Foreigners Not So Welcome?

He had no clue he was in danger when the beer bottle smashed into his face. He had been about to step into another cab ride home after another night’s drinking at Sanlitun, Beijing’s infamous bar street. No posturing, no threats, no gut-wrenching realization he had a fight on his hands. Just the impact of cold hard glass.

As he went down, his assailant and two other Chinese men set to finishing the job. Kicks and punches, mostly kicks, to all the places raging instinct strikes for: head, ribs, and groin. It was late, not quite one in the morning, but on Sanlitun Street that still left a clutch of witnesses at hand. Not one, foreign or Chinese, interfered. Not until that tacit moment when the attackers had spent themselves, grave injury done, did another foreigner wade in to push them off.

But the victim’s night of horror was just beginning. Helped to a hospital, he learned in a delirium of pain that no medical treatment would be forthcoming until all proper papers and proof of payment had been verified. Eleven hours passed until doctors finally attended him and assessed the damage: a shattered cheekbone, nose broken in two places, a welter of assorted fractures and contusions. He came to after surgery with two steel plates holding his head together.

The police are never far off at Sanlitun; they know better. And the assailants, compromised by a lack of planning, were soon rounded up. Before being hauled off to jail, they were asked what had prompted such a brutal assault. After all, they hadn’t taken any money. “No reason.”

Once out of the hospital, he dutifully filed a report at his embassy, to learn that he was the fourth of his countrymen to make such a claim in the last week. But by no means is this a matter of Germans being singled out. The diversity of victims, and the spike in violent assaults over roughly the past year, bear the marks of unreasoning, unspecific anti-foreign backlash.

Should you listen to an expat reeling off his laundry list of discontents with Beijing, and should you finally ask rhetorically why on earth he stays, he’ll tell you that the city is safe. So what if traffic can ride a green arrow through your walk sign, and hepatitis lurks in every mid-market hotpot joint, and you’re shaving minutes off your life expectancy with every lung-full? For as long as even the oldest China hands can remember, Beijing has stood superior to any comparable western metropolis in one very appreciable statistic – lack of violence. Maybe some golden boy from Brussels doesn’t see it, but his cousin from Amsterdam does. And those of us who have even casual acquaintance with the mean streets of Los Angeles, New York, London, where the potential for a wrong look to end in bloodshed hums like a lethal current through public life, for us its absence is tangible here in the Big Smoggy.

But those days of pax probiscum are winding down now, and only in retrospect will we appreciate how lucky we were. All the years of twenty-something kids earning more with a little lazy English teaching than a Chinese middle-age professional humping it in a dismal cubicle sixty hours a week, or a son of the revolution hawking his produce night and day for three months. All the presuming on China’s “catch up” policy and the official good will enforced from the top down.

And god forbid anyone take this as some sandwich-board warning to get out of Dodge, or hunker down in a lao wai enclave. There’s been no sea-change in national sentiment, French torch-dousers notwithstanding. You’ll still get the friendly, awkward goobers dying to trot out their hard-won English and possibly even make friends with a foreigner. The lazy susan will still spin and stop with the new dish pointed at you.

And this is not to suggest that the emerging problem is economic in nature, or even political. It’s psychological. It’s metaphysical. Nothing exists without its opposite. No laughter without tears, no pride without shame. That’s why Americans can’t really be rich; they think being poor is taking the bus and having last year’s cell phone. Who truly thought all this elaborate politeness, all the English acquisition, all the status ads featuring Eurasians posing as Chinese, had no shadow? How long can you ride on being with the folks who brought high-rises, plumbing, cars, computers, forcing a proud people to concede they aren’t products of the most advanced civilization, the only civilization the world has ever seen?

The opposite was always there, and growing muscle demands to be flexed. Nationalism nothing. Take it a level deeper, to our apish, innate, inescapable pride of origin. Vonnegut’s biggest, scariest Granfaloon. We’re white. We’re yellow. Yay. You’re not. Booo.

So rather than some patronizing tsk tsk with an appeal to nobler instincts, much less a call for revenge or other such ignorance, some historical perspective. For Chinese in the West, the shadow came first, and its opposite has been neither overt nor over-abundant in the offing. In 1871, there were less than two hundred Chinese in Los Angeles. Segregated by default from whites, they were also corralled by the Mexican residents to Calle de Los Negros, N-word Alley, the squalid backrooms on a street fronted by nothing but brothels, saloons, and flophouses.

On October 24^th, California’s first major race riot erupted, when a rainbow coalition mob, on the flimsiest provocation, beset LA’s tiny, defenseless Chinese community. Here’s a brief sample from Fradkin’s The Seven States of California:

There was no doubt, however, about the mob’s frenzy and rapaciousness during the riot. The crowd, including a constable, fired at two Chinese women, wounding one. They chopped holes in roofs and poured gunfire into crowded apartments where women and children huddled. When men fled into the street, they were immediately cut down by a barrage of gunfire.

Other wounded Chinese were hauled from apartments, kicked, stabbed , and then hanged. A young Chinese doctor was shot in the mouth, robbed, and then hanged. Even a fourteen-year-old boy was hanged. The most commonly cited number of Chinese deaths was nineteen.

A bunch of cowboys in Rock Springs, Wyoming, butchered 28 Chinese fourteen years later, and a vigilante mob almost succeeded in expelling all Seattle’s 400 Chinese residents a year after that, stopped only be two companies of militia. Ancient history? How about the anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia eleven years ago? Sure, maybe that’s all the unfortunate interplay of economics and Realpolitik, horrible, yet bearing scant resemblance to the beatings going on at Sanlitun. So ask a teacher, or better yet a student at a Melbourne, LA or Birmingham public school what the FOBs (Fresh Off the Boat Chinese) can look forward to.

Not a rationalization, or even an apologia, mind you. Just a supposition of the miraculous, that the shadow of our welcome in China has been so faint for so long.

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