This past week, I decided to structure my lessons around the topic of living conditions. About half my classrooms are equipped with a computer and projector setup, so I went the extra mile and prepared a spiffy Powerpoint show. It included pictures of home interiors and different neighbourhood settings, with the goal of getting the students to work on adjectives describing the pros and cons of various living arrangements. After that I would put them into groups and assign each group a “role” (young family, student, young professional, etc.) for whom they would have to come up with an ideal (but somewhat still realistic) home. Judging by some flickers of life I saw in my classrooms, the activity went over rather well.
The most interesting part of the lesson was learning about my student’s preferences, and how they often seemed to be the polar opposite of students and young adults back home. Of course, I cannot make any sweeping generalizations about hundred of millions of people based on a few opinions in Hangzhou, but I did come across enough similarities across different classes to have some food for thought.
1) What does modern mean?
The term modern is thrown around quite a bit in these parts, often carelessly to say the least. But strangely enough, getting my students to explain to me what they understood it to mean was like pulling teeth. They could tell me if something was modern or not, but they couldn’t explain why. The whole subject arose since one of the adjectives provided to describe a home was “modern”. I would show them a picture of a kitchen, and they would say “wow, it’s so modern!”- but that was all I got out of them, an explanation would have been too much. One student suggested that a “modern” room must have a tv and computer in it, otherwise it is old and traditional. In the end, most explanations revolved around a similar idea: everything Chinese is old and traditional, everything non-Chinese is modern. And modernity is inherently good. I guess nationalism doesn’t extend to cultural tradition.
2) The Quiet Life…at 20
Some of the funniest “ideal homes” I heard about necessarily came from the groups playing the role of young students.
One answer was: “our apartment would be quiet and clean so we could have a nice environment in which to study hard.” Student living, geared towards studying? Definitely a foreign concept to me. I told them about student neighbourhoods at home, where students live among beer bottles, pizza boxes and movie posters and have a nice soundtrack of drunks roaming the street to keep them awake (when you aren’t the one out there making the noise, that is). I hesitated to tell them that an “ideal student home” at home would more likely involve free kegs and some sort of central funnelling system.
In my freshman English Majors class, I showed the students two pictures: one of a hip, funky urban neighbourhood and the other of small suburban homes on a quiet landscaped street, obviously miles from any sort of interesting civilization. To my surprise, many of my students chose the suburban scene as their preferred location. When I asked again where they would like the live at their current age (about 20), the answer remained the same.
I’m guessing this comes from the desire to experience what eastern China is severely lacking: space, privacy and quiet. The suburbs, much reviled by most young people in the West as soulless sprawls, are perfect for the Chinese Dream (again, think 1950s USA). They are peaceful, orderly and developed, with every house having its own nice garden and lawn for the kids to play on. If this is where you grew up in Canada or the States, you might be thinking this is hell with a happy face plastered on. But if you grew up in some huge, dirty, smelly crowded Chinese city, this could be paradise. The grass is always greener on the other side, especially if it can actually grow there.
I told them that many young people at home try to escape these places when they reach a certain age, heading for the city and its plethora of nightlife, culture and attractive young people of the opposite sex. I proposed that someone in their early 20s would ideally want to live in some loft or studio apartment (probably in a renovated warehouse) in an impossibly hip urban neighbourhood, close to bars, clubs, funky cafes and stores and all the places that funky people like to do their funky things. Peace, quiet and order could wait for later. But they seemed kind of mystified: why would someone want to live in an old building in a dirty city?
The sad thing is that neither side’s expectations are remotely realistic. Given China’s minor population problem (not to mention resource depletion), a nation of suburban dwellers seems like a pretty far fetch. With so many people, any suburb would invariably become a crowded, busy noisy city itself in no time. And where would you put all the farmers? Oops, someone forgot to grow the food. Of course, there are then the multiple theories about how suburbs, in attempting to provide an ‘escape’ from city life, do nothing more than spread the city further and further as people keep having to ‘escape’ older suburbs (for more outlying areas) as they become more urbanized. Result: sprawl as far as they eye can see. The Americanization of China would not be pretty (or even possible).
As for us Western urban hipsters, by the time most of even find out which neighbourhoods are “cool” they are already in the throes of massive de-cooling. The death bells toll for any neighbourhood’s hipness factor the second it is declared “a place to be”. Before any under-funded twenty-something urban bohemian can even blink, yuppies are busy gobbling up living space will commercial space is delt off to chain stores to do with as they please (hello, five chain coffee shops on every corner). I guess it takes money to be cool, and that’s something not many young students have much of. Even if one does manage to make it to a neighbourhood before the mass-produced mochaccinos, during that initial stages the place is probably still too derelict and unsafe to be worth it (”I live on a street of abandoned warehouses, my life is so great!”) Being hip, what a tough life.
4) New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
Showing them pictures of some upscale downtown neighbourhoods in Montreal (think restored Victorian homes), I asked the student who they thought would live in such places. The overwhelmingly response was: government officials! Try as I might to explain that the average gov’t official could not afford such a place in Canada, I was chuckling too much. Of course, in the Chinese context this makes perfect sense thanks to one simple word: corruption. Sometimes I get some subtle signals that my students aren’t as naive as they let on.