China
Wednesday, December 24, 2003
Christmas Changes
The history of Christmas has been something like the “telephone game” we played as children, whispering a sentence from ear to ear and finally ending up with something quite different at the end of the line. Millennia before Christ was even born, people had already been celebrating the winter solstice in late December, as the long nights finally started getting shorter and warmth began to return to the world. The Romans, for example, celebrated this as a tribute to Saturn, the god of agriculture.
Later, when the leaders of the church decided to celebrate the birth of Jesus for the first time (more than three hundred years after the fact), they decided to hold it very close to the date of the Roman “Saturnalia Festival”. Yet while “Christianity had, for the most part, replaced pagan religion” by the Middle Ages, the original form for celebrating Christmas remained very much the same:
“On Christmas, believers attended church, then celebrated raucously in a drunken, carnival-like atmosphere similar to today’s Mardi Gras… The poor would go to the houses of the rich and demand their best food and drink. If owners failed to comply, their visitors would most likely terrorize them with mischief. Christmas became the time of year when the upper classes could repay their real or imagined “debt” to society by entertaining less fortunate citizens1”
In fact, the modern form of Christmas (in the spirit of Silent Night) was very much an invention of the American upper class in the mid-nineteenth century. It sought to put out the raucousness of the event and prevent additional “Christmas riots”.
Now that another hundred years have gone by, the winter solstice is no longer immediately relevant to modern life and the old form of celebration is well forgotten. Yet America’s economic growth spurt of the twentieth century has consolidated another change: the commemoration of the birth of Christ has become the most significant incentive to go shopping that mankind has ever known. A culture has sprung up where gift-giving (and lots of it) is both a pivotal way to show your love for friends and family as well as a massive influx of fuel to the international money machine2.
Here in China, the youth may give each other small gifts, but there is nothing on the scale of America’s massive shopping spree. Instead, Christmas in China feels like a low-key version of America’s New Year’s Day. People use it as an reason to go do something fun, to whatever extent is within their means.
On Christmas eve for example, my high school students have a regular day of classes and then arrange for parties to be held in each classroom in the evening. A wealthier friend of mine goes out with her family to a karaoke restaurant, where they can spend the whole night eating, drinking and singing. Chinese may or may not know something about Jesus, but generally, their Christmas has nothing to do with Christ.
A faithful Christian may be saddened by all this, and sincerely protest that Jesus is supposed to be at the center of Christmas. Yet, since Jesus’s birth was actually put into this holiday long after it was established, is it wrong for other cultures to take him out of it again? Indeed—how might Jesus have celebrated his own birthday, and how would he have asked us to celebrate it today?
1 From the “History Channel” web-feature devoted to Christmas.
2 See also this article on the history of Christmas (archived at Looksmart.com’s “Find Articles”
, with a specific reference to the “Christmas economy.”
China • Way of Life • Religion • (41) Trackbacks • Permalink
Sunday, November 23, 2003
The Wonderland of Science Fiction (and the Matrix)
The Matrix: Revolutions is playing in Shanghai. If you’re in town, I recommend that you stop by and see it. It’s in English with Chinese subtitles.
I invited one of my best Chinese friends to see it with me last weekend. She happened to take the English name Alice before I met her three years ago, which is a beautiful coincidence to anyone who has seen the Matrix films. I imagined that this movie might make her feel a bit like that Alice, following the white rabbit to Wonderland, so I tried to catch her up on the main idea of the story as we had lunch before the movie, to show her just how deep the rabbit hole goes.
“Ok,” I said, “actually, not many people realize this, but the word Matrix literally means ‘womb.’” We were still waiting for the food to come. The restaurant was decorated with strips old China Daily newspapers on the walls, and strange spiraling glass decorations hung from the ceiling. “In this movie, though, it means something very different.”
She nodded in confirmation as she checked in her electronic pocket dictionary, and the Chinese words for womb appeared on the small screen. “Ah, yes. I see.”
“Well, the idea in this movie is that everything you see around you is not real, it’s all part of this giant computer world called the Matrix. These bodies we think we have are actually just computer programs—our real bodies are sitting in little red capsules somewhere just making electricity for intelligent machines, while our minds are trapped in this false virtual world. The main characters in this film are people trying to save humanity from this ‘prison for your mind,’ and awaken everyone to the truth.”
“Oh.” She frowned. “It sounds really complicated…”
- * *
Most Chinese are not used to science fiction stories. Although science fiction has made great strides in recent years (the popular Chinese magazine Science Fiction World being a notable example), it has nothing close to the volume and diversity that western countries have. The cultural atmosphere, from Confucian traditionalism to Maoist crippling of the educational system, has not always facilitated the development of the imaginative arts.
I had feared that Matrix: Revolutions would be a huge, confusing mess to Alice, but when she came out of the theater, she was giggling to herself. “It’s just like a video game! In the end, they saved the world by using Chinese Kung Fu!”
- * *
When I was small, I used to watch sci-fi movies and television programs with my father every weekend. When he came to pick me up and drive me an hour and a half away to his home in Denver, he used to tell me science fiction stories in the car.
He made them all up on the spot. Of course, years later he admitted how difficult it had been, how many times he had said “uh” and “um” while thinking of what should happen next and keeping his eyes on the road at the same time.
But I was enthralled, waiting on his every breath. When I wasn’t listening to his stories, I used to ask him about all kinds of scientific possibilities, and draw cartoons of my own sci-fi stories in my sketchbook. Somehow I began to see science fiction as way to envision the future so as to give people some sense of where they were going in their lives right now, and would ask them to think about where they really wanted to go.
- * *
On the surface, the Matrix really is just like a video game, with flying kung fu, laser guns, and hordes of mean robots to blow up. Of course, our reality is about none of those things. Reality means making friends, cherishing your family, and working hard to accomplish goals; it means waking up every morning to a world in which the most important thing is to serve other people and to make yourself a better person.
From another perspective, however, the Matrix is an excellent example of a fantasy story unlocking something much more than dazzle and hype. Underneath the fantasy, action-flick context of the story-line, there is a message about striving and transcendence, choice and fate.
Whatever form it takes, a good story should bring out the beautiful reality in us, show us a deeper layer of our own selves, and make us desire to bring others into that new reality as well. It should liberate our minds from the forgetfulness we fall into, where we worry too much about things that are somehow less than real. Any faithful journey into the wonderland of human imagination is ultimately about a very real understanding of human nature. By creating a fantasy world so unlike our own, we can highlight the basic things that make us what we are—truths that all the worlds cannot change.
(...dedicated with special gratitude to my father, for all the stories, all the patience, and all the “uh”s and “um”s…
Monday, October 27, 2003
China and the New World Wisdom
The Chinese are generally a proud people, and consider their culture to be a marvel thousands of years in the making. But China is as much a new civilization as an old one. Although the people have lived on this land since before recorded history can tell, their modern ways of thinking are not always informed by that history.
The modern flow of information all over the earth has meant that most Chinese are as much influenced by Hollywood as they are by Confucius. The twinkle of opportunity is brighter than the spark of wisdom in the eyes of a fast-developing nation – and perhaps rightly so. Since the world’s equilibrium is passing through cycles of upheaval and drastic change every day, many people wonder how much of the old wisdom still applies.
American leaders would just love to tell the Chinese all about the New World Wisdom, and to a great extent the Chinese are actually willing to listen. They are not, however, always so inclined to agree. To some, “new” means “Western,” but to those educated in the vastness of China’s past, it means something much more, something they wish to arise and define for themselves. They take what they like from the West, and they leave what they don’t.
Time will not tell us who was right or wrong. Historians of future ages will record how each nation on this earth was a strapping young adolescent at the turn of the millennium, full of ideas about how the world should be run, and equally full of confidence that their ideas would work. They will see an emerging world community struggling to piece itself together while at the same time keeping each part distinct.
For China, as for every nation, “new” increasingly means “together” with the rest of the world, while “old” means “apart.” A new wisdom for the world’s old countries, as well as the young, may very well be the fruit of that process of learning which joins these two identities into one functioning world system.
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