The Paralympics, and "Cultural Difference."

The paralympics have begun!

Interestingly enough, "para-" in paralympics does not stand for paralyzed, or paraplegic, as I'd assumed before looking it up on Wikipedia, "para-" instead coming from the Greek, and meaning, "besides." So, it means, basically, an athletic competition to take place besides the Olympics (as in, next to.)

Of course, this was just quick thinking. Originally it did stand for "paraplegic," but the inclusion of people with other disabilities made this unsuitable. That's a pretty lucky coincidence, or it would be if the root of "para-" in paraplegic were not the same. But it is.

Anyway, from the official hooplah here you'd think that the Paralympics were as much of a big deal as the Olympics. (I don't mean to be dismissive, I am merely noting that in spectators, number of sports, number of participating athletes, number of advertising dollars spent, etc. etc., the Olympics overshadow their disabled brother.) I have no recollection of this being the case in Atlanta, and of course, there are basically no news stories about athletes or television coverage, what have you, in the western newspapers, unless a story makes a headline for a different reason (say in an article in the Times recently about the benefits the Paralympic athletes get as opposed to those the Olympic athletes get from the USOC.)

At first, I just thought this was China, well, being China, going graciously over-the-top as a host. They are, after all, trying to win us over. (And win over us, but that's a different matter.)

But, as I've been thinking about it, though the above is certainly still a part of the reason for the overwhelming coverage (the games are on T.V. and are similarly unavoidable on the newspapers and newscasts, plus, in Chinese, the Olympics aren't over yet, by which I mean the Olympics and the Paralympics are considered as one big event rather than, as in English, two entirely separate, if related, ones) I've come up with some other possible reasons.

China, as I've mentioned, is trying basically to pull itself one-hundred and fifty to two-hundred years forward in a generation, plus maybe a half. Part of process is acculturation. Party Elites have to do quite a lot of tugging in many different arenas to do this, since it is so drastic, and one of the areas is in manners, basically. There has been a significant improvement in the spitting all over the place, though you still see some egregious examples, like while walking in the subway tunnels, or (not kidding) hocking one up and spitting it out on the inside of the subway car door. That, of course, doesn't count on the streets, where I am far less grossed out. Lining up, too, is a fraction better than it is in Shaoxing, though mostly, still, the line is a foreign concept, and I usually just wait until everyone else is on the Subway before getting on, since, as I am accustomed to waiting for everyone to get off before I get on, I wouldn't get on before everyone else anyway. (Figure that one out, and you should chuckle.) So, I actually half-agree with the statements of the Director of the Paralympics for China below, when he mentions "cultural difference."
Beijing withdraws advice on disabled
The Associated Press
Thursday, May 29, 2008

Olympic organizers said Thursday that they had withdrawn parts of an English translation of a guide for volunteers because of "inappropriate language" used to describe disabled athletes. Zhang Qiuping, director of the Paralympic Games in Beijing, did not offer an apology and attributed the problems to poor translation. "Probably it's cultural difference and mistranslation," Zhang said.

The Chinese-language version of the text remained online and was nearly identical to the English, using essentially the same stereotypes to refer to the disabled. A section dedicated to the disabled says: "Paralympic athletes and disabled spectators are a special group. They have unique personalities and ways of thinking." To handle the "optically disabled," the guide advised: "Often the optically disabled are introverted. They have deep and implicit feelings and seldom show strong emotions." It added, "Try not to use the world 'blind' when you meet for the first time."

Regarding the "physically disabled," the guide said: "Physically disabled people are often mentally healthy. But they might have unusual personalities because of disfigurement and disability." It went on: "Some physically disabled are isolated, unsocial and introspective; they usually do not volunteer to contact people. They can be stubborn and controlling; they may be sensitive and struggle with trust issues. Sometimes they are overly protective of themselves, especially when they are called 'crippled' or 'paralyzed.

The bit about "mistranslation" is pure crap, and usually "cultural difference" (you have no idea how often this comes up) is a desperate excuse for, say, why it's perfectly appropriate to arrest two women in their seventies for "disturbing the peace" when all they had done was apply for a permit to protest during the Olympics. (If you haven't been following that story, they were released a week after being sentenced to a year of "labor reform," with no further penalties, which also probably includes being under surveillance to a greater or lesser extent for the duration of their natural lives.)

But in this case, strangely, I actually think the guy's actually right. In the mad rush to modernize, the culture (which always lags behind the edge of innovation and social change) has been scrambling to figure out what's going on. One of the biggest changes in the west over the last two-hundred years is the changing relative importance of intellectual and physical labor. Two-hundred years ago, all you needed to be a worker was a strong back and a stupid mind, which of course favored young men. As work became less and less physically oriented, it opened up opportunities for older people (I mean, late-thirties and up,) women, and the physically disabled to enter the workforce, and, as they became more valuable to society, mistaken notions about these groups of people's intrinsic value began to change. But, in the west, this has taken a few hundred years, and lots of fighting. China still has not reached this level, either in percent of workforce engaged in mind work and not manual, or in valuing those who are not "the man," in this case, Han Chinese men.

The gap between most people's thoughts (let alone the more rural part of the population) and the guide for volunteers, then, is still rather large, and the document, even if somewhat infuriating to westerners, actually represents some sort of progress along these lines, even if it's hard to believe that as a westerner. The document, in a way, splits the difference between the cultural mind of the West and the East. Of course, since people have fought for so long to elevate the cultural conception of the disabled in the west, having an official document like this come along and enshrine stereotypes feels like regression. Again, though, this is mostly the effect of juxtaposition.

Having said that, one of the preparations for the Olympics was getting all the cripples out of sight. When I'd first gotten here it was rather common (like a few times a day) to see horribly disfigured people, some who'd obviously had work-related accidents, others with birth defects, pan-handling on the streets. So, obviously, enlightenment is coming slowly. It's another mind-numbing Orwellian contradiction, that is, that a McDonald's could have a poster outside advertising specials and marking it as a Paralympic sponsor, where just a few months ago a man who had his face burned off by something was begging for the equivalent of less than two pennies on the bench next to the store. Where did they go, exactly? I'd really like to know.

They haven't come back quite yet. But the workers have. They're pretty unmistakable. And their camps, say, next to the light rail tracks, are also rather obvious.

To be cynical, the blitzing news coverage and hangover news about the Olympic Champions and all gives the almost straight-forwardly government run news the opportunity to talk about this and relish in the distraction rather than move on to other things, like the fact that the central government just admitted that "maybe" some of the schools that fell over in the SiChuan earthquake only fell over because of "possible" faulty construction, (though no mention of corruption and why those schools were so faulty. It was blamed on the lightening fast growth.) So China's changing after all. "Maybe."

I had a conversation with one of my students recently about Sarah Palin recently that led to some of the above. In some ways, it appears as if there's been progress, and in others it's the same old China.

My student was amazed that Sarah Palin was warmly supporting her daughter (obviously she is not very familiar with the American political process) instead of being visibly angry with her. I tried to explain to her that support is exactly what this young woman needs at this point, and getting angry at her would help no one, leading to bitterness etc. at the perfectly wrong time. In China, she said, a seventeen year old would be kicked out of school immediately for this, along with the boy who got her pregnant. I was trying to get her to see the point of view that that's a terrible terrible punishment, taking away their only means of bettering their lives and supporting their child, and I think she understood that, but the dominant feeling was still, they've done something terribly wrong, they have to pay for it.

Again, very Chinese. Everyone is one huge happy family. But if you step out of line, even a little bit, you're thrown to the dogs.

My girlfriend, when I laugh about people spitting in the subway, always says the same thing "they're definatly not from Beijing," and she, modern as she is, holds a fair amount of contempt for anything not Beijing (or QingDao recently, because of a vacation we took there that was great.) Family matters stay in the family, city matters stay in the city, and country matters stay in the country. If you're in, we love you, but if you step the littlest bit out of line, you're an outsider, and you're never getting back in.

I don't necessarily advocate high-schoolers having sex (not since I graduated highschool, anyway) but they do it. It takes the most draconian of social controls to keep this from happening commonly (it still does happen in China, though it's about as hush-hush as possible) and there's always a trade-off.

So the question is, what are they losing by denying this urge?

A beautiful but disturbing day.

I wrote this in May and sent it to some people, but it seemed pertinent now considering yesterday's post.


This afternoon I had Stone. He is a smart child of eleven and he speaks English very well. Because it was such a beautiful day, and because it is very difficult to get him talking about anything, (we have played monopoly during our two previous classes) and because I was exhausted and didn't want to be boxed up in a room unless I was sleeping in it, I decided we would go for a walk. He strongly resisted this, but as I am his teacher he had little to say. We walked a little way, he complaining all the time. At the underpass of a large road he stopped and refused to continue, so I walked downstairs and waited in the tunnel, figuring he would follow me, and he did, so I led him like this, bit by bit, promising him we could sit as soon as we got to a group of benches in a little corporate park about a five or ten minute walk from the building in which we have class. We sat, and he began to talk, and this was good. We weren't talking about anything in particular, and he, every five minutes or so, brought up the fact that he would much prefer to be inside, but I kept saying wait a little longer, and he did, and we sat, talking and not talking.

He is a boy that loves his freedom, which is rare in China, but freedom to him means the freedom to play games, and little else. We talked about how schools are similar to jails in many respects (an analogy he, not I, made) and about how even inside of a jail one can be entirely free if he is master of himself. I kept poking him with the hints of nature around us, the birds, and the trees, the flowers and the wind, which (in particular) was too pleasant for me to acquiesce to his desire to return to the classroom, a two by two meter room which may or may not have a window on the eighteenth floor of an office building. I stretched out on a bench a few minutes after arriving, my head and arms and legs hanging off of it (it had no back) and he did the same, and I realized something, and asked him, "Stone, you never in your life have a time when you don't have to do anything at all, when you can just sit and enjoy the day, right?" He said "yeah." "Well then," I said, "I am offering you the opportunity to simply sit and feel the breeze and listen to the trees and do nothing, since you already speak English so it's not difficult for you and you want to go back inside? Why?" He said something about having to work during class, about always having to work and study, about not having any time to do anything else, because this was all that was important. I mentioned the irony of his using our class time to play games with me (he didn't bring monopoly this day, I think because his mother brought him, but he did bring a deck of cards, and was, as I said, rather disappointed when I said that we wouldn't be using them) but the conversation died there, more or less.

After he won me over and I'd had my fill of the (relatively) fresh air of spring in Beijing, as we sat in the classroom, I asked an innocuous question about how much he slept every night. Sleep being important to me and apparently impossible for the majority of Chinese students, I was curious. He said he slept usually nine hours, sometimes eight, sometimes ten, and then he said, which made me laugh, "sometimes more than this or less." While laughing I almost missed him say, "sometimes not at all." "Not at all," I said, trying to drag more out of him but not incredulous, as I have more than one student who routinely pulls all-nighters to finish homework and review even though eleven seemed a little young for this and he said "Sometimes my parents don't let me sleep, because I didn't finish my homework." The way he phrased this made me rather aghast, and I asked him how often this happened. In the last year, he said, "only once." I felt a little better. He has mentioned previously and briefly how his mother is always angry at him, and his family life does not seem joyful, to say the very least. I don't remember how this next part came up, it may have been started by some loose questions and comments about his parents, or he may have just started talking, but he then went on to talk about how his parents hit him, about how they beat him in secret, and how they made him not able to scream, and when he said this last part I almost started crying. "Parents don't care about anything," he said a few times, as I told him that western people think that this is wrong, that in America kids would be taken away from parents for this, that in the west we think this is the worst thing that you can possibly do to a child, someone who is entirely defenseless and powerless, the worst thing you can do is hit them. "It's a terrible, terrible thing," I said in the calmest and strongest voice I could, because I couldn't say anything else. "I know," he said, "parents don't care about anything."

There are parents who genuinely love their children, of course, there are a few I can think of in particular whose pure and warm love for their children shines through their every gesture when I see them together, and even these beatings are motivated out of concern for what the parents believe is the welfare of the child, which is what makes them even more twisted. There is a phrase in China that translates roughly into "Use a stick to raise a good son," something akin to our "spare the rod, spoil the child." There's another one that means, "If you don't beat a kid at all for three days, the kids will climb onto the roof of the house and kick the tiles down." Chinese accomplishes this sentiment in only eight syllables, if you can believe this, (it literally says "three days no hit, house on overturn tiles,") but my admiration for this entirely different language is rather besides the point. "Backwards thinking," I said to him in Chinese, so it would have more effect, and so I'd be sure he understood. He nodded and continued looking at the table between us. "Now can we play a game?" he asked me.

I actually might have forgotten about this, busy and tired as I was today, were it not for my last two students of the day, two middle schoolers, Wendy and Joyce, who I teach together. They'd be seventh graders in America. I had only three hours of sleep last night, so I was exhausted, and I had nothing to talk about really. We usually gossip, more or less, and they tell me about their school, and the students (this I could really write a book about, they go to the best middle school in the country, with all that this entails. They are both good students, but there is some serious influence at this school. The President of China gave a speech there this year. That sort of school.)
Today, as I said, I just couldn't keep any line of questioning up, I was way too tired. Eventually for some reason the question popped up in my mind again (again, on topic) "How much do you sleep at night?" Joyce sleeps a healthy amount; Wendy between four and seven hours, a little on the shy side. We then had a long discussion about how lack of sleep hurts students and doesn't allow one's mind to function at one-hundred percent, and then how people need time to themselves during the day or the week or sometime at least when there's nothing that they have to do, which I was comparing to the sleep that the body needs to regenerate, which evolved into a discussion about how people shut parts of themselves off in order to get done what they have to, and how that makes them ultimately weaker and less able to accomplish anything meaningful (my view,) or how this makes one capable for doing what they have to do, to get what they want, and how it is the people who need rest who are actually weak (Wendy's view. Joyce usually disagrees with her when we talk about things like this but I think she feels powerless to do anything about it, she sees the logic and feels what I'm saying but sees no road out.) Without going into the details of the discussion, Wendy, the more talkative but less fluent one said, "we've lost our tomorrows," at one point, which I think is one of the most beautiful English phrases I can remember hearing, and later, when I summed up the conversation by saying, "you're saying to me that in your lives the two of you have no time to just be yourselves," she said, "yes. We have no time in our lives to be ourselves."

This was the connection to my time with Stone. My female student was saying that she can't stop, that she couldn't stop, that she couldn't listen to those parts of herself that she had shut up in order to be able to sleep only four hours a day, in order to be able to study with all of her "free time," in order to go to special classes all weekend etc. etc. I was getting that feeling from Stone as well. Walking outside on a beautiful day, just sitting on a bench in a park watching people walk around made him uncomfortable.

This frightens me deeply, because these are not isolated cases. This is the mindset of the entire society. Every kid is expected, required, and made to do this. One of my older students has a son of five years. He recently went on a trip with his grandparents to Nanjing; she picked them up at the train station the morning of our class. "You let him miss a week of school?" I asked with a teasing disbelief. "How? Why?" "It's Kindergarten," she said. "It's not important." "Would you," I began, knowing the answer, "have let him do that next year, if he were in first grade?" "No!" She said, with a tint of surprise and the same air of obviousness with which I asked the question. "And why not," I asked, "what is the difference between kindergarten and first grade?" "In First Grade," she said, "there have..." she struggled for the word, "kaoshi." She looked at me hopefully. "Tests," I said, "In first grade there are tests." "Yes," she said, "In First Grade have tests."

Little Emperors, Huge Country

A very good essay in Psychology Today about only children in China, and one that covers all of its bases, good and bad.

Just a few highlights:

"You must do this to live:" keeping up with the Joneses x 5. Though China seems more and more like a land of plenty, with 1.3 billion people, there's nowhere near enough to go around. Kids, from first grade, study every single day for hours. This is no exaggeration. Of course, what the article doesn't mention is that, out of the 1.6 million college level jobs for 4 million graduates, the majority go to someone not because of credentials, but because of connections. After all, with such limited space, it's natural that that would provide the crucial push.

Also note that one of the reasons parents push their kids so much is selfish: kids are expected to take care of their parents after they retire (55 for women, 60 for men, though the numbers are growing) and there's no other system in place to do so, nor is it customary for an individual to plan for his or her retirement. It's all on the kids' shoulders. "risky family," indeed.

This I particularly like:
"Back then, every mental problem was seen as anti-socialist," says Kaiping Peng, a University of California Berkeley professor who was among the first generation of Chinese psychologists to receive formal clinical training, in the late 1970s. "If you were depressed, they thought you were politically impure and sent you to a labor camp."

I think even the west is just now starting to understand in a mass way that mental problems don't mean there's something wrong with you as a person.

Also, the point I make to many of my students:
"On your resumé, you can't put, '1988 to 2001: studied 10 hours every day,' " laughs Howe, the Chengdu student. "You have to actually do stuff," though the way I say it is, "you need to have a life, too."

As a freedom lover myself, I find this truly pitiable, and believe it probably makes for a less healthy individual and society.

Anyway, see my post later this week called "Whose Century," for some more.

have fun today.

China, and Sloppy Thinking (v. David Brooks)

An Op-Ed in the Times by David Brooks, where he summarizes an extremely important cultural difference between the West and China, and talks about several theories on why it may be, though, obviously, who knows?

But there are great problems in thinking this way. I don't have the answers, of course, but I would at least like to add something to the conversation.

"When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the subjects to pick out the two that go together, the Americans would usually pick out the chicken and the cow. They’re both animals. Most Asian people, on the other hand, would pick out the cow and the hay, since cows depend on hay. Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships."

There are other famous studies exploring the difference in the way citizens of developed nations organize information from rural people in developing nations. What they found was similar to the above: Asked to pick out which object didn't fit in a group, the developed nation's citizens picked "wood," from a group that included "wood, saw, hammer, and ax," noting the relationship between tools, but the rural people were confused, seeing basically no connection, and most often picked "hammer," since both a "saw" and an "ax" can be used to cut "wood."

The point, though, is that there is a relationship between "cow," and "chicken," but it's not a practical one, it's an abstract one. The study, if I remember correctly, was about the effect of education and reading on the way the brain organizes information, and it also showed that adults who learned recently to read also began to make abstract rather than practical connections, that it was not simply children who had been well educated that made this connection.

So, is this an East-West difference, or a difference in educational methods? The East is famous for rote learning, while the West values (ideally) the fostering of thinking itself, as a way to make previously unnoticed connections and to problem-solve. Ask any High school student in China what date an historical event happened, and they'll likely be able to, especially if they're preparing for the Gao Kao, a test that compares to our SATs as The Joker compares to your average bank robber. Ask them why that date is important, and they may be strapped to think of anything. A western student may just be b.-s.ing, but they'll be able to construct some sort of argument, which is ironic due to Brooks' statement that the context is so important to the Chinese. (Obviously, both what and how are important in learning.)

I do not know what the difference is due to, but I would be wary of making claims one way or the other.

He continues:

"But what happens if collectivist societies snap out of their economic stagnation? What happens if collectivist societies, especially those in Asia, rise economically and come to rival the West? A new sort of global conversation develops."

Really? What about Japan? Famously, Japanese companies are run like feudal empires, and are loathe to change (not change of, say, methods or reacting to markets, with this they do very well (look up Kaizen) but structurally, and yes, culturally. But even this is changing. Articles in the Times a few months ago chronicled the rise of employees suing their companies for various damages. Japanese mainstream society has only existed outside of strict feudalism for seventy years, and China, it could be argued, is still mostly a peasant, folk culture, growing towards modernity and away from traditional roots, and it has only been doing this for thirty years. Change appears to happen quickly, if not all-at-once, but, in reality, it is often a painstakingly slow process, especially in the earliest stages. It takes generations, plural, not twenty years. I cannot say that China will become more liberal and Western internally (though externally they have co-opted quite a bit) but I would certainly be sensible enough to be more patient about it. After all, the Enlightenment started hundreds of years ago, and people still aren't all that enlightened, even though they may personally think they're great.

And then:
"For one thing, there are relatively few individualistic societies on earth. For another, the essence of a lot of the latest scientific research is that the Western idea of individual choice is an illusion and the Chinese are right to put first emphasis on social contexts."

This is certainly true, which is (conversely) why I think it is so important to emphasize every individual's development along the lines they wish to pursue. Like economics, where local conditions reflected in prices contain far more "knowledge" overall than central planners can ever have, the individual knows what is best for him/her, and can make choices accordingly, whether those choices are driven by "free-will" or by the context the choices are made in (obviously, this is far too complex a subject to tackle here.) Ultimately, I think the distinction is irrelevant. No matter how the choices are being made, the individual and the society are better off if someone can make a personal "choice." The problem with putting the emphasis on social contexts is that, as in China, where this is overtly so, it leads to a very rigid social structure where one is expected to do one and only one correct thing according to the circumstances, entirely denying that individual difference exists (I have come up against this again and again here. Fortunately, since I am not Chinese, my choices and conduct are taken with a grain of salt, and quite often admired, in the "Oh I wish I could do that" sort of way.) Again, wherever the "choices" are coming from, it is clear that offered different options, different people will do different things.

In any case, the West is not done developing either. Yes, we're depressed, yes, we need healthier communities, yes, we need more social ties etc. etc., but we're coming to see that, and, as individuals, choosing to deal with it. Isn't that preferable to somebody sitting in an office looking at statistics and saying, "hmmm, we should somehow coerce older people into more exercise." Perhaps the example goes to far, but I'm sure you get the point.

This is why I think this article is dangerous, almost.

"The rise of China isn’t only an economic event. It’s a cultural one. The ideal of a harmonious collective may turn out to be as attractive as the ideal of the American Dream."

This dream, as we have seen throughout history, and this way of thinking about humans and the rights of individuals, has led to the worst tragedies of human history, not the least of them in China itself, during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Importantly, free societies never do this, and Authoritarian societies really like to.

And, as hinted at above, the American Dream has always included a social dream. Making it to the top certainly does not preclude community, and often those who have won their American Dream are the most prominent of social benefactors.

"It’s certainly a useful ideology for aspiring autocrats."

Exactly.

I will be writing later on the rise of China economically and politically, hopefully before the Olympics are done.

Keep Thinking.