CET Alumni Photo Contest: Top 3 Winners of the Culture & Customs Category
Congratulations to the following Top 3 Winners of the Academics Category for the CET 30th Anniversary Alumni Photo Contest. Photos eligible to win the the Culture & Customs category could show local celebrations, festivals, rituals or events.
1st Place: Gang Chen (Yale University, Summer 2010 CET Intensive Chinese Language in Beijing )
"Bleacher Seats" - (Xiahe, China) Village residents gather on "bleacher seats" at a local Tibetan monastery to watch religious dance rituals.
2nd Place: Suchada Sutasirisap (University of Texas – Austin, Fall 2010 CET Chinese Studies & Internship in Shanghai)
"Zao An Beijing (Good Morning Beijing)" - Breakfast stand workers sell breakfast at the stand near the Tian An Men square (Gate of Heavenly Peace), Beijing. My CET classmate and one of the Chinese roommates stopped by to grab some freshly made soy milk while we were on our way to the Tian An Men.
3rd Place: Lizzie Chen (University of Texas – Austin, 2011 CET/UT-Austin Maymester in China)
"Untitled: Wang Lei" - Wang Lei, 28, has been in the tattoo industry for 10 years. He says as a younger generation comes of age, the social acceptance of tattoos will grow.
To view all Photo Contest entries click here
Not Up For Debate
King Abdullah II of Jordan (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images Europe)
Maybe an “oops” cultural moment today. It hadn’t occurred to me that I may have crossed some boundaries until a classmate expressed her shock at the direction our classroom conversation had gone with our Arab Theatre professor. There had recently been a piece in Al-Jazeera with regards to the leadership debacle of the current King of Jordan in the context of the Arab awakenings going on North and South-West of him. One passage from the article brought up insulation from the unfiltered feedback of the populace as a dangerous characteristic of leaders in the Arab world, and the rhetoric of this point was near-identical to a passage from the Syrian play were discussing in class, The King is the King. Excited about having made the connection, I brought up the article as the class conversation winded down, asking our Professor if he thought this fault of insulation was fairly applied to the King of Jordan (as it had been in the Al-Jazzera article), and if so, if the message of The King is the King could be applied to Jordan as well.
Long pause. The Professor responded delicately, explaining how close King Abdullah II’s father had been to the people, that the King himself was actually half British (hence the blue eyes), and that, as the second son, the position wasn’t originally in his fate. Only retrospectively do I see the deferral in his response; at the time it felt like an answer, a excusal perhaps, and I wonder if I can still claim the answer I did extract, or whether my interpretation obliterated what he was actually trying to convey.
It’s not as if I was searching for some seed of discontent. I just assumed (and it appears wrongfully so) that because the article from Al-Jazeera was public and widely accessible, and the article’s thesis reflected in locally-authored literature, the ideas were public and open for debate as well. The Professor seemed uncomfortable, which I misinterpreted as due to our having “strayed from the topic,” but not entirely unwilling to engage, and once again I am left unsure as to the boundaries and flexibility of the red tape.
Going to Zi-Zhu-Yuan Park (紫竹院公园)
Written by Raymond Palmer (Connecticut College)
CET Chinese Studies & Service-Learning in Beijing, Spring ’12
When you’re feeling a bit bummed and off, why not go to a park? At least that’s what I thought, so I decided to go to Zi-Zhu-Yuan Park (if you want a word-to-word translation it’s Purple-Bamboo-Palace Park). I don’t remember why exactly I was feeling a bit off… maybe I was feeling homesick, maybe I was just feeling extremely stressed (especially after the toilet incident), I’m not sure now that I think back on it: it doesn’t matter anymore anyhow. I’m thinking it’s related to culture shock – there are different phases that you go through, apparently, like the honeymoon phase, the I’m-hostile-to-everything-and-anything phase, etc. – but alas, I can’t put my finger on a cause. I was just feeling bummed.
So, thanks to Google maps I was able to spot a nice-sized pond surrounded by greenery – a park: and that was Zi-zhu-yuan Park. It seemed pretty close by but I wasn’t sure if I could realistically walk there within 30 minutes (that’s about the time when I usually decide I have to take public transportation) – but I walked anyways. I have time, and I needed some change.
If you look at Google maps you’ll realize that the park is pretty huge. The little red circle is where I live, and the big red blob is the park. Pretty impressive, right? The blue line is the route I took, and you’ll notice that I didn’t exactly take the shortest route (that I thought) possible. That’s because the city here is made up a little differently, and those alley ways between buildings aren’t always passable. You know how in New York or Boston you can almost always walk in between buildings if there’s space in between them, like alleys? Not so easily here. And that’s because there are walls everywhere. I tell you (and Professor Moser will tell you), WALLS. It’s a city of walls, really, when you take a look around, or like myself, try to cut through a section of town without knowing. To begin with, the campus that I am on is surrounded by iron bars, with only 2 entrances. You walk across the big street, and there’s another campus (of the same university), with only 1 entrance. I wandered into that campus when I was trying to walk in between the buildings, and was trapped in there for about 15 minutes while I tried to find an exit on the other side. In the end I had to go out the entrance that I came in through (I felt defeated). I saw apartment buildings on Google maps, and thought, “Oh I could walk in between them” – No. Apartment building complexes are again, walled in, with usually only one entrance. Schools, apartments, hotels, a tea house, somebody’s house… you’ll see walls everywhere, and it’s just impossible to “cut across” a section of town randomly. If you want to navigate around town, you have to stay on the streets, which are signed and easy to spot. I learned that the hard way, by wandering into different complexes and frightening people there because they just don’t expect somebody to randomly walk into their walled-in parts and examine every inch of it in pursuit of another exit.
So anyhow I got there, after some interesting meanders, to Zi-zhu-yuan Park (it took me a grand total of only 15 minutes on my way back, after I knew my way). It is simply gorgeous, and on top of that, free! I found out about this after talking to Zuo Cui, my RD, and Jason Wang, the Intensive Chinese program RD, but parks here are often not free. In most parks there’s a little fee that you have to pay at the entrance to get in, which can be anywhere from 2 or 3 kuai to 10 kuai. Zi-zhu-yuan Park is one of the only parks that are still kept free, although the government apparently lowered the entrance fees to the other parks when the Beijing Olympics came about. So I guess I got lucky. I will confess, however, that when I saw the gate to the park approaching I got ready to run/jump past any toll booths because I wasn’t ready to pay a fee to get into a park. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not used to the idea of paying to get into a park unless it’s something like six-flags. Oh and again, that whole park is walled in, with defined entrances (in case you hadn’t guessed already…).
The park is absolutely gorgeous, especially because the big lake in the middle (and other little ponds as well) is all frozen over and the waves and whatnot are all frozen in place. It’s like a winter wonderland. I bet you can’t skate on it (although I will watch you try if you want to), but it’s pretty darn solid. That’s another thing: almost everything is frozen here, just like in NE – they don’t use any salt here though. You’ll see chunks of ice just rolling around the streets, and little ice-waterfalls seeping out from between walls or mounds – everywhere. Even people’s spits (which you’ll see as much as bird-poo here) are frozen over. It hasn’t snowed here yet, but I bet it’s going to be chaotic if it does.
Let’s Talk About “Can’t”
Two words getting ample use in my life here in Irbid are “haraam” and “mamnuah,” which in English are roughly approximated to mean “flagrant violation of social norms” and “forbidden.”
The reasons behind the application of such labels all feel incomplete. If the prevailing norm is that the young men construct blatant lies about their relations with girls*, wouldn’t the accompanying norm be that people disregard stories of conquest authored by them? (*this coming from the report from one of the Jordanian language partners that 1) young women here don’t put pictures of themselves on their facebooks because the young men will download the pictures and use them as proof of intimacy between themselves and the girls, and 2) saying hello to a young man in public is to open the door to similar opportunities for lewd fabrication).
It could be that in our quest to glean “understanding” from the Jordanians we get presented with the generalization, given anecdotes such as the parenthesized one above. Their experiences are most likely far more subtle and multi-layered than they can or even want to convey to a student who can neither claim Arabic as a first language, or Jordan as a home country.
My unease comes from my feeling that a lot of the assessments of the “haraam” come from us Americans. This past weekend, as a Bedouin tour guide danced closely with the Italian women he had hand-picked from the haphazardly assembled tent audience, we Americans were the ones watching with eyebrow raised and disapproval written on our faces. And as I got up to do the Macarena in what I assessed to be a more PC version of game-faced participation, it was judgment from my American peers that I feared the most.
So the question I keep coming to is, are we off in our collective assessments of the forbidden? Has the cultural handbook we’ve all been presented with missed the mark in it’s evaluation of the required local sensitivities? I can’t help but feel frustrated, having come to Jordan to gain real knowledge, and yet feeling like I’m still being asked to operate under generalizations and stereotypes. I feel disempowered to discover people and things for myself, as the city seems to be littered with red tape, and I’m not confident as to who put it up.
This picture illustrates the point. Taken midway in our tour of the desert castles of Jordan, this was the second of two Bedouin tents we entered, custom being that the castles have makeshift outposts to house the guardians of the various isolated monuments. The first of the tents was the stage to the scene of the “flagrant violation of social norms” described above. At the second site, having expended the potential wonders of the centuries-old castle and begun our trek back to the bus, we entered the second tent stationed along the way with a degree of caution, memories from the first tent still fresh on our minds. Here we were met by the gracious keeper of the outpost, supplanted with tea infused with sage and pleasant conversation, with the two men pictured playing bemused witnesses to our exchange.
Were we to have assumed we knew the contents of this identical-looking second tent, and to have assigned a uniform sleaziness to it’s keepers, we would have missed the unique individuals within this unique tent. That is my fear—that in adhering to the pre-labelled forbidden and inappropriate, and abiding by the red tape, I will miss the subtle degrees of difference one hopes to get out of immersion. To not let the individuals in a country speak for themselves seems antithetical to going to a country—I can make generalizations from my couch in New Jersey.
The difficulty is when religion and culture become conflated. And I think that is the obstacle I’m butting my head up against, but haven’t even named for myself.
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