CRITICAL

The Jude has ruined me. The orientation week of my freshman year of college, I had an epiphany that the Jude directly caused. I had just settled into my dorm room, I had chosen the inner single room in my triple room (inside the double room was a single room and I was the first one in bright and early, I took it because, well, to hell with lazy asses!) and we poured over the schedule looking for what was going on that day.

“Is there anything you need to be here for?” The Jude asked.

“Um, there’s an ORGY photo this afternoon.” ORGY is the acronym for the children of Reed Alum. I would be second generation ORGY as both my father and his parents (my grandparents) are Reed Alumni.

The Jude glanced at her watch telling her it was a little after 8. “Do you really want to take that picture?”

I shrugged. It had never occurred to me to question “desirability” when it came to academic institutes. Academia was the one non-questionable institution in my religion-free life. It was like asking a Catholic if they liked the flavor of the sacraments and implying that if the flavor wasn’t good they should skip the sacraments.

“Because I want to go up and see Mount Hood.” The Jude explained.

And thus the snake was loosed into my Garden of Eden. I wanted to go to Mount Hood far more than I wanted to wait around and do nothing for hours on end for a picture. But how could I defy Academia when it even came with an explicit, efficient schedule? I was raised by my mother (an Agnostic) and my father (at the time was a staunch Atheist who replaced his higher power with science) and so Academia was all the god I ever had.

“But there’s a schedule.” I meekly protested.

“So? You’re in college now. You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

I was 16 years old and there was a brilliant bright light in my head as I realized in this moment my life became about my own choices. My parents had already been very casual and comfortable about the notions of drugs, alcohol and sex. My mother always told me that nothing would ever feel better than hardcore drugs and the reason they were so dangerous was not that they were evil and felt horrible but that they felt so good it made things that look evil from here not matter at all from there. “They feel so good, that stealing from your family and wrecking your home means nothing.” Consequently and despite our genetic tendency towards addiction, none of my brothers nor I have ever had a serious drug problem. My younger brother Beavis and I definitely have addictive personalities but I don’t think it’s coincidence that neither of us ever had a serious drug problem. My parents never had a problem with allowing us to try alcohol, share in their bottle of wine or anything like that. Consequently and, again, in spite of our genetic tendency towards addiction, my siblings and I never had a serious alcohol problem. The attitude towards sex in my house was that it was a really, really fun thing that came with some serious ramifications. Growing up, my parents’ attitude towards sex was rather European (“To be alive is to be sexual…) but being medical professionals there was always a bent towards health (“…and there is nothing wrong with that provided you’re responsible. To make a life you cannot or will not take care of is irresponsible and to spread disease is irresponsible because it effects the world beyond yourself.”). For one of my early teen birthdays, my mother gave me the newly-out female condom with the explanation, “I just want you to be prepared when the issue comes up.”

In other words, most of the stigma and shame around most of the American familial hot buttons weren’t really there for me as a kid. However, this new idea that our “Eh, take it as it comes” attitude could or should be extended to my one pillar of sanctity was world altering and mind obliterating. My personal deity had given me a schedule to follow and my own mother, one of the two who had created my respect for Academia, was giving me permission to take it or leave it as it fit my life.

It was the greatest (and luckily first) lesson of my academic career and perhaps, not ironically (via Socratic philosophy) inherently destroyed what would have been a brilliant academic career. The voice that was once, “Gee, I should work harder. This isn’t working out because I’ve done something wrong” turned into, “Maybe I don’t want to spend this much time consumed by perfecting something that ultimately I don’t want to have much effect on my life.”
In that trip to Mount Hood in lieu of the ORGY photo shoot, I lost my arithmetic discipline completely. I stopped working out 6 hours a day and starving myself because I no longer needed to exhaust and starve away the idea that my world was filled with things I didn’t want beyond my control. My faith was gone but in its place was critical thought. I never took the flagellation from my teachers as a shortcoming of my own but rather a piece of the very strenuous and often masochistic choice to get the best education America has to offer. Granted, I left Reed broken and battered as it became clear to me that I was infinitely inferior to most of my classmates but I graduated just the same as them and I learned how much I was capable of.
I was very clear from that trip on that my future was very distinctly my choice. As the veil of dogma lifted, I started to see my future for the next four years as what it was; the very best of the academic decision for a future and not the very best of the only decision for a future.

I must admit, it was a hard thing to manage and I don’t know if I’d suggest it as the way to go for everyone. Destroying your pillars of divinity is a rough thing; most people need catastrophic loss to walk away from god. Apparently, I’m easily swayed to the dark side at the mere suggestion of my mom.

Nevertheless, I find myself in a society (perhaps it’s just the social circles I run in in Xi’An, perhaps it’s China, who knows) in dire need of a similar crisis of faith. I’m not talking about an uprising or a destabilization of the government or anything of the sort. I’m not a revolutionary and I have no intentions of reforming a government I have no place criticizing. (Frankly, Mia Farrow can shove it with her sanctimonious, hypocritical open letter to Spielberg about bashing the Chinese government. I’m not aware of the US being prompt in recognizing the Geneva Convention which states that once genocide is openly recognized [as it has been by the UN and US in the Sudan for going on years now] any UN member country not explicitly helping in bringing about a resolution is also complicit in said acts of genocide. The US is currently too busy getting into a pissing match with Iran to make up for her negligent past. Ms. Farrow is perfectly fine taking these shots at Spielberg’s attempts to create bridges of diplomacy with China from her Upper West Side AMERICAN home. America may not directly fund Darfur but in terms of global policy, we’re perfectly fine with it happening and have no problem with genocide occurring indefinitely because we need more oil rights. In other words we are complicit. Frankly, Spielberg is merely an extension of US Foreign policy and I’m tired of this sanctimonious “I’ll criticize you and label you NAUGHTY for the same mistakes I’m making” both the extreme left and the extreme right seem to be so fond of. What the fuck ever happened to reality?) I’m talking about private, solitary questioning within the realm of personal perspective.

My fellow colleagues do not question the dogma they have been fed. My neighbors do the same. I’m not even discussing issues as sensitive and “no-no” as unions and labor force rights but things as basic as body image, gender relations and finances.

Granted, we certainly don’t have those things down in the US but I find it fascinating to be removed from the non-discussion here. In the US with our pop-self-help culture and armchair “Spirit” healings, we’re constantly discussing how to feel better about ourselves. We reject anything that might make us feel bad about ourselves as illegitimate and unfounded while we embrace most anything that tells us we’re able to do, be anything. We believe that passion is enough to make anything legitimate. American Idol wouldn’t have nearly as many viewers if there weren’t fleets of ignorant fools who truly believe that they will be the next pop star despite their utter lack of talent. The fact is that, despite the American dream, there are lots of things we will never be good at.

However, China seems to be the exact opposite; they seem to embrace the notions and images that seek to make them miserable. I say it to all the Chinese women I know because all the Chinese women I know discuss body image to no extent, “You’re crazy.”

Almost all my Chinese girlfriends here are in their late thirties and early forties and their main topic of conversation is how fat they are. And, if we were teenagers in high school that would be one thing but we’re talking about adult women. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again; China is the land of Kate Moss body types. The women fear really working out hard for fear of muscle development and they fear food for fear of body development. They only eat food they hear will make them slim and they only drink beverages that will do the same. Anytime I ask for advice on tea, I am always told, first and foremost, of the tea that will make me slim. I am also told (without prompting as I am perfectly happy with my body at current) by my close friends not to fear that if I stay in China and continue to diet, I will be slim someday. The fact is that as a teenager, I loved the idea of slim but as a woman, I love the idea of curves. There was a time I wanted to be willowy but now I like the idea of being round in all the right places, which I feel I am.

However, the notion of a developed female body is unspeakable. My friends refuse to hear or believe that anyone could possibly choose to look the way my body does. My few girlfriends with similar body types (ie. developed in spite of their best efforts) are consumed with shame over their bodies. They find my explanation that “Men should be hard. Women should be soft” to be laughable. That my stomach is flat; I can run for an hour on the elliptical trainer and then do an hour and a half session of Bikram (hot) yoga after a day of 8 hours of teaching; and eat primarily rice and vegetables (ie. I’m healthier than I’ve ever been) seems irrelevant. Body types differ and people look the way they look but the idea that health should be a priority over weight seems to be lost on my girlfriends to the exclusion of most other discussion.

Of course, the few friends that I have that do have the body type everyone is striving for are constantly bitching about how they want breast implants because their flat chests are shameful to them. I even had one friend ask if I would go with her to the plastic surgeon so he could see the size of breasts she wants. I tried to explain to her that our frames are completely different (her shoulder breadth is literally the breadth of my waist) and so she needs to talk with him directly about what would work on her frame.

And poor body image is so popular among women that many men are utterly comfortable in insulting a woman directly to her face. My blind massage guy was perfectly comfortable in informing my Chinese Angel (while laughing his head off) that I am so fat that he has trouble locating the pressure points on my body and when I was going to him for my treatment, he was perfectly find grabbing me by the waist yanking out my love handle area (hard enough to leave finger marks on my hips) and telling me, “Too fat.” A man who literally speaks no English knows, “Too fat.”

And I find this constant discontent to be indicative of a large societal thing. As discontent as the women are with their bodies, the men are with their bank accounts (I know, strange, foreign country this China. Poor body image and money issues? What could Americans possibly know of that?). Men constantly ask me how much money I have, how much money I make and how much money my parents make. When I demure, I am told, “Oh yes, Americans don’t like to talk about money.”

To which I always respond, “I do like to talk about money. I like to talk about how to work with money, how to make money and how to make my money work. Hard numbers about what is in my bank account is another matter.”

And that always gets a confused look. The idea that money is not just a trophy to be spent (they pay for everything in cash, be it their latest Benz or their 100,000 dollar [not Yuan] home without a single thought to principle, rates of return, etc) is utterly perplexing.

I think it goes back to a conversation I had with the man with grabby hands before he became Mr. Grabby Hands. We talked about the cultural difference of coming from America and entering hardcore mid-China. There’s a certain level of naivety or lack of critical life thinking that seems to (not) be going on. Work is to gain money and once you have money, you should spend it on things, not investments. Women’s bodies are the ultimate statement of who they are (I have yet to hear a woman complain she’s not smart or strong enough much less about getting passed up for a promotion). And, on both accounts, society is free to comment to no end about how they stack up to against these ideals clearly fed to them by Madison Avenue. For the first time in a long time (say, since high school) there is a “right” and a “wrong” way to live.

Consequently, in their private lives, they are capable of very little other than forthright earnestness and their forte for bluffing is non-existent. And as the future Mr. Grabby Hands gambled in a drinking game with Z and Z’s friend, even I (a girl who attempted poker once in her life) could tell when they were bluffing. I had no idea what was going on or how the game worked or why they would be lying but I knew every time they bluffed.

Unlike my experience with the Jude, I get the sense none of the people I have contact with ever were introduced to the notion that Madison Avenue may not prescribe the most effective role models. Tony Robbins is idolized as the Californian dream and Amway is able to get away with billing itself at “The Most Famous American Company Ever” while hospitals advertise, “Pain-Free Abortions.” Brainwashing, pyramid schemes and “pain free” major surgery all go unquestioned for this lack of critical thinking. People are genuinely surprised when these things turn out not to be true. This lack of ability to bluff well, much less perceive the bluffing of others has led to many odd experiences, not the least of which was the marriage proposal by my massage dude.

Before I came to China, I was warned by one of my Chinese immigrant friends that I should be wary of Chinese men and that they would do “anything” to come to America. I adore her but her perspective of me tends to lack my bitch façade as she gives me no reason to invoke that side of this Janus. The fact is that I am from New York and while that certainly means I have had more than my fair share of fast ones pulled on me (and will continue to for the rest of my life; thus is the design of this world) I am confident in the fact that I am not only as prepared as anyone can be for sussing out the con-artists from the genuine people but I am also prepared to acknowledge when I am in an emotional state capable of sussing them out or not.

I knew when I first arrived that I was not prepared to suss things out as I had no perspective on the culture. Consequently, I made a few mistakes but nothing too disastrous, as I knew I shouldn’t put too much out there until I had my Xi Legs. (The two most obvious examples of my proactive defense were that I spent no money beyond the bare essentials for survival and the fabrication of a long-distance romantic relationship, both in attempts to avoid making commitments I was in no position to make well.)

My confidence was slowly built when it was revealed that my gut response to many a situation was correct. Fortunately for me, my predecessor was so greatly disliked by so many that I was left to fend for myself (unspeakably rough in the short term, a blessing in the long run). I sorted out that most of the culture was truly as transparent as it appeared to be when things were informal (when they’re formal; I have no idea what the hell is going on as no one emotes anything save Stepford Wife happiness) and that many of the issues I was running into were not about my lack of “international culture sensitivity” (the generic attitude of vague tolerance flavored by one or two of the local prejudices that is pervasive in many of the world’s largest cities) but my lack of understanding that the people I was dealing with had no tools to cope with anything beyond their own world.

They fully expected me to be (culturally speaking) a Chinese woman with blonde hair, blue eyes and an American accent. Whenever they were met with anything distinctly “other” that challenged them, their response was essentially that I was being an upstart and I needed to fall back into line. It was cute that I would drink socially. I was cute that was older than 23 and not married. It was cute that I filled the American stereotype of “VERY FAT Fatty.” It was not cute that I refused to take “because the school says so” as a reason to violate my contract. It was not cute that I put up a fight about the parameters of infringement on my private time. It was not cute that I wasn’t romanced by countless married men with the “Western women are all whores, so you should fuck me” line. It was not cute that I would not tolerate unreasonable time frames without an explanation. Hell, the cabbies here get really mad at me that I know enough Chinese to fluently converse about directions but can’t talk about much else because all the people they’ve ever known either speak fluent Mandarin or none at all. I’m strange middle ground. The diversity most are willing to handle begins and ends with the multitude of pictures taken. Anything else and they are unwilling to consider.

My blind massage guy took the middle school romance equation that seems to be so prevalent here (the standard of romantic love here seems to be a long period of time getting to know a man’s financials and a woman’s body type, followed by a few “I love you”s, a few promises of puppy dogs, unicorns and rainbows and BOOM “We’re getting married!”) and thought he could swindle a greencard out of it.

My third session in, he played me all these naively saccharine love songs from his cellphone while he worked on my back. He then started asking if he could go to America. I said he should go to America but I wouldn’t be able to help him as I would be staying here. In between informing me of how fat I was, he kept pressing the issue of going to America and I kept saying he should go himself. He would ask if I had a boyfriend while still giggling over my love handles. He would ask if I could date a Chinese boy as he grunted in frustration trying to feel through the fat to find the pressure points. He would sing along with the “I love you” music as he would inform me that I am too fat, too tall and too strong for a woman.

My final session, he said he wanted to go to America with me as “Taitai.” “Taitai” is the Chinese word for the most complementary term of a wife. (“Tai” means “Very” and if you double up on anything it turns it into the most extreme value of the word possible; hence “Taitai” means “The Best/Most.” It’s the same as saying, “My wife the goddess”)

Nowhere in any of this discussion of his opportunity to go to America was I really mentioned. He never asked if I wanted a boyfriend, much less if I wanted him. (The longer I’m in China the more rare I realize Z is; he always asks for my consent. He always wants to know of the state of my pleasure. He always explicitly asks if whatever he’s suggesting will make me happy. He’s not afraid of his own “un-masculine” [by Chinese definitions] or my own “un-feminine” behavior between us, if it’s genuine. And, he’s never once spoken derogatorily of my body. In fact, all the feedback I get from implies that he might like my body more than I do; a surprisingly rare thing from men here. And yet he has never once told me how beautiful I am, unlike everyone else who practically trips over themselves to repeat it over and over.) It was all about his opportunity to realize a dream (he is, realistically speaking, fully unprepared to realize) and I could be anything he wanted as my ability to be opinionated is next to none with my current Mandarin capacity.

While I am insulted he might think that I might fall for such narcissism, what really bothers me is that according to the Chinese customs and women as I have been exposed to them, I should, in all actuality be totally in love with him. I should have bought his efforts hook line and sinker. Most of my Chinese girlfriends, upon hearing my recounting of the situation, asked immediately what sort of finances he has and what kind of family he comes from as they thought I would be madly in love with any man willing to go to such effort to be romantic like that. I have had to consistently backpedal and explain, “Um, no, I’m not interested” as seemed self-evident to me by such surface level “romance.”

I was left to wonder, “Where the hell is your critical thinking?”

I had dinner one evening with my Brazilian Angel, le Francais and a Franco/Chinese couple and we discussed this very phenomena of the incredibly naïve romance coupled with the incredibly hard-edged financial perspective. From the men’s perspective, the relentless pursuit of cash to the exclusion of a life seems baffling. They both work with men who are millionaires many times over and yet, the millionaires refuse to relax or ever enjoy their money. Such wealthy men also tend not to have much of a financial portfolio as there is no discussion of money outside bank account balances. It seems incongruous that men so driven to get away from their roots of poverty would be so naïve as to not have financial advisors, a portfolio or personal financial plan. Yes, there are lots of wealthy Chinese with solid financial planning but there are stunning numbers without it.

And then there was the discussion of mistresses. As I have been proposed to regarding the whole “kept mistress” thing on several occasions, I stayed the hell out of that conversation. There was a discussion that once the romance wears off of a marriage, it is fully expected that most people will take lovers and wealthy men have a long string of kept mistresses that they genuinely fall in love with and ache over leaving their wives for. (Not that this sort of thing doesn’t happen everywhere but I’ve never see so much lace, glitter, flowery prose and naivety involved with it before.) The notion of working on a marriage seems to be a foreign and silly notion; once love is gone it’s gone and it’s not coming back. Hell, one of the teachers in my school has announced to everyone that she’s now the live-in mistress of her former college paramour because he’s rich and can afford to keep her in the lifestyle she deserves. This is the man she left to marry her husband and have the son with after a drunken one night stand. The husband is the one she will remain married to until the day she dies and the one that tolerates her cohabitation. And the lack of divorce is explained by, “Yes, of course, we stay together for the children.”

Since that discussion, I have been left to have conversations about the overwhelming presence of money. (Keep in mind, I grew up in a wealthy family in the wealthiest circles of New York’s moneyed. Globally speaking, I am from the most fortunate of the most fortunate. I am very secure in the idea that there will always be money because before the age of reason, it was secured into my brain that money can always be had. My perspective is one based upon neither a childhood of going without nor an adulthood of an inability to provide for my children. I am aware that I am fortunate to have such a comfort with the ebb and flow of money. I also feel that good fortune does not negate one’s right to voice their opinion.) One of my fellow female teachers is about to get married and her greatest fantasy is to be married to a bank account. She loves the idea of a man who simply cuts the blank check and then has no say in the purchasing. She has a fantasy that for her birthday she doesn’t get presents but cash. All the women in the office agree with her.

“But if you want money, if you want things, why don’t you get the job to get money and those things? Why do you need to marry it?” I asked. While changing your job after choosing a career path in college is remarkably difficult in China, there was a time in which every teacher said, “I want to be a teacher because…” Why is the comfort they sought then now so uncomfortable? “Teacher” is a highly respected and firmly middle class profession in China. Most teachers will never be rich but most will never be poor. It would seem that they want the spoils of great risk without ever having to put themselves out there and risk to make a great fortune.

Besides, money always comes and goes. Even Donald Trump had to declare bankruptcy. It seems a rather unstable third party to base a marriage on. Relationships are volatile enough as is and money plays a huge part of that; to base the entire interaction on cold, hard cash seems incredibly foolish to me.

My questioning was greeted with silence and a shrug followed by the dismissal that I couldn’t possibly understand because having grown up with money seems to negate the validity of my perspective on it. Frankly, that explanation strikes me as total bullshit.

However, in that I couldn’t possibly understand, we are in total agreement.

Just having left that conversation, I went to the other school to be greeted by my beloved colleague and a discussion of the effects of big business on American politics. He finds the American political system to be fascinating because it’s so simple to explain and easy to grasp conceptually (“a government of the people, for the people and by they people”) but so easily corrupted (as is everything) by the influence of large sums of money. We discussed the power of money and how it warps people.

“Yes, we are told to teach the students that morals are more important than money but in the real world, the big question is, ‘which is more important?’ Perhaps it may actually be money.”
“No, I think the issue is ‘not enough money.’ Morals and money are not mutually exclusive. Anyone can be bent if they don’t have enough money but students need to learn to understand when they have enough. The problem is not a question over ‘money or morals’ but a question of ‘how much is enough.’ If you learn to see when you have enough, morals take care of themselves. After all, money is not enough. Power is not enough. Being rich doesn’t mean anything. If being rich is what you truly want, than you will be rich. But then what? People need to learn when to say ‘I have enough’. I don’t think we prepare students for the day when they have enough. We don’t prepare them to give back to the community. We don’t prepare them to take care of others. We don’t prepare them to create. We prepare them to attain at all costs, including cheating which we are forced to condone in our classes, and then briefly mention that most means to attainment are bad. The truth is they will be immoral. That’s life. What we should teach them is how to handle financial success in a way that benefits the society they will be taking their wealth from.” It may be noted that I am the daddy’s little girl of a man who made his money in one of the more exclusive plastic surgery groups in New York while espousing, “Better is the enemy of good” and then grew up to watch many of the September 11th widows piss away the compensation money despite expert financial advice because they refused to entertain the notion that the money was not, in fact, blood money but merely a pragmatic tool to free them up to cope with staggering emotional wounds. In other words, I have seen what happens when money is seen as more or less than “simply money.” Money is a tool. A great, wonderful tool that I wish we all had enough of but it’s ultimately, simply one of many tools in life. Despite what consumerism teaches us, it certainly offers no meaning to life.

And my beloved colleague, being my beloved colleague thought about what I said for a bit as he slid behind the mask. Instead of the reflexive, “Go fuck yourself” responses I tend to get when voicing my opinion on needing to know when enough is enough, he looked at me and struck me dumb with, “Do you think you are rich?”

I was surprised as no one in China has ever thought or cared what my perspective on myself is. It is always a forgone conclusion that I am rich. Outside of Z, it was the first time anyone has acknowledged me as self-aware entity with a past capable of self-reflection and not merely a lightning rod of wealth, promise and general privilege to be judged by those who have what they perceive as the only true life experience. I stopped being AMERICA and was Christina. No Chinese person that I’ve met in China outside of Z has ever asked me my opinion of my own self worth. It has always been a forgone conclusion that I see me the way they see me; as better than everyone born in China.

And I looked at my beloved colleague and I thought about my placement within the world as a white American with no debt, a private/liberal arts education, a retirement fund, a multiple foreign language capacity, no serious mental or physical disabilities, a privileged childhood, a boy who loves her, a family that loves her, friends who support her and a job that pays her far more than she needs in the place she lives. There is only one answer to that question for me. “I have enough.”

He smiled at me and said, “You are great. What is your plan to give back?” Again, I was surprised by his perspective of me as just as subject to parameters as he is. No one but Z forgoes the Faberge egg treatment and here was my beloved colleague asking me rather challenging questions.

“To learn languages and all the things that go along with truly learning languages. I want to go to lots of countries, learn how to cope within those cultures and have the full, local experience. I want to help with the blending of cultures. I like being a part of education and cultural diffusion.”

“You are great,” he repeated.

“No,” I answered truthfully. “I was given these things by my parents. I should not be praised for accepting the gifts of my parents.”

And it’s true; from the access my privileged childhood afforded me to the critical thinking awakening the Jude inadvertently triggered, most of the tools that have helped me the most here in China are from my parents and not of my own creation. I just wish I was surrounded by more critical thinking and less glittery, bad love ballads in both China and America.