深圳 notes 5: So let's move beyond your culture
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Title : 深圳 notes 5: So let's move beyond your culture
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news-today.world | Hi guys. In my last post, I spoke about the challenges of trying to explain aspects of Chinese culture like the eating of dog meat to Westerners. In this post, I am going to talk about something a lot more personal. On this trip, I have met loads of Chinese people which I can separate into two broad categories: good Chinese people and bad Chinese people. What do they both share in common? They are all Chinese people, meaning that they are from China, speak Chinese, were brought up within the same Chinese culture and self-identify as Chinese. Let me begin with the good Chinese people whom I was very impressed with. I visited the Chinese city of Shenzhen - now for those of you who aren't familiar with Shenzhen, it is one of only four Tier One cities in China (along with Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou). Tier One cities aren't selected on population or size per se, but on function. So Shenzhen is Tier One because it is a centre of commerce, it has its own stock exchange, it has many universities and thus it is classified as even more important in this system than say a bigger city like Chongqing. You can see a lot of the photos and videos from my trip on my Instagram.
Besides, due to Shenzhen's proximity to Hong Kong, it is often seen as a showcase of modern China to the world. Many tourists who are in Hong Kong often take a short trip over to China and get no further than Shenzhen, so the government in China are keen to give them a very good impression. It is an extremely new city, unlike say Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, there are many old buildings which are kinda unloved, dirty, falling apart at the edges and could desperately do with a paint job - but such buildings are hard to find in Shenzhen where everything just looks so new. It is also one of China's richest cities, but such statistics are to be taken with a pinch of salt - there's no denying that there's a lot of rich people in Shenzhen who have benefited from the economic boom there, but then there are also thousands (if not millions) of migrant workers from the much poorer provinces doing all the dirty and dangerous jobs there, earning little more than 1000 RMB (S$210 or £117) a month. It suffices to say that it is a city of huge contrasts, between the new Chinese elite and those who have been left behind in this system. There was one morning when I could sleep due to jet lag, I got out of bed at 5:30 am as I was wide awake and went for a walk. The only people up and about at that hour were the construction workers who were just arriving at work, if they earn 1000 RMB a month and they work 30 or 31 days in a month, that means they earn about 30 RMB a day or £3.52 or SS6.30 a day. That wouldn't even buy you a drink at some of Shenzhen's more fancy bars that I visited. The irony is that those fancy bars were built by these poor Labourers.
I did get to meet some of these new Chinese elite in Shenzhen - now Shenzhen prides itself for its 创业精神, it is a city where entrepreneurs thrive, where they live and breath innovation and have a head for business. The evidence of Shenzhen's success is the sheer amount of wealth you see there , these people are extremely good at what they do and they work bloody hard. My hotel was outside the Tencent 腾讯 headquarters and I could see workers leaving the offices after midnight as it is not uncommon for them to put in 15 or 16 hour long days at work. I was attending the launch of the Brisbane-Shenzhen Landing Pad and my partner's company was one of the Australian companies invited to the event: it was an honour to be a part of such an interesting event where I met entrepreneurs and investors from both Australia and China at the event. As this event was organized by the Shenzhen government, it was carefully choreographed and only the most successful Australian and Chinese companies were invited to the event. Needless to say, some of the people I've met there just blew my mind. I've gone from running my own business to going back to working for a boss - I know just how demanding it can be to start a business from scratch and I have so much respect for the people in Shenzhen who have achieved such incredible success in their respective fields. The Chinese team who took care of us in Shenzhen were also incredible people - I am now good friends with them and I have much love and respect for them.
As for the other side of the coin, yeah I met plenty of the usual rude Chinese people. When I arrived at my hotel in Macau, a tour group from China had just arrived and they were arguing, shouting at each other in the lobby and some of the men even spat on the floor. That's right, they spat on the floor in the middle of a luxurious hotel. I had spent a few moments speaking with the staff at the hotel (who were a mix of local Macau and Filipino workers) and one lady said to me, "this is normal for them, this is what we have to deal with everyday." I guess she was just resigned to it, whilst I was mortified at having to be confronted with such an ugly display of Chinese behaviour. On the flight back to London, I sat a row in front of a Chinese couple who talked so loudly. In the middle of the night, the man asked the woman so loudly, "你要不要喝水？" I was sleeping soundly, that woke not just me up but quite a few others around me and I just lost my shit - I turned around and gave them a bilingual scolding. You wanna be the ugly China man? I'll show you how ugly I can be. But then again, like the staff at the hotel in Macau, many of those around me were upset but were not surprised: they had come to expect nothing less from Chinese people in a plane - they are usually incapable of behaving in a decent manner and perhaps I shouldn't have been that surprised. Certainly, anyone who has visited China would probably be nodding in agreement right now and saying, "yup, that's exactly what I encountered when I was in China, that's how they behave."
So, what do the brilliant Chinese entrepreneurs in Shenzhen and the Chinese rude people I have encountered have in common? That's right, they're all Chinese. Now allow me to share a bit more not from this recent trip, but from my childhood. I was brought up in an extremely, stereotypically Chinese family. My father was a Chinese teacher who was completely ignorant of all other cultures apart from his own, so he basically attributed all positive attributes like kindness, diligence, perseverance, mercy, honesty, patience and discipline to Chinese culture and of course, that's complete and utter bullshit of course (like my dad has said so much stupid shit over the years, don't get me started) - it is not as if other cultures in Europe, Africa or America don't possess such qualities as well. My father conveniently chose to make the assumption that all other cultures were vapid and devoid of merit, purely on the basis that he knew nothing about other cultures. But it suffices to say that my parents didn't have enough confidence in their own ability to bring up their children, to impart the right kinds of values as parents - so instead, they defaulted to the customary norms according to Chinese culture. So they would expect us to be honest and not tell lies because it was the Chinese thing to do, rather than the right thing to do regardless of your skin colour or nationality. Of course, by the time I was like 10 years old, I realized that my parents were utterly clueless about parenting, I began to resent anything they were trying to impose on me, particularly their culture since it was so dear to them. That's why I started to resent Chinese culture as it was a convenient scapegoat to blame - the alternative was to resent my parents and I couldn't bring myself to do that.
But here's my conclusion that may seem extremely obvious, but well, sometimes it it worth stating the obvious. Being Chinese needn't necessarily make you a super successful entrepreneur. Being Chinese doesn't necessarily turn you into an obnoxious cunt whose behaviour causes grave offence everywhere you go. Being Chinese, having this culture, only plays a fairly small part in your life - the rest is still up to you to turn yourself into a great person that people will love and admire. What you will accomplish in your life depends far more on the choices you make as an individual, rather than the kind of cultural influences that played a part in your upbringing. We have to hold each individual responsible for his/her own actions that has led to the successes and failures in their lives, rather than make any kind of assumption based on their nationality, ethnicity, skin colour or culture. Thus by that very same token, if you were to go to China today, you will encounter everything from extremely successful entrepreneurs who will inspire you right down to super obnoxious assholes whom you might just get into a fight with. Being Chinese doesn't make you a good or bad person for there are both good and bad people in Chna; being brought up with Chinese culture doesn't necessarily make you good or bad either. This may sound obvious, but in light of the kind of upbringing I had, I feel that it is necessary to state the obvious.
In hindsight of course, it is easy to explain what was going on with my parents' approach. I am quite frustrated by the way we refuse to judge our parents in Asian culture, as if to do so would be ungrateful and immoral. But that conveniently ignores the fact that there are a lot of parents out there who are clueless when it comes to parenting - it's not that they are bad or evil people who are deliberately trying to damage their kids, no. They're just plain ignorant, stupid and uneducated - they are out of their depth when it comes to modern parenting and as a result, they make many mistakes and this was very much the case with my family. So they did what most people would do in that situation: they merely offered what they knew best, which was their culture. My father went one step further than that: as he was a Chinese teacher, the only useful thing that he could really teach me was Chinese so he used to wax lyrical about how learning Chinese was going to be so important for business in the future as everyone in the world would want to do business with China. That was complete bullshit of course, because it was a statement not based on a single shred of evidence, but rather a sincere desire that the one thing he could actually give his children would turn out to be actually quite useful one day. Don't get me wrong, please. I don't question my dad's sincerity, I just question his methodology when it came to evaluating the value of his language and culture. You know the saying, when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. I still don't think he has actually realized how irrelevant the Chinese language has been in my career.
Where does that leave me then? Well, when I was a child, I used to resent Chinese culture and all things associated with Chinese culture because I blamed my parents' behaviour on their culture but hindsight is always 2020. Being Chinese didn't somehow corrupt my parents or made them bad people, heck no. My parents were uneducated, ignorant and autistic, that was they were had such awful parenting skills - all those factors had very little to do with the fact that they were Chinese. Blaming their culture was just a convenient scapegoat for me as a child, because the alternative would be to blame my parents for their faults and shortcomings. No, the rational thing to do would be to hold my parents personally responsible for any mistakes they may have made, rather than simply blaming it all on their culture. To be blunt, the very worst aspects of their parenting are associated far more with their autism, rather than their Chinese culture per se. So once I came to that conclusion, it has freed me from my previous prejudice against Chinese culture to get reacquainted with it on a clean slate, without the baggage that I had brought with me from my difficult childhood. Now, I have quite neutral feelings towards Chinese culture now, which is a huge step from before, when I had mostly negative feelings towards my parents' culture which had become a rather convenient scapegoat for my resentment and anger all these years.
I have been incredibly lucky to lived and worked in several countries, on top of that, I speak several languages as well. This means that I have had the chance to befriend people from all over the world. Now, contrast this to people like my father who don't even speak much English and are totally ignorant about any other cultures apart from his own. I've seen this with a lot of parents who feel inadequate when faced with the massive challenges of bringing up their children in this modern age: they default to something 'greater than them'. So someone like my mother may say something like, no I may not have all the answers, but as long as you believe in god and use the Bible as your guide, then you will find all the answers in there. It seems almost convenient to have a reference like that to default to when it doubt, as if it contains all the answers you will ever need to deal with whatever challenging situation you may encounter in the future. Well, for my parents, they pretty much treated Chinese culture in the same light - I was raised to believe that Chinese culture was superior to all other cultures in the world (which is bullshit of course) and that it would serve as my guide for life if I embraced all things Chinese. Of course, in hindsight, that's bullshit of course - my parents were totally ill-equipped to prepare me or my siblings for this crazy modern world we now inhibit. But rather than saying, "kids, you're on your own, we can't help you - solve your own problems, it'll make you a stronger person", they actually genuinely believed that our Chinese culture would help us through these challenges we faced in life.
Is this necessarily a bad thing? The saying, "whatever helps you sleep better at night" comes to mind. Think about the way uneducated people in the past often sought solace in religion: they had all these problems in their lives they couldn't solve, so they prayed about it and felt better after praying, because they genuinely believed that a benevolent god had heard their prayers. Nothing has changed after they have prayed - they are probably still facing the same problems, but at least they have somehow managed to calmed themselves down to a state whereby they are relaxed and can have a good night's sleep rather than stay up all night worrying about the problems they can't solve. By that token, yes having something like religion to help you sleep better at night is a very good thing to have. My parents' very warped view of being Chinese and Chinese culture functioned in much the same way, for example, they believed that Chinese people had much higher IQ than white people, so by nature, we already are at a massive advantage when facing the rest of the world. That belief gave them a sense of confidence which didn't come from say, having obtained a degree from a top university - my parents are not very educated, they are not graduates, if you subjected them to an IQ test, the best case scenario is that they would emerge as average. But if believing that they are intelligent because of their genes would give them a sense of confidence about tackling the problems they face in life, then why not? I'd rather they had that confidence (regardless of what bullshit they choose to base it on) than for them to go through life with no self-esteem.
When I was in Shenzhen, I have seen manual labourers who were up at the crack of dawn earning about S$6.30 a day for working on a construction site, I have also met multi-millionaire entrepreneurs who have stunned me with their brilliance. Simply being Chinese didn't give the manual labourers any advantage at all, there are so many other factors in life that determine whether you become successful or not in life. In short, my parents' theory is totally bullshit, they are ignorant and uneducated folks who didn't have a freaking clue what the hell they were talking about - but if their interpretation of being Chinese gave them some confidence to face the challenges in life, then I am going to let sleeping dogs lie and not challenge their way of thinking. But no, my parents are not the official spokespersons of Chinese culture - just because they totally misrepresented Chinese culture to me when I was a child is not a good enough reason for me to resent it today. There are good things that one can certainly learn from Chinese culture, the same way there are good things we can learn from Russian, Korean, German, Japanese, British, Thai and French culture alike. Being in China allowed me to see Chinese culture at work personally and it couldn't be more different from the totally warped version of it my parents had tried to present to me as a child. To be honest, after having seen the gross, nasty PRC tourists spit in the casinos in Macau, I'm still not fond of Chinese culture - but moving beyond that, I'm interested to try to re-engage it on a clean slate and if I were to hate Chinese culture, I want to hate it because I didn't like it and make that judgement purely on my terms, rather than for it to simply be a default stance because of how my parents misrepresented Chinese culture.
If I may be blunt: simple, uneducated people cannot handle complex messages and my parents were like that. They wanted to believe that everything about being Chinese is so brilliant and well, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to start poking holes in their theory. But when you are not very educated, when you haven't achieved that much in your life, when your CV isn't impressive, when you really haven't accomplished that much over the decades you have spent on this earth, it may be pretty hard to find anything in your life that you can feel proud about. So in this case, people often attach themselves to something they are loosely associated with. The classic example of this is when supporters of a football club go out and celebrate because "their" club has won an important football match - but I'm like, you're just a spectator. Did you actually contribute to the team winning? How can you justify the kind of jubilation or feeling any pride in the outcome just because you claim to support this club? If you are genuinely a fan of football, why not just join a local team that plays during evening and weekends, then perhaps you can personally score a goal and feel some real pride? Oh, are you just too fat and unfit to even play a game of football, the sport you claim to be such a big fan of? Well, that's my cynicism talking. I am equally cynical about anyone who claims to be proud of being Chinese - yeah right. That's bullshit. You can feel proud about something you've done, such as if you have scored top marks in a difficult Chinese exam - now that's an achievement you can point to and say, "I did that, isn't that brilliant?" But simply being Chinese doesn't give you the right to feel proud about anything. It's ridiculous to feel any pride over something you can't claim any credit for.
So there you go, that's it from me for now on this topic. What do you think? What kind of relationship do you have with your culture? How does it affect the way you feel about yourself? Do leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.
Besides, due to Shenzhen's proximity to Hong Kong, it is often seen as a showcase of modern China to the world. Many tourists who are in Hong Kong often take a short trip over to China and get no further than Shenzhen, so the government in China are keen to give them a very good impression. It is an extremely new city, unlike say Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, there are many old buildings which are kinda unloved, dirty, falling apart at the edges and could desperately do with a paint job - but such buildings are hard to find in Shenzhen where everything just looks so new. It is also one of China's richest cities, but such statistics are to be taken with a pinch of salt - there's no denying that there's a lot of rich people in Shenzhen who have benefited from the economic boom there, but then there are also thousands (if not millions) of migrant workers from the much poorer provinces doing all the dirty and dangerous jobs there, earning little more than 1000 RMB (S$210 or £117) a month. It suffices to say that it is a city of huge contrasts, between the new Chinese elite and those who have been left behind in this system. There was one morning when I could sleep due to jet lag, I got out of bed at 5:30 am as I was wide awake and went for a walk. The only people up and about at that hour were the construction workers who were just arriving at work, if they earn 1000 RMB a month and they work 30 or 31 days in a month, that means they earn about 30 RMB a day or £3.52 or SS6.30 a day. That wouldn't even buy you a drink at some of Shenzhen's more fancy bars that I visited. The irony is that those fancy bars were built by these poor Labourers.
I did get to meet some of these new Chinese elite in Shenzhen - now Shenzhen prides itself for its 创业精神, it is a city where entrepreneurs thrive, where they live and breath innovation and have a head for business. The evidence of Shenzhen's success is the sheer amount of wealth you see there , these people are extremely good at what they do and they work bloody hard. My hotel was outside the Tencent 腾讯 headquarters and I could see workers leaving the offices after midnight as it is not uncommon for them to put in 15 or 16 hour long days at work. I was attending the launch of the Brisbane-Shenzhen Landing Pad and my partner's company was one of the Australian companies invited to the event: it was an honour to be a part of such an interesting event where I met entrepreneurs and investors from both Australia and China at the event. As this event was organized by the Shenzhen government, it was carefully choreographed and only the most successful Australian and Chinese companies were invited to the event. Needless to say, some of the people I've met there just blew my mind. I've gone from running my own business to going back to working for a boss - I know just how demanding it can be to start a business from scratch and I have so much respect for the people in Shenzhen who have achieved such incredible success in their respective fields. The Chinese team who took care of us in Shenzhen were also incredible people - I am now good friends with them and I have much love and respect for them.
As for the other side of the coin, yeah I met plenty of the usual rude Chinese people. When I arrived at my hotel in Macau, a tour group from China had just arrived and they were arguing, shouting at each other in the lobby and some of the men even spat on the floor. That's right, they spat on the floor in the middle of a luxurious hotel. I had spent a few moments speaking with the staff at the hotel (who were a mix of local Macau and Filipino workers) and one lady said to me, "this is normal for them, this is what we have to deal with everyday." I guess she was just resigned to it, whilst I was mortified at having to be confronted with such an ugly display of Chinese behaviour. On the flight back to London, I sat a row in front of a Chinese couple who talked so loudly. In the middle of the night, the man asked the woman so loudly, "你要不要喝水？" I was sleeping soundly, that woke not just me up but quite a few others around me and I just lost my shit - I turned around and gave them a bilingual scolding. You wanna be the ugly China man? I'll show you how ugly I can be. But then again, like the staff at the hotel in Macau, many of those around me were upset but were not surprised: they had come to expect nothing less from Chinese people in a plane - they are usually incapable of behaving in a decent manner and perhaps I shouldn't have been that surprised. Certainly, anyone who has visited China would probably be nodding in agreement right now and saying, "yup, that's exactly what I encountered when I was in China, that's how they behave."
So, what do the brilliant Chinese entrepreneurs in Shenzhen and the Chinese rude people I have encountered have in common? That's right, they're all Chinese. Now allow me to share a bit more not from this recent trip, but from my childhood. I was brought up in an extremely, stereotypically Chinese family. My father was a Chinese teacher who was completely ignorant of all other cultures apart from his own, so he basically attributed all positive attributes like kindness, diligence, perseverance, mercy, honesty, patience and discipline to Chinese culture and of course, that's complete and utter bullshit of course (like my dad has said so much stupid shit over the years, don't get me started) - it is not as if other cultures in Europe, Africa or America don't possess such qualities as well. My father conveniently chose to make the assumption that all other cultures were vapid and devoid of merit, purely on the basis that he knew nothing about other cultures. But it suffices to say that my parents didn't have enough confidence in their own ability to bring up their children, to impart the right kinds of values as parents - so instead, they defaulted to the customary norms according to Chinese culture. So they would expect us to be honest and not tell lies because it was the Chinese thing to do, rather than the right thing to do regardless of your skin colour or nationality. Of course, by the time I was like 10 years old, I realized that my parents were utterly clueless about parenting, I began to resent anything they were trying to impose on me, particularly their culture since it was so dear to them. That's why I started to resent Chinese culture as it was a convenient scapegoat to blame - the alternative was to resent my parents and I couldn't bring myself to do that.
But here's my conclusion that may seem extremely obvious, but well, sometimes it it worth stating the obvious. Being Chinese needn't necessarily make you a super successful entrepreneur. Being Chinese doesn't necessarily turn you into an obnoxious cunt whose behaviour causes grave offence everywhere you go. Being Chinese, having this culture, only plays a fairly small part in your life - the rest is still up to you to turn yourself into a great person that people will love and admire. What you will accomplish in your life depends far more on the choices you make as an individual, rather than the kind of cultural influences that played a part in your upbringing. We have to hold each individual responsible for his/her own actions that has led to the successes and failures in their lives, rather than make any kind of assumption based on their nationality, ethnicity, skin colour or culture. Thus by that very same token, if you were to go to China today, you will encounter everything from extremely successful entrepreneurs who will inspire you right down to super obnoxious assholes whom you might just get into a fight with. Being Chinese doesn't make you a good or bad person for there are both good and bad people in Chna; being brought up with Chinese culture doesn't necessarily make you good or bad either. This may sound obvious, but in light of the kind of upbringing I had, I feel that it is necessary to state the obvious.
In hindsight of course, it is easy to explain what was going on with my parents' approach. I am quite frustrated by the way we refuse to judge our parents in Asian culture, as if to do so would be ungrateful and immoral. But that conveniently ignores the fact that there are a lot of parents out there who are clueless when it comes to parenting - it's not that they are bad or evil people who are deliberately trying to damage their kids, no. They're just plain ignorant, stupid and uneducated - they are out of their depth when it comes to modern parenting and as a result, they make many mistakes and this was very much the case with my family. So they did what most people would do in that situation: they merely offered what they knew best, which was their culture. My father went one step further than that: as he was a Chinese teacher, the only useful thing that he could really teach me was Chinese so he used to wax lyrical about how learning Chinese was going to be so important for business in the future as everyone in the world would want to do business with China. That was complete bullshit of course, because it was a statement not based on a single shred of evidence, but rather a sincere desire that the one thing he could actually give his children would turn out to be actually quite useful one day. Don't get me wrong, please. I don't question my dad's sincerity, I just question his methodology when it came to evaluating the value of his language and culture. You know the saying, when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. I still don't think he has actually realized how irrelevant the Chinese language has been in my career.
Where does that leave me then? Well, when I was a child, I used to resent Chinese culture and all things associated with Chinese culture because I blamed my parents' behaviour on their culture but hindsight is always 2020. Being Chinese didn't somehow corrupt my parents or made them bad people, heck no. My parents were uneducated, ignorant and autistic, that was they were had such awful parenting skills - all those factors had very little to do with the fact that they were Chinese. Blaming their culture was just a convenient scapegoat for me as a child, because the alternative would be to blame my parents for their faults and shortcomings. No, the rational thing to do would be to hold my parents personally responsible for any mistakes they may have made, rather than simply blaming it all on their culture. To be blunt, the very worst aspects of their parenting are associated far more with their autism, rather than their Chinese culture per se. So once I came to that conclusion, it has freed me from my previous prejudice against Chinese culture to get reacquainted with it on a clean slate, without the baggage that I had brought with me from my difficult childhood. Now, I have quite neutral feelings towards Chinese culture now, which is a huge step from before, when I had mostly negative feelings towards my parents' culture which had become a rather convenient scapegoat for my resentment and anger all these years.
I have been incredibly lucky to lived and worked in several countries, on top of that, I speak several languages as well. This means that I have had the chance to befriend people from all over the world. Now, contrast this to people like my father who don't even speak much English and are totally ignorant about any other cultures apart from his own. I've seen this with a lot of parents who feel inadequate when faced with the massive challenges of bringing up their children in this modern age: they default to something 'greater than them'. So someone like my mother may say something like, no I may not have all the answers, but as long as you believe in god and use the Bible as your guide, then you will find all the answers in there. It seems almost convenient to have a reference like that to default to when it doubt, as if it contains all the answers you will ever need to deal with whatever challenging situation you may encounter in the future. Well, for my parents, they pretty much treated Chinese culture in the same light - I was raised to believe that Chinese culture was superior to all other cultures in the world (which is bullshit of course) and that it would serve as my guide for life if I embraced all things Chinese. Of course, in hindsight, that's bullshit of course - my parents were totally ill-equipped to prepare me or my siblings for this crazy modern world we now inhibit. But rather than saying, "kids, you're on your own, we can't help you - solve your own problems, it'll make you a stronger person", they actually genuinely believed that our Chinese culture would help us through these challenges we faced in life.
Is this necessarily a bad thing? The saying, "whatever helps you sleep better at night" comes to mind. Think about the way uneducated people in the past often sought solace in religion: they had all these problems in their lives they couldn't solve, so they prayed about it and felt better after praying, because they genuinely believed that a benevolent god had heard their prayers. Nothing has changed after they have prayed - they are probably still facing the same problems, but at least they have somehow managed to calmed themselves down to a state whereby they are relaxed and can have a good night's sleep rather than stay up all night worrying about the problems they can't solve. By that token, yes having something like religion to help you sleep better at night is a very good thing to have. My parents' very warped view of being Chinese and Chinese culture functioned in much the same way, for example, they believed that Chinese people had much higher IQ than white people, so by nature, we already are at a massive advantage when facing the rest of the world. That belief gave them a sense of confidence which didn't come from say, having obtained a degree from a top university - my parents are not very educated, they are not graduates, if you subjected them to an IQ test, the best case scenario is that they would emerge as average. But if believing that they are intelligent because of their genes would give them a sense of confidence about tackling the problems they face in life, then why not? I'd rather they had that confidence (regardless of what bullshit they choose to base it on) than for them to go through life with no self-esteem.
When I was in Shenzhen, I have seen manual labourers who were up at the crack of dawn earning about S$6.30 a day for working on a construction site, I have also met multi-millionaire entrepreneurs who have stunned me with their brilliance. Simply being Chinese didn't give the manual labourers any advantage at all, there are so many other factors in life that determine whether you become successful or not in life. In short, my parents' theory is totally bullshit, they are ignorant and uneducated folks who didn't have a freaking clue what the hell they were talking about - but if their interpretation of being Chinese gave them some confidence to face the challenges in life, then I am going to let sleeping dogs lie and not challenge their way of thinking. But no, my parents are not the official spokespersons of Chinese culture - just because they totally misrepresented Chinese culture to me when I was a child is not a good enough reason for me to resent it today. There are good things that one can certainly learn from Chinese culture, the same way there are good things we can learn from Russian, Korean, German, Japanese, British, Thai and French culture alike. Being in China allowed me to see Chinese culture at work personally and it couldn't be more different from the totally warped version of it my parents had tried to present to me as a child. To be honest, after having seen the gross, nasty PRC tourists spit in the casinos in Macau, I'm still not fond of Chinese culture - but moving beyond that, I'm interested to try to re-engage it on a clean slate and if I were to hate Chinese culture, I want to hate it because I didn't like it and make that judgement purely on my terms, rather than for it to simply be a default stance because of how my parents misrepresented Chinese culture.
If I may be blunt: simple, uneducated people cannot handle complex messages and my parents were like that. They wanted to believe that everything about being Chinese is so brilliant and well, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to start poking holes in their theory. But when you are not very educated, when you haven't achieved that much in your life, when your CV isn't impressive, when you really haven't accomplished that much over the decades you have spent on this earth, it may be pretty hard to find anything in your life that you can feel proud about. So in this case, people often attach themselves to something they are loosely associated with. The classic example of this is when supporters of a football club go out and celebrate because "their" club has won an important football match - but I'm like, you're just a spectator. Did you actually contribute to the team winning? How can you justify the kind of jubilation or feeling any pride in the outcome just because you claim to support this club? If you are genuinely a fan of football, why not just join a local team that plays during evening and weekends, then perhaps you can personally score a goal and feel some real pride? Oh, are you just too fat and unfit to even play a game of football, the sport you claim to be such a big fan of? Well, that's my cynicism talking. I am equally cynical about anyone who claims to be proud of being Chinese - yeah right. That's bullshit. You can feel proud about something you've done, such as if you have scored top marks in a difficult Chinese exam - now that's an achievement you can point to and say, "I did that, isn't that brilliant?" But simply being Chinese doesn't give you the right to feel proud about anything. It's ridiculous to feel any pride over something you can't claim any credit for.
So there you go, that's it from me for now on this topic. What do you think? What kind of relationship do you have with your culture? How does it affect the way you feel about yourself? Do leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.
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