It’s summer and that usually means catching up on important things like “dissertation research,” “World Cup,” and, of course, “television.” One of the undeniable pleasures of Beijing is exchanging a few kuai with the local DVD salesman and walking away with two or three complete seasons of trash television.
Of late, I’ve been really into a show called “Sons of Anarchy.” It’s a kind of evolutionary “Sopranos.” Both deal with organized crime (Mafia/outlaw motorcycle gangs) mixed with suburban banality and a fair dose of very dark humor. (The Sons’ ‘Paulie Walnuts’ is an out of control psychopath who waxes lyrical about necrophilia while removing the teeth from a soon to be identified corpse in the local morgue.) As you might imagine, it’s a tough show to watch and while it is a well-written and brilliantly acted series, the violence is enough to make the boys from the Bada Bing seem like Carmelite nuns. (Check out a video clip here.)
For example, in the third episode of season one a former member returns to town and is seen still sporting a tatoo with the club’s emblem. The solution? You guessed it, a ten-minute musical montage showing the club pouring whiskey down the shlub’s naked back and using a welding torch to permanently remove the club’s insignia from the outcast’s writhing body.
Why am I telling you all this? Well, the music accompanying this orgy of righteous torture was none other than the Alice Cooper anthem “Eighteen.” (Among other things, the show has a GREAT soundtrack.)
I got a
baby’s brain and an old man’s heart
Took eighteen years to get this far
Don’t always know what I’m talkin’ about
Feels like I’m livin in the middle of doubt
It got me thinking about a conversation YJ and I had recently about this awkward moment in global history, a moment when China would appear to be ascendant but just can’t seem to get out of its own way on the world stage. It’s a cliché, but like most clichés one that contains a bit of truth, that China may be an old civilization but it’s still a relatively young country. Despite its past, China is a global adolescent…the baby’s brain and the old man’s heart, if you will.
Like many adolescents, one must respect how far China has come, but you also have to be wary because, and anyone who thinks back to their teenage years can relate, there is a gawky sensitivity to perceived slights during this time, a need to flex the muscles, and it’s also a period made all the more clumsy by being coupled with the shocking lack of self-awareness so often found in university freshman dorms. (Or Tun on a Friday night.) It’s a brittle and volatile mix of pride, achievement, hope, insecurity, and fear.
It’s a moment when people try to find their own identity, one that takes into account the past while trying to move beyond that from whence they came. Some might see an Olympic opening ceremony welcoming the world one year and a national day parade fetishizing military hardware the next, I see a kid who can’t decide between wearing polo shirts everyday or shaving his head and getting his foreskin pierced.
The defensiveness and hostility, the barbaric yawps so easily elicited in the face of perceived slights and grudges, are typical of the angst-ridden young, trying to posture and pose and hypersensitive to those who seek to dismiss or minimize their accomplishments and abilities. How much more so when, to extend the metaphor a bit, we can think of this as a teenager whose early years, to put it mildly, were subject to the whims of a crazy and abusive Ma(o)ma?
What I’m trying to say is, maybe we should give China a break. Thinking back to those weird and awkward days of our late teens, most of us have moments and phases we’d rather forget and I can think of few people who would prefer to be assessed based on their 18-year old selves.
It’s not to say it won’t be a bumpy ride. Mark Twain once said, “When I was 14 I thought my father was the stupidest man on the planet. When I turned 21, I couldn’t believe how much the old man had learned in just seven years.” Part of the (my?) frustration in China is seeing how far China has come while surrounded by evidence that the powers-that-be in this country seem willfully unaware of how far there is to go.
Nevertheless, and it seems strange to say this about a civilization that boasts of a 5000-year history, the arrogance and awkwardness of China’s emergence as a state and nation (as opposed to an empire) on the global stage is the arrogance and awkwardness of youth, things which are rarely permanent conditions.
It’s a critical moment for the country, a moment when China and the Chinese people will have to decide what kind of nation they want to be going forward. Such things are never cast in stone, but, like our own post-adolescent lives, are the results of a myriad of small decisions, external interactions (both positive and negative), and — as a historian it can be painful to say but true nonetheless — mere fate.
Here’s hoping.
I’m not sure I buy this theory, since it depends too much on anthropomophicizing (did I spell that right?) a country. Yes China is young, but is that really an reason for its citizens to be insecure? It seems to me that it’s more a product of how China’s relationship with the world has been presented to Chinese people over the last 60 years, and the fact that that viewpoint dominates media, and even more importantly, education.