One hot night in Puglia

S.M. di Leuca, July 11th, 2024

I have just shockingly realized not having posted on this little blog for almost a year. To be fair, since my last entry (last August), I have been busy with all sorts of positive distractions: my relationship, which has proven to be one for the long term; my job, which kept me busy until last March and is now happily over; and traveling, the main activity that has occupied me since April and continues to do so. It is, in my opinion, a sign of mental health and, more generally, happiness when one stops writing a diary. It often means that real life, with its hustle and bustle and all of its immediacy, has taken the place of a few obscure, if not completely pointless, musings. And yet, reading a few of my older posts, I am so glad that I have kept a periodic account of my life and, more interestingly, of our times, which are changing so fast year after year. With the conviction that, even if I were to be the only reader of these accounts, it would still be worth reading, here I am writing for my future self. More specifically, I write this from a holiday house in Apulia, in the deep South of Italy, where I am spending the summer holidays with my parents and their two friends, R. and C. It would be ridiculous to pretend that a full account of almost a year of life could be written now, on an unexpected Thursday evening, just as I am preparing to sleep. I’ll try my best to keep this succinct and refrain from letting the broth get too watery, as the saying goes.

The first major topic that comes to mind when I think about the last 11 months is obviously my trip to China. It might be because I returned from this trip only a little more than a month ago that its memory is still so vivid in my mind. Images of the two months I spent roaming the interior of China and the North of Vietnam keep flashing before my eyes. Every week that passes, I am more and more amazed by the romantic aura that these memories have already started to acquire. I set myself up to write a journal of the trip. While traveling, with this idea in mind, I recorded my impressions day by day, hoping to transfer their vividness from speech directly onto the written page. So far, I have only drafted the first few days of the trip, where I mostly rant about my visits to Macau, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou, the literal pearl of the Chinese South, a city I fell in love with almost at first sight, and whose charm I still fail to convey satisfactorily within my writings. I feel that I have embarked on a titanic task by writing that diary. Yet, I feel it is a diary that deserves to be written, and occasional memory sprawls confirm that for me. It might take months, if not years, though, if I continue at this speed.

I don’t want to waste energy writing about China here, as I plan to leave this topic entirely for the other diary, which I might post when it’s finished. On the other hand, it is so difficult to refrain from sharing a few thoughts. Having assiduously studied its language, arts, and culture for over seven years, I can say that China has become a part of my own life and identity. Yet, no matter how long the preparation, I couldn’t have been ready for what I was to face: a country full of contrasts, profoundly different from anything I had imagined. A nation so vast, with a history so rich and complex, that a lifetime wouldn’t suffice to explore it all. And amidst all of this, some of the best food I’ve had in my entire life. From the rich pork broths of Canton to the cold rice noodles and stuffed buns of Xi’an, all the way to the ridiculously delicious cuisine of Chengdu, which is so rich and varied in flavors that covering it would probably deserve a chapter by itself. I am so grateful to have studied the language long enough to interact with people, make new friends, and get a somewhat real feeling of what living in China in our age must be like. I hope to convey all of this in the diary I’m writing. On the other hand, I am also aware that such an enterprise requires writing skills far superior to my current ones. Until my account is fully written, and all my confused thoughts are more or less awkwardly brought into text, my only audience will be friends and family.

These two groups of people react to my stories about China in different ways. The elders listen with presumptuousness, interrupting with jokes about the food, the dictatorship, and the people’s backwardness. ‘Did you eat anything weird? Bugs, locusts, any living animals? How dirty was it?’ They do not care to hear about the marvelous places I have been to or the interesting people I have met. They have no interest in the arts, the literature, or the incredible cultural refinement achieved by this civilization. For them, my words merely confirm the stereotypes that are already solidified in their minds. They hold on to a single, outdated image of China, the one they learned long ago. Would it be the same if the country in question were different, like Japan?

My younger friends listen to the same stories with more interest and curiosity. They ask fewer questions and let me explain more. While they are not necessarily more interested in Chinese culture than the elders, they seem more willing to accept that China is a different reality from the West, one that operates under its own unique system. Although they are still tempted to critique the autocracy, their disillusionment with our own system makes them less judgmental and more open to hearing about how things work on the other side of the world.

Interestingly, the interactions I had with Chinese people when talking about the world outside China were different in an almost specular way to those I just described. That is to say, the Chinese elders were the ones most willing to listen, while I had more communication problems with younger people. Chinese elders are very welcoming towards foreigners, especially those who can speak a bit of their language. While their pride in being Chinese is unquestionable, they are often very interested in hearing where you are from and what life is like there. If they had the chance to save some money over their lives, they might have traveled to Europe or North America before, often having formed their own personal opinions on these places. In this sense, many Chinese elders give off what I would almost define as an ‘international’ vibe. They are secure in their Chinese identity but are also more open to the diversity of the world, which they do not perceive as a threat.

Younger people, in my view, are different in this respect. They are still curious about the West and possibly more knowledgeable than the older generations. Their understanding of our history and politics is surprisingly accurate, especially considering that the vast majority of them have never set foot outside China. Yet, for them, the connection between nationality and identity is somehow more binding. I have noticed this from the conversations I had with some of them. The fact that these people were all younger than thirty convinces me that this must be a generational phenomenon. They were born and grew up after China’s economic opening, after the great economic boom had already started. They saw their country developing at a rapid pace, and their families’ living standards improving year by year. Even now, in the post-pandemic era, with all the difficulties the Chinese economy (like the rest of the world’s economy) is facing, their support for the government remains steady and unwavering.

Part of it must be the general tendency to avoid direct criticism, which is typical of Confucian societies and also seen in places like Japan or Korea. Part of it may certainly be the human tendency to stand for one’s roots. A certain tendency to avoid discussing unpleasant topics about one’s homeland in front of an outsider. (This attitude reminds me of that saying we have about ‘keeping one’s dirty sheets inside the house’). But, on top of all of this, there is definitly something else—a subtle yet widespread sentiment of trust in the institutions and relatively high hopes for the future, which have not been dampened by the heavy blows of recent years. This sentiment is foreign to us, difficult to understand especially in this day and age. Their optimism is truly impressive, especially when one considers the working conditions of the majority of young Chinese today and compares them with those of equally young Europeans. We are so much better off than them, and yet our trust in the system is so much lower.

I read my words again and realize that this opinion might sound completely new and foreign to a Western audience. In our media, we are very accustomed to hearing reports of teenage suicides, and terms like ’lying flat’ or ’let it rot,’ which seem to signify that the Chinese economic model has reached a stage where it cannot recover from its contradictions. This narrative suggests that the Chinese people, especially the young, are destined to accept their fate and live as some sort of slaves in a somewhat futuristic, ultra-modern, ultra-technological authoritarian dystopia. I want to stress that there is some partial truth to this view. But what the Western perspective often ignores is everything else. The thirty years of economic growth that have swept across the country like a rising tide, from the financial districts of Shanghai to the wild western lands of desertic Xinjiang, are largely overlooked. We fail to see how the delivered promise of economic growth has created a nearly sacred allegiance between the CCP and its people. It will take more than a pandemic and an economic crisis to break this bond. This is why, in my opinion, many of the young Chinese I’ve met find it hard, if not unfair, to criticize the government. After all, it is this very government that has brought China to where it stands today: a potential candidate for global economic dominance. It is this government that is striving to restore the Middle Kingdom to its rightful place: that is to say, at the center of the known world. The fact that the decadence of Western ‘democracies,’ as we are so fond of saying, accelerates by the day, only reinforces the Chinese perception that their social, economic, and political model, despite its challenges, must be the successful one.

Communication with younger Chinese was the hardest when talking about Taiwan. Hearing me speak Chinese, a lot of people would naturally ask me how long I had been living in China for. At the beginning of the trip, when I was not accustomed to chatting with Chinese people yet, I would reply simply ‘Oh, no, I don’t live in China. I live in Taiwan’. My answer was often met with expressions that ranged from the plain awkward to the subtly confused. Only later I realized that my answer was, to the ears of a Chinese person, very odd to say the least. Chinese people are firm in the conviction that the island of Formosa is an unalienable part of the Chinese homeland. To them, hearing that I lived in China, but not in Taiwan, meant either of two things: one, that I couldn’t distinguish the concept of China and China mainland, or two, that I recognized Taiwan as a separate entity. To avoid awkwardness in the interactions I had, I later on started replying, ‘I have been living in Taipei for two years’. To which they themselves added: ‘Oh, Taipei, so you live in Taiwan’.

Apart from this, the Taiwanese issue often became a topic of conversation with the young people I talked to, especially once we had broken the ice and started to speak more casually. It was then that I noticed my communication difficulties about Taiwan were the greatest. Clearly, most mainland Chinese, and the vast majority of youngsters, have never been to Taiwan. The island was declared off-limits by the Chinese government in 2019, except for business and family visits. In talking about Taiwan, I noticed a large gap between my own and their perception of reality. Young Chinese people were very surprised to learn that their Taiwanese peers do not share their enthusiasm for the reunification of the motherland and are very happy to maintain their status as an independent polity. Hearing this, my young interlocutors would often react with astonishment, their words and body language suggesting sorrow and disappointment. In their view, Taiwanese people are unquestionably part of the Chinese family, just as citizens of Inner Mongolia, Tibet, or Xinjiang are. In a way, this is even more so for the Taiwanese, since the vast majority of them belong to the Han ethnic group, making them, strictly speaking, part of the Chinese race proper. Why on earth wouldn’t they want to reunite and govern themselves separately from the other provinces?

Halt. Let me stop right here, as I realize that, by bringing up the question of Taiwan and its relationship with the mainland, I am about to step into a thick forest from which I know no way out. This issue, and the variety of possible opinions surrounding it, are inevitably linked to the question of what China is and, in turn, what it means to be Chinese. To discuss these questions seriously, one would first need to consider the notion of Chinese identity and how it differs from the concept of nationality, with which the West is undoubtedly more familiar. However, it is beyond the scope of this post to delve into that discussion. Suffice it to say that my trip to China has made me realize that the views we hold so firmly in the West are not so firm after all in the rest of the world. They are often directly challenged in the Chinese mainland. As the world shaped by the American empire begins to crack, and as the cracks multiply and deepen year after year, we shall soon see that Western perspectives on these specifically non-Western issues are increasingly deemed irrelevant.

I have promised myself to limit this post to a few thoughts, yet here I am, spending so much time writing, editing, proofreading, and rewriting a post that will probably be hardly read by anyone other than me. So let me finish here, until I move to London in August. Hopefully, at that point, I will have something more to say.