By Robert Bickers
‘What are we to drink?’ asked a British doctor in Shanghai in 1867, reflecting on the precautions needed to maintain health in the sweltering city. His answer, as
The original brewery
A fountain at the current brewery
Robert Bickers, a professor of history at the University of Bristol, is currently working on The Scramble for China, a history of the foreign presence in China from the 1830s onwards, which has involved fieldwork at the Qingdao brewery, amongst other places.
That was when I started to think about staying in America and writing exclusively in English, even if China was my only subject, even if Chinese was my native tongue. It took me almost a year to decide to follow the road of Conrad and Nabokov and write in a language that was not my own. I knew I might fail. I was also aware that I was forgoing an opportunity: the Chinese language had been so polluted by revolutionary movements and political jargon that there was great room for improvement.
His piece resonated with another we’d just read at Xujun Eberlein’s blog Inside-Out China, particularly since Eberlein mentions Ha Jin in her piece. She agreed to allow us to republish it in its entirety here:
By Xujun Eberlein
Last week, Singapore reader Drifting Leaf asked how I see myself. If you read her letter, you will see this question was about cultural identity. She says:
When I see old CCTV/HK/Taiwan TV programs, it brings me back to my childhood. I’m not sure how far I should identify with or support Chinathough. I love classical Chinese culture but the present China/government has quite a negative image.And:
When we watched the 2008 Olympics, we were uncertain whether we should feel proud of Chinaor not because we are foreign citizens and am not sure if we can lay claim to Chineseness. I believe you still love China despite all its political problems.
Her questions took me through some soul-searching. I moved to theUS as an adult and I've been living here for 21 years; my American-born daughter has turned 20 this year. I'm used to the way of life inNew England: to pull weeds and plant flowers in the summer garden, or to have five months of winter solitude in a snow-besieged colonial house. Looking back, I seldom thought of the question "What am I?" except that when I visited China in recent years I often felt like a foreigner. Occasionally I had to provide information on my ethnic background ("American Chinese" or "Asian American") when filling out forms, however I don't consider ethnic background the same thing as cultural identity.
In short, I've never really suffered the anxiety of identity loss. Drifting Leaf's questions made me wonder why.
A couple of weeks ago during a library presentation on my book, someone in the audience asked if I'd like to move back to China. Without thinking I replied, "No, my home is here now."
So, what role does Chinese culture play in my daily life in Americathen? Perhaps the answer lies in a corner of my garden (and yes, that's where my blog hearder comes from):
This is what my husband and I call our "Chinese wall." After we moved to our current home in the summer of 1998, the two of us spent three years of summer weekends building this garden wall with our own hands. Its style was modeled from the gardens of Sichuan, and the patterns of the reticulated windows were taken from the Ming Dynasty garden book <园冶>, which I found in a bookstore in Boston's Chinatown. The inscribed characters on the maroon wooden board above the moon gate are "思蜀", meaning "long for Shu," where "Shu" is the ancient name for Sichuan.
Readers who are familiar with the Three Kingdoms period (220-280 AD) might be able to see this inscription makes a reverse use of the classical allusion "乐不思蜀" – "here is too enjoyable to long for Shu."After the Shu Kingdom was conquered by Wei, the brainless last King of Shu, Liu Chan, was taken to Wei Kingdom's capital Luoyang. During a banquet with Shu dancers performing, all the captured Shu officials began to weep, only Liu Chan giggled as usual. The King of Wei asked him, "Don't you long for Shu?" "Here is so enjoyable, I don't long for Shu," Liu Chan replied. Thus, "too enjoyable to long for Shu" became an adage admonishing those forgetting their roots.
The inscription in my garden, however, is not an admonishment. It simply reflects my sentiment: whenever I see a Sichuan style garden, I'm emotional – thus the painstaking effort at building the garden wall shown above with the moon gate and the inscribed board. I had never gardened in China, yet in New England I became a diligent gardener. This emotional reaction is rooted in my upbringing in Sichuan, not much different from Drifting Leaf's nostalgic sentiment when she sees traditional Chinese programs on TV.
I'm also fond of Japanese and English gardens, and have tried to make a corner with each style in my yard. However I long for "Shu" more than anything else, and only that part of the garden has sentimental value, thus deeper meaning, to me.
This is to say, the cultural elements from one's upbringing are always there, in the chemistry of your blood, no matter which corner of the world you land in, no matter what you call yourself. That, to me, is cultural identity. It is quite independent from political stance or nationality, as my friend Chiew-Siah pointed out.
I can't help but mention again Ha Jin's latest book, A Free Life, which is regarded as the author's most autobiographic novel. Anyone who has read it can't possibly miss the protagonist's (thus likely the author's) grudge against China and laud for America, which was why such a boring book was – quite amusingly – hailed by a NYT book reviewer as "a serious [American] patriotic novel" badly needed at a time of Americans' serious protests against the invasion of Iraq.
Ha Jin's book actually provides a good example of "乐不思蜀" – "here is too enjoyable to long for Shu." Its political attitude is not really a surprise given that Ha Jin left China shortly after its most painful time, and his departure to the New World has fixed that old impression in a freeze-frame. Apparently he has been unable to update his view of China as the country updates itself. Despite the political grudge that confused the author, who in turn was confusing politics and cultural identity in his novel, as a realistic writer Ha Jin, perhaps involuntarily, illustrated the independence of the two: while the protagonist is determined to cut ties with anything Chinese, he involuntarily thinks in a Chinese way and applies the traditional Chinese value system in handling business, family and relationships.
Here is another little interlude: recently a library invited several of us to talk about our books. Among the speakers, another woman and I were Chinese. The order of speech was by last name alphabetically; as such I was the first to speak. In introducing my background, I mentioned how all schools were closed and books burned during the Cultural Revolution. When it was the turn for the other Chinese woman, who was originally from Hong Kong, she talked about the Chinese tradition of respecting teachers and books. "Even in mainlandChina, the CCP only chose the most diligent students as its members," she said. I sort of expected her to acknowledge the practice in the Cultural Revolution as an exception, but she didn't touch anything like that. I wondered if the two of us, each presenting a different aspect of China, had confused the audience. As if she had read my mind, when we were all finished and about to leave, she said to me out of the blue, "You have to talk positive to young readers." Her book was a young-adult novel. Though disagreeing, I nodded understanding.
One could say both she and I share a cultural identity: the Chinese culture. But she had her upbringing in Hong Kong. I'm pretty sure that, had she also experienced the Cultural Revolution, she would have talked quite differently that night. This is to say, the culture one identifies with is more closely related to personal experiences than ethnicity.
Now, do I still love China despite all its political problems? This depends on what one means by the term "China." When I think ofChina, what comes to mind are familiar shade of trees, fragrance of flowers, shape of landscape, smell of Sichuan cuisine, peculiar expressions of the Chinese language and intimate faces of relatives and friends. Those, I love. I care. Thinking of them makes me emotional. Thus, China is not an abstract concept to me.
This is also to say, I no longer have an abstract love of China, especially when the name means the state. And that's okay with me. When I was a child, we were taught from the first grade on to "Love the Party, love the people, love the motherland," as if the three were one thing. I had taken the concept of the three abstract and unconditional "loves" as granted, until the Cultural Revolution and my "insert" into the countryside disillusioned me and made me realize how those abstract concepts compromised individuals. In the early 1980s, there was a popular saying among those who were actively seeking migration abroad: "I love the motherland, but the motherland does not love me." (This background might also help to understand the grudge in Ha Jin's aforementioned novel.) I suspect Drifting Leaf's situation now is quite similar to those people's then.
Since my youth in the countryside I've grown averse to abstract political concepts. Having lived in two opposite countries has taught me many things, one of which is it's often less wrong to go for the particular rather than the abstract. The world is being destroyed by abstract concepts and exclusive ideologies. But this is the topic of another long post so I won't keep ranting here, but I, too, would like to cite the Beijing Olympics as an example: I enjoyed very much watching the Olympics, not because it lifted China's international image, but because the performance was superb. On the other hand, I still hold the opinion that the huge government spending on the Games could have found a better use in improving conditions for the Chinese population still in poverty.
So, unlike many "angry youths," I don't unconditionally advocate nationalism, though it had also once been my position in my youth, and I still respect the many great nationalists in China's history. But I will not let nationalism stand in the way of my issuing a critical opinion as a honest writer.
Before I end this piece, let me say a few more words about the style of my garden. Isn't a Chinese garden wall absurd, or 不伦不类, as a companion to a New England Colonial house? Coincidentally, I find answers from a book I'm reading titled Has Man a Future? The book is a transcript of conversations between "The Last Confucian" Liang Shuming and Chicago University professor Guy Alitto. In the Foreword written by Prof. Alitto, he mentions that when he interviewed Mr. Liang in 1980, Liang often talked with assent about Buddhism and Daoism, and also praised Christianity and some parts of Marxism. At first Alitto found it hard to understand: how could one be a Confucian and Buddhist at the same time? How can one identify with both Christianity and Marxism? Eventually he realized that, to be able to fuse many seemly conflicting thought schools, is a distinctive characteristic of traditional Chinese intellectuals. An excellent observation.
A few months ago, we ran an interview with Lisa See about her new novel, 
Shanghai Girls. The book was released last week and See is in the middle of a series of talks and readings, including one that China Beat is co-sponsoring on June 6 in Corona del Mar.
“The Olympics briefly focused attention on China’s serious air pollution problems…But China’s water woes are at least equally pressing, and it may be easier to see what effects they will have. Two little-noted news items from near the end of the year may illuminate that – after we review some background.Strangely, these stories have attracted very little press coverage. There is, however, an excellent video at the Asia Society website. And there is a fair amount of stuff that’s worth reading about China’s water problems in general. If you are interested in learning more, here are a few things I would recommend:
Water has always been a problem in China, and effective control of it has been associated with both personal heroism and legitimate sovereignty for as far back as our records go…. But water scarcity is probably an even greater problem than excesses, especially in the modern period. Surface and near-surface water per capita in China today is roughly ¼ of the global average, and worse yet, it is distributed very unevenly. The North and Northwest, with over half the country’s arable land, have about 7 percent of its surface water; the North China Plain, in particular, has 10 to12 percent of the per capita supply for the country as a whole, or less than 3 percent of the global average. China also has unusually violent seasonal fluctuations in water supply; both rainfall and river levels change much more over the course of the year than in either Europe or North America. While the most famous of China’s roughly 85,000 dams are associated with hydro-power (about which more in a minute), a great many exist mostly to store water during the peak flow of rivers for use at other times of year.
The People’s Republic has made enormous efforts to address these problems – and achieved impressive short-term successes that are now extremely vulnerable. Irrigated acreage has more than tripled since 1950, with the vast majority of those gains coming in the North and Northwest; this has turned the notorious “land of famine” of the 1850-1950 period into a crucial grain surplus area, and contributed mightily to improving per capita food supplies for a national population that has more than doubled. Much of that, however, has come through the massive use of deep wells bringing up underground water far faster than it can be replaced; and a great deal of water is wasted, especially in agriculture, where costs to farmers are kept artificially low. (Chinese agriculture is not necessarily more wasteful in this regard than agriculture in many other places – and certainly the deviations from market prices are no worse than in the supposedly market-driven United States – but its limited supplies make waste a much more immediate problem.) Water tables are now dropping rapidly in much of North China, and water shortages are a frequent fact of life for most urban residents. (Beijing suffers fewer water shortages, but only because it can commandeer the water resources of a large surrounding rural area included in the municipality.) Various technologies that would reduce water waste exist, but most are expensive. More realistic pricing of irrigation water would help – but probably at the price of driving millions of marginal farmers to the wall, and greatly accelerating the already rapid rush of people to the cities. Consequently, adoption of both of these palliatives is likely to remain slow.
Instead, the state has chosen a massive three-pronged effort to move water from South to North China – by far the biggest construction project in history, if it is completed. Part of the Eastern section began operating this year, and the Central section is also underway (though the December 31 Wall Street Journal reported a delay due to environmental concerns). The big story in the long run, however is the Western line, which will tap the enormous water resources of China’s far Southwest – Tibet alone has over 30 percent of China’s fresh water supply, most of it coming from the annual run-off of some water from Himalayan glaciers. (This is an aspect of the Tibet question one rarely hears about, but rest assured that all the engineers in China’s leadership, including Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, are very much aware of it. Tibetans, meanwhile, not only see a precious resource going elsewhere when their water is tapped: they regard many of the lakes and rivers to be dammed as sacred.) The engineering challenges in this mountainous region are enormous, but so are the potential rewards, both in water supply and in hydropower – the electricity water can generate is directly proportional to how far it falls into the turbines, and the Yangzi, for instance, completes 90 percent of its drop to the sea before it even enters China proper. The risks, as our two stories make clear, are social and political as well as environmental…
Call the two news stories the “double glacier shock.” On December 9, Asia Times Online reported that China was planning to go ahead with a major hydroelectric dam and water diversion scheme on the great bend of the Yarlong Tsangpo River in Tibet. The hydro project is planned to generate 40,000 megawatts – almost twice as much as Three Gorges. But the water which this dam would impound and turn northwards currently flows south into Assam to form the Brahmaputra, which in turn joins the Ganges to form the world’s largest river delta, supplying much of the water to a basin with over 300 million inhabitants. While South Asians have worried for some time that China might divert this river, the Chinese government had denied any such intentions, reportedly doing so again when Hu Jintao visited New Delhi in 2006. But when Indian Prime Minister Singh raised the issue again during his January, 2008 visit to Beijing, the tone had changed, with Wen Jiabao supposedly replying that water scarcity is a threat to the “very survival of the Chinese nation,” and providing no assurances. And so it is – not only for China, but for its neighbors. Most of Asia’s major rivers – the Yellow, the Yangzi, the Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Sutlej, and Indus – draw on the glaciers of the Himalayas, and all of these except the Ganges have their source on the Chinese side of the border. Forty-seven percent of the world’s people, from Karachi to Tianjin, draw on those rivers.
In short the possible damage to China’s neighbors from this approach to its water and energy needs is staggeringly large – and the potential to raise political tensions is commensurate. Previous water diversion projects affecting the source of the Mekong have already drawn protests from Vietnam (and from environmental groups), and a project on the Nu River (which becomes the Salween in Thailand and Burma) was suspended in 2004. But this project has vastly larger implications for both Chinese and foreigners. If, as some people think, the twenty-first century will be the century of conflicts over water, Tibet may well be ground zero.
Of course, China is hardly the only country that has ever appropriated water (not to mention other resources) that others see as theirs; I am writing in Southern California, made much more livable by denying Mexico Colorado River water it is theoretically guaranteed by treaty. And there is also something to be said, environmentally, for anything that provides China with lots of electricity and isn’t coal…
But that’s where the second glacier shock of 2008 comes in – news that this crucial water source is disappearing faster than anyone had previously realized. A report published in Geophysical Research Letters on November 22 noted that recent samples taken from Himalayan glaciers were missing two markers that are usually easy to find, reflecting open air nuclear tests in 1951-2 and 1962-3. The reason: the glacier apparently had lost any ice built up since the mid-1940s…And since the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the Himalayan highlands will warm at about twice the average global rate over the next century, there is every reason to think the situation will get worse. One estimate has 1/3 of the Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2050, and 2/3 by 2100. If that scenario is right, then even if all the engineering challenges of South-North water diversion can be solved, and even if China undertakes and gets away with taking water away from hundreds of millions of people in South and Southeast Asia, the resulting fix might not last very long…”
