At the Teahouse Café: Essays from the Middle Kingdom

By Isham Cook

It's 1949 at Revolutionary University. Chinese students spend all their waking hours in political meetings—when they're not hauling feces from the latrines to the manure fields.

Jump to 2015. Chinese endure endless meetings at the hands of bosses and are required to keep their cellphones on around the clock and pick up at once—or be fined. They live in a technological utopia while enslaved by the same structures of psychological control of over half a century earlier.

Underlying the myth of a "New China" are the contemporary Middle Kingdom's numerous continuities with its past. In this collection of wide-ranging essays, Cook reaffirms the old adage that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

"As an American who has lived in China for many years, Cook provides insights into a culture that is notoriously opaque to outsiders, its intricacies and quirks revealing themselves only after significant immersion."--Kirkus Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Isham Cook
• Release date: May 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9780986293412

Isham Cook

A Chicagoan, Isham Cook has lived in China, since 1994.

Book preview

​Preface

The challenge in introducing an exotic country to an English readership is how to package a people in the consumable form of a book. The prevailing method for nonfiction is to employ two interlocking techniques: the representative sampling and the objective reporting style.

Let’s first consider how to sample a society. If the goal is to present a cross-section of a country, a mosaic of a society at a glance, the number of potential candidates to draw from, any one of whom qualifies as much as any other, soon overwhelms. A means of reducing the number is needed. You could confine the selection to the most memorable personages who happen to come your way as you meander through a country, remarkable in their very ordinariness, as in Graham Earnshaw’s The Great Walk of China: Travels on Foot from Shanghai to Tibet (Blacksmith Books, 2010). If this approach sacrifices a certain breadth, it has the virtue of lived experience, of spontaneity and authenticity.

Or you could cull subjects around some universal or aspirational theme, as in Evan Osnos’ Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014): In my research, I gravitated most of all to the strivers—the men and women who were trying to elbow their way from one realm to another, not just in economic terms, but in matters of politics, ideas, and the spirit. As Peter Hessler describes his own similar purpose:

I often wrote about people who were on the move. I found myself attracted to the migrants and the transplants, the ones who were searching and the ones who were fleeing. I like the folks who felt a little out of place. Some were chameleonlike, and others dreamed of returning home; a few engaged in various forms of creative bumbling. But they were all good to talk to, because they had learned to describe their surroundings with an outsider’s eye. (Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West, Harper Perennial, 2013)

This approach would seem to have greater reach and breadth. Yet it relies on a finely tuned winnowing process, one that reflects certain priorities of the author or publisher. In the case of China, these priorities tend to be skewed towards the disadvantaged and downtrodden sectors of the population. Although the intention may be to represent people from all walks of life, what’s really being represented are the expectations and stereotypes of Anglo audiences for an oppressed and tragic China.

Dovetailing with the aspirational approach is the contemporary reportorial style. Think of the omniscient third-person narrator of traditional fiction, who stands above the action of the story to observe it wisely and dispassionately with his all-seeing eye. The objective reporter similarly at-tempts to disappear, to remove himself from the scene and allow his subjects to speak for them-selves. It is taken for granted nowadays that all journalists and reporters do this. Nonetheless, it still seems to need emphasizing, given the long era of distortions in Orientalist ethnology and letters from former colonialist lands, which we have only gradually emerged from. The following excerpt could serve as one of many examples:

Filth there was everywhere. It seemed inseparable from the people, and a total apathy as regards matter in the wrong place pervaded all classes, from the highest to the lowest. The spring is opening, and my hard-worked coolies doff their heavy padded winter clothing, parade their naked skin, and are quite unconscious of any disgrace attending the exhibition of the itch sores which disfigure them. I remember, however, that I am in China, and must not be disgusted. (Edwin John Dingle, Across China on Foot, Earnshaw Books, 1911)

Or consider the curious dispatch from China by the journalist Carl Crow, Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom (Earnshaw Books, 1940), of only a few generations ago (which I will return to in Chapter 15). The book purports to introduce the country to an American audience, yet it contains not one quotation or fragment of reported conversation, not one minimally fleshed-out description of a Chinese individual, despite the author’s decades of residence in Shanghai.

Osnos thus reminds us that he has tried, above all, to describe Chinese lives on their own terms (Age of Ambition). Hessler notes this as well, while pointing out the limitations of objective reportage when adhered to too strictly:

One challenge for a foreign correspondent is to figure out how much of yourself to include: If a story is too self-centered, it becomes a tourist’s diary. These days, the general trend is to reduce the writer’s presence, often to the point of invisibility. This is the standard approach of newspapers, and it’s described as a way of maintaining focus and impartiality. But it can make the subject feel even more distant and foreign. (Strange Stones)

Such a compromise allows the narrator to loosen the reins a bit and adopt a leisurely style of nonfiction storytelling. While his foreignness unavoidably impacts his interactions with the Chinese, he need not entirely suppress his own identity in the interest of objectivity. It’s a nice balance that serves another purpose, again for the sake of audience obligations. In the high-stakes elite publishing market to which writers like Hessler and Osnos belong, travel literature is scripted and circumscribed by the dictates of mass-market sameness. Personas are calibrated to average-American reporter guy settings, with a bit of bumbling gee-whiz naivety thrown in perhaps, but otherwise shorn of any unsettling idiosyncrasies. Besides institutional blandness, there are other problems with the objective sampler approach, enough to dissuade me from adopting it in At the Teahouse Café.

First off, the idea of encapsulating in a single volume the people of a whole nation, especially one as huge as China, is absurd, however well intentioned. To turn it around, I can’t think of any comparable book about the USA written for a foreign audience, which could serve as a representative sampling of Americans (it would be hard enough to imagine such a book even about any US minority group). If a Chinese person shows me a copy of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickle and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America and says he learned a great deal about Americans from it, I wouldn’t disagree, but the circumstances of her subjects have very little to do with me or almost anyone else I know. While I happen to admire Ehrenreich and have myself once experienced some of the penury she describes, the cross-section of lives her book embraces is quite limited when viewed against the larger society. Or perhaps one of Studs Terkel’s oral histories? But his was an ongoing project, carried out over numerous books on a variety of subcultures; only thereby is a significant section of American life able to come into view.

The more time one spends in a country, the less one is able to describe it. One can only depict the local and the particular. The sheer variety of people and range of individualities stretches out infinitely, flattening generalizations and rendering any attempt at national characterization a purely arbitrary exercise. Some common traits can be isolated and valid cross-cultural inferences made, a few patterns ascertained and laws arrived at, but that’s a different endeavor—the essay. The longer I live in China (sixteen years now), the less conscious I am of being in a foreign country. I can step back and contemplate my context and my inevitable differences from natives, to be sure, but that’s not the default state of mind. What I notice more and more are the similarities that people share everywhere. The variations among individuals are always greater than the differences between countries.

Second, there is too much disingenuousness involved in the suppression of authorial character to warrant use of the so-called objective narrative persona. The objective reporter is, again, the unique creation of certain marketing trends in Anglo journalism and publishing over recent decades. It is very much a product of our times. That my book is not published by a major publisher frees me from these constraints and allows me to adopt a critical stance towards this unacknowledged ideology.

The author’s own eccentricities are as interesting as any of the people he or she chooses to write about. To deny these in the name of an illusory impartiality amounts to self-censorship. I want to know all about his problems, debts, lies, affairs, fantasies and other secrets and schemes, acquired in the home country from which he is fleeing or in the country to which he has fled. I want to know about all the people he would have written about but didn’t for fear of compromising so-called professional integrity. I am most interested in the author whose very presence in another country is a source of strife and drama, who is confounded by the culture while conforming to it or not; or one who is arrested or kicked out over some dreadful scandal. In this respect Englishman Robert H. Da-vies’ brazen and eloquent Prisoner 13498: A True Story of Love, Drugs and Jail in Modern China (Mainstream, 2001) has to be one of the most impressive nonfiction books on the country ever writ-ten.

Finally, the Western writer’s urgency in speaking for, and on behalf of, an oppressed people straining under authoritarianism, striving and searching for freedom, is hostile to the one thing literary representation relies on for readability: attitude. In place of irony, satire and wit, we have the monochromatic voice of earnestness and righteousness. But there is nothing more humorless than politically correct cultural relativism, even with avuncular touches of humor added to the mix. I find the refreshing candor and dismissive contempt of the imperialist traveler of yore, if not terribly edifying on the culture, then more entertaining. More Edwin Dingle:

The town’s business stopped. People left their stalls and shops to glare aimlessly at or to ask inane and unintelligible questions about the barbarian who seemed to have dropped suddenly from the heavens. When I addressed a few words to them in strongest Anglo-Saxon, telling them in the name of all they held sacred to go away and leave me in peace, something like a cheer would go up, and my boy would swear them all down in his choicest. When I slowly rose to move the crowd looked disappointed, but allowed me to go forward on my journey in peace. (Across China on Foot)

My own way out of this impasse is to adhere to my own rules. I avoid the temptation to speak for or represent China through a carefully culled assemblage of native voices. Instead, I write about whatever has preoccupied me in recent years, in the hope that my experiences will resonate with readers knowledgeable about the country or pique the interest of those less so. Where relevant, I freely implicate myself in my interactions with locals. If elsewhere I tend to stay in the background, it’s not out of objectivity or some other brand of professional modesty, but because I’ve already detailed my life in China in other books, Lust & Philosophy, The Exact Unknown, and Massage and the Writer, where I freely acknowledge my hallucinogen-drenched hippie past and irrepressible radicalism. At the Teahouse Café captures certain facets of China better suited to the form of the essay (descriptive and expository, polemical and satirical), spotlighting the country’s various institutions and social spheres (politics, education, psychology; eating, shopping, entertainment). A few of the essays grapple with China through cross-cultural comparisons (US, Japan), or turn the perspective around to examine Western preoccupations and prejudices from the Chinese standpoint.

Every generation tries to break out of the old mold, whether openly or covertly through passive-aggressive behavior. Chinese society is currently going through a passive-aggressive phase. There is slavish conformity, and at the same time a bizarre disrespect for civil society and laws. I think it has something to do with the obsession with privacy and private space. There is no public space; all space is private and automatically yours. You own whatever space you happen to occupy at the moment. You own the car you are driving, and you therefore own the patch of road your car sits upon, even if it’s blocking an ambulance on its way to the emergency room. People are every bit as afraid of losing their place in line at McDonald’s, their standing in the Party, their coworkers’ approval of their latest dress, their virginity, or their investments in the stock market, as they are their car’s patch of asphalt. That’s the current vibe the country is dealing with. It will pass, or to be more exact, things will take a new guise, and it’s hard to say what that will be. China evolves much more drastically than other cultures, while staying true to itself.

I. C., Beijing, May 2015

​Chapter 1: Honesty, diligence, obedience: Why I support China’s Great Firewall

Many negative reports have been coming out of China lately. A litany of scandals involving greed, fakery, adulterated food, callous drivers sideswiping pedestrians, and so on, have appeared in the Western media. Now there is much concern that the country wishes to close off Internet access to the rest of the world. As a long-time foreign resident in China, I wish to lay out the reasons for this laudatory development and set the record straight.

China is a Confucian country with a strong tradition of morality. The five traditional virtues of the ideal Confucian gentleman are ren, yi, li, zhi, and xin, which translate as benevolence, righteousness, etiquette (the filial rites), wisdom, and faith. Since Chinese communist morality is the logical outgrowth of Confucian morality, in 2013 the Party launched the China Radiates Virtue campaign (deyao zhonghua). It updated the latter three of the five virtues to accord better with modern times. The Party’s new five virtues represent those of the ideal communist: ren, yi, cheng, jing, and xiao, or benevolence, righteousness, honesty, diligence, and obedience (filial piety).

A series of five posters celebrating this campaign have sprung up in many cities. Each poster presents one of the five virtues and twenty-four illustrative role models, drawn from both the widely known and the ordinary among the populace. Let’s take a look at one of these posters, that of cheng or honesty:

Among other fellow role models, there is Zhen Rendong, a lowly janitor who discovered a bag containing RMB 200,000 (about USD $35,000) in a rubbish bin. Although he lives a hard life, he reported it to the police. The owner expressed his gratitude by awarding him RMB 2,000. However, instead of keeping the reward, Mr. Zhen donated it to the local government.

There is Liu Hong’an, a college undergraduate who runs his own breakfast stand selling Chinese crullers (deep-fried dough twists). Some unscrupulous sellers add alum or detergent to the oil to lend crispness to the dough, and may even use recycled gutter oil as well. But not Liu Hong’an, who would never compromise his loyal customers’ health.

There is Liu Guohua, chairman of a dairy company in Shanxi Province, who vows never to succumb to profiteering by selling adulterated milk. Whenever the price of milk goes down, he still purchases it at inflated rates to protect the livelihood of the farmers from whom he sources the milk.

And there is Liu Chencai, general manager of a pharmacy chain in Hainan Province. He is famous for treating his employees with kindness and respect, laying off not a single one during the Chinese financial crisis of 2009. He is highly conscientious and would never sell anything but reputable, quality-assured medicine.

So we see that the reality of China is quite different from the negative accounts regularly featured in the Western media. Most Chinese are moral and examples can be found from all walks of life. The original role model is of course Lei Feng, the humble PLA soldier who spent his short life helping others until his untimely death in 1962 at the age of twenty, when he was accidentally killed while directing traffic. So widely revered is this model of virtue that the Chinese Government can’t print enough posters of him to display around every Chinese city. There is even rumored to be a Lei Feng University where the cream of China’s students recite quotations from his diary and learn how to be altruistic citizens.

For instance, if you come upon a roadside accident, don’t just stand in the crowd staring at the victim but help him, even if he or she accuses you of causing the accident and demands a huge amount of money in medical compensation. Or if you happen to hit someone with your vehicle, don’t speed away and certainly don’t run over the victim a second time to kill him and make him go away, but take responsibility for your actions and call for help. Observe Lei Feng’s example and be a good Samaritan.

Following a barrage of popular complaints, there has been an upswell of support in the past few years to curtail bad information from the outside world via the Internet. Such destructive influences take the form, for example, of separatists agitating for Tibetan or Taiwanese independence, corrosive social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, slanted Western news organizations, and most of all the scourge of pornography. The overly lenient policies of Presidents Jiang and Hu experimented with blocking a few of these sites. But with the advent of devious means of accessing them illegally, it is clear that more needs to be done. Chinese citizens are increasingly demanding cyber-sovereignty—a closed, autonomous and native Chinese Internet, free of outside influence. This will be achieved by the neutralization of the virtual private networks or VPN’s, which enable unlawful access to the World Wide Web. I applaud this development and wholeheartedly support the blocking, most recently, of Google and Gmail as well.

I have lived many years both in China and my home country of the United States, and I am thus in a position to understand both sides. I acknowledge the appeal Western newspapers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal has for many Americans. But after extensive contact with alternative viewpoints and much critical reassessment, I have come to realize how biased they are.

This is not the space to analyze the problem in depth. I suggest a good book on the topic, such as Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Chomsky details the ways the major US news organizations shape—brainwash is the word—Americans to identify their own interests with those of the moneyed class, more euphemistically known as the Establishment. And what is remarkable about this Western indoctrination is that the more educated you are, the more likely you are to believe it. To take an example from recent times, American news media, being de facto instruments of the US Government, put up very little protest against the brutal and disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003.

I also understand the appeal of Facebook and Twitter. They are fine for Westerners, but not for the Chinese. Twitter is deluged with pornography and all sorts of unbalanced ideas that cause rumors and mislead people to think and act irrationally and dangerously. Real-time networking apps are used by American teenagers to form flash mobs to harass and beat up innocent crowds. Facebook displays Americans’ unhealthy obsession with pets—a diarrheic stream of cat videos (the Chinese are more practical and use domestic animals for food instead of entertainment). China’s web, by contrast, has come up with closely monitored, more hygienic equivalents to Facebook and Twitter, namely Renren and Weibo. Yahoo and MSN