I was born in a country where 90% of the people share a single ethnicity, where we have no national religion, but where we do have the stomachs to eat any living creature on earth.  So it came as a shock to me, later than it probably should have, that some people may not eat certain things out of choice or because of their religion. Sure, China has Hui people who are Muslim and who eat Qingzhen (Halal) food, but prior to university I’d only met a handful of Chinese Muslims in my life. And even in school, it wasn’t that I didn’t respect my friends’ aversion to pork, but it was just completely outside my own upbringing.  I don’t think I lacked sensitivity, just a sense of perspective about what diversity means.

This problem is even harder for my mom. During Spring Festival, some of my husband’s students came to our place for a dinner party. One of the students ]]> (Ed Note: With several major projects in the works and with a gig next week guest blogging for James Fallows, I asked my lovely wife and co-conspirator Yajun if she’d like to help out for the next few weeks.)

I was born in a country where 90% of the people share a single ethnicity, where we have no national religion, but where we do have the stomachs to eat any living creature on earth.  So it came as a shock to me, later than it probably should have, that some people may not eat certain things out of choice or because of their religion. Sure, China has Hui people who are Muslim and who eat Qingzhen (Halal) food, but prior to university I’d only met a handful of Chinese Muslims in my life. And even in school, it wasn’t that I didn’t respect my friends’ aversion to pork, but it was just completely outside my own upbringing.  I don’t think I lacked sensitivity, just a sense of perspective about what diversity means.

This problem is even harder for my mom. During Spring Festival, some of my husband’s students came to our place for a dinner party. One of the students was Jewish. Since he has trouble finding kosher food in Haidian, he chose to become a vegetarian. This just amazed my mom and all of the Chinese guests. As we were cooking, even though my husband explained why the student couldn’t eat any meat, from my mom’s confused and curious facial expression I could tell that the idea was just beyond her understanding.

It didn’t stop my mom making delicious vegetable dumplings for him, but the poor student had to explain why he couldn’t eat meat to the Chinese guests over and over again.

China is not a country that celebrates true ethnic and culture diversity. Officially, we are 55 ethnic groups making up one China, but the Han are definitely the dominant and normative culture. Other than the fact that minorities are happy while dancing on stage during gala shows, very little information about them is presented in the mainstream media. Since the media is under the government’s control, minority voices and their cultural and historical perspectives are nowhere to be heard.  China lacks social awareness of what diversity truly means.

Furthermore, a sense of individualism is also often suppressed in China. Many Chinese, like me, are taught since they were children that it is not okay to be different. We are not individuals, but a member of a group, a group which defines our identity. Everyone has to use the right hand to write or to eat. We have to find the one correct answer to the questions in exam. If a child’s creativity and imagination fails to match the content of text books, he or she is labeled as a bad student. Same thing with food. If somebody doesn’t eat a certain kind of food, that’s being picky and is sure to draw the parent’s ire.

However my experience in the US a couple of years ago showed me another perspective. Some people I met were vegan who even couldn’t eat eggs. Others were Muslims who could not serve themselves from anywhere near a dish containing pork. Practicing Jews could only eat meat prepared in a certain way and had to avoid other foods or combinations of foods. Plus, there were also people who were lactose intolerance or had food allergies. I also knew people who couldn’t eat wheat or other grains.

So I saw vegetarian burgers, kosher butchers, and lactose-free milk. In the supermarket, there were specially-prepared foods to meet the need of various consumers. It was totally fine to be different and picky about food. You didn’t have to change, because other people understood and prepared something special for you.

I am amazed by the social awareness and understanding in the US. Part of it, I’m sure, is that the US is a nation founded in large part by immigrants. The other important reason, I believe, is that different — sometimes even completely contradictory — voices can be heard in the US. Dr. Martin Luther King called for the rights for African-Americans 50 years ago. Today Amy Chua teaches Americans how to be a successful Chinese mother. Public information and communication turns ignorance to acceptance and, finally, to a point where difference is no longer seen as different, just part of the greater whole.

Certainly, some people choose fear rather than acceptance. After September 11^th strong anti-Muslim sentiment spread in the US, and throughout US history people have been harassed or even killed because of their race or religion.  But these are problems which are openly discussed and debated in the US media and society, sometimes painfully and divisively.  Martin Luther King was persecuted for his beliefs, but without him and his story Barack Obama would not be the US President today.

With more and more foreigners coming to China, many Chinese will have to grapple with this kind of cosmopolitanism. Different concepts and values may clash with one another at the beginning, but it is an inevitable phase. I am sure the next time when the next guest from a different religious or cultural background comes to my parents’ home, it will be my Mom explaining to the other guests about what she’s learned about the diversity of the world’s cultures.

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As a Chinese person, books written by foreigners about my country always intrigue me. Of course, some are good, others…not so much.  The bad books occasionally rate a mocking giggle, but the better ones are like mirrors that reflect the country, the people, and yourself. Peter Hessler’s new book Country Driving is one of those mirrors.

The book has three distinct sections: The first recounts Hessler’s experiences driving along the Great Wall from Beijing toward the Tibetan plateau, a trip of nearly 7,000 miles. He spoke with people he met along the road and observed first hand how automobile ownership and the boom in new highway construction have transformed interior regions of China. The second part focuses on Wei Ziqi and his family, who live in Sancha, a village in the rural hinterlands of Beijing. For six years, Hessler rented a weekend home from this family and built deep connections with them. He saw the effects on Wei’s family and the village as China’s economic development trickled into this previously isolated pocket of rural life. In the final section, Hessler describes how a little town in Zhejiang has become a boomtown in large part due to ]]> Ed note: This is a guest post by Zhang Yajun.

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As a Chinese person, books written by foreigners about my country always intrigue me. Of course, some are good, others…not so much.  The bad books occasionally rate a mocking giggle, but the better ones are like mirrors that reflect the country, the people, and yourself. Peter Hessler’s new book Country Driving is one of those mirrors.

The book has three distinct sections: The first recounts Hessler’s experiences driving along the Great Wall from Beijing toward the Tibetan plateau, a trip of nearly 7,000 miles. He spoke with people he met along the road and observed first hand how automobile ownership and the boom in new highway construction have transformed interior regions of China. The second part focuses on Wei Ziqi and his family, who live in Sancha, a village in the rural hinterlands of Beijing. For six years, Hessler rented a weekend home from this family and built deep connections with them. He saw the effects on Wei’s family and the village as China’s economic development trickled into this previously isolated pocket of rural life. In the final section, Hessler describes how a little town in Zhejiang has become a boomtown in large part due to a newly built expressway.

The book is about change, because that is what China is all about these days. Everyday there are new roads, new cars, new drivers, new business, new rules and new development. It is so different from the China of my parents and grandparents: the China where everyone was told what to do and nobody was supposed to do anything other than that.  Wei Ziqi, like the other residents of Sancha, lived in the old China for most of his life. His village remained mired in extreme poverty and isolation. (The annual income was a little over US $250 per person.) Even though their village, officially at least, is a part of the Beijing municipality, few people from there had ever ventured out their valley into the city itself. They lived only a couple hours drive away from Tiananmen Square, but for the residents of Wei’s village the capital city might just as well have been another planet.

But no village is too isolated to feel the effects of China’s dynamic economic growth and Wei Ziqi’s generation is very much a watershed generation. They see the changes and the opportunities happening in the country and they want their share. Every Chinese learns early on that he/she will have to compete with many other people for scarce resources – from space in a good school when young, to jobs and houses later on.  So when they see an opportunity to change their lives they are desperate to grab hold of it. Everyone is in a rush. Nobody wants to be left out. Certainly, some win and some lose, but Wei Ziqi’s story is one of relative success. He develops a new business, learns how to dress and behave as a “modern businessman,” and even runs in an election for the village party secretary. Despite these accomplishments, however, neither he nor his family seems happy.

Wei Ziqi is not alone in this problem. For many Chinese, their biggest concern has always been poverty. They believe that all their problems would float away if only they had money. When success does strike — and for the first time in their life they don’t need to worry about money — many Chinese are still anxious and lost and don’t know why. They are just unhappy.

In Hessler’s account of Wei Ziqi, I see my family, my relatives and my friends all facing a similar predicament. But it is not their fault. They are just normal human beings looking for the best for their families and themselves. At the same time, China is developing fast — almost everyone is better off than before — but the psychological and mental adjustment to cope with the rapid change is much more difficult than they expected. Hessler does a good job capturing both the anxiety and opportunity of this transitional period:

“The longer I lived in China, the more I worried about how people responded to rapid change. This wasn’t an issue of modernization…But there are costs when this process happened so fast…from what I saw, the nation’s great turmoil was more personal and internal. Many people were searching: they longed for some kind of religious or philosophical truth, and they wanted a meaningful connection with others. They had trouble applying past experiences to current challenges. Parents and children occupied different worlds and marriages were complicated-rarely did I know a Chinese couple who seemed happy together. It was all but impossible for people to keep their bearings in a country that changed so fast.”

There is a myth, one believed by many Chinese, that foreigners do not and cannot understand China.  This book shows that this myth is simply nonsense.

Hessler makes the effort. He drives through many of the least developed provinces and villages in China and down little country lanes for months on end.  He camps in the open air and lives on Red Bull, chocolate bars and Oreos.  He saw the China where villagers worked for months to dig useless tree holes even though the diggers only received two bags of instant noodles each day to show for their work; the China where young people move away to cities or towns to find jobs while the elderly cling to their old life in the villages; the China where desperate migrants have to lie about their age and identities to seize a job in a booming industrial coastal town. Even many Chinese, especially those who live in the cosmopolitan illusion of Shanghai and Beijing, are unaware of this China. It may not always be pretty in pieces, but there is great beauty in the mosaic of a people living their lives in a time of great change and working to make a better life for themselves and their children. It is a China I want more people to know about.

Yajun (A.K.A. Mrs. Granite Studio) works in the Beijing bureau of The Christian Science Monitor.  You can read her latest article for the Monitor here. Her last post for The Granite Studio was on the recent Chinese student demonstrations in Paris.

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Some hits from around the web on this sunny and cold Friday afternoon:

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Yu Hua has garnered considerable press with the publication in English of his novel Brothers.  Ian Johnson interviews the author for the Wall Street Journal Asia Edition and I was particularly struck by this observation on public trust:

But what bothers Mr. Yu more about these obvious problems is a lack of trust in society. The book trade itself is good example of this, he says. “It’s really hard for a young author to break in because there are few reputable critics. It’s corrupt. People pay critics to write all sorts of nonsense.” He says reviewers charge 3,000 to 5,000 yuan for a review. The accusation is impossible to prove but it is true that China has a weak scene of literary criticism. He contrasts the situation to a western publication like France’s Le Monde. He ]]> You know it’s cold in your little hutong home when your hibernating pet turtle wakes up, climbs out of his bowl, and is found huddling under the space heater.  Still not sure how he did it, we’re thinking he had an outside accomplice with our cat the most likely suspect.

Some hits from around the web on this sunny and cold Friday afternoon:

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Yu Hua has garnered considerable press with the publication in English of his novel Brothers.  Ian Johnson interviews the author for the Wall Street Journal Asia Edition and I was particularly struck by this observation on public trust:

But what bothers Mr. Yu more about these obvious problems is a lack of trust in society. The book trade itself is good example of this, he says. “It’s really hard for a young author to break in because there are few reputable critics. It’s corrupt. People pay critics to write all sorts of nonsense.” He says reviewers charge 3,000 to 5,000 yuan for a review. The accusation is impossible to prove but it is true that China has a weak scene of literary criticism. He contrasts the situation to a western publication like France’s Le Monde. He says that newspaper gave him a two-page spread, resulting in a huge spike in sales — because French people could trust the newspaper’s judgment, not as infallible but as an honest effort at reviewing a book.

This is why, he says, literature in China is so troubled. Young talented writers have a hard time finding readers and there is almost no serious criticism to help guide readers and writers. At the heart of the issue is a dysfunctional civil society — which takes Mr. Yu back to his favorite topic of society as a patient. “What China lacks is public trust,” he says. “It’s what is missing the most in China right now.”

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Second up, the China Beat has an excellent roundup regarding the controversial sale, set for next week, of two bronze statues looted from the Old Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan) in 1860.

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Finally, Global Voices reports on the online firestorm set off by this picture of a young woman straddling a statue of Mao Zedong in a Hunan shopping plaza.

The photo has made the rounds of Chinese BBSs and chatrooms with the conversation about the girl’s behavior soon (d)evolving into a debate  over the complex legacy of the Chairman 33 years after his death.

Some pro-Mao:

“毛主席是我们的开国领袖啊
就算犯过错，也不用这样吧”

“Mao is our founding father!
Even though he might have done something wrong, you don’t have to be so harsh!”

Others…not so much:

“开国？开的一个什么国？一个腐败的、独裁的专职的、草菅老百姓的国？什么开国元勋？战犯而已，有朝一日会像美军解放伊拉克时，萨达姆的塑像被群众推翻.”

A founding father? What has he founded? A country of corruption, dictatorship and careless treatment of people?
A war criminal he is. Someday it will be just like the statues of Saddam toppled down in Iraq.