarkable comprehension, while he goes about his day job translating and checking references for one of the world’s most reputable magazines, is gaining a Western fluency that many of his peers strive for. He is already “in” with a group of select, accomplished young Westerners, and they are welcoming him into their social circle not only as “a Chinese friend”—something that carries a different set of assumptions and social etiquette—but simply as ”one of them.”

Not all young Chinese want to spend their time hanging out with foreigners, trying to fit in and understand our sense of humor and cultural minutiae, but of those who do, Howard does it with conviction and an admirably smooth style.

-- Rez, Jardine Executive Training Future Tai-pan: Hong Kong

Rez is smooth. His dark hair is slicked back, his tie is perfectly tied, and his pinstriped suit is tailor-made. We sit down to Nepalese in a restaurant in Soho, and he explains his complicated background: Welsh-American and Chinese father, Malay mother, born in Saudi Arabia, raised in Hong Kong.

After stints at Johns Hopkins and LSE, Rez is now in the executive training program with Jardine Matheson, one of Hong Kong’s most storied trading companies.

“We’re the ones who started the Opium War,” Rez tells me, “and we don’t hide that fact from anyone. In fact, we take pride in it.”

Jardines is involved in basically any sort of large commerce you can think of, and Rez rotates between various management positions. Presently, he manages gate services at Hong Kong International Airport, from which he has acquired the ability to ignore yelled threats and learned, with some regret, that ethnic stereotypes tend to ring true in passenger behavior. (The only time he’s had to call the police in was when, after a two-hour delay due to technical issues, irate Shanghainese passengers started pouring water over the gate staff’s computers.)

Rez went to international school, where the students were forbidden from speaking Cantonese, and so he understands but does not speak the local language. He acknowledges that foreigners and Westernized Chinese in Hong Kong live in a bubble, rarely traveling beyond the CBD and its endless malls, restaurants and nightlife. When I asked him about differences between Hong Kong Chinese and mainlanders, he replies: “There is no real difference.”

He hopes that the next management rotation will net him the coveted position of executive assistant, through which he can meet all the right people while assisting the company’s current “Tai-Pan”, the traditional Hong Kong term for foreign businessmen or “big shots.” To be selected requires good guanxi, which Rez possesses in abundance.

“My family and the Jardines owners associate with similar society,” he explained. My friend had earlier mentioned hanging out on Rez’s yacht, and while he currently lives with his parents on the Peak, the highest, most exclusive part of Hong Kong, he has purchased an apartment in Soho and owns another in New York.

Before we part ways, I ask Rez if he hangs out with his colleagues.

“I sometimes hang out with other executive program trainees. Beyond that, though, all the other airport staff are very local Hong Kong Chinese.”

By this, it is understood immediately, that he means they are beneath him. It is hardly conceivable, absurd even, for a member of Hong Kong’s established class, western-educated and on the corporate fast-track, to associate with the commoners of his homeland, those who make up the vast majority of its population.

--

Obviously, I draw an extreme comparison here, but in considering what makes China so compelling, I found these two cases to be the clearest examples. While Hong Kong is a place that maintains a strong colonial legacy: there, the white man remains king, and an international versus a local education will in large part determine your entire life. It’s racial hierarchy, while more inclusive that in past times, remains far more rigid and exclusive than the mainland. As one Hong Konger living in Beijing explained it to me: “It’s not so much about how much money you have but simply who you are…who your parents are.”

Of course, there’s plenty of snooty superiority within the mainland as well, something that the Shanghainese in particular are well known for. But on the whole, the mainland gives off the sense that—despite all of the inequalities and corruption within the system—there remains genuine opportunity for upward mobility. In social terms, the mainland possesses a large and growing class of newly enfranchised middle class professionals who all came from humble beginnings, possessing much less of the ensconced smugness that Hong Kong retains. I sense this from the way that my colleagues interact. Their generation, which came of age following Reform and Opening, carries a vision that is not quite the American dream—although in their earnest striving to own a home and car one certainly sees a strong resemblance—and it’s certainly not the Maoist classless proletarian vision, but a fully understandable, defensible and exciting one. We China-observing foreigners often voice our concern over the environmental Armageddon of every middle-class Chinese family owning a car, but through my work, I am meeting university students and professionals fully aware of their society’s problems, and diligently attempting to address them with the sort of innovative, entrepreneurial solutions required.

Hong Kong in many ways symbolizes the accomplishments of Western civilization, with its efficient infrastructure and glamorous old hotels and endless new malls. These material accomplishments are all things that Beijing and Shanghai are feverishly working to attain and display, in a David toward Goliath gesture of come-uppance that China can acquire all these things without having been colonized by the West. I don’t enjoy the country’s overly defensive, victimized self-identification, but suppose that given the choice, I still prefer it to the smug superiority of Hong Kong’s elite. In Howard’s ambitious social climbing and steadfast acquisition of Western cultural fluency, I see my own parents: I see myself. He belongs to a generation that will redefine his country and world in significant ways, and I hope that while here, I too can help contribute to that redefinition.