Living in Shenzhen

It's kind of like being the baddest boy on the block, but living next to Godzilla. A massive, bustling, international city, Shenzhen is smack dab next to the world's premiere metropolis, Hong Kong.  If in similar proximity, Beijing and Shanghai would also lose much by comparison. 

Of course, there's more to a city than financial centers and property values. For those of us who like a little soul in our cities, we got Shenzhen. At least the Lonely Writers do, and to follow up Shopping in Shenzhen, a comprehensive guide to plumbing the city for bargains, they've given us Living in Shenzhen, a 256 page mini-tome that proves Shenzhen has arrived.

A Chinese Baby's First Birthday

The Chinese understand gratitude. After eons of the masses grinding for a daily bowl of rice, they know counting clouds is a waste of time, and counting blessings the only way to keep going.  In the West, baby's first birthday is a cause for kitsch and consternation.  Shots of junior staring confusedly at his cake are endearing, but soon he'll be mobile enough to stand in front of the TV, and pull things off tables.

 In China, parents hold their breath for their child's first year of life. After all, precious gifts are so easily snatched away by jealous spirits. Thus the three ceremonies of baby's zhou sui, not so much an anniversary of birth as a milestone in family continuity.

The Chinese

In Five Minds for the Future, Howard Gardner, who coined the term ‘multiple intelligences', tells us what qualities will define successful people of the near future. Only those with Respectful Minds, the ability to transcend identifying only with our immediate kind, will be able to establish the trust and common cause necessary for success in the global village. A person with a Respectful Mind "offers the benefit of the doubt to all human beings. As much as possible, she avoids thinking in group terms."

A great exercise in cultivating the Respectful Mind lies in turning a contemplative eye to China. Could the most populous country, and by many accounts most monolithic, also be one of the most diverse? Could each of those 1.3 - however - many billion really be a unique world unto herself?

For practice material, we refer you to The Chinese, an exhibition running at the Paris-Beijing Photo Gallery from July 18th to September 12th. Two Swiss photographers, Mathias Brascler and Monika Fischer, spent the year before the Olympic Games traveling the length and breadth of China, thirty provinces, seeking always the individuality in the common.

Captured in portrait form, each subject is placed against a stylized background symbolizing his niche in the Middle Kingdom. Not a one of the odd two score subjects  reminds you of another. Not a one is flashing the obligatory ‘victory' sign. And not a one fails to reveal a unique soul, worthy of respect, sparkling behind dark eyes.

The Fable of Lao Wang

Once there were two kingdoms, separated by the Misty Mountains of Relativism. These mountains were so high and impenetrable that almost nobody believed there could be a kingdom on the other side. Once in a great while, however, someone would make the journey and return to tell of it. Sadly, these travelers’ journeys were discounted in public discourse as the ravings of madmen.

The Hidden Village of Guoliang

In the heart of Henan's Taihang Mountains lies forgotten Guoliang Cun.  Not entirely forgotten, of course, in China a "forgotten" destination can officially mean fewer than ten thousand visitors per day. But far fewer than that disturb this marvelous relic of rough-hewn splendor, and the place truly was forgotten long enough that the term applies more to Guoliang Cun than to most any other Chinese habitation.

Getting to “I do”: The 6 Steps of Ancient Chinese Engagement

Wedding season is in full swing here in China, and how lucky the brides and grooms. The degree of freedom they've enjoyed leading up to the nuptials would astound their forebearers. The biggest task they face is choosing the right Audi motorcade, and which "videographer" will hang drunkenly out of a van at the front.  If you can believe it, not so long ago in China the process leading up to the big day was fraught with a thousand potential landmines of propriety, abstraction, and inscrutable traditional processes, lumped into six general categories.

3 Calligraphy Masterpieces

 Zhao Mengfu's Autumn Colors on the QIao and Hua Mountains

Darn those Chinese characters. Pictures for words? Where’s the logic; where’s the system? Then again, that’s why Chinese calligraphy is an art far and beyond any self-expression achievable through western penmanship. Written Chinese characters reflect the calligrapher’s aesthetic tastes, level of education, depth of sentiment, personality and temperament.  Al l made possible through the soft elasticity of the ink brush.

Perhaps you’ve seen the old gentleman at the park, dipping an over-sized brush in water, tracing characters with tai qi delicacy and footwork as gawkers stand rapt. He has three guiding principles in mind. Movement, for only through practiced flow of wrist, elbow, shoulder, and body will he maneuver the brush correctly, and control the flow of ink. Speed, force, pressing and lifting for varied brush contact, all critical to worthwhile calligraphy. Then there’s structure, the layout of the characters’ points on an imagined quadrant. This is a matter of balance, release and replacement, capping and piercing, ascending and falling, a dynamic spell which imbues the characters with life. Only with practiced movement and structure can the calligrapher’s style be seriously considered.  His inspiration, taste, level of education, and personality find expression in this realm.

Before too long the last old gentleman will grow too feeble to do his art justice, and calligraphy as an art will go the way of cloisonné and embroidery, fake pearls churned in factories for mass consumption. That lack of authenticity will douse all but a spark of interest in Chinese calligraphy, already diminished in an age when  the hand-turned is no competition for the computer-generated. But we’ll always have the following three classics of calligraphy, for the ever few who can distinguish gold from that which glitters.

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.

The Princess of Nebraska

So the world is flat. And hot. And crowded. Even if we don't have Youtube right now in China,we have Youku.  Here Paul van Dyk gets crowds as hip as in Berlin, hopped up on K, speed, coke, and pretty much anything else you'd find in the bloodstream of a New York audience member.

But unless you're young and leisurely enough to savor that youth culture, the flat world theory doesn't translate, not all the way. To older expats, the phrase "young Chinese woman" still triggers a narrow set of images: the twenty-something office girl, the cheerful restaurant greeter, the child of Party privilege behind a tinted Mercedes window. For those in the West, the set grows even more discrete: the factory drone, the exotic cinema slut, the hard-working overseas student.

Now what if that overseas student has a life beyond books and her parents' generational ambitions? What if consumer culture and the internet have left her as jaded and morally ambiguous as any of her western counterparts, and a brief fling has left her pregnant?

Wu Zetian - The Woman Who Became Emperor

A woman ruling China. The mere thought of it flew in the face of Confucian fuddie-duddies and their "Mandate of Heaven" nonsense. Nonsense, because men rule wisely not by virtue of their male parts but in spite of them. Yet the thought of a woman holding sway over the Han was tantamount to heresy for traditional Chinese, even after 1949. Amazing that one actually managed to seize the reins of power, albeit  a woman of brains, beauty, and more ambition than Macbeth after an Amway convention. Her name was Wu Zetian, and she still lives in infamy for doing everything men did for power, except better.