« Roadtrip! | Main | Elementary my dear »

July 08, 2004

Flashback

My mom's family lives in Binzhou, in Shangdong Province - south of Beijing. According to the Shangdong government's website, Binzhou has a population of 555,756 but this figure is misleading. In china, the city's population also includes outlying rural areas - in the US, they would not even be counted as being part of the metropolitan area. The actual urban city has approximately 100,000-150,000 people I think. Binzhou, like the rest of China, is a place caught between the past and the future. It's not that there is no present - only that people are so concerned with improving their economic lives tomorrow that the present is only an ephemeral investment. The future is the grand goal of becoming a developed country - everywhere I go people are very much aware of this goal of catching up with the US and the West. Everywhere I go people ask how things are in America, whether I've seen this in America, or whether Americans think this or that particular way. My response is always approximately the same -Americans have no common beliefs except that every individual can have their own beliefs. That's the one great ideal of the modern West. We don't always live up to it, but we do at least accept it. And everywhere I go, the educated Chinese always have approximately the same response: "Of course, I understand what you say. And of course, there are numerous problems with China and in the long-run it's much better to do things as you do in the West, but you have to consider China's society and history. It won't work." In part, it's a Catch-22; surely, change will never happen as long as people think like that. However, I do accept some of their points - change is difficult, perhaps too difficult. America's still imperfect respect for diversity was forged through hundreds of years of bigotry, bloodshed and political wranglings. But the US have always been a country of different people and different individual ideals. We have crafted a system so that different groups can at least fight out their differences peacefully, with some historical exceptions. China has never enjoyed the same diversity and unfortunately, has had 2000 years of rather successful authoritarian rule (at least for the leader). For the majority of Chinese, many of the attributes of culture are rather static by now - relationships between friends and family members, food, art, etc…

Binzhou is not a poor city, nor is it wealthy. Its economic development seems slower than that of the country as a whole. Even so, it is still a completely different city than when I left fifteen years ago - there is a whole new section of town with what the locals would consider to be luxury apartments. By contrast, the complex my grandfather lives in has not changed at all from fifteen years ago - it was the last place I lived before I left for the states. From what I remember, it was average then and even more dilapidated now:













My grandfather is what we might think of as a 'true believer' in Maoism - self-sacrificing to the last. He fought as a guerilla against the Japanese in the desperate combat that gripped China during World War II, with enough distinction to earn him a place as a county administrator. He never really used his position to advance himself or his children, in stark contrast to the way things are usually done in this country. By all counts, in fact, he was a horrible father who neglected his children. Some may call this integrity, but I think that would be going too far. I think of it as a form of extreme stubbornness. He was stripped of his position and made to sweep streets during the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, yet he still holds dear to the key tenants of Maoism. Though perhaps this is not the case anymore - he is, after all, eighty-two:









This was the place I spent some part of my childhood in:



















Posted by rxu at July 8, 2004 03:08 PM

Comments