Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
1. Organ-Stealing Prostitutes: Myths, Language, and Other Walls Between China and the World
2. Bella and the Books: China’s Competitive Study Culture Forges a Determined Heart
3. Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears the Crown: China’s Little Emperors and Their Heavy Expectations
4. How to Eat Your Parents: China’s Housing and Marriage Markets Collide
5. Sex for Fun: The Quiet Revolution
6. A Leftover Woman: How Marriage Expectations and Government Priorities Bind
7. Double Eyelids for Double 11: Conspicuous Consumption and the Biggest Consumer Holiday in the World
8. Test Monsters Dream of Innovation: Will China’s Superstudents Reinvent Their Country?
9. The Good Comrade: Being Gay in the Middle Kingdom
10. Learning to Play: From Eating Bitter to Eating Hotpot
11. Be There Now: One Hundred Million New Travelers Hit the Road
12. A Young Man and His Party: How the New Generation Sees Its Government
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
Copyright
YOUNG CHINA. Copyright © 2018 by Zak Dychtwald. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover photograph: girl © Dong Wenjie/Getty Images
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-07881-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-9133-3 (ebook)
eISBN 9781466891333
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].
First Edition: February 2018
* Philip’s given name is not Philip. Like many from Hong Kong, and increasingly from the mainland, he took an English name. “It is convenient for doing business with foreigners,” he told me. One of those foreigners had been my godfather, Jayme. When I planned to study abroad in Hong Kong, Jayme reached out to Philip and asked him to look after me. He took the role of Chinese godfather very seriously.
* The symbols above the English letters represent a tone, of which there are four. They are easy to read, as the direction of the line over the letter indicates the direction one pitches their voice to accurately pronounce the word. For instance, the first word, Yī, meaning “one” and read in a first tone, is read in a high, flat tone. Pán, in this case translated as “sheet” and read in a second tone, is read by pitching one’s voice from low to high. Sǎn, translated as “loose” and read in a third tone, is read by dipping one’s pitch from medium to low and back to medium-high. There is no fourth tone in this phrase, so we will use the example of mà, to curse or scold, which is read pitching one’s voice from high to low.
† This line dividing China in two was proposed by the geographer Hu Huanyong in 1935 and is best known as the Hu Huanyong Line (also as the Heihe-Tengchong line) and runs from Heihe, Harbin, a city in China’s frozen northernmost coastal province on Russia’s southern border, diagonally down and across from Tengchong, Yunnan, China’s southwestern province that borders the Tibet Autonomous Region, Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar (formerly Burma).
* 书山有路勤为径，学海无涯苦作舟: Shū shān yǒu lù qín wèi jìng, xué hǎi wú yá kǔ zuò zhōu.
* In part this law was designed to stop religious missionaries from proselytizing the Chinese.
* A Spaced Repetition System (SRS) is a tool that learns with you to present study material before you forget it. Based on past performance, the SRS will manage the timing and frequency of chosen material. For instance, I have correctly identified the flashcard for the word I in Chinese often enough that my SRS knows I don’t need to see it anytime soon. The phrase for nuclear deterrence, on the other hand, will show up much more often, as I have yet to master it. When managing thousands of inputs, an SRS decides what you need to study so you just need to sit and do it.
* Several years ago, many cities around China outlawed motorbikes, both as a way to clean up city air and incentivize green industries. Now, the streets are packed with electric mopeds that people charge every night in their apartment complexes.
* Using Chinese characters to imitate the sounds of English words is still quite common among older Chinese who can’t read pinyin, the romanization of the Chinese script that young Chinese now learn alongside or before Chinese characters to standardize pronunciation. Older Chinese people say “ha-lou” instead of hello because that is how it is transliterated in Chinese: hālóu.
* According to the United Nations, before implementation of the one-child policy, sixty males and fifty-three females died before their first birthday per one thousand live births of each gender in China. By the 1990s the figures were twenty-six males and thirty-three girls died per thousand live births before the age of one. In the 2000s, twenty-one boys and twenty-eight girls died per thousand live births. The reasons for these deaths included accidents and illnesses. But “it would be a ‘fair inference’ to suggest that infanticide has had a role in this, says Jonathan Cave, an economist at Warwick University … Actual infanticide … is rare, though … some families, faced with limited resources, may have chosen to prioritize boys in terms of healthcare and nurturing. Couples in rural areas were permitted to have a second child if the first was a girl—this was partly an effort to reduce neglect and infanticide, says Cave.” See Justin Parkinson, “Five Numbers That Sum Up China’s One-Child Policy,” BBC News Magazine, October 29, 2015, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34666440.
* Researchers have established a link between education styles and nearsightedness. Whereas China used to report around 20 percent of its population suffered from myopia, that number has soared to 90 percent for teenagers and young adults. Korea, who boasts another memorization-centric Confucian education system, reports 96 percent of students suffer from nearsightedness compared to a third or less in England, the United States, and Germany.
* Even the slang for censorship has found a homophone to avoid the censors. Censors claim they are “maintaining public harmony” by removing items from the Internet, so when netizens found something had been censored, they would complain about comments or articles that had been harmonized. Soon the censors caught on. Netizens then substituted the term river crab for harmony because the terms are homophonic in Mandarin but have different tones: the difference between héxié—harmony—and héxiè—river crab—when spoken is a failing fourth tone in the second syllable. Now Chinese say sensitive articles are often “river crabbed.”
* This phrase directly translates to “seven paternal aunts and eight maternal aunts.”
* If China were to have a sitcom about its last four decades of development, the main character’s catchphrase would almost undoubtedly be 计划赶不上变化, or plans can’t keep up with the changes. It is a commonly used phrase to describe an apartment being torn down, a radical change in technology, a pivot from the government, and all of the good and bad changes that make steadfast long-term planning in China a near impossibility without making enormous room for variability.
† Apartments in China only provide the illusion of ownership. China often exercises eminent domain, seizing land and repurposing it for public projects. Few mass land seizures have been better documented than those associated with the Three Gorges Dam project, which displaced about 1.3 million people. Some people are remunerated poorly, others handsomely. Even displacement can be cast as fortune intervening in China. Some families receive so much money for their property that their sons or daughters are called chāi èr d
ài, “generation demolition money,” a play on the famously advantaged fù èr dài, “second-generation wealthy,” and guān èr dài, “second-generation public officials.”
* Li also pointed out that Friends’s Monica inherited the rent-controlled apartment from her grandmother. Li noted, “Our government does not have this ‘rent-controlled’ idea, OK?”
* “Sitting the month,” zùo yuèzi, refers to the restorative month-long period after childbirth when women are meant to regain their strength. During that month new mothers are supposed to stay at home or in one of the thousands of hospitals in China specifically designed for postnatal care. The controlled cleanliness of the environment is meant to protect women in what is described as their weakened state after birth. Cold fruit and cold drinks are forbidden. All types of “cold” things, from weather to water to food, are limited or forbidden. Whereas women once were restricted to limited bathing, with the advent of indoor heat and showers they are now supposed to shower, with the water at 104 degrees Fahrenheit. The traditional concept is more than two thousand years old, having originated during the Western Han Dynasty (206 BC–9 AD) and remains widely popular within Chinese medicine.
* This is how the Chinese refer to what the West often calls the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), beginning with the Japanese occupation, most famously including the Rape of Nanking, and extending to the end of World War II.
* I was once reprimanded by a friend from Beijing while telling him how it pained me to move away from that apartment in Suzhou. His family had moved out of the Hutong district, the narrow street alleys that have come to be emblematic of “old Beijing.” He told me, “You foreigners, especially journalists and academics, come in and want to learn about China, who China is today, where China is going, right? You all move into our historic districts and old buildings that we’re all trying to move out of. Tell me this: is China going in the direction of the Hutongs? Of the run-down apartments by the canals? All of you living in those parts distorts your understanding and coverage of China.”
* “The lock is really a software code that’s put on the phone by the manufacturer as per the requirement of the carrier that sells the device. And the lock is meant to ensure that the phone can’t be used on any other operator’s network until a different software code is entered to unlock the device.” Marguerite Reardon, “Ask Maggie,” CNET, August 15, 2013, https://www.cnet.com/news/confused-about-locked-vs-unlocked-phones-ask-maggie-explains/.
* The College Board denied my request to see countries of origins for all testers who scored perfect marks, and I couldn’t help but wonder how many came from China.
* Both Ju Chao and Lin Lin offered me their admissions materials after the admissions process had been completed.
* China has a taxonomy of cigarette brands that everyone recognizes: the workingman’s cigarettes, the government official’s cigarette, the festive cigarette, and so on. The cigarettes handed out by the sons of the deceased were far too expensive for the humble village.
* According to Gallup, fewer than 5 percent of Americans identify as gay or lesbian. See Garance Frank-Rutka, “Americans Have No Idea How Few Gay People There Are,” The Atlantic, May 31, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/americans-have-no-idea-how-few-gay-people-there-are/257753/.
* Bùxiào yǒusān, wǒ hòu wéi dà: “Of the three major violations of filial piety, not producing a successor is the gravest.”
* It has now been circulated in so many different permutations under so many names that pinning down the original is impossible.
* 食色性也: Shí sè xìng yě.
* Not to be confused with my Chinese godfather, my Chinese uncle is a man named Chungliang “Al” Huang. He and my dad have known each other since they were young. He has known me since I was a child. Uncle Al is a Tai Qi master and calligrapher. Several months after I arrived in China, he invited me to take part in a Tai Qi retreat he was leading in the mountains of Wu Yi, Fujian. He is also responsible for giving me my Chinese name.
* “今朝有酒，今朝醉!”: “jīn zhāo yǒu jiǔ, jīn zhāo zuì!”
* In comparison, a third of Americans, two-thirds of Canadians, and three-quarters of the British hold passports.
* 世界这么大，我想去看看: “Shìjiè zhème dà, wǒ xiǎng qù kàn kàn.”
* Though there has been some recent scholarship disputing the popular reading of Emperor Qianlong’s letter to King George, which argues that the correspondence proves China’s arrogance in underestimating the Western empire, Chinese primary school books continue to utilize this narrative as a cautionary device. For the new reading, see Tom Cunliffe, “Emperor Qianlong’s Letter Strategic, Not Arrogant,” China.org.cn, January 30, 2015, http://www.china.org.cn/china/2015-01/30/content_34686142.htm.
* 看脸的社会: kàn liǎn de shèhuì
* 酒后吐真言: Jiǔ hòu tǔ zhēnyán. Literally, this idiom translates to “After booze vomit/spit out the truth.”
* “Moderately prosperous society” is the translation of Xiǎokāng shèhuì used by the Xinhua News Agency.
* 天高皇帝远: Tiān gāo huángdì yuan.
† In Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll, author Jonathan Campbell writes, “If Western rock blew the minds of young Chinese in the early eighties, Cui’s song twisted heads clear off bodies and drop-kicked them across time and space.” Jonathan Campbell, Red Rock: The Long Strange March to Chinese Rock & Roll (Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books Limited, 2011).
* This phrase is originally from the Japanese saying 出る釘は打たれる, but it is also quite applicable to Chinese culture regarding group dynamics.
* 一朝天子一朝臣: Yī cháo tiān zǐ yī cháo chén.
* 大众创业，万众创新: Dàzhòng chuàngyè, wànzhòng chuàngxīn.
* 信心危机，信仰危机，信任危机: Xìnxīn wéijī, xìnyǎng wéijī, xìnrèn wéijī.
Young China Page 28
