I hate cell phones. Anyone who knows me fairly well – especially here in China – is probably aware of this, either explicitly or implicitly. I never liked them but this has grown to hatred – at a philosophical level – during my time here. In China, you will be hard pressed to find anybody who does not have one and use it incessantly. When I tell people that I don’t have one, they genuinely can’t comprehend it and ask me, with complete befuddlement, why not. The answer that I usually don’t give is that I believe that they are anti-social. Walking down the street, people coming the other way don’t see me, don’t see anything, except whatever message or picture or game may be on their phone’s screen. One night, at a coffee shop, I noticed three people sitting at a cozy little table facing each other…all looking down at their phones. They were there, but they really weren’t; their contact with the world around them minimized. This, as I’m sure has been presented many times before, is similar to the situation in the United States.

At different times, I have maintained contact with people here – people that I’ve met in person – in a text format (on my computer). While this correspondence is fairly comfortable, I often find that – if it gets a little more personal: talking on the phone, meeting socially – there’s an almost palpable panic. Although there are reasons for this – language and culture barriers are big ones, I’m sure – I also believe that texting gives people a sense of security that may not always be a good thing. I mean, there was a time, not so long ago, when even all but the most unsocial (and wealthiest) agoraphobes of us would more frequently interact with each other personally. It wasn’t that traumatic, and in different ways, from a human standpoint, it was probably good. This, I will also acknowledge, is most likely another similarity between our two cultures.

My opinion on this hadn’t changed until a few days ago, when I had asked, while paying a bill, where a waitress that I know had gone. As the manager vaguely told me, the bartender listened and gave a short chuckle that was out of place. As I took my change and walked out, I pondered small events from my week: consulting with a student as three others, almost literally, breathed down my neck (I’d tell them to get back and they’d take a step back and then step forward again…I felt like I should have been holding a whip and a chair); having a semi-private conversation with someone as two others took it all in, one adding her own comments; bargaining with a merchant as a small crowd formed around us. All very routinely disconcerting. And I remembered the last time I saw this waitress: keeping her distance from everyone – sitting off behind another counter fiddling with her phone – until she came out to say goodnight to me.

And so my thoughts turned to cell phones and text messages and, for the first time in my life, I saw some practical, everyday use for them: privacy. This is different from the United States. Everyone in China is either up into everyone else’s business or trying to get up into everyone else’s business. Most just accept it as part of the culture or chalk it up to the fact that there are so many people here. But maybe, in some cases, texting is a manifestation – conscious or subconscious – of a struggle against the lack of it: no matter how many people are around, text messages are silent and hard to see. Having changed my mind a little, I’m not going to run out and buy a mobile phone – I still think they’re anti-social. But, if some people have chosen to use this machine to rage against another that is probably worse, then I guess I’m okay with that.

Awhile back, on a long train ride somewhere, I was flipping through an English language edition of Mao’s Quotations (“The Little Red Book”). These souvenirs are sold throughout China in different languages and, although I’d bought copies before as fun little gifts to bring back home, I’d never bothered to read any of them for the sustained length of time that a train ride provides.

For most of my time in China, I have been mentally compiling a growing list of negative observations, not the least of which is what I perceive to be a lack of accountability present through its society: Get caught cheating on an exam? But it’s a misunderstanding. Painters spackle the table and floor because they couldn’t be bothered to use the drop cloth crumpled in the corner? But your ceiling and walls are painted. Poisoning food, water, and air? But China is a developing country. At its best, experiencing this is frustrating; but to register no reaction at all would be to give in to a minor form of apathy all too easily expanded to the major kind.

As I read the book’s opening pages, I couldn’t help but notice that, almost immediately, the concept of “self-criticism” as an important aspect of Marxism-Leninism came up (Chapter 27 is, in fact, devoted to this general topic). I’ve heard stories, although not so much about teenaged Red Guards flipping everything on its collective head, dunce cap clad unfortunates publicly denounced, et cetera. Rather, what little I’ve heard is less spectacularly destructive but still damaging: families paying daily homage to Mao’s picture and reciting passages from his Quotations. Some possibly did so because they bought into it, some because they were told to, and some because they were afraid of what would happen if they didn’t. Just the same, as I read out of boredom what these people had read for very different reasons, I began to think.

I do not consider the Chinese to be a stupid people. I do consider the Chinese to be a pragmatic one. How many true believers would there have been (legitimate or brainwashed doesn’t matter) paying homage and reciting? And how many would have been just paying a literal and mindless lip service? From my own limited experience and observation here, I’m of the opinion that that particular see-saw would have come crashing down pretty fast on the side of the latter if it ever got off the ground at all. And I wondered at how much resentfulness this would have caused.

For every negative conclusion that I draw about China, I try to maintain some sort of hope that something will turn up to disprove my opinion but, as time has gone on, I have begun to entertain the idea that I myself may be paying a sort of lip service to this wish. Yet, reading Mao’s book that night, I was encouraged to have possibly been hit with at least one refutation in the form of an entire generation indoctrinated with enough self-criticism to last a lifetime, then finally cut loose from its forced accountability. And that generation, liberated from this particular type of dogma, then having brought forth its own children – who learned from their parents a reflexive insincerity and a permanent resentfulness against being blamed for anything – sent them to continue on in the established path. Should I judge these people so harshly? I don’t know. What I do know is that, reading “The Little Red Book” on the train that night, I saw a glimmer – justified or not – of where their lack of accountability may have come from. And despite all of the negativity that helped to bring this out, I felt then a tenuous and fleeting empathy with them.

Last week, I saw the show Prison Break for the first time. I had assiduously tried to avoid this, as I have so far done with 24 and, amazingly as I think about it, with the entire run of Friends but, for my final exams, I allowed each testing group to pick its own discussion topic and one of them chose “Why I Like Prison Break”, with the pilot episode as a common sample for us to use.

An extremely popular show here in China – at least with university students – I’ve been hearing about Prison Break since it first aired in the United States, so it was easy to find a DVD in one of the local shops. Watching it the night before these students’ exams, it was everything that I thought it would be: intricate in plot, occasionally violent in deed and always violent in feel, gray in appearance and acting, and more unbelievable than one of the Brothers Grimm’s wildest fairy tales. And yet…I damned near watched Episode 2 right after Episode 1 had finished. I stopped myself – I’d had some things to do – but, like a bad drug, the show had done its best to hook me.

My burning question for my students was whether or not they found this show to be at all believable. To varying degrees, they both had.

In the United States, when the majority of adult TV viewers (at least I hope to God it’s the majority of adult TV viewers, but I don’t know…I’m just trying to be optimistic here) tune in to a show, we do so with a set of societal information that enables us to separate the plausible from the implausible from the laughably implausible. We can still suspend belief, but then, when the show’s over, it’s back to reality for everyone. The problem here in China is that these viewers don’t have this same societal information: they don’t know what reality is in the United States and this stuff fills the void.

Honestly, I haven’t seen or heard of any ugly instances resulting from this – no Fox inspired examples of misguided gung-hoism from Chinese ex-pats in the States – but it still can’t be good to be that far-off in your image of something. Or maybe it doesn’t really matter. Before I came to China, I thought, aside from Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, there wasn’t much. So when I first visited Hangzhou and saw that it had a nice public bus system, I was quite taken aback. But I survived this shock…and others.

Still, this lack of information sometimes makes me uneasy. When The DaVinci Code was all the rage here, I ended up watching it and thought that it was terrible and slightly worrying; there was one particular character, some scary, vacant looking albino monk who goes around doing some pretty nutty things and, in one scene, strips naked and beats himself bloody with some sort of cat o’ nine tails after tightening some barbed wire leg garter into his thigh. China is not that Christian and, according to the small number of local Christians that I’ve spoken to, Catholics aren’t either. Watching this film, I thought that this might be further bad news for the cause. I mean, a self-flagellating religious fanatic psycho paleface as some sort of reference point? I don’t know. And the thing about China is that, in most cases like this, I never will: judgment passed here is usually quick, silent, and final. Right or wrong? Well, that’s of secondary importance, if any.

New York. That’s what I thought when I got off the bus. Chinatown, New York. I needed a map so I stopped at a newsstand…English or Mandarin? Neither. The craggy old vendor disgustedly waved me off with an, “Arggh! Pūtōnghuà!” The second vendor I tried wouldn’t even acknowledge me. Asshole. Just like New York. This was a letdown. For at least three years I’d had this trip in my head and now that I was finally here…this. As a Bostonian, it’s probably programmed into my DNA to be suspicious of New York. And whenever I’m visiting an old Boston friend who lives there now, I’m always a little relieved to be leaving and a little sorry to be leaving him behind. And so I find that if a place reminds me of New York, I usually don’t like it. Shanghai does and I find that I’m always glad to be leaving there, as well. And so, having checked in to my hotel and having met up with my friend – a transplanted Nanjingese – I alluded to this as we walked past an off-track betting parlor…with the hopeful postscript that maybe my instincts were off this time. But still, everything about the place screamed Chinatown.

I didn’t stay in Hong Kong all that long. Just a long weekend. And I’ve been back in Nanjing for a little while now. And in my time back, I’ve picked up a Hong Kong guidebook and a Cantonese phrasebook. You might think that this is funny: to buy a guidebook and local phrasebook after having just gotten back from a particular trip, but I don’t – at least not in this case. You read these books to familiarize yourself with a locale and that’s exactly what I’m trying to do now. Just like I was trying to do then. Usually, familiarization with a place is physical: streets, subway stops, places of interest, these sorts of things. In Hong Kong this was true as well. And it was easy enough, courtesy, most likely, of the colonial masters. And I saw some of what I should see and did some of what I should do and enjoyed it. But the intangibles turned out to be a little more complicated. Where am I? In my hotel room the morning of my departure, I found that I had described the city in three completely different ways in three different postcards. None of these descriptions were wrong. It made me stop what I was doing. What is this place? My instincts had been off – I knew this almost immediately after pigeonholing it. And I now began to think that there might be no pigeonhole, just some sort of crack to be slipped through. Of the places I’ve been, it’s the most enigmatic – an almost forgotten afterthought of a question that is content to stay out of the way until something brings it forward again to be puzzled over and then put down again for future consideration. I enjoyed Hong Kong, but I’m not sure if this is the right word to describe my ongoing experience with it. I mean really, does a riddle bring you joy? How about a riddle that you know is there but haven’t even been able to identify yet?

I have heard the Mainland described along these lines, and I believe that it’s justified. However, I don’t think that I’ve gotten too wound up in this – I knew what it was before I even got here and acknowledge that it would take quite a few lifetimes to start to figure it all out. China is enormous, old, and secretive – whatever you get from it is what it gives you. Hong Kong is small and young. And right there to be seen. And then it’s not.

Maybe my impression is wrong, I’m not basing it on much. But then again, first impressions aren’t usually based on much. If I do make it back there again, I hope that it’s just as elusive as it was this time. Taking that away might make all the difference.

Linguistic Note: Pūtōnghuà refers to Mandarin. In Hong Kong, Cantonese – an almost completely different form of Chinese from Mandarin – is the language widely spoken.

Essay Note: I wrote this almost a year ago, back in May of 2009, a short time after I’d paid a long considered visit to Hong Kong. My impressions, though not quite as fresh now, haven’t changed. I still find myself frequently looking through that guidebook.

In his latest book, “1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance,” Gavin Menzies follows in the footsteps of his first book, “1421: The Year China Discovered America,” making an alternative investigation into a pivotal event in Western history.

As with Menzies’ earlier book, this one is ambitious and controversial. Unlike “1421” however, “1434” concentrates primarily on the one geographic area largely omitted from the first book: Europe. Specifically, he proposes that quite a few of the inventions, innovations and mental leaps that occurred in Europe – particularly in Venice and Florence – during the Renaissance, can be traced back to the year 1434, when a Chinese fleet (commanded by Admiral Zheng He, the primary figure in “1421”) sailed to Venice in order to bring it into China’s tributary system. Menzies argues that maps, star charts, tables and astronomical calendars far more advanced than anything the Europeans had would have been presented by the Chinese ambassador as part of his official visit in order to better enable returning foreign delegations to find their way back to China when paying deference to the Chinese emperor. Additionally, groundbreaking agricultural, industrial and military information widely available in mass produced Chinese pocket encyclopedias and a huge, all-encompassing one would have also made its way into the Venetians’ hands during Zhang He’s visit. Based on this receipt of information, important ideas were planted, allowing Europe to surge forward intellectually, industrially and economically, filling the void left by China after its withdrawal from the world stage. A theory this big requires a lot of proof and Menzies spends most of “1434” trying to line it up and present it coherently. A good part of the first half of the book is given to bolstering the claim that the Chinese did, in fact, reach Venice at that time. He concentrates first on establishing a longstanding trading link between China and Egypt through the Cairo-Red Sea Canal and then goes further – into the Mediterranean and Adriatic – using some of his favorite “1421” methods: matching DNA, folklore, linguistic and cartographic similarities, subsequent European voyages and plant transfer. Using this evidence, he alleges that the fleet stopped along the Dalmatian coast in Croatia on its way to Venice.

From this point on, he uses the rest of the book to try to link major Renaissance players and ideas to this 1434 visit. In doing so, he continues on with one of 1421’s major themes: maps and how they’re connected. Understandably, this is where he’s most comfortable. What made “1421” so compelling was the experience that informed the work. A career spent in the British Navy as a navigator and sub commander gave Menzies a very special skill set particularly appropriate for dealing with the most important aspects of that book: cartography, ocean currents, weather patterns and navigation, especially related to longitude. His thoughts on these topics and how they relate to his main theory come across clearly and convincingly: he sounds like he knows what he’s talking about and has the credentials to prove it. But in “1434,” he can only stay in this familiar territory for so long before the subject matter demands that he move on to less comfortable footing. To Menzies’ credit, when he does eventually venture out into the world of Renaissance Europe, he really goes for it, dropping some very big names (Da Vinci and Gutenberg, to name a couple) and calling them – and their contributions – into question. His general idea is that any number of important innovations, from movable block printing, to weapon design, to waterway construction, to silk and steel production, can be traced back to 1434 and that Chinese visit. He submits that these breakthroughs were transmitted through a chain of Renaissance men, having originated in the widely available Chinese books dealing with topics as varied as mathematics, agriculture and warfare as well as to an enormous encyclopedia (the “Yong Le Dadian”) that would have been brought by the fleet. To his further credit, he makes enough of a case to justify some consideration, if not necessarily acceptance, of what he has to offer.

That sort of a reaction is close to the one experienced when reading “1421.” However, it’s not the same. That extra well-informed conviction and excitement that comes through in “1421” is somehow missing in “1434.” In “1421,” the sense was of somebody using his expertise to satisfy his curiosity and in the process, going further than he ever could have foreseen and making some massive, unexpected discoveries. Menzies, in the newer book, seems out of his depth. What’s more is that he seems to know it. By his own admission, substantial portions of various chapters have been paraphrased from the work of others more expert than he in the Renaissance and medieval Chinese history. While there’s nothing wrong with this (Menzies, in various places, makes it clear that the whole two-book project is a work-in-progress and a collaborative effort), it does further hurt his credibility with academics. Many have already criticized or dismissed his work in 1421 as pure fiction based on what they consider to be his circular arguments and questionable sources and evidence.

That being said, “1434” is worth reading for those interested in alternative history. This isn’t a Little Green Men from Mars Built the Pyramids kind of book, although the chapter near the end of “1434” dealing with the tsunami caused by a comet crashing into the Pacific and wrecking the Chinese fleet may initially bring similar thoughts to mind. “1434” and “1421” are serious. Correct or incorrect as their theories turn out to be, at the very least they deserve to be considered with an open mind.

Note: This book review first appeared in the March 2010 edition of Map Magazine.

I had wanted a miracle. Not one of those miracles you have to explain or justify, but a hit-you-over-the-head, fall to your knees and praise the Lord Biblical one. The kind that makes witnesses, if not cover their eyes and pray to God, at least pause to reconsider things. Maybe reconsider everything. The kind of miracle that I’d never before seen.

And then it rained.

Standing on my metallic rooftop that morning, under the darkness of the ominous, ominous skies as lightning bolts made landfall in the city around me, I squinted to see the sun or, more exactly, the moon in front of the sun, now hidden high above the clouds and the rain and the dark. If I hadn’t known about the eclipse I never would have noticed, nor would anyone else have noticed.

The biggest one in five hundred years…

China is monotheistic. Its one true god is money. Don’t let the Buddha fool you – he’s really nothing more than a middleman…insurance bought with incense sticks. The eclipse should have, for its brief duration, been a wonder and sign – a testament to an awesome, incomprehensible power…something so much more than just paper and coin. Something to make the shopkeepers and the merchants and the high-rollers or would-be ones stop what they were doing and look up – at some sort of loss – in amazement.

Instead there was nothing…aside from the muttered complaints of those hoping for some excitement and diversion on an otherwise typical summer day.

But there was the rain. Lots of rain. When it had finally stopped, I went downstairs with my camera…I’m not sure why, there wasn’t anything to see…there hadn’t been all morning. The little road in front of my building had again been flooded and so I stood for a while stranded on the raised concrete landing, leaning on a wall and watching people wading past. Some trudged along indifferently, some enjoyed the feeling of the cool water splashing over their ankles. A torrential downpour. A heavy stillness afterwards. This storm, like so many others, had passed by without consequence.

I had sent one of my students a message that day to complain and commiserate. Her city was also in the direct path of this invisible eclipse. Later, I received a message from her in return. Had she seen anything? No. She hadn’t. It had been raining where she was, too. But, reading her words, she sounded happy and excited. She’d gone with her friends out into the storm to try to see. The fact that she hadn’t didn’t seem to matter.

She knew it was there.

Note: The events referred to in this essay occurred on or just after July 22, 2009 – the date of the total solar eclipse that cut a narrow path over much of Asia, and the longest one anticipated in China for the almost five hundred year period from 1814 to 2309.

To those of you who still visit The China Gate:

You may be wondering what happened. This is understandable. Please allow me to explain. Since a relatively short time after I posted my last essay on March 31, 2009, the Great Firewall Of China has been in full effect and access to The China Gate has been blocked. This has happened before, but this time, there were two major differences:

1. Access to Blogger, the server for my site, was also blocked, which prevented me from posting anything from within China.

2. Access to the proxy servers that I have used to get around this was blocked as well.

In the past, I have found that this censorship was usually quite capricious. One day, access might be denied and another it may not until things would eventually loosen up. But to this date, one year later, that hasn’t happened. I have theories about why this may be, and maybe I will share them with you later. But for now, I will refrain.

At some point during the last year, I became aware of software that I could purchase that would allow me to bypass this. For a long time, I chose not to. My primary reason for this was because, even with this access, one big chunk of my target audience – readers within China – would still not be able to get in; I thought that I’d wait it out, too.

Unfortunately, my feeling now is that this block isn’t going to be lifted any time soon. As a result, I got the software, which I used to post this. However, those in China without access to this sort of thing are still in the dark. In a much earlier essay, I wrote about censorship and how it really does work. My opinion on this has not changed. Over the past year, I’ve had essay ideas and started to write them down but then stopped when I remembered that I had nowhere that I wanted to put them. Part of this was due to a lack of motivation – there were places that I could have sent my essays – but I’m finding from firsthand experience that this, and alternative distractions, are what censorship really thrives on: Relax. Play video games. Check out some porn. Just don’t pay attention.

Over the next stretch of time, I may revisit some of those old essay ideas, try to put them into readable form, and then post them here. Some may seem chronologically out of place; if this is the case, I’ll put some sort of contextual explanation either immediately before or after the main body of the essay. If not, I’ll just post them as usual.

So, to those of you who have been kind enough and patient enough to stick around, I sincerely hope that whatever I post from here on out will be worth your long wait.

Sincerely,
Matt