China reveals both tradition, modernism

Editor’s Note: “Letter from” is a monthly column written by a Mainer or person with ties to this state, who is living or traveling far from home. Troy resident Dana Wilde is teaching American literature on a J. William Fulbright grant at Fudan University in Shanghai, China. He is an adjunct faculty member in the English department at the University of Maine in Orono, and has worked as a copy desk editor at the NEWS.

We’ve been in China only a few weeks, and already reality is altered.

In our neighborhood near Fudan University, the residential complexes of rectangular four-story apartment buildings are neatly enclosed by walls about 7 feet high. The streets are pleasant, despite the relentless humidity and grit. Leafy trees line the sidewalks, which are made of stippled concrete in 2-foot squares. People of all ages amble easily along on bicycles, some with carts attached and bells ringing as they go. Little children with smiling faces straight out of 17th-century etchings hold hands with Dad or Mom.

People stare at us everywhere we go, especially at my 9-year-old son, Jack, whose bright blond hair generates intense curiosity. In bustling department stores, where there seem to be three clerks for every two customers, friendly counter women form small crowds around us and touch Jack’s irresistible head. He tries to shun the attention by averting his eyes, but it’s no use – in China, averting your eyes is decorous politeness.

It’s a pleasant holdover of manners from bygone days. Today, China’s largest cities – Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou (aka Canton) – are to unschooled Western eyes amazingly modern, and growing more so at a breakneck pace. In Beijing and Shanghai, cities of roughly 13 million and 14 million people, high-rise buildings are under construction seemingly everywhere. The windows of huge office towers gleam along the skylines, signaling China’s determination to lift its economy and its culture into the 21st century – a determination not only to share in the material wealth of America and Europe, but to play a major role in how this century’s history, culture and economies develop.

It’s a gigantic task. Officially, China’s population is 1.2 billion people; unofficially, probably much more. Huge as the cities are, most Chinese – more than 800 million – live in the countryside, which we are told lags far behind in even the rudimentary luxuries, such as telephone lines, medical care and jobs. To help these people, China needs to broaden and strengthen its economy; this requires it to open its economy to the West, a drastic measure, given its closed communist past. Paradoxically, the country people are likely to be the early victims of the improvement measures: More than 150 million farm workers are expected to be unemployed as agricultural trade with the United States and other nations increases. Think about it: 150 million unemployed.

This poses dangerous problems for China’s leaders, who are well aware of the political, social and economic risks of their actions – and of the even greater risks of nonaction. The country people live much the way their ancestors did, and so the problem is not only economic, but deeply cultural: In order to keep itself together, China must bring as many people as possible into the mainstream economy, and to be brought into the mainstream, the people need to learn to live in the world of automobiles, cell phones, computers, banks and – the Chinese fervently hope – a working law enforcement and court system. The country people are not used to these things.

It’s as if there are two Chinas: the urban east of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and the rural west where illiteracy is a fact of life. It’s possible to think of the East as new, and the West as old, as if on the one hand China’s 5,000-year-old culture had disappeared in the cities’ construction of high-rises, and, on the other, its ancient agricultural ways were stalled in the dust and heat of the farms.

But it’s not so simple. As one U.S. official said to us, many Chinese hold the view that China had 4,500 pretty good years, and then exploiting Westerners kicked them around for 150 years or so, after which communism, with its good points and bad, moved in for about 40 years. Now, in this view, China is engaged in a major cultural upheaval, a sea change, as they say, while it reinvents itself. China is intent on educating and modernizing its rural areas, while its ancient heritage subtly remains in the cities.

Even now, we are learning to catch glimpses of China’s past, probably the way archaeologists learn to recognize fossils: Once you know what to look for, they’re everywhere. And they function, though not the way a Westerner might typically think.

Turning into the main gate of Fudan University, for example, you are faced suddenly by an enormous, looming statue of Mao Zedong. It’s carefully placed to take over your field of vision as you enter the campus, and the effect is hair-raising. Is it a monument to the glories of communism? Not exactly. A reminder of the social and political chaos of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s when so many Chinese suffered terribly? Not exactly that, either.

What, then? Well, perhaps like the Great Wall of China – which was first built in the 200s B.C., extended in the 1300s to hold back the invading Mongols and is carefully maintained today – the statue of Chairman Mao indicates a sense of the wholeness of Chinese culture, its radiant achievements and its darkest moments taken together as a single heritage, a single fluid moment.

Its great beauty and its violence. Along the top of the concrete walls enclosing the apartment complexes in our Shanghai neighborhood, colored glass is arranged in delicate, randomly abstract patterns, pleasing to the eye, really. The glass is in shards, cemented upright on the wall top; its beauty, like the whole of Chinese culture, exists simultaneously with danger – you don’t want to scale this wall because the broken glass is the delicate Chinese equivalent of barbed wire.

In Shanghai’s streets, life goes on energetically as it has for Asian millennia. On the sidewalks, people carefully scrub their hands and arms over tubs of soapy water. In the open-air market, men and women laugh and chat as they dicker over onions and mesh bags of live frogs. Taxis honk their ways through bikes and pedestrians. The humidity is no bother because the pace is remarkably slow; we imagine this same pace 200 years ago when Europeans began to push in, a thousand years ago when Shanghai was no more than a fishing village at the mouth of the Yangzi River.

In the coming year, we Americans will learn practically from scratch about one of the richest, most important and – at present – most dynamic cultures in human history.