East-West Station

Recently there have been some street scuffles in Bangkok between pro and anti-government protestors. The anti-government posse is called Pad and according to the Guardian:

The People’s Alliance for Democracy (Pad) is a collection of rightwing activists, business people and former army chiefs…The movement wants to replace the country’s electoral democracy with a system that would be dominated by appointees from the bureaucracy and the military. It claims the country’s rural majority is not sophisticated enough to choose good public servants.

Bloody peasants keep on voting for the wrong party! Suggestion:Why not switch to the Chinese system?

Anyway, during the street fights one of the pro-government peasants, a 55 year old man, was killed. He was beaten to death with golf clubs. Apparently, golf clubs are “the weapon of choice” for the Pad and this speaks volumes. Golf encapsulates very aptly the gap between the prosperous, leisured, often right-wing urbanites, and the great unwashed of the countryside. What…those Lao bumpkins have the temerity to vote for a party we don’t like? Let’s batter them with golf clubs.

I’ve nothing against the game of golf of course, just what it has come to stand for. Most “golfers” are not really that interested in golf and are arrogant cocks, and the golf courses themselves gobble up water at an alarming rate.

I say ban it! Anyone who disagrees gets pummeled with a pool cue.

The Spanish men’s basketball team recently provoked a storm in a teapot over an advertising photo showing them pulling the sides of their eyes…because they were off to China! Geddit? Hilarious!

And someone recently dredged up another photo from the Spanish women tennis team’s website showing some of the same high jinks.

In the fuss that has followed some interesting issues arose. The US media pondered aloud as to what the Spanish team thought they were up to by publicly insulting their hosts. And NBA superstar Jason Kidd opined that had the US team done the same they would have been thrown out of the Olympics and not been allowed back in the NBA. The Spanish retorted by calling it “an affectionate gesture” and pointing out that the Chinese themselves hadn’t seemed to have taken offence at all, insofar as to date there have been no comments by the Chinese media on the incident. Fair point!
But then the US and UK (evil Anglo-Saxons) insisted on placing the “affectionate gesture” in a context of other “Spanish gestures”, including “the monkey chants that greeted England’s black footballers in a friendly game in Spain and the blacking up of some local fans when Lewis Hamilton was competing in the Spanish grand prix.”

My take on it all is that who cares if a bunch of greasy spics take the piss out of the chinks? I’m like so totally, yeah…whatever.

Not really! Just my little joke. Geddit?

Actually, I have a fond memory from about 15 years ago when I was living in Hungary. I was studying in a rather sleepy provincial town called Debrecen and one afternoon I witnessed a visiting schoolboy choir from Korea getting off their bus in front of the concert hall. The local lads had probably never seen real live asians before and so the Koreans created quite a crowd of little gawkers. Then one of the wee rascals thought it would be funny to pull his eyes into slitty position and this soon spread until you had a crowd of laughing Magyar boys pulling slanty eyes and pointing at their Korean guests. Hilarious!

But what made it memorable for me was the Koreans’ response. After about a minute of being taunted like that, they responded by making big round goggly eyes with their fingers and pointing back at the local kids and laughing. I loved them for that. It made me proud to have a Korean name.

Wouldn’t it be cool if the Chinese national basketball had a photo done pulling big goggly eyes next time they go off to play Spain? Not particularly, it would be childish. But that’s kind of what the Spanish athletes are guilty of, being childish…but surely not malicious or racist.

is a line from a famous and provocative poem by Psychopoet Sylvia Plath. The poem’s name is “Daddy” and it equates her daddy, her husband, and male authority figures in general with Nazis and with vampires who suck the life force out of their female victims. Sylvia Plath committed suicide three months after she had written this poem.

But since a lot of the poem is actually attacking “daddy”, is the famous line better interpreted as being ironic? Maybe…but there is also a well documented type of trauma that results from physical as well as psychological abuse from husbands and fathers due to the strong and irrational feelings of love the victims foster for the perpetrators.

And the line, and the ones that follow it, and the connotations of the type of trauma described above, all made me think of Mao.

Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

When I think about Mao, one of the things that baffles me about his ongoing popularity amongst the CHINESE is that this was the guy who was responsible for the unnecessary death and suffering and humiliation of millions and millions of CHINESE. He didn’t inflict much suffering on other countries, it was his own nation of CHINA who bore the brunt of Mao’s murderous madness. And CHINESE culture didn’t fare too well under Mao either. Let’s face it, his reign was an almost unmitigated disaster for CHINA and it was only after he died, and after Deng XiaoPing managed to get rid of Mao’s legacy, that CHINA could start to thrive and prosper again.

So why would any proud CHINESE who loves CHINA have any fond feelings (let alone love) for a man who wrecked the country they love and killed the compatriots they love?

Well, I guess one reason is because whatever else Mao wanted, he certainly wanted a great and powerful China. He wanted China to be a world power, of course, and everything he did, every sacrifice he made, was in the name of that cause. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, or without starving millions of your countrymen, or without starting a cultural revolution that closes all the universities, or without…etc etc.

And I suppose another reason is because younger Chinese don’t know what villainy Mao got up to because it’s all been airbrushed out and all that’s left are portraits of a chubby uncle with a ruddy friendly face and a big smile. “Our founding Father who fought off the Japanese and established a new free China! Hurray for Mao! And hurray for the CCP!”

And these reasons make sense to me, and I find they help explain his popularity. But those lines of Sylvia Plath’s also come to mind and they unsettle me and suggest a darker, more troubling, but also - it must be said - slightly less convincing reason.

How many of those who have been brutalized by a strong male authority figure really do end up trying to pardon him and find love in his actions? It’s kind of pre-modern “old testament” stuff, I guess, though probably quite a common psychic tic amongst females in strict Islamic cultures.

But it doesn’t really ring true. In much the same way as the Plath quote isn’t really trying to be “true” either, it’s trying to grab our attention by shockingly overstating the case.

And in China I don’t see such a big gender split. It’s definitely a sexist country in many ways, but not a profoundly sexist one. Women don’t have much power in the public realm here, but at least they don’t get overtly discriminated against, and at least there are some female business leaders and politicians. And the situation is getting better because Chinese women are not prepared to put up with it so much anymore.

But what the lines also point to is a love of power. A big fascist daddy is a power figure, and a lot of Chinese do seem very hung up on power. “I like the US because it is a strong country”. “One day China will be number 1″ are comments I have heard more than once. And I suspect that some of the Chinese love for Mao is a love for and fascination with power. And the fact that he massively abused that power seems neither here nor there!

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not getting all idealistic here. We will never be able to extract power from the equation…it’s part of the psychic air we breath, as the following quote from the French philosophe Foucault nicely captures

“The strategic adversary is fascism… the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”

But fascism is power manifested in a particularly nasty and mean spirited way, and it needs to be rebelled against. And Plath’s poem has a strong, sassy, and liberating ending to it…

And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

The day the Chinese are through with that bastard Mao will usher in better times. Dancing and stamping on the old waxwork in Tiananmen would be cool. And the day that citizens all around the world can get through with power worship in general will be a very happy day. May it happen soon. World peace, dudes.

Good title? I think so and I thoroughly enjoyed the book, which is a popular science work by the travel writer Bill Bryson. As the title suggests, it’s a book about life, the universe and everything…from the Big Bang to the ascendancy of Homo sapiens.

As the man himself says, “This is a book about how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since.” It has potted histories of cosmology, astronomy, paleontology, geology, chemistry, physics, and more, and some greatly entertaining snippets about the great and the good of the scientific community. How about this one from the life of Charles Darwin? Apparently after coming back from his famous voyage on the Beagle, Darwin opted to let his notes and observations (later to become The Origin of Species) sit in a draw for almost ten years instead of publishing them, as he knew they were bound to cause a storm. What did he do during those years?

Darwin fathered ten children and devoted nearly eight years to writing an exhaustive opus on barnacles (’I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before,’ he sighed, understandably, upon the work’s conclusion). (p467)

Bill Bryson is a funny man, and a deservedly popular writer. “A Brief History of Almost Everything” is a bit of a departure from his normal genre of travel writing, but it works very well and deserves all the hyperbole on the blurb, and I couldn’t put it down. Well, actually I could. I put it down when I finished it. I’m not still clutching it in my clammy mitts, you understand? But when I had finished it and had thought a bit about it and was about to allow it to slip from the front of my focus to let my back brain masticate on it in a more leisurely fashion…something struck me. It’s a well known affliction for the long term expat: almost everything you read or hear or experience that is non-Chinese sooner or later gets put through the “and what does this say about China?” processor.

And I realised that Old Billy Boy’s Big Boffins Book has almost nothing about China in it. No Chinese names, no Chinese scientists mentioned, and not even any mention of compasses or paper or gunpowder! And no Indians or Indonesians or Thais or Japanese come to that.

The story in this history is of a succession of clever westerners wrestling with all the problems and questions that beset the curious, and triumphantly solving almost all of them. As befits the subject matter, Bryson is more concerned with what gets solved than with who solves it, but he does have a knack for the bringing to life the personalities behind the science too…and in his account they are all westerners.

There are a couple of references to China, but they are rather unflattering ones. There’s a brief mention that as China is now opening up, western scientists are at last able to travel unimpeded and do some proper research on dinosaur remains. Here’s the other one:

In China, a gifted Canadian amateur named Davidson Black began to poke around at a place called Dragon Bone Hill, which was locally famous as a hunting ground for old bones. Unfortunately, rather than preserving the bones for study, the Chinese ground them up to make medicines. We can only guess how many priceless Homo erectus bones ended up as a sort of Chinese equivalent of Beecham’s powder. The site had been much denuded by the time Black arrived, but he found a single fossilized molar and on the basis of that alone quite brilliantly announced the discovery of Sinanthropus pekinensis, which quickly became known as Peking Man. (page 527)

Well, if I were a Chinese nationalist reading that, I might be forgiven for sniffing out some condescension. A not completely unfair paraphrase of the above passage might run as follows:

The silly old Chinese were buggering everything up with their blundering half-baked beliefs, but luckily a proper western scientist got there in the nick of time and made a great discovery for the benefit of the enlightened scientific community…which doesn’t include Chinese by the way!

Anyways, it’s not so much what Bryson may or may not be implying about China, it’s the omissions that are more serious, I think. As the recent piece over at Frog in a Well shows all too well, China contributed a lot to scientific understanding over the years, and although this didn’t translate into a modern scientific/industrial revolution it is a big gap if you claim to be writing a history of nearly everything. Though to be fair, he did say nearly everything!

There was a time when the Chinese were considered to be scientific trailblazers and here is a nice quote from a review of a recent book about the life of Joseph Needham “The Man Who Loved China” , a book that is getting a fair bit of attention in the English language Chinese blogosphere these days.

“Four thousand years ago, when we couldn’t even read, the Chinese knew all the absolutely useful things we boast about today,” wrote French philosophe Voltaire in 1764. But if today in the West we widely acknowledge those words to be true, that’s largely due to an Englishman.

That “largely due to an Englishman” sounds a bit smug, doesn’t it? And did he have to mention that Voltaire is French, it’s kind of superfluous.

Well, anyhoo, Needham was he of the notorious “Needham question”, namely “Why didn’t the Chinese beat Europeans to the Scientific Revolution?” especially since they led the field for so long. My guess is that the answer lies in an unwillingness to learn from other nations and too much thought-policing by strict authorities. But the Chinese are a competitive bunch these days, and hungry for scientific knowledge and international prestige, and you gotta wonder if they’ll start being innovative and trailblazing once again. One thing is for sure, the first Chinese to win a Nobel for science is going to be a MEGASTAR.

But that kind of nationalistic fretting and pettiness really should be beside the point. Science, among other things, should help us to overcome our nationalistic blinkers and celebrate the achievements of Homo sapiens and not just Caucasian man, or Sinanthropus pekinensis. When I was reading “A Short History” I forgot that I was living in China and the “what does this mean for China” question only occurred to me after I’d put the book down. And that is as it should be, basically. Although it’s interesting to compare cultures and to look at science from different angles, nationality is insignificant whenever we start to consider the big picture.

We looked at Wilfred Owen’s well known WW1 poem Dulce Et Decorum Est in class today, and I tinkered around with things a bit to get the discussion going.

Before I explain my tinkerings, here’s the original poem:

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

I didn’t show the students the full poem straight off. I chopped off the last 4 lines…the ones with the “message”…which just left the graphic descriptions of the horrors of war.

I then asked students to decide whether it was, broadly speaking, an anti-war poem or whether it was designed to make readers feel pity for the poor English soldier and so hate the Germans/the enemy more, and thus, broadly speaking, a pro-war poem.

Most thought it was an anti-war poem, so then I surprised them by showing them these “last 4 lines”, baked earlier by me:

My friend, you would not then deny our cause is best
Or try to teach our children that humanity is one.
Here is the truth: Dulce et decorum est
To kill the Hun.

I had to explain that “the Hun” was a derogatory term for Germans during WW1, but after that they were all agreed that it was a patriotic poem aimed at stirring up raw passion against those who would gas “our boys”.

All of which is nonsense of course, and I admitted it and showed them the original ending and after some discussion we agreed that the original is more powerful/profound/humane etc. But the vastly different interpretations caused by the tweaked ending does indicate the ambivalence that can result from mere depictions of war.

And, yes, here comes the inevitable Chinese slant on this…I don’t watch CCTV that often, but when I browse through the channels here it’s pretty much odds on there’ll be one showing evil Japs doing despicable things to brave Chinese. I don’t watch these films/dramas so I can’t comment, but am I a cynic/pessimist for expecting that the “message”, the semantic tweak to depictions of war, is more along the lines of “Chinese are great and Japs are vicious scum” than “War is a disaster”?

Can anyone confirm/disprove my hunch?