“Hey! What are you doing? You kids get away from there! You are not supposed to be touching that!”
But as I became older and more confident, I went close to watch the organ players playing, or even practicing. Once I had learned the secret of how to turn on the mystery music machine, I would even try playing it quietly when the real musician got tired and left. Sometimes they would say to me: “Do you play? Wanna give it a try?”
Flipping through the radio stations at home or in our car, our parents would frequently make distinctions as to what kinds of music were worthy of our ears versus sinful.
“Cut that mess off! You know better than to be listening to that devil music! What’s the matter with you?”
Our father made it clear that most songs without the words “Jesus” or “Holy” were not good for us and would not be tolerated within the walls of his house. The exceptions were children’s records they bought for us to listen to, songs of nursery rhymes or anything produced by Walt Disney. Otherwise, the records did not stay in our hands for over a minute, quickly snatched away as if poisonous. When the musical Peter and the Wolf came out it was amazing because it was not considered devil music. We were allowed to listen to it. As time went by, defining what was spiritually edifying versus destructive became an act of splitting hairs, frustrating because I did not want to be yelled at or whipped for bringing into the house anything considered to be from the “Devil”.
Our neighbor held loud weekend parties, during which our parents would be unusually grim. To me, the noise was both mysterious and appealing. Our ears were bombarded with sounds of happiness, people letting loose. The parental interpretation was that it was the noise of sin: loud laughter, tinkling bottles, the blues and complicated jazz improvisations. But it was actually not dissimilar from what I heard in church.
26
Adjusting to My New Home
The University of International Business Economics is highly ranked in China as a teaching institution. Founded in 1951, it services over 13,000 students, approximately 3,000 of them non-Chinese. I was a part-time teacher there, thanks to my chat with the the vice-president at a public event and was trying to figure out Professor Ed Lang, the head of the English department.
I called him Professor Strange because of his puzzling behavior, but in the wider scheme of things, perhaps it had nothing to do with racism, or even greed. It could just be that we thought dramatically differently.
Lang was a tall Chinese male in his mid-to-late forties, with light chestnut skin and thinning hair. He wore glasses and usually a dour expression, and dressed like a shabby Willy Loman. He had the look of a schemer, and doted on the pride of his life, his precocious eight-year-old daughter. We ostensibly had something in common: he had spent a year in the USA, teaching as a visiting scholar at a campus in North Carolina.
He had procured my services to help him in his start-up business, providing weekend communication workshops to local banks in towns outside Beijing, and one evening at the end of one of the teaching sessions in a small city called Hengshui, he suggested a stroll.
“Aaron, I will go with you if you need to take a breather,” he said. “But be careful where you walk alone. It’s dangerous being out at night. This place is not your city, you know.”
I had taken many walks alone before in many Chinese cities, early morning jogs and evening strolls. No problem. Professor Lang, meanwhile, said this was his first time out on foot in this particular town. Yet here he was now advising me on street safety. Why was he mothering me? Did he feel a need to be protective because I was not a Chinese?
Hengshui, in Hebei province, was two hundred miles or so south of Beijing, and an international marathon was due to be held here in a few weeks. Large, colorful signs were everywhere showcasing the running stars who would take part. There were also signs offering new apartment building units for sale, proclaiming them to be an International World Village.
As a colleague, I was happy to help Professor Lang, but during the long drive on a tour bus to get there, I was already regretting it. Our destination turned out to be a resort near the town, a sorry-looking barracks site where I roomed with three students from Inner Mongolia on four bunk beds. No inside toilet. Professor Lang stayed in the small hotel building nearby.
My part-time status at UIBE continued for three years. Then, to my surprise, I was offered a permanent position by the dean in another department. This position as Academic Consultant carried with it housing and a 10,000 RMB per month salary, with only one class per week to teach. This would also solve my visa problem. Ah! Too good to be true. Several months of silence ensued and when I tried to contact the Dean, he was unreachable. Finally, another member of my department gave me the disheartening news.
“Oh, I’m told that you are above the age limit,” he said. I was 66 years old at the time. “Being that you are over sixty-five, we cannot hire you on a permanent contractual basis as an educational consultant. Sorry to have to tell you this.”
I was not surprised, yet I felt a bit irritated since I was seeing several white-haired Caucasian teacher types hobbling and shuffling around the halls or puffing on pipes outside. They certainly looked older than I. Perhaps race had nothing to do with it, I will never know. Yet various subtle and not-so-subtle signs of disrespect eventually caused me to drop my association with the University of International Business Economics. Perhaps my age really was the key, and race or credentials had no bearing on how or what the Chinese were thinking. But by that point, it didn’t matter. My hopes had been built up for nothing. There are millions of good-hearted Chinese, one two, three bad apples didn’t matter. Yet broken promises seemed to be the mark of the city. So move on!
This negative experience didn’t dampen my view on teaching in general. I transitioned from traditional classroom teaching to more informal work with language improvement programs, while still maintaining a teacher’s outlook on life. Teaching for me has always meant helping others learn to use their minds. Sharing insights. Showing how to search for information and how to utilize resources, exercise creative decision-making. I know from personal struggles that winning comes from attitude and inner-motivations, viewing mistakes as lessons to be built upon.
Literature certainly had an impact on my thinking. In my youth, I read and re-read Robinson Crusoe, Robin Hood, The Swiss Family Robinson, Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Kidnapped. The lessons I gleaned put my own plight into context. My personal problems paled in the face of what other people had encountered. These stories taught me that there are always ways to solve problems no matter how insurmountable they might seem. Violence and hopelessness need not be the only alternatives. And no one can dictate your dreams unless you give them the power to do so.
I have always wanted my students to embrace the challenges of life, accepting the good and the bad. I encourage individuals to use their will-power, to think rationally to overcome whatever may be standing between themselves and their dreams. Fear of the unknown must not be allowed to dictate to them.
Before China, I endured challenges and enjoyed personal achievements in many areas. My life had always been colorful and exciting. I have also had the joy of seeing many of my students take off and fly, embracing their dreams and reaping the rewards. Teaching means to give, to help make sense of confusing puzzle pieces, to understand the choices offered by forks in the many roads. By sharing and helping to build stronger individuals, ultimately better communities emerge, one brick at a time.
I ran into a problem when trying to see the much-heralded international marathon featuring runners from Kenya, Ethiopia, and the United States to be held in Hengshui, the small town where I had conducted weekend seminars with bank personnel. Years ago, I was a runner in high school and college, but I had never attended a professional marathon. I purchased my train ticket, and put in a call to the bank manager’s office in that small town. The bank was one of th
e many sponsors, and I figured they could advise me on what to do once I arrived.
“Sorry, we do not think that you will be allowed to be a spectator at this event,” said my contact. “The local government has employed over 3,000 security guards and it will be tightly controlled.”
“Do you mean to say spectators will not be allowed to watch the race?”
“Yes, according our information, even our bank personnel will be unable to see this race.”
“Are you telling me that I cannot even be at the finish line? I already have my train ticket and really want to see this marathon. Can you please check again?”
An hour or so later, a text message arrived on my mobile: “Sorry, but we are told to advise you not to come. Sorry.”
For a split second, I considered going anyway, just to prove the point. Once, when living in Changsha, I expressed interest in visiting Tibet and the Chinese teachers tried to dissuade me from going. I persisted and the trip was excellent. Now, here I was being told that this international marathon being held in a place I had previously visited was off-limits. But this time, I really did not feel like the hassle. What if they were right, and I was not allowed to see the event, which was sure to be televised? Surely spectators would be visible on television. It was another illustration of how China may not be so open as it appears on television.
Perhaps a Black person not living in China would cry prejudice in the face of such an incident, but having lived in China for a while, I don’t draw hasty conclusions. In this culture, I only know what is going on less than half the time, and this degree of ambiguity was increasingly okay with me.
27
Variations of Symbolic Violence
My new abode was only a five-minute walk north from the Shilipu stop on Beijing’s Number 6 subway line. Transport was convenient, food vendors offered boiled yellow-and-white corn on the cob, candied fruits on long sticks, and an assortment of meats. One of my favorites was a large crepe on which a raw egg and spices were lathered, and then folded around meat and leafy lettuce. This Chinese pancake was cheap and tasty. Small, electric-driven three-wheeled taxis trolled about waiting for weary feet wishing for a painless last lap home. Some days, shelling out the five RMB to hitch a short ride was a godsend. Forget the exercise.
My quarters were not pretentious, and I saw only a few foreigners. Strong smells of garlic, onions and other mysterious spices wafted into my apartment some evenings. If my windows were open during the summer, the dense smoke of the food alley on the southern side, twenty-two floors below, invited images of charred meats and strange cuisines.
I was living in Beijing, but my mobile phone could receive messages from friends all over mainland China. Some messages included scenes of violence on the streets, often police beating people, obviously recorded on mobile phones similar to my own. I asked one of my Chinese friends about these scenes, and he said such incidents were common in China.
“We Chinese see this sort of abuse all the time,” he said. “But at least the guys who were beaten did not get shot or killed. That would only happen in your country, America. That is not the Chinese way.”
I totally agreed. As a Black American I feel safer in China than in the USA. But now I was wondering, would this anti-gun climate last? I have seen more kids playing with toy guns in China than in the US, and Western action movies are popular here. Most contemporary Chinese action films rely not on marital arts but handguns, and the growing sales of a wide variety of toy guns makes me wonder how this will affect young Chinese minds.
I received a self-made video from a Chinese friend who is a photographer and filmmaker featuring several young Chinese males playing jokes on people, faking gun robberies and staging assassinations in public, all for the shock-value of seeing startled, terrified people scramble away in the grip of fear. Coming from America, I am very aware of how short a leap it is from play-acting to death.
My neighborhood in Beijing was not upscale, but it was still well-patrolled. Two or three young men wearing jump boots, black uniforms with single red arm bands, and black caps strolled on the sidewalks looking bored. Each carried a walkie-talkie, and if alone, could be seen playing with a mobile phone. Once in a while they would ride by on bicycles with a large red flashing lamp blinking behind them, even during the day. These were my neighborhood watchers. These patrollers now wear uniforms with small flashing red lights on each shoulder, which makes them an eerie sight.
In the US, a Neighborhood Watch was usually a strategy used to prevent people from committing vandalism. Here, it seemed to be something more.
Of course, in China, lawyers and others who dare to be outspoken run a risk of harassment, disbarment and arrest. But comparing life in Houston and Shanghai is like comparing red apples to red tomatoes. There may be similarities, but they just mask radical disparities. The differences do not mean that the social disease in each place is any less damaging.
In China today, maybe there is a tendency to over-police and for people react with heightened sensitivity to every public utterance. The same self-censorship I have seen endlessly with Chinese students operates in public in various ways. Take for example the soccer sports announcer in Shanghai who lost his job for calling members of the visiting Jiangsu team “northern dogs.” Yes, this indeed, is similar to the racist comments attributed to baseball and basketball team owners over the years in the United States.
Admittedly micro-aggressive behavior exists against some foreigners in China, but it is not as pervasive as the bigoted White vs. Black attitudes and behavior typical in North America. Only one who has experienced a life-time of racial aggression can understand this concept of feeling safer despite other social group challenges. The reality was that it was highly unlikely in China that I would be terrorized by trigger-happy police with itchy fingers.
Although, by the way, Chinese police do sometimes shoot people.
Personally, I love the technology of firearms. Guns fascinate me. I’m American! But I would not be comfortable with such an impersonal killing machine always at my fingertips. Accidents happen. Years ago, I purchased a small ornate shot-gun. After registering and paying, I waited the mandatory three days and then picked up my gun. This purchase was romance-related and involved the potential of me becoming a new black-on-black crime statistic due to a contested claim between myself and another guy for the favors of a particular beauty. Having been informed that my competitor owned a handgun, in fear, I decided to even the odds. Then it occurred to me that if this other “soul brother” and I killed each other, “The Man” would not be unhappy. So I short-circuited the syndrome and sold the gun back to the store. I have never shot a gun. Nor, since those wild oat-sowing years, have I owned a real gun.
However, I am convinced that most Americans embrace gun ownership largely out of fear and distrust. That was my initial motivation for buying a gun. We live in an increasingly hostile environment. Many believe that police protection is not guaranteed and it is better to be safe than sorry. The issue of guns is nuanced. Only a person blind to reality would fail to recognize the power that mere gun ownership gives a person, but whether the possession of a gun diminishes fear is hard to determine.
The gun obsession seems especially strong for Black American men in the United States. Unlike when living in China, in the US, we are like birds on a wire. We either fall off, fly off or get shot off. And gun ownership symbolizes power, and in a landscape where people’s individual security is threatened on a constant basis, both by law enforcement and others, it seems to follow that they would flock to the symbolic power of gun ownership.
Middle-aged Chinese men have frequently expressed interest in guns to me. They want to know as much as they can about this technology that is forbidden by their government. And as long as the movies and the media are filled with these symbols, and as long as parents buy children realistic replicas as toys in stores, this fascination will continue.
Little has changed in the United States, it seems. The gap between haves and have-nots has widened. The hypocrisy of a judicial system where legal recourse is unequally applied, prisons filled by those who have been psychologically broken and disillusioned. Black Americans and other minority citizens are not blind to these realities, and these people usually have experiences which can convince them of the necessity of gun ownership. A real man owes it to his family to protect them and also his material possessions. American police often encourage victims to arm themselves saying, “We cannot be everywhere at once!”
In the bigger picture, smaller countries possessing weapons of mass destruction is more upsetting to the bullies who possessed these death toys first. Bullies will always call those who respond in-kind as undeserving and untrustworthy.
I now have a huge toy gun collection purchased since coming to mainland China. I am simply amazed that such realistic replicas are sold and available. I am bothered by the fact that even kids can easily buy them in stores or from street vendors in China. Most large US retail stores no longer sell toy guns, but in China, the giants still stock such items. Raising children to play with guns is a blot on China’s future, but today’s kids are so hooked on video games featuring electronic killing that the matter of actually holding toy weapons seems almost irrelevant.
28
How Deep is Your Love?
Black in China Page 15