For many visitors, China will never be more than its pollution, commerce-driven megacities, famous sites and filthy public latrines. Admittedly, China can be very inaccessible. Without language, without time, and without the willingness to debase a huge and unexpected array of beliefs, it can’t be much more. After all, how does one get past the years of constructed orientalism, mountains of cheap goods, and the frightening largesse of the statistics – especially when any single one of these factors is overwhelming?

There are few things that get under my skin more than the tired old stereotypes of the uncivilized Chinese who spit on every corner and snack on their pet dogs (or babies, as some claim). Yet, due to a personal conflict between my eastern and western halves, my father and mother, Asian life and Australian life, it is sometimes very hard for me to speak out against the seemingly endless barrage of ignorant prejudices about China and its people. Indeed, not to speak is the Asian way. And to my own discredit, I confess that I often reduce myself to entertaining certain people with cheap anecdotes about cultural mishaps and untoward differences.

Yet, the transformation my awareness underwent in China was something wondrous and magical. I was drawn in by the intimate flow of life in the streets – the fleeting moments hidden around every corner, the tiny marketplaces in back alleys, the movement in the hutongs, the chaotic jumble of bicycles and carts, the worlds within worlds, and the innate calmness of a people who give each other space, despite the crowds. But more importantly, I was seduced by the way China deconstructed and reconstructed me conceptually.

China is worlds apart from the west – the mindset is different, the approach to life is different, and European language concepts can not be applied. Words only cover parts of meanings, and new meanings take a long time to understand. But perhaps the most striking aspects of my China experience were the consequences of being so firmly outside the sphere and influence of Christianity – to be momentarily liberated from the intense individualism and egocentrism of nations harvested on the belief that each of us stand alone (to be judged before God).

Living inside an empire of communities which devalued the individual so entirely was challenging to say the least. On one hand, I couldn’t cease to believe in the rights and the power of the individual; yet, on the other hand, China brought me face to face with the negative offshoots of western individualism. As incredulous as it may seem, many of the “ills of the west” (depression, anxiety, and eating disorders) are not diagnosed, treated or authenticated in the same way in China. I now take the viewpoint that these ills only exist in personal belief, stemming from a negative egocentrism which is cradled by social validation.

So, there is nothing greater than taking the risk of being shaped and changed in an unimaginable way, and to have every idea one has ever been fool enough to believe in discredited. And that the strength of China is undeniable – a strength that lies not in its government, but in the millions of people who believe more in the magnitude and power of this nation than in themselves.

This photo book is a visual memoir of the three years we spent in China. Our photos are not the most stereotypical shots you will find of China, and we hope that amongst the pages you find something of interest that gives you a new insight into Chinese life.

Esta es una memoria gráfica para que nunca olvides que viajar es vivir, para que recuerdes siempre el camino. Viajamos a través del tiempo, por nuestras vidas, navegando el río de la sangre, hasta el final de nuestros días.

.foolism - the new school of thought ...

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This is CHINA!

. Thousands upon thousands of tourists gathered to enjoy the last warm days of Autumn at the Great Wall!

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China's Rich Orphans

A bitter-sweet memory a former student shared with me: “I started boarding school at five. Each night an auntie would instruct us to clean our room before we slept. We would wait for her to leave, throw bucket-loads of water onto the floor, and then laughing, we would pretend to be little fish swimming away in the dirty water. We would then huddle together to keep warm and sleep, because none of us liked to be alone.”

Growing up in Australian suburbia, we all had the inking the Asian education ethic was a far cry from the lame aspirations of underachievement dogging the average Aussie. What this inkling didn’t even nearly give us, was the full picture of educational expectations in China. As it turns out, Chinese-Australians were pretty laid back compared to Chinese from China.

Schooling in China starts as early as two. By schooling, I do not mean day-care or finger-painting, nor do I mean an hour-and-a-half in a sandpit with other toddlers, and an adoring parent waving at you lovingly from outside the kindy gate. Entrance for two year olds into China’s most prestigious pre-schools requires a hefty round of testing and the submission of a resume listing talents and achievements. These ‘achievements’ do not include obvious toddler triumphs, such as being potty-trained or weaned from a mother’s tit, but glorious musical, linguistic and athletic feats.

For many toddlers, acceptance into these prestigious schools also marks the start of boarding school. At boarding school, these small children are expected to shower, feed and dress themselves, attend full days of schooling, and show their filial gratitude by achieving highly. Many a sympathetic teacher has been known to complete the tasks themselves, before drilling the toddlers with the question and answer: “Who did this?” – “I did this!” “Who did this?” – “I did this!”

For many, being a good parent in China means providing the most expensive and prestigious education available, and pressuring your child to over-achieve. As judgemental as it may sound, I think it is wrong, senseless, and detrimental to any child’s wellbeing. Children should be with their parents. There are thousands of ways to bring up healthy, happy and intelligent children, and this is not one of them.
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Home or Away

After ten raging years of hostel-hopping and share-housing, the idea of “home” has become no more than the few familiar trinkets I drag around with me, and the déjà vu of nine repeated stays in buildings like Hong Kong’s Chungking Mansions. My post-modern nomadic lifestyle has found me renting in excess of fifteen different share-houses across six countries, traversing the hostels of another twenty, and spending long extended months on grimy couches.

In fact, it had been so long without central air-conditioning, functional household appliances, five cars for a family of five, a private patch of grass, and an unobtrusive place to hang my washing, even the idea of a month with my parents, in a remote corner of Australian suburbia had me on edge. Of course my edginess could always be offset by moments of rosy nostalgia for the obvious benefits – no roaches, no voyeuristic landlords, no construction sites, and no acid rain … just sunny arvos filled with warbling magpies and puffy clouds.

The reality of these wonderful arvos though, is they give you a lot of time to obsess about things like allergies to gluten, and which sacred Indian cow gave you tapeworm. And as these worries subside the mind tends to fill with delightful childhood memories like playing lesbian Perfect Match with Barbie (because Ken was ever-absent), or writing long heart-wrenching Dear Diary entries delineating the complexities of being eleven, which would later be used as performance pieces by my brother to entertain other small, snotty children.

After a decade outside the shelter of the family, I can now affirm not having a Ken doll and being mocked by a group of eight year olds are fairly minor household challenges. Living jacked between two major inner-city freeways, with a nutcase who leaves chocolate bunny-face croissants outside your room by day, and writes disparaging classifieds in your name by night is much more testing. As is room-sharing with a girl who has a penchant for Celine Dion ballads (in Italian), and who wants you to make decisions based on her mother’s communication with a dead saint.

My return to the familial home though has been most marked by the reminder that cleaning doesn’t have to be democratic. There actually isn’t a need for individual dirty-dish stacking stations, and it is only a dull egalitarianism that gives everyone an equal right not to scrub the toilet. My parents’ extreme cleanliness has also successfully expelled all of life’s murky bits and hidden skeletons. There are no algae infested pools with feral ducks, no family heirlooms inherited from the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, and no horror film obsessed Alzheimer’s patients locked up in back studies.

Despite pushing on thirty and feeling the world has changed me, I’m discovering that under my parent’s roof, I inevitably suffer from a compulsive, reactionary eating disorder, which I like to blame on everyone else’s weird carb-free, lactose-free, organic diets. The eating also dampens the effects of my mother’s regret-filled diatribes about bringing up strong-willed, independent children. Because now, instead of being settled into a life in suburbia (around the corner from her), and willingly popping out her third grandchild, I only crave the return to my anonymous and clandestine existence in the heart of China.
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The Shallow Roots

"The starting point of all critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and in 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Therefore, it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory."   - Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks

Several years ago I began to travel. The will to uncover the parts of myself that I could not yet see, and the parts of myself that I did not know, has always been my most basic driving force. A force that manifests as the will to compile (within my consciousness) something similar to Gramsci's 'inventory.' This intent for knowledge and clarity has taken me back to numerous cross-overs in both the Occident and the Orient.

I have wandered from continent to continent, leaving my mind open to the consequences of irreversible change. As much joy as there has been, there has been disappointment. In China, I have been struck by an immense sadness, because there is a nothingness about wandering the streets of a civilization that has severed its ancient roots, and negated thousands of years of thought. The tree that grows here now has shallow roots that cling to the empty dream of modelling and then transcending its "western" other (the Olympics were this kind of display).

So I ask the question, how are those of us with historical roots in both Orient and Occident supposed to see clearly and know ourselves, when half of our civilizations are in demise, and our histories have been overwritten? Is it natural to accept that as our civilizations have been conquered, parts of ourselves have also been conquered? And how do we reconcile this defeat and submission, when the Occident has always rejected us, because of our embodiment or traces of the conquered?

Too easily the noveau-Occidentals jump up to speak for all, in their declarations of: race doesn't exist, colour doesn't exist, we are all the same, we constructed it all ... But who is this "we?" For centuries this "we" has been the greatest conquerer of all; the great construct to obliterate diversity. It has been this "we," with its colonial conquests, wars and genocides, that has left deep scars in the psyches of many peoples around the world, not just those in the Orient.

For every "Oriental other" that constructs him/herself in the image of the Occident, one more tiny thread is cut. The underwriting is clear: "It is true what you say, we are all the same (now). We are the same, because I have ceased to exist, my culture does not exist, and together we have obliterated my history, and filed it into a department of your history. My skin may be a different colour, but I am no longer recognizable as your "other" (bar a few shadows in my eyes), because I am no longer what I was. I am as close to being you, and your own brother. Yes, we are the same, because I do not remember, and there is no way for me to know."
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Behind Yuyuan, Shanghai

. trailing the back alleys of shanghai ...

. comtemplating the contradictions of yet another china ...

.  another china still full of its exhausted dreamers ...

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A Little Bit of Summer in the Jing!

. Outside the "Bird's Nest" during the Paralympics ...

On Harmony and Human Rights

In 1968 the United Nations General Assembly approved two conventions on Human Rights that expanded upon the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: the International Convenant on Political and Civil Rights, and the International Convenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. 

It comes as no surprise that China did not ratify the Convenant on Political and Civil Rights, but for some, it may come as suprise that the world's grand and booming orator on human rights, the United States, did not ratify the Convenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. China however, in line with the majority of developing nations, did ratify this second Convenant. Regardless of my personal opinion, I think it is perfectly logical that a nation as large as China, with China's history, insists that the right to develop and the right to subsist be prioritized over individual rights.

In regards to these two convenants, we can jusifiably conclude that the boxing rounds between these two powerhouses about human rights do not actually include any agreement about the nature of human rights. The US accuses China of being an authoritarian state impinging on people's civil and political rights, and China, in turn, accuses the US of being a 'violent, crime-ridden society' that 'does not guarantee the personal safety' of its citizens. 

Articulating the Chinese understanding of human rights, also sheds light on the logic of a billion Chinese standing up to say: "China brought human rights and freedom to Tibet, a feudal nation wallowing in poverty and slavery." What remains doubtful of course, even within China's own mindset of human rights, is just how China has brought 'cultural rights' to the Tibetan state.

All this aside, I can't help but notice that despite China's aggressive claims to the protection and advancement of human rights, a soft underbelly of uncertainty belies the public consciousness. I dug a knife into this underbelly earlier this week, when I messaged my editor, proposing the inclusion of a unit on human rights in a series of high school textbooks that I'm writing. Her response was all too clear: "Harmony, and One World, One Dream. Thanks." 

 

Reference: Ching, Frank, China: The Truth about its Human Rights Record, Random House, Great Britain, 2008.

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