Chinese Society in Literature - Book Report/Review Example

An interesting book which at one level is generally superficial, yet at another level turns poetic and serious---. This is the feeling that remains after reading through “Foreign Babes in Beijing”; a memoir of her life in China by Rachel DeWoskin.Rachel is a graduate of Columbia University with a minor in Mandarin. DeWoskin lived in Beijing from 1994 through 1999. She worked for an American PR Firm in Beijing (‘P.R’ sounds uncomfortably like the Chinese word for an unflattering body part. “Anna told me that, PR in English sounds identical to piyar, the Chinese word for asshole.” page 256) .This was the time when China was passing through a crucial stage of history. After the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, China was opening up and modernizing its economy. So in a sense this memoir by Dewoskin, who is the daughter of Kenneth DeWoskin ,a noted Sinologist at the University of Michigan , should become a serious record of those changing times , of at least the city of Beijing , especially as she had childhood memories of China because of which she says she felt connected to China. Her father had been taking his family to China since her brothers and she were tiny. Even she remembers the childhood train rides across internal China, and how her parents made the children drink “thick, warm beer, since they could never be sure water was clean, even when it was bottled.” And her mother felt that China, of those days, was just like Disneyland, except of course authentic. “My mother brushed her teeth out the train window, rinsed with beer, and read us Charlotte’s web in hard sleeper bunks.” But, in spite of all these childhood China impressions and parental background, the book fails to satisfy any high academic research expectations. The book is more descriptive than analytical. At the same time it does makes some serious and interesting observations about the people, political environment, and the culture, which give us a picture of the modern Chinese society. THE TRIVIAL AND THE POETIC: Superficiality of the book starts from its cover. The cover shows long stunning pair of fish netted legs. These legs are not hers, the author points out .But a semiotic reading of this image and its signs on the cover leads one to assume that the book will not go beyond her soap opera experiences. This risqué photo on the book jacket is the most misleading cover one may have seen in for ever. When one moves from the cover to the opening of the book, this impression gets more confirmed. In the opening scene of the book, Rachel DeWoskin is about to film her first love scene for the Chinese TV’s first soap opera, from whose name the book gets its title. A crowded luxurious room in Beijing Sheraton Hotel is the location. The actor Rachel DeWoskin is sitting on the edge of a king sized bed surrounded by lighting assistants and boom boys. As the director Yao gives her the order “Touku”, she is paging through the English- Chinese dictionary, trying to find out what exactly is the director’s order. The leading man acting with her, quietly and confidently removes his pants. And it suddenly dawns on her that that is what she also is supposed to do. This “drop trou” opening of the book is frivolous. The same superficiality creeps into her writing when she goes on describing some of her shooting experiences. The single example is her description of a “crisis that erupted on the set” on a Sunday. The crisis erupted when her co-actor Sophie, who is a German girl, got offended, because “assistant Director Xu told her that she had gotten “too fat”. She got so upset that she went to lie down and the shooting was held up.” (Foreign Babes in Beijing – pages 143-44-45). Though the writer tries to argue that, what the German actor felt was a cultural offense, she bores the reader by going too much into the details of the incident. At the same time DeWoskin sparkles as a writer when she unexpectedly shifts the point to the issue Obesity among the Chinese. “Sophie began a melancholy hunger strike………. Fat was a hot topic that year. The Government, worried that its newly wealthy population was becoming McDonald’s-scarfing couch potatoes, launched an anti –fat campaign in 1994.” (page146). She achieves the same shift from trivial to poetic when she deals with her infatuations with Wang Ling, the lead player of the soap opera. He plays the role of the married Chinese man Tianming ,with whom Jiexi, the loose Western woman, played by DeWoskin falls in love and steals him away from his wife and takes him to America. She met Wang Ling just before they started filming. She was in the studio office for signing her contract, when he came in. It was Sophie, the red –haired German girl who plays the role of Louisa, a character parallel to Jiexi, who introduced Wang Ling. She gestured to Wang Ling. “He plays your boy friend.” Wang Ling heard her, and I guess he knew the word “boy friend,” because he pointed at himself and said “Nnanpengyou.” Right. He was going to be my Nanpengyou.He was stunning, with angles all over his face. The fluorescent light shot off his cheek bones. Would we kiss in the show? (Page 99) “Would we kiss in the show?.” , seems to be a cheap feminine expression of lust at first sight .But DeWoskin, the writer takes this seemingly silly expression of lust to a higher plane, during the course of her narration. One night, after the shooting of the climax scene, in which Jiexi runs and runs in slow motion to leap into the hands of Tianming, Wang Ling asks DeWoskin out to dinner. During the dinner Wang Ling reveals that he has a French mistress but his wife doesn’t mind that. He also tells her that he doesn’t mind if his wife has sex with other men. Driving her back home, and after stopping his jeep in front of her apartment, Wang Ling says “we have kissed several times”. Actually they had kissed nine times that day itself. “But we have never kissed without every one around”, he adds. She says she felt like desiring him at that moment, but resisted. Anyway they kissed for real for the first and only time. But she felt awkward after. “It ruined our friendship”, she says. “Illicit kisses ruin friendships everywhere. This is a global fact, although at the time I attributed it to cultural misunderstanding.” (Page 154). Here the writing reaches subtle heights. THE NEW CHINA: Through out the book she makes interesting and important observations of people she meets, which reflect on the culture and the political ambience. According to these observations China is changing and changing fast. The characteristics of the New China are: more liberalized or westernized youth, the youth of the cyber culture with little ideological conviction, lack of guarantee for jobs with the weakening of the so called work units, people migrating to urban areas or “special economic zones” for jobs, change in sexual attitudes, and attitudes towards marriage and even child bearing and eating. Through these observations, though often casual, DeWoskin is able to bring out the changing face of China, in spite of being handicapped by her lack of full command over the Chinese language. “In the Foreign Babes office, I was rootless. I could gauge anything about or from their looks. It is one thing not to understand the flow of language. It’s another not to understand anything at all.” (Page 84). Her case studies of close friends she made, while she was in Beijing, are a major part of the book. She calls them “Model Babes”. One of DeWoskins model babes, is Anna, a colleague at the PR firm and a friend. She is a revolting Chinese girl, who rebels against her parents and traditional Chinese expectations .She was an admirer of China’s first all-woman rock band, Cobra. She loves the expatriates more than the Chinese. She pursues a disastrous love affair with a Saudi Arabian student, named Khalid, to lose him ultimately. Khalid returns to his home land and gets married in a traditional Saudi way. “It is difficult to exaggerate how daring a life choice this was for a 20 - year –old Chinese girl in 1992,” writes DeWoskin. Her observations of Anna gives us some insight into the new generation Chinese, with little traditional ideological convictions, and hence desperate and revolting. Yet another of her encounter with a Chinese woman reveals some socio-economic issues faced by the Chinese today. To manage her apartment as well as the administrative jobs like paying the telephone/water bills and so on, she hires a maid. Xiao Gao, the maid and Dewoskin were of the same age. But she was married and six months pregnant with her second child. The second child is a socio-economic issue for every married Chinese woman even today. China instituted its “one child policy” in 1979.This was to control the population growth and achieve maximum stability in economic growth. The maid, whom Dewoskin hires, presents a typical picture of a woman under this Govt. policy of birth control. Her first child is a girl. And there is a general preference among Chinese couples for boys. The maid was worried whether her second child also would be a girl. She and her husband manage to bribe a doctor and get illegal gender test performed. After a lot of confusion Xiao Gao, the maid, decides not to abort the girl child. She decides to hide her first child in the country side with relatives. This woman’s case brings out both the human dilemma as well as attempts to subvert the law. “Disregard for one-child policy was widespread by 1994; couples hid children with relatives, paid fines or found loop holes in the rules. Some rural families were exempted from the rule, since they needed children to carry on family farms.” (Page 91). China is still sticking on to this one-child policy. This policy mixed with preference for boys, has created the problem of too many boy babies and not enough girls in the worlds most populated nation. “Daughters were considered an economic burden, not only because they would eventually leave the house to marry into some one else’s family, but also because of the cost of their weddings and dowries.” (Page 91) China has a 2,000-year feudal history that considered men superior to women. Fifty odd years of dominance of Communist/ socialist ideologies have not changed much of the attitudes of people in this regard. According to Washington Post, “in 2005, some 118 boys were born in China for every 100 girls. In some regions the figure has hit 130 boys for every 100 girls; the average for industrialized countries is between 104 and 107 boys for every 100 girls” (Associated Press report in Washington Post.com January 23, 2007) The Chinese Government is trying still to tackle the gender imbalance with educational campaigns, punishment for sex selective abortions and rewards, like retirement pensions for parents who have girls, according to the report. As the world’s population surpassed 6 billion (6,000,000,000 ) in October 1999, China’s population represented more than 1/5 of this total (20.8% )---one out of every five people in the world lives in China. The decline of the “work unit system or danwei” is another major change in the Society, recorded by DeWoskin. “The work unit system is in decline; most of the state owned sector is still organized into danwei, and every citizen has a file, but companies has given up their greatest measure of control, that over employees’ after-hour lives and general welfare.” (Page 78) Work unit or danwei was a truly socialist concept of organizing the work force into production units with out any individual profit motif. It included government offices, institutions such as hospitals and schools and both state owned and collective enterprises. The work unit members were permanent employees. Each work unit took care of the welfare of its members from housing to schools, clinics, shops and even post offices. The opening up and the entry of private enterprises including foreign Multinational corporations have declined the work unit system. More and more workers get layed off now in China, as pointed out by China watchers like Joel Andreas. “The massive conversion of public property into private transformed managers into property owners and other work-unit members into disenfranchised proletarians. Work units in which previously both managers and workers had enforceable claims suddenly became the exclusive possession of the managers.” (Changing Colors in China -- Joel Andreas –New Left Review 54, November/ December 2008). The decline of the work units may be one of the reasons for the increasing failure of the one- child policy .Because it was these work units, with their substantial influence on the lives of the individuals, that supervised the one-child policy. All these have their reflections on general attitudes towards sexuality in china. Pre martial and extra martial sex is a major social issue in China, according to DeWoskin. “In Shenzhen, the city Deng Xiaoping touted as a model for all developing Chinese cities, an ernaicun or “second wife village,” had blossomed. These neighborhoods, also called “concubine villages,” flourished in the suburbs of Guangzhou and Shanghai as well” (page 152) Business men kept their second wives here, distant enough from their real wives thus preventing ‘chaotic discoveries or encounters’. “Most of the married production and crew members (of the T V studio) brought girl friends out to our dinner and Karaoke nights. No married women brought boy friends, not because they don’t cheat, but because it wasn’t socially acceptable to flaunt male disanzhe publicly.” (Page 152). The new marriage registration principles passed in October 2003 simplified the processes of marriage and divorce. Certification from the work unit or resident committee is no more needed to get married or divorced. The pre martial physical, which was once a proof of the woman’s virginity, is not obligatory now. “A survey shanghai women applying for marriage certificate in 1996 found that nearly 70 % had already experienced intercourse. This behavior defies traditional injunctions against premarital intercourse that prevailed for “respectable” women as late as the 1980’s in urban China.” (Opening up: Youth, Sex, Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai --- James Farrer – page 232). Extra martial affairs are China’s top women’s issue today. Even Foreign Babes, tells the people to change their traditional attitudes towards sex. In foreign Babes there is a scene of the wedding night of the good girl Louisa with her Chinese Boy friend Tianliang. “She slinks into bed with her hair down, wearing an old lady’s padded silk nightgown, giggling and sighing. Tianliang tells her to be quiet.” (Page 214), because he doesn’t want his parents, sleeping in the next room, to hear it all. She tries not to make sound as she crawls across the bed. “But the old man Li shouts in from the next room, “don’t be so quiet! Do what ever you want.” Even the old man Li, the sternest representation of old China, can modernize when pressed by his beloved country’s modernization.” (Page 214) The impression that DeWoskin gets and gives is that, ‘Foreign Babes’, the soap opera itself was propaganda to prepare the people for modernization. China is a country with active censorship. But the Beijing leadership supported this soap opera to convey messages of modernization. “But the actual programming was directed by more powerful forces: Commercial advertising and public’s taste for the exotic (Western Girls, for example). Wu Jie’s Foreign Babes had to make both money and some kind of moral statement.” (Page 211). The general feeling the reader gets is that the soap opera is trying to endorse the foreign or western values, not hands down, but critically. The technique is “tempt and teach.” A portion of the soap opera had connected the western values with AIDS .The scene almost tells the audience that AIDS is an import from the west. When the two western actors, DeWoskin and Sophie, protested, the director agreed to cut the scene. “It was a small concession, really, since when we watched the show there was a scene mysteriously close to the one they had promised to cut.” (Page149). Just that the two protesting actors were not there in the scene! At the same time, the new western/ market values are creating other problems like the problem of obesity in China. With the spreading of the fast food habit among urban Chinese, the problem of obesity is as acute there as in the United States. The fast food sales account for two-fifths of the total sales of food and beverages in China. Major players in the industry include American brands McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut along with China based Malan Noodle. Growing prosperity is another factor leading to this problem “ Actually people were smoking and overeating because they could afford it…….As China beefed up, its bill boards and magazines sported razor-thin models of beauty, diet products, herbal remedies, and fat-reduction farms spread across the country.” (Page 147) The interesting point is that along with this fast changing China, there co-exits an old traditional China. “There was tension in Beijing over reconstruction of old neighborhoods and building into modern apartment complexes. The ancient neighborhoods housed beautiful traditional siheyuan, which were expensive to preserve and renovate and for most part had no running water, bathroom or heat” (page 72). The Chinese are still conservative about numbers. The writer lived in an apartment in building number 4 at Fangzhuang. The rent for apartment in this particular building was lower than those in the adjacent buildings, because “si, four, is a homonym for another si which means death. One and four together suggest imminent or impending death, which is why no Chinese building has a fourteenth floor.” (Page 86) It was internet and high tech communication systems that broke down the iron wall around China. By the latter half of twentieth century, the new communication systems made it impossible for any country or culture to get isolated as an island. Thus the cyber culture age has forced China too to modernize and liberalize. This has lead to the disappearance of what the Chinese called the “Iron Rice Bowl”, or the system of work-units that guaranteed permanent jobs, income, medical care, housing, and kindergarten for the children and even a life after retirement. This has changed the old class structure, and has lead to uneven economic development in China. The few urban rich have become more powerful. And there is unrest in the rural areas. But one cannot write off China. China has not embraced capitalism outright. What they are experimenting with is quasi- Maoist capitalism. A powerful Marxist – Leninist party, with very vast popular base, is in control of the country. The People’s Liberation army is not only an armed wing, but a political wing too, of the state. Because of all these factors the Chinese experiment is unique, and the result of which is unpredictable. As DeWoskin’s friend Anna jokes “Chinese are good at importing foreign things and adapting them to Chinese conditions.” (Page 174) Though there are scholars, even leftist ones, who take pessimistic view of the Chinese scenario, Scholars of political economy and sociology, like Giovanni Arrighi of John Hopkins University, forecasts a brighter future for china. In his much discussed book “ Adam Smith in Beijing” Arrighi, argues that epoch of US hegemony is ending , and is going to be followed by an era of East Asian dominance with China at its centre. Rachel Dewoskin echoes this optimism when she says: “While, we westerners have come and gone, China has changed at its own pace, gradually at times, quickly at others, with in plan at times, but most often outside it. What may be more predictable is how china changes us.” (Page 142) ======================================= Sources used: 1) DeWoskin Rachel – Foreign Babes in Beijing: Behind the Scenes of a New China, W.W.Norton, and New York. 2) Washington Post.com January 23, 2007 3) Andreas Joel-- Changing Colors in China---- New Left Review 54, November/ December 2008 4) Farrer James ---- Opening up: Youth, Sex, Culture and Market Reform in Shanghai, The University of Chicago Press, May 2002. Reference: 1) Arrighi Giovanni--- Adam Smith in Beijing: lineages of the twenty- first century, (paper Back), Verso Books. Read More