Bystander Apathy in China and Other Social Ills, Part 2: Turning Right on a Left Signal*

* for an explanation of the title, see this article in the New York Times.

One reason I decided to return to China temporarily is that there is a certain energy in China that seems absent from Canada. Other Canadian acquaintances have said that this energy comes from the fact that China is still developing whereas most of the “developed” countries have done exactly that, finished developing, so there’s little to strive for, and this feeling of stasis enters the attitude of each citizen. And to be stereotypical about Canadians, we tend to be more distant, to hold back, don’t take sides and often just don’t bother. In China, though, there’s a kind of metallic vehemence in the air. You can practically feel that everyone on the street is striving for something and believe they deserve it. For someone who has gone through long periods of feeling undeserving, I was hoping being in China might give me a bit of a backbone.

But as my friend commented in my post on misconceptions about China, issues like Sanlu Milk Company putting too much melamine into milk comes from precisely from this atmosphere of self-centred entitlement. After Den Xiaoping opened China up economically, there has been a sense that everyone’s lives ought to get better in the new system, and so many people are doing whatever it takes to get ahead.

Going back to Lijia Zhang’s The Guardian article, it seems to be true that Chinese people are mostly brought up to be very good to people they know and distant from people they don’t know. For example, my mother took a job as a director of a research centre in China, and her the administration is responsible for finding her a suitable apartment, buying her a car, and even paying for her gas and assigning her a chauffeur. However, the chauffeur would never think to stop and let people cross the road, despite being a decent guy. In some ways this can be seen as an improvement, after the Orwellian world of the cultural revolution where children were given extra points for denouncing their families, and seems almost like a warped kind of individualism. However it does make the average Chinese person more myopic than the average North American. Added together with the sense of entitlement, this means that most people are unwilling to think about the repercussions of their actions beyond the good it could do for themselves and their own.

I have thought about this question a lot, and one day I realized that it wasn’t Communism that was the problem, as most people in Western countries seem to think it is. Leaving aside the Chinese government’s Maoist version of Communism for a moment, nothing in Communism suggests that a person should risk danger to others for the sake of his or her own gain. In fact that sounds more like Capitalism. Being capitalist means that accruing personal capital eclipses all else, and supposedly this would motivate people into genuine competition and then the “best” would come out on top. I think the current problem in China shows a failure of Capitalism more than it shows a failure of Communism, since this kind of motivation, carried too far, would make people do terrible things for profit, and even if the best does emerge sometime in the future, all the exposed failures along the way would have killed many more babies. In addition, foreign media such as movies and TV shows still subtly show how being rich could improve one’s material life and that this is desirable.

I bounced this idea off my mother and she offered a very helpful amendment. She said that the current state of affairs in China was the combination of both Communism and Capitalism. Before Communism established itself, China still operated by traditional Confucian ethics and Buddhism. The Communist party, believe that religion is the opium of the masses, supplanted it (destroying the “Four Olds”:
Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas)and became a kind of religion, with values such as self-sacrifice and goals such as a classless society (and getting signed at the local party leader’s office when getting married and getting a little red book as a wedding gift…). However, the Chinese government became aware that it also needed to operate on a Capitalist economic system if it were to survive as an international entity, such as having a free market. Recently Cuba has also gone this route after holding out for so long. If older Communist values and procedures went against this Capitalist system, then they could not stay, and the other general values of Communism like self-sacrifice and public service are suspect by association. The problem is not that China is Capitalist but that it is Capitalist after Communism destroyed many traditional values from philosophy and religion that would have provided a check to the evils of Capitalism.

As an analogy, a European parallel to exploiting vast numbers of people for profit would be the slave trade. One might say that traditional Christian values didn’t prevent the slave trade from happening, however against this there is the idea that by the time that the slave trade began in earnest, the Western world had shifted to a predominantly capitalist one already. And also, Christian values was instrumental in appealing for the end of the slave trade as well. Currently in China there isn’t an established moral system like Christianity that people can default to, and new ideas of global humanism haven’t yet taken root. Hence each man for his own and social myopia, because there is no deep-seated moral structure left.

The worst part about this alliance between Communism and Capitalism in China is that Chinese communism isn’t a dictatorship anymore, but a hegemony. This means that it doesn’t make you follow extreme laws and enforce extreme punishments, but adjust itself to incorporate opposition to make opposition difficult. Insofar as Capitalism is the opposite of Communism, then yes, Chinese Communism has already incorporated Capitalism into its modus operandi. What happened in Libya and Egypt probably won’t happen in China anytime soon because in Libya and Egypt there was a dominant system that was seen as oppressive, and there were no other viable option than to start a revolution, and there was very little to lose and a lot to gain. In China, however, both Communism and Capitalism are operating, so there is no one dominant system. I believe that people in general try to avoid conflict unless they have to defend themselves, so if they feel that they can get ahead with opportunities in the Capitalist market, this keeps them docile enough not to start a revolution against the Communist government. However, due to hegemony, Capitalism isn’t so much another really another option outside Communism but under Communist control. Only people in China may not realize this and thus they are exactly as the stereotype accuses Asian North Americans of, of being model minorities, only model minorities in their own country.

With Communist ideals out the window and nothing left from before Communism, Chinese society is a world of tooth and claw. Embezzlement, funding scams and shoddy production all have their roots in placing personal material wealth before all other objectives in a Capitalist system that suddenly promises a more luxurious life. This is probably the mentality of most middle and upper-class people, and to a certain extent also the poor and disenfranchised. They have realized that a harmonious (和谐)Communist society, which the government tries to broadcast, isn’t true. There is profit, and competition, and those who lose, and they would rather trust that the Capitalist system will make them winners. From a year of cultural studies, however, I know that there is a cultural theory that the media lies to consumers, insinuating, for example, that your worth can be raised by cosmetics or having a better car. The problem with China, I think, is that both systems are lying to its citizens. China is in the period of rejecting one lie, but rejecting one lie means buying into another one.

Bystander Apathy in China and Other Social Ills, Part 1

As people around the world know already, a week or so ago, a girl in Foshan, China was run over twice on the street and no one stopped to help her. People both in China and outside it are outraged about what happened. This incident has drawn commentators shaking their fists at the cold social atmosphere in China as well as responders claiming that one cannot use this incident to generalize to a whole nation.

This is the link to news coverage of the incident with footage from CCTV cameras showing the girl being run over twice and people passing by (Unfortunately blog functions don’t seem to work through VPN and I can’t insert this as an embedded video).

My friend in Canada sent me an article in The Guardian about this, since she read my post on misconceptions about China and didn’t entirely agree with me. I realized that I’ve been meaning to talk about the dark side of the moon for almost a year now and haven’t gotten my thoughts together, but this incident showed me that I need to stop procrastinating. Everything to be said will probably take more than this post to cover. Consider this post as an introduction to other posts to follow.

Generalization? Human nature?

Many of the top comments when I first read the article in The Guardian was that yes, this incident is terrible, but it doesn’t mean that everyone in the whole country would be so crass. I owe that this is a fair point. Another counterargument that occurred to me was the case of Kitty Genovese, a waitress in New York who was murdered by a stalker on her way home from work, and although whole blocks heard her, no one helped her. Most psychology courses seem to cover this, and it is an example of bystander apathy and the failure of altruism: most people choose not to help others if they believe that it is not their business or if they might get hurt.

But against this point, helping a little girl on the street in broad daylight is very different from confronting an armed murderer in the dark. In the Kitty Genovese case, the bystanders had a lot to lose in the immediate moment as well as a lot to gain in the immediate moment. Rushing out to help Genovese might mean that she would live, but it might mean severe injuries or death. The case in Foshan had no immediate dangers – it is unlikely that whoever tries to help a little girl on the street would be run over as well. I believe that people in general tend to be more afraid of immediate consequences, which is why behavioural therapy works. This means that in the absence of immediate costs, all the passers-by in Foshan calculated a future cost to themselves and this was a stronger deterrent when weighed against the immediate gain of alleviating a little girl’s suffering. Well, I suppose you could call this their 5-year plan.

Against the first point, yes it is very important not to generalize from one incident to the character of an entire nation. However I do not believe that this was what the writer, Lijia Zhang, was suggesting, the title of the article notwithstanding. She herself being Chinese would know many decent Chinese people, and she is certainly not saying that everyone would behave this way. But her example of the Nanjing judge does show that the legal system in China tends to adopt perspectives like persecuting the young man who helped an injured elderly woman to the hospital. So it is a nation-wide issue.

Because I have lived in China, I have had similar experiences, though thankfully I was never the one run over or hurt. My grandmother, who has a slight anxiety disorder and rather paranoid from her experiences in the cultural revolution, has actually warned me over the phone not to help other people on the road if I see them hurt. I have a post in Ideogrammatica about being attacked with a giant wrench at a glasses store, and thinking back on it, although many people were standing at the door watching the fight progress, no one tried to do or say anything to the two parties except for me (has Guy Debord written about spectator apathy? I wonder*). There was also an incident a few months ago when I was still living in Nanning. I lived beside a small road, almost a highway ramp, which was always neglected for repair for being the dividing road between two municipal districts, and so neither district wants to take responsibility for it. Nanning being in the south of China, many people own mopeds and motorcycles instead of cars, and once when my mother and I were driving by, we saw an overturned moped and a woman sitting on the sidewalk with her leg bleeding. Other cars were passing and no one stopped. I got off to help pull the moped to the sidewalk and ask whether the woman needed help, and all the while cars behind my mother’s were honking their horns at us.

My mother backed me up in this case, but not so when a few weeks after this, we were in a hotel meeting with a professor from Austria, and another lodger returned from the hotel after missing his flight. I’m not sure what sparked the issue, but he sat smoking and calling all the waitresses the Chinese equivalent of “you ugly dinosaur” for half and hour in a carrying voice. I finally told him that he was making other people uncomfortable. He nonchalantly told me he wasn’t calling me ugly and continued to smoke, and then my mother’s meeting ended and they pulled me away, saying that I shouldn’t get involved.

I always wonder about the correct level of social action and compared my views with other Chinese people’s. I was mugged in Toronto (well, Scarborough) on the way home from university a few years ago, and I called the police immediately afterwards from a nearby house. A Chinese student living in the same house as me got mugged 10 minutes after I was, and we were both subpoenaed to go to court and testify. My mother told me that most Chinese people would just think, “it was my bad luck” and not call the police, and she discussed this situation with her PhD supervisor, an elderly Irish gentleman, and he was rather surprised and said that of course he could have called the police as well. Why did I call the police? Did I believe that I could get back what they had stolen? That would have been nice, but more than this it just seemed like what I ought to do. Anyway, the housemate always seemed sort of frosty towards me afterwards and was extremely worried about retribution, and seemed to think that I could bring this upon him by calling the police. The police officers who handled the case eventually reassured him that this was unlikely, and in the end we didn’t have to appear in court, for which he was thankful.

(I also think a lot about this because a friend of mine is consistently the opposite of this kind of immediate apathy (I believe this differs from long-term apathy, where people just don’t care about where the world is going instead of not caring about consequences in the present). For example, he was also mugged but fought back. If someone was being an asshole around him he would tell them so to their face. He would break into an office building to use their computers if he was bored and then helpfully install security programs on their computers before he left. However, he has been going to counseling and so forth for not being able to adopt “normal” responses in social situations, and although he has said that I ought not to encourage him, I sometimes wonder whether the “normal” people ought to be more like him rather than the other way around. Are people with this kind of outlook not normal? Have we just played too many online RPGs when we were young or read too many comic books?)

Anyway, I mean for this introduction to conclude: the incident in Foshan is not a case representing all human nature and it is also not just an individual case. It does reflect the social climate of China and it is symptomatic of much turbulence therein. I do not pretend to be a social analysis expert, but to allude to Robert Frost’s epitaph, maybe I am just trying to resolve a lover’s quarrel.

* incidentally, Chinese people do really tend to adopt the role of a spectator. Maybe it’s the whole modernity thing and flaneur and all that hitting China later than Europe. My father once did a fun experiment in a park in China. He stood in the middle of the bridge and looked into the water at absolutely nothing for 5 minutes, then left. When he came back five minutes later and there was a crowd standing on the bridge staring into the water. There is also the tendency in China for shoppers not to buy from a shop if it looks like there’s no one else buying from it. Usually I go up to a lonely stall and then people follow me. Apparently people get hired to stand around and pretend to be customers so that they would attract other customers. Sheep?

Youth Culture, Fandom and Social Participation in Durarara!!

Contents:
I. Personal background
II. Comparing Baccano! and Durarara!!: narrative structures, emphasis, character relatability
III. How Durarara!! shows the condition of an urban setting, with a bit on parkour at the end
IV. How Durarara!! shows different kind of fandom/participation, through character analysis
V. Duarara!! fandom activities

When Durarara!! first started airing on Crunchyroll, I watched the first two episodes because I liked Baccano! and they have the same original author, Ryohgo Narita. I was expecting something along the lines of Baccano! especially because I read on a summary that Durarara!! would also be certain events told from multiple perspectives, but the first two episodes left me feeling a little “wtf?” The issue with Rio Kamichika wanting to commit suicide in the first two episodes, added to the fact that the main characters were high school students, gave me the impression that the series would revolve around teen angst a lot. I feel that I’ve already outgrown that (or maybe I’m just eager to outgrow it), so I dropped the series. It’s a pity that like me, some other viewers also felt that they couldn’t get the point of the series after a few episodes and stopped watching.

Recently, I’ve been intensely absorbed in Baccano! – I’ve been doing translations of volume 8/9 of the light novels over at Baka-tsuki, and recently I just finished the first volume of the story arc. I remember hearing that there was an Isaac and Miria cameo in Durara!! and that the two series take place within the same universe, so I decided to try Durarara!! again. I’m glad I did, because I’m doing some background reading to prepare for PhD applications, and recently came across studies about fandom and Internet culture. To me, these topics clicked with a lot of what is depicted in Durarara!! .

II. Baccano! : Durarara!! :: form : content/theme

Why are people comparing baccano to Durarara? Yes, they’re by the same author. But that doesn’t mean much of anything.
- NYA, Random Curiosity

(I have a post about Rashomon, Baccano! and Haruhi in the works but it’s stalling because I couldn’t find anything new and intelligent to say, and also because I have to watch series multiple times before I blog about them, and watching Haruhi repeatedly drives me crazy.)

Both Baccano! and Durarara!! are by Narita and do share some similar structures, in terms of an ensemble cast, multiple perspectives and incomplete information that gets gradually revealed. While at this point I still like Baccano! more, probably due to how much work I’ve invested in it, I have to say that Durarara!! is the more “mature” of the two series. It was written after Baccano!, so from this point of view one can say that Narita has smoothed out his rough edges as he developed his craft.

However, the most obvious difference between the two series to me is that they have different purposes, with one emphasizing form more and the other emphasizing themes more. As an analogy from art history, milestones in the field seem to come either from a radical new subject of the artwork or a radically new way of representing it. For example, Gustav Courbet painted peasants working in the fields in the 1800s and this was shocking because peasants had never been thought of as appropriate subjects of painting. In the early 1900s, Marcel Ducahmp painted works like A Nude Descending Staircase; while there have probably been a lot of nudes on staircases in the history of painting, this achievement was one related to form because Picasso represented the human form as geometrical and also tried to depict movement in a stationary medium. I’m oversimplifying this – Courbet also developed a rougher way of painting that offended the Academy, but one can see these two painters as general examples of how art and literature can develop through form or content, if not both.

Baccano! is very entertaining with its larger-than-life characters and fantastic elements. The “point” of the Baccano! anime seems to me to be a formal/structural one. Within the 13-episode series, there are 3 main timelines that proceed simultaneously, and each episode switches back and forth between these. The OAVs brings the viewer back to Gustav St. Germain and Carol at the end to emphasize that there is no one perspective that can be more valid than any other, and there is no beginnings and endings even though the tidy human mind likes to think there are (from what I’ve read of the novels, this seems to be mentioned in the novels but it isn’t stressed as much as in the anime), and the immortality of the characters just makes this point more salient. The anime is brilliant in that it leads viewers through 3 plotlines to arrive at a resolution for all of them, and one plotline can give clues and answers to events in the other ones. The most dazzling aspect isn’t necessarily the events in the plot (which, to tell the truth, are still pretty dazzling) but how the plot is executed and what this says about human cognition and our need for closure.

Durarara!! is different in that while it does include an ensemble cast and does have narration from multiple perspectives, the execution of the anime’s plot is pretty linear compared to Baccano!. It seems that Narita has confidence in the form that he has developed over Baccano! and is now building up more of the content with Durarara!! Like Baccano!, Durarara!! also has amazing characters – e.g. I feel like Izaya is almost like a more sadistic version of Huey Laforet – but it places its content more at the fore. There is less action and that makes the anime seem slower, but events in the plot, rather than the plot’s structure, is more reflective of the human condition.

Jutester wrote on the recommendations section for Durarara!! in Myanimelist.com that the two series are similar in that they are both about underground groups in society, and this is true; there are gangs in both – organized crime like the Mafia in Baccano! and youth gangs, underground doctors, and illegal immigrants in Durarara!!. However they are handled differently. Baccano glorifies in violence and gore, like it’s an animated Quentin Tarantino film. The psychopathic Ladd Russo is probably the best example of this – punching an opponent until both fists are bloody, dancing in a pool of blood, shooting a child in the head, etc. But while Durarara!! glorifies in action, such as Shizuo Heiwajima throwing things like pop machines and Celty’s chases on her motorcycle, it doesn’t figure violence in an entertaining way as much as Baccano! does. From very early on in the series, Masaomi narrates that he wants to protect Mikado from the darker side of society, and the actions of the renegade Yellow Scarves members are horrifying rather than appealing. In addition, the “twisted love” in Durarara!! seem more frightening than the twisted relationships in Baccano!, even though technically they’re on the same level of twistedness. For example, Ladd and Lua in Baccano! are pretty messed up, as well as Huey’s relationship with his children, but they don’t seem as creepy as weird love trapezoid between Mika Harima, Seiji, Namie, and Celty’s head, and the entourage of girls who worship Izaya. Speaking of Izaya, I also feel that while the information brokers in Baccano! seem very cool for the extent of their powers, Izaya in Durarara!! is meant to be doubted despite being appealing, seeing as how he shamelessly uses people and puts the focus characters through a lot of misery. In Durarara!!, I think, there are more clear villains.

On the flipside of villains, something which Baccano! lacks and Durarara!! has is characters viewers can relate to. There isn’t really anyone in Baccano! that viewers can relate to right off the bat, because the world it depicts, 1930s American gang warfare and train hijacking, is so far removed from our own, even without any anime-esque twists. While there are elements of profundity like Claire’s solipsism , and his idea that human relationships makes one’s world bigger, there aren’t too many instances of desires or quandaries or losses that exactly match what real people today experience.

Also, the two series are both about gangs but they are very different gangs. In Baccano!, the gangs are well-established organized crime families run largely by adults, but the gangs in Durarara!! are mostly packs of kids, and I think this is the series’ strong point. In Episode 18, Masaomi singles out Horoda for being too old and tells other members not to invite adults anymore, because they’re just junior high students and wants neither to fight against adults nor be controlled by adults. In the end, when Horoda and the Blue Squares members reveal that they’d taken over the Yellow Scarves from the inside, all the remaining members appear to be adult or approaching adult age. I remember in Children’s Literature class, the professor says that a lot of young adult stories “get the parents out of the way” before the story starts – either they’re dead or missing or away on a trip or whatever, because these stories tend to want to build into a world just for children(1). Masaomi’ comments seem to reflect this. All children feel at some point in their lives that parents can ruin things and they just want to bump around and see where they end up, which children’s literature allows them to do. Durarara!! shows a world where there aren’t many adults, and rather it’s up to interactions among teenagers to sort things out, and so the teenage/young adult audience might find the series more compelling than Baccano! because they would see themselves more in the series’s characters. Ultimately, which side of the line Mikado will end up in and how he will get there, and whether Masaomi can extricate himself from a gang war that he’d rather not be in, stand in for all the questing of young people to find their place in society, as trite as that sounds. So, I must admit that I misread the first couple of episodes, and the series actually does have very strong points and a lot of depth.

III. The Urban Condition

So uh, anybody figure out who the main character was? Some say it was Celty, others say it was Mikado, and people even say that there is none. […] In my opinion its Ikebukuro itself, since I felt that the events spiralled around the city itself, but then again, that’s just me.
– Click, Random Curiosity

A lot of people who watch Durarara!! noticed that the anime prominently featured Ikebukuro. There is also a discussion on Random Curiosity about the final episode where Simon punches Izaya into a sculpture that says “LOVE,” where fans debate whether it’s in Shinjuku or Ikebukuro and one fan, “ammato,” says that he/she heard that the production team actually went around Tokyo and assigned where certain events would take place. Hence, Click in the quote up there is correct that Ikebukuro is more than just a backdrop – it has its own importance. (I really wish that I had my notes with me, because a couple of years ago there was a seminar on anime culture at Ryerson University in Toronto where one professor talked about the relationships and significances that different areas of Tokyo such as Ikeburkuro and Akihabara had to anime fans. I can’t remember what he said, but it seemed to be along the lines that there are many places in Ikebukuro that cater to fans.) Anyway, in this section the focus is more generally the city and how the city, Ikebukuro or not, provides an important setting that is also a comment on the condition of many young people today, and sets up a lot of tensions in the anime series.

I think urban studies is a specific branch of the Humanities, but I haven’t really done any work in this area. I only have a vague memory that Charles Baudelaire, an early 1900s French poet, had about the idea of the flaneur, which is someone who walks around the city and looks at urban sights and urban people, which is sort of like window shopping + people watching today, and very general stuff from Social Studies class. In the 1800s and 1900s, the city was just developing into the structure it was now. In the Industrial Revolution migration of people from the countryside to the cities, social structures in the country, such as the relationship between landowners and peasant farmers, changed. This caused a lot of concern among the middle and upper classes regarding the breakdown of traditional hierarchies in the city where you could meet anybody. The absence of a hierarchy and the everyone for themselves attitude, added to poor working conditions, also made crime in the city a big concern. In some ways this is still the case.

More abstractly, life in the city also changed people’s self-concept. In rural areas and in feudal societies, a person’s place in society was likely determined by the work that he or she is doing, which was most likely passed down from older family members, plus being a member of whichever church/congregation. Most people lived by identifying themselves vis-a-vis immediate family first, then the community, which was probably a village or a town, and for most people this would have been as far as identification got. Middle-class merchants and craftspeople would have had a bigger world view since they engaged in trade and production, and of course the upper classes had an international mentality and could probably speak a few languages. But most common people would not have had the chance to feel that they were a part of a world or even a part of a country. But being in the city, where there was every kind of person imaginable, plus the sheer number of people, made one quite aware that there was a huge world out there and that one person was quite small.

Also, since the city developed due to industry, there was the sense that the city was a giant machine and people got sucked into it. This idea of the city still stays with us today, because people who work in urban areas like to go to the beach or the woods or something non-urban for holidays. Part of this is true. To be sort of Marxist (not meaning a Communist here though), industrialization does make the individual worker a cog in a machine. In feudal societies, perhaps even peasants had the sense that the land they were working on has been handed down through their ancestors, and it gave them a sense of ownership and pride in the work they put into it, but in the factory, workers do small repetitive tasks for the owner of the enterprise.(2) However, industrialization, while messing with traditional hierarchies and identities, also provided a new playground. It is possible that in the city a lowly peasant could work hard and become wealthy through the capitalist system, whereas this wouldn’t have been possible in the feudal system. (The American dream should be amended to be the American urban dream. Few immigrants go to America to be farmers, for instance). So the city provided a sense of possibility but also a sense of danger in that anything could happen to you, and also a faint sense that taken altogether, the city wasn’t quite human and sort of mechanical (For a comparison between the experience of working with a machine and the experience of being jostled in the city, see Bejamin’s “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” section VII).

Benjamin writes that Baudelaire was caught between two aspects of the city – on the one hand, he could be a flaneur and enjoy the teeming possibility of the city as a detached observer, but on the other hand, as a person being among the city crowds, he was also a part of the masses. A quotation from Benjamin is that “He [Baudelaire] becomes deeply involved with them[city crowds], only to relegate them to oblivion with a single glance of contempt.” (“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” section VI). I might add that other people also dismiss Baudelaire with a single glance of contempt too. Whereas in a village you knew everyone who lived around you, in the city this isn’t the case, and so critics in the 1900s talked about alienation in the cities, a criticism we still hear today.

So, going by these effects of being a part of the city, there is alienation from the traditional references of personal identity, which are no longer present, however there is also the possibility that people can develop into anything they want. There is fleeting glances of contempt but there is also anonymity if one is trying to escape from the law. All of these aspects of being in a big city is central to the development of Durarara!!. Toshi left an insightful discussion comment on Random Curiosity that if we apply Campbellian archetypes, Mikado is like the young man in tribal societies who leaves his home to go into the forests to become a man. I agree that the Campbellian archetype is still apt even for the 21st century, except boys no longer go into forests to prove they are men anymore, they go into cities. The cities is where a new identity can be forged and sustained through new connections, but it’s also where young people can fall really, really hard.

In the first half of the anime, Mikado repeatedly emphasizes that he wants his life to become more interesting, and that’s one reason he accepted Masaomi’s offer to enroll in Raira Academy in Tokyo. This is the aspect of Mikado that would take advantage of a city’s possibilities. The first episode seems a bit confusing but that’s probably exactly what the producers want us to feel, which is to feel like Mikado experiencing the city intimately for the first time, with its legends and rival factions and quirky characters. It also makes Mikado and the audience feel that there’s a whole web of material that we don’t know about, which there is, and this is the aspect of the city where individuals might feel alienated and insignificant. Some audiences (like me) might have felt alienated enough to drop the series, but I think the point of the series is that the audience should overcome what amounts to culture shock along with Mikado.

Because anything in the city is possible, there’s a question of where Mikado would go, whether he will be swallowed by the anonymity of the city and become a drone, or whether he will become a man in the wilderness. He obviously doesn’t plan on becoming a drone, however soft-spoken and awkward he is. But “becoming a man” is also fraught with danger, since anything is possible and there are all kinds of people in Ikebukuro, from mad otakus to headless fairies to hell-bent traffic officers to rival street gangs. Many young characters of the series is in a similar situation as Mikado, in that they are trying on identities and allegiances and fandoms in order to find who they are. The question surrounding Mikado becomes: what aspects of the multitudinous city will he imbibe to form his identity as a man, and are they the right ones?

(Before I get into answering this question in the next section, I want to add that part of the mechanicalness of the city is that it controls the flow of human bodies. To drive in the city you have to obey traffic lights, for instance. But something we might take for granted is that most public places are ordered into grids or webs of some kind, meaning you can’t take the most direct point from A to B “as the crow flies.” Most people probably don’t see this as a restriction, since we generally still end up where we want to go. But we still find that breaking these rules seem pretty cool. In Durarara!!, Celty is amazing for her mastery of the Ikebukuro streets on her motorcycle/horse, and Shizuo is amazing because he can literally change the urban setting by picking up and throwing almost anything that’s not a concrete building. I thought that part of the humour of how he used a highway signpost to smash the car that Saki’s captors were fleeing in (Ep. 21) lies in that he’s abusing an urban sign which is normally used for peacefully directing traffic to completely smash someone’s vehicle, not to mention deprive other drivers of directions, at least until it gets fixed.

Even if Shizuo can’t pick up buildings, He and Izaya both know parkour, which is sadly underemphasized in the anime. Wikipedia says that the objective of parkour is to “take the most direct path through an obstacle as rapidly as that route can be traversed safely,” or in another words, A to B as the crow flies and working around the obstacles that the city places in the way. In the philosophy of parkour, “Urban reclamation,” which is “the idea that by creating an urban landscape around us, society has robbed us of something dear to us” and “We re-imagine the concrete and architecture as we see fit, and are no longer bound by the rules of ‘stairs’ and ‘barriers’ and ‘fences’” (Tran, “Two Theories on Parkour Philosophy”) For Izaya, who manipulates humanity, parkour can be seen as another kind of manipulation, but at least Shizuo can be a force for good even if he doesn’t always feel that he is. In Celty, Izaya, and Shizuo, there are characters who are not physically bound by the limitations of the city.

(Interestingly, in the article “Two Theories on Parkour Philosophy,” there is a section on “Human Reclamation” that contrasts the movement of parkour to movement up the social ladder of capitalism, which most people are “conditioned” to believe they will be “perfect capitalists,” but
“reality and statistics have only shown that this is a very rare occurrence and most people will remain in the same place or social stratum for most of their lives.” So, this goes back to the idea of the city as being a place where anything is possible – but actually few people “make it.” Working around the boundaries of the city becomes symbolic for working around the system of capitalist production that the city stands for.)

IV. Different Kinds of “Fandom”

With “fandom,” I don’t mean just fans of particular media productions – I mean more loosely groups who actively participate in anything that gives them a sense of identity.

Durarara!! shows many different ways that its urban youth focus characters engage with society to build their identity. There’s Izaya, who manipulates everyone while claiming to love humanity; Anri, who can’t engage with people, and Saika, whose relation of “love,” similar to Izaya’s “love,” brings destruction; again, the love triangles between Mika, Seiji, Namie and Celty’s head; the scary makeup girls who bully Anri, who seem to be swallowed in commodity culture, and their rapidly gesticulating boyfriend; Walker and Erika, the otakus with a twisted sense of reality; Masaomi, who becomes the leader of the Yellow Scarves and is mired in gang warfare; and Mikado, the anonymous leader of the Dollars.

Basically, I see Durarara!! showing two kinds of social engagement. One is an obsessive, (self-)destructive engagement with one aspect of society that makes everything not of this aspect to be expendable, and another is a balanced engagement that takes into account both one’s private sense of self and one’s social roles with a sense of responsibility. Some characters have a sense of this all along, and some grow into it. One can say that Celty and Shinra, two older characters, also go through this path as well. Shinra, being in love with Celty, wants to hide the knowledge of her head from her, but realizes that he is perhaps being selfish. Likewise, in the beginning of the series, Celty is very adamant about finding her head, but she comes to accept that lacking her head does not unmake who she is.

To start with more minor characters, the creepy makeup girls and their boyfriend. They seem like they’re trying to fit into a certain popular image, which in the representation of the anime, seems outrageous and ridiculous because it’s overdone and pretentious. The boyfriend, especially, seems to reflect how young people will overload themselves with signs of a subculture to shore up their sense of belonging to that group, hence the hair and the gesticulating that proclaims himself as part of street culture, but again, overdone.

I don’t know how to analyze Izaya, and it seems to me that he’s one character in the series who isn’t quite human in character – all other characters, when they do wrong, seem to have a reason and a background story to explain it, but Izaya doesn’t. Anyway. The obsession on the part of Mika, Seiji, and Namie doesn’t really need to be explained, except to emphasize that Mika is so blinded by her obsession that she’s willing to accept a severed head in Seiji’s possession and would get cosmetic surgery for a chance to be with him, and Anri also said that Mika and Anri were only friends because they each used the other to make themselves look better. And Seiji is willing to grievously hurt Mika to protect the relationship between him and the head, and Namie is willing to completely disregard the law to protect Seiji, kidnap people to do experiments on them, etc.

Next, there’s Walker and Erika. When I first heard about them, I was immediately interested, because having anime fans in anime is a very brave thing to do because the production is confronting the audience with themselves. I first thought they were sort of cute, and it was very brave of Walker to save Saki. His otaku-esque rant while he is confronting the Blue Squares who kidnapped Saki was one of the highlights of the episode : “In real life, people don’t come to the rescue like in movies and cartoons, and so this girl’s been trashed like she has. So I was thinking…if a hero appeared now to save her, perhaps the world would become two-dimensional, and I’d become the saviour of the world with superpowers at my command!” (ep. 18)

Basically, Walker and Erika espouse the philosophy that reality and fiction aren’t separate. This is perhaps what enables Walker to walk up to a gang and save someone they’re torturing – he sees his actions as a part of a fictitious story, a two-dimensional world (which it is from the audience’s POV, hence part of the fun in this scene). I think this episode portrays an obsession with the two-dimensional world in a positive way, because it gives people courage to do what they wouldn’t dare do otherwise.

However, Erika and Walker quickly become extremely creepy. I haven’t read the novels but apparently they torture people according to how people in anime, manga and light novel series are tortured. The most disturbing of all is Erika in episode 21. While Izaya is goading Masaomi with the theory that he will always be haunted by his past, Erika is basically saying that Masaomi can just pretend that the conflict with the Blue Squares never happened. Later, scenes of a troubled Masaomi pacing the streets of Ikebukuro are interspersed with Erika and Walker in an anime store, and Erika saying hat she can edit reality to be what she wants and can get rid of everything that she doesn’t find interesting. The scene shows her casually throwing one of those ball container things into a garbage can. While this isn’t as bad as educational critics saying that violence in the media causes incidents like the Columbine shootings, it has a more troubling undertone in what it says about how a engagement with fiction might distort a person’s social outlook. From this, I find how Narita handles Walker and Erica to be very realistic, by neither criticizing nor glorifying the otakus, and hence I still like Walker and Erica as complex characters.

Saki’s situation is also troubling. Again, not having read the novels, I’m not sure exactly how Izaya collects girls who have been traumatized in their past, but Saki as the one example in the anime would do anything for Izaya, as she states in Masaomi’s flashbacks. During the conflict between the Yellow Scarves and the Blue Squares, Saki gets kidnapped and tortured and hospitalized on Izaya’s orders. I suppose, purely theoretically, being traumatized in some way is a big wound to anyone’s self-concept, especially children. Izaya might exploit this fragile sense of self and give the girls a sense that they have a legitimate place alongside him, and they do as he commands because he is the only person in their lives to offer them a sense of place. Saki’s change through the series seems to be that she has found another reference point for her personal definition, which is Masaomi. A lot of fans seem to find her really creepy too, but I think the last episode redeems her, when she calls Simon’s sushi restaurant and tells him everything that Isaya plotted in an effort to save Masaomi.

Masaomi’s situation has a slightly different inflection than the other characters. He’s no longer trying to be a part of something to give himself a sense of identity, but trying to get away from certain things in his past that makes him someone he doesn’t want to be. This can be just as bad as unquestioning participation. One thing in his past is the Yellow Scarves, whose leader position he grudgingly takes up again, and another is Saki, whom he couldn’t bear to visit and whom he wants to break up with. At first, around Masaomi are two competing choices. One is Izaya’s philosophy. Izaya says to Masaomi in Ep.20 that since people use their accounts of the past as a guide for their actions, then it is possible to think of the past as “God.” Izaya uses this chain of reasoning to tell Masaomi that since he feels guilty about what happened to Saki in the past, then Saki will be like Kida’s “God,” and that he will never shake free of it. The other philosophy is Erika’s philosophy that Masaomi can believe what he wants and forget about what happened to Saki if he doesn’t like it.

However, Kyohei (Dotachin) gives Masaomi another choice, and that is to overcome his guilt and “be responsible to both the past and the future.” This was stated in rather abstract terms, but Masaomi manages this by the end of the series. Not wanting a repeat of what happened between the Yellow Scarves and the Blue Squares, Masaomi goes to face Horoda, the upstart leader of the Yellow Squares, proclaiming that he’d been running from his past but he is going to actively catch up with his past this time.

Lastly, there’s Mikado. Contrary to Masaomi, who just wants to be a normal high school student, Mikado wants his life to be extraordinary, which is one reason he went to Tokyo. This makes Mikado the character that most of the audience can relate to, because most audience members are probably teenagers and young adults who wished that their lives were more interesting, and not the reverse like Masaomi, which is wishing that their lives were more normal. Hence, what Mikado does in the series would command the most attention, and more than anyone else, his path serves as a guide among all the other clearly dysfunctional paths other characters take.

Unlike other characters in this section, Mikado doesn’t jump into a social faction to find a place for himself and he doesn’t commit himself to actions just to prove himself. For instance, he advocates peace when some of the Dollars members agitate for conflict with the Yellow Scarves, even when he doesn’t know that the leader of the Yellow Scarves is really Masaomi. In other words, he seems to feel secure enough in his position (and the position of Dollars) that he doesn’t feel that he needs to prove anything by committing everyone to a gang war. He’s already proved himslef. In the middle of the series, when Mikado is dealing with threats from Namie, he has proved that he can mobilize all of the Dollars members and overwhelm Namie with numbers acting in a pacifist way. The nature of the Dollars, contrary to other youth gangs, is nonviolent; Mikado tells the Dollars members only to stare at Namie and her employees, but not to actually do anything else to them. He has tried to influence the Dollars to become a socially benevolent group, for example through public acts of charity. Most importantly, he can let go and disband Dollars when it seems that being a member risked targetting by the Yellow Scarves. All in all, for Mikado, the Dollars is important but not such a crucial part of his identity that he would hold on to it above all other things, such as the safety of its individual members, and it doesn’t colour his perception of his own situations to the exclusion of everything else. In this way, Mikado strikes a balance that many of the character in the series lack.

One quote from Celty that strikes me is in episode 23, when she says that Anri, Masaomi, and Mikado need to meet not as the leaders of their respective factions, but as themselves. But what is “self” but a collection of identities, and what are identities except that they describe the self as belonging in various groups? So how can there be a self for the three Durarara!! characters totally apart from their identities as Slasher, Yellow Scarf leader, and Dollars leader? What Celty seems to be saying is not that there is some abstract “self” apart from identities found in social groups, but that one’s investment in one social group should not overwhelm the other aspects of one’s identity. In this case, it would mean that none of the three characters ought to place their relationship to their respective groups above their friendship for one another.

In this respect, Durarara!! is extremely postmodern. In postmodernity, everything is constantly shifting, there is no fixed centre of reference and nothing is absolute. Postmodernity describes secularization, since less and less people are sure about all-powerful deities and their absolute authority. Postmodernity also rewrites history, showing that multiple events and people contributed to the unfolding of one event rather than attribute the event to one remarkeable person.(3) It is where we get novels like Wicked, and where we get narratives structured like the ones in Baccano!. Identity, too, is part of this. There is no single “self” that is always going to be stable through time. All the other gangs in Durarara!! seem to espouse an older and outdated sense of identity, where there are feuds between factions and revenge; Yellow Scarves members calling Masaomi “Shogun” seems to reflect that they are more traditional in their idea of hierarchies.

Dollars reflects a more postmodern sense of identity. There are no hierarchies, no defining characteristics, no fixed memberships, and an unknown leader. In Episode 21, some members of Dollars call out in the chatroom for their leader to do something about the impending gang war, and also question the leader’s choices and capabilities. However, the members come to the agreement that it’s not up to their leader but themselves, because the group has gone beyond the conventional notion of gangs where a group of people “belong” to a person who leads them, but rather, “It’s not about who Dollars belong to – it belongs to us.” In this move, Dollars crosses the line between the social and private self. We see in Masaomi the conflict between what he wants personally and what he must do as the leader of the Yellow Scarves because the Yellow Scarves is external to his sense of self and calls on him to negate other aspects of his character to prove his allegiance to the Yellow Scarves. Group membership is the worst peer pressure. However, in Dollars, there is no difference between the outside group to which one belongs and the members’ sense of self, since they can join and leave as they please – in another words, participating in Dollars would never risk one’s self-concept because Dollars never tries to impose on its members that it’s more important than any other identity that its members might hold. The fact that Dollars members refuse to disband comes from their own sense of self as responsible individuals and not because the leader of the Dollars calls on them to prove their allegiance.

This difference between Dollars and the other groups is most saliently expressed in the colours of other gangs versus the Dollars’ transparency. What I have been talking about with Masaomi, the scary makeup girls, the otakus, and Seiji, Mika, and Namie is that something external to themselves – either a group or a person – has drawn them into an allegiance where all other allegiances are rendered unimportant or impossible. If one participates in a colour gang, for example by joining the Yellow Scarves, one has to be yellow and no other colour, and this is often shown on the characters’ clothing. However, Dollars does not require this of its members, and it has no outward sign of membership. Not requiring that its members show a particular colour symbolically means that it lets its members take on other identities in addition to being a Dollars member. The anime handles this well stylistically, by making unnamed colour gang members gray silhouettes with only their colour to identify them, making the majority of passers-by grey, and having all the members of the Dollars suddenly erupt into their full spectrum of colour when they choose to act on Mikado’s call to stare at Namie.

V. The Fandom of Durarara!!

The Dollars ARE real. And you’re a part of them. We are real people trying to make a real difference in this world. And we don’t WANT the world to take us seriously, because then our group would be infiltrated by a bunch of assholes that just want to ruin everything. Yes we all have different cells (our friends, and people near us), but that doesn’t make us separate gangs as long as we all continue to collaborate and contribute by keeping communications with these forums.

– Umbra Serpens, ID TzE2UXLq, Dollars BBS

People speak of Urban youth culture a lot, and in general the city is seen as a place where youth culture is established, because the city has spots outside adult surveillance and young people can move freely to find themselves. While the roots of urban youth culture isn’t going to disappear any time soon, I feel that in the West at least, the Internet is the home to more subcultures than the streets.

In some ways, Dollars is extremely similar to the medium it operates through, which is the Internet. The Internet is postmodern because there is no centre and technically no hierarchies; there is no central website that governs other websites, and people connect to the internet and leave, whatever identities they have outside it. The Internet is anonymous, which translates to the Dollars’ transparency. In addition, the Dollars is shown to be all-pervasive in Ikebukuro even though they aren’t seen by marked symbols of membership, such as when member after member pop up and help Anri escape from the Yellow Scarves on an unplanned relay rescue. Similarly, the Internet today is ubiquitous, as smartphones can connect to the Internet and one can access the unseen Internet almost wherever one goes. Mikado’s words as the anime ends is that Dollars can be considered the city, but I would say that Dollars is the Internet as well.

Or maybe another perspective is that Dollars and its members are the go-between between the virtual world and the concrete one. Many people join Dollars (or any other group) because group membership makes them feel that they are affecting some positive change, if this change is only just to make oneself happier. A group like Dollars may start on the Internet, but it has real life consequences for the characters, for example when Mikado sees on the news that graffiti has been cleaned up overnight due to his nudge the day before, not to mention Dollars helping to save Anri’s life through the cell phone network. The importance of the Internet to Dollars is that it provides a network that can be called upon to change the world.

At the next level, although Durarara!! is an anime, it has real life consequences for the audience’s real life. There is a Dollars BBS made to look like the one in the anime. It’s a mind-blowing project, because as you face the log-in page, you feel that the difference between reality and fiction is collapsing. Like Dollars in the anime, people can come and go as they please, use different user names if they choose, follow other members’ proposals or not. It’s all entirely voluntary and there is no leader, other than perhaps administrations. As implied in the quotation opening this section, some people are concerned that this kind of group cannot last among a world still dominated by hierarchical groups. But just as parkour is a symbolic rebellion against the tiers of the capitalist system, Dollars can be a symbolic alteration of conventional hierarchy. The fact that some members don’t need to be “taken seriously” is like what I said about postmodernity, that there is power in being fluid, unstable, and outside the system of punishments and acknowledgements. In addition, the problem that I looked at in the last section with everyone except for Mikado comes from taking their groups too seriously, making it more important than anything in the character’s life. Not insisting that the real world Dollars be taken seriously by the rest of the world may also protect members from investing too much in the group itself to the exclusion of other aspects of their lives.

On the BBS there are also threads proposing missions to better the world in small ways, such as giving others confidence and helping each other with life issues (I’ve barely scratched the surface of the missions – I’m sure there have been other worthy projects that I haven’t seen). It was started by fans of the anime, and it’s still bound to its roots, but it has great potential to become a major force. I am slightly worried that the enthusiasm with the real-life Dollars group will fade as fans move on to other animes, but I hope that this will not be the case. For everyone who wishes their life were more interesting, if members do complete small acts of kindness in their life and get positive reinforcement from other members, this will constantly remind them of what it means to be a part of Dollars. Then, when a crisis does come, members may remember that they are a part of Dollars and react accordingly. For example, if an earthquake hits the city you are living in, it would be wonderful if a message can be sent to all the Dollars members in the city, and whomever is safe and has no other obligations can meet up and try to help others.

The whole last section was spent analyzing different kinds of social participation, with the conclusion that the colourless nature of the Dollars helps its members to stay and do good without compromising their selfhood. What the Dollars in Durarara!! did for its members is what Durarara!! would do for its audience – make the audience into intelligent and socially responsible people and not Walkers and Erikas, who simply put reality they don’t like in the trash. And it looks like it’s working.

—

(1) The first example that comes to mind of children’s literature where there are no parents is Harry Potter. Of course Harry doesn’t want his parents to be dead, but it means that his adventures are negotiated through an interaction with his peers rather than through teachings by his parents. And step-parents don’t count as parents – I remember my prof for Children’s Lit saying that having step-parents in a story is an automatic cue for readers to hate them as surrogates for all the adults ruining their lives. Hence the Dursleys.

(2) This is an oversimplification and I don’t entirely agree that the two systems are so different. One could say that in feudal societies, a lot of work that peasants do is for the landowner and not themselves, and in contemporary production there are still many incidences of small business and individual craftsmanship. But it’s more a question of the scale of the two systems.

(3) For example, in recent decades historians have been trying try to explore the Holocaust and WWII in the West through examining social forces rather than put most of the blame Hitler, but many people are unhappy about this because that seems to absolve him of guilt. Personally, I don’t think it does, because explanation doesn’t absolve guilt, it just explains guilt.

Misconceptions about China

This follows neatly after my last post about how China was badly portrayed in The Mummy 3, and we’re also just over the 90th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, which was on July 1st. Anyway, in this post I’m going to go along with the powers that be, while conceptualizing a future post that really doesn’t.

Last week, I finally got MSN to hook up with Facebook with the help of some friends, and so I was able to talk to people on Facebook without using a VPN. The first person who messaged me on Facebook chat was my MA supervisor. He had just returned to Canada from a research leave in Taiwan, and one thing he said in our conversation is that the West still holds the illusion that it’s superior to the East. I commented that even if the West admits that they cannot be said to be more technologically superior anymore, they still believe that they are morally superior. “Another illusion,” my supervisor said. He noticed that much of the interaction in Asia goes on with complete disregard for what the West says and does.

It’s important to me that the world doesn’t view China as the incarnation of pure evil. As a Chinese-Canadian who has lived in some very remote corners of the world (a suburb in Galway, Ireland, for example), I’ve noticed how Chinese immigrants were treated as second-class citizens based on the view the media has crafted about China. At first it was that China is an extremely undeveloped country. No one in Ireland in 1995 believed that China had highways or buildings over 3 floors high, and people a school probably thought of me as a refugee. I remember being very puzzled as one boy firmly declared to me that China must not exist because he hasn’t heard of it. Then, as China became more powerful and developed, the conception was that yes, China is developed now, but it’s going in a wrong way. It’s a threat that needs to be tamed. Primarily it’s based on a notion of moral superiority.

How Chinese immigrants are treated aside, another reason that the image of China matters to me is that it’s an alternative in a world where real alternatives are disappearing all the time to be replaced with pseudoindividuality. Admittedly, China is managed with a completely different philosophy and setup than in the West. However, difference does not entail a division of good and evil. I must emphasize that I have not been brainwashed and I can clearly see China’s shortcomings, however most media ends up building an extremely negative image of tyranny and poisonous food. If everyone subscribes to this image it would influence them to reject positive differences as negative ones.

There are 2 ways to comprehensively build a positive image of a subject. One is to contradict the negative things said about it, and the other is to say that yes, those negative things exist, but there are other positive ones to balance things out. In this post, I’m doing the former. Below are some points I have noticed in China that contradict things I’ve heard in North America.

1) There is no recycling, and more generally, Chinese people don’t care about the environment at all.

While I was living with my grandmother in Beijing, you couldn’t tell the Recycling Bin apart from the Garbage Bin apart because garbage had completely caked both, and for someone who was willing to dig through my housemates’ garbage to short out recyclables, I was disgusted. However, there actually is recycling here – people didn’t use the Recycling Bin because they had their own system. In China, one would see many men and women on tricycles loaded with styrofoam and cardboard. That’s the recycling force.

If you have things you want to recycle, just find one of these people. There are usually a couple hanging around each apartment complex and are easy to find. Tell them you have stuff to give them and take them to your apartment. They will usually bring a scale with them to weight the recyclables you have, and pay you a small amount for taking them off your hands. Everything that I could recycle in Canada I found that I could also recycle here.

The objection is that it’s not centralized, however centralized recycling doesn’t necessarily encourage recycling. I had friends who still threw their bottles into the garbage in Canada, and once the bag is tied and the garbage truck leaves, they’ll still end up in a landfill. In some ways, the system in China where a monetary reward is always offered for recyclables could encourage recycling more. Not being centralized just means that it’s harder to earn a living if you’re one of those men and women on tricycles, but that has nothing to do with how much recycling is done.

As for the environment in general, Chinese tech companies are creating energy-efficient air conditioners just like Western companies are, and in Nanning, the city I’m staying in now, made a rule that no one can lower the temperature of their air conditioners below 26 degrees Celsius or they would have their power cut off. This isn’t an idle threat, either; a couple of weeks ago the city experienced mass power outages because the power grid was overloaded.

For an interesting movie on the same topic, there is a movie whose name translates to How Yukong Moved the Mountains – but not the documentary about the cultural revolution under the same name. Yu Gong Yi Shan (How Yukong Moved the Mountains)is a 2007 mockumentary about Shuang Liang Li, a factory worker who devised a plan to remove a slag pile of 10, 000, 000m^3 over ten years to make his hometown living environment healthy and safe. It’s quite inspiring. You could say that this is propaganda to make other countries believe that China is doing something about its nasty environmental record, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t influence its Chinese audience to be more conscientious.

The main point is not to judge other nations just on surface discrepancies and not to measure them with the same ruler and apply the same system. When I first got here, I was unhappy that many manufactured products, such as cookies and toilet paper, would be individually wrapped while sold in a large package. My friends in Canada have also joked that imported junk food from China, while tasty, isn’t very environmentally friendly – it seemed that China has traded off environment for convenience. However, I realized that there are other factors as well. Compared to developed countries, a greater percentage of Chinese people live in very poor conditions, such as a shack beside train tracks. There’s no humidity regulation and of course rodents and insects are all around. If food isn’t individually wrapped in a larger package then it would be inedible within a day or two, and similarly in a monsoon season type of weather toilet paper would be completely mushy in a couple of days.

2) The government completely disregards its ethnic minorities.

Especially after what happened in Tibet before the Olympics, everyone in the world frowns even more on China’s human rights and how they treat ethnic minorities. China is in a very interesting position for having 55 groups of ethnic minorities in addition to the most widespread Han majority. Places like North America and Australia probably pat themselves on the back for having Native reserves and programs while lambasting China for wiping them out.

The situation in Tibet was awful, and the Dalai Llama was indeed wronged when the Communists “liberated” Tibet, however it doesn’t necessarily mean that every minority is oppressed. Currently I’m living in Guangxi, west of the better-known Guangdong (Canton). In this province, the largest group of ethnic minorities is the Zhuang group, and this province is called the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. How much autonomy this place has is doubtful, but I heard that a certain level of government (my Chinese isn’t good so I didn’t catch which one) is required to have a certain percent of members of the Zhuang minority on board. Of course, that could just be in name only, and you can say that the rest of the members pick one they think is more in line with their own views, but certainly North America and Australia has a long way to go before it gets even here.

Additionally, art- and media-wise, ethnic minorities are always included in things like New Years Gala shows. On the central CCTV channels, there’s a channel specifically devoted to music, and every evening there’s a program where musicians from ethnic minorities are invited to perform. Of course, this can be token multiculturalism, but North America has definitely applauded itself for doing just these things. And as a classmate has said, one can argue about the theoretical falseness of such things all day, but people who participate in these activities often still feel empowered.

The most important factor to support that China supports its ethnic minorities is that they are exempt from the one-child policy. This policy has also drawn a lot of ire, because most people in the West believe that it’s not the government’s business how many children a family wants to have. This kind of emphasis on the individual pursuit of happiness overriding the needs of a community is perhaps not really something to be proud of, but that’s not the topic so I won’t get into it. Anyway, middle and upper class members of the Han majority nation can only have one child, but poor peasant families and ethnic minorities can have more children if they wish. Compare this with eugenics in America.

That said, I wish the education system took ethnic minorities’ cultures more into account. A friend who is doing policy recently wrote her MA thesis about education in China and said that due to the standardized curriculum, ethnic minorities’ points of view are mostly left out. In addition, schools don’t respect the customs of ethnic minorities, for example having male teachers for Muslim girls when their families would rather they have female teachers.

3) It is impossible to find wholesome food.

This scare took place after the scandal about Sanlu Milk Company putting too much melamine into milk and causing a huge number of babies to get sick. In the time that I was in China, I heard more like stories about watermelons with dangerous growth hormones and sticky rice wrapped with leaves with unsafe colouring and so forth. This is indeed a problem with packaged food. However, unpackaged food is another story.

Agriculture in China is on a different system than in more developed countries. Things like vegetables and fruits are grown by small-scaled farmers, like an extended family. This might seem “primitive,” but this is the standard that the West wants to return to. for example, Vancouver in Canada just passed a law that allows people in single residences to keep up to two chickens in their back yard.

Most people don’t go to supermarkets in China – they are extremely empty considering the population density. Most people go to farmer’s markets, and you can find a farmer’s market almost every 15 blocks or so. Because these small-scale farmers have to come daily to this market, it means that they don’t live far away and hence it’s very easy to live by the 100-mile diet in China. It also means that what you’re eating is in sync with natural cycles, something which naturalists complain about not having, when you can have bananas in the dead of winter. Bittermelon, this cucumber-like gourd popular in China, was conspicuously absent during the winter here. Because I’m used to a diet where i can find anything shipped from anywhere, I tried to find bittermelon among the 10 or so stalls in the local farmer’s market in February. The farmers looked at me like I was insane. Now it’s summer and it is selling for 1 yuan/500 g, while this leafy vegetable that I enjoyed in March is gone. And it’s perfectly fine.

4) The entire country is materialistic and wasteful.

With burgeoning consumer culture, this is true of most people, especially young people. This point is largely a bitter idea older Chinese immigrants (including me) have about how the emphasis on thrift and basic living from their youth (childhood) is gone now. I have seen my Chinese housemates throw away whole meals because they don’t like the taste and take a taxi to campus, which would have been a 15-minute walk.

However, this isn’t the case with everyone. In China, most people are less materialistic than their Western counterparts – by counterparts I mean people of the same socioeconomic background in the West. For example, there are small stalls by the road where you can get your shoes stitched for a few RMB if something breaks, such as the thing between the toes on flipflops getting pulled out of the base. Most people in the West would just throw away their flipflops and buy a new one, but I had to line up to get mine fixed. There are also people who would sharpen scissors if they get dull or adjust the fit of your clothes if you find that they no longer fit you. Partly the reason that this is possible is due to the huge income gap – the people who repair shoes and sharpen scissors and sew clothes don’t earn much and hence their services are affordable to most other people, whereas in North America if you go to the tailors to re-sew your clothes you might as well buy a new one. However, the only reason that North Americans can afford to buy a new one is that the new one is probably made in a country where people earn a lot less than they do, so the income gap is still there, it’s just that they can’t see it.

5) Everyone is brainwashed by the Communist Party and have no mind of their own.

This is probably the least true of everything on this list. This might have been true 20 years ago. I remember my mother refusing to watch the movie Seven Years in Tibet because she believed it to be counter-propaganda (Is it true that Brad Pitt is not allowed to set foot in China because of it?), but she’s come around now. Anyway, most people with half a brain know that China is on the road to hell and really don’t believe anything the news says about growth and development and people living better lives.

I had a few friends over a month or so ago and they began to heatedly discuss things like the gap in income, the poor standard of living for peasants and migrant workers, corruption, the Chinese education system, homophobia. Some of my co-workers at the college also discuss similar things in the staff room and then say “what we just said doesn’t leave this room” before leaving. Yesterday was the singing competition for staff in my college to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party, and I ran into one of my students and she was surprised I was there. I told her that it’s intriguing to me because the anniversary of political parties aren’t ever publically celebrate in North America, and she said, rather matter-of-factly, “Well, it’s not like we want to celebrate it .” Lastly, a couple of months ago, I set a writing topic about arguing whether or not students should join the Party, and a large number of students professed in their homework that it’s a waste of time. Most of the time Chinese people can’t publicize their views (yet), but independent thought is a huge improvement.

For a more policy-oriented and more academic article, take a look at “5 Myths About the Chinese Communist Party.”

Lost in Sinophobia: The Mummy 3, Hero, and China on the World Stage

I watched The Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor in the summer of last year, and I have wanted to write something about it ever since, but things like thesis and TESOL and moving to China got in the way. Before you get excited, I have to say that I don’t have many good things to say about it.

Well, the good thing I have to say about it is that the director, Rob Cohen, really seemed to have put his being into it. Watching the Director’s Commentary is like watching a completely different movie, almost like a historical documentary, because he explains with enthusiasm the historical details of the Emperor’s tomb , the contraptions in the tomb and their technological significance, etc. His fascination with China comes through clearly, and it’s passed my green light for not being an Orientalist rant. As the movie shows the first sights of the tomb, Cohen says, “The horses and chariots you see in the back of each frame, these are magnificent things you can see at the tomb site in Xi’An, at the museum, if you’re so lucky as to be able to go to China to see this, it’s something you will never never never forget.”

Cohen seems to have a lot of archeological knowledge about the Xi’an tomb. For example, he says that he tried to model the tomb in the movie on the actual tomb. He added details like the astrolabe, even though it wasn’t invented until later in history, just because he thinks of it as a Chinese technological breakthrough that should have screentime. The vapourized mercury put in place to kill grave robbers and the crossbows were all “true Chinese design.” He explains the significance of water wheels for Chinese irrigation. It goes beyond just oggling at foreign curiosities. Cohen says that in the movie, he made the emperor buried under the rest of the tomb based on the fact that Chinese archeologists actually discovered that there might be an underground chamber, but also tells the viewers that China doesn’t want to dig it up yet. He says he understands that finding the actual remains of Emperor Qin might be a “complicated idea” for Chinese people even though as an enthusiast for this sort of thing, he doesn’t quite understand why. To rein in his enthusiasm and to admit that he doesn’t understand is quite an achievement.

Cohen ends the commentary by saying he normally doesn’t agree to direct sequels because he doesn’t want to beat a dead horse, however his love for China made him take on this project. You can hear from his voice that he probably means it, especially when he begins with Michelle Yeoh and Isabella Leong’s beauty as a metaphor for how he wants the viewer to appreciate China. “”I look at the beauty of Isabella and Michelle, the face of Asia is what I wanted a lot of people to see in the film, to look and feel my love and respect for Asian culture, Asian cinema, and Asian history.” Normally, my hackles would be rising at a White man gushing about how pretty Asian women are, but in this case I feel that Rob Cohen is being humble enough vis-a-vis his object and not boiling in White superiority: the beginning of the film shows a map of the world, and the point of view of the camper focuses on China as if the viewer was falling into it. Cohen explains, “I wanted to make sure that the audience understood the relationship between North America and China, and to get the feeling of the scale of that country, and its position in the world.”

Granted. Cohen loves China. The problem is that unless you watch the director’s commentary, you don’t really take away the relationship between China and the world that Cohen seems to want you to get. The Wikipedia article on this movie says that Chinese reactions has been negative, and cites Perry Lam’s article in Muse, which says that the move is a “clever and malicious political metaphor” for the rise of contemporary China. This is exactly what I was thinking as I was watching it. Chinese products are flooding the Western market; the master depends on the slave even if the slave works in a sweatshop thousands of miles away because if all the women and children in sweatshops do go on strike, the master has absolutely nil. China is a power that can stand up to Western imperialist powers, for good or for ill, evident in China’s stance against the Western powers regarding Libya and willing to say that they are not necessarily liberating heroes. I’m not saying that everything that China does is right (this blog is usually blocked, after all. Today somehow I managed to log on and this is why I’m writing like crazy), but at least it serves to balance out some of the Western powers’ self-righteousness.

This obviously makes the western world nervous, and it’s evident in this movie. On the one hand, you have the Qin Emperor, who wants to enslave humanity for no apparent reason, and on the other hand, you have the British + American duo, Rick and Evy O’Connell, whose mission is again to protect humanity. Especially with the problems that the West has with China’s human rights record, it’s very easy to slip into portraying China as an old, peculiar nation with their cruel habits of dealing with their people. Historically, the Qin Emperor did mobilize a huge number of people to build the Great Wall and probably did treat them without today’s conception of human rights, but the Emperor Qin mummy’s megalomaniac speech is a little over the top. “Today you wake to a world in the grip of chaos and corruption. I will restore order, I will retain what is mine. I will crush any idea of freedom. I will slaughter without mercy. I will conquer without compassion,” the Emperor Qin mummy says. Wow. Where’s Rob Cohen’s love of China now? In the end, the China of the movie just seems like a superpower poised to take over the world.

Emperor Qin Mummy is just a stereotypical villain – there isn’t even a love of his life thing to soften his evil like there was for Imhotep in the last two movies. However, General Yang, the under-villain if you will, is rather interesting. I feel bad because Anthony Wong, the actor for this role, is capable of extremely poignant nuance, and there really wasn’t many places to show that in this movie. However, he does tell Emperor Qin mummy, “I love this country. Only you can bring it back to greatness.” So, instead of being the incarnation of pure evil, he’s just a patriotic guy who is resorting to extreme means. In the actual historical time period that this movie is set in, China was extremely chaotic, since the Japanese invasion in WWII had just ended and the Communists and the ROC would start duking it out in the Chinese Civil War. Perhaps resorting to extreme means is understandable. However, you own community’s patriots are called patriots, but another community’s patriots are called fanatics. Never mind that in Rick and Evy, you have the union of the two strongest imperialist powers in the West, America and Britain; they’re still heroes and General Yang, his lovely sidekick, and Emperor Qin mummy are still doomed to defeat as the villains. Shanghai is the way it is in the movie and in actual history, eclectic, because each foreign country that came to China carved out a piece of it to be their own territory. Rick and Evy’s chase for archeology is never presented as imperialism, whereas Imhotep’s and Emperor Qin’s ambitions are always presented as such. Rick says that the Eye of Shangri-La “belongs to the Chinese people.” That’s a wonderful sentiment, but I don’t know how much that reflects reality. If you go to the British Museum, there are tons of artifacts that should belong to the people of X country but are not in X country.

One thing about General Yang’s resorting to extreme measures bothers me in ways that go beyond the world of the movie. General Yang is willing to support an incarnation of pure evil to achieve his means, but what about the Chinese actors? The movie is an adventure movie, a 3rd sequel whose greatest intention is to thrill and dazzle. On top of that, it portrays China in a rather villainous light, despite its pretty astrolabes. Yet three of China’s top actors, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, and Anthony Wong star in this movie. It seems that Chinese actors are resorting to some extreme measures to be exposed to the international audience. Exposure might bring the Chinese movie industry into greatness, but if General Yang’s approach is misguided, I think the actors’ approach is also misguided. I am not saying that Hollywood is an incarnation of pure evil like Emperor Qin mummy is, but appearing in foreign films just so that you can be more known outside China, without careful consideration about what kind of message you are endorsing, is wrong.

I am especially disappointed about Jet Li’s role in this movie, given that he played the lead role in the movie Hero. Hero is a very nuanced movie, despite Zhang Yi Mou’s dazzling colours and the actors’ martial arts performances. Its structure is like the Japanese movie Rashomon, where many different versions of the same story is told, and different “truths” emerge depending on which version you believe. In Hero, Jet Li plays the assassin (named “Nameless”) that comes to kill the Qin Emperor, because the Emperor is conquering too many lands and is getting too powerful. He gains an audience with the Emperor and does not reveal who he is at first; he pretends that he supports the Emperor and brings out the swords of other assassins who have failed in their task and tells the story of how he defeated them. For example, a lover’s quarrel between two of the assassins made it easy for them to defeat each other. However, in the end the Emperor detects that he is not telling the truth, no matter how many times he has told the story. In the end the Emperor realizes that the nameless assassin is about to kill him. However, the nameless assassin tells the truth. One of the lovers, who came close to killing the Emperor, realized at the last moment that a unification of China is not necessarily a bad thing, despite the sacrifices that are taking place. His lover, unable to comprehend his change of heart, refuses to speak to him, and that is the real reason of their quarrel. Rather than being defamed, Emperor Qin is a hero in Chinese culture, as he standardized the Chinese language as well as many other factors, long before most of the cultures in Europe had an idea of what a nation is. In other words, he had a great vision that most people didn’t understand. Jet Li’s nameless assassin also realizes this and decides to walk out without completing his mission. However, Emperor Qin orders him to be killed because he was a rebel who wanted to assassinate his king. Emperor Qin did not want to do this, but his law demands it; he looks on and sheds one tear as the palace archers execute the one man in the nation who truly understands his vision.

Jet Li’s role and the portrayal of Emperor Qin in Hero makes the Emperor Qin–supervillain role in The Mummy 3 extremely frustrating. If other actors didn’t pick up on the bland one-sided portrayal of China and the Emperor in The Mummy 3, at least Jet Li should have, having acted in at least 3 versions of the assassination plot of the same Emperor and portrayed a character who died as a result of an epiphany about another point of view. The director’s love and respect for China and the actors’ desire to push Chinese cinema onto the international stage just gets lost in action sequences, special effects, and an extreme fear of Chinese power. Especially with the actors, a desire to partake in either soft power or capitalist glory has created a kind of self-betrayal. The problem with The Mummy 3 is exactly why I wasn’t thrilled about the 300 movie, even though most people were awed and impressed by it, because it turned a decent comic into a pretty piece of Islamophobic propaganda. Of course international criticism is necessary to keep each other in line, however there is no point in pandering to international fear-mongering. Perhaps sometimes art and literature is to help its audience diffuse their tensions, such as the countless Japanese villains in Chinese TV programs giving Chinese viewers an outlet for the bitterness of WWII, but there is a point where such things can just continue to fuel pointless hatred while not really suggesting any concrete solutions. Viewers can’t go to China and defeat a 5000 year old incarnation of pure evil and save the day, and those involved in filmmaking ought to give more thought about what kind of connotation the film has.

The rant ends here, though I have to say, I am apprehensive for the same reasons about a movie version of The Horse and His Boy form the Narnia series, because the book is loaded with firepits of discrimination towards the Middle East. I’m sorry to say that my own idea of what the Middle East is like is very much coloured from reading Narnia books when I was younger.

Chinese Neologisms

(If you just want to go to the Neologisms and skip the theoretical background, go to II.)

I. Thoughts on Chinese and English differences

As I’m beginning to settle into my English teaching job here in China, I’m seeing more and more differences between Chinese and English. For example, in Chinese you can write a sentence with 4 or 5 commas separating the phrases and it would be grammatically correct, as long as all the phrases are about the same subject (My TESOL practicum supervisor told me that this is correct in Spanish as well). In English you can’t do this, and between phrases you often need conjunctions. For example, in the last sentence I have to use “and” before “between,” otherwise the sentence just sounds wrong.

But in this post, the focus is something smaller than a sentence, which is words. I started learning English when I was 7 years old, and for several years I always thought that the equivalent to the English “word” was the Chinese term for “character,” “字” (zi). But then I found out that individual characters were called “characters” and not “words,” and a combination of characters (usually 2 or 3), which in Chinese is “词” (ci), was called a “word.” In this system, English letters would be equivalent to Chinese radicals, or the stroke combinations that make up a character. This is also where the name of this blog come from – compounds of radicals make characters.

This is a really fundamental difference between Chinese and English, that compared to Chinese, English lacks a linguistic level of the character. In Chinese, characters mean something individually but mean different things depending on which other characters they form words with. In English, if you want to say a female bovine animal, you have a new word, “cow.” If you want to say a male bovine creature, you say “bull.” By contrast, in Chinese there are no new words for “cow” and “bull”; you simply say “female bovine” (母牛) and “male bovine,” (公牛) with two characters in the name each. The only cases that comes readily to mind where it’s opposite, ie. where there’s 2 words in English where there’s one character in Chinese, is in the labels for family members and for cooking (how stereotypical…). If you want to say “younger sister,” all you would have to say in Chinese is “妹,” and there is “姨” for an aunt on your mother’s side and “婶” for an aunt on your father’s side. Similarly, in cooking, pan-fry, stir-fry, and deep-fry all have one character each to express them, which are 煎 (jian), 炒 (chao), and 炸 (zha). There’s also a character, “爆” (bao), which the textbook I’m using for speaking class tells me means “quick-fry,” though I have to admit I’ve never heard “quick-fry” before. Anyway, this would be the character pronounced “pao” in “kung-pao chicken.” Other than these two categories, I think in many cases it takes more than one character in Chinese to express one word in English rather than the other way around.

(long aside: I just had a thought last night that this enables the Chinese language not to have a gender hierarchy, for example in English sometimes the word “man” stands in for all of humanity, whereas in Chinese it would be “person,” “male person,” and “female person,” and the combination “male person” would rarely stand for everyone. I’m sure people like Julia Kristeva have mined this language difference and its implications for gender already. But this also means that cognitively Chinese people might think differently. If you have “cow” and “bull” and each is a word on its own, it’s not immediately obvious from the word that they belong to a larger category “bovine.” However, if all you have is “female bovine” and “male bovine,” then you would always be reminded of the category that they belong to. Perhaps what cross-cultural social psychologists have noticed, that Asians tend to think more holistically, comes partly from such language differences. As a side note of a side note, this makes it really hard for me to read Axis Powers Hetalia fan works in Chinese, because in common Chinese the name of countries rarely stand alone, like “France” and “America,” but they would be “Fa-Country” and “Mei(beautiful)-country” respectively. Hence, when a Hetalia character in English says “I am France,” it’s possible to forget for a moment that France is a country and just believe that the person is called France. Chinese never lets you forget that the person is in fact a country. When the fan work gets raunchy I really, really just want to forget that we’re talking about countries. Oh the implications.)

Anyway, so this way of combining different characters makes Chinese exceptionally rich in shades of meaning. Each character has its own meaning, and if you say XY the meaning can be different from if you say XZ, where X gives a basic meaning and Y or Z gives a different twist to it. For example, “精神” (jingshen) can mean “vivacious” or sometimes a person’s psychology, but “神经” (shenjing) means nerves and neurons, where “神” by itself actually means divine or magical (“神经” literally means “magical/divine meridians,” but it’s usually not understood literally). So while in Chinese there might be fewer characters, there are tons of character combinations, but English has few combinations in comparison while having a lot of individual words. Of course, there are prefixes and suffixes that change the meaning for the root word, but they are limited because the root word still bears most of the meaning of the word, whereas in Chinese in a combination both words might carry similar weight of meaning and combining with a different word can radically change its meaning. Also, the words in English that have a root plus affixes are most likely from French and are not really “English.” In English there are concatenations too, like the expression “get up” cannot be explained with either “get” or “up” individually. Looking at the New Words and Slang tab of Merriam-Webster online, there are such words as “frenemy,” and of course more established words like “Internet,” “blackmail,” etc.

But even if these words exist, comparatively single-word expressions overwhelmingly outnumber them in English. I believe that because English tends not to use combinations, combinations seem a bit strange and are slow to become official words. (Not all European languages are like this – for example, there are insanely long words in German like “vergangenheitsbewaeltigung.”) But because Chinese has always operated by pulling characters together and changing their meaning, it’s easier for new concatenations to take hold in Chinese. Finally, the actually neologisms in Chinese…

II. Neologisms
(all phonetics are given in pinyin for Mandarin pronunciations, without tones)

给力 (geili): literally, “give power.” This has mostly taken the place of the older expression “加油,” which literally means “add gas” (as in add gas to a car and make it run faster). 加油 is used as an expression of encouragement, but as a friend explained it, gas is so expensive that no one can afford to give anyone else gas. Hence, just give power in its raw form. “给力” is also used in more contexts, for example a commercial for some sort of slow cooker has a middle-aged woman saying that the cooker is 给力.Or, as my friend explains it, if you see a piece of news or an incident that really amazes you (in either a good or bad way), you can say it is very 给力. Because English is so popular in China (you have to take an English exam to graduate from university), Chinglish is also very popular. My friend explains that there’s a word floating around that is an English conjugation of this expression, which is “geilivable.” To keep going in this vein, we might end up with more conjugations like “ungelievable” and “geilivability,” as in “the geilievability factor of X incident ranks 10 on a scale from 0 to 10.”

山赛 (shansai): literally, “mountain competition.” This expression comes from a story about criminals hiding in a mountain, outside the law, and it’s come to mean “knockoffs,” which are outlaw products. I’ll probably write a post later on about these specifically.

你妹 (nimei): literally “your (younger sister).” This is usually used with the character for “to look at,” which is “看,” so the expression is “看你妹,” which translates to “What are you looking at?” I have no idea how this went from younger sisters to this.

In China there’s a website called Baidu, which is the equivalent of Google. It also has a section where you can ask questions and people will answer then, like in Yahoo Answers. One question asking for a clarification of “你妹” got a long hack answer about how your sister isn’t the same as my sister because of genetics and so forth.

雷 (lei): literally “thunder.” This expression is for anything that disturbs you a little and makes you go “wtf?!” For example, a funny but bad ethnic joke. Often this is used with the character for person, so it’s the adjective “雷人,” which means the joke would often make people go “wtf.”

2B (erbi): this is an insult and an amalgamation of two other insults: “250″ and “傻逼” (shabi). The first one, 250, is pronounced “erbaiwu,” a shortened form of the accurate pronunciation for the actual number. Both of these terms mean varying types of stupid, and I’m not too clear on exactly how they’re different yet. I think 250 means someone is immature and irresponsible and thinks about things in an illogical way, whereas “傻逼” just means sort of dull or slow. So I guess 2B means someone who’s both slow on the uptake but then acts out and does stupid things as well? Not sure.

海带 (haida), 海藻(haizao): literally “seaweed” and “algae.” The origin of these 2 terms is another term, “海归” (haigui), where the first character means “ocean” or “sea” and the second means “return.” This term denotes Chinese people who leave China to get a better education and then come back to China to work. China has tended to hold these people in high esteem, because usually they have to be very hard-working and intelligent, and they usually get national fellowships to study abroad after competing with millions of people. So, in general, they find great work positions in China. In this term, a looser translation is “return from across the ocean.” However, the character for “return” is pronounced exactly like “龟,” which means turtle, and so without an appropriate context “海归” can sound like “sea turtle.”

Hence, new terms for people who come back to China further elaborate on the theme of the ocean life. “待,” which sounds the same as “带” but with a different tone, means to stay or wait; so, 海带 refers to people who go back to China but stay at home instead of work. Because more and more people are leaving China for their education, it isn’t a special status anymore, and people often can’t find jobs when they go back. In 海藻, “藻” also has the same pronunciation as another character, “糟,” which means “terrible” or “to ruin.” There are also people who leave China not because they work hard, but because their families are rich enough to support them. Often they just work barely hard enough to get a degree. These people are often looked down upon.

囧 (jiong): this character is an archaic character meaning “bright” or “shining” (archaic as in…the word “hap” in English or something. We only have “happen” in common use nowadays, though “hap” was used a little more than a century ago). Though now it’s not used as the original character – it’s used as an emoticon, an equivalent to “D=” It ranges from expressing “damn” to “awww”.

The page for this on Baidu has really nice pictures showing different drawings of this character to be more anthropomorphic. It also shows pictorial conjugations (I want to copyright the term “pictorial conjugations”!) by combining this character or character that look like with the expression “orz” or “OTL” (which looks like a person on their hands and knees, head being the O to the left) This combination is an emoticon for the humblest apology, which is kowtowing. Suppose you insulted someone on a forum and then found out it was actually your favourite singer in disguise, I guess you would use a combination of the two.

There’s a huge list of popular terms on Baidu. it’s a little outdated (2007) but I’m sure some of these terms are still in circulation.

III. New Chinese Words Transliterated From English
(“translation” is keeping the meaning in another language, “transliteration” is keeping the sound of the word).

Chinese is different from English in another interesting way, in the relationship between a sound of a character or word and its meaning. People who grew up speaking English might think that Chinese and Japanese accents sound really exaggerated and worse than other accents, and in a way it might be true, because in Chinese and Japanese the language has fewer sound. In another words, the language doesn’t require you to twist the components of your mouth and throat in as many different ways. So, if you learn Chinese or Japanese first, your tongue probably settles into a kind of narrow habit, and it’s really hard to do thinks like distinguish between “r” and “l.” In Chinese every character has an average of 10 homophones (even taking into account different tones), whereas in English only a very small fraction of words have homophones (see / sea). Sometimes this can be confusing, for example “制癌” and “治癌” are both pronounced “zhì’ái” (tones 4, 2), but the former means “cause/produces cancer” and the second one means “cures cancer,” but most of the time the context of the expression gives you clues about which character it is. This means that the meaning of the characters in Chinese come from how they are written and not how they sound. For example, if you look at the third paragraph in the first section, 3 out of 4 of the characters for various kinds of frying have the same radical on the left, and this radical written larger is the character for “fire.” So, even if you don’t know how to pronounce the character, you would know from the “fire” radical that the character has something to do with fire, and given the context of the sentence, you would probably guess it’s something to do with cooking. And almost every Chinese character has a meaning, which means that every Chinese sound has a meaning, unlike in English. For example, you can pronounce a random string of syllables like “staflenich” based on your understanding of how the 26 letters are pronounced, but this has no meaning. You wouldn’t even begin to think about what it means. But in Chinese, if you see a combination of a few characters, most likely it has a meaning, even if it’s not an actual Chinese word.

This also means that when things get transliterated from English, there are many characters to choose from to express one syllable of English sound, and they all have different meanings. So, the practice is usually to choose characters which have both a similar sound and nice meanings. This makes things very different from English, because in most English names, the meaning behind them are not obvious (though this is partly because many English names aren’t actually English, but maybe Hebrew or German or whatever). What does “McDonald’s” mean? It means “belong to McDonald.” If you’ve read or watched Shakespeare’s Macbeth you might know that “MacX” means “the son of X,” so ok, so the fast food chain belongs to someone who many generations ago was the son of someone named Donald. Behindthename.com says that “Donald” comes from the Gaelic name “Domhnall,” which means “ruler of the world.” Well, seeing how far McDonald’s has spread, that meaning really fits. But unless your name is Donald and/or you’ve looked up what it means, then it’s not obvious what “McDonald’s” means. But in Chinese, the transliteration is “麦当劳” (mai’danglao), which sounds inelegant, but because each character has a meaning, the meaning of the name is immediately obvious. It literally means “grains as effort,” or more loosely, an advertisement that the food at McDonald’s will give you energy. The following are more words transliterated from English but with their own connotations:

Hacker: 黑客 (hei’ke), literally “black guest.” This Chinese term makes hackers seem more like digital ninjas. It also spawned a whole spectrum of other coloured guests like red, blue, white, and grey (I kid you not!) Red hackers are patriots who use their skills to protect national networks. White ones are anti-hackers that are employed to protect company networks and so on, and grey ones are the worst of all and cause trouble for everyone. And I don’t quite understand blue ones yet. Baidu says that blue ones “believe in freedom” and work independently, rather than being employed, to “keep peace on the net.” This is all so mindboggling.

Blog: 博客 (bo’ke), where “博” means “rich” or “expansive.” It’s commonly used with “士” (shi), which , to denote the Ph.D. degree. This makes blogs sound a lot more learned.

Fans (as in “we are fans of X singer”): 粉丝 (fen’si), literally “vermicelli rice noodle.” And in Chinese it’s always pronounced like the plural even when talking about one person. The first thing that comes to mind by associating people with noodles is that the people are spineless. It seems that this makes the term slightly derogatory, but maybe it’s just my personal perspective. Apparently different fan clubs will name themselves differently, sometimes by different ways to cook rice vermicelli noodles, like cold vermicelli rice noodles. It’s like if “pasta” was the collective term for fans in English, and fans of Alfred Hitchcock movies would call themselves “fettuccini alfredos” or something.

Talent: 达人 (da’ren), literally “achievement person.” This is used slightly differently from the English word, which is used more as a noun to talk about the field that someone is good at, as in “X has a lot of talent.” In Chinese, because of the character for “person,” it usually means a person who is good at something instead of the actual thing, as in “X is a talent at…” In English this also works, but it’s not used as much. The meaning of the Chinese doesn’t differ so much from the English, but this is used in a lot more places than in English. In English, “talent” is used to talk about an inborn ability, usually in some kind of humanities or arts subject, like languages or music. But in Chinese it’s used to mean an ability at a variety of things, eg “You can be a talent at saving money” or “we are talents of happiness.”

“Out” and “high”: These haven’t been transliterated, but often printed in English. “Out” as in someone being “out” of a game, used in more situations than in games, and usually it’s used intransitively, as in it’s not explicitly stated what the person would be out of. A Heinz radio commercial: “You’re going to be ‘out’ if you don’t come to X event this weekend.” There’s also “outman,” meaning someone who is “out,” though this is often written in the characters “奥特曼” (aoteman), which is also the Chinese name for the Japanese Ultraman franchise. And “high” is sometimes translated rather than transliterated, into the character for “high” or “tall,” “高” (gao). Since as a whole Chinese people do drugs less than Westerners, it’s used mostly for a state of rowdy drunkenness or extreme excitement.

IV. For English words of Chinese origin, here’s the wikipedia article
Apparently the Chinese slang for a bachelor, “光棍” (bare stick / bare branch) has been used in The Economist. Geilievable!

Criminal Performances

(Anyway, I started this post in November and it’s now January. At first I was too busy with a TESOL course and the practicum to finish writing it, and also because after I graduated from my MA program and started taking the TESOL course, I found that I was unable to write academic paragraphs. And then I went to China, where I’m staying currently, and wordpress seems to be partially blocked by the Great Firewall. My friend Michelle got me over the wall with vtunnel. I’ve sort of lost my thoughts on this…so forgive the rough and aimless post. But hey! head over to http://ideogrammatica.wordpress.com to read about how I was accused of robbing someone on the street last week and dragged to the police station.)

This post is a bit late after the fact, but around Hallowe’en, there were 2 rather interesting (and disturbing) incidents in Canada where people crossed the line in terms of how they disguised themselves. One was at a Hallowe’en party at Royal Canadian Legion branch 103, where two men dressed up as KKK members and led a White friend, who was dressed up as a slave in blackface, by a rope. The other was the young Chinese man who got onto an Air Canada flight disguised as an elderly Caucasian man. The latter of course raised a lot of alarms, and the young man is being detained, and former was also deemed alarming and branch 103 was shut down.

Last Hallowe’en I just briefly posted about how students in the English department at McMaster handled Hallowe’en, and my friend Michelle noted in the comments that Hallowe’en is a time when we get to subvert constructions of identity (I feel that she does this daily, but that’s beyond the point). Often people don’t exploit Hallowe’en to its full potential, choosing instead to disguise oneself as fairly conventional creatures of darkness, available at your local Shopper’s Drug Mart. I hesitate to applaud either of this year’s Hallowe’en incidents, but they certainly subverted racial identity in historical and international ways.

When I first heard about the KKK + blackface incident, I asked the person who told me whether those costumes were meant to be ironic, and she told me it wasn’t. The Globe and Mail features an article where Crowley, one of the men dressed in a KKK costume, said that incidents of the KKK lynching African Americans “has been gone for years and years and years…That’s so past-tense.” Interviewees from Campbellford, ON say that there’s no overt racism in their community, and so the best conclusion would be that the KKK and blackface costumes weren’t ironic, but neither were they malicious. The problem seems to be that people (White people) are not really educated about the significance of the signs of racism and the impact they could still have.

However, Crowley’s rather dismissive attitude is what bothers me. Other than sounding like a ditz, which I think is really hard to pull off in print, by saying that lynching is “so past-tense” Crowley is suggesting that his attitude is the norm, and people who protested need to get with the times. The Globe and Mail article also states that the man in charge of the Hallowe’en event “felt that it was their right to wear these costumes under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada.” Crowley fell back on some sort of common sense norm, and the event organizer fell back on a legal norm. Neither is satisfactory. Crowley was essentially trying to shrug off blame by saying that it was excessive sensitivity on the part of others that made his costume a national issue, when he should really have owned up immediately. The way that the man in charge of the event appealed to the Charter was rather ironic: the re-enactment of the KKK and an African American slave embodied the lack of rights and freedoms that racialized human beings have had to put up with, and he was trying to defend White people doing this re-enactment by appealing to those very rights. Hmm.

Then there’s the 20-something Chinese man dressed up as an old Caucasian man to get past airport security. Unlike the KKK + blackface incident, in this case a member of a less privileged ethnicity dressed up as a member of a more privileged ethnicity (Asian > Caucasian rather than Caucasian > African American). The privilege of Caucasians in this case is obvious – as an elderly Caucasian man, he was let on the flight without proper ID. If he tried to do the same thing while not in disguise, he would have to have the right ID, and moreover the airport staff might have paid special attention to him because of his ID. And since he was an Asian refugee, this case was reported with an air of humour in the press, the pictures of him and his disguise like ads for a freak show. I’d hate to see how it would have been if he was from the Middle East.

Another difference is that the young man from Asia being detained and his case is an international security issue, whereas the men in Campbellford only had the legion shut down and they could still go about the other avenues of their lives. Why is the racist, or at least ignorant, attitude of many within a country considered less dangerous than a young man who wants a better life in another country…?

Fanpower, Nationalism, and the Success and Controversy of Hetalia: Axis Powers;

Or, alternatively titled, “Unbearable Cuteness in Front of the Swastika”

(read right to left. from the wonderful people at http://aph.starry-sky.com/_credits.html)

About a month ago, I started watching Hetalia: Axis Powers on Funimation’s Youtube channel. I heard about this a couple of years ago, but the idea of a story featuring the personifications of different countries in WWII was so bizarre that I didn’t pick it up. I did this time because I feel like I finally have the conceptual tools to deal with something like this, and also because I wanted to procrastinate on writing my thesis. If you visit my entry on my rant blog, 27, 000, 000, you can see a long conversation I’ve had with various persons regarding how I have struggled with this series.

Success

The series was initially a webcomic by Hidekazu Himaruya, a Japanese student studying design in New York. The only other webcomic series that has become as popular that I can think of is Megatokyo, and even so I don’t think they are on the same scale. Most cultural productions have an intended audience; this audience is limited by language if not geography, and culture, gender, age, sexuality, ethnicity. Note that this does not mean that a story must include main characters with specific gender and age to appeal to that gender and age, as many adults enjoy Harry Potter and so forth. However, this often helps (though regarding gender, I once read a writer saying that while girls would read novels with male main characters, most boys don’t want to read novels with girl main characters). If we analyze Hetalia with the audience categories above, what would we get? (if you want to skip this seemingly inane list, go
down.

Language: Originally for Japanese-literate audiences, because I assume that as a student in NY, if Himaruya wanted to create a comic in English, he should have had the English skills to make one. Also, the focus of the main storyline is on the Axis powers, which included Japan, and most people in the West would probably think twice about creating a story from the perspective of the Axis. But now English-speaking fans have translated almost everything. Even his blog is translated. There are Spanish Livejournal communities, so language is not necessarily a barrier in this as long as fans and companies are willing to translate it.

Geography: As it’s a webcomic, technically it has no geographical intentions other than those limited by language and culture.

Age: Likely late teen to young adult, 15-30 years old. The author himself is in this age bracket, and the format of his initial publication suggests that aside from creating a personal passtime, he had been creating this series for people who access webcomics. Who are in general not, say, 70 years old.

Gender: This is harder. On the wonderful website TVtropes, which accepts contributions from fans regarding the themes of any/all narrative production, the page on Hetalia notes that many people are surprised that the author is male, because of “all the Ho Yay.” As yaoi and shounen-ai manga and anime are generally produced by straight females for other straight females, Hetalia, which exhibits a lot of homoeroticism, seems to enjoy a largely female audience. I would think that males who are interested in WWII would go watch BBC documentaries and Band of Brothers instead. However, I cannot conclude that this is what Himaruya intended.

Sexuality: Again, since most yaoi and shounen-ai manga and anime are generally produced by straight females for other straight females, I would think that despite the homoeroticism, many of the fans are straight. Or, to put it in more academic terms, although the series features homoeroticism, it doesn’t try to offer any theory or criticism regarding homosexuals in real life; homosexuality isn’t its main topic. Most yaoi and yuri and so forth are along the same lines in that they don’t make sexuality their objective, and do not represent the LGBTQ community. This is not to say that homosexuals don’t enjoy yaoi and yuri and so forth. I remember my gay 40 year old highschool counsellor quite enjoying the series Fake.

Ethnicity/Culture: Putting these into the same category because even now I don’t quite know how to demarcate race/ethnicity/culture. Leaving aside language, I mean “culture” as whether the society accepts this kind of thing as a legitimate passtime. For example, 40 years ago North American culture would not have received this well at all, given the focus in Axis powers and the homoeroticism. The intended audience for Hetalia are probably those living in a liberal humanist culture, ie a culture that seeks to advance human interests (whether personal or those of human communities), not overly devoted to religion, believes in human individuality and freedom and artistic freedom. This is a very broad definition of “culture,” and maybe it’s better to use the word “zeitgeist.” I mean that most people in industrialized societies think this way.

So far, Hetalia doesn’t sound so special: there are many other titles which are targeted at young Japanese-speaking, straight, and liberal humanist females.

When culture overlaps with nation, what is outside the intended audience is the number of national cultures which are represented in Hetalia. This seems obvious, but this also means that it increases the number of national cultures which have a stake in what the series is saying. The popularity of Hetalia rests on the number of nations it represents (someone at the Hetalia LJ writes there are around 50 so far) but also what nation means. Recently, a lot of academic talk has been on things like the “death of nation,” as people increasingly move around more, things like the European Union are appearing, and the corporations become multinational to the point where it’s hard to locate anything particularly “American” about Coca-Cola. However, there are also academics that point that that this perspective is a very Western-centric one, as many nations have only recently won status as a nation through very hard work and a lot of bloodshed, and probably don’t like to see the whole idea of a nation dismissed.

It’s very convenient that I am writing this at the end of the Fifa World Cup (the result of which I am sure many Hetalia fans are happy about). Even if the Western world is feeling the benefits of globalization (being able to read Hetalia even though I don’t understand Japanese, for example), when it comes down to it people are still very nationalistic. Nation is still bound up with culture, and hence defines human beings even if they are able to move to other places in the world and access the culture of other places. Globalization hasn’t gone on long enough for nation not to matter.

What makes Hetalia popular is that as long as you are within one of the 50 personified countries and even marginally engaged in its culture, there is a feeling that somehow the series has you in mind. With this vast representation, the other parameters of age and gender and language do not decide the number of fans as much. Added to the lightness of the series (which I will return to in the “Controversy” section), the series offers engagement with an aspect of what defines you, and makes you laugh. Even if some of the audience isn’t there for the nations, the nations are good-looking young people.

The fact that these nations are human characters also makes this different from engagement with BBC documentaries. There are lies, damned lies, and statistics, because statistics can’t deliver the emotional impact of what things mean, and ideas like “nationhood” are often too abstract. A writer once said that in war, the average soldiers almost never fights for their “nation,” but for people they know in that nation. Hetalia compounds national and human feeling together. Knowing that 27, 000, 000 Russians died in WWII doesn’t quite give the impact as seeing the personification of Russia lament over this (this bit about Russia isn’t in the series but a fanwork).

More importantly, it is the premise of Hetalia that makes it possible for infinite fan participation. I believe that what makes a work open to participation is its lack of closure. Most novels, for instance, try to tell a story like the story is the most important thing that happens to its characters, and the story has a clear conclusion where the characters emerge from still alive (or not), but will never face anything like this again. The story is emphatically “over.” However, with Hetalia, the story focuses on WWII with many many side stories exploring history before that and since then, even current events as they occur. The short comic strip form does not give the same message as a novel or graphic novel; there is no sense that each comic strip tells the most important story its characters will face. This encourages the audience to think up other scenarios than to think that the story is “over.” Even if your nation isn’t one of the 50 in the series, you could imagine what your country would be like, and produce fanwork based on this. It is also impossible for Himaruya himself to exhaust all of the history regarding the 50 nation-characters he has created. Recently, someone on the Hetalia LJ posted a video with some viewers found “confusing,” because he/she used many dates, juxtaposed with fanart, that the official series has not addressed. But that is creative fanwork. And events are ongoing, eg the World Cup, which has generated thousands of fanfictions and fanarts in English audiences alone, and the recent bizarre case in which Russian spies in America used Canadian identities.

Controversy

This series is light. It’s moe, according to Anime News Network, which means the audience response is likely one of feeling some kind of love for most of the characters. Most of the countries’ leaders do not get too much spotlight, and the series does not equate the country with the dominant political party/person. For example, Funimation introduces Germany’s leader as “hard to manage.” This is obviously a reference to Hitler, who hasn’t made an appearance in the webcomic or manga, that I know of (correct me if I’m wrong). In other words, the character of Germany doesn’t espouse Nazi values, rather more stereotypical “German values” like productivity.

In addition, the series sometimes privileges likable characters over historical accuracy. The character of Poland talks in something like a valleygirl accent and repeatedly ignores Lithuania’s attempts to warn him of Russia’s intention to invade with Germany, rather concentrating on buying ponies and painting his house pink, which really has no historical equivalent. As with Poland’s accent, sometimes the characters’ characters don’t correspond to their reference countries. There are also many light-hearted stereotypes, such as China ending all of his sentences in “-aru,” which is apparently the stereotype Japan holds of how Chinese people talk in general. And of course, Italy, who is totally useless in a cute way, with no tendencies towards Mussolini’s brand of fascism or anything.

If nationalism can make people embrace the series for its positive portrayals of audience home countries, then nationalism added to the light-hearted stereotypes also makes people reject it. South Korea censored the anime completely due to what it considers an offensive portrayal of Korea in the webcomic and manga. For those who haven’t read these, Korea is a somewhat strident, though cheerful young man who seems a bit self-centred, and who likes to claim that he’s the eldest of the Asian nations and that he invented everything. Fans in the West have generally been thinking that Korea couldn’t take a joke, and that the series pokes fun at every country anyway. Personally, I had the thought that we haven’t heard of Poland denouncing the series yet, and the character of Poland could be seen as just as offensive.

But Japan didn’t try to invade Poland. Going back to the intended audience – Hetalia is a Japanese production, even if many fans all around the world have created fanworks accompanying it. In WWII, Japan (the real life country) went on its quest to unify Asia, or rather, its invasion and brutality towards the rest of Asia, and from what I know, a lot of citizens supported this effort (at least in the early stages). Say that Korea has a chip on its shoulder, but it wasn’t so long ago that its status as a nation was almost revoked. I also read on the excellent webcomic Secret Asian Man that Korea was spelled “Corea” until Japan changed it in WWII because they did not want Korea speaking before them at international assemblies, then rostered alphabetically, and this spelling stays. And with Japan’s refusal to apologize for war crimes and even censoring its role in WWII from textbooks, it’s easy to think that Hetalia comes out of the same destructive machine. So the censorship of Hetalia in Korea is understandable, even if it is unfortunate. Along the same lines, the character of China has a Hello Kitty knockoff doll called Shinatty-chan, though in Chinese fandom “Shinatty-chan” is called “Gitty,” as “Shina” is a really offensive term the Japanese called the Chinese in WWII. The equivalent in the US would be personifications of different races in America, with the African American character carrying around a toy called Nigger. Although Taiwan has licenced the anime, I’m just waiting for the Chinese government to pounce on Hetalia, though I hope it won’t come to that.

Resolution

Accept for the moment that nations (both people and governments) are justified in feeling unhappy with stereotypes in Hetalia. What can they do about it? One solution is censorship, which South Korea is trying (and I’m very very glad that Himaruya didn’t take the series on a suicide run by creating a North Korea). However, there are different types of censorship. There is censorship of sexuality and violence, which most people feel somewhat justified about, and censorship ofconcepts, which people don’t feel justified about. The former kind of censorship judges that people will one day be able to access concepts behind sex and violence once their cognitive skills can handle it, whereas the second kind judges people as never being able to handle it.

Although I feel that Korea is justified in wanting to censor Hetalia, I believe that actually censoring it shows its lack of confidence in its national citizens. First, it is assuming that people will draw a strong link between Korea the character and Korea the real life nation – after all, if people don’t, then it is no danger. While this seems like an obvious intention of the work itself, it is not true. Most audience members would be trained in the difference between fiction and nonfiction, even if it is historical fiction. Fan works with mature content sometimes urge its audience to try and see the characters as people rather than as countries. Canadians may find the doujinshi about Canada being lovesick towards America entertaining without wishing Canada to cozy up to the US politically.

Second, censorship assumes that the audience receives the work and it ends there, that there is no way to voice contradictions without editing the original. As I mentioned in the “Success” portion, the fanworks now outnumber the official work by the thousandfold, filling in gaps that Himaruya would not approach due to the sheer size of his topic. Because the audience in different nations see themselves represented, often they take it as a welcome challenge to create their own stories about their country. South Korea censoring the series means that while the rest of the world sees the annoying Korea character, less Koreans would be able to do something about it. A better solution would probably be to let the series run and sponsor fans who want to create and publish their own Korean Hetalia doujinshi.

** August 2010 edit **
Having read more about the controversy the series created in South Korea, there is a bit more to add. Apparently the national assembly met together and rejected Hetalia based on, among other things, a piece of fanart showing Korea grope Japan (This is probably a worse provocation than featuring an annoying Korea character by himself. I guess the people in the national assembly thought that this piece of fanart originated in Japan, or if they didn’t know it was fanart, thought it was a part of the Japanese official work. Since there are still gloomy sentiments towards Japan, this fanart at once implies what Japan thinks about Korea AND refuses to acknowledge Korea’s anger towards Japan by making him GROPE Japan). In some ways this buttresses what I have been saying so far about the power of fanworks, especially with regards to Hetalia.

The community members who think that South Korea is misjudging the situation argue that their rejection of the official series was based on fanart, which are not the same thing. This is true, but increasingly it is difficult to say what is authoritative and bounded piece of work. This what happens in postmodernity – information flows are so convenient compared to past centuries that a lot of popular culture is people reworking what other people have created; think of all the celebrities and fictional characters satirized on The Simpsons, and The Office featuring a wedding based on a Youtube video of a wedding. I am not disagreeing with the community, but the controversy over Hetalia proves that the line between the official and the fanwork is increasingly blurred. Apparently CCTV (main new network in China) broadcast a piece of Hetalia fanart about China and Russia when talking about about citizen responses to the joint Russia-China space program, without knowing the context of the fanart at all. This really amused fans, but on the other hand, the person who drew the picture of Korea groping Japan probably regrets it now.
** end edit**

Last Caveat(s)

Also, there is something in the fan communities called a “kink meme.” Someone submits a request for a character pairing with some sort of condition, often sexual, and someone else fulfills this request with fanart or fanfiction. While most of this is light-hearted enjoyment, some of the requests can get pretty disturbing. I have extolled fanpower as a positive force, but here may be evidence against fans taking up a series too much. Some posters’ arguments in favour of kink memes are that it’s not real life; enjoying a story about rape does not mean that someone condones rape. Having said that people can tell the difference between the nation-characters and the nations themselves, I cannot be a hypocrite now and say that when it comes to kink memes, people cannot tell the difference, however uncomfortable those requests make me.

People who objected to this sort of kink meme seem to be worried about spreading “Racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia” in general. At its foundations, this problem relates to the nature of enjoyment, and the fear that enjoying a story about rape will make that enjoyment bleed to cover everything in the story, going so far as to make rape itself enjoyable. Psychological studies have shown emotional carryover to be true, such as this article here. But I’m not sure emotions and preferences are the same thing, just like love and hatred are not really emotions. Finally coming to the picture at the start of this entry, I believe the majority of readers would appreciate Italy being cute without also thinking that the swastika is cute. In fact, what I love about this page in the comic is the utter disjunction between Italy being cute and the swastika. I get to write 3000+ words on it, after all.

Alternatively, the argument could be that preferences are built upon exposure if not on carryover, and this is the argument used by anti-videogame censors who believe that excessive exposure to acting violent will create massacres like the Columbine shooting. But this sort of worry leads to things like the No Fly List, which hits its targets but also a lot of false positives.

Speaking of liberal humanism, many fans espouse the philosophy of “if you don’t like it, don’t read it, but don’t try to stop someone from writing it.” This position has faith in individual discretion, which is valid. However, going away from Hetalia for a moment, this philosophy sounds too much like it’s condoning shutting one’s eyes to things one doesn’t like instead of doing something about it. Going back to the series, I believe that if people find something objectionable, they SHOULD say something about it. But also keep in mind that the result might not go your way.

Another thing that some fans have argued is that filling a rape kink meme does not necessarily mean the fill is automatically pornography; it depends on how it is written. This is true, but then again, a kink meme has its purposes in being pornographical, and most people do not want to to read fills for lofty reflections. Rationally, I understand that I should have more faith in the fan community, and I have mostly argued in the fans’ favour. I am confident that people who read a rape scene between Germany and Poland and enjoy it as characters do not want a repeat of it as a historical incident. As a poster said on the fandomsecrets blog on June 4, 2009 at 10:08pm, “I don’t mean to sound nosy but I always find Hetalia fans incredibly sensitive towards other people and their country’s histories.” For very disturbing kink meme, there is probably also a fanfiction that handles the same nation-characters and historical incidents in a very sympathetic manner.

However, if someone has not met any Koreans and reads Hetalia and none of the fanworks, and takes it literally, it is possible that the person will form a stereotype of Koreans as being sort of annoying and self-centred. Taking Hetalia literally probably won’t happen very often, but it is possible. I believe in artistic responsibility; there should be some sort of reference to or documentation of non-fiction resources in both official works and fanwork. Translators of the webcomic and manga have very nicely provided links to articles that Himaruya have used and even say they have no idea what he meant because they couldn’t find any sources on what he was saying, but I wish fanworks would also give footnotes to the effect of “real life was actually something like this, and I changed it because….” As I said in the edit, fanworks can now have as much impact as official works. While no fan should condone self-censorship, this means that potentially nothing you do is only for yourself, and fans should take up equal responsibility to actual authors and artists.

*****

Regarding the last caveats, I am still not certain that the position I am taking is the “right” one, or even if there is a right one. I dread the day in the far future, when countries closer to the equator are fighting countries north of them due to global warming, where a terrorist quotes Hetalia during his or her trial. Hetalia touches many people and elicits very strong reactions – this makes it a powerful work if nothing else and worth participating in on all levels, whether you watch the anime casually or suddenly get the urge to submit a paper on it to an academic conference.

I think I’m going to make myself some pasta now.

Revisionism x Patriotism: Teaching Revised US History in Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology

In the beginning of May, I went to University of Toronto’s 3rd annual New Narratives Conference. Since I hadn’t presented at academic conferences before this, it was an eye-opener. With such a growing field as comics and animation, it was amazing how everyone’s presentations gelled together.

I wasn’t going to post my paper, but I just realized that even though I’m writing my thesis on comics and I’ve read tons of comics and tons of criticism, I haven’t posted anything related to comics at all. So here it is. The Secret Identities Anthology can be found here. It’s a great read even if you’re not interested in racial politics per se.

—–

Eammon Callan, in his discussion of multicultural education in the US, worries that multicultural histories may be “too shameful to warrant anything other than revulsion,” and that national heroes “lose their God-like status and become richly ambiguous human beings, just like the rest of us” (Callan 475), thereby creating demoralized and apathetic future generations who do not have faith in the national community. However, recent researchers into superheroes comics such as Mike Dubose and Matthew J. Smith have shown that superheroes change according to their cultural climates, and are no less national heroes for this. Callan’s concerns and comics scholarship on superheroes meet in Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology, published by The New Press last year. The comics collected in this anthology span from the days of railroad building into the near future, directly engaging with topics such as the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII and the murder of Vincent Chin during the downturn in the US automobile industry in the early 1980s. Arguably, historical events presented in Secret Identities could disrupt founding US myths such as freedom and democracy. However, the diverse Asian American superheroes featured in this anthology share one goal, which is to strive for and maintain these values. In addition, the editors have also put together an extensive teacher’s guide. Far from demythologizing US history, Secret Identities creates an alternate body of US myth in the form of superhero narratives. I will briefly outline issues with multicultural education and the potential for comic books as education materials before examining Secret Identities in more depth.

I. Comics in education:
Although we think of comics as only recently become a tool in education rather than a distraction from it, comics in education is not new. During WWII, the Office of War published comics instructing its young readers to fulfil their “patriotic duty” and stay in school (Zorbaugh 196, cited in Dorrell, Curtis and Rampall). As a popular medium, comics intimately reflect their times, and even overtly discriminatory comics of the past can “present a number of social phenomena, including gender, race, and sexual inequality or stratification, and violence” and especially “superhero comic books also reflect cultural assumptions about gender and American values” (Hall and Lucal 60). Indeed, Hall and Lucal suggest that X-Men be supplemented by texts such as Omi and Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States to discuss identity politics (62). In a sense, Secret Identities is riding on a long-established tendency in using comics as education materials as well as a recent resurgence.

II. Multicultural education
the classroom is one of the early “contact zones” (Edelstein 28) between cultures, where both students and teachers are increasingly coming from diverse backgrounds, and where school texts may describe communities different from the school community.
Edelstein writes that criticism of multiculturalism have come from both the right and the left, with the former “bemoaning the loss of a supposedly ‘common’ culture” (21), and the latter faulting it for being too much of a token and superficial approach without affecting any change in power and privilege. Although liberal scholars recognize that the idea of a common culture is absurd, it does not rule out the problem put forth by Callan, that teaching disparate histories of oppression may demoralize readers and contribute to a loss of faith in the national community. The other large issue is finding ways of engaging more deeply in multiculturalism beyond, say, setting up food festivals. I will argue that SI works to resolve both issues.

III. Myths, Superheroes, and US identity
Callan specifically discusses Benedict Anderson’s influential idea of “imagined communities” (qtd. 469), and argues that although Anderson does not explicitly state it, myth is central to building communities because “myth inspires in a way that plain facts about predatory warfare, self-serving elites and downtrodden or resistant masses cannot possibly equal” (469) [Richard Reynolds: Superheroes: A Modern Mythology] Dubose examines national myths specifically as it relates to Captain America in the 1980s. What is particular about Captain America is that he changes as the socio-political climate of the US changes. Although he serves as a soldier in WWII, after rehabilitated from his plane accident (comics serialized in the 1960s), he is sensitive to the “doubtful status of morality” in the 80s and even admits that America isn’t living up to its own dream (927). Dubose writes that ultimately Captain America is a hero because he transcends politics – that he represents the abstract concepts of liberty, justice, dignity, and the pursuit of happiness. To develop upon Dubose’s argument, because one superhero character outlives individual creators and readers, he/she builds an imagined community not only through space but also through time, and is a “contact zone” (to borrow from Education) where citizens, through time, negotiate cultural values (Alilifu Nama: “psychological sandbox”). Other studies, such as Matthew J. Smith’s “The Tyranny of the Melting Pot Metaphor: Wonder Woman as Americanized Immigrant,” also focus on the evolution of one superhero figure along with changing American cultural climate. What Secret Identities presents is not so much the evolution of one figure but the evolution of the idea of superhero as it relates to nation. Arguably, an anthology of superhero comics by Asian Americans could only have arisen recently in the US, as there would not have been Asian Americans working within the comics industry, and with the resources, to put together this anthology. Realizing this allows us to better examine multiculturalism and superheroes in conjunction.

I. Minorities and superheroes
One of the central ideas behind the anthology is the similarity between the Asian American experience and the situation of superheroes. The opening page of the section, “When Worlds Collide,” features Asians of various national backgrounds gathering, paired with deliberately ambiguous words that could refer to either the immigrant experience or alien superheroes. Similarly, the publisher summary on the back cover begins by describing a “quiet and unassuming guy with black hair and thick glasses,” which describe the Asian stereotype but also Clark Kent. Granted, not all previously conceived American superheroes are from another world; even so, immigrants, with different ideas, abilities, and appearances, are comparable to superheroes due to their difference from the majority. “Taking Back Troy” is the fictionalized story of Vincent Chin. Historically, in 1982, as imported cars from Japan led to layoffs in the American automobile industry, two workers took Vincent Chin for a Japanese man at a strip club and murdered him after a dispute. In this comic, the Japanese professionals behind the more desirable import cars are directly compared with superheroes (Asian Americans especially have been labelled the “model minority” for their work ethic, which has earned both ill-will and praise from the majority). “No Exit” is similar in that Enayet and Rahmat are arrested because of their foreign appearance and their Muslim religion.
However, one trope of superhero comics is the masked and costumed hero, which should hide visible racial markers (though I will be discussing exceptions featured in the comic “9066” shortly). In many cases in SI, dressing in the same attire as other American superheroes enable Asian American superheroes to belong not only to the superhero community but also the national community, and in many ways the comics depicting military combat in WWII present the military uniform as another kind of superhero costume, which further emphasizes the national dimension. By presenting Asian Americans superheroes, SI positively reconceptualizes difference while also tapping into the superhero’s inclusive potential.

II. SI and its way of addressing history: not just “cultural tourism” (Edelstein)
The superheroes in the short pieces of Secret Identities certainly address both the history of discrimination experienced by the Asian American communities, and also provides the positive models for integrating the complex history and overcoming marginalization. In addition, the anthology consciously works with and presents itself as part of the American superhero tradition. Thus, as a text for multicultural education, it is not simply “cultural tourism,” nor does it engender apathy and ethnic separatism.
1) First of all, the volume deals explicitly with the history of Asians in America, and the effects of discriminatory events on Asian Americans today. Campus activism in the 1960s has lead to broader consideration of minority histories, however these narratives still rarely emerge in popular culture. The twenty-six stories in the anthology are arranged largely in chronological order, from “Driving Steel,” which traces the conflicts between Irish and Chinese railroad workers, to “Peril,” about a young man trying to clear his father’s name and prevent his research on advanced weapons from being abused. In SI, most comics centre around one or two heroes of specified ethnicity during a specific time or political climate. For example, “9066” and “Heroes Without a Country” are early stories dealing with Japanese-Americans during WWII and particular sentiments during this time period. The title of “9066” refers to the executive order signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942, which called for the internment of Japanese Americans living along the coast of the Pacific after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. In this comic, the main character is an unidentified Nisei (or second generation) Japanese American superhero, who feels that he has overcome the racial barrier. [Example: “I thought that it didn’t matter who we were when our masks were off” (Tsuei and Ma 27). However, after Pearl Harbour, his fellow superheroes tell him that if he resists their arrest, they would take him by force. The Nisei superhero goes quietly because he is “afraid of what a fight would do to others that look like [him]” (27). Although a fictional account, this narrative reflects widespread attitudes within the Japanese-American community that while their internment was unjust, they would comply to avoid further dividing the nation. It also points to a failure of both the superhero ideal and the American idea, which in this comic especially are intentionally conflated.
2) Despite the comics in the anthology showing the mistreatment of Asian Americans at the hands of the majority, they also insist that Asian superheroes in America are Americans. This insistence on American citizenship also balances diverse Asian-American voices in these comics with a unifying theme (and also reflects earlier directions in Asian American cultural studies). “Heroes Without a Country” fictionalizes the historical all-Japanese 100th Battalion. In the comic, the leader of the battalion, Captain Matt Kim, is based on Korean-American Young Oak Kim, who refused a transfer from the 100th battalion because both Koreans and Japanese Americans are Americans. Also, in “The Citizen,” Franklin D. Murakawa (who goes by his superhero alias, “the Citizen”) had tried to arrest a former US president for war crimes and was sealed inside a spherical chamber, until President Obama releases him to fight off the Nazi mutant soldiers of Operation Robot Stomp.

Example: As the Citizen emerges, he tells Obama, “I work for the country, not the government.”

The title of “Heroes Without a Country” echoes Captain America’s alternate superhero profile, “Nomad, Man Without Country,” during a period when he disagrees with government policies and operated separately (Dubose 927). Despite this, he is still an “all-American superhero,” and readers (and perhaps to a certain extent the citizens of the Marvel universe) recognizes that to be truly American in spirit requires that he recognize when it is straying from his values and refuse to participate. Though Asian Americans can only do so at a greater risk (as shown in “9066”), the superheroes of SI choose to identify with the foundational tenets of America rather than America as a geopolitical entity. Patriotism, in Callan’s definition, is “active identification with one’s particular nation as a cross-generational political community whose flourishing one prizes and seeks to advance” (468). Hence, Franklin D. Murakawa is truly “The Citizen,” though it may take rehabilitation by a later president, and as a fictional character only be popularized generations later than Captain America.
3) As Captain Matt Kim allies himself with Japanese Americans, many Asian American superheroes of SI ally themselves with other American ethnicities. Edelstein discusses the dangers of ethnic or racial separatism in multicultural education, suggesting that “forging coalitions, not only ‘among various oppressed groups’ but between oppressed groups and ‘members of dominant groups,’ is crucial in order to move toward these goals” (36) “Heroes Without a Country” emphasizes that Samson is the most decorated American superhero and is Jewish. Graphically, Samson is shown in newspaper clippings to have a large star of David on the front of his costume. This comic does not only evoke the internment of the Japanese with the depiction of Nazi camps, but by evoking this parallel shows the similarity in history between various ethnic groups who have faced persecution around the world. Other comics show historical alliances between the Asian and African American communities. In “Driving Steel,” the Chinese railroad worker “Jimson Fo” is accompanied by an African American youth, “Jack,” as they compete with an Irish railroad worker team who is cheating to get farther into the mountain. While it might seem that Jack is Jimson’s sidekick, the comic ends with John telling Jimson, “Jack is what Creeder [the Irish overseer] calls me, suh. My real name is John. John Henry.” Jimson replies, “I will call you John Henry, if you will stop calling me Sir” (Yang and Jew 24).

example: The last large panel shows the two men from behind, side by side, both looking into the mountains. Before setting out into the rest of America, Jimson and John Henry establish an equal relationship.

In addition, readers should realize by this time that young “Jack” is the African American folk hero John Henry, who challenged rail workers using a steam drill and won. Chinese labourers on the American and Canadian railroads are an important component of Asian North American history, and “Driving Steel” not only features an alliance between two minority characters but also a marriage between their cultural legends, enacted upon America during nation building.
4) In addition, by asserting themselves as superheroes of the American cause, the Asian superheroes already establish their alliance with the dominant group. Perhaps the most morally complex comic in this collection is “The Blue Scorpion and Chung.” In the opener to this comic, the comics creator Gene Yang and the director Michael Kang talk briefly about the role of most Asians in action films as sidekicks, which is demeaning and emasculating. Therefore, it is important to “tell our own stories, on our own terms” (Chow and Baroza 62). “The Blue Scorpion and Chung” fulfils this obligation in somewhat unexpected terms. Chung, a Korean-American, acts as a sidekick and chauffeur to the hero Blue Scorpion, who is often drunk and makes jokes bordering on racist. After defeating a Korean drug trafficking station, the captured drug dealer asks Chung, “So why do you put up with this pile of garage? You do all the work, he gets all the glory” (Yang and Liew 70). Chung answers, “The Blue Scorpion is justice. Sometimes justice requires sacrifices” (74). The “own terms” of “The Blue Scorpion and Chung” shows that the heroism of Chung is less that he can fight off drug traffickers and more that he makes sacrifices to ally himself with “garbage” for the sake of something greater than any individual. The comics in SI are certainly not separatist in this regard. The anthology ends with a timeline diagram showing when the comics are situated, and how characters relate to one another across time. On the website, this diagram is captioned, “Multiple creators. Disparate stories. One universe?” I believe that this qualifier operates at a few different levels: to echo the vast and complicated “universes” created by Marvel and DC, to create one universe for disparate Asian stories, but also to forge one universe and one community with existing superhero and real world stories from different cultural backgrounds.
5) Using superheroes to discuss the history of Asian Americans also answers another charge of multicultural education, that present and future generations would feel that nothing can be done about repeated oppression of racial minorities. Although critics of superhero comics sometimes argue that these comics do better when focusing on action sequences and do not lend themselves well to serious social critique and contemplative subject matters (eg, in Wright 162-163), SI uses the martial definition of “action” to drive its activism. One comic, “The Hibakusha,” deals with the aftermath of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still impacts families today, and in teaching this topic is it difficult to avoid black and white portrayals of US as the “bad guys” and Japanese citizens as helpless victims. “The Hibakusha,” whose title is a transcription of the Japanese expression “explosion-affected people” (SI Study Guide, 3), deals with young adults who have developed superpowers as descendants of the atomic bomb survivors, who are training in a facility run by a man known only as “Mishira.” The story does not sidestep the horrors of the atomic bombs even though it deals with amazing superpowers.

Ryan Suda, who is given more back story than the other characters, is recruited to train with the other young superhumans.

Ryan Suda, who is given more back story than the other characters, is recruited to train with the other young superhumans. Ryan’s father loses his temper at the agent, telling him that his own father’s skin was peeling, his mother’s kimono was fused to her skin, and his wife was interned in the US. However, Ryan sees things differently, and agrees that it may be a “silver lining of a genocide,” a chance to overcome mutual hostilities for one, and secondly a chance for Ryan and others like him to be valued and to act on their abilities, despite being made inhuman. By focusing on the imagined superhuman abilities that could come from such a horrific historical event, the comic itself focuses on agency instead of victimhood. In addition, creating an anthology of superhero comics is an active method to teach students history that may be otherwise neglected, and also to assert current Asian American talent in the comics industry.
6) Historical background not included in the comic is covered by the Secret Identities Discussion Guide. Although the medium of comics has been praised to be effective in education, a criticism has been that the comics industry is slow to adapt to the protocols of education and academia (Coogan, qtd. in Hudson 23). Multicultural history, with its possibly depressing and difficult content, may need even more scaffolding to become successful in education. Keith Chow, one of the four editors of SI, is a specialist in comics and education, and thus has developed extensive teaching notes to SI. As of December 2009, discussion guides to the first three sections of SI are available online, covering “War and Remembrance,” “When Worlds Collide,” and “Girl Power.” Each corresponding section of the guide contains the social or historical background to the setting of each comic, followed by discussion questions. The entire section concludes with “Resources and Further Reading,” which lists books and articles. “War and Remembrance” and “Girl Power” also includes lesson plans with essential vocabulary and assignment plans.

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Works Cited

Callan, Eammonn. “Democratic Patriotism and Multicultural Education.” Studies in Philosophy and Education 21 (2002): 465-477.

Dubose, Mike. “Holding Out for a Hero: Reaganism, Comic Book Vigilantes, and Captain America.” Journal of Popular Culture 40.6 (2007): 915-936.

Edelstein, Marilyn.”Multiculturalisms Past, Present, and Future.” College English 68.1 (2005): 14-41.

Hall, Kelley J. and Betsy Lucal. “Tapping into Parallel Universes: Using Superhero Comic Books in Sociology Courses.” Teaching Sociology 27.1 (1999): 60-66.

Hudson, Laura. “Comics in the Classroom.” Publishers Weekly 255.51 (2008): 22-23.

Nama, Alilifu. “Brave Black Worlds: Black Superheroes as Science Fiction Ciphers.” African Identities 7.2 (2009): 133-144.

Reynolds, Richard. Superheroes: A Modern Mythology. London: B.T. Batsford, 1992.

Secret Identities: An Asian American Superhero Anthology. Eds. Jeff Yang, Parry Shen, Keith Chow, and Jerry Ma. New York: The New Press, 2009.

“Secret Identities Discussion Guide: Section One: War and Remembrance.” Secretidentities.org. Web. 18 Dec. 2009. .

Wright, Bradford. “From Social Consciousness to Cosmic Awareness: Superhero Comic Books and the Culture of Self-Interrogation, 1968-1974.” English Language Notes 46.2 (2008): 155-174.

Reading _Reading Lolita in Tehran_ in North America

As usual, I am slow on the uptake, and so although this book was published 7 years ago and I wrote a reflective entry on it a year ago, I procrastinated on posting anything. I had wanted to write an entry on this after my term of being a TA for Women’s Studies, but other academic things got in the way. The first part of this entry is what I wrote immediately after I read it, and the second part is my reassessment and considerations after a year of more work and school. As I listened to the audiobook, some of my spelling may be off.

This is what I wrote right after I read it:

2 weeks or so ago, I got the audiobook for Reading Lolita in Tehran from the library, and I just wanted to see if it merits the praise and popularity it garnered – and also because Susan gave it t my mother for Christmas once, and it’s sitting on the shelf in PEI. So far, I’ve got the last 2 disks (out of 10) to go, and I need to rant about my reaction to it.

Before I start, I need to say that of all the books Nafisi mentions in relation to their lives in the Islamic Republic, I haven’t read any. Maybe this is a part of my reactions.

1) I don’t feel touched. The characters seem real to me enough, but I don’t feel bad for them like I should.

2) I find Nafisi petulant at times. This may not be justified because I haven’t lived through something like that, and I can’t say what changes to one’s character may result. I’ll come back to this later. But what I mean as “petulant” is…she seems to say these things about people, like how the “Little Great Gatsby” professor was someone who constantly worried about himself, and then the example she gives would be that he was worried about being sacked during the time of unrest. I find her statement unfounded. She paints him to be a bad person, but the example she gives seems like a natural worry to have. Also, her saying that the mediating woman professor was ambitious and used people – I find her criticism sort of coming out of nowhere. Yes, that professor tried to make people compromise, but there isn’t a clear connection between that and Nafisi’s statement about her intentions. she does say that it’s hard for her not to “pontificate” but I find that she takes her position to be able to pontificate for granted, like she has a right to criticize those around her and enjoys making fun of them on some level (eg calling the professor “Little Great Gatsby”). I’m not sure exactly where I get this impression from.

3) Not really about the book itslef, but about its literary/media context (got to than ENGD03 [course on Culture and media theory] again). A huge theme, and undertone, running in the book is the unfair censorship of…everything. That many works of the West are banned at Iran at that time. I feel like her book is involved in an equal but opposite problem. How many books, in the West, are from people in the Middle East who are praising such revolutions and praising components of religious fundamentalism? Yet these books which include within them a denouncement of Islamic and heavily religious-based societies are popularized in the West, translated. Same with Persepolis (btw, I never felt a moral superiority or petulance from Persepolis as I mentioned in 2)). although she may not have any control over the context her book is published in, it detracts from her arguements somewhat.

4) (really 2 b) – not just her characterization of individuals but also of organizations. People in revolutionary groups and extremist groups are pretty much always shown in a negative light, either character-wise or physically. Guards, students, etc…she accuses the government of being too black and white but I don’t feel like she gives much gray area either. I noticed this part also in Kingdom of Heaven. Some people said that this film was a fair treatment of Muslims and Christians, but some said it wasn’t — I thought it was pretty fair in a liberal humanist way, but then noticed that no one on the side who wanted war with Saladin was portrayed very well. It’s this sort of exclusive linking of character and ideology that I find disturbing.

On the whole, Nafisi’s narrative voice reminds me of a professor I had once, both positively and negatively – someone with a lot to say, a sharp and discerning mind, but seem to carry on a bit into the extreme ends when they’re trying to make their point.

5) Another thing was when I was reading about romantic relationships that Nafisi’s class was having. I think it was Nassrin, who called off her relationship with Ramin (sp?) because he differentiates between girls he respect and share intellectual life with and girls that he’s sexually attracted to. He categorized Nassrin with the former, and Nassrin felt that a fulfilling relationship should also have physical attraction. I agree with one point, that in a monogamic society he should not have a wandering eye to her sister and other women when in a relationship with her, but I have to disagree that wanting a relationship based on sharing intellectual life and respecting them is a wrong ground for a relationship. She and Nafisi seem to be suggesting that this is inadequate and part of the regime’s education, and on the one hand, it is – but I think it’s not as absolute as they portray it to be. Many of my friends and I struggle with the males in our society all the time because they cannot get past the bodies of women when assessing them for relationships, which is the opposite problem to women of Nassrin’s position. I think we would appreciate someone like Ramin who at least is willing to use other criteria.

6) another thing I started to think about when listening to the audiobook is the status of literature. I absolutely agree that literature gives people a way of looking that is “democratic,” as Nafisi states. But I disagree that literature should always appreciated as literature without becoming a model for actions. Specifically, she decries the regime for stating that Western literature spreads decadence, and hence censored many texts; her argument seems to be that they’re “just words” and have no power to make anyone decadent, even if they portray decadence in the first place. However, this seems to be at odds with her view that texts make people see the world democratically – isn’t that an impact of literature? So even if she disagrees on portrayals of decadence, it seems strange to disagree that words have power of reality and people’s actions.

A more pressing point is the relationship of literature to class and to Communism. I’m not saying that Nafisi disparages lower classes – in fact, the fact that she doesn’t make much distinction between classes or mentions much about it to me is a sign that ultimately she doesn’t even begin to discriminate based on class at all. But I do feel that her perspective on literature reflects a “bourgeoisie” sentiment. What I am saying is that books like Persepolis and Reading Lolita in Tehran reflect the attitudes of only a certain group of Iranians (and this is perhaps a part of my ignorance too – I have a conception that there was a gap between intellectuals and non-intellectuals in terms of their reading in 70s and 80s Iran, and my assumption is based on this). The status ascribed to literature as a remedy to an oppressive regime only applies to well-read people who can use (probably not the best word, but I can’t think of a better one) literature this way. And partly, too, maybe those who don’t read James Joyce and Fitzgerald and so forth don’t have a problem with the regime, or not as much as a problem? I realise this could be a chicken or egg question – correlation or causation question. I’m not too clear on it either.

7) This brings me to a more personal note. I think that despite living in canada and educated by very open and Westernized parents, somehow I also espouse a lot of quasi-Marxist-Leninist values, probably from my brief schooling in China and the fun grade one readers featuring Lenin and so forth. I do believe that Western culture, under certain circumstances (especially rapid introduction to a country) can make people “decadent.” eg, the people I live with, rich Chinese kids who are using their parents money for their international tuitions, who throw perfectly good food away and take taxis to school even though it’s 15 minutes walk away – because their families have always lived well in a capitalist environment and never learned from poverty not to waste, or appreciate the work of production. I also believe that literature is not necessary to a society. This may be from years of my parents telling me that my chosen field of study is useless, but it’s not entirely…well…you can say that X major is useless because it’s useless to you personally or useless to society in general – and although my parents have used the former form of argument, I feel what’s really behind what they’re saying is the latter type of “useless.” Eg, “studying literature is selfish because you aren’t applying your abilities to the needs to society.” (I feel bad for my mother in a way, because I think she’s conflicted without knowing it, because her chosen work is a Scientist and the conflict has never been the crux of any vast decision she had to make; in the cultural revolution in China she pretty much had no options to choose anything related to humanities, because of the political atmosphere. Unlike me, because choosing my goal in careers is a vast decision, whereas societal pressure, direct and indirect, put my mother on the path of science without her having to agonize over her own principles. I feel that she’s conflicted because although she really is a ‘patron of the arts’ and loves music, literature, and painting, she still feels from her Communist training that these are extraneous and unnecessary pleasures.) and so I espouse also, partly, that literature and art are extraneous. So while they can give people a democratic outlook, by my way of thinking, democracy as most people conceive of it is a goal for an individualistic society and strongly only one class of that society. I’m personally torn between agreeing with Nafisi as pertaining to literature and not.

8) The book did me a great good, though, which is perhaps not the good that most women in the West would get out of it. Most females who are living in the West would probably feel good about not living in a society like the Islamic Republic because if they were, then they would be oppressed in many ways by many parts of society (family, community, government). for me though, I am glad I live in North America not because what would be done to me but because of what I would do. There is a part in the book where a revolutionary student and ex-soldier set himself on fire and ran down the halls. I wouldn’t go so far, I think, but I would probably be among either the women guards / inspectors who keep tabs on girls who break the laws, keeping them in jail and so forth, and maybe even torturing them, for the sake of maintaining a supposedly higher standard of morality. In such a society, I would become the fundamentalist, or one of the Marxists in the book, who are no better (I had previously taken on the fervour behind the Russian Revolution with admiration, and that was just reading about it).

*****
My thoughts a year later:

Starting with 8): Last term I went through “feminist colonialism” with first year Women’s Studies students over and over again. This refers to the tendency of feminists in the Western world to assume superiority to societies that are seen as more “backward” and in need of “help.” I feel that the majority of Western readers would unknowingly and well-intentionedly take this stance when reading Reading Lolita in Tehran. I just read on the book’s Wiki entry that certain scholars attacked the book for being a propaganda tool for the Bush administration. If it is true that most women reading Nafisi’s book would feel a Western superiority (or at least Western relief), when I would have to agree with the criticism that Reading Lolita in Tehran is a propaganda tool.

HOWEVER. I took a somewhat mind-boggling Asian North American Literature course last term, in which we talked about the debates that went on within the Asian American community over Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. The book was contentious because some Asian American writers felt that it set forth descriptions of Asians (specifically Chinese) as misogynist, which would play into mainstream stereotypes against Asians and hence reinforce Orientalism and Western superiority. The general consensus among the class, other than maybe one or two people, seemed to be that one artist cannot be responsible for faithfully portraying a whole culture, and if she tried, she’s be upsetting someone somewhere down the line anyway, and it was up to readers to take the author’s words as only the author’s words and not representative of an entire culture. I feel both ways about this, as I did about the (over)reaction on the part of Iranian officials regarding the move 300, and didn’t say much. One thing I was thinking, though, was that if readers need to get to a point of reading critically, they need to be taught by writers to do so. So in some senses it is the writers’ responsibility.

How this relates to Reading Lolita in Tehran is that after thinking about this question a lot, I have to ask why academics attacking Nafisi for being a tool of the Bush administration are attacking her and not the Bush administration. If I have learned anything from graduate studies so far is to think beyond the one artist, to think big. My discomfort with the climate the book was published in (as I talked about in 3)) is part of this thinking big, and added to the debate on The Woman Warrior, I have resolved my discomfort – I take issue not with Nafisi but with the sociopolitical climate. In the Consumer Culture course that I am TAing for, we are talking about Identity and Community this week. In times of crisis, people tend to dig in their heels that much harder regarding the self and the Other. Nafisi’s book was caught up in this sort of entrenchment, but that does not devalue her criticisms against the regime in Iran, unless someone can prove that she actively and deliberately took advantage of the political climate, or jumping on the bandwagon. I would think it’s more the case that Nafisi has thought about this deeply and felt like she needed to voice her criticism since living in Tehran, but the political and publishing climate hasn’t allowed chances for her to voice them until post 9/11.

To conclude by expanding out from Reading Lolita in Tehran – It seems that recently many creative works have been caught up in the same sort of debates. I mentioned 300 already, which I felt was using stunning graphics and a heroic plot line to almost subliminally reinforce the difference between East and West. Another example is the films of Deep Mehta, such as Water and Heaven on Earth. One of my friends in the department criticized Water for showing a phenomenon that rarely happens anymore, which people watching would not know, and would just assume that India is a nation that oppresses women. As someone who feels more attached to my ethnicity than my gender, and as someone who still shares some values in Communist social responsibility, I mostly stand on the side of these “conservative” criticisms. I feel that artists cannot just be individualists pursuing individual visions – they should provide a context for their visions (though that is not to say that all literature has to be “useful” in a Social Realism / artistic skills for propaganda sense). The larger burden of providing the context is perhaps not, after all, the job of the artist, but those working with arts and literature, such as academics, curators, publishers, etc. After all, we talked about how Kingston did not want her memoir to be titled “The Woman Warrior,” and it being marketed as a memoir rather than fiction wasn’t something she had much control over.