Fashion Update!

It is the end of another summer in Beijing, and the conclusion of another entertaining season of English-language t-shirt messages. To be honest, there weren't as many mirth-inducing misspellings this year. The charm lies in the occasional lack of context, which means they are not that different than those worn by young people in other countries.

Among this year's best:

Give Me Time To Break Your Heart
How Am I Supposed To Know What To Do
Take Me To The Party
Jojo Could Not Be Contacted
Too Young To Regret, Too Old To Be Naive
More Respect Less Attack

and

Everything's Amazing And Nobody's Happy

Much credit to the t-shirt makers for copping Louis CK's routine. Even I would have worn that one. Amid the thick air and high temperatures of a Beijing summer, sometimes I am amazed that anybody's happy.

Tale of Two Cities

I could not pass up a recent article from The Atlantic, just from glimpsing the lightning-rod title alone: "How to See the Real China: Ride Beijing's Subway."

This article was written by Deborah Fallows, and has all the marks of an author whose husband told her to sit in her Beijing villa and do something halfway-useful. And I'm generous in using "halfway". If she wanted to see the real China, she should have sat on the subway platform floor and made herself a target of every drop of saliva and worse that came her way.

She cites all her years of living in Beijing and Shanghai, two of the new Chinese super-cities, and writes about how subway passengers' behavior has improved during the past 4 years: upscale business-people quietly and dutifully standing in line, not pushing and shoving, following every rule of law and order and fairness.

What a crock.

Fallows admits she based these experiences on riding the new Line 10 through the Beijing central business district, arguably one of Asia's most modern and civilized areas. She manages to write a lame follow-up that documents the jarring counterpoint of riding Line 1, the oldest subway line in the city, which is always packed with people from, as is the favored term here, "all walks of life." Her husband gets doubled-over by a migrant worker struggling to carry his plastic-grain-sack-full-of-everything onto the crowded train. This is the true Beijing subway experience, and the one she should have started her story with.

I like to contrast Fallows' article with the book written by Tom Scocca with the similarly incendiary title, "Beijing Welcomes You." Scocca arrived in the alleged city-of-the-future at roughly the same time I did, and his account is rock solid, from the forced evictions in old neighborhoods, to the people crowding to get aboard a bus refusing to let the disembarking passengers get off first. ("Habit was stronger than etiquette, or numerology," according to Scocca. True.)

Scocca is at his best when he describes the what I would call the life of a typical Beijing resident: "A 30-year-old Chinese citizen has seen more disruption and change than a 60-year-old American has; a 60-year-old Chinese citizen has seen more than a 200-year-old American would have."

Think about that the next time you look at the Fodor guide.

I Know They Mean Well, But Still

There is a massive billboard near our apartment compound, meant to block the view of yet another monstrous modern construction project. The billboard boasts an illustration of young children riding a rainbow, which is just fine, except for the fact that the dark-skinned child looks like he just stepped off the stage of a minstrel show.

At first, it was a miracle to me that there was a place in the developed world that was so culturally-insensitive to allow something like this to happen. Then, I started to think, apparently someone needs to explain to the Chinese that this is insulting, degrading, and just wrong. And I'm not just talking about wrong from the African-American perspective, but from the general perspective of dark-skinned peoples from Brazil, to the Horn of Africa, to New Guinea and beyond.

It's clear that the artist's intent really was quite innocent. What better way to show China's inclusiveness than to depict children representing all the world's continents enjoying a thrilling journey aboard a multi-colored sled. But even this is a farce. The fact is that mainland China does not fully understand that there is a whole 'nother world out there that swings to a different beat, and the chances that a difference-making number of Chinese citizens will not get to experience that fact is between slim and none.

That is one of the tragedies of the so-called New China. The current generation of 20-somethings on the mainland is slowly beginning to realize that they will only share the same quality of life as their parents, despite all the modernization of Chinese society, the new buildings and the airports, and the annual lucky 8% GDP growth. Traveling to another country to live and work will still be a distant dream, one that they will pass on to their children. Maybe then, Beijingers will find out about the world beyond China's borders, and get a sense of what real diversity is all about.