The way people communicated in the old days

The bottom floor of my apartment buildings contains three different photocopy shops—each about 3 feet wide and 10 feet deep and employing three or four people from seven in the morning until ten or eleven at night. During the warmer months I often see a young child and a grandmother. Often, when I go downstairs, the staff are glued to their computer screens: watching Korean Soap operas, Chinese MTV, or American movies over the internet. They close the windows so I can see and print my documents and the screen displays something very familiar. The old Microsoft background of a green hill with the icons for word, explorer, etc—all arranged along the left-hand side. A familiar dialog pops up on the right-hand side when I insert my USB port. Everything looks exactly the same: except that the words under the icons and the dialog box are all in Chinese.

I walk into a bank—there are glass doors, potted plants, people waiting in line behind those self-connecting ribbon dividers, tellers behind plate glass and consultants behind large wooden desks with flat-screen computer. The furniture and even the clothes are just like in the United States—or just like Guatemala. Only the writing on the forms and the people inside the clothes are different.

Outside the bank there are some differences. The traffic lights are arranged sideways and count down how much green or red time is left. The largest of the boulevards have a slightly different arrangement than in America and the bus stops are more likely to have cover for the rain. But the shapes of cars, of buses, all look exactly the same. There are Chinese chain stores with round wooden stools instead of McDonalds style booths—but they have similar illuminated menus, cash registers, and offer food on brown rectangular plastic trays.

In some restaurants, things are different. I notice that in many upscale places the wait staff wear older, traditional outfits, as do some of the chefs. Meanwhile, the people supervising them are wearing Western style suits. This is an interesting metaphor for the current stage of development, in which it seems the Chinese who have adopted Western forms, are in charge of the Chinese who have retained their traditions. Western practices and rituals are dominant for the moment, even though it is Chinese people who perform them.

Sometimes, I watch television. The commercials for Laundry detergent, or alcohol all utilize a familiar vocabulary. A four wheel drive vehicle gets stuck in the mud and splatters all o a young girl's white clothes. A giant javelin splits open an skyscraper so that bored office workers can peer down at a giant dance party twenty floors below. They all feature Chinese faces, advertise products which will enlarge the bank accounts of Chinese capitalists, and were presumably designed in Chinese ad agencies, but the pacing and style all follow conventions which, like the Microsoft start-up screen—are familiar wherever Cathode ray tubes are found. During the age of typewriters, there was a point when the party thought about having the adopt an alphabetic system to write the Chinese language—severing a link more than three thousand years of tradition. Instead many aspects of the modern Western communication system: Soap-operas, commercials, web-pages, phone-texting have been voluntarily adopted, but the traditional writing system has been retained: in Karaoke bars, it appears on TV screens so people can sing along with pop songs—something no one would have imagined thirty years ago.

Last year one of my tasks was to judge a contest based on the phrase: “Good Good Study, Day Day up.” It's an interesting example of Chinglish—the vocabulary is English, but their arrangement follows the rules of Chinese grammar, when repeating a word: person person for everyone—is a way of emphasizing its universality. The types of mistakes my students make in English, or even when they write things which are grammatically correct, but contain unfamiliar juxtapostions, they reveal the assumptions of Chinese grammar and thought patterns.

As I look at the banks, and the streets, and the computer screens, it occurs to me that in Urbanized China too, you see the proliferation of a worldwide cultural vocabulary present wherever skyscrapers, freeways, and men in suits are found. But, like Chinglish, the arrangement of this cultural vocabulary is not identical to the west.

Of course, a generation ago, Chinese people did not practice capitalism or wear Western-style suits. They wore Mao-style jackets without lapels. In between the commercials you sometimes catch glimpses of that. Some shows on TV are modern drama or game shows, or cartoons with fuzzy animals. I even saw what appeared to be a Chinese version of Buffy the Vampire slayer—featuring Chinese actors chasing Chinese vampires through the streets of Shanghai. But some of the shows are historical dramas, featuring people in ornately embroidered ancient dress and hairstyles interacting around ancient courtyards. It occurs to me that these may be the equivalent of the old Cowboys and Indians serials—an attempt to ensure that the lessons of a time when people used their hands to fight and sew and carve wood will not be forgotten in an age when so much of our economic and military life is under the dominion of machines and people who use their fingers mostly to press buttons.

Thee is a mall in Foshan where I go to practice archery. On the third floor of a galleria featuring clothes and makeup, I found a place sort of like a batting cage or a bowling alley. In the middle is a climbing wall, where people can practice rock climbing. Elsewhere in the mall I see hiking gear, so people can head for the mountains carrying backpacks and supplies. I suspect kayaks and surfboards are not far behind. Although these might be seen as European cultural domination, like the banks and the restaurants, there is something else at work too. What people do to earn a living while wearing suits and sitting in front of computer screens imitates the nineteenth European cultural model—though the businesses sell different things from from whale oil and opium. But kayaks and surfboards use the designs of native Americans, though they were constructed of different materials. Even the modern sport of archery owes much to native Americans, and of course has long roots in China and Korea. Here in China people put on suits to play games designed in Europe, but when they take off the suits, they may play games invented somewhere else.

There was a time when people believed that developing our cultural commonalities would create a War-free world, one in which there was no need for soldiers. Or at least, only blue-helmeted UN troops acting as police forces. Here in Mainland China, lots of college kids sing pop songs from Taiwanese idols--you can recognize them easily at Karaoke bars because the characters people sing along with are the older style. But their embrace of Taiwanese pop culture doesn't seem to have lessened their willingness to accept their government's position that Taiwan is part of China. Or their acceptance that military force might be necessary if Taipei gets too far out of line. The notion that national boundaries should dissolve is implicitly a continuation of the Pax Romana, the notion that a single council can decide what is legitimate for the entire known world. And thanks to the dream of Woodrow Wilson, former governor of the state of New Jersey, that primacy passed from the Senate in the Imperial city of Rome to the UN in the Imperial city of New York. The Mediterranean world provides a different model among the Greek city-states, however. Even when there was cultural commonality: they spoke the same language, watched the same plays, and read the same authors--they still recognized that princes and soldiers would occasionally need to kill each other to work out their differences. Thebes, Athens, Corinth, and Sparta all represented fundamentally different ideas about how human societies should develop, and being true to those multicultural ideas, meant that they occasionally chose war rather than submit to Roman policing.