"Bouncing Around" as Theme for Mixed People


Mixed people have to deal with “bouncing around.” There are different terms that folks use, but “bouncing around” to me includes both (1) others pushing you around such that they would restrict your identity, and (2) you yourself making near-sighted choices about your identity, for example, embracing “exotic” when it is cool, while being outraged by “exotic” when it doesn’t suit you.

This old yarn exemplifies the first half of “bouncing around:”


The white man said, "Colored people are not allowed here."
The black man turned around and stood up.
He then said: "Listen sir....
when I was born I was BLACK,"
"When I grew up I was BLACK, "
"When I'm sick I'm BLACK, "
"When I go in the sun I'm BLACK, "
"When I'm cold I'm BLACK, "
"When I die I'll be BLACK."

"But you sir."

"When you're born you're pink, "
"When you grow up you're white, "
"When you're sick, you're green, "
"When you go in the sun you turn red, "
"When you're cold you turn blue, "
"And when you die you turn purple."
"And you have the nerve to call me colored?"


The black man then sat back down and the white man walked away....


The Black man is Black, and proud, and steady, and resolutely Black. There is something so poignant about this joke- such an indictment, told, of course, in jest. The White man has all these things he is allowed to be, all of these changing identities- this sum of power- the power to re-mold one’s identity, change it by fiat, and expect others to adjust their schema immediately.

Ludacris alludes to this idea in his song "Hopeless"

Ludacris "Hopeless"

We realize that the Black man in the joke has to both adjust externally, and be restricted internally- hyprocrisy; utterly a bum deal it is, meaning little means to negotiate one’s identity.

Has Chinese and Western, it is never as stark as described in the joke- neither in Greater China, nor in the West, but that is not to say that bouncing around is not an issue.

The second half of “bouncing around,” I’d describe as follows.

While working in Mainland China- there was perpetually an issue of “what approach should I take to this hour’s problem?” I had to compute on an ongoing basis, “well, this would be more of a Chinese approach, yet this is a Western supplier, so is he going to assume his classic, go-to approach, or is he going to adjust for the circumstances, namely- is he posturing for how I’m likely to act?” Everything becomes an exercise in game theory. Could I not go to a golf game or other social function or would the implicit task related to “task A” actually be bloody important? I mean, how should I craft business correspondence: “do I make it direct or more obtuse and/or flowery? Do I come out of the gate with the main point in the first line, as every American English teacher will tell you for your tenth grade thesis, or do I bob and weave and leave it out till the end?” How do I handle negotiations, or negotiate the expectations of business favors from suppliers or vendors? There is rarely any absolute truth in the business world, no matter the country, no matter the culture. But what happens when your sensitivity is used against you? These are the types of cultural claims a mixed person has to deal with. They are relentless. They come at you in such a way that if you pay them the wrong type of heed, you’ll have narrower and narrower bandwidth to ponder the bigger picture.

And that is the issue with “bouncing around.” Sometimes you want to just fall into someone else’s stereotypes. You can’t be bothered. You take the easy road. I know, I know. It’s tiring otherwise, and people can be rude, and obnoxious, and seem racist even, at times.

But. Avoiding “bouncing around” is the only way to really negotiate your identity.

 

My Afghan Roommate at Fletcher

One of my roommates at The Fletcher School, a few years back, was an Afghan. He was an ethnic Hazara and grew up displaced from his homeland, spending twenty years in Iran. He, my other roommate, a tall Swiss Army Officer, and I would routinely sit down and talk in our humble but cozy suite at Blakeley Hall, on the Tufts Campus. Some of us would drink tea. Others would partake in cold Swedish snus, straight out of the Haier mini-fridge. One evening, my Swiss roommate intimated that he might propose to his girlfriend. “Awesome!” we said.

Our Afghan roommate, found this an opportunity to open up a little bit, and he proceeded to tell us about his marriage. He was, at the time, the only married man amongst the three of us. He was clearly bitter about some of his experiences, being a refugee, and now with every Skype call back home there was probably a small gulp down his throat as he was told the days news in Afghanistan, as the ratio of bad news to good news was usually much higher. He told us about how the concept of intermarriage, inter-ethnicity is extremely taboo, especially between Hazaras and Pashtuns. He told us about how he was thinking of running for office in Afghanistan, and how no Pashtun would ever vote for him, but if Hazara tribal leaders affirmed him he could expect 90% plus of the Hazara votes. He told us about how he was planning to start a family.

He told us about his wedding. He said: “well, so, we were in X valley in Afghanistan, and there were many people in attendance, and anyhow, I was pretty tired from planning it…”  “Wait, dear Afghan roommate, yeah right, you mean you were tired from helping your fiancé plan it, right? I said. “Oh, no, I planned the wedding. In Afghanistan and Iran, of course the men plan the weddings,” he said.

The point of the Afghani interlude is to reflect on our whole enterprise, of contrasting these opposing forces. Really, they are on a spectrum, like masculinity and femininity these concepts are jumbled up even in the more alpha or omega characters, its only in comic books that they appear in entire, pure form. The men planning weddings in Afghanistan and Iran is just an example that the same spectrum also warps around a curve, and actually completes itself in a circle, sort of how anarchists and fascists are so far apart that they horseshoe close to each other, also close enough to kiss.

In other words, the manly men in Iran are so controlling, so dominating over the women, in their macho social structure, that they end up planning the weddings too. They are the ones picking out the processional music, deliberating over outfits, or puzzling over particular shades of Lapis Lazuli for the table arrangements- people will ultimately find their own equilibrium of Masculinity vs. Femininity.

 

Cantonese and Other Dialects

I met someone in Hong Kong the other night from a publicly listed Chinese Tech company. His company is headquartered in Shenzhen. I wondered whether or not he speaks Cantonese (粵語，廣東話，or more colloquially on the Mainland 廣州話).

Baidu gives a number of eighty dialects, but the specifics of what counts as a dialect and what doesn’t is a doozy. To those hailing from smaller communities, which in China probably means entities containing fewer than 100,000 people, with fewer tongues speaking that particular vintage of local dialect, why doesn’t theirs “count?” To Beijingers for example, the Cantonese dialect that is spoken by about as many people as speak Italian around the world, Cantonese is “earthy.” It is “bird talk.” If a Beijinger wants to amp up the insult factor, they would call a Cantonese speaker, or probably a speaker of any other dialect, a “bird person.”

It turns out he does speak Cantonese- that is his lingo. Anyone who visits Hong Kong and predicts that because Mandarin is more and more commonly heard, means that this comes at the expense of Cantonese, only has part of the picture. Hong Kong's facility in English is what is declining- but with tens of millions+ strong native Canto speakers in the Mainland, and a wider group who speak it as a second tongue (I'm thinking Fujiannese, Guangxinese, Hainannese), Cantonese is doing just fine.

Balance 6.4

Hong Kongers are practical. This is the ethos; this is verifiable fact.

Practical can mean balanced. It means keeping your head down and "getting on with it." It means walking past the nutters, ignoring the quacks.

But every once in a while, even the most practical people, those who would much, much prefer business-like stoicism must say something. 

There is a group in Hong Kong called the "Voice of Loving Hong Kong" (香港之聲). They have a multimedia campaign that pronounces that no casualties were suffered, at all, twenty five years ago.

There are political reasons why these are "sensitive issues." We get it. No savvy HK person doesn't get that. But to be so crass- so smug- to not only say "no comment," but to brazenly affirm that nothing happened is just such an affront. Such a baldfaced disregard for one's own plausible deniability (in the case the facts do, at some point, prove them wrong), is shocking, if not just sad. Shame on "Voice of Loving Hong Kong." 

 

 

Context cont.

I love this quotation from a story about Hong Kong Cemetery: "As a Chinese, this is not my kind of thing," he says of the cemetery, which he's always viewed with a superstitious sense of dread. He reacted "with horror" when my mother decided to write about the cemetery, promptly trying to dissuade her.

Check out the audio clip here

 

Context Matters

On an icy winter day in Boston, Massachusetts, and my dear friend who was a post-doc at MIT said to me “actually, it isn’t that cold.”

“How could it possibly not be that cold?” I said. Mind you we grew up in sub-tropical climes. “Well, it is like two hundred something degrees Kelvin,” he said. In his lab they don’t operate in Celsius or Fahrenheit. They don’t particularly care about the cold that we feel; he works on superconductivity, and his focus is on atoms and even smaller, sub-atomic stuff[i]. At zero degrees Kelvin molecular motion basically stops, there is no thermal activity. In freezing Boston that day though, my friend assured me there were plenty of atoms jostling around us, vibrating and making it “hot”, like positive two hundred degrees Kelvin hot. I had a mental cutscene to the North Pole, with huskies, skis and sleds, amidst frozen whitespace where I say: “What does Kelvin say now?” And anticipating a response like “well, ain’t as much atomic jostling here. Yep, it’s getting there.” He was using labspeak in the real world; or maybe it was me who was using pidgin-science in the field. Either way, context matters.

 

[i] The latest science on superconductivity involves tinkering with atoms at colder and colder temperatures. See this article for a backgrounder: Howard, Jacqueline. "Absolute Zero? Scientists Push Atoms Colder, To Record-Setting 'Negative Temperature' Realm." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 04 Jan. 2013. Web. 06 May 2013. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/04/absolute-zero-record-setting-negative-temperature_n_2404666.html>. One of the key applications is next generations engines, ones would be far more efficient than current internal combustion engines, which lose maybe three quarters of the energy put into them to heat. 

Uncertainty Avoidance

The notable Dutch researcher Geert Hofstede, a pioneer in intercultural comparative research, is someone I owe gratitude to.  His research has helped me think about what it means to be Western, and also what it means to be Chinese, from a standpoint of behaviors and values. The data behind Hofstede’s surveys informs the framework I use in Capricorn Monkey.  

Hofstede calls one of his dimensions Uncertainty Avoidance. In other words, some people are more O.K. with uncertainty than others. But change itself is also an element of uncertainty that people wish to avoid. I look forward to exploring this dimension and the other five dimensions that are treated in the book, in a more casual way on this blog, drawing from pop culture, and so forth.

This calls for a fun movie example. In Luc Besson’s classic film Léon: The Professional, there is a memorable scene in which Danny Aiello’s character says to Léon: “Change ain’t good, you know Léon.” They are sitting in Tony’s Butchery, which is operated as a front for Tony’s criminal activities, and the two have just had an uncomfortable conversation about money. Léon is a contract killer for whom Tony is a sort of dual mentor and agent. Léon, to our cinematic delight, is the archetypal lovable bumpkin with a blood-splashed CV. In the scene, we learn that though Léon has been “whacking” people left and right, the payments for all that dangerous work have been made to Tony. And, reading the subplot, we learn that Tony’s assurances that no one can knock him over, like all the banks which get knocked over, starts to smell fishy. We can only assume from the wrought pregnant pauses that Léon’s money, stashed with Tony is a little less accessible than he thought. But going back to Tony’s comment, what about the talk of change? Tony is a criminal, mind you, and this is an extreme example of uncertainty avoidance; most criminals who remain uncaught are naturally very resistant to any change. But what does Tony really mean?

Well, the movie gives a few snapshots of the new reality that Tony is facing. The first is that new criminal syndicates, like Asians and Russians are encroaching on the old guard’s turf. Tony’s extreme Uncertainty Avoidance manifests itself in xenophobia. Also, we know that in most cop and robber films the bad guys only deal in cash. Tony’s continual ranting about the banking system reveals a lot about his character. He is not only the guy who stuffs wads of hundred dollar bills under his mattress, it is 1994 and he is the guy who is going to resist email. Sure, Tony is probably aware that he is foregoing opportunities by being so insistent, and then again, what is wrong with the old way of doing business, with a firm handshake, while looking into someone’s eyes? You can’t help but get the feeling that this whole new world of sophistication is unrolling itself before Tony’s eyes, but ol’ Tony just cannot help himself. In addition to being xenophobic, Tony is anti-innovation.

Again, this is an extreme example; no one wants to encourage criminals to be innovative. Tony is in the business of dealing death, a business littered with risk as the tables can turn in an instant; but he doesn’t like uncertainty. Tony’s mentality is a showcase of extreme Uncertainty Avoidance.

The generalization I will make is that Western and Chinese instincts broadly align around the need to be enterprising. That means pro-innovation, lots of reasonable balancing done between privacy protection and convenience, eagerness to meet new people; it means jumping onboard with AOL in the early 90’s- essentially everything that Danny’s Aiello’s character wasn’t. His character, Tony, portrayed a gangster ethos- something appears enterprising but is actually nothing but rent seeking. It is a key difference.

Uncertainty is one of those unavoidable components to enterprise, and rather than shy away from it, there is a shared bias to view change itself as opportunity. This is supported by Hofstede’s data, which shows the lowest variance between the Western values and Chinese values, in all of the dimensions tracked, is found in Uncertainty Avoidance. Wanting change doesn’t mean change for the sake of change, nor does it mean picketing for new politicians for the sake of new blood. It means enterprise as the base criterion. That doesn’t narrow to just mean business. Whether it is in education, science or medicine, Western and Chinese outlooks share optimism for the future, and confidence that people can make the world better. And then again, why wouldn’t you be O.K. with uncertainty if you believe it is in your power to live incrementally better tomorrow?