In the last “book” post, I introduced “cultural models” in the context of a discussion about whether a hypothetical “Tom” should join a rock band or go to college. Here we’ll look at some actual linguistic data. An excerpt from the Americans (names changed):

(Jill) And who is right? I think Tom is right, because an education is a good thing in my opinion, but it’s Tom’s life, and if he wants to join a rock band then I think that’s his choice. We need to have some rock band people.

(Sarah) I think he’s right too, because if his parents force him to go to college, and he ended up going to college instead of joining the rock band, he wouldn’t try hard, he wouldn’t study, he wouldn’t do any of that, because that’s not where he wants to be, so it’d be a waste of his time and of the parents’ money and of just…it’d be a waste of everything ’cause like he won’t be trying hard because he doesn’t want to be there, so it’d be better for him to do what he wants to do, because then he’ll put in a lot of effort to do what he wants to do. And if he wants to be a rock star, then he’s gonna try really hard, and he’s gonna be happy doing what he’s doing, instead of listening to his parents and being miserable.

Several cultural models show up here:

• “Pursuit of Happiness” — Do what makes you happy.
• “Follow Your Dreams” — Closely related, but with a different emphasis: Whatever you love most, are most passionate about, that is what you should do with your life.
• “You Can’t Change Me” — People are who they are, and they will do what interests them. Especially young people. Trying to force people to do things they don’t want to do will have the opposite result.

These three cultural models together paint a clear picture of what is to be done: Tom should give the rock band thing a serious try. This is most forcefully expressed in Sarah’s use of waste. We use the word waste when we are conscious of the limits of our resources. What is the resource here? She mentions time and money, probably the most precious and carefully accounted-for resources there are. And she makes the case that Tom doing what his parents want, instead of what he wants, would be a waste of these resources. There’s much more to this “waste,” though, which I’ll save for another post.

Hidden beneath the surface of these three cultural models is the powerful idea that there is a particular “life path” each of us is meant to follow. Often in linguistic and anthropological studies, the deepest, most influential cultural models are the ones that are hardest to find evidence for, precisely because they underlie such a vast expanse of shared cognitive space in a culture. The Life Path model is no different: it is so deeply assumed that each of us has such a path that it is rarely stated. The clearest articulation comes in the following exchange:

(Joe) I have a friend who did exactly this. His parents wanted him to go to college, and the family members at first were like, don’t do it, don’t do it, and they were all angry about it, and then they speak badly of the idea to one another, they think it’s bad, but eventually, they’ve resolved it with saying, well, this is what he wants to do, he’ll learn or he won’t, but this is his path.

(Bill) I think that’s right too. Conventionally, you know, it’s not a safe thing to do if you want to be financially secure all your life or something, but if that’s not your big important thing…

(Joe) …which it shouldn’t be…

(Bill) Yeah, I definitely agree with you on that. But then I think you should just…I think you should pursue what you’re interested in.

This exchange weaves together Life Path, Pursuit of Happiness, Follow Your Dreams, and another key American cultural model, Live and Learn.

Let’s look more closely at the statement, “He’ll learn or he won’t, but this is his path.” The but serves its usual role of prioritizing: the fact that this is his path is more important than the question of whether or not he’ll learn — which says a lot about the importance of Life Path, since, in these educated circles, learning is thought of as extremely important. What makes Life Path here even more important?

Bill and Joe’s exchange leaves some things to the imagination. Lurking behind their reasoning is a “dirty little secret” that would make high-minded, educated, avowedly secular liberals cringe: human life is holy. God is there, behind all the trappings of “higher” reasoning.

Sociologist Robert Bellah deserves much of the credit for bringing this to our attention. He famously studied what he termed American Civil Religion: a set of religiously-based beliefs shared by Americans of all religious and non-religious stripes. These beliefs — about many things, including our duties toward our fellow humans, as well as the uniqueness of human life and the need to “express ourselves” and develop our talents — provide the energy behind much of the language used by the Americans in my research, including Joe’s privileging of Life Path over learning.

In case you’re thinking, “I’m not religious,” or “I’m not spiritual,” you’re not off the hook. These beliefs go to the core of who Americans are. If you subscribe to the notion that we each have dreams and talents, and that there are ways in which our talents are “supposed” to be used, and if you feel we “owe” it to ourselves (and maybe to others) to pursue our dreams, and if you think God has nothing to do with this, then I invite you to ponder: according to whom are we “supposed” to use our talents? To whom do we really “owe” the pursuit of our dreams?

Much to share. At the moment I’m kicking myself a bit for not having my audio recorder running while out and about.

Year after year one of the running jokes among China-weary expats I’ve known has been about the decibel level everywhere you go in China, or at least urban Han China. TVs in hotel rooms, loudspeakers on buses and subways, music blasting outside beauty salons. A constant assault, and hard to get used to for Westerners. The joke goes that the noise provides comfort of a sort, like a security blanket.

Once, back in 1993, an American friend, living in Beijing, was visiting me in Guangzhou and crashing in my room. In the cluster of high-rises I was living in, one morning the noise started earlier than usual (sappy karaoke music wafting from someone’s window), and I was particularly impatient and spiteful. I dug around my tapes for NWA’s Straight Outta Compton, popped it in, and played the first (title) track, at maximum volume, with the box pointed straight out the window. I immediately felt guilty, and confessed my guilt to my friend. He joked: It’s nothing to them. Like the buzzing of a fly, or maybe even soothing. True or not, by the time the track was finished, the karaoke music had disappeared, and I went back to sleep.

The joke is rooted in cynicism and condescension. Yet even if the spirit isn’t right, I now think that in content the joke is dead on.

The first of my two weeks I spent with the YingHua-in-Beijing Summer Language and Leadership Institute, where, like last year, I was guiding 8-to-15-year-old Americans and Chinese through the bewilderment of being thrown together as roommates. Colette had already been in Beijing for three weeks, co-directing the program, while Mariette, our older daughter, age 8, participated, and Francesca, age 6, was tagging along in a pseudo-mascot role.

We spent the week in Huairou, near Beijing, at the National Mountaineering Training Center (a scene in its own right, and pictured here on the kind of clear day that was sorely lacking while we were there). Over four and a half days the Center’s “coaches” led the kids in a series of team-building exercises. In so many ways the coaches’ treatment of the kids was jarring to me (and, I suspect, to the American kids). There are many reasons for this, but I think first and foremost is the EXTREME DECIBEL LEVEL.

Whether yelling “Line up!” or shouting “Can you do it?” or counting down from 10 to get everyone to listen, the noisy episodes just kept coming. Often they’d come after a period of relative silence, making them all the more startling. There’s a harshness and an edge to the noise, which can’t help but encourage the development of a counter-harshness and counter-edge in the children — a tangible, physical manifestation of the harshness and edge of Chinese society writ large.

The week after Huairou we vacationed as a family in Qingdao — the sunny, breezy coastal city of Tsingtao beer fame. Having emerged into the blinding sunshine from the impressive depths of Underwater World, we ambled about in search of a lunch location. As we passed a stall selling fried seafood, a speaker belted out: “Fried seafood! Fried pork! Shishkabob!” Over and over again. Then, as we rounded a corner, we heard something baffling: next to a lady selling a variety of toys sat a speaker. Out of the speaker, at typical volume, issued what couldn’t have been, even to native speakers, anything more than a watery, humanish voice saying…something, over and over and over. As grating as the fried-food bit might have been, at least it had some modest informational value. But the informational value-add of this was nil. The noise was obviously and undeniably serving no purpose but to simply be noise.

I chuckled and commented to Colette, who also chuckled. In light of what had struck me at YingHua it all suddenly made perfect sense. And I recalled how our daughter Mariette, at age 3, not long after we had moved to Beijing in 2004, and having spent much time out and about on the streets of Beijing with Mom and Dad, would at odd times hold up a toilet paper roll to her mouth and start shouting quasi-verbal inanities at high volume, reminiscent of the sorts of noise I’ve been describing throughout this post.

From the perspective of my own personal growth, what had once been nothing but pure annoyance to me now fit inside of a completely coherent framework: adaptive human behavior. Being annoyed is understandable, but by itself annoyance is ultimately fruitless in our species’ quest for genuine understanding. With the distance from it that I now have it all seems quite obvious, but the bodily fact of culture makes it tough to see beyond our own immediate reactions. More on this next time.

]]> http://www.jasonpatent.com/2010/08/03/the-art-of-noise/feed/ 2 http://www.jasonpatent.com/2010/07/16/headed-to-china/ http://www.jasonpatent.com/2010/07/16/headed-to-china/#comments Fri, 16 Jul 2010 20:31:32 +0000 Jason Patent http://www.jasonpatent.com/?p=1142 A year ago almost to the day I posted this to the blog. In it I describe some of the rewards of working with young people in a challenging intercultural context. Tomorrow I’m off to Beijing to rejoin the YingHua Summer Language and Leadership Institute for another go-round.

What’s new this year is that my wife and daughters have already been there for the first three weeks of the program. Colette has been co-directing the program. Mariette, our 8-year-old, is a participant, and Francesca, our 6-year-old, has been “tagging along.”

After a week wrapping up the program, we’re off to the small Tibetan town of Xiahe, high in the hills of Gansu Province. Colette and I have been there three times, and it is one of our absolutely favorite places in the world. But we haven’t been there since 2001, when, in late May, we went there to scope out possible locations for a semester program. It was on that trip that we met a young Dutch woman named Christine Mariette, and suddenly we had a name for our first daughter, who wasn’t yet born. Since then we have dreamed of bringing her and any sisters or brothers to Xiahe. Unfortunately we didn’t have a digital camera back then. Some nice photos here.

Depending on connectivity I may post from the road. Otherwise I’ll be back in early August.

Tom is about to graduate from high school. He decides he doesn’t want to go to college, despite his parents’ wishes. Instead, he wants to join a rock band. What will the family members all say to one another? What will happen in the end? Who is right?

To overgeneralize: if you are an educated American, you probably have some sympathy for Tom, and you may even think he should go for it and forget his parents’ advice, even though you also think he will probably fail. You may think that he should pursue his dream; you may even think that he must pursue his dream, if he has truly been given a rare talent. You may believe that no matter what his parents say or do, they will not and cannot change Tom: he needs to learn lessons on his own, even if they are hard lessons, even if he suffers. His life is his to make, and the most valuable lessons are the ones learned through direct experience.

When I was a graduate student in linguistics doing research for my dissertation, I asked this question to several pairs of U.S.-born, native-English-speaking people. I also translated the question into Chinese and posed it to pairs of China-born, native-Chinese-speaking people. (The native dialects of the Chinese interviewees varied, but, being educated, all spoke Mandarin with great ease.) The summary I just offered of possible American views reflects a standard set of “cultural models” which my American interviewees turned to consistently in discussing this scenario.

Brief terminological aside: “cultural model” is a quasi-technical term used by scholars at the margins of linguistics, anthropology and psychology. Essentially it refers to an idealized notion of how the world works or should work. If I go to a restaurant and my server asks me to fill out a deposit slip or endorse a check, I will be surprised because the question violates my mental “model” of how restaurants should work. These models are called “cultural” because they are shared: I can reasonably expect my restaurant companions to be equally surprised about the server’s actions.

The cultural models that make up the “standard” Chinese view of the rock band question diverge sharply from the American cultural models. Before describing the “standard” Chinese view, though, I need to stop for a moment and address a concern that I hear every time I present my research. The concern is usually expressed as a statement like, “But that’s not how I think,” or “That’s not how it would go in my family.” My response is not to quote statistics, because I have none to offer. Instead, I say: Absolutely. No one person is going to follow the “standard” line entirely. I certainly don’t. The “standard” view I’m referring to is an approximation or aggregation, based on responses from interviewees, and, in the years since the research, on countless conversations with Americans and Chinese on the topic. The analysis will not stand up to rigorous scientific scrutiny; no social science research ever can, no matter how many statistics are quoted. It is by nature inexact, because the subjects, human beings, are by nature inexact.

The “standard” Chinese view (I’ll now stop “scare-quoting” the term) differs radically from the standard American view. Tom — or, more properly, his Chinese alter ego Wang Er — has an opportunity to receive an education. Fewer things are more valuable than this opportunity, because in an overpopulated world, competition is intense, resources are scarce, and you need every edge you can get. Wang Er’s parents are absolutely right to insist that he go to college. Nothing is stopping Wang Er from pursuing music as a hobby. But his focus should be on studying hard and getting a solid, reputable job upon graduating. Not only will this set up Wang Er and his family with a strong economic foundation to guard against future calamity, but everyone will look good too and gain the respect of those around them.

Different topics, different style, all in service of making those trans-Pacific ties ever stronger. I’d love your feedback. Please email me here.

Meanwhile Happy Holidays to all who celebrate them!

That said, it’s worth looking at the cause of the annoyance. From a cultural standpoint, the quality in question is self-righteousness. It’s a fine line between self-righteousness and universalism, which I’ve discussed a lot on this blog. I think the link between the two stems from the conflation of two ideas: that there should be a standard worldwide, and that the standard should be our standard, where “we” are a particular cultural group: in this case the U.S. or the West.

When self-righteousness is present, it tends to take over. I become more concerned with how I’m better than you than I am with what you might actually be up to in your life. In fact, it becomes hard for me to hear about what you’re up to in your life, because in my eyes it doesn’t really matter, because you’re not really the kind of person whose actions and interests matter. After all, I’m better than you.

Whether or not this exercise in pop-psych is accurate, it characterizes what I see in much Western media coverage of China, and much of what China novices from the West are curious about when it comes to China. Few Western journalists and publications seem interested in the myriad, and quite concrete and difficult, actions taken by officials, businesspeople and other leaders all across China to improve the lives of the Chinese people. There is much to be learned and gained from a careful study of these efforts. And thankfully it’s not all deficit, as shown by this piece from Time. Here’s a teaser:

Could the world’s lone but weary superpower actually learn something from China? It’s a politically incorrect question, of course. China is an authoritarian nation; its ruling Communist Party deals ruthlessly with any challenge to its hegemony. It remains, relatively speaking, a poor, developing country with huge problems to confront, massive corruption and environmental degradation being Nos. 1 and 1a. Still, this is a moment of humility for the U.S., and China is doing some important things right. If the U.S. were to ask the Chinese what it could learn from their example, it might gain some insight into what it’s doing right and wrong.

Now if I wanted to I could complain about the shock the author seems to be expressing at the very possibility that the U.S. could learn from China, but I’ll refrain. Or not.

Now that I’ve written this thoroughly self-righteous post, feel free to let me have it.