the color of its countries

I'm afraid I've lost a certain amount of Chinese blogging momentum here. I made my last post from Belfast, Maine, where I was staying a few days with Drew and his lovely family. From there I drove back to New Haven, emptied my apartment, shipped my material life home, and then followed suit myself. Along the way, I spent an unanticipated night in Las Vegas, and that is where the first event of actual relevance to this blog unfolded.

First, a little non-China-related background. To spare myself the trouble of getting to Hartford or NYC and my parents the trouble of driving to LA, I had decided against a direct coast-to-coast flight and instead opted for one in three legs: from New Haven to Philadelphia, Philly to Las Vegas, and then from Vegas to my hometown of Santa Barbara. Had everything gone according to plan, I would have endured a few layovers and arrived at the SB airport sometime after midnight. However, the plane I was meant to board out of Philly arrived an hour and a half late. I was so content with my pirated Pimsleur Mandarin tapes that I didn't bother to get up and hassle the gate agents, so I missed the window when I might have insisted on being placed on a different flight into Vegas to make my connection. When I landed, I discovered that the last flight to southern California for the night had been the one I missed, so I had no choice but to accept their voucher for a night's stay in a little roadside motel—not very felicitous circumstances for my first overnight in Sin City, I'm afraid—and hop a shuttle back to the airport for an early flight the next morning.

It was on the shuttle that the subject of China resurfaced. I was the only passenger and I sat near the front, so the driver started in with the same small talk I've been tolerating for several weeks now. "What brings you to Vegas? Ah, coming home from school? You just graduated? Well, congratulations to you! Where are you going? China? Now, that's adventurous of you!" In almost every other case, this is the juncture where my conversation partner reveals that he or she has a young relative who has also taught in China and just thought it was the greatest experience ever, and I'll have an amazing time, the Chinese are just the sweetest little people in the world, the only thing is that they sometimes try to rip you off for money, but after all it's a poor country and what do you expect?

This shuttle driver, however, took off on a completely different tangent. "China?" he said. "Well, I could sure tell you a thing or two about China." He proceeded to lay out an elaborately conceived conspiracy theory about how the Chinese were systematically buying America out in order to take it over. Did I know how much of the American currency they owned? Did I have any idea how much richer Chinese people are than Americans? As proof, he cited the wealthy Chinese who apparently come to Las Vegas to blow $50,000 a night for a month at a time. (I decided not to bring up the average citizen who has to work dawn-til-dusk seven days a week to make a decent living or the way most university students live like paupers in dormitories with poor plumbing and limited hours of electrical lighting for study—forget about the sweatshop laborers). He had other points, too, many of which I've forgotten. He really lit up when he discovered I had gone to Yale, for example, and launched a brief side discussion on secret societies. "There we go!" he practically shouted. "A Yalie! So you know all about how Bush and Kerry were best friends in their secret society back in the day! Skull and Bones, man! Nobody believes it when I tell them!"

In short, though—absurdity aside—he seemed to be expressing a grossly inflated version of sentiments that actually strike me as pretty widespread. I don't think many Americans think, as he claimed to, that a college grad is clever to be learning Chinese now because she'll have a leg up on everyone when Chinese becomes our national language in the near future. I do get the sense, though, that we are deeply if not fully consciously unsettled by China's shift from Communism—regarding which I think the average American had grown out of fearing and reviling, and instead settled into a general attitude of pity and superiority—into an ambiguous system with all the power of capitalism, but one that can't be relied upon to conform to Western convention. I can't quite put my finger on it, so I'll do my best just to speak for myself. When I consider China as a growing nation, I do sense some repetition of the stages in Western economic and industrial development. I've often debated (to little resolution) the fact that the abhorrent working conditions one finds in the workshops of developing countries are no different from those of the American factory around the turn of the 20th century. Perhaps, at least without a great deal of foreign subsidy of other labor models, they are a stage that must be reached and then transcended before a nation can dispense with them. The children who are apparently being kidnapped and forced into a life of pick-pocketry—including training exercises like snatching objects from containers of boiling water to improve snatch speed—certainly do sound like something right out of Oliver Twist.

Besides this, though, my gut tells me there is more to what's happening in China. In the same way I felt it in Japan, I sense that it is a country that is superficially modern by the Western model (at least as far as the big cities and their technology and architecture are concerned), but one operating on a profoundly different ethos. In Japan, perhaps for the reasons of Japanophilia I've already discussed, I found this delightful and refreshing rather than concerning. After all, I can think of very few large-scale Japanese policies in the last 50 years that struck me as dangerously misguided or in violation of human rights. (This could, of course, be a result of Japan's superior ability to sweep things under the rug, but I'm not convinced that explains the discrepancy.) To draw what is probably an inflammatory example, I often get a milder version of the same visceral feeling I have when I contemplate Hun Sen of Cambodia. As far as I'm concerned, he's an old crony of Pol Pot surrounded by other old cronies of Pol Pot, none of whom ever reckoned with the atrocities of that regime, but all of whom seem quite content to pay lip service to the internationally dictated party line as long as it affords them freedom to pursue their personal ends. In China's favor, the populous is not starving, most are receiving a reasonably solid education, and the tourist industry does not rely heavily on child sex workers. At the same time, I frequently sense that the Chinese media machine offers the world a cheerfully painted version of its actions while the government blithely—well, shall I say blithely marches to the beat of its own drummer, and enter the running for the most tactful euphemism of the year?

Anyway, I can see why many Americans feel vaguely unsettled when they contemplate a China increasingly involved in US and world policy, but one with culturally perplexing motives, and furthermore one that routinely says one thing while doing another. I suppose all of this makes me lucky indeed to be setting foot on genuine Chinese soil, where I can hear about all this straight out of the dragon's mouth, as it were—rather than out of the People's Daily, that is.

In other news, I am currently aboard Air China flight 986, approximately two hours into the 11:45 flight to Beijing. Drew and Luke and I have secured an exit row for ourselves and are reveling in the leg-room.

I think I'll take a nap now.