NAME: Jun Jun
AGE: 17-20
OCCUPATION: Migrant
IMPRESSED BY STRENGTH OF: Michael Horn

The first time I met a Chinese migrant was almost 4 years ago, on my first night ever in China. After my flight landed in Beijing, a representative from the teaching program I was with whisked me away to a cheap hotel in the outskirts of the city. The arrangements were to stay there one night before taking a train the next evening to the school I was assigned to teach at in Yueqing, Zhejiang.

Hidden beneath the hotel, accessible through an underground stairwell, was a dimly lit nightclub blasting music loud enough to be heard five stories up in our rooms. When I finally settled in, I felt dazed and tired from the long flight, but I had waited too long to finally be in China to just go to sleep. Me and a few other volunteers decided to investigate the underground nightclub with the loud music.

The bartender was a middle-aged man with flowing, long hair— done in a perm and dyed brown. His leopard print shirt was exceptionally tight. The place was mostly empty, so we sat down in front of him and ordered drinks. I started to talk with him, but my fledgling Chinese was too weak and the music too loud. He shot me a smile and walked to the other side of the bar.

Around the time my ears felt like they may have sustained permanent ear damage, I noticed that there were many private rooms around the nightclub. If me and my friends were to sit in one of those quieter, more brightly lit rooms, not only could we have a better chance of hearing each other, but we could also read my Lonely Planet and make plans for the next day. I approached the bartender and pointed to a private room: “Room, how much?”

My beginning Chinese textbook didn’t prepare me well enough for his response, but I did catch that he wanted 100 RMB (at the time about 12.50 USD). The price seemed high, but me and the other volunteers decided to split the cost of the room. Our program had told us about ‘special prices’ in China for clueless foreigners who don’t know any better, but we were either too tired or dazed to fight it that night.

A few minutes after we sat down in the private room, a skinny Chinese boy probably in his late teens walked in. His button-down shirt was fastened only in one place, revealing a low-cut, red muscle shirt. The confusion of him suddenly joining us quickly intensified. The boy took a seat next to my friend and fellow volunteer Michael Horn, draping him in his arms. He looked at Michael and spoke in English, with a thick, sultry Chinese accent: “You are so strong.”

It took almost ten more minutes of increasingly awkward conversation to tentatively determine that what we had paid for was not a room.

It was around this time that the boy caught on that we were not interested in his services. He was also unsure of whether he should stay or leave—after all, we did pay for him. We invited him to stay. I went to the bar and bought him a beer, and we chatted for a few hours.

His name was Jun Jun. He was kind, polite and had the patience to speak with a foreigner with only basic grasp of the Chinese language. He told me that he wasn’t from Beijing but from the countryside of one of the provinces surrounding Beijing municipality—just like all the other boys there. When I told him that we were thinking about sightseeing in Beijing the following day, he helped us plan a schedule. When he found out that it was my first ever night in China, he welcomed me and warned me of some things I may encounter and not be used to.

He was the best ambassador China could have provided me on my first night there.

—————————————————————————————————————————-

When I woke up the next morning, I thought about what had happened since the last time I woke up in a bed. In 30 hours, I parted with my friends and family, flown across the Atlantic, gone to China for my first time, and purchased and befriended a male Chinese prostitute.

I decided to go back down the underground stairwell to get another glimpse of the nightclub before I left. With the lights turned on, things began to make more sense. The dirty brick walls were covered with posters of half-naked men, and the stench of all sorts of carnal acts emanated out of the private rooms. I noticed that Jun Jun and many of the other employees I recognized from the previous night— young men aged about 15-20 years— were waking up in the private rooms. There weren’t any customers around; the nightclub was also Jun Jun and the rest of the staff’s home.

The middle-aged bartender was sitting behind the bar, still wearing the same skin-tight, leopard print shirt from the previous night. Beside him, sitting on the far side of the bar on his right side, was a big tub of lubricant that I had failed to notice the night before. For a moment, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of disgust. He was probably the boss of this bar, and the money he made to upkeep his flowing, brown curls almost definitely came through some sort of exploitative means. But I tried not to pass judgment— not on my first day in a foreign country.

As I walked out of the bar, I waved goodbye to Jun Jun.

Later, as I was checking out of the hotel, a group emerged from the underground stairwell. At the head of the pack was the bartender— behind him, a small bevy of his teenage employees.

They reached the street outside and it became obvious how different they were. Their colorful, skin-tight clothing and flamboyant body language blatantly stuck out from the rest of the backdrop. They were outsiders in two different ways. While the kind of person they liked made them homosexuals, the kind of place where they were born made them migrants. (With few exceptions, those born outside of Beijing can only register as Beijing urban residents— and enjoy the resulting social and economic benefits— if they purchase an apartment in Beijing: something far out of the reach of most rural Chinese.)

Just as I was about to lose sight of them, I noticed an elderly man had taken offense at the bartender and his boys. He confrontationally glared at some of the boys in the back of the pack— an explicit expression of disapproval.

The bartender caught sight and immediately sprung to action. He put his arm around the boy and stared right back into the eyes of the elderly man. He stared until the old man relented and walked away.

NAME: Master Yang
AGE: 68
OCCUPATION: Dongba Master/ retired prison guard
FAVORITE CALLIGRAPHER: Zhu Da (朱耷)

It’s a mid-autumn afternoon in Baisha village in southwest China—brisk, clear, the sky overtaken by the 18,400-foot Jade Dragon Snow Mountain located a few miles down the road. A mixture of sounds meanders through the cobbled streets and into the homes: livestock wandering, children playing, a farmers’ orchestra practicing traditional music. I am sitting on the patio of Master Yang, a Baisha calligrapher, scholar and religious leader.

I begin to feel that China is very far away. The architecture, language, and even the musical scales emanating from the farmer’s instruments are distinctly non-Chinese. The blue embroidered tunics and sheepskin capes the women around me are wearing are designs found nowhere else in China. From the patio, I can see the calligraphy studio inside Master Yang’s home. The works hanging on the walls convey an elegant simplicity unlike any calligraphy I have encountered elsewhere.

The residents of Baisha are Naxi, belonging to one of the 25 ethnic minority groups found in Yunnan, the most ethnically diverse province in China. The calligraphy in Master Yang’s studio uses not Chinese characters, but Naxi Dongba script— the last living set of pictographic characters in the world.

Baisha was once the political and cultural capital of a Naxi Kingdom independent of Chinese jurisdiction. For centuries, it was the center of a distinct society characterized by animist religious beliefs and matriarchal social norms. Although Baisha has been part of China since Kublai Khan conquered the region in the late 13th century, Naxi society still continues to thrive there. It does not take long to realize that, among other things, the Naxi have maintained their matriarchal social roots; the women still call the shots in many household and economic affairs. For centuries, the Naxi have consistently managed to preserve their cultural identity against the tides of history.

This is the third time I have waited on Master Yang’s patio to meet with him. Sipping the local Yunnan coffee he prepared for me, I think about an earlier meeting, when, after entering the master’s home, I met a middle-aged man from California. The man, who was living in a village near Baisha and studying spirituality and philosophy under Master Yang, assured me, “You have no idea what a special place you’ve stumbled on.”

As it turns out, he was right.

Master Yang bears the title of Dongba. The Dongba—which means ‘wise men’ in Naxi language—are priests and scholars in traditional Naxi society. The process of becoming a Dongba is arduous, requiring candidates to spend extensive time studying Naxi classics, rituals, history, and script. The final task of prospective Dongba is a pilgrimage to a sacred cave in Baishuitai, a region in northern Yunnan province where Dingbashiluo, the first Dongba sage, developed and promoted Dongba beliefs and customs.

The Dongba have extensive social responsibilities, including providing advice, preserving Dongba script and protecting Naxi knowledge as well as conducting funerals, exorcisms and festivals. In the past, when a person faced a problem or important decision, they first consulted with a Dongba. The traditions still exist today but only a handful of Dongba remain, and most are elderly men.

Master Yang slowly emerges from his home just as the old men in the farmers’ orchestra are putting down their instruments to drink rice wine. The master is short in stature, with graying hair and olive-tan skin. His most noticeable feature is his perpetual smile that seems out of place for a man of his age and distinction. He asks what I would like to talk about, and I tell him that I want to learn more about his life.

Master Yang was born in Baisha in 1942. By his seventh birthday, he had lived through Japanese occupation, World War II, Chinese civil war, and the founding of the People’s Republic of China. But it was the events that occurred after the founding of modern China that most profoundly affected his life in Baisha.

After communist victory in 1949, Dongba rituals and traditions were targeted by the government as counter-revolutionary superstition. As a result, the Dongba of Baisha no longer dared to conduct rituals or practice Dongba calligraphy. Some buried their equipment and ceremonial clothes in anticipation of a time when they might be tolerated again. “The Dongba had become cow devils and snake spirits,” Master Yang muses, recalling the terms Chinese revolutionaries used to demonize enemies of the revolution.

In this political context, Master Yang had no choice but to postpone his studies of the Dongba mystical arts. After graduating from high school, he took a job at a local prison, where he would work for the majority of his life. In his free time, he studied the classics of Han Chinese culture and eventually became adept at writing poems, stories, essays and calligraphy in the Chinese style. However, he wasn’t satisfied with this type of scholarship. “I was a minority scholar on the edge of China,” he says, “there was no way for me to compete with what was coming from the Han world.”

The dismantling of forced integration guidelines for minorities that accompanied the “reform and opening” policies of the late ‘70s gave Master Yang a new opportunity. By the early ‘80s, his research and writings began to turn towards Naxi customs and ritual. It was during this time that Master Yang and a group of other like-minded Naxi scholars essentially brought Dongba traditions back from the brink of death. Through his research and writings, he contributed to the resuscitation of a culture that had proven resilient many times before. Just as it had survived the invasion of Kublai Khan and other dynasties past, the Naxi and their unique way of life survived the trials of the Maoist era.

But the greatest threat to the Naxi way of life came through the forces of development and globalization. In 1997, the ancient streets and architecture of Baisha and neighboring Lijiang attracted the attention of UNESCO, which gave both sites the World Heritage Site label. Partially as a result of this, Lijiang, a picturesque old town of winding streets and canals located only 11 kilometers south of Baisha, exploded into one of the premiere tourist destinations of China.

As hordes of tourists flooded Lijiang in the ‘90s, the region became connected to the rest of China via a new airport and modern tourist infrastructure. Significant economic development followed— along with the grumblings of other Yunnan ethnic minority groups that the Naxi were crudely marketing or even “selling out” their culture. During the early tourism boom, Master Yang found work in Lijiang lecturing tourists about Naxi history but quickly found the crowds too tiring. Before long, he retreated back to his studio in Baisha.

Master Yang believes that the Dongba have survived through the turbulence of history because the rituals and services they provide have always come from the needs of the community. While the changing dynasties and crude policies of the past have done little to affect the actual need for traditional customs and spiritual guidance, the subtle yet deeper influence of materialism, modernization and popular culture has profound implications for the younger generation of Naxi. He says that these days, many younger Naxi are more interested in pop music and television than they are in the ancient customs and calligraphy of their ancestors.

The farmers’ band is already playing again when the master is finished talking. He slowly rises from his chair and begins to walk towards his studio. “We’ll find a way to keep it going,” he tells me, looking back.

Before I leave his home, Master Yang commemorates our meeting in accordance with tradition—by completing a work of calligraphy. With total concentration, the old Dongba gently presses his brush against the parchment to create four pictographs— a giant leaf, a set of seven squiggly lines, what looks like a pig with triangles for eyes, and a wave. With his trademark smile he translates the work for me: “May everything turn out as one wishes.”

NAME: Shi Min
AGE: 26
OCCUPATION: Salesperson for Oracle China
FAVORITE HOBBY: Hiking

NAME: Silang Laji
AGE: 23
OCCUPATION: Road worker
FAVORITE TYPE OF TV SHOW: Kung fu epics

During the seven day National Day vacation, I traveled to the Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in West Sichuan to hike around Minya Konka, a 7,500-meter holy mountain. This essay was written based on the experience.

After seven hours on the mountain road to Minya Konka, our van suddenly halted next to a girl standing on the side of the path. She exchanged a few words with the driver in the sing-songy local dialect of Tibetan and promptly stepped in the van.

Before she got in, it was easy to recognize that the girl was one of the many laborers in the area working on road construction. Road networks are rapidly expanding in China’s Tibetan regions as part of government plans to foster economic development and increase incoming Han Chinese migration. So far, the plans have been successful, dramatically elevating living conditions as well as increasing access to goods for the majority of people. However, some believe that these benefits come as a double-edged sword. The price is the further opening up of the Tibetan world to the dominant Han Chinese culture (through migration, products, media)— the surrender of even more cultural autonomy.

The girl was easily recognizable as a road laborer because she displayed the distinguishing features of every laborer I saw.

First, she was a female. Because most young men migrate out of rural areas to work in urban centers, women (and the elderly) tend to take care of the work in the countryside—including physically intensive work like farming or road renovation. In the Tibetan areas of China, where traditional gender roles restrict women from leaving home, this trend is especially potent.

The second distinguishing factor was her oversized floral hat. Chinese culture resoundingly equates ivory-white skin with beauty. With the laborers working outside at high altitudes (over 3,500 meters), failing to protect their skin from the sun would amount to sabotage of physical appearance.

She sat in the middle aisle. A few moments of silence passed before she spoke to us.

“All of your skin… is so white,” she said in surprisingly fluent standard Chinese. “I’m so dark— it’s a little embarrassing.”

Taken off guard by both her language ability and self-deprecation, I responded by saying that it didn’t matter at all to me— that I thought she was pretty, actually. I added that in the USA, many people lay out under the sun to deliberately blacken their skin. The bizarre fact about a distant land didn’t faze her.

“Well, around here, I don’t count as that pretty,” she said, smiling.

Silang Laji was 23 years old, with callused hands and tan skin—marks of growing up in the countryside. When the driver picked her up, she had just finished her day’s work on the road. Under normal circumstances, she would have had to walk for two hours to her cousin’s house in a nearby village, but today she was lucky. Her uncle— our driver—just so happened to drive by.

A Chinese passenger met eyes with Laji, “How is it doing road renovation work?” he asked.

“Xiguan le” – I’m used to it— she coolly responded.

“What about the four hours of commuting everyday?” the man pressed on, “that must be difficult.”

Smiling, and with a playful bounce to her voice, she shot back—“Xiguan le!”

A few days later, we learned that it had been her second day on the job.

Laji was the first Tibetan I met in Western Sichuan that spoke standard, unaccented Chinese.  When she was 13, she committed herself to learning the language, despite the fact that almost no one spoke it in her town. With no one to talk to, she studied standard Chinese with the only resource she had available— TV.

TV is more or less the same all over China, even in remote Tibetan mountain towns with few speakers of standard Chinese. With television networks stubbornly broadcasting only in Chinese, Laji found a perfect study resource. She spent hours a day dissecting the foreign language she heard in the news reports, kung fu epics and dramas on the TV. After years of listening and practicing in her mirror, she was able to speak the language with little difficulty or accent. In the process, she took a special liking to the Korean and Taiwanese dramas, which she found to be especially romantic.

Television wasn’t the only place where she admired Han culture; she also preferred Han men.

“Tibetan men are immature,” she said, “they can be very traditional, even going as far as beating their wives.”

When I asked her how people could allow violence like that to happen, she blamed it on “feudal mentality,” evoking the politicized term used by the Chinese Communist Party to characterize the theocracy that governed Tibet prior to its 1949 liberation by the People’s Liberation Army.

“Han men seem much more mature, much more civil,” she added.

Over the next few days, I spent a lot of time with Laji, who decided to take off time from roadwork and hike Minya Konka with my group. While hiking, we sang (Han and some American) songs, told (Tibetan and American) stories, and told (Han) jokes.

After a few days of travel, we reached the most remote place we would stay at— a village of eight homes, located at the base of the holy mountain. One of the homes belonged to the 10-member family of Laji’s elder cousin.

It was nightfall. Fifteen people huddled around the wood stove, eating sour cheese and drinking Tibetan butter tea. The weather was cold, and the stove was our only source of heat. I wouldn’t have known what day it was until someone turned on the TV that was sitting in the corner of the room, next to the murals of various Tibetan lamas. The screen flashed on and an image of thousands of soldiers marching in formation projected across the room. At the back of the formation, a giant, red mural proclaimed “Long Live the Motherland!”

It was Oct. 1st, 2009, the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. The broadcast was the long-awaited military parade. In the Han Chinese world, there was an almost hysterical anticipation for the event.

But in the dimly lit room, something about the whole spectacle felt distant. The noise coming from the TV set seemed to be swallowed up by the vast silence of the towering mountain at our doorstep. I glanced around the room— there were two foreigners, two Han Chinese, and eleven Tibetans. Some of our hosts curiously watched the broadcast (despite probably not understanding the Chinese) and many others just ignored the TV.  Laji was wiping the dirt off the traditional Tibetan clothes she was wearing. An old Tibetan man wearing a knock-off Columbia windbreaker and boots sat in the corner. With eyes closed, he quietly rotated a prayer wheel around and around.

Laji, glancing away from the TV, told me that she preferred Korean dramas.

NAME: Xi Shaoqi
AGE: 26
OCCUPATION: Personal trainer
INTERESTING FACT: Trained masseuse and Chinese traditional herbalist

NAME: Gege
AGE: 33
OCCUPATION: Journalist
AVERAGE NUMBER OF ALL-NIGHTERS PULLED IN ONE WEEK: 1.5

My first week in Chengdu I became interested in writing about the former drivers of Chengdu’s man-powered sanlunche, who, following a 2008 government ordinance prohibiting the iconic pedicabs from operating in Chengdu, have had to find new jobs and embrace unfamiliar lifestyles. I asked my friend Gege, a journalist from here, if he knew how these drivers were dealing with their uncertain futures. Gege responded with a high-pitched laugh— putting his arm around me he said, “that question is so America.”

Gege is chief editor of a major Chinese newspaper. He speaks too fast, chain smokes, and can’t sit still. His commitment to reporting news in an accurate, incisive fashion has earned him a reputation among colleagues for being reckless— crazy, even. When an armed conflict erupted last week near Guogan, a town in Myanmar near the Chinese border, Gege was on a plane headed to the border region within hours. Unsatisfied with simply seeing the refugee camps on the “dull” side of the border, he paid villagers to smuggle him in through the mountains, concealed his identity, and interviewed Guogan’s remaining residents— all while dodging AK-47-toting soldiers on the look out for foreign journalists. He wrote five articles about his time in Guogan, all of which were published. Gege is 33 years old with no kids, no girlfriend, no steady home— and no plans to settle down soon.

I later asked Gege why he found my “American” question so predictable. “You see, journalists will always project the cultural and historical context of their work, and Americans are no exception,” he said. “Maybe in a country like the US, with a relatively stable history and deep concern for individual rights, ten thousand people suddenly losing their jobs would be big news, but in China we would never portray something like this as that serious— this kind of thing just happens so often.”

Central to the distinction Gege was making was rennaixing, a Chinese word roughly meaning “the capability to bear or endure.” Gege continued, “The rennaixing of the Chinese is strong. These drivers will endure,” he said “One look at Chinese history and you can see that we have always had to endure, always have had to have rennaixing. The drivers will find a way— open a store, become workers, open a fast food restaurant, something.”

Reflecting on how trite my question must have seemed to Gege, it seemed fair to assume that different historical and cultural contexts deeply affect approaches to journalism. Gege was quick to mention in our discussions how he believes modern Chinese culture affects Chinese media.

In his opinion, a major result are the government controls that restrict his free space. He has visible contempt for the censors—whose work scouring media all day in search of political incorrectness he says must be “the most boring job in the world”—but the scenario is something that he grudgingly deals with.

Once, Gege traveled to Yunnan (a province in Southwest China) to write a story on the construction of reservoirs in the Southern part of the province. He observed that while many were benefiting from the increased power supply, many peasants were being forced to relocate from their flooded villages to remote mountain areas where conditions were rougher. Upon his return, he wrote – and published – an article documenting the peasants’ rennaixing.

A letter from the Chengdu Propaganda Department appeared on his desk only a few days after the publication.

The department had deemed his work suspicious, even suggesting that he had been working for foreign journalists. In the end, Gege was lucky – his name was cleared after he sent a hasty though persuasive letter to the department proving that no foreigners were involved.

But not all journalists have been as fortunate as Gege. Some years ago, the propaganda department closed down a Chengdu newspaper called Business Affairs Morning Paper. Gege said that there were three reasons for its demise: first, several reports in the paper had pried too closely in investigating the corruption of a local official. Second, Business Affairs was owned by an entrepreneur who also controlled several other media outlets. Although the Chinese government tolerates private ownership of media, private media empires are seen as threatening – and, consequently, the government tends to break up such arrangements. The third and most critical mistake was simply one erroneous character that slipped through the multiple layers of editing. A line in an article was supposed to read:

“40 years of the establishment of Tibet (province)”

But one misplaced character dramatically changed the meaning:

“40 years of Tibetan Independence”

This mistake proved to be the most disastrous. “The golden rule of Chinese journalism,” Gege noted, “is just not to mention the ethnic issues. There are many ways to justify different kinds of articles, but bringing up any ethnic issue will bring trouble.” After the Tibet mishap, Business Affairs was suddenly unavailable for a week. Although it came back temporarily, its fate was already sealed.

Gege has no sympathy for papers like Business Affairs that fail to obey the rules. “Of course I want reform— all of us [journalists] do,” he said, “but if we don’t follow the rules, then our papers won’t be able to live on to actually get the reform. The improvement in the last twenty or even ten years was unthinkable before. If our paper went under like Business Affairs, we would never get to make use of the freedom we have now.”

To Gege, journalism is a fundamental social commitment—a commitment epitomized by the “incredible efforts of journalists involved in the Watergate scandal.” “Our society is like a dark sea,” he said, “and the media is a boat with a bright light. It is our job to point out the dangers approaching us. Nowadays, we reporters can fulfill this duty much better than before, but there is still much difficulty. For now, we just need to follow the rules, survive, and have rennaixing.”

A few days after I asked him about the pedicab drivers, I showed Gege a draft of this blog entry. It was met with the same high-pitched laugh— “You Americans really are obsessed with rennaixing.”

Note: At his request, Gege’s name has been changed and picture not displayed.

NAME: Tuan
AGE: 35
OCCUPATION: Motorbike Driver
FAVORITE AMERICAN POLITICIAN: Bill Clinton