You'd think if a country were going to choose a song for itself, the song would reflect its best traits. Venezuela's would be about beautiful women and pristine beaches, Switzerland's about its chocolate and cuckoo clocks. If a nation wishes to advertise its fighting prowess, decorum would dictate following America and England's lead, with allusions to flags still waving and making mightier yet.
In the East, countries display a lyrical schizophrenia, giving voice to a side otherwise seldom advertised. The trend seems to be historical. The Qing Dynasty, for example, was founded by a semi-nomadic race of mounted toughs who rode roughshod over the remains of the Ming Empire. To judge by their anthem, though, their reason for doing so was to establish a loafer's paradise, a realm of gold and giggles threatened only by the ocean.
It's common knowledge that the Chinese invented gunpowder, and then took to using it for both displays in the form of fireworks, and also for military applications. Nowadays, massive firework events are held all over the world - but it's a contemporary Chinese artist - Cai Guo Qiang - who is taking the artistic side of gunpowder to new heights.
So now we're ready to be nice to our Mother Earth, now that it's all but too late, now that we see continued abuse won't devolve on our grandkids' shoulders, but our own. With a fifth of Mother Earth's homo sapiens, all busy fulfilling the "next superpower" prophecy, China must convert to Sustainability if this new religion is to have any temporal effect.
Her standing in the church excites much gossip among the laity. A little googling turns up a novena's worth of sins: tales of cancer villages downstream from the chemical plant, toxic waste dumps next to schoolyards, bakshish buying carte blanche to pollute and despoil.
Such wickedness always follows radical national mandates, even those as noble as "Let's beat the first world at its own game, for the glory of China." But there's always hope, we hope. Zhongnanhai can get a nation toeing the party line like no other political force known to man. And the party line now unequivocally crosses out industrialization at all costs. Here are five signs of the new faith in China, and a new credo - To be rich in a barren, toxic wasteland isn't glorious.
"When I was young I, too, had many dreams. Most of them I later forgot, but I see nothing in this to regret. For although recalling the past may bring happiness, at times it cannot but bring loneliness, and what is the point of clinging in spirit to lonely bygone days?"
These are the words of Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature. He also resided in Shaoxing, which reveals that his question is not rhetorical. Certainly Shaoxing is not alone among Chinese cities for having a rich past to cling to, but the way its past reverberates in its present, and its people, makes it one of those second tier cities that reward an expat in ways Shanghai can't. Likewise Hangzhou and Suzhou, which share Shaoxing's charms, but far too famously to reward a dedicated Sinophile, for the discerning avoid taking a lover with a large reputation as such.
Guiyang is a city at once in the center and on the fringes. Draw a line on a map between Chongqing and Nanning, now one from Kunming to Changsha –they meet at Guiyang. The city features traits of the outlying four: wild, ethnic Kunming; subtropical Nanning, GDP-obsessed Changsha, and precipitous Chongqing. Yet rather than a reputation for combining the best of the Southwest, Guizhou’s dubiously conferred “poorest province in China” title saddles Guiyang with a rep as a backwards jerkwater, a wannabe hub in which you recover from your plane/train ride before boarding the bus to go see the Miao up in the hills.
You can't reach paradise without braving the unknown. All the world's sweetest spots, the ones where man has only to enjoy the sunshine and wait for ripe fruit to fall, lie far past the view from a continent's shores. Who knows what those Stone Age argonauts lacked that drove their hollowed-out logs to Tahiti, but it wasn't courage.
Polynesia is a paradise no longer, the vital component of mystery long gone, its reality the world's dream vacation. The same holds for the Caribbean. At the far reaches of the Indian Ocean, however, the Seychelles are remote enough from the collective grasp to draw blank looks when mentioned. Aside from the Seychelles' inhabitants, only the French, who will cheerfully walk a thousand leagues over broken glass to get away from it all, are generally familiar with these wondrous isles.
It's wedding season in China again. Time for young couples across the land to make sure the Han race doesn't die out, but not before a formalized ceremony to make procreation socially acceptable.
For the most part, all this means to you is a sudden profusion of non-official motorcades. You see, no union of any consequence can start without one, so that the wedding party can announce to the world at large, which neither knows them nor cares, "Look! We're rich enough to rent these black sedans for a day." Be a mensch and act impressed by giving the motorcade a thumbs up, especially if it's composed of Volkswagen Santanas.
Often though, perhaps inevitably, you will be invited to a Chinese wedding. Think twice before turning down the invitation. In all likelihood you are being counted on to function as an "honored guest", a totem of face and good fortune. Only the gravest excuse will prevent your erstwhile host from assuming you're trying to hex the nuptials. Try this one: "Bu hao yisi. The patriarch of my family died on the date in question, and honor prevents me from celebrating on that day."
Want to go, for the cross-cultural experience? Excellent. The following tips will make sure you don't inadvertently curse the new family for seven generations, or come to at a People's Hospital with a tube down your throat.
- A long-ago lao wai relates the traditional Chinese approach to romance.
I have heard Sir Robert Hart tell an amusing incident which occurred in Peking. He said that the Chinese minister appointed to the court of Saint James came to call on him before setting out upon his journey. After conversing for some time he said:
"I should be glad to see Lady Hart. I believe it is customary in calling on a foreign gentleman to see his lady, is it not?"
"It is," said Sir Robert, "and I should be delighted to have you see her, but Lady Hart is in England with our children, and has not been here for twenty years."
"Ah, indeed, then perhaps I might see your second wife."
"That you might, if I had one. But the customs of our country do not allow us to have a second wife. Indeed they would imprison us if we were to have two wives."
McDonald's kills, if you believe the hype. Western food must be unhealthy, otherwise why would only the rich people in Western countries be thin? So we come to China, and cluck over the cuisine - so diverse, so tasty, so affordable. But is it really better for you?
On average, yes. Let ‘average' in this case apply to the diet of the truly average Chinese person versus that of the truly average Westerner. The former constitutes about eighteen hundred calories a day, quickly burned in the process of pedaling, pushing, and hauling for the good of the people. The latter ranges between three and three-and-a-half thousand. Automorph Occidentalis needs perhaps a tenth of that to drive himself from point A to point B, where he burns another fifty to a hundred waggling his fingers over a keyboard and getting a wrist workout with the mouse.
