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.

Interpreting Chinese Youth Sub-culture as a Haughty Expat

Like many foreigners in China, I find myself spending a lot of time observing and interpreting Chinese culture, particularly its modern youth culture. A lot of the time, I find myself fighting the urge to be haughty and snobby, looking down upon whatever Western food attempt, miscued Chinglish effort, local rock band, modern art display and other examples of contemporary Chinese art and culture through my ‘oh-so-cultured’ Western eyes.

I can almost see the online video about disrespectful Overseas Chinese, where the ungrateful ABC walks around some upscale display condominium, pointing out the inauthentic, "knock-off Western" paintings or a particularly poorly matched choice in bedroom furniture. It's bi-polar in the unique way that being an expat in China so often is, because I feel like I spend a lot of time defending China from the ignorant, outsider opinions of people who write off China without having stepped a foot inside it, do not speak the language, and know nothing of the country beyond Western media coverage. My relationship with China is not so much "love/hate" as it is "defend/critique."

In coming to China, it is easy to look upon a lot of contemporary Chinese culture, particularly that of the yuppie/nouveau riche classes, as tacky, kitschy, derivative and naive, to look upon its interpretation of modernity as simply a sloppy attempt to imitate the developed West. And then, as does happen so often during conversations about this topic, expats (like myself) will bring up the Cultural Revolution, China's rocky past and how amazing it is simply for any of this to exist at all. We’ll continue that though contemporary China may be a long way from Tokyo and even further from London or Milan, it's still a whole lot closer than it was 30 years ago.

I came to Chengdu having heard of a nascent art scene, and was quite sorely disappointed to see just how undeveloped and small it really is. Newspapers frequently run articles discussing how hot Chinese art is in the market these days, yet sadly, when I visited the art warehouse district in Shanghai, I found that the art I saw there which struck me as most original was made by foreigners. Having come interested in discovering youth sub-culture and rebellion, I’ve found that too much of it appears to consist of kids in tight jeans and Chuck Taylors who listen to Panic at the Disco, the more enterprising of them perhaps starting a band that sounds almost identical.

That's not to say that this doesn't happen in the West: it does, in great amounts. But I suppose that's just the point: I'd come to China looking for something different--"Williamsburg-in-Shanghai", but unique in a Tokyo-ish way, was my naïve ideal. And where it is indeed very different, so much of what is deemed contemporary and young here seems directly imported, or bastardized in interpretation, straight from the West. Whether it's young couples eating a “romantic meal” in McDonalds on Christmas, college students imitating Kobe on the basketball court or middle-class kids at a punk show, much of it feels completely lacking in Chinese characteristics. It feels hollow, inauthentic, and lacking the sort of localized, independent adaptation that made rock and roll, punk and the Weather Underground so, well...cool.

In talking to a fellow foreigner about it, we noticed that so many of our young Chinese friends--all intelligent, open-minded and capable--were so devoted to going to America for college and fortune, that perhaps it left little opportunity to concern themselves with developing local culture and art. Most of them study hard sciences, not the humanities, and in their spare time they don't seek out "Carsick Cars" or the latest hip indie band, they practice their English through "Desperate Housewives." The most Chinese cultural activity I can point to is that some of them write Tang style poetry for themselves. Others take an interest in Tibet, minority culture and Buddhism. But even such an interest I've read comes originally from "Shangri-La chic" becoming fashionable first in the West, then being re-adopted by Chinese hipsters via Western media.

When you live in a society thrusting itself head-first towards a vision of development that is so culturally intertwined with being Western, and when so many of the best and brightest spend all their energy competing to get into MIT, it leaves little energy for subculture. My friend suggested that perhaps in a generation or two, the children of a more-established middle class will be more interested in the humanities, art and such things often considered non or less-monetary in nature. Perhaps that will be the case, though given the competitiveness of modern China, I wonder whether even future generations will be willing to take their eyes off the cash prize for long enough.

At this point, I suppose it's just too early to expect much of what the “cool kids” and their subcultures here to have developed its own characteristics. Having only recently gained access to Western media and lifestyles, many Chinese are in a ‘honeymoon’ phase in terms of their relationship with the West, possessing an idealized vision of societies of universal abundance and comfort. In reading Zachary Mexico's enlightening "China Underground," I was struck at how of all the counter-cultural youth he met, few of them seemed to be doing much that I would deem "innovative" or "unique." Whether this is partly due to Confucian, conformist education or other similar “uncreative Chinese” arguments is another argument altogether.

Eventually, when I go out seeking culture that feels sufficiently "Chinese," I find it amongst the elderly, and often enough, in parks: writing calligraphy with water brushes, singing local opera and playing Chinese chess or mahjong. I study kung fu at the local sports university, and though I occasionally do see some kung fu majors practicing, it's more likely that I will see track and field athletes taking a recreational tae kwon doe class. Chinese youth culture, to caricaturize, is more about Warcraft, NBA and KTV than anything uniquely local or particularly different, at least to Western eyes. That's not Chinese youth’s loss at all—rather, it's mine, as a foreign observer seeking out something that this country’s young people are not at all obliged to provide.

One China blogger at the site Lost Laowai has pointed out that more Chinese youth appear to be rebelling through fashion, a sort of baby step towards deeper forms of rebellion, borne of critical thought, dissent and creative communities. I can only hope this is true, but would imagine that such youth fashion circles are, in their own way, as conformist and imitative as mass culture, though admittedly within a much smaller community.

That's not to say there isn't creative, interesting stuff going on here, nor that I'm even aware of all of it. This is, naturally, just one non-expert perspective by a foreigner. Wonderful online platforms like neocha.com expose us to non-mainstream music and creativity that were previously unknown, and I occasionally do meet or hear about locals doing exciting work. But my point is that largely, in my (albeit limited) time here, I haven't seen much noteworthy "contemporary Chinese culture" to date.

Links:

Idealized images of Westerners:
http://www.chinasmack.com/stories/china-does-not-have-any-men-suitable-for-me/

One of the best Chinese bands I’ve heard: http://www.myspace.com/rebuildingtherightsofstatues