china as a society, hangzhou (where i went), also polynesia
By: Schuyler Devos
Tags: Shanghai, Kebab, China, Hangzhou, Sociology

rustling papers, clearing throat..

Ok, ok.

Well, Shanghai is over. It passed pretty quickly, like most places do, even though it was actually quick since I was only there a week. It was very hot, so I won’t miss it, except Guangzhou seems hotter so maybe I will.

I was wondering what it was about China that seemed a little “off” to me, not that anywhere is more intrinsically off than any other place, but I had a tickling sensation at the back of my brain nonetheless and wanted to figure out where it came from and I think I finally got it.

Here’s what I’m thinking: everything in China is meant to be Very Big and to appeal to/be utilized by as many people as possible. This is both literal and metaphorical. Even the smallest (new) restaurants are gigantic affairs with maybe 50 tables, and a lot of them have more than one floor. Part of this seems to do with how one is supposed to eat in China, i.e. not alone like a loser who looks like he has no friends, but in me it tends to provoke a sense of agoraphobia (from the Greek agora). This isn’t always the case, and there’s lots of littler family run restaurants it looks like aren’t that big, but I’m not sure that in 21st century China those aren’t the exception rather than the norm.

What this means in praxis is that it’s often hard for me to feel like I’m not being moved through some highly efficient but soulless mechanism. I feel like this in restaurants, in subways, high-speed trains. Kinda everywhere. Everything in China is designed to get people through a pipeline and doing what they need (ostensibly) to be doing as quickly as possible, and the result is a distinct lack of individualism vis a vis the feeling one gets being in public. I would say that this is just a difference in the collectivist versus individualist mindset, but I don’t feel the same way when I’m in Japan. I think the focus there is on individual /communities/, rather than individual individuals. In Tokyo, you can always find some hidden bar where a certain group of locals hang out, or some other hyper-local hyper-nuanced event that you have a chance of just wandering into. The same is true in New York. In China, that’s not the case. I really haven’t accidentally wandered into anything, so efficient is the system. Now, that’s not to say that China doesn’t have anything equivalent to what I experienced in Japan, but I do think the fact that I can’t seem to find it does say something.

Also, apparently Chinese aren’t happy either. I was browsing the World Happiness Index for fun, and according to their findings Chinese people are not happy at all. Not only do they rank behind Russia (which is perpetually miserable), but overall it seems like the people in China are less happy than in LIBYA. That is, the Libya we talk about when we refer to “The Libyan Crisis”, war-torn Libya, controlled by ISIS Libya. That’s kind of crazy, and while I don’t think any study should be taken at face value it’s another indicator of the sort of thing I’m talking about.

Maybe it’s growing pains. China came up fast and it’s still coming. I can’t say I understand it anyway, who’s only been here for less than a year total. But I do find it very interesting.

Mmk.

I went to an exhibit in the Shanghai… Museum, I think it was just the Shanghai Museum, no bells or whistles. The one was about porcelain in one or another specific Chinese dynasties, except the catch was that this was some sort of dark period (warring states?) where up until now they hadn’t been able to pinpoint a lot of information on the specifics, but now they have so it’s a reason to be excited. To be honest, out of all the arts pottery is perhaps the one that’s least exciting to me, so I can’t say I was super stoked, but I understand that this is important to someone, maybe to cultural narrative, almost certainly to cultural narrative. We all want to believe we come from somewhere and are going somewhere. This is just a way to help.

The other exhibit had to do with the crafts of… island nations, Oceania. Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia. Now this was a good one because it raised a lot of questions, or maybe just made a lot of statements. To me, it was all about bridges. The bridge between land and water, the extension of one’s animus and intention into their environment and physical world, the connection between the life we can see and the life we cannot see. All the clubs looked like animal heads or phalluses. It made me think of power or some invisible force flowing down the arm of the wielder and dispersing out through the club into the world. Here’s a line I really, really loved about manna:

Bonito is the receptable in which supernatural spirits manifest to the living… they contain mana… the spiritual power men seek to make their actions more effective in the world of the living.

A spiritual power to make your actions more effective in the land of the living! How poignant. It’s wonderful. What an ephemeral transfer. Very powerful. How are we bound to the world around us and how do our tools reflect this? That’s what I was thinking of.

I also went to Hangzhou. It feels like I have these incredibly full days that sneak up on me without warning (I don’t think this day will be one since it’s almost 1 pm and I’m still sitting here typing). But I went to Hangzhou at 9, climbed a mountain, climbed down another mountain, visited the big lake, biked through the city to lunch, biked through the city again later, went on a boat to the big lake, ate some crab kebab that wasn’t as good as I’d hoped, napped in a cafe. Honestly I found the city quite beautiful, very green and wide, like Washington D.C. except Washington D.C. sucks and Hangzhou doesn’t. There were lots of /things that happened/ that day, at least, that made me feel as if I’d gotten my time’s worth, which is an illusion I’m content to extend. Then later I went to Haidilao, which is always nice.

Hm, what else…

Well, there’s always something “what else”.