A Southern Capitol Plagued by the Past

Walking around Nanjing this weekend, the city felt like it was still full of ghosts. The glossy new veneer thrown over the old capitol city cannot begin to cover up the horrors of its recent past; the history of the place seeps through even the name of the city itself. And although flows of capital have given Nanjing new life, but there is still a lot of bad blood.

The Nanjing Massacre of 1937, an event of unmentionable violence, can only be imagined with visions of brutality of the most perverse order.

But for the Chinese, the event has endured in the popular imagination not only as a tragedy, but a symbol of Japanese wrongdoing and a landmark of nationalism. The wounds left by the event, it seems, have been perennially reopened and the younger generation still grapples with the pain and are still taught to be outraged.

As I entered the Nanjing Massacre Museum, one of my chinese teachers, a young, well-educated woman told me, with great indignation, that the Japanese had muddied the event to the point of outright dishonesty in their text books.

"History is history." She said, as if to say that the past was indisputable, and that atrocities should not be denied.

The fact that she did not see the hypocrisy of the comment, in light of Chinese practices of academic and historical censorship, was simply stunning. But she, like most young people, had been conditioned to resent the Japanese.

Those who experience atrocities of war are marked for life, and little can be done to change their prejudices, but to find such sentiments among a younger, better educated, and more well-connected generation left me at a loss for words and with a head full of questions.

Mostly, these questions were about China's feasibility as a superpower, not because of their culture or people, but because of their government's influence on the two. Every country is nationalistic to some extent, but when that nationalism has resonated in the hearts of the young, I begin to worry.

If The New York Times' video in which young people at a music festival burn a Japanese flag is any indication, the Chinese youth culture is going in a dark and frightening direction. Rock music is supposed to unite people, but from the looks of the footage, it's just background noise to the hateful zealotry of young nationalists.

One imagines that the connectivity of this capitalist century encourages global citizenship and cross-cultural understanding, but if the youth - the most connected people in China - harbor such fervent animosity, the reality of capitalism without democracy seems bleak.

The Best things in Life are... Knockoffs?

I was at the little supermarket here at Peking University, as I am almost every week, buying a few western dietary necessities. Glancing down at a plastic-wrapped parcels of apples I noticed that they were,in fact, Washington apples. My head spun at the improbability of these delicious red orbs being here in Beijing. Food miles be damned, I thought. I'm getting these.

I returned to my room, ready to crack into these crisp, fresh delights of the pacific Northwest. But when I began to peel the familiar little sticker off, I noticed that there was something peculiar about the insignia. First of all, it wasn't coming off. What demented Washingtonian had crazyglued the stickers on? Then I realized that these were not in fact "WASHINGTON" apples, but the produce of "WASHNGTON."

Counterfeit... fruit?

Now, barring the possibility that there is a Washngton, China that is famous for it's produce, I would say that these were elaborate fakes.

As fakes go though, these were impressive. Exempting the typographical error, the iconography was spot on, as is the case with a lot of the counterfeit goods here. For a moment I felt like a dumb foreigner who had gone looking for a western product at cut rate prices and been duped, but I consoled myself in the reassurance that the Chinese bought these fakes by the barge load.

The Silk Market, which is the most popular and iconic place to buy knockoffs, has universal appeal to westerners and Beijingers alike. The fakes at the Silk Market are more than passable, even flawless in many cases. But it isn't generally the quality that people are interested in, it is the iconography of a designer label.

The namesake of a brand or a designer seems to be more impactful than the credibility of the article itself. My beloved Washington apples are somewhat analogous to a "Duke & Gabbano" belt buckle or a "Nokig" cell phone. The typography is similar, the look is decent, and the attitude is, "why not?"

"Ipones" can be bought for a few hundred RMB and an pair of "Levis" goes for clearance prices at the most, but buyers are hardly in the dark about the brazen misrepresentations of brand. So whatever admiration there is for western goods is far overshadowed for the irreverent passion for fakes. Even if the fakes aren't the best quality, the label itself serves a need of the mind without the high price tag.

As for needs of the stomach, the apples were still delicious, even if they weren't from Washington.

City Malls, Mall City

Recently I feel like I’ve been touring a lot of shopping malls. It sounds really horrible, I know. But I didn’t exactly plan for it. I kept running into the reality of having to visit a mall for this or that – maybe a restaurant was there, maybe I had to get something for my camera, maybe I just needed socks. Whatever my reasons have been, I keep encountering the shopping mall. If my experience is any indication, shopping malls are just as much a part of life in Beijing as they are in the United States. And in a way, shopping malls make me feel at home, unfortunately.

Walking through a mall is somewhat of a paradoxical experience. Malls are both inviting and alienating, attractive and repulsive, salient and innocuous. I say innocuous because so many things are going on around you, acting on your senses, that you can’t possibly keep track of all of your physical surroundings. Standing in a shopping mall corridor is like walking through a video game; so many stimuli rush past you that you cant even keep track of details that would otherwise be glaring and obvious. From the outside, malls in Beijing are often nondescript, sometimes underground or incorporated into office buildings, but inside is a commercial funhouse of shining floors and attractive shops primed to receive the newfound wealth of the newfound wealthy.

As a customer you are selecting the stores and the stores are selecting you – they vie for your attention and you receive their messages about yourself and your world. And the messages people in Beijing are receiving – the messages they want to receive – are mostly about the romance of material things. Beijingers, like everyone, are being sold the intangible qualities rather than the substantive ones - the qualities that make things more special and you more special for having them.

Shopping mall culture, the culture of things for the sake of things, might signal things to different people, and I’m not prepared to say that it’s an indicator of anything besides a universal passion for newness. It’s unfair to cast the expectation of reverence of one’s own culture on any country that happens to be a couple thousand years older than the US. Besides, I'm pretty sure the Cultural Revolution shattered any hope that the refinements of traditional material culture could remain intact.

Without being too judgmental, I would still say that shopping malls are awful, but not because of what they sell. It’s the culture of shopping malls and the lifestyles that they create that I am resentful of, not the people who choose the new and vulgar over the old and elegant.

798

Most of the time I think of capitalism as an obvious perpetrator of culture-cide, but in the case of the arts, things become more blurred. Even though 798, a military factory transformed into a once affordable artists community, seems to have gone high buck, the art showcased there still presents the strongest visual culture I’ve seen so far that is distinguishably “Chinese.”

Last week I stumbled around a few galleries and studios and while a lot of the art was culturally indistinct, good deal, maybe even a majority of the pieces were China-centric. I’m no expert on Chinese classical art, but sufficed to say that they had an aesthetic that echoed the classical, but which broke away from classical forms in terms of materials or subject. I saw classical symbols and materials twisting into new forms, self-aware and emboldened.

More heartening than anything though, was the fact that a lot of the artists actually had something to say about China itself – and that people were buying it. I won’t get into a protracted discussion of whether or not sold art is in some way tainted, because that’s for the artist to decide. And everyone selling art at 798 must have made up their minds by now. After all, even Leonardo needed patrons.

So maybe glossy boutiques and over-furnished coffeehouses are an incurable cancer that eventually afflicts any artists-colony-turned-yuppie-colony, but the malignancy here has yet to be seen. Hopefully the hipsters overrunning New China won’t just turn out to be a scourge of culture-consuming tourists, but zealous investors in arts and other staples of cultural discourse.

Far From Home, Familiar

The cabbie smoked all of the way from the airport to Peking University, breathing back little puffs of smoke that would be my first taste of Beijing air. I didn’t really mind, though because I was more focused on the city around me. But squinting through the thick smog and 1 am darkness, I saw nothing but screaming lights and skyscrapers. And all I could think was, “where is Beijing?”

To be honest, even after a month, I’m still asking the same question.

People always say that China has finally entered the world stage, but from where I’m standing it looks more like the world has entered China. And the global offerings of choice for the Chinese are undeniably, almost invariably western. The torrential flows of capital into China have created a landslide of consumers yearning to perennially redefine themselves.

Often times Beijing has just seemed like a bad dream, a consumerist nightmare. Don’t get me wrong. The energy here is beyond description, but so is everything else. Beijing overloads your senses and for a while I was reeling from the sheer amount of commercial stimuli and its frightening similarity to the US. The only thing that’s different is the scale, which compared to the United States feels steroidal.

What some might call surface changes, the adjustments of a culture to the capitalist system, seem like much more to me. Not just western fashions, but western lifestyles, too are becoming more and more appealing as people move out of old neighborhoods, away from each other, and into high-rise apartments and far-flung suburbs. To an American, a Middle American to be more specific, the aftermath of the commercial siege of Chinese culture looks eerily familiar to the sort of shopping mall surroundings I grew up with. The whole city, and maybe even the culture are up for grabs in the new economy and are being sold at the lowest measures of value: money.

People here are refurbishing their lifestyles, their lives, and when all’s said and done probably their culture - not just their apartments.