==+==+==+== C h i n e s e C o m m u n i t y F o r u m ==+==+==+=== Sunday, March 6, 1994 (Issue No. 9410, Weekend Edition) +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= Chinese Community Forum (CCF) is a journal published on China-Net. CCF is dedicated to the discussion on the issues related to the Chinese community. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of the Editorial Board of CCF. Contributions to the discussions and suggestions of new topics are very much appreciated. +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= # of Table of Contents Author | Lines ============================================================================ The East and The West a. "Multi-Culturism," Exotic Food and Ethnographic Spectacle...................................Y. Y. Xu 266 ===========***==========***==========**==========***==========***=========== From The Editor ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chinese students and scholars in the foreign land, especially those of us in the US, have all experienced various so-called international festivals organized by the authorities of the universities. The intent of these activities is to appreciate the cultural diversity, to enhance the understanding between people from different cultures and to overcome racial and ethnic barriers. Have those activities really achieved this goals? A Chinese student at Case Western Reserve University expresses her feelings and perceptions of one such event. We carry her article here in this special Weekend Edition as a continuation of our discussion on the cultural differences between the East and the West. ===========***==========***==========**==========***==========***=========== a. "Multi-Culturism," Exotic Food and Ethnographic Spectacle...................................Y. Y. Xu 266 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Last year the August issue of CWRU magazine did me the honor of enclosing three color photos of my husband and I in the midst of preparing Chinese dishes for the annual International Dinner in April. The timing for the coverage was important; presumably it helped to make a point about the ethnic diversity on campus as a sales pitch to attract more freshmen. The cover shows two young Indonesian students dressed in the silky costume of their "indigenous" culture with matching headwear and ornaments, a striking couple of prince and princess. Among the other photos included was one that showed the two directors of International Student Service loaded and surrounded by colorful artifacts from all over the world -- one is tempted to see these as the trophies they carried home from far away lands. The title of the article chronicling the whole event in detail, where my name was mentioned several times, was "Global Gastronomics." In the Fall semester cocktail party in my department, my fellow graduate students and my professors failed not to remind me of my newly acquired fame. They let me know that I was finally being "distinguished" and "recognized," to my infinite discomfort. Indeed rather than flattered, I was inexplicably troubled by the amount of attention I was receiving, which made me feel literally like a thief or a swindler. What I found most embarrassing was the congratulatory note in their voice. I asked myself with an ironic grin: "Am I to be thus identified with Chinese food? Am I to earn my fame in the academic community here by way of showing off my amateurish culinary skills?" Not that I am not proud of the long tradition and achievement of Chinese cuisine, but this is besides the point, not to mention the fact that food is not all there is to feed the eyes and the stomach in China. Then I recalled the fact that initially we, the Chinese students, did not even make it to the list of those to be interviewed, as selected by the Office of International Student Service, although we are the largest group of foreign students on campus. The reporter commissioned by the magazine sought us out because she had a personal affection for China. Food and drink in abundance flowed from the tables in the elegant ballroom where the banquet is held every year, food cooked by students who "volunteered" to do so in their spare time; they were reimbursed for the grocery they purchased but not their time and labor, while tickets were on sale to the general public for $15 a piece. After dinner foreign students again "volunteered" to stage a "talent show" to entertain the guests with folk songs, dances, or mini-dramas from their native country. The evening was quite an extravaganza, with exotic food, outlandish costume and entertainment all in one, and to many in Cleveland it was in a way the quintessence of the cosmopolitan culture that she can boast of. One was supposed to be moved by it and to embrace it as a vision of world peace and a positive sign of the possibility of eliminating national and racial barriers. How did the audience react to the event when it culminated and blossomed forth after weeks of preparation? Well, they could tell you that they "L-l-l-l-oved it." At the end everyone exclaimed: "What a wonderful evening, what a success!" But was it? That is the question. Did the audience feel that they left with a morsel of Chinese culture wrapped up in their napkin to be stowed away somewhere in their memory? Being both a participant and an audience, I felt and still feel at best ambivalent toward the whole thing. The guests were there waiting to be entertained. And of course one couldn't expect them to grant the show on the stage the same prestige as those in Carnegie Hall. Mumbles and whispers among them almost drowned out the songs of the students who were trying laboriously to "demonstrate" their culture, that is, that part of their culture that they deemed appropriate for the audience's taste and worthy of their attention. I fail to see what impact this kind of event would make toward the improvement of the Americans' understanding of the complexity of other cultures. In fact this kind of selective repertoire is nothing less than a cannibalizing of other cultures -- fragments of foreign cultures were fed to the audience in a piecemeal fashion, torn out of their context, exactly like each dish served isolated from the ritual feast of which it was supposed to be an integral part, where it had no meaning except in its position in the whole. The audience saw the texture, the pattern, the color, the ingredients all in abstraction. They did smell the pungent aroma of a Malay dish and hear the bell ringing from an ancient Java Temple, but they missed what was beneath and behind the dish, the music or the dance, i.e. the custom, the ritual significance of each dish or each gesture in the elaborate dance, the history of the country it came from, including often the shameful part the white men had played toward its cultural decline. Can one really understand, for instance, the peculiar customs in China's Szechuan Province, the rich, hilarious humor embedded in the vernacular dialect and the temperament of the local inhabitants there by inhaling a wisp of the hot and spicy "Ma Po Toufu"? Do Americans know whether "Ma Po" is a real person or legendary character? Or for that matter, do they know that "Ma Po" refers to a person in the first place? Nor is this approach to foreign cultures anything new. Ample examples can be found in the way CNN focuses on some unusual aspects of foreign countries for the entertainment of the whole world, including the countries being videotaped, the belly dancing in Egypt or the gypsy belly-dancing beauty queen contest in Romania for instance. Besides, the two-hour so-called "talent show" was no worse than a cheapie tourist package put together by a clumsy salesman who tries to "wrap it all up for you" in a week cultures as diverse as that from the Middle East (even such a geographical designation betrays the insidious Eurocentrism at the root of Western ethnography), from Southeast Asia, from Latin America or from the Balkans. The showcase model, so effective a marketing strategy, pervades the way Americans learn about the rest of the world. Underlying it all is the belief that you can grasp the whole by sampling a part of it, not taking into account the fact that each part that constitutes the whole is not replaceable or not interchangeable. Moreover the audience came with the expectation of a connoisseur, hoping to get a bit of something, in this case, exotic culture, to eat or to go and then go on with their way of life. They did not expect to disturb themselves too much about the existence or presence of the "others." It is amazing to see how they always carry on such arrogance with perfect ease so that it almost disguises their ignorance. At most they got to the fringe of the "other's" village and that was as far as their curiosity would take them. Thus our guests were contented to remain the spoiled tourists who marvelled at everything they saw and yet recognized or comprehended nothing. They liked being carried along with the boisterous tourist/shopping spree that reassured them the closeness of home and the familiar, but they made no attempt to establish any affinity with the place and the people they encountered. The tourists who were wary of and felt threatened by the rampant spread of prostitution in Thailand failed to "see" the profound religious impulse on the face of the Thai natives, or the worshipful gesture they made at every buddhist statue they passed by on the street. I was appalled when once a well-to-do, well-meaning woman who worked as a pharmacist said to me, for lack of anything else to say about China, that the Asian Plaza downtown was an embodiment of Chinese culture. "God bless you!" I groaned inwardly. She said she had Philippino blood from her grandmother and she had adopted two orphan girls from Thailand, so she considered herself having enough of international background to make observations about multi-culturism. The "Plaza" she referred to consist of a Chinese food store, a Chinese restaurant owned by some people from Hong Kong, and a souvenir shop crammed with vases, buddhist statuettes, ink, wood-carved sandalwood fans and "Qi Pao," crudely tailored silk gowns worn by Chinese women before the 50s. In occasions like the "international dinner" Chinese students are often embarrassed when it comes to attire -- we don't have our unique "habit" any more, unless we plagiarize from other ethnic minorities in China and claim theirs to be our own. On the other hand, students from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Palestine, etc., who are "at home" with T-shirts jeans and sneakers, are invited to step outside of their usual self to behold their own ethnicity as embodied in their costumes, as if they have to be reminded by the American audience to retain, not to forsake, their "true" identity. Thus they are encouraged to turn themselves into a spectacle and a voyeur of that spectacle at the same time. Perhaps it is too much to ask of the audience, who only expect to be nicely entertained, to wallow in the pleasant smell, sight, and sound of exotic cultures (after all it is their right to be "indolent," if that is what we choose to call them), to try to reach any in-depth understanding of a foreign culture and people. Eventually I lost my faith in this kind of ethnographic project. Like the boy at the end of James Joyce's story "Araby" I felt the same disappointment that damped my soul. As a result, I felt the gulf between the West and the East had visibly widened rather than dwindled. One became more aware of the cultural differences and the difficulty of communication, and at the same time less attuned to the prospect of "universal goodwill and harmony," much as it might be desired. As a vision of the "global village" so much talked about lately, I found it frankly quite distasteful; it left one feeling nonplus; one simply couldn't warm toward it. One can't even hail it as a haphazard but nonetheless splendid bazaar, saturated with light and color though it was. The effort was there, but what was lacking was sincerity and commitment to genuine exchange. I imagine that versions of our "International Dinner" is being duplicated in different campuses throughout the United States. Should we resist it? Should we opt for non-involvement, non-cooperation? It is time that we question such an established tradition, especially at whose pain and whose cost it is maintained. It is important to examine what preconceptions or presuppositions our culture prepare us in term of what to expect of the "others." Is it then all a matter of perception? Is that all it boils down too, as one of the hosts for the "Crossfire" program on the White Water Gate investigation suggested, who confidently promised to unravel fact from fiction for the audience? Can we help being ethnocentric? Is it an inherent human failure? Ethnocentrism is certainly not the monopoly of the West, nor are the problematics of ethnographic spectatorship and connoisseurship limited to the encounter between the West and East. To some extent they are symptomatic too of the way we treat the "ethnic minorities" in our own country. The unabashed arrogance adopted by one culture toward an alien culture is not a uniquely European or American product; perhaps we the Han are liable to the same charge if we examine the way our Han culture perceives, represents or exploits the exotic elements in the cultures of other ethnic groups, our condescending effort to "preserve" their tradition, their customs and their craftsmanship, their language, ... our sponsorship of "ethnic" culture institutes, museums, dancing troupes, etc.. Folklore, literature, folk dance, folk music have been relegated to the apolitical, timeless realm of arts or aesthetics; any political ramifications they might have (resistance, subversiveness, etc.) were purged in the name of "national unity." At the same time we learned that the pursuits of love, happiness and beauty were the recurring themes in most of the folk songs -- that was how universal human sentiments were. Then they were crystallized and appropriated to be part of our much cherished "national cultural heritage." An obvious example is what happened during the "cultural revolution:" melodious Tibetan, Uygurian, Mongolian folk songs were conveniently adopted (or one can say plagiarized) for propagandistic purposes, with the old lyrics discarded, substituted with lyrics that glorified and eulogized Chairman Mao. Thus ironically, they were made relevant to the there and now only by our replacing their hero or savior with Chairman Mao. What was de-emphasized in the effort of preservation and the process of transformation was their possible resistance to the territorial, economic and cultural hegemony, as well as all the subtle forms of coercion of the Han people. Don't get me wrong: I am not an agnostic, nor do I advocate cultural mysticism. All my grumbles and fault-findings may well be a reflection of my own obsession with authenticity, with pure, uncontaminated origin, with a timeless essence, and my refusal to be reconciled to the fact that no culture is changeless, that culture is constantly transforming, negating or renewing itself, that culture itself is a flux or vortex or transformation, never evolving around a fixed center or core. In the end it is a form of narcissism: we are pursuing our own image of perfection, demanding the world to fit our image of it, not the other way around. However I am not inclined to think that it is a matter of personal sentiment; on the contrary I believe that my reaction will find resonance in the community of Chinese students here. Be that as it may, I have resolved that if I can help it I am not going to "volunteer" to participate in this tradition this year. It is not biting the hand that feeds me, but a personal protest against ethnographic exploitation. There comes a point where one has to say "enough is enough." I refuse to subject myself to the spectatorship of some indifferent "connoisseurs," indifferent both in their attitude and in their taste; their capacity for appreciation of other cultures is simple defective. Is it our responsibility to enlighten Americans about our culture which is so different from theirs, to force the existence of other cultures to their conscious attention? I guess the responsibility is mutual. We have to explore a more viable form of explaining ourselves and our culture I doubt not the sincerity of the students who rehearsed many times a folk dance or a dramatic demonstration of a cherished national legend and who labored to show their culture at its best. But when the curiosity and response are absent on the part of the audience, no rapport is possible -- the show is doomed to fall flat or dead even before it is staged. However it has not always been doomed to fail. Over the years that I have been participant-witness of such event, one of the programs stood out with extraordinary vividness in my mind. I remember a Malaysian melodrama of a romantic tale about courage and fidelity that ended with the hero holding his beloved dead as stone in his arms, killed by accidentally by his arrow aimed at his rival. Then, from the sound track boomed the wistful song of Bryan Adams, "Everything I do I do it for you," an all-time favorite for many sentimental souls. It was so unexpected, so incongruous and yet so brilliantly contrived that it just took the audience by surprise. It was an absolute "toute de force," with such a touch of genius, and such an artless, uncanny sense of humor and irony. It endowed the song a much larger significance than the trite theme of romantic love. If we choose to see it in a positive light, it was a remarkable "moment" that really produced a rupture between the West and East, between the ancient and the modern. I have never seen the like of it before or since. However, one can also say that the juxtaposition stripped the song of its romantic trope and reveal the "deep structure" and theme of dominance and gender politics: the application of this popular love song at the end of the Malaysian drama made the audience aware of the fact that it was not exactly a dialogue between two lovers, but a monologue in which the at once humble and eloquent male subject addresses a silent female object. By extension, it implicates the failed dialogue between the West and the East, between the aggressive, masculine West and the passive, silent, often feminized East; it this case, the West's "altruistic" declaration "everything I do I do it for you" is after all not so innocent, but spurred by all sort of profit motivations. 02/21/94 in Cleveland +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=++ + Executive Editor: Changqing Yang Executive Moderator: Huang Tang + + Editor-in Chief: Ning Luo + +--------------------------------------------------------------------------+ + For subscription: mail "SUB CHINA-NT Your-First-Name Your-Last-Name" + + to LISTSERV@UGA (bitnet) or listserv@uga.cc.uga.edu (internet) + + For back issues of CCF: + + anonymous ftp to cnd.org[132.249.229.100]:pub/community/CCF + + For contribution and inquiry: mail to ccf-editor@ifcss.org + +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=++