Andrew Singer Talks About China

Vol. 3, Issue 7

Culture is as Culture Does? (Part I)

If we want to understand the relationship between China and America, understanding the two countries’ cultures is key. Culture animates people, and it is people who form societies, direct economies, lead governments, march into war. But understanding culture is anything but straightforward. This Issue tunes into an early cultural discussion between America and China that still resonates today.

Who defines culture? At the dawn of the twentieth century, several authors and publishing titans laid claim to telling Americans who the Chinese were, what China was, and how both were similar and different. Heavyweights included authors Pearl Buck and Carl Crow and publisher, Henry Luce. Culture, beliefs, and traditions made up much of the canvasses upon which they were storytelling and reporting.

In describing American views of China during this turbulent time, Hua Hsu writes that “China always provided a useful surface upon which to project American anxieties and hopes. Economic and political realities notwithstanding, China remained a point of civilizational comparison.”

The heavyweights in turn “shaped the China conversation….[They] oversaw powerful networks of influence, promoting the works of writers and thinkers with whom they mostly agreed.”¹

And yet, Chinese writers in America did push back, albeit most often without being heard. One who was heard was Kiang Kang-Hu, a left-leaning politician, scholar, and academic. He critiqued Buck’s seminal The Good Earth in the New York Times in 1933 for its focus on peasants and farmers and its latent disdain for urban modernity:

“‘They [Chinese peasants and farmers] may form the majority of the Chinese population but they are certainly not representative of the Chinese people,’ he protested. By fixing on these lower classes, Kiang argued, Buck was offering a narrow impression of the nation that was ‘far less true to Chinese life as a whole.’

His beef was with representation—not just who was allowed to speak on behalf of China but what image of the growing nation those representations highlighted. Why not focus on the Chinese whose influence and ideas he believed would guide the nation in the new century? As he remarked in a related essay on China’s image in the world, ‘misrepresentation is even worse than nonrepresentation.’”²

Gish Jen, a present-day American writer and cultural commentator, delves deep into an analysis of the filters we use to view (“edit”) the world. She draws clear contrasts between East and West, though she examines and extols exceptions and overlaps (“ambidependence”).

• East-West Narratives = Society v. Individual

• East-West Senses of Self = Interdependent v. Independent

• East-West World Views = Collectivistic v. Individualistic

These different approaches to self shape our immediate societies as well as the interplay between nations; in Jen’s terms, whether we look at things from an evolutionary v. revolutionary perspective, treat boundaries as blurred or firm, and follow tradition v. creating as an organizing principle.

Individualism and independence are hallmarks of American society (or at least that is what the marketing says). In his analysis of a then young America, Alexis de Tocqueville first-named individualism the result of the new country’s “egalitarian self-sufficiency” (Jen). People enjoyed more equal social conditions and attainment that allowed them to “satisfy their own wants” (de Tocqueville). More specifically,

“‘They owe nothing to any man, they expect nothing from any man; they acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands.’”³

What of collectivism and interdependence? In a society that traces back millennia, there is generally a more flexible existence, a world in which boundaries are more fluid and pushing against the grain is seen as counterproductive and bad form. Bruce Lee recalled his instructor telling him one bad training day to:

“‘preserve yourself by following the natural bends of things and don’t interfere. Remember never to assert yourself against nature; never be in frontal opposition to any problems, but control it by swinging with it. Don’t practice this week: Go home and think about it.’”⁴

Can American and Chinese cultures be compatible? Buck argued a century ago for “interrelatedness and cooperation.” Her critic Kiang “fixed on the discreteness:

“‘Chinese ways of thinking and action are different from, and often contrary to, Western methods,’ [Kiang] writes. ‘By trying to understand the Chinese viewpoint your scope of life will be enlarged and enlightened. It is the only means to rid of prejudice and ignorance.’”

Buck and journalist Carl Crow were contemporaries in China. Crow became famous for talking about and up China’s “400,000,000 customers.” It has been written that Buck “brought China closer” (through “parched farmlands and genteel sensibility”),” and Crow made “China a destination” (“by mapping routes of global commerce”).

“Buck had encouraged Americans to look beyond their borders; now [with Crow] they were being told what to see….But, more importantly, [Crow] was also implicating the readers themselves, making them aware of their participation in the far-away encounters his book detailed….They [American readers] were as curious and exotic a population to Crow’s Chinese customers as curious, exotic China was to them” (emphasis added).⁵

Who and what gets “airtime” are thus game changers (or game stoppers) for cross-cultural understanding. They provide the “mental images” of our friends/adversaries--be they light or dark, positive or negative, substantive or substantive, accurate or stereotype. A century ago, the spread of knowledge and awareness was slow, deliberate, and limited due to technology and distance. Today, it is instantaneous, spontaneous, and overwhelming. And very real impacts are heightened.

H.T. Tsiang was a Chinese resident of America during the same time period as Buck and Crow. He was a fervent, if not also fevered, radical who could not catch a traditional publishing break. His voice was barely heard. Analysis of Tsiang’s novel, China Red, noted that so many scenes in the book

“…call attention to Tsiang’s utter powerlessness when it came to influencing the construction of China within the American imagination [during the 1920’s-30’s].”

His novel has been called a “wry, knotty, and difficult tale of China’s apathy and Communist awakening,” and he has been described as also wanting to “…depict a China that was young, modern, and sophisticated.” And yet, everywhere he turned, Buck was effectively in his face. Tsiang’s goal was to “enlighten Depression-era readers in America to the worldwide struggle for justice and equality,” but instead readers gravitated (were led to) to Buck who “…comforted down-on-their-luck Americans by recounting a story of the land couched in values like patience, modesty, and perseverance.”⁶

How we discuss, view, and relate to culture also supports (and breaks) our conceptions of identity. Tsiang, a down-and-out proletarian writer, artist, observer, and traveler-resident, was an embodiment of this:

• “He was Chinese, yet he felt estranged by what was happening at home, as well as the unusual ways in which Chinese identity could be deployed from afar.”

• “As fellow immigrants debated whether their futures lay in assimilation or a return to China, Tsiang rejected the very premise of the question. He aspired toward an identity that floated free of base allegiances….He sought an identity that was far more flexible and contingent that what America’s racial landscape allowed in the 1930’s—perhaps now too.”⁷

Alice Tisdale Hobart spent many years in early twentieth century China accompanying her businessman husband. From her fictional perch, she asked resignedly through her character Eben Hawley, Jr., “If only…East and West were not so suspicious of each other and would enter into mutual respect and confidence! What a pity that in the long history of trade between China and the West there was so much on both sides to deplore,….Young Eben [an American born in China] felt himself a man with two countries: he wanted to explain the land of his birth to the land of his birthright, he wanted to illumine the land of his birthright to the land of his birth.”⁸

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The next issue will continue this conversation with discussion of culture in the context of today’s China.⁹

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1. Hua Hsu, A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific, Harvard UP, 2016, Pages 23 and 107

2. Hsu, Page 37

3. Gish Jen, The Girl at the Baggage Claim, Knopf, 2017, Pages 172-173

4. Jen, Page 116, and https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/water-my-friend-fluidity-flow-bruce-lee-connie-wang-steele/

5. Hsu, Pages 40, 78, and 84

6. Hsu, Pages 67 and 127

7. Hsu, Pages 62 and 109-110. "perhaps now too" referring to early twenty-first century

8. Alice Tisdale Hobart, River Supreme, 1929, Page 190

9. Photo Credits (select): Shanghai Door (photo by Miranda Richey Unsplash), Democracy_in_America_by_Alexis_de_Tocqueville_title_page (www.commons.wikipedia.org), Beijing Doors (photo by Eean Chen Unsplash)