Money = Happiness ?

Today I met with two different Beida friends. Ironically, both conversations ended up being about the emphasis students seem to put on money making. It astonishes me how common it is to find students applying for jobs simply based on the amount of money they can be expected to make or how it might make them look if they land a job with such and such a company. I think it is really unfortunate that so many talented students can’t think of anything else to do with their lives than how to make a lot of money. There is so much more to this world than money and yet it seems that all modern society seems to emphasize is consumerism and wealth acquisition. In high school, I remember my math teacher telling our class that each and every one of us was smart enough to make a million dollars if we really wanted to; so rather than spend our time thinking about how to make money, we should think about what we were interested in doing or how we could contribute to society.

I brought the issue of contributing to society up with my Beida friends and their response was that Chinese people in general just don’t have the concept of social responsibility. Chinese people are used to following the crowd 随潮流走; because by following the crowd, the chances of bringing harm to one’s life are minimized. Now that way of thinking is inherently flawed in my opinion. But I don’t blame people for thinking that way, at least the majority of people. However, when it comes to the well educated elite, I feel there is a greater responsibility to society that few of this class seem to share.

Thinking about my own school, I realized how this is equally the case at Stanford as it is at Beida. Students care more about prestige and wealth than about making the world a better place, because after all, who cares if the world is a better place so long as you are happy. But I guess that begs the fundamental question: “Can money and prestige bring you happiness?” or put differently, “Can one equate money and prestige with happiness?” What makes me a bit depressed is that I think one can equate the two in our modern society. Why? Well because from a very young age we are shown images that money and prestige put smiles on people’s faces, particularly your parents—which is really important in Chinese culture—and it seems to be what every dream is made of both in books and in movies. It is so ingrained in us that there is little hope for us to develop a counter argument somewhere along the long and complicated road that leads to adult maturity. Even isolated within the comfort and well protected boundaries of a university, one is hard pressed to withstand the onslaught that is modern society. It is even more so today what with the advent of the internet and high speed broadband.

I personally feel like I shouldn’t have to worry about money, but when everything around me seems to say otherwise, I must admit that it is hard to stay steadfast in my beliefs. After all human beings are weak and the eye is easily enticed by shiny things.

You know, the more I think about it the more I realize how hard life really is. Thinking about stuff makes life harder; if you just follow the crowd, then life becomes pretty simple. But on the flip side, if you just follow the crowd— are you really living?

Dreams...

Dreams… In the span of our entire life, how many dreams do we have? How many dreams are conjured up and then forgotten only to wither away into the abyss of lost and neglected dreams? Today I chatted with another Beida student, her name is luo ying, and she is finishing up her MA in Indian studies at Beida; she just came back from Pakistan after spending 10 months there on a government exchange program. She came back early just so she could look for a job. We talked for an hour about the importance of having a dream and a goal in life. I asked her why she was thinking of applying to Deloitte and other top accounting firms, and she told me that it would be a good opportunity and a safe job. After probing further, I realized that she had no real plans for her life; she wanted to teach and continue learning languages if she could, but the prospect of using Hindi and Weigur in a job were slim so she figured her best bet would be to work at a large company that would give her good training and other opportunities to expand her career potential.

After talking it through with her, we came to the realization that the choice wasn’t such a bad one after all considering that she might have the opportunity to transfer to a location that could utilize her specific language abilities if she entered a multinational company. I thought it was ironic that we ended up coming to the conclusion that sometimes our dreams are not fit for reality and so we must make the next best choice. She said that it isn’t so easy in China to find a job that you like or one that will make your dreams come true; I told her that it was the same in America even though the competition for regular jobs doesn’t seem nearly as competitive as it is in China.

I’ve just spent the last hour or so trying to fall asleep; tossing and turning in my bed, I’ve been thinking about the future and the uncertainty that I will have to deal with in the coming months while I try to find work that is both meaningful and along the lines of what I want to do. The last thing that I want to do is to do something that I don’t care about. I’ve already decided that so long as I have the choice, I will choose to do something that I love and am passionate about. The only problem is that you can’t really find out what that is until you do it. I wonder if it is an easier choice to make for me because I am an American as opposed to my friend who is Chinese.

I also made a very important realization today while I was walking around with my friend Takeshi Nakamoto. I was telling him about my dream of being a film director—one that I’ve been throwing around for quite some time now, but for some reason still feels a bit ethereal. He asked me what kind of movies I wanted to make and I told him I wanted to make international movies. I then started thinking out loud and as I was processing my thoughts while speaking to him, I realized that one important goal of being a film maker for me was to create stories that I could relate to. It was one of those feelings that you get when as you are talking, you realize how much sense you are making. Ever since I was little I’ve enjoyed watching movies and reading books, but it wasn’t until I reached high school that it finally dawned on me that most of the movies I had watched were ones featuring white people and black people and other ethnicities other than one I could identify with. The issue of race became unavoidable when I thought about why I felt distance from the stories of my favorite movies.

There are no protagonists that I can really say I identify with because when you watch a movie on screen race is no longer something that can be overlooked; this realization hit me pretty hard on the head and has gotten me thinking. Lately I’ve been looking for my motivation to keep working at filmmaking, but it has been hard because of a number of factors.

I also managed to mention to luo ying that I really felt like I have no home; she corrected me by saying that I probably felt like I had no home country. I’m not sure whether she was right, but I explained to her that what was missing was a strong sense of identity with America. The America I identify with is one of ideals; it is one that exists in my mind becomes real in so far as I speak the words that I am an American and feel the surge of patriotism and nationalistic identity that come with the phrase, “I am an American.” But it really only goes that far. I suppose for some people it is enough but for me it isn’t. I’m looking for something more, I don’t know what exactly, but I know that I whatever it is I don’t get it while I am in America. I told her that was the reason I’ve come to China and why I’ve spent so much time in Japan. I think it fundamentally has to do with culture. I am searching for a culture—one that I can call my own.

That seems like a good answer to the question why I don’t want to work in America after I graduate.

But the bigger question seems to be: Why is culture so important to me? I think this question is a lot more complicated than it my seem at first glance.

too busy? be like a snail!

Today I talked about a number of interesting topics with Chika. We ended up talking about how our value system is based on constant comparison with those around us and with society as a whole. It seems to me that everything we do is based on this habit of comparing our lives with those around us. Somehow he tied this into the part in the book of Matthew when the phrase “Do not judge lest ye be judge” pops up. Basically the tangent we went on with this one is that the intrinsic value of human beings is the same regardless of how you evaluate them. But when it comes down to it, society doesn’t seem to think so; Ghandi will always seem like a much better person than say, Hitler.

Society moves forward because of this value system based on comparison; value is assigned comparatively. Thus my life and the choices I make for myself are either relatively good or relatively bad based on the comparisons I make with other people. When you think about it, everything from choices about what we wear, what jobs we take and who we marry are affected by this tendency towards comparison.

In Chinese class we are reading this essay that compares modernization to a snail. The main argument of the essay seems to be that present day society suffers from an excess of work and a loss of free time—in short, people are too busy. This business manifests itself in this never ending yearning for increased speed and efficiency; faster computers, faster information and faster methods of consumption are some examples. The author marks two important time periods in the history of modern civilization: the first being the industrial revolution and the second being the electronic and digital revolution. Though these two revolutions increased efficiency and production, they did not increase our amount of free time; on the contrary, they seemed to have caused a decrease in the amount of free time we have.

Because we are constantly looking for the next best thing, be it a new home or gadget, the need to work more hours to earn more money develops. It is a vicious cycle in which humans are the horses that chase the carrots on sticks (money and social status); we cannot escape it, because as society moves, we move as well motivated by our own fear of being left behind. I was surprised to find how true this seemed to be and how much of what I do and choose for myself is governed by this comparative value system.

I need to get back to reading some Thoreau… I’m looking for a Walden Pond in a barren wasteland.

moral responsibility

Just finished watching this movie 活着 (to live) by Zhang Yi Mou. I think the movie was two parts, I've only watched one of them, but that was enough to give me a strong impression of the director's intended message. The story is about a Chinese family during the Cultural Revolution. The family consists of a mother, father and a mute daughter. The parents worry that their only daughter won't be able to find a husband, but in time their fears are allayed when a strapping young man comes to sweep their daughter off her feet. I use the terms "strapping" and "sweep off her feet" loosely, because, after all the movie is set in China during the Cultural Revolution. Appropriate to the time period, the husband and wife wear very conservative PRC clothing: the husband is in what looks like a blue workers uniform and the wife wearing a jungle green one with red stars that symbolize her loyalty to the Communist Party. The wedding itself is a very modest affair, with the husband and wife to be pledging their allegiance to Chairman Mao and bowing before a newly painted red portrait of him on the wall outside their house.

As the movie progresses we see more and more instances of the effects of the Cultural Revolution, for example on the day of the expected birth of their child, the mute daughter's parents go to see the village head; in one room they chat about the fortune and great luck of the grandparent's to be, while in the other room, the village head's wife is weeping hysterically while she packs her husband's belongings. As they grandmother and grandfather to be are walking out of the village head's house, he explains to them that he is being summoned in for questioning by the party. During the Cultural Revolution such things were common—one's loyalty to the party was something that could be brought into question at any time. When they get to the hospital, the parents notice that there are no elderly doctors, the only people walking around where young girls wearing red armbands. In class we learned that during the Red Guard Movement—the first two years of the Cultural Revolution in which Mao called upon the youth to excise the bad elements (landlords, rightists, capitalists etc.)—Red Guards wore red armbands in order to show their status as participants in the revolution. The parents are not convinced that the young girls know what they are doing so they ask their son-in-law to go find an older doctor. He comes back with the doctor that had once delivered babies at the hospital that they were at; around the doctor's neck was a sign that labeled him as a bad element. The father noticed that the doctor was famished so he went out to get some mantou(buns) for him to eat. The hunger stricken doctor devours the buns in an instant, which leaves him in a state of delirium offset by the occasional hiccup. The father brings him some water to drink in order to help down the buns that he had eaten too fast. The camera then switches to the room that their daughter is in; the cry of a baby signals that their daughter had given birth. Everything seems perfectly find until the nurses try to clean up; in a series of dramatic cuts, the situation turns from happy bliss to dire desperation. The nurses were unable to cut the umbilical cord properly and as a result, the mother continues to bleed profusely; they try to get the experienced doctor to help out, but due to eating seven mantou and drinking water that caused them to expand in his stomach, he was completely incapacitated.

I found the last scene to be incredibly ironic: because the doctor was being publicly denounced and punished by the Red Guards, he had not eaten for three days—his inability to assist in the situation was determined as soon as he was given the mantou to eat. Because the young nurses had taken over the hospital, the mother to be was at the hands of people far too young and inexperienced to be delivering a baby. Thus the mother had almost 0% chance of survival. Perhaps the greatest irony of all was that the very Chairman Mao that the family had be praising and pledging their loyalty to was the cause of the Cultural Revolution that ultimately brought about the conditions in the hospital that caused their daughter's death. And yet the Chinese people still seem to praise him like a savior.

This Monday I went to learn how to cook 肉饼（roubing –also known as meat pancake）. While the meat pancake was the reason behind my nonstop throwing up and diarrhea five hours later, the conversation that came up while we were eating was quite insightful. My cooking teacher's husband and I started to discuss the Communist party and Chairman Mao. I can't quite remember how we got started on the conversation, but I do remember that he believed that Mao was a great leader because he was able to unite China; I have heard this argument many times before so it wasn't surprising in the least. Ah I remember now how we got into the conversation. It started with us talking about roubing—ironic how the topic starter eventually came back to have the last laugh with me running to the toilet to apologize for looking down on it. Roubing was the type of food that poor peasants ate, except without the rou because back in those days when uncle Hu (teacher's husband) was living in the countryside, as most young people did, meat was scarce. He said back in those days you had to eat your meat fast because if you didn't it would be gone before you knew it and then you would have to wait months until the next holiday. This conversation got us talking about the state of peasants in China and the fact that they sell their food at such a low price to the government that they can never really escape the poverty line.

Uncle Hu made the point that despite the widespread poverty in China, the peasants were not going hungry nowadays. China was united under Mao and has forever been better because of it—so believes Uncle Hu and millions of other Chinese like him. In his opinion, Mao was a true political genius. Using the concept of Communism to unite the predominantly peasant population, Chairman Mao was able to bring the entire country under his control—a feat that none were able to accomplish prior to him. During the period of land reform, farmers were given land from the government to ensure that they had a vested interest in the new government. With the peasants content, Mao could work on securing power and strengthening China. Eventually I had to mention the Cultural Revolution and the 30 million plus lives that were lost as a result of the violence and widespread hunger. Uncle Hu's response was: not everyone's perfect, by then Mao was an old senile man bent on securing power for himself; but in his opinion, Mao had undoubtedly had led China onto a path of prosperity by the act of uniting the country under him. When I think about it now, I can see why Chinese people are able to revere him so highly; after all he did unite China, even if it cost millions of lives in the process.

After a moment to think over Uncle Hu's argument, I decided to ask him why the loss of life didn't seem to matter to him. This spawned into a larger debate about the difference between American and Chinese politics which essentially differed on the issue of moral responsibility. The Chinese perspective is that a country should deal with its own issues before it goes and meddles in another country's issues. When I asked him about Darfur, he said that the situation was unfortunate, but that it still wasn't the responsibility of any country to step in; his parallel analogy was that of a Chinese father being reprimanded by the police for disciplining his child with violence. In Chinese culture, the father has dominion over his family's affairs, no other person has right to interfere; in a nutshell that's the Chinese approach to world politics. People that are born in times of unrest and chaos are unfortunate, but that doesn't mean we should go save them. His bottom line was: "If everybody began to interfere in the affairs of other countries, where would the world be?" At that point I had nothing more to say, I realized that they had a good point in denouncing America's tendency to meddle in the affairs of other countries. But at the same time I could not give up my belief that life is sacred; people have a responsibility to protect it.

In the end he chalked it up to a difference in upbringing and values. It seems so trivial a distinction, but I guess our individual cultures do have very different value sets and thus the environment in which American and Chinese children are fundamentally different.

Is the world really flat?

This last week has been a bit of a blur, my apologies for not posting anything recently.

Yesterday I watched a surprisingly rich movie called Waking Life. The whole movie takes place in a dream, or at least I think it did; it was actually quite confusing because it was one of those movies that challenged the way you think and view the world. I definitely would recommend the movie; I will have to watch it again when I have the mental capacity to digest the complex dialogue that runs throughout the movie.

Today I went to a talk given by Thomas Friedman author of The World is Flat. We arrived at the bookstore about two and a half hours before he was scheduled to speak. Although it was a long wait, the talk was definitely worth it. Having not read the book myself, it was great having the author break down the major pieces of his argument in a easily digestible form. The basic premise of his book is that the world has gone through three great eras of globalizations: the first was the period from the 1400s to the 1800s, which was characterized by imperialism and a movement of a large world to a mid sized world motivated by specific countries (e.g. Spain and Portugal); the second major era of globalization was the period from the 1800s to 2000, which was an age dominated by company and corporation driven globalization; the last era was from the 2000 to the present, which has brought the world from small to tiny, one that is centered around individuals that are connecting, collaborating and competing with one another.

Friedman then went on to further elaborate on the specific points in time that led up to the era of globalization that we are currently in today, what he calls globalization 3.0. The invention of the personal computer, the development of the internet browser interface and the widespread investment in fiber optic lines created an environment that essentially leveled the playing field; or in Friedman's words "flattened" it. The flattening of the world has removed the barriers to entries to many different areas of business in addition to creating a competitive labor force that is not constrained by physical boundaries.

What I appreciated most about Friedman's talk was the optimism with which he shared in his assessment of this phenomenon of 21^st Century globalization; he said that, although his critics often snub him by saying that globalization is simply a means for the gap between the rich and the poor to widen even further, globalization has in both China and India, been the single most effective means of bringing millions of people out of poverty at a rate that no other method can boast. Personally I think that globalization is a good thing, even though it may result in a loss of jobs in America; the reason I think it is good is because I believe in the fundamentals of a free market economy and I believe that globalization will continue to increase the scope of the free market. Digital media, fiber optic connections and the internet has created a world in which people can do business directly with other individuals. This freedom has the potential to allow almost anyone to be an entrepreneur and find a way for themselves to make a living that is not limited to their physical locale.

Something to think about…