Monday, January 20, 2014

The Thickness of Skin




Academic jazz, this morning.  Mr. Bunky Green, another alto player and another Charles Mingus big band alumnae who is playing an appropriately Dustybrine number this morning “East & West” from the 1979 release “Places We’ve Never Been.”  I say “academic” because he developed a career at this time as a leading jazz educator at the University of Chicago and later at the University of North Florida, Jacksonville.  The Wiki page on the gentleman is a bit paltry and doesn’t do much to explain his unique first name.  If he had it since his early days, one can only imagine he developed some thick skin as to what anyone else thought of it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunky_Green

Sensitivities to perceived affronts are a natural defense mechanism.  This person doesn’t respect our tribe and is therefore a threat.  I assume we’re hot wired to identify with a sense of collective identity and ascribe value to it as something that we somehow, may want to defend.  In the “old world” ethnic and national identities are often fused.  My “new world” identity in the New York area involved many cross cutting cleavages: ethnicity, class, race, religion, gender.  Nationality only becomes pressing when you head over seas. 



What would I be “thinned skinned” about?  In the north east of the U.S. ethnicity was very important and it was clear to me growing up who was Italian and who was a “WASP.”  Irish assimilation had been so thorough and early that it was almost absurd to imagine a genuine slight that would sting against my Irish American identity.  Traveling in England, later, I could sense a raw prejudice, and note my reaction to it.  Anti Catholic bias was perhaps the same.  I didn’t consider myself one of the faithful and the identity was broadly assimilated.  Occasionally you’d hear a slight by someone “outside” and I’d be surprised to find myself a bit defensive, even though technically I wasn’t supposed to care. 

The first time I went overseas I went to the U.K. and to Ireland.  This was, not surprisingly the first time I could consider my nationality objectively.  I had, at the time a rather thoroughgoing critique of my country and its role in the world and assumed a bond with other critical thinkers globally as to the limits and shortcomings of the United States.  This, from my manuscript “The Seven Deadly Starbucks” (7DS) on an early recollection of international thinned skin:

I can recall going to the U. K. as a twenty one year old. Hatred of Ronald Reagan was so thorough and complete for me as if it were a mental constant. Then a protest wall, a scathing caricature of Reagan surrounded by anti American slogans, angry faces, yelling. Reagan and I fused suddenly into countrymen collaborators staring down an angry mob of otherness. Of course I could raise my fist and shout, “yeah, Americans hate him too.” and actually mean it, but my mind immediately and momentarily went instead, to guilt and self-protection. This, before I could worry about being cool or deciding what I felt.

Those callouses are rather well worn on my skin now, having lived half my adult life overseas.  But frankly Americans, and certainly white, suburban, middle class American males of Irish Catholic ancestry have a buffer of predominant imagined normalcy.  I can and do, of course, ponder and acknowledge the complexity gender roles, race roles, and national roles.  Though I think, for better or worse, I can count on comparatively thick skin when someone casts all men as bad, or all whites as bad, or all Americans as bad, etc.  It doesn’t take a gymnast’s prowess to hear a slight against any of those groups, understand that it is not necessarily a slight against me personally.

All this to say that in China, Chinese people, who are of Han Chinese descent and are Chinese nationals, seem to reckon with slights against the nation differently.  To stereotype, people seem thin-skinned.  There is 岌岌可危[1] to be on guard against.  Is that really so? 

Americans have enjoyed the illusory, temporal privilege of arbitrating a certain sort of world-order for the last seventy years or so, with the world’s largest economy and predominant military, to buttress their notions of self.  Rhetorically there is a neutral, meritocratic platform that welcomes anyone to “become” American, separating tribal, ethnic identity from a national identity.  And America has created uniquely modern and potent soft power that has enormous attraction to people who may not care at all or in fact be repulsed by the American dollar or the country’s military power projection. 

All this colors the way Americans confront “anti-Americanism” overseas.  Some pride and some disdain are always there in equal measure.  Bring it on.  It’s a topic that, I am generally willing to explore with any but the most stentorian or bigoted person.  In China, intelligent people meanwhile, are often very sensitive about hearing critiques of China their nation (which for 90+% of the population is also their tribal ethnicity. )

With some distance, the dynastic history, in which Han civilization is civilization, despite the regular indignities of conquest by neighboring Khitian, Liao, Mongol or Qing.   Nothing known (with the exception of Indian Buddhism) could even remotely compete with the manifest glory of Han civilization.  Then, maritime Europe presses its way in, the industrialized world forces China’s subjugation on unequal terms and China must endure one hundred and fifty years of humiliation and chaos, until today, when it is finally, undeniably rising.  For a non-Chinese, or a Chinese who has lived overseas, to return and point out challenges, inconsistencies, let alone venal governance, wanting social graces, is the exasperating, annoying, and unwanted noise of someone who “doesn’t understand.” 



The Times blog which they call Sinosphere often has good material.  Yesterday a young Chinese reporter named Hellen Gao had an excellent post entitled: “Back in China, Watching My Words.”  http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/back-in-china-watching-ones-words/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=World&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body  She describes a conversation with her grandmother who was once a reporter herself.  Explaining to her grandmother what her hopes are as a reporter, her grandmother chides her that she is naïve.  She is made to feel unqualified to comment on the nation she grew up in.  Later her grandmother is caustic with her because she even hinted that foreigners would be interested or could comprehend, her story.

I wrote a few days back about the pollution, again.  I get as annoyed as any Chinese person, by all the negativity.  If it’s so bad, leave.  And it’s not “so” bad.  It’s a remarkable privilege to be here at this epicenter of civilizational resurgence.  There are wondrous things and annoying things, as there are anywhere and if the nation is to strengthen and improve it needs to be able to absorb respectful critique and engage intelligently.   Indignity was no place to have a nuanced discussion from.  One fears that ‘resurgence’ will not be so either.

American grandparent fears would be different.  Foreigners trying to understand America: what’s to worry about that?  They get it wrong, they get it right, who cares?  America, like China is narcissistic enough to assume that everyone would want to know about who we are.  Freed from any tribal sensitivities, the nation as merely a modern social political experiment with an albeit pockmarked but generally sturdy track record, examination isn’t threatening and misperception is likely to seen as humorous, more than anything else.  But here in China, where for most people the tribe and the country are one and the track record is only beginning to stabilize, critique, even well meaning or innocent critique and examination from outside, is still very threatening.

All of this will be further disturbed soon, if the following news report is correct and China’s economy finally overtakes the U.S. in size, far sooner than people had expected. On the one hand, its just data point.  But clearly it is also an auger. It will force a different critique in and of America that the country hasn’t specifically experienced yet.  Then again, it might all just be bunk that rhymes with junk, and never come to pass.  But I doubt it.








[1] jíjíkěwēi:  imminent danger (idiom); approaching a crisis

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