What I Wouldn't Write

I.  Needles
 
A few months before I moved to Beijing, my parents -- who know me well -- bought me six or seven books on China.  I eventually read my way through 4.12 of them (damn you, Oracle Bones!), but the one that immediately caught my attention was China in Ten Words, by Yu Hua.  I read through it in about six hours, and was riveted by Yu's account of his country: by turns heartbreaking and hilarious, these essays/memoirs/ruminations on his own personal narrative and a wider Chinese history caught at me.

In one of the essays ("Reading"), Yu recounts how, as a child of the Cultural Revolution, he became a voracious reader (the story involves him asking random strangers on the street for books, hoarding tattered copies of French classics with missing identifying marks (like titles or authors), and his older brother punching a librarian in the face).  In another, he describes the first time he saw an execution.

In a way, the most poignant of his stories comes from the introduction.  Here, he tells us that when he was eighteen, his job was to go to factories and inoculate workers.  His team would reuse the same needles again and again.  One day, they inoculated children, and the children cried when the needles came out.  When he examined the needles, he saw that they had become so barbed that they ripped out little pieces of skin when he withdrew them.  He had never noticed before, because the workers had never complained.

From then on, he stayed late at work, sharpening the needles.  He reflects, "Later, when I recalled this episode, I was guilt-stricken that I'd had to see the children's reaction to see how much the factory workers would have suffered" (Yu viii).

It's enough to give you whiplash, that book, with its endless jostling between self-deprecating amusement and aching pain, and I can't think of any better preparation for living in China.

II.  An Important Caveat

(Seriously, READ THIS.)

Okay, look.  Before I go any farther, I need to get a couple of things out of the way:

1. The United States has a tendency to be extremely anti-China.  That is not the intent of this post, and if you take it as such, you're doing it wrong.  China is not an evil empire that is poised to take over the world; it's just not true.  And this is not an anti-China post.  Everything that I've said in the rest of this blog is true: I fell a little bit in love with China when I lived there, with its noise and grit and casual chaos.  I wouldn't take it back for the world.
2. One of my favorite things about China was the ways in which it challenged my views of "the way to be".  It's really humbling to watch the aftermath of a fender-bender on the gaosu, grumble to yourself about the inefficiency of its handling, and then realize: 1.35 billion people live here.  Their system seems to work for them. You are a guest, and you are not here to judge.
3. I am not, in any way, an expert on China.  I do not read or speak Chinese, and I can't read Weibo or the Chinese news or the comments on Youku or any of the Chinese blogs.  All that I can speak to is the observations I've made and the things I've read.  

The thing is, though, that I could never post about the negative side of China's complexities before, because I lived in China and I didn't want to get deported.  And if you think you're paranoid about what you post online in the States?  You have no idea.

Well.  "Couldn't" is maybe the wrong word.  "Wouldn't" is more appropriate, as seen in the title of this post.  And that might be the whole point.

III.  A Case Study in Paranoia
 
Take, for example, Tienanmen.  The June 4 uprising in Tienanmen Square is one of the verboten topics in China, and while one is generally heavily discouraged from saying anything negative about the Chinese government, mentions of Tienanmen are considered to be on another tier of Not Okay.  Like, deportation Not Okay.

When I went to Tienanmen Square for the first time, all I could think was, This is so surreal.  I recognize this from the pictures.  You know the ones -- the guy, the tank.  The classic.  And I looked around, and I wondered, Which of the people around me remember what happened here?  And which ones are plain-clothes police?

And one well-meaning friend posted "don't start any protests over there!" on my photo on Facebook, and another sent me a Facebook message asking me to talk to his students about "the Tienanmen Square massacre," and I panicked and deleted them both without explaining why.

Paranoia rules the day.

But.

While on a bus through Shunyi, I saw a piece of graffiti that stunned me: a crudely painted tank on a brick wall.  In front of it, casually holding out a hand, was a stick figure, dancing.

IV.  (Il)legal
 
Okay.  The thing about living in China, as Deborah Fallows observed in her linguistic memoir Dreaming in Chinese, is that everything is illegal.  It's illegal to watch most foreign movies.  It's illegal to take an unlicensed (or "black") taxi.  It's illegal to consume porn.  It's illegal to be gay.  It's illegal to criticize the Chinese government.

(As an aside:  Yu actually makes a good point in one of his New York Times columns, "The Hijacking of Chinese Patriotism," where he decries the conflation of the Chinese nation with the Chinese government:

The patriotic education promoted by the Communist Party over the last 64 years has managed to equate “love of country” with love of the party and the government. But when the distinction between country and ruler is erased, patriotism ends up being hijacked, and easily manipulated by a narrow-minded nationalism.

We discuss this all the time in the United States, right?  It's pretty normal to have a conversation about the government vs. the nation vs. the people, and how you can love your country but not your government.  But when we think of China, we think of a monolith: the government is the nation is the people.)

And because everything is illegal, nothing is.  The only way to watch a foreign movie that hasn't been approved by the Chinese government (they approve twenty a year, according to rumour) is to buy a bootleg DVD, so that's what you do.  I did not see a single legit DVD store in my time there.  Since legal taxis vanish from the streets every time a drop of rain falls and will sometimes refuse to take you to your destination at the best of times, it is often necessary to take a black taxi if you're trying to get somewhere reliably and quickly (say, if you need to get to work in the morning).

I won't even go into the impossibility of criminalizing homosexuality.  (Or porn.)

It is impossible to live a life in China without breaking the law in a hundred little ways.  Even I -- someone so devoted to following the rules that I can't even get on a bus without paying for it, that I tell the cashier when he undercharges me, that I have never smoked pot, that I feel guilty keeping money that I see lying on the street -- even I am sure that I broke the law in China, that I broke laws I didn't even know existed, just by walking down the street.

So, what effect does this have on day-to-day life?  As an expat, it's hard for me to say what it's like for a Chinese person; I only have my own observations to go by.  In my first month in China, I was on a bus that malfunctioned in the middle of the highway.  (I think some essential engine part fell off?  We heard a clunk, anyway, and then the bus stopped working.  I had a cough and a fever and this was the last straw:  I wanted to curl up and die.)

We'd bumbled to a stop across two lanes of traffic, and when the police came, they flagged down a truck and made its occupants tow the bus to the side.  The truck seemed sort of sketchy -- it had a lot of workers in it, and it was clearly being used as a commercial vehicle (and equally clearly was not necessarily a legit commercial vehicle).  Fresh out of America, I remember thinking, how can the police just force a random truck to tow a bus?  What if they have somewhere to be?  And then I remember answering myself: Because if the truck's driver said no, the police could probably find something to arrest them for.

I am reminded here of the Nate Silver's recent post to the effect that that the homicide rate African Americans experience is comparable to those in Nigeria or Myanmar, and I know that the nebulous line between justice and reality isn't only a problem in China.  But, as militarized and privacy-blind as America is becoming, it is nothing compared to China.  When I flew in China I got pat-downs that made the TSA seem downright prudish (though they were extremely polite).

The organizers of LGBT non-profits can disappear overnight.  The police can walk into a club, drug test everyone, and deport foreigners who test positive on the spot.  And everyone is neurotically paranoid about the internet.

V.  Pollution

Take pollution:  it is difficult for me to explain how bad the very bad pollution days are in Beijing.  I'll try, though.

The first thing you need to know is that the Air Quality Index is an arbitrary scale created by the EPA.  China uses a scale based on that EPA scale, though the calculations involved may be slightly different.  The EPA's scale goes from 0 (perfect) to 500 (super bad) (not the technical terms).  The Chinese scale goes from 0 (perfect) to 300+ (also super bad), with the same category numbers and descriptors as the EPA's scale.

These are called "arbitrary scales" because the numbers don't correspond to anything concrete -- the EPA just thought that 500 was as bad as it could possibly get (silly EPA -- it's like you've never met humanity!).  China's scale, tellingly, seems to have no upper limit.  That said, above 500 their AQI no longer provides numbers, reporting that the air quality is "Beyond Limits".  (I'd be interested to know if the 300+ scale was actually a 500 scale before this.)

According to my amateur math, the WHO recommends a daily limit of 25 on the scale (500 is 20 times what the WHO deems safe).  Cities in the United States will often get up to a bit higher on particularly bad days; on those days, there's often a health alert.  During my first year in Beijing, roughly a quarter of my days there were under 150 ("good" days).  About a half were between 150 and 300.  ("Pretty bad" days.)  And a quarter were above 300, with maybe two weeks' worth of days above 400 and a few days that broke the scale:  500, 600, 700.

On days above 150, you begin to see the pollution hanging in the air.  When it goes above 300, I get headaches and it's hard to be outside.  Above 400, I also get stomach cramps.  The sun will glow redly in the sky, almost invisible: you can look at it without pain.  When "bad days" fell on weekends, I would shut myself in my bedroom with my air purifier, a book, and my computer.  When I left my bedroom to get a drink of water or something to eat, I could taste the difference in the air.

True, my second year there was better than the first:  fewer days over 400, only a few days over 500.  I tried not to kvetch about it incessantly, because friends don't kvetch to friends, and I accepted the pollution as the inevitable consequence of living in China.  Still, better doesn't mean good, and I could never quite manage the trick of not noticing the air. 

TL;DR:  When I was standing on a station platform in Newark, at the beginning of my first trip home from Beijing, I nearly cried with happiness to be breathing the fresh air of urban New Jersey.  I am not kidding.

VI.  My Point, At Last

My point is, I've spent the past two years compiling a list in my head of things that I was afraid to talk about online.  Pollution is one of them.  You have no idea how much I wanted to post about that creepy blood-red post-apocalyptic sun.  And the fact is, maybe I could have.  Maybe I was being too paranoid.

Or maybe not.  In December of 2013, Yu wrote about the ways in which Chinese bloggers circumvent the online censors, saying that:

We have no way of knowing how many words have been blacklisted, or which once-banned words can now be used. Sometimes you can manage to avoid all the taboos and post your opinion, but if it is couched in too explicit an idiom, it will get deleted almost right away.

So we adapt. With the Chinese government so bent on promoting a “harmonious society,” Internet users slyly tailor the phrase for their own purposes. If someone writes, “Be careful you don’t get harmonized,” what they mean is “Be careful you don’t get shut down” or “Be careful you don’t get arrested.” Harmonize has to be the word most thoroughly imbued with the May 35th spirit. Officials are aware, of course, of its barbed meaning on the Internet, but they can hardly ban it, because to do so would be to outlaw the “harmonious society” they are plugging. Harmony has been hijacked by the public.

It's inspiring, in a totally depressing way.  And I do think that the internet is hugely instrumental as a meeting place for Chinese voices that are critical of the government, though as a non-Chinese speaking ex-expat, I would encourage you to read the words of Chinese authors rather than my own if you want to learn more about it.

So, why wouldn't I write about this before?  Three reasons:

1. As previously mentioned, I am a pathologically law-abiding citizen.  I am pretty sure that the one time I break the law, I am going to be the one to get in trouble, so I just don't.
2. I didn't want to play into the vision of China held by the West.  Again, as previously mentioned, I think we have a tendency to glory in the perceived dysfunction of others, be it censorship in China, women's rights in Iran, or education reforms in Florida.  We point our fingers at others and feel superior, ignoring the problems in our own communities.  China is not the evil empire.  
3. Also, we are not blameless!  While I suck at economics and therefore cannot say for certain, I have a sneaking suspicion that the reason pollution is so bad in China is that citizens of developed nations such as our own want cheap things.  And while it's correct to be alarmed at the Chinese government's inefficiency in dealing with the horrific explosion in Tianjin this week, it would be hypocritical to forget our own government's tragic mishandling of disasters past (and probably future).

VII.  Finally
 
Censorship is scary, but this is about more than that.  One of the things I love most about China is its complexity -- the tensions between old and new, between pollution and sustainability, the communal and the individual.  I have learned so much there.  I have been lucky to meet some of my favorite people on the planet.  And I never felt that I could write about the full complexities of the place, that I could do justice to it, without the possibility -- however dim -- of getting in trouble.  In that way, censorship sells China short.

It's hubris, of course.  I'll never do justice to it.  A nation of over a billion people and thousands of years of civilization?  Come on.

But.

A year after that other bus ride, I was on the same bus, passing by the same graffiti'd wall.  I was sure the scrawled tank would have been removed, and yet, there it was, and there was the figure: still dancing.

Yu, Hua. Introduction. China in Ten Words. Trans. Allan Hepburn. Barr. New York: Pantheon, 2011.