9/18

9/18

http://picasaweb.google.com/105909573807230408134/9_18?authkey=Gv1sRgCKO0uPralvT0Gw

I'd like to talk about spin a little bit. Spin is not a single concept, but very similar patterns applied to different contexts. Spin is where you keep a certain amount of emotional distance from various things, and you use that to your advantange. A very honest, plain-spoken person will only have one emotional viewpoint on any given thing and only ever voice one opinion of that something. If he's nice, maybe he'll take after the proverb about saying nothing about things he doesn't like. I think this is a good way to go about life, and perhaps most Americans live abide pretty closely by it. The average Chinese person, however, applies a lot of spin. If you were a fly on the wall of three different living rooms where a Chinese person is recounting a story to three different friends, you'd likely hear three totally different stories.
Let's factually describe a hypothetical event. Some friends are asked out to dinner by a business acquaintance. He generously provides a tea he likes to be brewed for the whole party. Friend A really likes the tea, and compliments it quite a bit. The hosts sets out some packets of the tea and offers them to anyone who wants to take some home. Some time later, friend A tastes his tea once again and then pockets one of the packets.

When talking about A, people present at the dinner might say of him, "he likes to pretend he really knows his stuff about tea. He was just going on and on about that tea so he took a packet for himself. Now he's going to show off with it at his next dinner and tout how good his tastes are." Who knows, that might lie close to an honest opinion of friend A's behavior.

In some other setting among a different circle of friends, when comes up, the same person from above might say, "oh, A is really into tea. He liked this red tea that we once had. That was a good tea."

As you can see, no matter what your emotions are on a subject, when doing spin, you should always view the situation in a different light. Having gone to so many different dinners with so many subsets of folks, I've seen the same things treated well and poorly in turn, praised and slagged depending on what the speaker was trying to get across. Obviously, some people have more spin than others, but overall, spin is clearly detectable more so in China than in the US. I don't know if I'm ready to label the average Chinese person as slimier because of his spin-doctoring, but I am observing that he does it.

In the morning, we packed into a loaf car to go to my mom's old home. It's where the brother of her father still lives. The poverty in which they live is reminiscent of what I saw in Guangxi. I mean, they have plenty of money, but their attitudes and habits are such that they live in conditions that are like poverty. My mom's uncle is 82 and his mind is perfectly healthy. But he took a spill last year and his legs haven't recovered quite yet. There's some nerve damage that makes it very hard for him to walk. In America, even at that age, his children would likely get together and figure out what kind of physical therapy program he'd need, or what kind of live-in nurse they might try to hire. Here, all his children are busy with their own lives, and so his care is left to his wife, who's perambulatory but not bushy-tailed at her age. In the family, there is enough cash to treat him and to make his life better for years to come. But the attitude here is that he took that fatal fall that is going to leave him bedridden for life, as though there are no options. It might seem cruel to an outsider, but this is probably the way people have been thinking for centuries here. It's these sorts of attitudes that will take the longest to Westernize, if they ever will.

We left there before lunch, even though my mom's uncle's wife insisted on cooking something for us. She was very nice. After scrabbling out of the unpaved country roads in the loaf car, we went into Tangshan city to have lunch before visiting another relative. By keeping lunch limited to ourselves, we were taking off some of the money burden of the relatives who were being visited, who are obligated to host for the visitors. My 3rd Uncle knew a guy who opened this Sichuan restaurant in the city. It specialized in dutch oven cooked fish soup. That dish was amazing. The details are with the photos.

After lunch, we visited my mom's brother's youngest sister, who also lived in Tangshan proper. We hung out for a long time at their home, which was mildly annoying because there were a lot of smokers. While there's a lot of smoking everywhere, I don't have to stick around it for long usually. Even at a web cafe, I could get better air. Finally, we got off our asses and went to the dinner restaurant, bringing our own steamed crabs with us. Chinese restaurants usually don't have problems with you bringing in some of your own dishes. Some have wised up and started taxing outside alcohol, though.

Dinner was extremely over-ordered. Eventually, it got up to triple layers of plates. I didn't stick around to see that with my own eyes, though. I had been lobbying all day to visit my cousin Yupo, who I'd missed in the initial gathering of relatives. I heard second hand about how many dishes there were, left uneaten. Also about how hammered my 2nd and 3rd Uncles got. That's typical for them. Even before I left, about 2/3s into the dinner, about 5 people drinking had put back a couple fifths of 100 proof rice whiskey. And they apparently kept going on brandy and some beer they ordered. I'm sure my uncles soaked up a lot of that total. On the long ride back to Guye, one uncle had his head bowed the whole time, passed out, and the other had his head slack and tipped all the way back, sleeping. Truly tweedledee and tweedledum.

A couple of us took an early taxi for the hour ride back to Guye. At night we finally got ahold of Wang Yupo, who hadn't come up to dinner last night because of the terrible traffic around here. Even tonight he got back pretty late. The company van just couldn't get through the traffic jams fast enough. He has to get up at 6 and gets back at 9. Too many people with cars. Yupo came over in his scooter and picked me up. I think the last time I was on a motorcycle or scooter was 1997 when I was back here. It was at night and only a few minutes or so, so not too scary. Of course neither of us wore any gear or helmets or anything like that.

Anyways, I brought as his gift some DVDs for his daughter, Wang Xinran, or Ranran for short. She's just started first grade this year, and is still bounding with that young kid energy. Fortunately, she hadn't seen at least one of the cartoons I'd brought her. According to her pops, it doesn't matter how little English she knows; she'll keep watching something over and over. Yupo and I started chatting about stuff, and Ranran kept coming over asking about this and that. I showed her the air traffic control game on my iPhone, and she liked that quite a bit. When I last left China, Yupo was dating his wife but still single. What a difference 8 years make. Since then, Yupo's hair has thinned out enough to warrant wearing it really close. He's married that girlfriend and been having a family. His work as an electrician at the train plant has been pretty steady, if a bit hard with all that commuting. It's decent money, which is good. Still, it's not his dream job. He's always wanted to be a director and still pursues that interest by writing in his spare time. He's not terribly good at typing Chinese, so he still writes in shorthand, and if a story is worth it, he has his wife type it up. She teaches elementary school (the very one their daughter goes to) and thus has decent computer skills. I don't actually know her full name. When you're friends with someone much more so than his wife, you can call the wife 'sao zi.' I'm not sure what it means, but it it's basically a title for a friend's wife.
Yupo once had a last ditch effort to get into the moviemaking business. After he graduated from his vocational school, he snuck up to Beijing to audition at the Central Institute for Performance Arts, which would radically boost the viability of his acting career. He went through a couple rounds of auditions, having to make excuses about why he would be away for a couple days at a time. Ultimately, he didn't make the cut, so he had to go back to life as usual. He told me this in confidence some years ago when he didn't have anyone he could share it with. While he was doing these auditions though, he met another hopeful who ended up washing out. This friend stuck it out in Beijing and kept at it one way or another, and eventually landed a job as a script editor. Now they're hiring and the friend has a spot for Yupo. It's a big leap. Yupo has a job and home that supports his wife and kid. If he were to take on this job in Beijing, he's not gonna be able to give up after a few months and come crawling back to that electrician job. He's worried he's not gonna be able to come through on the occasional writing assignments, as writing to someone else's topic as opposed to one's own ideas is much harder. He's going to be living alone in a city that's at least 2 hours away from his family. All serious considerations. Still, it is a good pay raise and would be a real stepping stone to other opportunities in the business. Sadly, I can't relate at all to switching between industries that differ that much, and from a job I tolerate to one I might genuinely like. Yupo's got til about the end of the year to decide.
After hanging out with Yupo and playing with Ranran for a while, I headed back home. I think it was a good talk. There's only one more thing on my checklist -- in 2002, one night we were walking around at night just hanging out, the four of us cousins. Yupo, me, Wang Peng, and Wang Kang. I spotted a vendor broiling lamb skewers over his coal brazier and asked to stop and get some. Yupo ordered the whole set and handed them out to us. I got out some money to pay, but he stopped me. Over all the dinners we'd been invited to, where friends and relatives have paid for, this one moment was the most genuine. Yupo told me, "no matter how much time goes on, no matter how much distance separates us, we're still family, and from one relative to another, it doesn't matter who pays." It's not like it was a lot of money, but it would have made more sense for me to pay rather than him. Still, the idea means a lot to me and I think it's the basis from which I think about my family in China. So yeah, before I leave, I need to make sure to drag him and maybe his family out to have some of lamb skewers on me.

At this point, it should be clear that I'm closer to my mom's side of the family than my dad's. One reason is that I've simply spent more time with them. In 1997, I lived in Tangshan for almost 2 months, and didn't even go to my dad's old home. Another important reason is the language barrier. My da bai's wife and my da gu -- they can't even speak Mandarin. They can understand it reasonably well, but I can't talk to them. For these two reasons, I've never had a really meaningful conversation with my Guangxi relatives. I wish I could have, but that is left for future visits.

The superbly observant will have noted that Wang Peng and Wang Kang, sons of sons of my mom's brothers, have the surname Wang. While I am surnamed Mao because of my father. So why is Wang Yupo, son of my mom's sister, also a Wang? Simple -- his father is a Wang, too.