The Chengdu Chairman

In Chengdu (Sichuan Province, southern China), there is a public square overlooked to the west by an enormous statue of Mao Zedong, one of those statues of Mao saluting his people.  Is he showing them  fatherly warmth?  Grandfatherly wisdom? Stern headmasterly direction? In Chengdu it appears as if he is ordering a venti latte, because the eastern side of the square features a Starbucks.

Mao is not ubiquitous in China.  The only place I have seen him in the city where I live (Dalian, Liaoning Province, Northeast China) is behind the DJ in a nightclub.  There, a young version of him gives the same salute, as if to say, "Dance on, comrade!" I've never figured out whether his appearance in the night club is meant to be ironic. In Chengdu it is surely not an intentional irony, just an accident of the Sino-schizo reality of the 21st century.  Mao is not openly rejected, but there is very little of his ideology left to be found. Three decades ago, Deng Xiaoping took the country in a whole new direction when he reformed the economic system and supposedly declared, "To get rich is glorious."  As far as I can surmise, no one ever looked back.

It is, in fact, easier to find a Starbucks in China today than an imposing statue of Mao.  Back home in the US, I wouldn't call myself a fan of Starbucks (my husband is the coffee snob in our family, and rarely lets anything other than Peet's pass his lips), although neither do I avoid it.  Caffeine + dairy + sugar is a powerful good thing.  But I have lived in China for more than a year now, and here, Starbucks is my frequent refuge: a place with a decent beverage, a soft chair, and free wi-fi.  If it had toilets, I'd just move in.

My Starbucks is located within An Sheng Shang Cheng, a shopping center.  There are no toilets in the Starbucks, so if you overdo it on the lattes, you have to trek across the mall to a KFC, stand in an always long line and use a perpetually damp and splattered squat potty.

I go to Starbucks so that I don't go home and do bugger all.  I have spent my time in China adjusting to a new culture (including the expat culture), a new language, and also to unemployment, which was not my lifestyle back in the US.  Given that I might qualify as the world's shittiest housewife, this has been a big adjustment.  Sitting in Starbucks pretending that I have a life is better than sitting at home, wishing food would magically appear in the kitchen.

When my friends and I gather at Starbucks, we enjoy peering into the mall at the newly urbanized peasant Chinese and their outlandish clothes. The mass migration in China has brought hundreds of millions of people off the land and into the coastal cities.  They have access to modern housing, modern conveniences, and modern styles.  What the women do with those styles is something like what a New Jersey gangsters wife does when her husband comes home with cash. Hair is big and heels are high.  My friends and I are mostly the opposite, we are the REI/L.L. Bean kind of crowd.

My own orthopedically sound, not to mention safely reflective, shoe collection.  Hell, I didn't even pull the Earth shoes out of the closet.

We are confounded by the fact that women whose feet were forcibly bound for several centuries now voluntarily opt to squeeze into some of the most challenging footwear available on Earth.  The Communist Revolution brought previously unknown freedoms and power to the women of China. Mao famously said that women hold up half the sky. The foot binding custom was already on the decline when Mao came to power; Mao put it to rest forever. He also put women to work and set them on the path to political equality.  In recent decades, specific non-discrimination laws have been enacted, though not necessarily observed. And yet, the women continue to bind themselves, in a sense.  The women binding themselves today are not the elite rich ones of the past, they are the newly enriched (if only a bit), perhaps looking to verify their wealth with aching feet.

 The women of China seem to de-liberate themselves with short shorts and f-me boots.

When I am alone at Starbucks, I try to read.  I try to write.  I try to study Chinese, which I am determined to master before I die. It will assuredly take me that long.

Recently I sat alone in Starbucks, pouring over my "to do" list (excerpts: review for Chinese lesson, buy a curling iron, buy bread, write something profound, read history book, find out why Flip Video software doesn't work after upgrading to Mac OS X 10.6.6).  On my Mac, iTunes shuffled randomly and I listened mindlessly until I noticed that Patti Smith's "People Have the Power" was playing.  The song comes from Smith's 1988 "Dream of Life" album. The name kind of says it all, but here's one of my favorite parts:

I awakened to the cry
that the people / have the power
to redeem / the work of fools
upon the meek / the graces shower
it's decreed / the people rule

It's a good song. I have no idea what she was specifically thinking about when she wrote it, but to me it sounds like something right out of Mao's Little Red Book.

I bought a vintage 1970s copy of Mao's little red book in Shanghai, one that includes an English translation side-by-side with the original Chinese.  Less that five minutes perusal of it yields this quote: "The richest source of power to wage war lies in the masses of the people." The Chinese Communist Party today understands that such power is a double-edged sword and they have gone to great lengths recently to suppress any gatherings of people who want to put their power behind something other than the Party. 

In the midst of the uprisings of north Africa, meetings or "strolls" were proposed on a Chinese language web site based outside of China.  Such sites are in theory inaccessible to the Chinese populace (and to me) because the government maintains the Great Firewall.  In practice, most Westerners living here use a VPN service (some of which have experienced great difficulties lately) and many Chinese citizens probably do the same.  The government moved quickly to make these group strolls impossible by installing construction barriers at the appointed places, posting uniformed and plainclothes policemen at them, and running street sweepers down the street at the appointed time.  The government has also moved to shut down prominent underground Christian churches, which had been tolerated for many years. (The New York Times has covered recent events in China stories here and here, for example. All of their China coverage is indexed here.) Prominent Chinese citizens, such as the artist Ai Weiwei are being locked up for talking too much about people power.  Any Chinese citizen who wants to discuss the power of the people will be shut down, and fast.  Perhaps forcefully.  Ironic, no?

The Western press makes much of the lack of a free press in China.  They are at least partially justified, but I also think they enjoy the ego boost that they get from pointing fingers at oppressive autocrats.  Pretty easy targets, really.  The press in the US does enjoy free speech, but sometimes opts not to take advantage of this and sells itself to the highest bidder. (If you enjoy reading eviscerating takedowns of the pompous mainstream media in America, I recommend Glenn Greenwald.) The Internet in China, just as in the US, has given the people greater opportunities to freely express and report on issues outside the mainstream/government controlled media.  The obstacles are greater in China, but not insurmountable. 

The lack of a freedom of public assembly here in China seems so much more draconian than the constantly discussed Great Firewall and government censors. There is so much more to our first amendment than just the freedom of the press.  The US Constitution's first amendment restricts the activities of the Congress, grants rights to the press, and grants rights to the people:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Congress can't pass a law to make you, and the local police can't force you, to refrain from peaceably assembling.  As a rule, America does an admirable job of hewing to this law and principle. (OK, insert your counter argument here, proving me right and wrong at the same time.) Not so in China.  China probably has a similar provision in their constitution, but everything in the Chinese constitution is trumped by the stability card.  The Chinese suffered more than a century of instability at the hands of foreigners, and more significantly, at their own hands.  The Party plays the stability card constantly (newspapers are chock-full of editorials singing the importance of stability and stories in which leaders extol its necessity), and backs it up with force.

Chinese student's lovely hat and Jimmy's skanky one

My Starbucks is popular with expats and with Chinese students from the local university.  I occasionally strike up a conversation with one of the students. One day last week I was bored but unmotivated. I didn't want to read.  I didn't want to study.  As I was standing in line, I noticed a young man, young, well-dressed, kind of cute. Probably Chinese, but maybe not. And he was wearing an Alabama hat.  Not much different from the one my husband, Jimmy, wears, only with a different color scheme.  Jimmy's Alabama hat has now seen time on three continents through four seasons. Twice.  Oh GAWD it is skanky!  And he still won't wear the new one I bought for him. The A, to me, is as clear as a bell. Hmm, stranger things have happened.  One time, on a volcano in Hawaii, with a broken down rental car, I ran into some fellow Alabamians.  So I spoke to him.

If I were home in Alabama, I wouldn't have noticed the hat.  In some other place in the US, especially outside the South, I might have simply given him a knowing glance and nod, the silent "Roll Tide."  Here in China, I had no clue whether he knew what he was wearing or not.  So I start with a cautious, "What's the A for?"  He offered an unsatisfactory answer: "It's a baseball team."  Uh, no, buddy, it's not a *baseball* team.  I backed off.  "Nice hat," I said, and took my decaf iced latte with me to a soft chair.  I figured I'd be studying after all.

Then he sat beside me.  Okay, pal, I'll give it another shot.  "Are you a student?" I asked.  

"Yes."

"What do you study?"

"Film directing."

"Oh.  Who is your favorite director?"

"Blah-de-di-blah-blah." He named some American action-film yahoo.

"Oh, not Chinese? I am a big fan of Zhang Yimou."

"Blah-de-di-blah-blah.  I like Tom Hanks.  Forrest Gump."

"Oh, may I see your hat?  Ni de mao zi, wo ke yi kan kan yi xia ma?"  Aha!  Yes, there inside it said, "Crimson Tide."

"You know in the movie, Forrest Gump played football, not baseball.  Here,"  my enthusiastic pointing follows, "at Alabama!"

Blank stare.

Ok, I wasn't going to bond with random Chinese youngster over his very attractive hat.  He had no idea what his hat meant, especially to me.  Much of my family settled in Alabama in the 1800s. Alabama is home, family, fun, and, especially football.  At the club with Mao behind the DJ they play some freaky mix of "Sweet Home Alabama" and the Chinese, Russians, and Africans dance and sing.  I feel like "double rainbow guy." What does it mean?!

"I should study.  My Chinese is very bad." I dropped my gaze back to my books.

He tired of waiting for me to chat some more and abandoned the chair beside me.  Leaving space for the next student to pounce.

"Can I ask you a question?" she asked.

"Sure.  No problem."

She pointed to two words in her notebook.

"Fatigue," I enunciated.  "Symptom."  I said it twice.  That's a tough one.

"Are you a teacher?" she asked.

"No, I'm unemployed."

"Can you be my friend?"

"Sure, I'm here all the time.  Many days."

Her hat featured a rainbow.  If I couldn't make the boy understand Alabama, there's no way I'm going to explain a rainbow to this girl!

"Can I have your phone number?" she asked.

"No. I'm sorry." I replied.  And here the genial east-meets-west atmosphere broke down.  She was not angered, but disappointed.  Hell, I was disappointed for her.  But not so disappointed that I was going to invite one of the random 1.3 billion into my life.

I want to know more about China and the Chinese.  I want to know what Mao means to the new generations.  Why he is on the nightclub wall, for example. It is fascinating to contemplate the effect a single man can have on a nation, especially a man who both rescued and ravaged that nation.  Mao is like a car wreck that you can't take yours eyes off.  China has always been a mystery to the West and never more so than now, when the contradictions of Mao and Deng and the Internet and authoritarianism and stability are so obvious.  Or is it some stunning natural phenomenon?  And I'm double rainbow guy, "What does it mean?!"

But it is so exhausting.  Some days I find that all the coffee in Starbucks just isn't enough to take me down that road.

Mmm.  My venti latte tastes good today.