D - Questions on Contentment

I fear for anyone continuing to read this blog for insights into China. With any luck, you will still find some but more and more our journey here is turning introspective. Our trip has been a great opportunity to learn about a foreign culture and people, but I never realized that being here would ultimately turn our thoughts inward. When you are in your home country, virtually everyone you speak with is a mirror. Since you share common cultural values it is easy not to question the assumptions that are being made in the everyday. In a foreign land however, those assumptions fall idle. You must confront your most basic precepts.

In the first post of this blog, I discussed my mild dissatisfaction with my work life prior to China. As I indicated then, it was easy for me to question the validity of my occupation. In America, an upper middle class person such as myself has the world open to them. I could get rich working at a large investment bank in New York. I could go back to school and become a history professor. I could get my MBA and command prestige. Maybe I could run for political office. There are so many choices it's a little overwhelming. But what if I didn't have so many choices? How would that change my perspective or life? If I was less than thrilled with what by all accounts was an excellent job, how would I feel stripped of opportunity and confined to one path?

In China (and everywhere except the middle crust and above in Western countries), people don't have a lot of choice. Even in the "new" China, if high school students don't get the requisite score on the China College Entrance Exam, they are relegated to factory work or service jobs for the rest of their lives.

As an example, there is a Chinese couple that owns a food stand just outside the Foreign Teacher Building here at DMU. Inside the food stand, they have a couple of fryers and a cutting board. Their stand is strategically located on the path between the DMU West Campus and the DMU East Campus, so they see quite a bit of foot traffic. Sometimes they both man their booth, sometimes it's just the husband, and others it's just the wife. She wears a red shirt that seems intended to suggest a fast food motif and tops it off with a red cap that I've never seen her doff. During the warmer months, he wore these tank top muscle shirts - and he could pull them off! He was pretty built although I don't think it was because of his gym membership. He probably has a manual labor job somewhere else. The thing I will always remember about him is the ever present smile on his face. He never seemed stressed or cross, even when students would throng around the booth at lunch time.

They offer two dishes. One is the Jian Bing Guo Zi, which they make by pouring batter on a flat fryer. Next they break an egg onto the batter, spread it around and then flip the pancake. Into the pancake they place green onions, two crispy flour shells, and a Chinese hot dog split in two. They fold this up into a pocket and voila. Dish number two is known as "han ba", aka the chicken hamburger. They put a fried chicken patty in a sesame roll with some lettuce and mayonnaise. Both of them are surprisingly good and have become regular staples in our diet. The price has something to do with it - the Jian Bing Guo Zi is 2 yuan and Han ba is 3 yuan. In China you can easily eat on a dollar a day if you really want to.

So why spend all that time describing two people that would be identified as having no significance in the world? Who will remember them for serving up fried chicken patties? Because they are two of the finest people I have ever met. I say that knowing them in the most cursory fashion. Our conversations in Chinese are basic to say the least. But when I see them work in that stand, day after day, I can see real contentment. There is no sense of resenting the work that they do. We've all seen it in a fast food place. The sullen eyes of the bored cashier who seems like they would rather be in the iron maiden than taking your order. And how many of us have thought in the back of our minds while gathering up our double cheeseburgers - "you know, I'd be miserable too if I were stuck behind that counter".

We're not breaking any new ground here, are we? Everyone knows that your job can't be your life and sometimes you have to grin and bear it. What's paradoxical about life is that you can know something in your mind but until you feel it and experience it for yourself it's not real. I think that's what China is doing for me. I have plenty of time to think here and at the same time I'm confronted by people who not only get by with less money but are incredibly contented doing so. That has a way of getting inside you.

I want to close this entry with a quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a famous Russian author who survived the Soviet gulag and became a prominent writer and philosopher. He made many enemies criticizing both capitalism and communism.

"If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. It is imperative to review the table of widespread human values. Its present incorrectness is astounding. It is not possible that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only voluntary, inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream of materialism." - from "A World Split Apart", 1978