When celebrating a research subject’s birthday Shanghai style, rather than eating the cake, it is customary to zha dan gao or plaster each other’s faces with it.

Since coming to China on a research fellowship, I’ve spent very little time with other “foreigners.” I have preferred to “go native,” spending most of my time with my research subjects, rural-to-urban migrant workers who think of me by turns as a confidante, a little sister, an odd spectacle of cultural hybridism, or some combination of the above. As I have assumed the identities they apply to me, the way I identify myself has also evolved.

The notion of “transformation” in a foreign land is a familiar cliché to Americans who venture abroad. But during my time in China, my cynicism has yielded to a grudging resignation that I have transformed — and that whether the change has been “authentic” or imagined does not change its reality. Being foreign teaches you not only how different you are, but also how thoroughly unremarkable you can be among the masses in an unfamiliar territory.

The sensation and science of being foreign

The more I see of Shanghai, the more I discover that everyone here has come in search of liberation. Migrants see this city as a way out of poverty. Westerners see a way out of the ennui of ordinary middle-class existence.

Foreigners are a different kind of migrant, in search not of wealth but of self-affirmation. Talented but aimless individuals flock to Shanghai because they feel like China is a place where “things are happening.” This country also attracts the dregs of educated America: sad middle-aged BA-generalists turned English teachers, meandering middle-class 20-somethings trying to cash in on globalization, earthy backpackers whose lives are tucked between the dog-eared pages of a Lonely Planet.

I’ve developed a taxonomy of the foreigner species, known in China as laowai. There are savvy laowai, with their native girlfriends, their slick use of the local slang, their inside jokes about how ridiculous the Chinese are with their uncivilized habits, their pathetic English, their sexual awkwardness and comical willingness to hit on foreigners of the opposite sex. Then there are the clueless with their pathetic Chinese, their fear of loud traffic and unsanitary restaurant conditions, their naïve fascination with all things “classically” Chinese, like pagoda rooftops, calligraphy scrolls, and chintzy kimonos for which they pay scandalous amounts at seedy street markets.

Many of the foreigners I’ve met have passed the initial culture shock and subsequent euphoria phases of being immersed in a new culture. They are now in the jaded phase. They just can’t get used to some things, they say, like the shoving crowds on the buses, the filth in the streets. Some resign themselves to leading a Western existence in China. Like the Chinese American girl I know who, in her three years here, has never ridden a city bus and admits to having not a single Chinese friend.

For its part, Shanghai prides itself on being more “open” to the rest of the planet than any other city in China and currently aspires to be a dazzlingly modern global capital. The city’s come-hither gaze toward the Western world disturbs and frustrates me, though I owe my own presence here to it, and it makes me more determined to distance myself from the foreign influence in this city that I ironically help constitute.

My negative impressions do have a tangentially scientific basis. Assisting a Chinese sociology professor’s study on the lifestyles of foreigners in Shanghai, I learned that most of the interview subjects shared two major characteristics. Whether they had come in the hope of teaching English for a decent salary or slipping into a white-collar post at a branch office of a foreign company, they were in China mainly because they did not want to be at home. “I just wanted something totally different” was a frequent comment.

The other characteristic these ex-pats had in common was that they professed disdain for other expats, looking down on the stereotypical cloistered lifestyle of expense accounts and social clubs.

At a downtown bar crawling with tipsy Westerners, a young man said to me with a smirk, “Foreigners in China are disgusting.” A fellow foreigner, an English teacher — who said he had left his techno party-monger identity behind in Britain because he was “pissed” —mused, “It’s easier than London. But the beer’s more expensive.”

Newly arrived foreigners don’t share the same irritating complacency but irritate me nonetheless with their naïveté. A young woman I met through American friends, apparently unfamiliar with the one-child policy, asked me one evening if abortion was legal in China. Another interviewee, a Canadian man working for a foreign company in Shanghai, expressed awe at the laborers he saw on the streets struggling to earn a living.  “I see the people go by on bikes. Old, old people peddling, ringing the bell, trying to pick up scraps and stuff like that,” he said. “It’s helped make me a lot more conscious of my money.”

There’s something unsettling about this glorification of hardship. In a Westerner’s eyes, the poor of another country become a muddy moral window, reflecting through grease spots and blood stains a pathetic world that makes the privileged feel passively guilty but above all fortunate. The gain seems, like so many other interactions between developed and undeveloped societies, one-sided.

Blending in and mixing it up

I feel at once disgusted by fellow Americans’ self-confidence and impressed with their survival skills, which even the least culturally competent learn quickly.  I hear them peppering their English with Chinese curse words and haggling with shopkeepers like an “authentic” Chinese. But what could be more typically American than assuming that an American identity can be cast off or disguised as one chooses?

But I dismiss their gratuitous efforts to assimilate mainly because I can pull it off better than they can. Looking Chinese gives me a great advantage over non-Asian Westerners, whose tallness, hairiness, angular features, and plump figures jut out in a Chinese crowd. In my own pursuit of authenticity, I always speak in Chinese, shop at neighborhood markets, and eat at the homes of Chinese friends, borrowing their slang. And it feels good to claim the power of residing in two parallel cultures.

Maybe I’m too Chinese for my own good. I’m coarser in China than I am even in my native New York, grabbing mercilessly for a seat on a crowded bus, speaking at the same loud volume — rude to Western ears — that others use when they address me. My questions here are more intrusive, reflecting a traditional Chinese lack of social caution in asking about your monthly salary, or pointing out, as one friend did recently, that your teeth look unusually yellow this afternoon. Unlike Westerners who politely turn down elderly beggars and children selling flowers (which generally encourages their pursuit), I no longer acknowledge their presence as I walk by, the same way Shanghai natives do. We are all pushed forward by the knowledge that if we stopped to listen to every poor person and everyone who takes advantage of sympathy, we’d never go anywhere.
Yet what separates me from the hordes rushing into a modern lifestyle is that I do stop to listen, often through thin walls. My research topic is the rural migrants who flood into the cities for work, upward-striving but poor and often poorly educated. While the economic and social gulf between us is enormous, despite — or possibly because of — the differences between us, we turn the space between us into a synaptic connection.

My American background has made me instantly popular as it makes me an object of intense curiosity. While I disrupt their notions of a classic laowai, they also see me as a fellow Chinese, with American characteristics. Some migrants have sort of adopted me, viewing me as a distant relative living in the big city by herself who needs looking after. They call me xiao gu niang, or “little girl,” and say I should protect myself because I’m dan cun — the Chinese term for pure and naïve. I do feel vulnerable here, but not in the way they think. I want to tell them that they oversimplify me — perhaps reading simplicity out of me the same way I read out of them complexity that I imagine.  I probably seem simpler in China because my language skills limit my power of expression.  Or perhaps their inability to view me in all my complexity reveals not my “purity” but their innocence.

Migrant stallkeepers play cards to pass the time during a slow day.

A complicated woman

While individual complexity is highly valued in the West, in the mind of a rural migrant who has had to adapt to the assault of rough city life, dan cun is a precious and rare quality. One migrant worker I know recently brought his girlfriend (whom he met through chatting on the Internet) from Guangxi Province to Shanghai. A quiet girl, she whiles away many of her afternoons at an Internet cafe or in front of the television in the back room of the construction storefront where he works. Though her personality seems bland and even a little withdrawn, I see why my friend is drawn to her: She had that purity and consistence that is hard to find among urban youth who get wrapped up in the temptations of Shanghai youth culture — drinking, gambling, even organized crime. My friend didn’t seek a perfect match in looking for a girlfriend; he looked for a transparency, an innocence he could simultaneously protect and escape into.

Individuality is not prioritized here simply because to do so is a luxury. In America, I seek interactions with people who challenge me, but I find that intellectual and emotional challenges are most appealing when everyday living is relatively easy. Personal subjectivity becomes important when the impersonal aspects of our lives are settled, stable, and in a sense, boring. For people who struggle with economic hardship, socializing is utilitarian — a release from the burdens of the workday. Romantically, as my friend’s girlfriend showed me, a good match consists of trust, convenience, and a tacit agreement to face future struggles together. Intellectual or sexual attraction is a secondary consideration.

Though I think it would be a stretch to argue that Chinese culture does not value individuality at all, traditional Chinese do tend to idealize simplicity in a girl’s personality. For migrants who are often in dire economic circumstances, a “pure” girl symbolizes comfort, stability, and solace in a tumultuous society. This doesn’t mean women are looked down upon. Certainly, females are much more respected in Chinese society today than at any other time in history. Still, when I observe workers from a local market in their homes, I see that women, apart from work and raising children, are generally devoid of much of a personal life. Men work hard as well, but they also find the time to drink and gamble with friends, often when their wives are looking after their children or their market stalls. Women are supposed to be tough, working to support their families as men do, but they should never be tougher than their husbands. A complex or fu zha personality would threaten the gender hierarchy that upholds this society and many others.

Complexity can, however, be welcome on occasion, especially if it speaks with a foreign accent.  Most of my research subjects and other Chinese I’ve befriended have expressed respect for me because I am a college graduate, an international traveler, and a woman. I know that my difference intrigues them; my foreignness empowers, and I use it to my advantage. I get a slight thrill from stretching gender boundaries when I hang out with male migrants. Once when I went to dinner with a group of construction workers, the boss was shocked that I was not uncomfortable with the situation, suggesting a respectable local girl would never go out alone at night with a group of rowdy men. During a recent visit to a research subject’s house, I had the slightly awkward realization that I was the only woman willing to discuss politics at dinner.

Having it both ways

I still can’t bring myself to call my research subjects “friends,” although they think of me as such. While they tend to simplify me in their minds, I analyze qualities of theirs to which they themselves are oblivious. My conversations with them never feel quite equal and thus can never be fully open. We’re operating on different levels of awareness — maybe even two different levels of power.

They feel privileged to have a friend like me, who offers them a window into a world they’ll never experience, yet who does not speak a strange language or have a white face.  A migrant worker close to my age told me that his village friends wanted him to take me back home on his next visit, so they could see what his “American friend” was like. I didn’t appreciate the prospect of being paraded around like an exotic pet. Yet I can’t be angry with him, because my “friendship” with him is similarly self-serving. My research subjects are my primary sources, and the fact that I can access them makes me feel special the same way they perhaps feel special for accessing an American.

A foreign student once told me that when people see foreigners here, they see money. I’m reluctantly beginning to believe him. People question me about everything from the price of my tape recorder or the clothing I am wearing to my monthly rent or the amount of my fellowship. I’ve been asked for a loan more than once, for rent money, for investment in a future business, for the purchase of inventory. I guess this is what I would do too if I lived in a world where it was crucial to grab every opportunity that came my way. I restrain my urge to yell that being from a First-World country does not make me a credit union.

But in the end, I have to concede my privilege, and it drags heavily on me. It’s not just having financial resources or an education. My privilege is rooted in my insight, my ability to view these people from my American perspective — to pass judgment, to observe their limitations and aspirations and futile hopes — while remaining detached. To me, they are primarily subjects, and friends only when I want them to be more than foils in my China experience.

It’s odd being able to have it both ways, operating as a two-faced double agent, moving back and forth across the culture gap. The more I become aware of the distance between myself and the migrants, the more I want to close it by spending time in their homes, talking with them, joking with them, trying to build some sort of rapport. But there’s always an element of exploitation, because I am the researcher. My investment in this place is not one of the heart but of the intellect, and though I’ve built warm relationships here, despite my determination to see the best in these people, they are not intellectual connections.

And on the other side, I see myself in the context of other foreigners living in China, and I realize that what I despise about them is what I fear seeing in myself — that cold, careless, clumsy superficiality, that arrogance forged from the latent understanding that this whole country is a temporary experience—a cultural experiment that can end any time one gets tired of it. It’s that arrogance of being able to choose one’s environment.

A debatable identity: two halves, or a whole?

Still, I also willingly enforce my arrogance. Cultural divisions feed my American exceptionalism, manifesting itself in my constant assumption that I must be right in a given debate — on China-Taiwan politics, on how much freedom parents should give children, on when a young person should get married — because I grew up in a comparatively democratic country and have a perspective on the world that the Chinese lack, or because I’ve graduated from college and the person I’m speaking to has a rural junior high school education.

I’ve spent countless evenings with a migrant worker from Shandong, in front of a television flashing images of combat in Iraq and the War on Terror, arguing with him about whether Iraq was better off before the American “liberation.” Though I’m hardly a defender of America, I feel compelled to counter the simplistic idea that Iraq was a content and peaceful nation before America came in and screwed everything up. When the same man said that he supported Osama Bin Laden for attacking America on September 11, 2001, a spontaneous twinge of patriotism urged me to ask: “If my parents had been working in the Twin Towers then, would you still support him?” Inwardly, I know I just desire to counter other people’s self-righteousness with my own, and the fact that both sides are probably misinformed affords us the opportunity to argue pointlessly with abandon.

Even among Chinese peers with educational and class backgrounds similar to mine, with whom I previously looked forward to sharing a common youth culture, a condescending attitude has begun to envelop me. I find myself looking down on Chinese young people’s obedience to a system of laws and rules that I see as oppressive. They stomach a dull and creativity-stifling public education system. Though many don’t respect the social structure that they must negotiate, they comply with it in order to get ahead.

Americans do the same thing, of course, but in China, where education consists basically of tests and regurgitation of lessons, complicity seems even more dangerous to an already silenced civil society. With one Chinese friend, a journalist, I debated whether China would soon face political instability if it did not begin to democratize its government. She asserted that China was more stable than I thought, that you could get along fine as long as you did not get involved in politics or voice your opinion when you weren’t supposed to. She prefers to stay away from sensitive issues like political oppression.

I wanted to tell her that her self-censorship is more of a threat to China’s political future than any outright oppression. But I refrained, because there is no way for me to grasp fully China’s political situation. My Chinese peers, at any rate, may be freer than they appear on the surface. The friend who has vowed to stay out of politics recently went through a political “training course” run by her employer, which she was instructed not to report about. In her bag on the way back from work, however, she carried one of the books that has been banned from press coverage.

People are subtly challenging the system in ways that I can’t understand; coming from a relatively enlightened political culture may actually blind me to the nuances of this political change. Who am I to lecture people on the necessity of political reform in China when I cynically ignore what’s going on in American electoral politics, and when my own country prospers at the expense of the freedom of others?

In our elliptical debates on cultural rifts, people have questioned whether I feel more Chinese or more American.  The simplest answer I can conjure is the loaded one:  I feel both Chinese and American. People admire this access to both cultures, instilling in me a pride that I’m not completely comfortable with. I like to be proud of things that I’ve done, not of a background that I did not choose.

But much of my confidence here is rooted in privilege that I did not earn. Sometimes I walk down the street, see people climbing over each other to board a bus at rush hour, spitting gratuitously on the sidewalk, displaying extremely bad hairstyles, begging on the street, walking around with a mass of scar tissue where one’s cheek should be—from a factory accident? A “struggle session” during the Cultural Revolution ?—and I think, Damn it, America is a great country. My hometown, New York, is a rough place, but at least people line up to buy train tickets there, at least most public toilets display a modicum of sanitary standards, at least the contents of your daily paper are not exactly the propaganda of the ruling party, and if the police harass you unjustly, there is a chance that you can seek legal redress through the justice system. Living in China has made me, an unlikely patriot, feel lucky to be an American — even, dare I say, proud.

The author encountered these young girls during a visit to an impoverished Tibetan settlement in Western Sichuan Province.

Through double-doors

The Chinese have a custom of going from door to door, leisurely visiting neighbors, called chuan men. It seems that my lifestyle now consists of jumping among different doors.

I live half my life now among migrant workers, people who have also chosen their environment. But did they choose it, really? “We were forced here,” one woman told me when I asked if their migration had been empowering to her as a female head of household. It’s not freedom to them — it’s economic captivity.

Entering their lives makes me realize that some doors will always remain closed to me. I know they are joking when they tell me to bring them back to America with them (help my son find a job there, all I need is a visa) again and again, but each time they repeat the request, the seams of their smiles bear threads of desperation. They don’t expect me to help them, but they still ask, out of an instinct to pursue any chance of improving their situation.

And why shouldn’t I help them, if I have more at this moment than they will ever possess? Am I selfish? Do my “American values” dictate that they should earn their way out of poverty on their own? Or am I just afraid that if I help one person, there will be nothing stopping me from helping the dozen or so other people I’ve befriended over the past several months who all need money? I think the main reason is my fear that if I make myself an economic resource for these people, they’ll see me more as an opportunity to get ahead than as another human being, and I will begin to see them as faceless, desperate opportunists and nothing more. That’s not the kind of relationship I was seeking when I came to Shanghai. The hectic, overcrowded anonymity of this sprawling city spurs me to try to preserve the best parts of my humanity, both native and foreign, as much as possible.

But underneath the moral conundrums of living as a foreigner in a –developing-world metropolis, what pains me most is that there is nothing keeping me from abandoning my troubling sense of ethics altogether. A foreigner has so much more license to screw up in China. American dollars go a long way here, and the status of being American can buy you a lifestyle of pleasant apathy unimaginable in the West.

I worry about falling into this laziness of Western privilege. In the past century, my native country has displaced China (the once-great empire named the “center of the earth”) as the axis of modern civilization. But when I try to discipline myself into being as un-foreign and humble as possible, in some ways it only reaffirms my foreignness. Who else would have the time and resources to experiment with a denial of privilege besides those who are most privileged? I have an ample research grant that covers all my living expenses while I am here. I try to fulfill the fellowship’s well-intentioned mission of scholarly and cultural exchange.

But it’s hard to approach the task with humility without being tugged by the inherent self-importance of being a cultural ambassador, especially when I know I represent America to the people with whom I interact. As I negotiate this new territory, I’m discovering that the border between native and foreign is surprisingly porous, the line between experience and exploitation so fine, it is almost irrelevant.

This article was written during a 10-month research fellowship in Shanghai. The author has since returned to the United States, though she has not fully recovered from China — and hopes she never will.

STORY INDEX

TOPICS > CULTURAL IDENTITY AND LIVING ABROAD >

World Hum
Enlightened travel writing.
URL: http://www.worldhum.com/

PLACES > CHINA >

China’s Communist Revolution, a Glossary
The BBC’s multimedia project on the history of Communist China.
URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/special_report/1999/09/99/china_50/default.htm

China Internet Information Center
Official news from China.
URL: http://www.china.org.cn/english/

Asia Times Online
Unofficial news from China.
URL: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China.html

Michelle Chen