Imported customs
At the University where I’m teaching, basketball is the big thing. Just outside my hostel, there are six basketball courts, and they are busy from early morning until late at night. Now that spring is arriving, I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s someone playing there 24/7. By contrast, although there is a football pitch, and sometimes there’s a team playing there, I never see knockabout games of soccer being played informally. I wonder how much of this is due to Yao Ming?
Last Sunday night, I met up with old friends at the Stone Boat cafe in Ritan Park, the old Temple of the Sun, where the Emperors made annual sacrifice. Leaving around 9pm, I heard the sound of Tibetan music. Thinking that perhaps a new restaurant had opened, I wandered over to take a look, to find a large circle of middle-to-old aged Chinese, all warmly wrapped up against the cold night air. In the middle of the circle, all of their bags were piled up, kept in plain view. There were about thirty people there, and they were all dancing along to the music from a CD player somewhere, throwing their hands in the air and stamping along in a ‘traditional’ Tibetan dance, with the occasional shout of “Hey!”. Heh. To the average Chinese, Tibetan culture appears as exotic and romantic as it does to the average Westerner; for these pensioners, Tibetan dance is the equivalent of the ‘cowboy-style’ line-dancing in the UK… All around Beijng, things Tibetan are ‘in’.
I was asking around, seeing what associations people I know have with various colours (following on from my last post). I mentioned to one that in China, red is associated with “Stop”, “Prosperity”, and “Communism”; she replied, “hmmm, maybe not so much the last one these days”.
As it happens, I’m currently re-reading “Escape with Me!”, first published in 1939. It’s by Osbert Sitwell, and deals with an extended holiday he took in China in the mid-30s. He opines in chapter 3:
Even so rigid a faith as Communism, if for for the sake of convenience it had temporarily to be accepted, would find itself powerless to alter the national character; on the contrary, the national character would very soon modify Communism to suit itself, or even assimilate it as it has always assimilated foreign conquerors.
. Much of what he writes, with the benefit of 70 years of hindsight, stands up well.
