Letter from Japan

Alvin Saha:

Hey, you don't know me, but I just happened to come upon your profile and I remembered that you used to write for the Spinnaker. I always thought that you wrote good stuff, so I sat down to read your profile, and found out that you are in China. I'm studying in Japan for a year, I've been here for about 6-7 months now, with about 5 more to go. What do you think about China and the political system? I was reading a little bit of your blog, but not very deeply, I must admit. What program are you teaching in China with? I've never been to China, but I've found that Japan is socially repressed and alienating. Oddly enough, it isn't just the gaijin (foreigners) who are alienated, but the Japanese themselves as well. To me, Japan, though a great nation (not to mention a helluva lot of fun), seems to have a large number of social problems that stem not from political repression, but rather societal values and the trouble that the younger generations are having with embracing liberal Western values and maintaining their traditional vales, which are often at odds with each other. Is China like this?

My response:

Hey Alvin,

I'm down in Shenzhen, China's first capitalist experiment [called a Special Economic Zone], teaching at a boarding school run by Beijing/Peking University. I'm teaching grades 3 - 6 right now. It's not quite what I was expecting to be doing but the job has grown on me a lot. I'm thinking next year I want explicitly aim to teach at a college. I'm assuming you're studying Japanese, right? My Chinese is coming along slowly but surely.

Ey, it seems the problems are very different in our respective countries. The Chinese are very family oriented. I mean, I'd always heard that other countries are family oriented, but coming from a divorced family with a great deal of estrangement I always assumed that the other half of America with non-divorced households was "family oriented."

By family oriented, they mean things like my roommate given half of her $250 a month to her parents. They saved a lifetime for her college education and now she subsidizes their future retirement. There's also the dynamic that almost every household being single-child. Kids here are lavished with attention and whatever the parents can afford.

Alienation just isn't an issue that I've seen.

The issues most younger Chinese face is trying to find meaningful and prosperous employment. This is a country that turns old ladies into human lawnmowers. Every store and restaurant has about double the staff that it really needs. There's just too many people... even a college degree in accounting, like my roommate, won't get you too much in your hometown. A lot of them move to the bigger cities for work.

Even in places like Shenzhen, my city, where almost no one is local, people cling to what's left of "traditional" values. Mao destroyed a lot of what we'd consider traditional Chinese culture, but there's an air of prudence about. Girls aren't supposed to wear bikini's to the beach and most of the women I've flirted with have kissed, at most, one boy in their quarter century of life. Being far away from home doesn't seem to erode these values as much as you'd think.

"Modern" is in, but it means money... not culture or thought. There is no art scene to speak of like in Japan. There are no "scenes" at all pushing boundaries and asking troubling questions. Everyone just wants to make enough cash to survive and give their kids a better future. So no, there really is no clash between their take on modern and traditional values.

Glad to hear from you,
- Trey Menefee

Tags: Treyopia China Chinese Japan Japanese culture modern difference traditional