Oftentimes, my writings and conversations on mobility suggest that I think more about others' movement than my own. Indonesian women who work in Hong Kong for years on exploitative contracts; Nepali taxi drivers in Dubai; the impact of temporary work visas on the cohesion of an American community. The truth is that my mind is often filled, too, with thoughts about my own jet-setting behavior. Lately, I’m trying harder to connect these two conversations—the external or observational, and the personal.
I’ve reached a moment in my life when transcontinental travel feels practically quotidian. I’ve spent about two of the last four years abroad, even as this time in my life is, on paper, dedicated primarily to obtaining my Bachelor’s degree. In admitting to this recent personal history, I remain conscious of how it sounds and what it means. Even as I have no trouble separating myself from the likes of international businessmen who groggily struggle to remember which global city they’ve awoken in, I nonetheless recognize that my lifestyle over the last four years has, in some ways, been rootless. Time with family is perhaps too often slipped in between other, “worldly” endeavors, and the addiction to abroad too often sends my mind wandering from the present to the next plane ticket. Of course, I’m not ungrateful for my opportunities. Global travel (of my variety) is privilege at its most extreme. Without the backing of a rare scholarship, the support of a rare family (emotional, yes, rather than financial, but then again it is a global rarity for a family not to require a financial contribution from an educated, 22-year-old male), or the immigration channel-greasing that comes with an American passport, none of my studying, interning, or wandering abroad would have been possible. I’m not oblivious to the irony that, while one of the things I love most about living in places like India or Indonesia is the ethic of frugality, the simple act of my stepping on a international flight is lavish.
All of these reflections and reconciliations aside, one of the gifts I know travel in diverse settings has given me is an ability to adapt. It takes me very little time to feel at home in environments radically different from my actual home. This kind of adaptability extends from small, unimportant habits—like a mastery of the squat toilet—to more significant determinants of culture and society—for instance, an easy acceptance of “jam karet” (rubber time) in Indonesia. I will admit, I derive perhaps too much pleasure from the remarks of Indonesian friends like “Greg sudah seperti orang Indonesia!” (Greg is already like Indonesian people!). To me, this adaptability, and others’ recognition of it, produces a kind of flexibility of belonging. I can go many places throughout the world and “fit in” well enough to feel incorporated, keeping in mind the privileges already mentioned.
Flexible belonging is fun, and exciting. I won’t pretend that I’m past that excitement or have risen above it. After all, it is still new to me. I’m only an “experienced” traveler post-2007. But lately I’ve been thinking about the difference between this kind of ‘internationalism’ and global citizenship. Global citizenship, even as the term gets thrown around loosely at high school cultural fairs, has to mean something more than this fun ‘adaptability’ I’ve identified. It also has to mean more than its counterpart, and perhaps the hollowest term of all, “global awareness.”
Citizenship is usually understood in contractual terms. But what contract do “global citizens” engage in? To me, this kind of contract is different; there is no international “state” or even an international “society” at the other end. It boomerangs back to us as individuals. Ironically then, global citizenship is hyper-personalized; it is a contract we engage in with ourselves, or for some perhaps a relationship we engage in with God. On one side of the contract is an understanding of (more realistically, an earnest attempt to understand) how our everyday decisions—what we say, what we buy, what we eat, what we drive, what we blog—reverberate throughout the world, as we know they do. That is to say, a global citizen first must understand how his boomerang spins out into the foggy sky. People like Robert Spencer, who refuses to acknowledge his blog’s role in fueling the ideology of the recent Norwegian bomber, fail to satisfy this first condition of the global citizen’s contract, fail to achieve what might be equated with “awareness.” They’ve stopped watching the boomerang of their actions in the world, stopped trying to count the ripples their stones make in the water.
While this first side of the contract is hard enough, answering it, fulfilling the other side of the contract, is harder. To me, catching that boomerang requires standing responsible for how our lifestyles and choices echo in the larger world. It requires lining up our reverberations with our values. In my life, sometimes there are channels, paths to take, where impact falls in harmony with my personal values. I can choose to buy less. I can choose to smile at strangers. I can’t choose, though, to elect someone to Congress whose votes will be guided more by his or her own personal morality than by corrosive special interests. I can’t drive a vehicle that doesn’t indirectly contribute to massive geopolitical and environmental injustices. Globalization has made commodities and services readily available. But it has so tangled our web of impact, so complicated our systems of exchange and participation, that finding ways to live in the world consistent with our values can feel impossible. Rather than watching our stone shape ripples in a pond, we’re dropping glaciers into the sea. We’ve thrown our boomerang halfway across the world. This is perhaps the most dangerous thing about globalization. Its complexity becomes a shield, a way for us to absolve ourselves of accountability. This absolution is what a global citizen rejects. Hard as it may be, a global citizen strives to understand his ripples, and where there is no channel for moral action, he struggles to forge one.
I’m certainly not yet a global citizen by this definition. My fun, flexible belonging is dramatically easier. Maybe though, if globalization is to be a phenomenon I respond to in my life, rather than gape at, this type of citizenship--ironically personal and endlessly complex--should be a standard I strive for.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Friday, July 15, 2011
The Belum
Drawing up a mental image of what Ponorogo, a small city in East Java, looked like twenty or thirty years ago feels almost impossible. There are definite roadblocks in such an endeavor. The first is that, when Ponorogoans trace back to the time of their childhood, vastly different narratives emerge. For some, the past was when harvests were bountiful, when the lifestyle of farmer was more respected. For others, the past was a time when ‘we ate only just enough,’ as opposed to now, when ‘we eat enough to be fat.’ For still others, the past might be a time when families were better maintained, when husbands respected their wives and women stayed at home to take care of their children. The second, and perhaps more important roadblock, is that people in Ponorogo don’t seem to think very much about the past. Most thoughts that fill the imaginations of its residents involve the belum (a ubiquitous Indonesian word meaning “not yet”). Most people seem to hold an aspiration that places contentment at some point in the future.
Perhaps the most pervasive dream in Ponorogo is that of the migrant. Her (90% of the time, it is a her) aspirations are wrapped up in the bright lights of modernity. She knows that three years of working in Singapore or Taiwan will be enough to pay the school fees of her children through university. She also knows that the money could transform her humble abode into a tall, grandiose home, the type of house that is quickly becoming a standard in Ponorogo. These migrants often find themselves caught in a cycle. They return to Indonesia with startling amounts of cash, and proceed to spend it, evincing their new middle-class wealth in a community that has come to rely on quick money. With cars, motorcycles, a sophisticated wardrobe. Soon enough, the money dries up and they return abroad.
But it might be more difficult to be a young man in Ponorogo, since the jobs abroad are almost exclusively for women. (Factories, in addition to the informal sector, request female labor, in large part because women are considered more obedient and less likely to demonstrate for pay raises.) For many men in Ponorogo, whose wives or sisters are working abroad, a salary is belum. So is respect in a community that has come to think of young men as indolent and unproductive.
The belum is also important for the network of “professionals” who profit from the migrant’s dream. This string of agents is complex: the recruiters in Ponorogo; the ‘mafia’, often composed of teachers, that persuades young girls to migrate (and in turn takes a cut); the middlemen in receiving countries who “secure” work placements; and the government officials who slice a bit off the top at every step. Without the migrant’s belum, without the perpetual next dream, next act of conspicuous consumption, the waters that nourish this circuited tree of profiteering would dry up. Despite the number of players, the business of migration is profitable for every link in the chain. For instance, the recruitment agencies (called PJTKI, Penyalur Jasa Tenaga Kerja Indonesia) are known to practice potong gaji, or salary cutting; they take up to 50-75% of the worker’s salary for the first 6-12 months of employment. While government officials in Ponorogo claim that protection laws for workers are very strong, the legislation says nothing about practices such as salary cutting. Legal reform plods, since the network of migration opportunists is folded into itself: Many government officials also own PJTKI agencies.
Is the belum a symptom or a cause? Is a life dominated by belum the unintended result of economic forces at work in Ponorogo, or is it a economic system in and of itself, a system of unfulfilled desire? These are the questions that linger as I depart from Ponorogo.
Perhaps the most pervasive dream in Ponorogo is that of the migrant. Her (90% of the time, it is a her) aspirations are wrapped up in the bright lights of modernity. She knows that three years of working in Singapore or Taiwan will be enough to pay the school fees of her children through university. She also knows that the money could transform her humble abode into a tall, grandiose home, the type of house that is quickly becoming a standard in Ponorogo. These migrants often find themselves caught in a cycle. They return to Indonesia with startling amounts of cash, and proceed to spend it, evincing their new middle-class wealth in a community that has come to rely on quick money. With cars, motorcycles, a sophisticated wardrobe. Soon enough, the money dries up and they return abroad.
But it might be more difficult to be a young man in Ponorogo, since the jobs abroad are almost exclusively for women. (Factories, in addition to the informal sector, request female labor, in large part because women are considered more obedient and less likely to demonstrate for pay raises.) For many men in Ponorogo, whose wives or sisters are working abroad, a salary is belum. So is respect in a community that has come to think of young men as indolent and unproductive.
The belum is also important for the network of “professionals” who profit from the migrant’s dream. This string of agents is complex: the recruiters in Ponorogo; the ‘mafia’, often composed of teachers, that persuades young girls to migrate (and in turn takes a cut); the middlemen in receiving countries who “secure” work placements; and the government officials who slice a bit off the top at every step. Without the migrant’s belum, without the perpetual next dream, next act of conspicuous consumption, the waters that nourish this circuited tree of profiteering would dry up. Despite the number of players, the business of migration is profitable for every link in the chain. For instance, the recruitment agencies (called PJTKI, Penyalur Jasa Tenaga Kerja Indonesia) are known to practice potong gaji, or salary cutting; they take up to 50-75% of the worker’s salary for the first 6-12 months of employment. While government officials in Ponorogo claim that protection laws for workers are very strong, the legislation says nothing about practices such as salary cutting. Legal reform plods, since the network of migration opportunists is folded into itself: Many government officials also own PJTKI agencies.
Is the belum a symptom or a cause? Is a life dominated by belum the unintended result of economic forces at work in Ponorogo, or is it a economic system in and of itself, a system of unfulfilled desire? These are the questions that linger as I depart from Ponorogo.
Monday, July 11, 2011
A Nyadran in Jawa Tengah
I felt like an old-school anthropologist, the colonial era scholars who sought to find the most other-able of Others, those most unimaginable in a Western ontology, and “explain” them.
Except it happened completely by accident. My interest in Indonesia doesn’t stem from a desire to trek into the jungles of Papua to “discover” indigenous peoples. In fact, I became fascinated in this country because of how its people think about Islam as a tool of modernity. But nonetheless, there I found myself, in a small city in central Java called Temanggung, in the front row of a gathering of hundreds—called a nyadran.
I was visiting friends in Temanggung, and a small group of us were drinking coffee in the town square. The evening had a quotidian feel about it. It seemed that regulars filled the small park, and I reveled in the santai, sepi (quiet and relaxed) mood of the town, as compared to busy Yogya and frenetic Jakarta. As the time approached ten o’clock, my friends asked me if I’d ever seen Kuda Lumping, what they described as a “traditional Javanese horse dance.” I offered an apologetic “belum parnah” (no, never before) as they informed me that a friend of theirs was dancing in a nearby ceremony. As we pulled into a narrow lane a few kilometers away, I realized that the event was indeed a citywide attraction. Hundreds of motorbikes stretched out in lines like millipedes. Indeed, there were hundreds of people in the audience, seated along stone risers and facing a dirt performance ring. Behind the ring was a stage with an eerie sounding Gamelan set and a coarse singer. Soon after we arrived, a horse dance began, with costumed young men (perhaps 16-20) took on the nature of horses, performing in near perfect synchronism. My hosts excitedly pointed out their friend (he is the costumed performer in the picture I’ve included).
Once the horse dance concluded, a different, more gripping spectacle took shape. A costumed performer, who had been present since we arrived, assumed a sort of master role, as the music intensified and people from the audience spontaneously became kesurupan—best translated as possessed. The friend who’d just finished his horse dance ushered me to the front of the crowd for a better view, as other audience members lost control of their body and were brought, like animals, to the center of the ring. My friends explained to me that no one planned on becoming kesurupan, but that those who allowed their minds to become empty were susceptible to possession by the devilish spirits that had been called to the space.
Indeed, it seemed that those becoming possessed had lost human sensations. Their eyes became milky, and they assumed the posture of tigers and lions, at times rushing at the audience and growling. Those from the highest risers who became possessed jumped inhuman distances to the ground. Audience members within a few feet of me became kesurupan, and others took on the role as caretakers, charged with keeping satisfied the devil inside their peers.
Part of sating these devils involved feeding them. Their appetites are apparently quite multifarious. Some of those possessed were fed whole roses as if they were marshmallows. More shocking were the kesurupan who chewed up and swallowed long fluorescent light bulbs. Given their ease in chomping down on the glass, they could have been eating peanuts. All the while, the master walked around the twenty or so possessed individuals (all men), cracking his whip on their backs and sending shivers up my spine.
It turns out that a ceremony like this one is performed only a few times each year. The one at which I so fortuitously found myself was in fact scheduled intentionally just before the start of Ramadan. Whether this is read as a kind of ‘Muslim Mardi Gras’, when people get all the unorthodoxy out of their system, or as a ritual to ward off evil spirits and facilitate reflection and contemplation during a holy month, perhaps the more important point is that it is situated within a localized practice of Islam. Indeed, as I was told several times that night, the ceremony I witnessed was used by the nine saints who spread Islam in Java as a method of placing the religion in a local context. The nyaderan, of course, is a story seldom told. Usually the accounts of Indonesians harmonizing Islam and local culture involve pleasing descriptions of the pesantren (Islamic boarding schools), which employ teaching methods drawn from centuries of Hindu and Buddhist influence to pass on unique Islamic traditions. Or fantastic stories of the Yogyakarta sultan, publicly celebrating Maulid (Mohammad’s birthday) with a traditional Gamelan ensemble.
While old-school anthropologists wrote about “little” and “big” traditions, it is possible to see the nyaderan as actually neither. The audience members there, my friends included, are not carrying on a “little” tradition while a “big” one (Islam) threatens to swallow it. Perhaps, instead of determining what is errant or orthodox, little or big—a perspective that ultimately marginalizes someone or some idea—those hundreds who came that night embrace multiple affiliations. They are both Javanese and Muslim, and rather than this being a split identity, it is likely understood as joint.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Local-Global Harmonies
My first experience in Indonesia continued what has become a pattern in my international travels. I arrived hoping to find my name neatly printed on a placard in one of the receiving lines outside Jakarta’s international terminal. Despite the fact that I was inspired by highly specific directions (“Meet at the Dunkin Donuts”), finding my ride became a difficult task.
Many states in the American Midwest have yet to receive their first Dunkin Donuts, but that one terminal, 16,000 km away from Dunkin Donuts' home in Quincy, Mass, has three. At the first and second I found no “Gregory Randolph” sign, and after about thirty minutes of looking, I couldn’t locate the third. Finally, from the echoing “taxi!” appeals ringing in my ear, I heard a relaxed voice: “Sir, can I help you?” Assuming an airport employee was coming to my rescue, I explained that I was looking for a hotel pickup van. Ridwan spent a half-hour calling the hotel and helping me track down the driver. Only as I was getting in the car did I find out that he was no airport employee, but just another taxi driver. I apologized, explaining that I had no Indonesian money to offer him. His response was resolute and smiling: “Don’t even think about it, Mr. Gregory.”
Such an experience would be an anomaly many places in the world, but here it is a more of a standard. For me, Yogyakarta—the student-centric city in Indonesia where I’m spending the summer—is defined by its people. Other than Chapel Hill, my home-country college town, I haven’t found a place anywhere in the world with such a high concentration of friendly and intelligent people.
Perhaps the more remarkable aspect of Yogya’s people, though, is their healthy balance of global connectedness and local groundedness. At the research center cum PhD program where I’m working, named the Indonesia Consortium for Religious Studies, the staff is presenting at conferences all around the world—Germany, Singapore, Bulgaria, Ecuador. But in conversations with the jet-setting staff, and in all my interactions with people since arriving, I’ve yet to hear anyone talk about moving abroad for anything other than a degree. Last weekend, an embassy official told me that the United States approves Indonesian visa applications at an exceptionally high rate, because Indonesians also return home at one of the world’s highest rates.
Understanding what defines local and global—as well as locating their harmonies and intersections—has been an taxing endeavor for my geography-oriented mind ever since I began traveling. But after a few short weeks in Yogya, I suspect this place might offer a few worthwhile contributions to the ongoing conversation on how to be both a responsible global citizen and engaged local community member.
Many states in the American Midwest have yet to receive their first Dunkin Donuts, but that one terminal, 16,000 km away from Dunkin Donuts' home in Quincy, Mass, has three. At the first and second I found no “Gregory Randolph” sign, and after about thirty minutes of looking, I couldn’t locate the third. Finally, from the echoing “taxi!” appeals ringing in my ear, I heard a relaxed voice: “Sir, can I help you?” Assuming an airport employee was coming to my rescue, I explained that I was looking for a hotel pickup van. Ridwan spent a half-hour calling the hotel and helping me track down the driver. Only as I was getting in the car did I find out that he was no airport employee, but just another taxi driver. I apologized, explaining that I had no Indonesian money to offer him. His response was resolute and smiling: “Don’t even think about it, Mr. Gregory.”
Such an experience would be an anomaly many places in the world, but here it is a more of a standard. For me, Yogyakarta—the student-centric city in Indonesia where I’m spending the summer—is defined by its people. Other than Chapel Hill, my home-country college town, I haven’t found a place anywhere in the world with such a high concentration of friendly and intelligent people.
Perhaps the more remarkable aspect of Yogya’s people, though, is their healthy balance of global connectedness and local groundedness. At the research center cum PhD program where I’m working, named the Indonesia Consortium for Religious Studies, the staff is presenting at conferences all around the world—Germany, Singapore, Bulgaria, Ecuador. But in conversations with the jet-setting staff, and in all my interactions with people since arriving, I’ve yet to hear anyone talk about moving abroad for anything other than a degree. Last weekend, an embassy official told me that the United States approves Indonesian visa applications at an exceptionally high rate, because Indonesians also return home at one of the world’s highest rates.
Understanding what defines local and global—as well as locating their harmonies and intersections—has been an taxing endeavor for my geography-oriented mind ever since I began traveling. But after a few short weeks in Yogya, I suspect this place might offer a few worthwhile contributions to the ongoing conversation on how to be both a responsible global citizen and engaged local community member.
Friday, June 10, 2011
The Wild West
Though this blog will focus on my time in Indonesia, my first entry is written from China, where I started the summer with two weeks of traveling, mostly in Gansu province.
It’s difficult to accept that I spent only two weeks in China. While there, I encountered a bewildering range of emotions, perhaps a spectrum that mirrors the diversity of human experiences in this vast country, full of romantic imaginings and struggling counter narratives.
My first impression of China on this trip was the Beijing airport. It is a strange, suspended space, massive in scale even though it feels utterly empty. The sun streams in through a tragic haze that mutes the character of the day. The travelers inside, caught in an ethereal light that refuses definition, are smartly clad in the idioms of the placeless global: slim fit black suits, iPads, angular eyewear. Starbucks. McDonald’s. These, I suppose, are the marks of global superpower-dom: formidable size, glittering technology, liminal foods.
Out west, past the massive city of Xi’an, the old imperial capital, we find other marks of superpower status. Arundhati Roy talks about how India is colonizing itself, and it would appear that China is doing the same. Xiahe—home to the Labrang Monastery, the second largest Buddhist monastery in the world—is on the frontlines of the Sino-Tibetan discord. In 2008, when protests flared up across the Tibetan plateau and were met with a violent crackdown, Xiahe was the eastern hub of resistance (second only to Lhasa in vigor). We met brave individuals there who were surprisingly open to detailing the cultural genocide. Names are changed (Sino-fied to be precise, and to be sarcastic) to protect the identity of these individuals, whose revelations to us are a bold and admirable form of resistance.
Wei Long, a Tibetan who made the perilous journey to India about 10 years ago in order to receive an education, evinces the strained relations between Tibetans and Beijing with his life experience. He’s been jailed and participated in protests. He and Feng, a young highly educated monk at the Labrang Monastery, detailed the most recent crackdown. Less than a month ago, when the Tibetan government in Dharamsala elected a prime minister, Chinese forces preempted any political activity. They arrived at Wei Long’s guesthouse before dawn and demanded that he kick out all foreign and domestic tourists within two hours. Then the army forces disappeared sixteen monks (only three of which have returned), and began reeducation classes in the monastery, teaching these brilliant Buddhist intellectuals reductive understandings of culture and sovereignty: “Tibet Is A Part Of China.” Despite setting strict limits on the number of resident monks at Labrang, and otherwise curbing the autonomy the monastery has in advancing Buddhist philosophy, the Chinese government is the direct beneficiary of fees paid by tourists to enter its gompas (we declined, in solidarity with Wei Long and Feng).
Wei Long surmises that the only hope for Tibetan people is a growing restive youth population in southeastern China, impatient for democratic reform. If the majority Han population can create a more open society, then perhaps Tibetans can make the appeal that has been so calculatingly squashed.
But the story of superpower-dom is not so uncomplicated. There are not clear winners and clear losers. Cities like Lanzhou and Dunhuang, in the northwest, left me neither awed nor angered. More curious. Lanzhou is a city that barely makes it into the Lonely Planet, but it is home to nearly four million people. One could tell lots of stories about the place. It maintains a solid reputation as the world center of beef noodles. The city is growing at an alarming rate, with Han Chinese rushing in behind capital investments. But Uighur Muslim culture still seems to inform street life. Lanzhou’s haze competes for worst in the country, but the streets are kept quite clean. Most of China lives in places like Lanzhou—urban, without glamour or fame, where development is good, and development is bad, where culture might be thriving, but also might be dying. Dunhuang is another such place. In a desert oasis on the outskirts of central government investment, the city has been transformed into a kind of Whistler in the Desert, where the night market was recently trebled and where every other restaurant seems to be serving its first customer. Dunhuang is the definition of a planned community—planned for the new domestic tourist, the upper middle class. The families that get down at Dunhuang’s glittering new train station are dropping $20 a person to walk on sand dunes and another $30 to visit the famed Magao Caves, a nearby UNESCO world heritage site.
China teaches that even about authoritarian governments, no unitary narrative can be written. There are so many ways to be Chinese today—proud, oppressed, yearning, thriving, resisting.
It’s difficult to accept that I spent only two weeks in China. While there, I encountered a bewildering range of emotions, perhaps a spectrum that mirrors the diversity of human experiences in this vast country, full of romantic imaginings and struggling counter narratives.
My first impression of China on this trip was the Beijing airport. It is a strange, suspended space, massive in scale even though it feels utterly empty. The sun streams in through a tragic haze that mutes the character of the day. The travelers inside, caught in an ethereal light that refuses definition, are smartly clad in the idioms of the placeless global: slim fit black suits, iPads, angular eyewear. Starbucks. McDonald’s. These, I suppose, are the marks of global superpower-dom: formidable size, glittering technology, liminal foods.
Out west, past the massive city of Xi’an, the old imperial capital, we find other marks of superpower status. Arundhati Roy talks about how India is colonizing itself, and it would appear that China is doing the same. Xiahe—home to the Labrang Monastery, the second largest Buddhist monastery in the world—is on the frontlines of the Sino-Tibetan discord. In 2008, when protests flared up across the Tibetan plateau and were met with a violent crackdown, Xiahe was the eastern hub of resistance (second only to Lhasa in vigor). We met brave individuals there who were surprisingly open to detailing the cultural genocide. Names are changed (Sino-fied to be precise, and to be sarcastic) to protect the identity of these individuals, whose revelations to us are a bold and admirable form of resistance.
Wei Long, a Tibetan who made the perilous journey to India about 10 years ago in order to receive an education, evinces the strained relations between Tibetans and Beijing with his life experience. He’s been jailed and participated in protests. He and Feng, a young highly educated monk at the Labrang Monastery, detailed the most recent crackdown. Less than a month ago, when the Tibetan government in Dharamsala elected a prime minister, Chinese forces preempted any political activity. They arrived at Wei Long’s guesthouse before dawn and demanded that he kick out all foreign and domestic tourists within two hours. Then the army forces disappeared sixteen monks (only three of which have returned), and began reeducation classes in the monastery, teaching these brilliant Buddhist intellectuals reductive understandings of culture and sovereignty: “Tibet Is A Part Of China.” Despite setting strict limits on the number of resident monks at Labrang, and otherwise curbing the autonomy the monastery has in advancing Buddhist philosophy, the Chinese government is the direct beneficiary of fees paid by tourists to enter its gompas (we declined, in solidarity with Wei Long and Feng).
Wei Long surmises that the only hope for Tibetan people is a growing restive youth population in southeastern China, impatient for democratic reform. If the majority Han population can create a more open society, then perhaps Tibetans can make the appeal that has been so calculatingly squashed.
But the story of superpower-dom is not so uncomplicated. There are not clear winners and clear losers. Cities like Lanzhou and Dunhuang, in the northwest, left me neither awed nor angered. More curious. Lanzhou is a city that barely makes it into the Lonely Planet, but it is home to nearly four million people. One could tell lots of stories about the place. It maintains a solid reputation as the world center of beef noodles. The city is growing at an alarming rate, with Han Chinese rushing in behind capital investments. But Uighur Muslim culture still seems to inform street life. Lanzhou’s haze competes for worst in the country, but the streets are kept quite clean. Most of China lives in places like Lanzhou—urban, without glamour or fame, where development is good, and development is bad, where culture might be thriving, but also might be dying. Dunhuang is another such place. In a desert oasis on the outskirts of central government investment, the city has been transformed into a kind of Whistler in the Desert, where the night market was recently trebled and where every other restaurant seems to be serving its first customer. Dunhuang is the definition of a planned community—planned for the new domestic tourist, the upper middle class. The families that get down at Dunhuang’s glittering new train station are dropping $20 a person to walk on sand dunes and another $30 to visit the famed Magao Caves, a nearby UNESCO world heritage site.
China teaches that even about authoritarian governments, no unitary narrative can be written. There are so many ways to be Chinese today—proud, oppressed, yearning, thriving, resisting.
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