Classless Society

I see the same cleaning lady every morning. She’s the size of an Oompa-Loompa, with one of those Southern Chinese faces fine-featured enough to stick in dough and make doll cookies with. Now, Da Shan has no need to get his golden pompadour ruffled over me, but I think I’ve cultivated my “Zao shang hao,” to an authentic timber. So why did it take me eight Mandarin good mornings until she stopped pretending she hadn’t heard me and replied?

It wasn’t shyness. I’ve seen her banter with the security guards and other members of her mop brigade, and she’s as feisty as an Ewok chieftain. And, though unschooled, she’s not afraid of foreigners. “Waiguoren ting you yisi,” [Foreigners are very interesting] she told me, after I had battered down the walls of reserve. Walls, ironically enough, mortared by class division.

It’s a painful conclusion to make, comrades, since so many died for a land established in the name of the peasant. But the eyes don’t lie. You know what I’m talking about. That magic micro-second of eye contact, too fast to bluff. Like when that erstwhile lovely you’re surreptitiously checking out from your cab unexpectedly looks in your direction, and you realize she was meant for profile shots. She sees and understands your dismay and embarrassment, as you do hers.

In those micro-moments with the cleaning lady, I saw confusion and suspicion, suspicion that maybe I was making fun of her. She figured the only reasons a foreigner would have to acknowledge her would be dishonorable.

And that’s a very common perspective amongst the Lilies of China. But that doesn’t explain the confusion I saw. The eyes of all those 1.9 meter, 50 kilogram self-anointed super models stick-figuring around the city hold no confusion during the micro-second. Their eyes usually say, “Oh god, the price of supreme beauty, to be subjected to the depraved leers of these foreign color wolves.”(I couldn’t be projecting here, could I?)

Anyway, I don’t see the confusion in the eyes of the praying mantis girls, but I saw it in hers. Because in Beijing, people of one class do not talk to so much as at people of a lower class. And class here is determined by your projected, not actual, net worth. Oh yeah, and your education; I’ll say that for Beijing’s class system. And lacking either, one is deemed unworthy of the niceties that make for human dignity – a tip of the hat, a civil tone.

Don’t believe me? How many times have you been the guest of honor at a nice Chinese dinner? Why do your hosts insist you try the dishes first, and keep the cross-cultural clichés flying? “Ha, ha, do you like Chinese food? Do you like NBA?” Of course, it’s gracious, but only a function of the instant status you command as a foreigner. Witness the Jekyll-Hyde transformation in your smiling host when the humble waitress needs a dressing down:

“Ha ha. You can say xie xie. Your Chinese is so good – Eh! Fuwu yuaRR! Ni ganshenmedeBLAHRAHRGAHR!! TIAN-AH!!“

To be sure, class-prejudice is a universal plague. As a teenager, I spent a summer sweating over a wood grill in the back of a fish n’ chips shack at the end of a pier at a yacht club. The yacht club teens would saunter in and sneer at me and the kitchen crew, and we’d drop their lobster rolls on the floor and fart on their fries. Mine is not a special story – it permeates the fabric of social interaction.

I guess what I have to accept is that back in the U.S.A. we have this cherished fiction of equality we must cling to, publicly at least. Because if even Maury Rosenberg, or whoever runs Paramount Studios, were to unload on the wait-staff at Morton’s like petty tyrants do here in the Jing, well…. Well for starters, he’d be the one to lose face, not the kitchen cipher. Furthermore, he’d stand a distinct chance of getting a Mexican knuckle-sandwich for lunch, and another one on the house.

But the Chinese rank and file are a passive bunch. The fact that their “betters” are better off only from welching on the better promise of a better world for the rank and file, they seem to bear philosophically. I’m the one with the problem, biting my fist because the messenger boy stands cringing in the doorway until he is bid to enter, because the ayi has to mind and feed the baby at the restaurant, but may not partake of the viands. Someone call me when the real revolution starts.