East-West Station

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.

When folks ask me where I’m from, I just tell them it’s a small cloudy country.

But while Britain is certainly cloudy, Chinese still tell me that London is a foggy city, even though it hasn’t been so since the sixties. It seems a fair few people’s perceptions of other countries are 50 years out-of-whack.

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.

When I went to live Hungary in 1991, it was not that long since the fall of the Berlin wall, the lifting of the iron curtain, and all the consequent changes to the region. And so there was still a fair bit of talk about “the bad old days” and my curiosity about what life under Communism had been like was satisfied by normal conversations without me having to be overly nosy about it.

And people at the time still told “Communist jokes”. These were largely concerned with how inefficient Communism was (or rather had been) or how stupid the police/soldiers/politicians (enforcers of Communist doctrine) were. And often they had an anti-Russian slant to them.

Some samples…

A man is queuing for food in Moscow. Finally he’s had enough. He turns round to his friend and says “That’s it. I’m going to kill that Gorbachev,” and marches off. Two hours later he comes back. “Well,” says the friend, “did you do it?” “No,” replies the other, “there was an even longer queue over there.”

Capitalism stands on the brink of the abyss. It will soon be overtaken by Communism.

Three prisoners in the gulag get to talking about why they are there. “I am here because I always got to work five minutes late, and they charged me with sabotage,” says the first. “I am here because I kept getting to work five minutes early, and they charged me with spying,” says the second. “I am here because I got to work on time every day,” says the third, “and they charged me with owning a western watch.”

And there’s even an Olympic related one…

Brezhnev reads a speech at the Winter Olympics “O-O-O-O-O.” “No,” his aide whispers to him, “that’s the Olympic logo.”

Well, we live in a Communist country here in China, don’t we? And have I ever heard any Communist jokes here? No.

I can only guess at the reasons really, but the first thing that springs to mind is that while the Soviet Union was presiding over an unconcealably crumbling and risible economy during the 1970s and 80s, China’s economy under the stewardship of those Commie bastards has quite obviously been on the up and up since the death of Mad Mao. (Maybe it was an ironic joke to put him on the banknotes?)

And so a fair few of the kind of Commie jokes told above simply wouldn’t be applicable for modern China, and so would not be funny.

But if it is true, as one pundit has it, that “The Communist joke was by nature deadpan and absurdist—because it was born of an absurd system which created a yawning gap between everyday experience and propaganda” then there should have been jokes-a-plenty during the years of Mao’s misrule, where the gap between reality and government propaganda was more than yawning, it was gaping and gigantic…it was sound asleep. But I have never heard or read any jokes from the Mao era. Perhaps everyone was too shit scared or starving hungry to tell jokes. Political jokes are dissent and dissent was deeply dangerous during Mao’s murderous reign. Or perhaps I have just missed them somehow because they never got translated from the Chinese and published in places I might read.

But another reason I don’t know any Chinese Communist jokes is probably because the Chinese don’t actually make as many political jokes as Europeans. After all, this Soviet Union era joke would certainly apply to China today…

When was the first Russian election? The time that God put Eve in front of Adam and said, “Go ahead, choose your wife.”

Now, credit where credit is due…since Mao shuffled off his mortal coil China has progressed a lot in several ways, not simply economically. And the CCP has to be given some credit for that. But the government in China needs more jokes to be told about it. It deserves some satire and some jibes for locking up decent people like Hu Jia, and for censoring anything it doesn’t agree with, and for treating its adult citizens like children (not least by refusing them the vote), and for trying to erase or alter its sordid past.

Not to laugh at the CCP would be laughable.

Anyone know any good Chinese Commie jokes??

This year’s Reith lectures are about China and are being given by Jonathan Spence, a Sinologist of some renown. His best known books are probably “The Search for Modern China” and “Mao Zedong”.

The Reith lectures are held annually in honour of John Reith, who was the first and probably the finest Director-General of the BBC. He was the guy who coined the wonderful mission statement for the BBC, namely that it should “Educate, Inform and Entertain”. Astonishingly, Reith was given the position despite having absolutely no experience of broadcasting. He simply had a feeling that he would be able to run any company he put his mind to and so when he saw the advert for the job in the paper, he applied. That sort of thing doesn’t happen any more.

The lectures are being held in the British library this year, home to the oldest book in the world… printed in 868 AD in China. The Reith lectures are a rather “British Establishment” affair and if you listen to them you will hear they are chaired by the prim and plummy sounding Sue Lawley and feature questions at the end from people such as The Archbishop of Canterbury and Oxford Professors of Chinese.

Spence himself is a rather phlegmatic sounding scholarly type and his lectures are solid and well-crafted rather than inspirational. More informing and educating than entertaining. He is also himself an establishment figure, having been educated at Winchester and Cambridge.

Why am I banging on about their backgrounds? Well, these are the kinds of people who ran the British Empire and I can’t help thinking how much things have changed since those not-so-distant days. Spence himself is married to a Chinese, something that would have been rather shocking/baffling until quite recently. And, generally speaking, the Chinese are talked about with respect and Chinese journalists are invited to ask questions at the end. Again, until quite recently, the British Establishment wouldn’t have given a toss what the Chinese thought about what they thought about China…intercultural dialogue was not really their forté.

Spence is giving 4 lectures in all and the first, on Confucius, has already been given and is available online.

Worth a listen. Especially as Confucius is such a hot topic these days.