ChinaBlog Day 1543802

It has been a while, so I'll give a little update. I'm approximately 6287 miles East of my last post. It is sad, clear, hot, stressful, and nerve wracking to be in Los Angeles after such a fulfilling adventure in the ancient world of China. Now that I have returned triumphantly to my school with stories of delicious scorpions, taxi battles, man-made rain, and a society of rebirth, the culture shock of returning to my homeland is palpable. We just take up so much SPACE here. But I will say that being able to drink the water and see the sun is making my life a lot more pleasant. Other than that, however, I return to the US and A undeniably changed. I think the most important such alteration to my perspecitve is one caused by lowered expectations of comfort and convenience. The Chinese seem to be just fine in their, from Western eyes, unbearably cramped and haphazard living quarters. In fact, Gallup recently went around the globe to countries of higher world economic standing and polled the inhabitants to gauge their level of happiness. Obviously, they don't simply come out and ask, "How happy are you?" Using a series of roundabout queries the poll showed that Chinese people have one of the highest rates of satisfaction with their current and perceived future existence. The economy there is exploding. The number of people living in abject poverty has dropped to rock bottom levels. Their average per capita income is still at high third world levels, but compared to the mass extinction level it was at not three decades ago, people are pretty ok with the trends. And that contentment is reflected in the way the majority of the people I met in China responded to my interest in their lives.
--But this positive change has come at quite a price. Chinese culture does not dote upon physical manifestations of the past the way our Western one does, so there is less of a sense of monumental loss when they bulldoze a thousand year old Hutong to create a single luxury apartment block (where people can play tennis upon the exact location that a single family held residence for generations). But all this promise of progress and betterment will fade eventually, and some will begin (and already have begun) lamenting what can never be recovered. China will be left with few copies of what life used to be like, and in the process of building toward a certain Western ideal will find that they have erased their very identity.
--I come back here and understand the Chinese drive to assimilate Western culture. It's clean, well-made, spacious, private, and individualized. All things that China has only recently become aware of, and then obsessed with. But these traits are surface treatments on top of a land lacking identity and culture. We grow up in our technological cities surrounded by advancement and diversity, completely disconnected from any sense of purpose or generational continuity. Each person is his or her own being, capable of creating or destroying themselves independent of anyone else, but unable and, eventually, desperately looking to find their grand place. The Chinese have culture in spades, it effuses from their very speech, and yet they covet (and I'm making an argument here) our independence and heritage-crushing individuality. It may seem to simply stem from the Western World's firm foundation atop Mazlow's Heirarchy, where we have little to fear in the way of starvation and basic physical comforts, and thus may now turn our attention to more esoteric ideals relating to comfort of mind. But I believe the conflicted intentions of our two hemispheres stem instead from a fundamental we-come-from-half-a-world-away difference of opinion, very simply. The Chinese economy is unstoppable in a way that ours has not been for almost a decade, the Chinese people are overwhelmingly happy with the direction of their lives and promises of the future, so it does not stand to reason that they are looking UP to us, striving to attain what we have and they 'do not'. We are just on different paths looking for different things dealing with the tremendous consequences of our relentless pursuits. That we may have what they want, and they may have what we want, is only reflected in our two cultures' inextricably intertwined fates. Wherever we two end up, we will probably end up there together.
--Goodbye China. I hope I may return someday.
-c