China's dirty laundry

Despite the bad reviews, I was excited about seeing "Pirates of the Caribbean 3," and I was happy to hear that it is being shown in the theaters in China, since everyone knows that seeing a movie in a theater is much better than watching it at home. I was also interested to see what they would do with Chow Yun-fat, the Chinese Pirate King!! :)

Then I learned that parts the film have been censored in China. Why? I asked. Was it too violent? Was there nudity? Did Disney pirates of the 19th century advocate Tibetan independence?

No: they had cut half of Chow Yun-fat's scenes because they "vilify and humiliate the Chinese," as Xinhua, China's official news wire, reported.

I haven't seen the movie yet (and I certainly won't in a Chinese theater), but according to some blogs, it's now difficult to follow the plot. The censors were apparently offended by Chow's bald head, long nails, and scarred skin. It reminded me of the reasons behind China's censorship of "Mission Impossible III," when scenes were cut in which Tom Cruise is in China, and runs past laundry hanging from clotheslines. I suppose the censors didn't want China to be portrayed as a "backward" country, in which, presumably, people hang laundry from clotheslines.

Such censorship is unbelievably inane, and indicates the hyper-sensitivity and pride that is often prevalent in contemporary Chinese nationalism. It's not even proper censorship! Usually things are censored because they are "subversive" in some way. "Devils on the Doorstep," a film about Chinese villagers in World War II, was banned in China for obvious reasons: the villagers in the film are often foolish and weak, and there's no sign of the Communist army. But what possible reasoning lies behind banning images of clothes hanging from clotheslines from a version of the movie that will only be shown in China? Even if we accept the idea that clothes on a clothesline indicates backwardness, there is no other way to hang clothes in China (the only dryer I've ever seen in this country was in a US consulate). Will Chinese viewers who see the clothes suddenly realize their country is backward?

The reasoning behind the censored bits of "Pirates" is slightly less hazy, though equally absurd. One film magazine wrote that Chow's appearance is "in line with Hollywood's old tradition of demonizing the Chinese." That may be so (though "tradition" is a bit strong), but how does preventing Chinese people from seeing those scenes possibly help the situation? Will a Chinese viewer suddenly get depressed because he realizes that his ancestors must have been pirate kings with bald heads and scars?

These are cases of censorship not being thought through, and of China's frequent bristling defensiveness about how foreigners view the country. They are annoying and ridiculous, but they are basically harmless. However, they may also be indications of the Chinese censorship system, which is quite sophisticated, slowly going crazy as it tries to censor too many things coming into the country. To a large extent the system relies on people's apathy -- after all, anyone who is determined can find restricted information. But China is so big, and is changing so fast, that the censors may feel they can't possibly keep up, so they panic too easily and react too hastily.

Beyond cutting out cinematic laundry, the deep absurdity of China's censorship system, and of censorship itself, is revealed during those moments when the system comes full circle to bite itself in the behind. On June 6 of this year, a very small classified ad was published in the Chengdu Evening News that read, "Paying tribute to the strong[-willed] mothers of June 4 victims." It was referring to a group of mothers of students who were killed during the Tiananmen protests in 1989, and who have been vocal in demanding answers from the government about the massacre. Normally, such a thing would never have gotten through, but, according to a source from the Chengdu paper who was quoted in a Hong Kong newspaper, the clerk who received the ad was born in the 1980s and had never heard of the Tiananmen protests. As a result, she didn't know that she was supposed to censor it.

Censorship of information about the Tiananmen protests is revealed to be remarkably, frighteningly effective, so effective that it doesn't work, as censorship never does. And what happened to the girl who unknowingly let the ad slip through? It's unclear, but according to an Internet blogger who may have contacts at the Chengdu paper, several editors have been fired, and the poor clerk has been arrested.

Food

Yesterday my roommate went to the market to buy meat and vegetables for dinner, but she forgot to buy cloves of garlic. The food that my roommates make often uses garlic, though not in the same way that I use garlic. Usually they chop it up and put it in some kind of spicy sauce with other vegetables. Sichuan food especially often uses garlic combined with a very, very spicy sauce that burns your tongue and makes you want to cry, but you keep on eating anyway because it's so, so good.

The market next to our apartment is a fairly large, friendly place with numerous local stands. However, I rarely go there because I'll inevitably be charged more than Chinese people. In fact, my roommates usually don't want me to go, for exactly that reason. It's a good arrangement for me -- a valid excuse for getting out of the shopping! When I went to buy the garlic, for example, I bought four cloves for 3 yuan, about 39 cents. "What!" my roommate said when I returned. "That should just cost 2 yuan!" She shook her head and sighed. I knew I wouldn't have to go to the market again for a while.

Though we white folks must often pay the foreigner tax, I've found that once people in the neighborhood get to know you, they usually don't ask for more money. I got a haircut at a local barbershop, and I mentioned I lived in the area; at the end I mistakenly paid 15 yuan, and the barber told me it was just 10. I usually buy beer at a small shop beside my apartment -- recently I paid 25 yuan by accident, but it was just 20. Likewise in another store with bread, and another with DVDs.

The market, though, will never get to know me, since I rarely go there, and even if it did, it seems to be part of market culture to always charge foreigners extra. I probably wouldn't know what to buy anyway. My roommates are all good cooks, and they can choose best. We usually have a few dishes: some boiled vegetables; some meat, perhaps with vegetables and some sauce; sometimes lamb, sometimes beef, sometimes chicken. We usually have soup too, and always, always rice.

If we're feeling a little peckish late at night, there are a couple of excellent night food stands close to our apartment. The best one by far is a barbeque where you can buy, among other things, roasted spicy lamb, roasted chicken, and roasted tofu. The lamb is a classic in Chinese cities. Once I was eating some and my sister, who is a vegetarian, called me on my mobile phone. "What are you doing?" she asked. "Eating lamb on the street." "EWWWWW!! That's so GROSS!!" I guess it sounds kind of disgusting -- lamb on the street -- but it's so, so, so good.

Every now and then I'll make something for dinner too, but I usually end up eating most of it. My curries have proven to be somewhat popular, as have my salads. Pastas have been greeted with a lukewarm reception, and I've generally decided to stop making them, since most of the ingredients are imported and it's a bit expensive. Unfortunately I can't unleash my cookie-baking skills, because we don't have an oven. My pizza, with its simple flour dough, will therefore go untasted, which is a shame, because sometimes I yearn for it in the face of so much healthy homemade fare.

In those cases, I'll sometimes resort to good 'ol Mai Dang Lao. If you don't know what that is, say it out loud and you'll probably be able to figure it out.

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Hangzhou

“I never realized just how many people are in China until I came to Hangzhou.”

A Chinese friend said that on our fourth and last day in Hangzhou, “the most beautiful city in China.” The city is considerably less beautiful when you can’t see its famous West Lake because of the thousands and thousands of black-haired heads in the way, or traffic that takes an hour and a half to go a mile or so. On Tuesday, May 1, the first day of the Chinese Labor Day holiday, it was chaos. As Chinese have become more and more affluent, they have begun to travel around their own country; when a holiday such as Labor Day rolls around, the country’s famous tourist cities become seething masses of tourist flags and cameras.

The first day we arrived in Hangzhou, the city still belonged to its residents. Labor Day was still three days away. That Saturday, after getting off the train and making our way to our hostel, we saw hundreds of surly police officers lining the streets, a few meters apart, their hands clasped behind their backs in exactly the same way, looking straight ahead with serious looks. We didn’t know what was going on—was Hangzhou always like this? Soon we learned that the city was holding a parade for its Third Annual International Cartoon Festival. The police, though, were treating the parade the same as any public march, which always had to be closely monitored and controlled. As cartoon characters marched down the street—Spiderman, Garfield, Mickey Mouse, as well as many, many unfamiliar ones—the hoards of police kept the screaming children strictly on the sidelines, and made sure nobody did anything subversive such as try to touch Minnie Mouse. Many kids did anyway, of course. In fact, it was remarkable how thoroughly the gruff police were ignored.

As the long line of characters walked past, waving at the children, I was very surprised to see, tucked in between a float of Disney characters and a line of creatures doing back flips, an ethnic minority contingent. There were several of them, some not Han Chinese dressed in ethnic clothing (as is common when displaying the country’s ethnicities) but actual members, it was clear, of China’s 55 minorities.

China is dotted with “ethnic theme parks,” places where visitors can walk amongst “authentic” ethnic houses, see people dressed in ethnic costumes, and eat ethnic food. I’ve been to such parks in Beijing, Shenzhen, and Nanning. In the National Congress, representatives from the country’s ethnicities usually wear their ethnic costumes, whereas Han Chinese always wear Western style suits. Such packaging and displaying of China’s ethnicities is part of the government’s obsession with control, an obsession that reaches into many aspects of people’s private lives—ethnic identity, religion, etc. (The F_a_l_u_n G_o_n_g never intended to become politicized, and never did anything to directly challenge the communist party; they simply became too well-organized, and their activities often extended beyond the control of the state.) China’s ethnic groups are neatly organized into 56 categories (including the Han), and regulating the 55 minorities to a straightforward display of “authentic” architecture, food, and costumes that can packaged and sold serves to eliminate uncomfortable ambiguities and keep them firmly in their place—happy squares in the patchwork of China.

This tendency to display extends to the business world. KFC in China, which is known for incorporating elements of “Chinese culture” into its restaurants (such as models of the Great Wall, Chinese architecture, and displays of folk art), has recently introduced a new hamburger that uses a sauce made from tomatoes and other spices. It is being marketed as a Miao sauce, the Miao being one of China’s ethnic minority groups. In an advertisement on TV for the hamburger, a Han Chinese backpacker hikes to a remote hut, in which a Miao couple, who happen to be wearing their bulky, colorful costumes, greet him. They give him delicious soup, and he loves it so much that he fakes problems that prevent him from leaving. Eventually he returns home, and is delighted to find the exact same sauce in the KFC hamburger.

As in some progressive countries, minority groups in China enjoy many special privileges in education and government—in some areas, a certain proportion of the local government must be comprised of members of the local minority, and many minorities have more opportunities to go to college than Han Chinese. In addition, some groups have managed to use the government’s obsession with control to their advantage, displaying what is expected of them while continuing their own activities and debates under the radar (see Sara Davis's interesting article, "Dance, Or Else: The Politics of Ethnic Culture on China’s Southwest Borders"). Yet putting ethnicities on display in such a blatant way—and including them in a parade specifically intended for cartoon characters—points to a deeper problem in China, a problem that has to do with where, and how, such minorities can be incorporated into a country that has never had a single race, nor a single homogenous culture, yet is constantly trying to develop unifying claims of history.

New rich

Today I was walking along the street and I heard drums behind me. A large group of people were marching along the sidewalk, banging large drums. They wore vests with flower patterns, red sashes around their waists, and they twirled red and green flags. There were thirty or forty of them. I thought it must be some Chinese festival I hadn't heard of. Or, I thought, it might be a wedding. I knew that Chinese weddings were loud and colorful; beyond that, I didn't know much about them. Most of the people in the parade were young: were they the bride and groom's friends?

The parade came closer to me, and I stopped to watch it. Ahead of it, three or four people were handing out flyers. I took one. On it were pictures of wine bottles and a big building. It was an advertisement for a restaurant.

In the US, gimmicks are easy to spot, but in China, they often become spectacles. Partly this is due to the abundance of cheap labor: if you want a parade of forty people marching down a busy sidewalk waving flags, you can make one yourself. But it’s also due to the business mentality that has taken hold of China's urban areas--the frenzy to become part of the new rich.

Signs of this frenzy are everywhere. There's a building going up nearby, and judging from the signs outside, it will be called B&W. At first I assumed the initials were two people's surnames--Bing & Wang, or Bu & Wu, or something like that. Then I saw the caption: B&W stood for Boss & Winner. I suppose the implication is that if you live or work in that building, you'll not only be a boss, but you'll be a winner, too.

On the cover of my notebook, which I bought for about 20 cents and which consists of about 50 pages held together by a cheap plastic spiral, it says: "Gambol notebooks, made with future technology, for tomorrow's most outstanding achievers." I'm certainly glad I bought one!