A Reflection

As of the time of me writing this, I have been in China for exactly two months, taught three summer camps, and coordinated one. I have been to more far flung parts of this country than most Chinese people have. I have possibly touched the lives of hundreds of children in a way that I'll never really understand, sang Brown Eyed Girl for hundreds of people, and climbed the Great Wall. I have been forced by the Great Khan to drink at 6:30 in the morning in a valley in Mongolia. I have gained an incredible amount of cultural understanding and experience from all of this as a person, and I never, ever want to do it again.

I will not deny that what I've done was immensely enjoyable and beneficial for me as an individual, because it most certainly was. In fact, if I could go back in time and talk to myself six months ago, I might even consider telling him that this was a really good idea, and was something that past Cooper should most definitely do. Why? Well, for one, I'm kind of a dick, but more than that this is something that I'm going to remember forever. It would be a different matter to go around again with these experiences. It wouldn't be worth it, not by a long shot, because for each of those really amazing things that I have done, there has been an equally horrible counterpart.

For all of the highs, there were the lows. There was that first night in Quzhou when the girls slept by candle light, and we discovered that we had to shit into a hole and would be without running water for the duration of our stay. I remember the entire room of guys erupting in nervous laughter simply because of how on edge we all were with the situation. Some of us thought we were going to die. I know the thought crossed my mind at least once.

That bad situation gave me a oddly wonderful situation: the first time I had cold water in Quzhou. You see, water had been scarce for a good five days, and all of it was warm. Every day was over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and we would all just kind of sit around and sweat in the heat. Then one day, the gatekeeper realized he could make a tidy profit, bought a fridge, and stocked it full of water and frozen treats. I think Logan was the first one who discovered what was going on, and he came running to the rest of us sitting behind the school and said, “Guys, you have to try this, it's cold water. When I first tasted it, I almost cried.” And you know what? I had the same reaction. It was like drinking water for the first time, and it was glorious. I don't think I've ever eaten so much ice cream as I did over the next few days.

Quzhou also had the delightful effect of making the next camp seem like a complete breeze. Inner Mongolia was far and away the best camp that we had. The kids were apparently great (I wouldn't know, I was camp leader for this one), our accommodations were top notch, and most importantly of all nothing changed. We had no demands from the school; we were simply allowed to do whatever we thought was best for the situation, and that freedom was something that we didn't really get anywhere else. It certainly made my job easy. It was also the first time we were allowed to go out and mingle with the locals, and mingle we most certainly did. We were welcomed with open arms into the town square, and also into the house of a local English teacher, which, as it turns out, was a bad choice. That woman followed us everywhere until we left. Inner Mongolia also had the most crying students at the end, and I'm not really sure why. The whole last day was just one big love fest.

Qufu was an interesting time as well. It brought us Don, the soccer players down the hallway, and the youngest students of any camp. Of all of the camps we had, this one went the fastest by a long shot. All of the good stories I have to tell from here have already been told, and not many of them are really worth retelling. I mean, The Incident was scary and interesting, but I've gained no new perspective on it. The soccer kids are still jerks, and Don... well... I don't think we ever had a more demanding or active camp director. Don would spring five minute speeches on the kids, actively chastise them for speaking in Chinese, and cheat to let his kid win. Don was a character, but not necessarily the good kind, like you want someone to be. But Don's demands could easily be met with the facilities provided. They just kind of sprung up out of nowhere and had to be fulfilled. The next camp in Guyuan was a completely different story.

In a lot of ways, Guyuan was a constant struggle. From the very beginning the thing smelled of trouble. We were told that we would be taking a bus to get there. That bus became two vans, and then it became a car and a van that was filled far beyond any reasonable capacity. This was an omen of things to come. We had classes that could only be described as a crap-shoot of student quality, with kids that understood English well sitting in the same room as kids that didn't speak a word of English, which made teaching them a very difficult process. Also, these were far and away the largest classes that we had, so it was difficult to teach and maintain order. This difficulty was compounded by what could be characterized as a misunderstanding between the program and the school, although I would probably use significantly stronger language if I was talking to you in person. You see, the school had said that they would provide teaching assistants for all of us, and when we got there, they didn't really have constant assistants for anyone except Zowahh, who ended up with a really nice young woman from the town that had nothing else to do while waiting for grad school to start. This lack of assistants combined with the wild differences in comprehension levels between classes meant that we were in quite the pickle. But that's not all, folks! A cornerstone of the summer camps are the activities that we do every afternoon, and the school had no place that was adequate for hosting large group activities. Fortunately, the school was more than willing to accommodate our TA problem, and everyone got assistants of varying quality in their classes. Some were great, like my TA Rita, some were not, like Abbie's TA, who would regularly leave class to go take naps. As for the activities, well, different strategies were tried, some worked, some did not. I spent an afternoon yelling bingo numbers at the top of my lungs to a cafeteria, the activity that turned out to be the last straw for our activity experiment for two reasons. One, it kinda sucked, and a lot of kids just up and left, which displeased the teachers. I was fine with it: if they don't want to do it, I don't want to force them to and have them resent it. But the major change that ended it was uniquely Chinese. All of the students we had needed to go out to the track and march and chant slogans for a week, and they had to do it in the afternoon sun. I don't get it either, but it solved things, and got us out of Guyuan.

But that's enough for story time, and probably the longest aside I have ever written. I blame Grand Dragon red wine. You've heard a lot of this before, and all of that wasn't what I was looking to discuss when I sat down to write this. What I want to do with this is to discuss exactly what my introduction paragraph is talking about, because it is, as much as my caveman brain can think about itself, a giant contradiction.

I think that contradiction gets to the heart of my relationship with China. One of the teachers from the program, Danny, who has since returned to the states once explained it in this way, although these words may not be his own: “You go through three stages in your relationship with living here. When you fist get here, you're still in a tourist mindset. Everything is new and strange, and you want to experience it. You feel like an outsider. Then, you realize that this is a place that you live, and that you know how to get around, and it feels kind of comfortable. Then, it becomes a place that you live that annoys you.” He thought that the third stage doesn't end, and it just kind of the endgame for your relationship with that country.

I am currently at that stage, if you couldn't tell already. Take the students that I run into all of the time as an example. When I first got here, it seemed like there was an ice between me and them, some sort of line that wasn't going to be crossed. I saw them, they saw me, and that was it. Maybe they took a photo of me from afar, but there wasn't interaction. Then, they started talking to me, coming up and asking questions, and this felt oddly comfortable. It felt like I was a part of this place, and that I was being accepted in a way. Then it became annoying. Why? The acceptance and ease is a kind of illusion. The kids ask the same questions in nearly the same sequence. Where are you from? What do you think of China? What do you think of Chinese food? I'm sorry, my English is very poor. Why did you come here? Do you know Chinese? Are you going to learn Chinese? And it always follows the same flat trajectory, as though there is some sort of handbook to interaction with foreigners that says that you have to ask the exact same question in the same way. Through things like this, the bland repetition of interactions, you come to realize that you're not really someone that exists here, you're a kind of attraction, a walking sideshow. This extends into the classroom as well. Once the students become comfortable enough with you, they don't want to learn anymore, they want you to entertain them. They want you to sing and dance, like a vaudeville routine. They want to take photos with you so that they can tell their friends that they have white friends because it makes them cool. When you first notice it, it seems off putting, and as it continues, it just becomes annoying.

This same formula also extends, albeit in a different way, to Chinese culture. There are so many aspects of Chinese culture and day to day life that aren't just strange, but counter-intuitive or disruptive to daily life, so much so that we developed a standard saying for when they popped up - “It's the Chinese way!”. Hell, Miles, Logan and Ben wrote a song about it. One of my biggest frustrations, the lack of communication, is a good illustration. At first, you just kind of naturally assume that communication is difficult for a number of non-cultural reasons. Things like the language barrier seem like a perfectly reasonable explanation for why you know next to nothing about anything as you fly into Beijing. Things go on, you sleep on plywood for a week, and you kind of get used to the fact that you're not going to know things, and you feel like you've established some kind of zen in your life, that you can just go with the flow, and the lack of communication will be no big deal. But much like the relationship with the students, this zen is its own kind of illusion, and as time goes by the lack of communication causes all kinds of angst and gnashing of teeth because there's important information out there that would make life so much easier if someone just told it to you. I'm looking at you, semester placements. The zen shatters. When the zen shatters, you're just stuck with another aspect of China that annoys you. I brought this lack of communication up at a meeting after all the camps were done, and the response I got was a blank expression and four words: “That's the Chinese Way.”

There's a whole long list of other examples of the Tourist>Acceptance>Annoyance cycle, but I won't bother with them now. I have bigger fish to fry here.

Somewhere in Qufu or Guyuan, I realized something that's been bugging me ever since, and I'm not entirely sure if it's true or not, but it's a concept that I've jangled around my head enough that I need to get it out. I'm pretty certain that China believes that its best is a second-rate version of the United States. They may not think about it in this way, but whatever way they see things, the outcome is generally the same. It shows in the products, in the creations of Chinese entrepreneurs. I hate to sound like Thomas Friedman, but I have seen very little in actual innovation from anything in China. Every Chinese created product that you run across, every major business is just a Chinese clone of something else, and the Chinese are happy with this. They're all damn pleased to knock down ancient villages to create shiny apartment buildings to try and live like the Westerners they all seem to want to be. And I'm not judging anything about it, but this raises a lot of very interesting questions in my mind.

For one, I think that it says something about the relationship between globalization and culture, for better or for worse. There are still distinct portions of Chinese culture that exist, and will probably exist no matter what. Food's a great example. For all of the American fast food chains you can eat at here, none are the same as they are back home, and none of the passion for American products has reached the kitchen in China. But with everything else, it seems like the 'global culture' is just big steamroller, smashing down distinct facets of a culture and replacing them with the generally American things that are popping up everywhere. And I have to wonder if this is just the way that it works, if the replacement of distinct elements is just the way of globalization, and not a product of the Chinese eagerness to accept economic growth at all costs.

The odd part of that steamroller, and the part that makes me think that there's something more to it, is that it seems like the steamroller is being driven by the Chinese. They're the ones bulldozing villages and relocating people to high-rise apartments they can’t afford to live in as a way of inflating their GDP growth numbers. They're the ones that welcome and encourage the western ways and brands, and remain fiercely, if not blindly, loyal to them. They're the ones that are falling all over themselves to pump out products that are nothing more than second rate versions of the Western ones they have no allegiance to. And they most certainly do that last one a lot, and in very visible ways.

Look at Baidu, China's Google. Try using it, and tell me something that it does that Google didn't start doing first (other than the MP3 search, which is a delightful example of China's general disregard for copyright law). The features are the same, the feel is the same, the layout is similar. The same can be said of RenRen, the Chinese version of Facebook. You can see it in the cars, you can see it in the clothes and the stores and every aspect of public life. I once described it as having everything be close, but just slightly off, and I now know that was something slightly deeper in the culture and the country.

And it's really all of these different things, the cultural steamroller, the Tourist>Acceptance>Annoyance cycle, and everything that comes with it. It's the gawking people, it's the fact that I've been here in Linchuan for four days and I have only received enough information about what I'm doing to fill an index card, and it's the fairly miserable experience that I've had over the past four months that make me not want to ever do this again. But, at the same time, my experiences here have been completely invaluable in my understanding of the world, and I can't say that I would ever want to give them away, or go back in time and take back my decision to come here. And I think that's kind of the heart of the contradiction, knowledge versus experience. I've learned a lot of things that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise, and that's priceless, and that's what's made this whole experience tolerable in a way. We'll see how the next four months go. I think they could be a completely different story.