A Night Out

I’ve been resisting lately the temptation to walk across the street after Mandarin classes on Wednesday night to have several Tsingtao to celebrate the conclusion of another work week. I’m slowly growing tired of the expat culture that thrives at such places, and the fact that the amount of cigarette smoke in bars here—when combined with general air quality in the city—causes one to wake up the next morning feeling as if they spent an hour the night before funneling the fumes of a sixteen-wheeler’s exhaust pipe. It was a long week, however, and I did not have much to do the next morning, so off to the watering hole I went to meet a colleague.

I arrived before my friend, and grabbed a seat at the bar. Same old, same old—the pair of Iranian guys running the foosball table, the English girls playing pool, the Dutch at the magnetic dartboard, laughing and talking in pidgin Chinese to the fuwuyuan walking around taking drink orders. After just a couple of minutes the smoke started getting to me, and the guy to my left puffing on unfilitereds coming out of a box that looked like a Chinese rip-off of Pall Malls was wafting smoke in my face. He was there by himself, and, for the moment, so was I. He would do this thing that many people do en route to beginning a conversation with you. He would glance at my face, then look where I’m looking (television, liquor bottles, etc.), then take a sip of his drink. Glance at face, shared my view, take a drink. After a couple of minutes he reached across with his glass and quietly said: gambei—“cheers,” in Chinese (literally, “dry glass,” or “empty glass”).

We started talking, and unfortunately his English was about as good as my Chinese. Combined with the ambient noise of Desmond Dekker and other reggae hitmasters blaring over the soundsystem, conversation was essentially impossible. So there we sat, clinking glasses occasionally, until my friend showed up, at which point I introduced the two. They started chatting in Chinese, at it was no time before we learned that this young man sitting to me left was studying at the neighboring elite university.

His area of interest was the origin of the Chinese language, and he knew an incredible amount about every single Chinese poet that came to my friend’s mind. I was riveted, and immediately started pounding on my friend to interpret my questions. After one or two, my friend laughingly demanded that I start trying to phrase the questions myself, which was disastrously good practice. It was one of those moments where I was mentally kicking myself in the head that I hadn’t been more diligent with Mandarin studying. Had I not had someone here who really knew his way around both the English and Chinese language, this entire world that was sitting on the barstool next to me would have been completely cut off from me forever--what a horrific tragedy such a loss would have been!

Trying to explain the idea of “metaphor” was a helluva task. My friend asked me how I would explain the term in English, and I didn’t really have an immediate answer for him—clearly the couple of degrees in literature was worth something. After a moment, I said, “it’s the process of gaining a better understanding of something by relating it to something that it’s not,” which as I said it made me realize just how bizarre the idea of metaphor really is. How is it that we are able to gain a better understanding of a thing by talking about what is not that thing? Why can’t we just talk about the thing? Why is it that it sometimes is easier to come to an understanding of a thing or a concept if you talk about things that are not that thing or concept?

I started thinking then about what the Chinese word for metaphor might be, or if there was even a word for the concept. Chinese is so inherently metaphorical already that such a word might be rendered moot. Metaphor is so built into the Chinese language that the exceptional status that the device enjoys in English stylistics may not carry over to a pictographic language like Chinese. For example, the term for the word, “everybody”—dajia—consists of two characters: da, meaning “big,” and jia, meaning “family,” or “home.” Put them together and you don’t get “big family,” but “everybody,” or "everyone"—as well as the idea that everyone is a big family in a big home, this planet. Or take the word for student: xuesheng. Again, you have two characters that, when combined together, mean something different than when the two are split apart. If you combine xue—“study,” “learn”—with sheng—“raw,” “fresh,” “new,” “inexperienced”—you get xuesheng, a “student” (or “students”—there is no distinction between singular and plural in Chinese diction). Unlike in English, where words are completely arbitrary combinations of letters that are systematized and understood to mean certain things when combined in certain ways, the structure of Chinese involves characters that are somewhat less arbitrary--occasionally, they actually directly depict the thing or concept they are intended to represent.

I wanted to ask him, too, if in the course of his work he has felt any political pressure to discover results that say certain things, or to spin results in such a way that certain things are emphasized and certain things are left out. I knew that, in recent times, the government has been putting pressure on literary scholars to demonstrate that the Chinese writing system developed earlier than Western scripts. The "youth" of the Chinese language drives the government up a wall (pun intended) because the tendency here is, given the current political situation, if something critical to the culture has no historically ascendant value in the global scheme, it is registered as a personal statement of the inferiority of Chinese culture and therefore must be discarded—destroyed, forgotten, wiped out from history. Hieroglyphics apparently first emerged around the year 3,200 BCE; our new friend cited that Chinese characters emerged around 3,000 BCE, which (not coincidentally, I’m sure) could allow you to argue that the languages are essentially as old as one another. (Chinese, however, is by far the longest continuously-used language system in existence, with a current lifespan of around 5,000 years and counting.) It has been my experience that students involved in the humanities over here are a bit more prone to venting skepticism and dissent when pressed (whereas many of the math- and hard science-heavy students that I teach will shut me out if I push them with sensitive political questions) and I wanted to see what this brilliant young Chinese had to say on the subject.

But there I was, awash in thoughts about metaphor and language with no language to convey these thoughts to the smoking scholar drinking Red Bull sitting to my left. My friend and he continued their conversation about the Chinese agricultural calendar (which consists of 14-day half-moon "weeks" and which is also still in use here in China) while I drifted away from the conversation with thoughts of my own. I turned to the bar and to my right was another Chinese guy drinking by himself, and the game started up again: glance at face, share view, take a drink. After a minute, he reached over with a glass of what I think was straight vodka and offered a gambei.

I was excited that his English was essentially fluent, and we began by exchanging that we were both employed by the two competing universities up the street, which meant of course that at least a bit of drink-buying was in order. He explained to me how, although he was currently employed by the university, he and the start-up he was involved with were getting ready to make a pitch to an Ivy League university in America to sell to them something akin to a specialized social networking platform that they had designed. Their competitors in the sale were Lenovo and Microsoft. The other brilliant young Chinese to my right, let’s call him Bai, did not have any kind words for Microsoft, nor for Bill Gates, who he respected as a hero but who is a man who has “forgotten his humble roots” when it comes to business practices.

Bai stopped talking for a moment and scoffed quietly into his drink as he looked over my shoulder at the conversation my colleague was having behind me. When I asked what the problem was, Bai responded that he “absolutely #@&%ing hates this guy,” and he repeated the phrase about five times in the next two minutes. My friend from the university I work at was chatting with the young owner of the bar we were standing in, as well as the bar directly below us, which is notorious (some would say infamous) as one of the most popular nightspots in the district. “If you’re white, the guys at the door are nice and friendly and you get in for free. They want white guys with money in there with all the Chinese girls.” He was getting really worked up now, sipping vodka furiously. “If you’re Chinese, you pay between 100 and 200 kuai to get in, depending who is at the door, and maybe sometimes you don’t get in at all. I hate that %&#@ing guy.” The owner was from the southern, Cantonese-speaking province of Guangdong, Bai said, and this was meant as an indictment that the guy did not have proper “culture.” He asked me how much I think the bartenders and wait staff make, and, after looking into the sunken, gray eyes of the fuwuyuan walking behind me, I said: “Not much.” He told me: 1,400 kuai a month, which translates into about $215—maybe 80 cents an hour, all told.

Our discussion about the bar owner’s business practices led to a discussion about one of the richest men in China, who swam to Bai’s home—Hong Kong Island—from mainland China over the course of an entire night with his brother several decades ago. Now a building contractor, the man has become one of the richest people on the planet, and he remains a real hero to Bai—he remembers where he came from, his original outsider status, and he acts accordingly. He always hustles and works hard for what he receives. He is notoriously kind and understanding with those that work for him at even the lowest levels. This man, it seemed, “has culture.”

Bai then told me about many of the professors from both of our schools who live comfortable lives by exploiting government funding. According to Bai, professors are given a certain annual stipend for each graduate and doctoral student for which they are acting as an advisor. The stipend is intended for the student, ultimately—for research, for defraying living costs when your job is not necessarily immediately revenue-generating, etc. If professors receive, say 2,000 kuai annually for a master’s student advisorship and 5,000 kuai annually for that of a doctoral student, Bai approximated that 10% of those stipends eventually make it to masters and doctoral candidates like himself. It is not uncommon that, between embezzlement and consultancy, professors at either one of our schools will make a million kuai a year, when their actual salary is around 30,000 or 40,000 kuai annually at the absolute most. I was wondering where all of the Audis and Porsche Cayennes that I see driving around campus were coming from. Now I have a better idea.

It was our discussion of great men, I think, that took us in the direction of speaking about Bai’s grandfather. He had passed away some years ago, but he lived into his 80s, despite several encounters with death during the Cult----l Rev---tion in the 1960s and 1970s. His grandfather was, before the establishment of “New China” in 1949, an intellectual at a university. Following Communist liberation in the ‘60s and ‘70s, workers throughout the country were forced daily (among other things) to sit down with one another after work to speak exclusively about politics. They were one-sided conversations, speaking about the rise of the proliteriat and the grandeur of the Chairman and New China, and the talk was meant to both reinforce ideology and to brainwash, but it was also designed to bring to the fore anyone with dissenting views. In passing one day, Bai’s grandfather mentioned that it in general is not good to have leaders who you cannot question. The statement probably took less than 10 seconds to make. The next day, he was snatched out of his life and shipped off to a work camp, where he stayed for the better part of the next decade of his life, being “reeducated.” He was given one small meal every two days; later on in life, Bai’s grandfather had to have 80% of his stomach removed because it had atrophied so horrendously from those years. To the end of his life, Bai’s grandfather was an incredibly gentle man—soft-spoken, soft movements, quick to laugh. “What couldn’t this man now laugh at?” Bai said at one point. He had been to the brink of death, had stayed there on the cliffside for several years. Our view of life would appear to takes on a new, perhaps more ridiculous aspect when you live that way for so long.

Bai was absolutely fascinated with Jewish culture. Our conversation about resiliency and strength in the face of adversity took us towards a discussion of the culture that Bai believed, with good evidence, to truly be “the chosen people.” They could handle tough times, and they seemed to be universally “clever.” This is the word that always comes up when you hear Chinese speak about Jews: “clever.” It is word used with tremendous respect for a people that Bai associates with the intellectual and physical ingenuity of his grandfather’s generation. There are several things that many young Chinese seem absolutely fascinated with, and one of them is definitely Judaism. Two other big ones are 1) the exact process of voting and how votes are counted in America, and 2) homosexuality and non-normative sexuality in general. Jews, voting, and homosexuality—big topics of conversation over here.

We both exchanged cards and declared that we would meet up again at some point in the future to continue the conversation. I turned around and there the literary scholar was, quietly sipping another Red Bull, foot frantically tapping the barstool below him. I asked for his contact information and told him as best I could in Chinese that I would really like to talk more with him once my Chinese gets a bit more competent. He smiled at my efforts to make myself understood, and he said he would be more than happy to talk shop at some point in the future. After finishing another beer and watching a couple of heated foosball games, it became apparent that no conversations I could have from here on out would beat those two. I grabbed my coat, put my hat on, and headed out the door with my friend from work to unlock our bikes and head home.