About This Book

Holes | Timing | Names | Images

 

Every post to appear here was first drafted over a year ago and revised since then. Total weight in words: over 50,000.

Rather than self-publish in book form, I’ve decided to capitalize on the hypertext potential of cyberspace. Hover over Mandarin terms to recall their meaning. Click photos for larger versions, as well as their locations in Google Maps. Contribute your own thoughts, including suggestions for revision. With one post appearing every weekday beginning January 1, the full run should finish in time for the Olympics in Beijing.

Future generations will remember 2008 as China’s year. I hope you enjoy these offbeat memoirs from my experiences there.

Holes

Write what you know, the adage says. Well, I lived in China for a year – I’ll write about that. People seem to enjoy those stories almost as much as I enjoy telling them.

The funny thing was, while writing I discovered how much I didn’t know. The meaning of that holiday. The names of those fruity candies. How they made thousand year eggs. Holes in my understanding urged me to research more.

I resisted those urges and left the holes unfilled.

Why?

Plenty of books out there provide gobs of facts about China. Honestly, they don’t interest me. I don’t know China from books.

What I do know is this: I lived in China for a year, and it captivated me, bewildered me, amused and frustrated and utterly challenged me. I struggled to comprehend every single experience. If I wasn’t misinterpreting the language, I was missing cultural cues. Questions rarely helped – as a foreigner I wasn’t privy to complete or straightforward explanations. (The Chinese put their best foot forward.)

Living in Beijing was, for me, passing hourly from one haze of uncertainty to the next. I arrived with the conviction that all humans are fundamentally the same; I departed utterly baffled by the depth of cultural differences.

So I do not know the Chinese. All I know is that I spent a year among them. It drove me to think a lot about language and culture, and I flew home with some fun stories. This book is my effort to capture in words, as authentically as possible, what it was like to live in a country so different from my own, lacking the necessary skills to decode it.

Crazy things happen when cultures collide. I will be just as interested in a Chinese person’s account of a year in America as I hope you will be in these bemused ramblings.

Timing

I’ve written my observations about Chinese culture and language in the past tense only, partly to underscore this book as an account of personal experiences. I can make no sweeping assertions on how China is or isn’t; I can only report what I saw, felt and thought while there.

I’ve also kept to past tense because the China I experienced was in the past – 1993-1994. Which begs the question: why read about China from another decade?

With the 2008 Olympics, China will shed much of its past and solidify its status as a world leader. Soon we’ll forget its awkward teenage years, its stumbling, overeager morphology from Communist excesses to economic powerhouse.

The China I knew was stretched between two poles: the political controls of the past and the social reforms of the future. Street vendors earned more than university professors. Police beat pet dogs to death. Businesses competed through imitation (the communist value of conformity) rather than innovation (the capitalist evil of individualism).

In that China, strands of an ugly past interlaced with whispers of a brighter future. Such rapid transformation was both amusing and inspiring. Looking back to that era is like flipping through a high school yearbook to find clues about the adults who emerged – a fascinating exercise.

Names

All names of Chinese citizens, including most of their English classroom names, have been changed for this book.

In comparing China to America I’ve been fairer than I fear some American readers will appreciate. Still, that hasn’t held me back from some unflattering impressions of China’s Communist Party – a party that still reigns.

Future political oppression may sound unlikely, but it must be remembered that reforms began prior to the Tiananmen Massacre, and were subsequently frozen for a brief yet severe political crackdown. One-party political systems tend to overreact to perceived threats to their control.

In this digital age, memory is forever. I would be grieved if one of my former students landed on a political watchlist simply for being mentioned in this book.

Images

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs were taken by Michael W. Hobson in 1993-1994. Other images were scanned from realia brought back from China during that same period. Larger image files are hosted here at Google Picasaweb, which features links to their locations in Google Maps.

Go easy on the photos — I wasn’t expecting to use them in a book. They were taken on a budget camera and developed and printed at the time by a local processor in Beijing.