Let’s Learn to Argue

Op-Ed

What would you say to someone with whom you disagree?

Here is what Chinese netizens said:

“Shameless rat!”

“Shut your dirty mouth!”

“You are no expert on this. You’re only a dumbass!”

“Your talk is as disgusting as your looks!”

“Go to hell!”

“Bullshit!”

“You think you are an expert? F*** all you experts!”

Why they became so angry is a long story.

A month ago, the former Chinese TV reporter Chai Jing released Under the Dome, an independent documentary on the inconvenient truth of China’s devastating pollution. The documentary went viral on the Internet and sparked heated conversations about environmental protection across the country.

A response by Wan Zhanxiang to Chai’s documentary also went viral. Wan is a senior engineer and administrator of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), a state-owned enterprise that the documentary identifies as one of the major contributors to the pollution. Wan attempts to refute many of Chai’s arguments. He claims that low-quality fuel produced by CNPC isn’t a major cause of pollution and that, without CNPC’s monopoly of the oil market, the quality of fuel will only drop. He concludes that “there aren’t many good points” in the documentary, perhaps because Chai “does not have enough brain power, or she doesn’t have enough knowledge or insights”.

Wan’s article was met with angry comments from Chinese Internet users who have rallied to Chai’s defense. Only one or two comments, out of the hundreds, actually use statistics or pertinent arguments to refute Wan’s points. Even on the censored websites that have probably deleted the most extreme comments, most pages are filled with angry squawks.

Whether or not Wan’s arguments make sense is a separate issue, but even if his arguments are ridiculous, irrational personal attacks are an even more ridiculous means of response. Chinese netizens should steer away from blind mob attacks and learn to think critically and argue in a rational way.

There are good reasons for being angry about Wan’s criticism of the documentary. Although he states that the article represents only his personal opinion, it is quite obvious that he is the unofficial mouthpiece of CNPC and the government, since his article was immediately circulated by all major news outlets. Naturally, his opinion reflects a strong bias, and with the powerful institutions as his backstage supporter, Wan sounds arrogant throughout the article by constantly using !! and ?? and calling Chai immature, which irritated a large number of her fans. To add fuel to the fire, the government decided to take down the documentary from the Internet. Many see this act as a reflection of the government’s reluctance to take serious measures against pollution and one more attempt to deprive the public of their right to information. And here came Wan saying that it is just a mediocre documentary without much value. No wonder he became the target of attacks.

But just because the crowd’s anger is justified, doesn’t mean that anger will contribute to the conversation in any way. If the point is to condemn Wan for trying to obfuscate the issues and lead public opinion astray, the best thing to do is examine his arguments, pinpoint the flaws in his logic, and present solid statistics to prove him wrong. Verbal abuse, in however large quantity, from ten thousand people, or even ten million people, does not do any of these. Some commenters also took the occasion to vent their anger at the government for trying to shut down the discussion by deleting the documentary. They didn’t realize that these curses and insults will only close off the conversation more tightly. Even worse, it completely betrays the purpose of Chai’s search for a comprehensive and scientific explanation of the pollution. As a work of investigative journalism, the documentary is not immune to errors or oversights. Only when these faults are spotted can the documentary maximize its accuracy and value. Consecrating the documentary and denouncing any criticism as if it were blasphemy does not do credit to the film or the filmmaker. It only denies Chai and the public opportunities to understand more about the pollution in China.

This is not an isolated case of mob attacks. They are rampant on Chinese websites and social media. Of course, to call this a Chinese phenomenon is overestimating the originality of the Chinese, although many are very good at turning all debates, intellectual or not, into verbal fights. It can at least partially be attributed to an endemic lack of critical thinking in education as well as in the society. Parents, schools, and other forms of authority dictate what is right or wrong, and children are never encouraged to challenge popular opinion. Most Chinese people don’t learn that truth only emerges as a result of constant debates. Nor are many aware that different opinions can coexist at the same time.

What’s worse, the Chinese tend to link a person’s beliefs directly to his or her moral standing. To have a dissenting opinion often leads to evaluations of one’s character as uninformed or unwise at best, unscrupulous at worst. Many Chinese people believe that whatever they deem to be correct is the absolute truth and that anyone who attempts to question that truth is to be shouted down or punished. Therefore, when a belief is challenged, the immediate reaction is not to argue back with logic or evidence, but to get angry. This mentality penetrates all levels of discourse. At home, in public, on the Internet, from pro-government rallies to anti-government sentiments, anything can be turned into a shouting match.

Should Chinese netizens refrain from getting angry then? Of course not. No human is completely rational, and societies wouldn’t evolve if humans weren’t driven by indignation, pride, and the desire to press for change. But there is a difference between being motivated by passion to accomplish things in a rational way and letting passion override the rational mind. Chai Jing did a praise-worthy job pursuing the former. It is now up to the netizens to crawl out of the abyss of irrationality and learn to argue.

Cooperation Not Co-optation – Why Valls’s Proposal Against Radicalism Will Fail

Op-Ed

France’s Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, appears in gossip rags almost as much as he does in serious political newspapers. After all, he is the young, upcoming star of the Socialist Party. However, his new plan for the education of imams – the religious leaders of Islamic congregations – is anything but progressive or innovative.

On March 2nd, Valls spoke at the University of Strasbourg about radicalism and secularism. He highlighted his continued concerns regarding these topics, “The rise of radical Islam and the rise of the extreme right” are “two major dangers [to France] that feed off one another.” In particular, he championed an education plan for imams as a solution to France’s burgeoning problem with radicalism. This program includes an assurance of increased dialogue between the Muslim community and the French government. However, the focus of the proposal is a curriculum for imams on the subject of French secularism, laïcité. In other words, the government is seeking to have an active hand in directing the religious doctrine of Islam in France.

Despite Valls’s best efforts to address radicalism, his “solution” will be ineffective and dangerous. This proposal is another step toward the increasing contamination of French laïcité policies by xenophobia. Given the January attacks in Paris, the definite and government-imposed training of imams will become another point of strife within the already tense population. His plan will motivate the very thing that Valls wishes to remedy – radicalism.

The resurgence of extremism in French society can be traced to pervasive xenophobia and the isolation of “foreign” cultures. This is not the first time that France has enacted laws to further the ideal of laïcité. In 2004, the government banned ostentatious religious symbols, such as hijabs or kippahs, in public schools. For some, this prevented religion from entering their child’s education. For many, this law further quarantined sub-cultures and intensified their desire to express their heritage freely. A growing population of young Muslims, many of whom are second-generation immigrants, have started to wear headscarves as a response to the restrictions. Hijabs are now a symbol of cultural expression in a country that tries so hard to suppress it. In its essence, fundamentalism reflects a longing to return to the literal interpretation – the roots – of a belief. Valls forgets that past laws, which limited religious expression, have actually given rise to more extreme schools of thought and practice. Instead of perpetuating the mistakes of the past, Valls should try to remedy them. Valls’s proposal will do nothing to ameliorate the situation, but will only further alienate the growing Muslim population.

Forced assimilation discourages collaborative tolerance.

That isn’t to say that secularism isn’t a worthy goal. At its core, separation of church and state is a noble pursuit, and one that is essential for effective democracy. Originally, laïcité was intended to counteract the dominance of Catholicism. Laïcité laws, mostly addressing public education, had protected freedom of thought from Catholic indoctrination.

Unfortunately, over the past fifteen years, xenophobia has distorted this ideal of secularism. Now, laws overtly favor the native French culture, which has pervasive Catholic roots. For instance, the Christian cross is exempt from the ban on religious symbols in public schools. When secularism is used to counter the dominant religious ethos, it promotes intellectual freedom. The minority perspective is heard and welcomed into the educational dialogue. However, when it is used to silence the minority, it becomes a tool for repression.

Instead of using laïcité to avoid addressing the real issues of an increasingly diverse France, Valls should take this opportunity to address France’s evolving culture. Islam and other sub-cultures are becoming as true to the French identity as baguettes or stinky fromage. A real solution to radicalism would challenge the entrenched notions of Frenchness. Valls’s current plan is symptomatic of the xenophobia that is polluting French policy. This plan reinforces the idea that minority cultures should be quashed and silenced. If Valls does not address France’s present diversity in an open dialogue, the intersection of xenophobia and secularism will ultimately result in a reckoning between France’s dominant and minority cultures. In 2004, the harassment directed at women in head coverings skyrocketed after the ban on hijabs had been enacted. No doubt, if Valls’s plan is enforced, further acts of Islamophobia will follow. Rather than targeting imams and the Muslim population in his ineffective proposal, Valls should seek a substantial cooperation – not co-optation.

The ABCs vs. the DFTs

Op-Ed

The ABCs of anorexia, body dysmorphia, and compulsive exercise comprise the alphabet soup of discourse on eating disorders in Western countries. What about countries in the East? Japan’s bowl is full of DFTs—danjonoyakuwari, fushoku-byo, and taijin kyōfushō. A true mouthful for anyone who’s not Japanese.

Though the West is considered the birthplace of eating disorders, Japan has had its own unique struggle. During the Edo era (1603 – 1868) doctors noted a small number of patients who refused to eat rice, and would vomit when forced to eat. They called this strange illness fushoku-byo, or not eating disease. However, it wasn’t until the 1980’s, after Western doctors solidified the study of eating disorders, that Japanese began to actively research and release medical reports on eating disorders, using the Western doctor’s rhetoric. From 1988 to 1992 the number of identified cases of anorexia alone quadrupled in Japan. And the rate continues to grow to this day, soon to surpass the number of reported cases in the United States. Though there is a concern in Japan that this epidemic of eating disorders threatens Japan’s spotless reputation, the government’s attempts at lowering this rate have little hope of reversing this rate.

The increase in reported cases of anorexia stems from the stringent danjonoyakiwai, or gender roles, in Japan. Japanese culture stresses traditional gender roles, women as shufu, housewife, and men as the prime breadwinners. Though women are involved in the working place in Japan, the expectation of strict gender roles endures. A 2014 poll found that 40% of both men and women 20 to 40 years old believe husbands should work full time while wives stay at home, and 71% of female respondents said women should concentrate on raising children. Japanese culture deems any form of self-praise or self-assertion bad manners, limiting the spaces that women have for communicating their feelings outside set gender roles. Disconnected from self-expression, these women develop low self-esteem and an inability to cope with social issues, factors that can result in self-deprecating behavior and eating disorders.

Complicating the already rigid gender roles is the societal pressure facing adolescents transitioning into adulthood. Social anxiety takes the top spot amongst the biggest fears of Japanese adolescents and young adults. This weight hangs over the youth of Japan, resulting in taijin kyōfushō, or interpersonal phobia, a fear of embarrassing those around you with your very presence. This anxiety contributes to the stress that women feel towards their bodies. The need to be like their peers, to not stand out in an already highly homogenous society, drives them towards developing eating disorders.

In 1997 the Japanese government recognized the prevalence of eating disorders amongst women ages 13-39 and issued policies to counter it. High school Physical Education and Health classes now systematically present information about healthy eating habits and nutrition. However, these classes are purely informational, designed to promote healthy attitudes towards eating. They don’t deal at all with the psychological undercurrents at work. Since 1997 the Japanese government hasn’t passed any more policies that focus on the growing number of eating disorders. The current government under Prime Minster Shinzō Abe remains silent on issues regarding eating disorders.

The eating disorder intervention programs that Japan has in place don’t work because they are based on Western models. Though eating disorders are universal, the attitudes behind eating disorders are unique to each culture. Many women diagnosed with an eating disorder in the west relate their need to be thin to success. Attitudes perpetuated by the media in Western countries also help explain why women develop body dysmorphia, a belief that one’s appearance is defective, whereas in Japan it’s not so much the media that affects the development of eating disorders as it is social anxiety and peer evaluation.

So why does the Japanese government adopt the Western approach in dealing with eating disorders to Japan?

The West has experience dealing with eating disorders, and in the minds of the global community the Western way is the best way. Plus Western methods of intervention have been used in the past to help diagnose and treat eating disorders successfully. What the Japanese government fails to see is that Western methods succeed because they are Western. There is no equivalent of danjonoyakuwari, fushoku-byo, and taijin kyōfushō in a non-Japanese context. These terms and their impact are products of Japanese history and culture that require study to understand. Yet Japan has yet to fund research on mental health issues as Western medical groups have done. As a result the symptoms of many Japanese who suffer from eating disorders don’t correspond to clinical diagnostic markers set by Western medicine; these patients fall into subclinical categories where they can’t receive full treatment.

In the 80 medical schools in Japan there is only one professor specializing in eating disorders.

The answer for Japan isn’t to be more like the West. The answer is as a nation for Prime Minister Shinzō Abe with the Ministry of Health to update policies on mental health issues while defining symptoms of eating disorders and the prognosis for their care in a Japanese context. It’s time for the dialogue on eating disorders to be spoken in Japanese. ABC doesn’t work in the land of DST.

Burying the Hatchet

Op-Ed

Japan claims to have fulfilled its responsibility towards the tens of thousands of women, euphemistically called “comfort women,” whom it forced to work in military brothels during WWII. The rest of the world begs to differ, and on March 1st, South Korean President Park called the Land of the Rising Sun out on it, telling Japan to apologize to and to provide for these women. Despite the passage of 75 years since the end of the war, Japan has yet to satisfactorily atone for the atrocities it forced on Korean, as well as Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Filipino, Burmese and Indonesian, women. Japan should give up its belief that it has fulfilled its responsibility and do as President Park demands.

The first step Japan must take to accept its continued legal and moral responsibility is to understand why the treaty it signed, the organization it founded and the statement it issued didn’t resolve the conflict. The treaty mentioned here, the 1965 Treaty on Basic Relations, required Japan to pay 364 million dollars to South Korea in war reparations as compensation for the conscription of Korean laborers under the boot of Japanese imperialism. The flaw is that the treaty only addressed forced labor, omitting forced prostitution. It simply never took these women into account because the issue of comfort women wasn’t even a blip on international or national radars until the 1970s. A treaty that predates the recognition of an issue cannot redress it and Japan should stop believing that this 50 year old treaty ended its legal responsibility.

As for the organization which Japan founded to address its moral responsibility, it was called the Asian Women’s Fund (AWF) and it operated from 1994 to 2007. Japan lauds it for being a joint collaboration between the government and the public to financially compensate former comfort women with a combination of private donations and government funding. And while the AWF itself wasn’t perfect (because of the mix of private and public funding, it wasn’t official government redress), its biggest flaw was that it closed.

During its 14 years of operation, the AWF only awarded direct compensation to a mere 285 women from South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines and built some medical facilities in Indonesia. Considering that 50,000 is the conservative estimate of how many comfort women existed during the war, 285 is a dismally small number. Japan didn’t even give women in North Korea and China the opportunity to apply for compensation because their governments and Japan’s weren’t cooperating at the time. Moreover, many South Koreans who could have been awarded money refused to accept it because it wasn’t official government redress. When the fund closed in 2007, many known comfort women were still uncompensated, leaving Japan’s responsibilities unfulfilled. As with the case of the 1965 treaty, Japan should realize that the AWF did not lay the matter to rest.

Last is the deficiency of the statement the Japanese government issued in regards to comfort women, called the Kono statement. Issued in 1993, the Kono statement was an explicit victory for comfort women by recognizing and apologizing for Japan’s crimes during the war. However, despite the sincerity with which it was originally given, recent political changes call into question whether or not it continues to apply. The current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and other revisionists promote a whitewashed version of WWII where Japan was not an aggressor and comfort women were regular prostitutes, thereby undermining the statement’s validity. Japan must recognize that the statement in its current easy-to-ignore state can’t contribute to Japan’s atonement.

Closely linked with this first step of acknowledging continued responsibility is the second step of actively doing something about it. The most basic and immediate way this should happen is the reopening of the AWF to work ceaselessly at identifying and compensating former comfort women. Even if they meet with very little success, either for diplomatic or social reasons, it is vital to show at least symbolically that Japan is trying to make amends. Moreover, when it is reopened, the AWF should be made a part of the Japanese government so as to meet the demand that the money it awards is official government redress. In order to counter the views of revisionists like Prime Minister Abe, the Kono statement should be given more political weight and the role of the AWF should also be expanded to include advocating for the truthful and fair education of the history of comfort women. Burying the hatchet doesn’t mean Japan is free to forget about their wrong-doing. It means learning from the past to make sure the hatchet stays in the ground.

Dancing with Seaweed

Report on a cultural event

My face felt raw as I trekked through the February blizzard to Alumnae Ballroom, where a hula dancing workshop was being held by Wellesley’s Hui O Hawai’i Club. Eventually, I arrived, apprehensive and snow-dusted. There were three other students there, including the teacher, Emily, a Wellesley student in the Hawai’i Club. Emily was from Hawai’i and had taken hula lessons growing up, as many Hawai’ian kids do. She handed each of us a long floral skirt to wear over our jeans and sweatpants. I couldn’t help but feel like a gawky little girl playing dress-up.

I’ve experienced the very same impostor syndrome every time I’ve visited Hawai’i. Four years ago, my dad moved to Hale’iwa, Hawai’i, a touristy country town on the north shore of Oahu. Spending time in Hawai’i has always made me slightly uncomfortable; I’m not a tourist, but I’m certainly not kama’aina, a resident of the islands. Hawai’ian culture is extraordinarily welcoming—Oahu translates literally to “gathering place”—but I can’t help but feel the uncomfortable reverberations of colonialism all around me. By being present, I’m participating in the massive tourist industry driven by colonialism and cultural appropriation. I decided to venture out through the snow to the hula workshop that February day because I wanted to engage in more appreciation of Hawai’ian culture, and less appropriation of it. Hula is still very much a vital element of Hawai’ian culture, not simply a gimmick used to please tourists or exoticize Hawai’ians. Hula is a hymn linking the present to the past, a shared ritual that transcends generations.

The hula workshop began with introductions and watching a video of three Hawai’i Club members performing a slow and elegant hula dance in the living room of a Wellesley residence hall. The dancers were dressed casually—no campy grass skirts or Western caricatures of Hawai’ian culture to be seen. “The song is about seaweed,” Emily explained to us, giggling as she pointed to a sheet of translated lyrics she’d printed out, “Hawai’ian music is always about nature. Even if it’s about love, it’s expressed through nature.” Each of the dancers’ synchronized movements and gestures told a story.

After we’d spent several minutes being mesmerized by the tiny, pixellated dancers on Emily’s dim laptop screen and swaying to the tinny music drifting from the meager speakers, Emily beckoned us to get up. She told us that we would be learning the dance performed by the girls in the video we’d watched, as it was slow, simple, and repetitive relative to many modern hula dances. She started by teaching us the building blocks of hula, most of which centered around swaying hip movements and subtle steps taken with bent knees. Little by little, we learned several variations of the kaholo, a series of steps to the side. “Step right, left, right, tap!” Emily called to us as we clumsily mimicked her graceful, flowing motions. I found it to be infinitely harder than it looked—step gracefully, but keep your knees bent to emphasize the sway of your hips, don’t fall behind!

Next, we learned the ‘ami and the ‘uwehe, swinging our hips in synchronized figure eights and popping our heels up from underneath our voluminous skirts. Soon enough, Emily told us it was time to learn the arm movements that accompany the dance steps. I wasn’t so sure I felt ready for this just yet—the gesturing of the hands is what really tells the story, and I didn’t want to destroy the beautiful flow of the melody’s tale. It took a lot of coordination to try storytelling with my hands while dancing with my feet; to mimic a wave with my palms while doing a sharp ‘uwehe with my heels. I felt like a cartoon character in fast-forward as I skittered around the floor: the dance didn’t seem so slow anymore.

The dance accompanies the song “Ka Uluwehi O Ke Kai,” composed by Edith Kanakaole; the title translates to “Plants of the Sea.” The song begins with the singer’s gentle voice crooning to a plucked refrain which repeats often, stitching the song together. The verse translates to “Such a delight to see / The great big ocean / So familiar and very cherished / With its fragrance of the lîpoa,” expressing affection for the sea and its lîpoa (a type of seaweed). Hawai’ian looks like an intimidating language to American eyes, endless strings of vowels punctuated by glottal stops, but upon hearing the words spoken, the enchanting phonetics snap into clarity. The words themselves become music.

As we went, Emily explained to us the meaning of the dance we were learning, folding tidbits of information into her explanations of the moves themselves. The song and dance are about picking strands of seaweed off the beach as though they were flowers. One of the gestures repeated throughout the dance involved holding our hands out in front of us, then flipping them over and drawing our fingers together to form flowers with our hands, bouquets of seaweed we’d just plucked off a faraway beach.

Before long, Emily checked her watch and announced that there were only five minutes left of the hula workshop. We had only learned the steps to the first two verses of the song, but since the song’s melody repeated so consistently, Emily encouraged us to run through each verse twice so that we could dance for the entire song (even if the moves weren’t entirely accurate). Though challenging, the full run-through of the dance was a lot of fun. The lilting lyrics created a lighthearted atmosphere that set the stage for our dancing.

How ironic, I thought, that I should feel so much more connected to Hawai’ian culture in the middle of a Massachusetts blizzard than I do when I’m 5,000 miles away in my parents’ mainland bubble on Oahu. It’s the people that make a culture real, not the place. Upon examining a translation of the lyrics after the workshop was over, I learned what the last two verses guiding us through the dance meant: the words eulogized the diverse species of seaweed found in Hawai’i—limu kohu, lîpoa, lîpalu—as though they were old friends frolicking in the sea mist. Nature is revered Hawai’ian culture, and there is no better way to understand this than to tell stories of their friendship with your own two hands—and your feet, and your hips, and your bent knees.

The Magic of Dali

Report on a cultural event

Two summers ago, I visited Dali with a friend to breathe the fresh air of this small town in southwestern China. I had long heard of Cangshan Mountain wreathed in mist, Erhai Lake decorated with bright flowers and cacti, and the stone walls and stone-paved roads of the ancient town. I had also learned of Dali’s reputation as a bohemian hub that attracts artists, poets, vagabonds, and hippies from in and outside China. But being a natural skeptic, I had some reservations. I wondered if “the bohemian air” was limited to the circle of self-branded hippies who lived there, and the rest of it was just another block in building a fantasy for tourists and one more way to attract business.

I found that Dali has lived up to its reputation.

Upon arrival I was in fact quite disappointed by the town. It was raining, and on the streets there weren’t many people but a lot of litter carried over by the winds. Pools of rain water reflected fake-old architecture and chintzy lights from shops that seemed to be selling cheap, inauthentic souvenirs. Full of grievances, we ducked into a small restaurant on the side of the road.

The owner/chef/waiter, DaHai, seated us, told us what ingredients he had that day and asked us how we would like the food prepared, before going into the kitchen to cook. He came out with two bowls of delicious fried rice, sat down at our table and started talking to us.

Learning that it was our first day in town, he recommended a list of food, sites, and other fun things that we should try. While we were eating, two friends of his came in to practice singing before their debut performance at a pub later that evening. DaHai brought out his guitar too, and as the sun began to set, we all started singing along in the small courtyard filled with delicious smells.

The two hours at DaHai’s restaurant completely flipped my first impression of Dali. And unlike in most cities in China, where such precious moments are rare cases of serendipity, in Dali they happen on a regular basis. I soon learned that, despite the encroachment of cheap souvenirs, the town is still filled with quality shops, bookstores, restaurants, and pubs, all with a hip twist. Most people, residents and visitors alike, are so friendly that it’s astonishingly easy to start conversations and make friends.

Every evening, the town’s main street turns into a marketplace with dozens of little stalls on the sidewalks. Among the vendors are local craftsmen, artists who have moved here, travelers who sell trinkets to fund future trips. People walk up and down the street, looking for good stuff and good chats. At first I was a bit reluctant to talk to the vendors, clinging to my big-city mentality that conversation often serves as the best sales strategy, but I soon realized that it was ok if I wasn’t going to buy anything, as long as I had a genuine interest in hearing the vendors’ and fellow shoppers’ stories and sharing my own. In one evening, I probably talked to more strangers than I would have in a whole month in my hometown, a city of eight million.

Walking past the night market, my friend and I ran into a street performance. There were about five or six musicians, including two white guys. With one guitar, one bass, two drums, one accordion, and many voices, they were belting out folk songs. A guitar case was laid open in front of them, as is the norm for all street performances, but they seemed too into the music to care about how much money was in there. Behind them, a row of listeners sat on the stone platform, most with a beer in hand, some singing along, others using their phones or cameras to record the performance. We sat down too, and joined the ensemble. The performers and listeners were always exchanging glances, smiling and nodding at each other as if they had been friends for a long time. Several times, one naughty singer replaced the lyrics with his own improvisation, which evoked a hearty laugh in the group. It seemed to me that the awkwardness common among strangers vanished in the air, and everyone sang along like old friends.

 

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Street Performance in Dali

To say that Dali is a paradise on earth is romanticizing it. My initial disappointment, although later outweighed by my affection for Dali, still reflects the troublesome reality: the ancient town is bit by bit commercialized and waves of tourists are putting pressure on the local traditions as well as the bohemian way of life. A hippie couple we befriended told us that they were planning to move away soon because Dali was losing the charm that had attracted them in the first place.

But Dali does have a kind of magic that softens people and “opens the door to their hearts”, as the Chinese expression goes. Of course, the resident artist community in Dali is a self-selected group with bohemian spirits. But haven’t most of the visitors, like I have, been conditioned to be on our guard against everyone else? The country’s recent history definitely contributed to the low level of trust: the Cultural Revolution that praised liars and informers, the lack of market regulations that led to an explosion of selling schemes and counterfeit goods, not to mention all the abduction and fraud cases rampant in local and national news. Having grown up with the maxim “don’t talk to strangers”, why were we able to shed our habitual vigilance so quickly?

It occurred to me that perhaps people come to Dali to let go of their constant alertness, to feel the geniality of this place and also to be part of it. As much as we normally avoid talking to strangers and consider those who do so suspicious, deep down there is still a desire for serendipitous encounters as well as sincere and agreeable conversations with strangers.

I’m glad that there is a place like Dali, where communication is not something to be wary of but to be longed for, where I can wander aimlessly, knowing that somewhere around the corner there will be a group of strangers who will talk, laugh, and sing with me.

Court Ladies or Pin-Up Girls: Choose One of the Above

Report on a cultural event

The exhibit, “Court Ladies or Pin-Up Girls?” was in Gallery 178 of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Even before checking the map, I could visualize where it would be. In many museums in the U.S., there is an Africa, Asia, Oceania section (often dimly lit) where all “ethnic” art is crammed in while Europe gets the run of the rest of the museum. And this is where Gallery 178 was. I immediately started to get worried.
“Court Ladies or Pin-Up Girls?” is centered around a piece in the MFA called Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk. When the viewer walks into the exhibit, the piece is on a table at waist-level in a glass case. It’s a colorful piece depicting four women holding a long, white piece of silk with two other women siting on a pale green mat, while others pound silk on the right edge of the painting. This exhibit had been inspired by more recent interpretations of the piece arguing that the piece has sexual undertones due to the piece’s actual title: Picture of Pounding Silk– a common metaphor for desire. Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk was what inspired the exhibit, but the big question, at least according to the exhibit’s title, seemed to be what exactly Chinese women were supposed to be– court ladies or pin-up girls.
As I moved towards the left, navigating the space clockwise, I confronted the wall text introducing the exhibit. Part of it stated that, “In a sense, this exhibition is not about women, but about men. How men imagined or desired women to be.” While that was a thoughtful idea to acknowledge in the context of this exhibit, I rolled my eyes. Of course it’s about how men imagined or desired women to be. Isn’t that all art is?
On the first two left walls, there were domestic scenes from the southern Song dynasty with intricately detailed backgrounds. These paintings were subtly suggestive, inviting the reader to pay attention to small actions. Here, a hand on the knee, very little personal space between two figures, or Buddha hand citrons hinted at an erotic undertone.

When I turned the corner to the back of the exhibit, I initially didn’t fully take in the content of this set of paintings on the back wall. They were parts of a 12-page album created by Meng Lu Jushi during the late 18th or early 19th century. Many of them had a muted greyness to them, and all I could see from a distance was that there were women. As I got a bit closer, I was able to see that the scene wasn’t quite as conservative as it seemed from a distance. Small dots of pink turned out to be nipples, and I realized that unlike Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk, the sensuality of this series was more pronounced.
I paused for a moment. Something felt strange about all of this. East Asian women are often sexualized in the Western imagination, and it was hard not to feel uneasy about erotic paintings of Chinese women being located in the back. It felt like stepping to the back of a 90s video store where the “adult” videos were hidden. Perhaps the curators meant to keep certain body parts away from the gaze of curious museum-going children. But something about putting the erotic pieces on the back wall and in a small alcove initially hidden from view felt needlessly prudish.

I turned towards the alcove where the paintings were even more explicit, with several nude and partially nude couples having sex. They were stunning, composed of thin lines, fine details and vivid colors. And it was these paintings that made me reconsider the exhibit as a whole. Seeing those paintings and the title of the exhibit in a Boston art museum initially made me think that I was just seeing another instance where East Asian women were eroticized.

But that conclusion does not do justice to the subjects. Regardless of what the wall text said, this exhibit is about women. Several of the paintings included women in loving embraces (sometimes with one another) and even being given a sex toy by an older woman. In other words, these women were exercising erotic autonomy. Just because a subject is erotic does not necessarily mean that it’s eroticized.

Nor does that mean that the exhibit is without its problems. Part of the issue, I later realized, is the title. While it’s empowering to see instances where women are acting on their desires, the fact that the title includes “pin-up girl” seems to trivialize these works. Pin-up girls are almost exclusively for male consumption, and it’s problematic not to notice the issue with making images of East Asian women available for mass consumption by a Western audience, even if it’s in a museum. When they’re the subject of the painting, they feel like agents, but in the context of a museum exhibit with a title that includes “pin-up girls,” it makes them seem more like objects. Additionally, the court lady and pin-up girl dichotomy is extremely limiting, and that entire question feels a bit silly. The question invites the viewer to only consider women as part of one of two categories, an exercise that’s neither provocative or productive. The exhibit doesn’t do a particularly good job of answering its own question, though perhaps that’s for the best since it’s a shallow one anyway.

The Future of Japanese Culture at Wellesley College

Report on a cultural event

As two women and two young girls, done up in beautiful coiffures and wearing kimonos of rich pale silk, plucked their koto, a traditional Japanese instrument, a respectful hush settled over the crowd at Yuki Matsuri.

This year with fingers crossed, the Japan Club welcomed a very special performance for Yuki Matsuri, or Snow Festival. They had managed to book professional koto players. The koto is a traditional stringed instrument that looks like an enlarged bridge of a cello with an extra nine strings and is laid on the ground. It’s the national instrument of Japan and it’s difficult to learn and to play. It’s a repetition of single strums producing a single sound. Each pluck of a string sends a forlorn twang into the ether. Often used in nagauta, long songs that accompanied kabuki theatre. For me, the sounds evoke the traditional Japan we often see in samurai films with geisha in beautiful silk kimonos looking out across a lake, watching a sakura blossom’s descent. However, the traditional sound can be disconcerting –anachronistic even—for unsophisticated audiences unfamiliar with Eastern music and instruments.

I looked out at the audience from backstage as the koto players continued. Their eyes were fixated on the performers. With each pluck of the koto, a single note resonated in the air. After ten minutes the saga of sounds slowly faded into silence, and the audience applauded. The performers paused, and the audience prepared for the next act to come on stage, but instead the performers began their second song. Another ten minutes passed, and several students began to shift impatiently in their seats on the floor. Some even got up to get more food, talking loudly to their friends and turning their backs to the stage. Japan Club members turned to each other and frowned: “Everyone’s leaving.”

It was true. Half the audience was picking up their plates, throwing them in to the trash, and walking out the doors of the performance room. This was only the second act of Yuki Matsuri. Veteran Japan Club members explained to me that it’s not unusual at long events like Yuki Matsuri for audience members to get up and explore the booths lining the walls during intermission. The great offense came from the fact that they were leaving in the middle of a performance. Although the koto players continued to play for their full time allotment, when they left the stage, they brusquely bowed to the Japan Club e-board members, gathered their instruments and quickly left. Their refusal to stay for the rest of the festival was the Japanese way of saying, “We’ve been utterly insulted by our treatment.”

This was the eleventh time Wellesley Japan Club hosted Yuki Matsuri. Every year, over 200 students attend in order to see the various performances ranging from a traditional sōranbushi, a fisherman’s shanty, to a Japanese Pop music medley. Along the walls of the Tishman Commons are booths that feature games like origami and delicious Japanese food such as oden, wheat noodles in a soy broth. Yuki Matsuri is a great way to expose Wellesley students to Japanese culture without having to host a lecture. Unfortunately, this event doesn’t receive the appreciation it deserves.

There is a lot of work that goes into planning a cultural event of this large scale. Japan Club Executive Board members start planning all the way in September and don’t stop until February. Their job description sounds simple enough, except people outside of Japan Club E-board don’t realize the painstaking details involved. People who don’t speak English very well perform many of the traditional acts that are brought in for Yuki Matsuri. As a result, most of the communications received from outside participants are written in keigo, or the formal Japanese used when addressing elders or superiors. This profound politeness is a reflection of the complex social hierarchy embedded in Japanese culture. Disregarding the cultural significance of formal correspondence signals to the performers a lack of respect.

Although the preparations for Yuki Matsuri are intense, the hardest part is getting Wellesley students to actually attend. The joke on campus—even amongst professors—is that all one needs to attract Wellesley students is free food.It makes a lot of sense. What could poor college students want more than a stimulating lecture?

Okonomiyaki, Japanese catchall pancakes.

It’s no wonder that the Japan Club, which orders over a thousand dollars worth of sushi, soba, katsudon, and gyoza, gets 300 guests from on- and off-campus. They come for the food, and the Japan Club members hope the students stay to watch the acts that their fellow students have spent half a year perfecting. Yet by the end of the night, maybe 100 to as few as 50 students have actually stayed till the end.

Although many audience members left during the koto performance, the event was still a success. The rest of the acts, including Mount Holyoke’s OdotteMita, a J-pop dance group, were able to perform their pieces without any audience members leaving. In fact many of the students excitedly waited until after intermission for Wellesley’s Taiko, a Japanese drum club. The loud banging of the large drums contrasted with the subtle long notes of the koto. The traditional music of the koto, often associated with the courtly life of Japan, was perhaps not ideally suited for a college crowd; most of who are not used the sounds of Eastern music.

Personally, I was angry that many of my fellow students had left the performance room without really giving the koto players a chance. Blame bad timing or short attention spans, but the majority of the audience members that night missed not only great performances, but also the point of a cultural show, exposure to a unique culture. Discovery and adventure require some effort and persistence. The disinterested students may out number the interested, but the interested students are learning a lot about Japan’s culture from the minimal effort to eat good food and listen quietly to performances.

Veritas through the Plexiglas

Report on a cultural event

In relation to the politics post-World War I, Winston Churchill said, “History is written by the victors.” This rings true in Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology. Even as you walk through the newly curated exhibits of the Hall of North American Indians, such as Digging Veritas: The Archeology and History of the Indian College and Student Life at Colonial Harvard, the feeling of inauthenticity lingers. As if only half the story is being told. Nonetheless, this museum – like many others – oozes authority with its ambient lighting and academic labels. Without even realizing it, we put our trust in the Peabody – trusting it to educate us with truths and not just “truthiness”.

In particular, the exhibits on the first floor serve as a crash course on native cultures. In many ways, they are meant to add striking visuals to what we learned in middle school. Numerous rare artifacts help illustrate Native American culture. Dioramas in one corner of the Peabody depict the everyday lives of the peoples.

Each glass case, barely two feet tall, is supposed to encapsulate the customs of an entire community of people. Cotton, painted green and brown, set the rustic scene. Clay, wax, or plastic figurines stand stagnantly in their customary activities. The oldest of these dioramas was made in 1906 – when it was possible to travel and see these cultures firsthand. It was as if the maker of these dioramas knew he had to preserve them in an airtight box before colonialism took it away. This “salvage anthropology” mistakenly tries to capture a culture as if it is static and can be objectively presented for the posterity. In fact, this diorama is only a narrow view of what Native Americans could have been and currently are like.

The Lakota, the Inuit, the Seminole cultures are all conveniently diluted through the plexiglas so that they are easier for us to consume. What the Peabody exhibits is not Native American culture, but an empty shell of it. These are merely artifacts preserved by the victor to be told to future generations. The exhibit’s labels attempt to both recognize and rectify our culpability in the marginalization of Native American culture. In nearly every section, one large plaque is titled “How were skin-working activities affected by European contact?” or “How did fishing activities change with Anglo-American contact?” Through highlighting particular sections of historical background – namely white influence – these plaques serve to admit the museum’s biases.

Even so, the recognition of bias is not the antidote for inauthenticity and misrepresentation. As you dip your toes in each culture of  the horseshoe-shaped exhibit hall, you will eventually come across a larger space. Here, the ceilings stretch up an extra story to accommodate the large totem poles that line the walls.

For many this would have been an impressive sight. But I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. Driving through the greater Seattle area, you can see totem poles at the local salmon chowder house or the park where you walk your dog. Although you probably learned about the Makah, the Tulalip, and the Chinook tribes with the rigidity of any other middle school curriculum, many of the cultures were experienced directly. Every now and then, pow wows occurred at the local high school gym – or whichever venue would suit the event. To say the least, we would not go to a museum to see totem poles.

The Peabody’s original set of totem poles were taken from a temporarily abandoned Tlingit village by white explorers. In accordance to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, the museum had repatriated the stolen artifacts in 2001. To replace the piece, the Peabody commissioned a new totem pole by a Tlingit carver. Even so, this “authentic” piece of Pacific Coast culture is displaced from its natural context. We have to be careful with the pretty words which wash away the true meaning of each piece. Despite its commendable actions to return the stolen totem poles, the museum still neglects to give true context or meaning to these cultural pieces. Nowhere in this exhibit does a label explain the spiritual meaning of the bear who sits at the bottom, or the fish which crowns the piece. We see so much of Native American culture secondhand that we often lose track of the fact that Native Americans are modern individuals who are more than a museum exhibit or a Hollywood caricature. These artifacts have meaning, a deep meaning that is poorly recognized at the Peabody.

Rounding out the Hall of North American Indians is a small exhibit, relatively new, and one rooted in Harvard’s own history. To no one’s surprise the oldest college in America has archeological relics sitting in the heart of its campus. Digging Veritas boasts a collection of artifacts gathered from a 2009 dig of Harvard Yard. Unlike other exhibits in the Peabody, it consists entirely of objects gathered from the institution’s own property.

The exhibit advertises itself as an archeological dig for the Indian College, an academic institution founded to educate Native Americans who were barred from the colonial ones. Photos of a local chief and students of Native American descent mark the walls closest to the entrance. However, the archaeological analysis barely includes anything about Native American life at the Indian College. Only a few bricks and knickknacks actually came from the Indian College. The curator’s labels candidly admit that many depictions of life at the Indian College are mere conjectures. The archeologists who presented Digging Veritas had tried so hard to reflect a truth that was ultimately inauthentic and decontextualized.

The lack of full-frontal truth in Digging Veritas is only one of the many disappointments in this hall filled with apologetic omissions of information and sweeping statements. Although it is clear that the Peabody Museum is modernizing to better suit the needs of education, we can only hope that it begins to adapt to its understandable inability to present an objective truth. The museum presents a reasonably good effort, but any attempt to depict a culture with plexiglas cases and limited labeling is a sad reification of Native American reality in past and present.

 

The U.S.-Japan Express

Report on a cultural event

I took the train to go to a panel on public transportation in downtown D.C., which was only fitting. Unfortunately for me and the rush hour commuters I was traveling with, the trains were running extremely late that morning because of the unusually cold weather. The old equipment that Washington D.C.’s Metro system relied upon couldn’t take the frigid temperatures and trains were malfunctioning inbound and outbound. The more trains malfunctioned, the more commuters were crammed into the functioning ones, and the overcrowding caused even more malfunctions.

Needless to say, I arrived at my event much later than I intended. I completely missed the welcome speech and the introduction to the presentations. In this at least I was fortunate: I was already familiar with the event I was attending. Called the 3rd JASC-KASC Trilateral Symposium, it was a series of three presentations put on by college students who had participated in either the Japan-America Student Conference (JASC) or the Korea-America Student Conference (KASC) the previous summer. Each panel addressed some issue that was of particular importance to the United States, Japan and Korea. The presentation I was most interested in seeing was the third, Urban Challenges, which specifically tackled public transportation.

I had grown up here in the suburbs of D.C. where public transportation was inconvenient at best and where getting a driver’s license was a rite of passage for a typical teen. Having a car was a basic necessity and most families I knew owned two. I was completely unaware of the importance of public transportation until I spent a year living abroad in Tokyo, a city of millions whose public transportation system is renowned. There I was empowered, so to speak, to go anywhere I wanted in the city quickly, cheaply and without a car. For example, I could make it from my local station in the outskirts of the city to downtown Tokyo in 25 minutes or less. Public transportation opened the doors of Tokyo to me in a way that D.C.’s metro system never had. I wanted to know what the student presenters, with their Korean, Japanese and American backgrounds, thought of the differences in public transit between our three countries.

The overarching theme of their presentation was that public transportation systems have developed differently in different parts of the world and that the U.S., Japan and Korea can all benefit from studying each other’s systems. The students gave three specific examples. The first was London’s system of using new technology to wirelessly charge drivers for driving in the city. The second was D.C.’s bike share program that opened in 2008 and expanded into the suburbs in subsequent years. The third was the extensive networks of trains that are common in and between Asian cities, with Tokyo cited as the prime example.

However, as the presentation went on it became clear to me that it was really our Asian allies who could teach the U.S. about developing, structuring and implementing public transportation on a city- and country-wide scale. The heart of the matter is that Japan, like many other Asian countries, is a train-centric society. Trains, buses and bikes are integrated into daily life, city infrastructure and the economy in a way that is rarely seen in the car-centric U.S.

Take for example Kichijōji Station, located near downtown Tokyo. The first time I went out the turnstile, I was shocked to find myself in the bowels of a four-story mall looking at shops, restaurants and cafes. The train station was literally inside the mall. Unlike the U.S.’s suburban set-up where strip malls and restaurants are located off of highways and surrounded by large parking lots, in Japan shopping and dining are clustered around train stations, which are the accessible hubs of urban life.

Being a train-centric society also means that more time and effort is invested into the development of trains. Simply put, the train technology in Asia is better than anything we currently have in the U.S. The most famous example of this is the shinkansen, dubbed “bullet train” by English-speakers, that travels between all major Japanese cities at 200 mph. But more importantly, Japanese technology is more advanced on a local level as well. Not only are trains in Tokyo newer on average than trains in U.S. cities, they are more reliable and extremely precise. Every time a train pulls into a station, its doors align with certain markings on the platform, which tell riders where to wait.

This is a far cry from the state of trains in the United States. Assuming your city has a train system, chances are its trains are the same ones that were being used thirty years ago. Out of date and unreliable, public transportation is a nuisance that most Americans avoid in favor of their cars. Without a car, the 18-minute drive from my comfortable neighborhood to my doctor’s office becomes an hour-long trek whose timing is dictated by the train. Low demand for train service means that even with government subsidies, most cities can’t sustain a public transportation network that would be sufficient for anyone making do without a car. This has substantial socioeconomic repercussions, as the JASC-KASC presenters rightly pointed out. Inconvenient, unreliable public transit causes low-income families to sacrifice time that they do not have to lose. And for low-income workers, time is literally money.

In their ideal view of the world, the student presenters hoped that the U.S. would learn from Asia and, by improving public transportation, improve the quality of life of the people who use it. Waiting for the still-delayed train to take me home, I mulled over how challenging adapting such a system would be, and not just because of the more practical funding concerns. Our cities and suburbs have developed based on the assumption that residents own cars and we as a country are practically married to them. Giving up our cars would be more than a question of functionality. We believe that we have a right to drive everywhere and we have convinced the government to support that right, to invest in new highways and not new train lines. So it is our responsibility to convince ourselves, our friends and our government that it is in our best interest to build, and then take, the train.