Heiche 1, Me 0

I’ve arrived safely in Beijing, where my rivalry with Beijing’s famous fleet of illegal gypsy cabs continues, albeit a little less successfully than last year.  Luckily this was only the first round. 

Unexpected hitch in my fieldwork giddy-up number one: The website (new last year) where all train tickets can and must be purchased has been rejected as dangerous and insecure by both of my favorite internet browsers. Good thing I was planning on buying a new computer after this year anyway!

Unexpected hitch in my fieldwork giddy-up number one: The website (new last year) where all train tickets can and must be purchased has been rejected as dangerous and insecure by both of my favorite internet browsers. Good thing I was planning on buying a new computer after this year anyway!

Sam Anderson (of Sentence-of-the-week fame) gives us the best one-sentence evaluation of Roland Barthes an American girl could ever hope for

And I quote: “Among the brand-name French theorists of the mid-20th century, Roland Barthes was the fun one.”  Though I do disagree with Anderson’s evaluation of Mythologies mission (no demystification! Instead, the ever-more uncomfortable vacillation between demystifying and consumption, so as not to flatten the form), his review only gets more lovely from there.  It’s worth a read, as is Sam Anderson’s often hilarious and always philological twitter.

In which an accident does not occur.  

via Shanghaiist

“Other societies are perhaps no better than our own; even if we are inclined to believe they are, we have no method at our disposal for proving it. However, by getting to know them better, we are enabled to detach ourselves from our own society. Not that our own society is peculiarly or absolutely bad. But it is the only one from which we have a duty to free ourselves: we are, by definition, free in relation to the others.”
Claude Levi-Strauss in “A Little Glass of Rum,” which is quickly becoming my favorite chapter of Tristes Tropiques 
“One cannot help wishing to master absence and yet we must always let go.”
Jacques Derrida
“You put a man in a room and lock the door.  There’s something serenely pure here.  Let’s destroy the mind that makes words and sentences.” “I have to remind you.  There are different ways in which words are sacred.  The precious line of poetry often sits in ignorance of conditions surrounding it.  Poor people, young people, anything can be written on them.  Mao said this.  And he wrote and he wrote.  He became the history of China written on the masses.  And his words became immortal.  Studied, repeated, memorized by an entire nation.” “Incantations.  People chanting formulas and slogans.” “In Mao’s China a man walking along with a book in his hand was not seeking pleasure or distraction.  He was binding himself to all Chinese.  What book?  Mao’s book.  The Little Red Book of Quotations.  The book was the faith that people carried everywhere.  They recited from it, brandished it, they displayed it constantly. People undoubtedly made love with book in their hands.” “Bad sex.  Rote, rote, rote.” “Of course.  I’m surprised to hear you offer these trite responses.  Of course rote.  We memorize works that serve as guides to conducting a struggle.  In committing a work to memory we make it safe from decay.  It stands untouched.  Children memorize parts of stories their parents tell them.  They want the same story again and again.  Don’t change a word or they get terribly upset.  this is the unchanged narrative every culture needs to survive.  In China the narrative belonged to Mao.  People memorized it and recited it to assert the destiny of their revolution.  So the experience of Mao became uncorruptible by outside forces.  It became the living memory of hundreds of millions of people.  The cult of Mao was the cult of the book.  It was a call to unity, a summoning of crowds where everyone dressed alike and thought alike. Don’t you see the beauty in this?  Isn’t there beauty and power in the repetition of certain words and phrases?  You go into a room to read a book.  These people came out of their rooms.  They became a book-waving crowd.  Mao said, ‘Our god is none other than the masses of the Chinese people.’ And this is what you fear, that history is passing into the hands of the crowd.” —From Don DeLillo’s Mao II

“You put a man in a room and lock the door.  There’s something serenely pure here.  Let’s destroy the mind that makes words and sentences.”

“I have to remind you.  There are different ways in which words are sacred.  The precious line of poetry often sits in ignorance of conditions surrounding it.  Poor people, young people, anything can be written on them.  Mao said this.  And he wrote and he wrote.  He became the history of China written on the masses.  And his words became immortal.  Studied, repeated, memorized by an entire nation.”

“Incantations.  People chanting formulas and slogans.”

“In Mao’s China a man walking along with a book in his hand was not seeking pleasure or distraction.  He was binding himself to all Chinese.  What book?  Mao’s book.  The Little Red Book of Quotations.  The book was the faith that people carried everywhere.  They recited from it, brandished it, they displayed it constantly. People undoubtedly made love with book in their hands.”

“Bad sex.  Rote, rote, rote.”

“Of course.  I’m surprised to hear you offer these trite responses.  Of course rote.  We memorize works that serve as guides to conducting a struggle.  In committing a work to memory we make it safe from decay.  It stands untouched.  Children memorize parts of stories their parents tell them.  They want the same story again and again.  Don’t change a word or they get terribly upset.  this is the unchanged narrative every culture needs to survive.  In China the narrative belonged to Mao.  People memorized it and recited it to assert the destiny of their revolution.  So the experience of Mao became uncorruptible by outside forces.  It became the living memory of hundreds of millions of people.  The cult of Mao was the cult of the book.  It was a call to unity, a summoning of crowds where everyone dressed alike and thought alike. Don’t you see the beauty in this?  Isn’t there beauty and power in the repetition of certain words and phrases?  You go into a room to read a book.  These people came out of their rooms.  They became a book-waving crowd.  Mao said, ‘Our god is none other than the masses of the Chinese people.’ And this is what you fear, that history is passing into the hands of the crowd.”

—From Don DeLillo’s Mao II
“A serious loss I should not omit to mention was the dispersal of our talented younger archaeologists, trained by more than half a dozen years in the field. Some time in November 1937, when almost all the members of the Archaeological Section of the Institute of History and Philology were gathered at Ch’angsha in a wayside inn, each member declared what he would like to do during the war. The result of this gathering was that some left the institute for war work, and some went to wander around; but the majority, including all the senior members, decided to follow the migration of the institute wherever it might lead, according to the drift of the time.”
Li Ji, my favorite accidental archaeologist, in Anyang (1977).  Portions of this weirdly autobiographical book, especially those describing the tenacity of archaeologists during wartime, are making me unexpectedly misty-eyed.  Here I imagine them huddled in a Hunanese version of the Tabard Inn, located at the end of the world or at least the end of the world as they knew it.  At times I’m overwhelmed by what a privilege it is to have the time to read these texts by other scholars and to read them closely, and never more than when I remember what an even greater privilege it is to be able to do so in a time and place of relative peace.

Melissa Chan, a reporter for Al Jazeera whose work I have followed and whose determination to see the story happening in person I admire, has been expelled from the PRC.  Above is her story on forced abortions, which is, not incidentally, the same issue that caused Chen Guangcheng to arouse officials’ ire.  Here is another great piece of hers on black jails, and here is an earlier entry I wrote about her piece on land seizure.  I am not sure I can explain what a huge loss this is.  

The buzz on twitter among my favorite China hands has been a mixture of vindicated rage, bored bitterness, and open admiration, but it’s important to remember that those are people who’ve spent decades living in a country that hasn’t ever become what they believe it could be, getting hopeful and disappointed and angry and hopeful all over again.  Although they focus obsessively on news coverage and communicating every little scrap of information they can find on whatever the latest developing story is, their ferocity seems callused, numb.  Every news story and every outrage gets the same treatment, and thus the always cynical, always similar, 140-word barbs start feel dull, fall flat.  

Are my sensibilities so fresh, my hands so raw, that each new disappointment should still sting and each new hope should feel, falsely, like it could redeem?  I’m too proud to say yes outright but too sad to deny that it might well be true.  And besides, we need sadness.  We need hope to be disappointed.  We need imagination to go on; as silly as it often seems, we need utopic thinking.  Although I sincerely believe the PRC needed Melissa Chan, I can imagine a world in which the very people who arranged for her expulsion will suffer a revelation, will prove to be disappointments, and will be forgiven, as I hope we all eventually are.

Peter Foster presents the only redeeming artifact to come out of the U.S. Embassy's handling of the Chen Guangcheng case by composing this perfect, culturally-inflected headline

And I quote: “Chen Guangcheng: America shows a naivity that beggars belief.”  I’m generally not the biggest fan of personifying nations, but I’ll make an exception here.  

My more cynical interpretation of the situation makes me think that the return of Chen was intentional rather than innocent.  It would be a mostly groundless reading if not for this Voice of America article, which seems more concerned with the way Secretary Clinton’s agenda to promote human rights in the abstract has been thrown off by the appearance of an actual Chinese human rights activist, the fact that State Department officials had to deal with (and then distort) Chen’s “broken English,” and the pressure put on all these poor civil servants who have been left “sleepless.”  Usually, I don’t make a habit of hating on VoA because they’re doing Lady Liberty’s work or whatever, but the displacement* at work in this article is out of control revealing to the point of being embarrassing.  Get it together, Gary Locke, and for goodness’ sake, stop smiling, this is serious, history will remember that you left this man at that hospital and did not act as though it were a serious thing to do.

*Cf. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, natch.

UPDATE: Another more dire take, also from the UK.  I am already dreading reading whatever the NYTimes is going to throw together in response to all of this.

UPDATED UPDATE: Oops!  Dread no more: Here it is, by the NYT BJ Bureau’s newest addition, Jan Perlez.