USA vs. HK #2: Health Care

I don’t mean to spoil the suspense, but this is an easy one.  HK has one of the healthiest populations in the world, easily beating the US in basically all measures of health.  HK is #2 in the world in life expectancy, and the US is #46.  HK has the 4th lowest infant mortality rate in the world.  The US has the 41st lowest.  And keep in mind that the diet here is not exactly what I would call healthy (though I’ll grant that it’s probably better than the average American diet.)  And HK air is fairly toxic (more on that soon).  So there are confounding factors on both sides to be sure, I could cite other indicators, but I won’t bore people with anymore numbers unless someone actually disagrees with me here.  We can get into the details in the comments section.

It’s true that rich people in the US have excellent health care, but that’s not the standard I’m using.  If I were a rich person, I might see things differently.  But I’m not, so I don’t.  If rich people want to comment and tell me why I wasn’t good enough to deserve access to basic health care in the US, feel free.  To me, fairness is an important concern when we’re talking about who gets to live and who dies.  As bad as the US is on important measures like infant mortality, it fails the fairness test even more miserably.

For the first time in my adult life, I don’t have to worry about an injury or illness forcing me into bankruptcy.  Health care isn’t free here, but it would cost around 12 US dollars for me to go to the emergency room.

The major objection Americans are likely to have to the health care systems in HK, Europe or anywhere in the developed world is the waiting.  It’s true that people in HK often have to wait to see a doctor if they have a non-emergency illness and want to go to a public hospital.  But doctors are the ones who decide who gets health care first, and they decide based on medical need, not cost or insurance company decree.  Private hospitals here function like private hospitals in the US, no crazy long waiting or anything, and excellent quality of care…except everything is roughly one-tenth the price.

But this has already been way too much discussion for such an easy contest.  The winner is HK.

Keep in mind, I’m writing this on November 19th, 2009.  It’s possible that things could improve in the US.  But I’m highly skeptical that the Democrats will be able to pass a bill that cuts the blood-sucking insurance company middle-men out of the system.  That’s what would need to happen if the US health care system is going to make this contest competitive.  I don’t see that happening any time soon.

The score so far: USA 1, HK 1.

USA vs. HK #1: Racism

A friend of mine came across a short essay by Andrew Sullivan called The Racism in China, and suggested that it might be an appropriate topic for me to write about.  Since racism has been lurking in the background of many of my posts, I guess I should take the bait and discuss it more directly.  I was going to start off this new USA vs. HK series with something a little easier, like health care or the environment, but I’ve haven’t been stirring up as much controversy as I’d like anyway, so here goes…

Much of what Sullivan says is consistent with my experiences both in mainland China and in HK.  Chinese feelings toward Westerners are definitely complex; there is a mixture of respect and disdain.  I’m considered somewhat barbarous and uncultured (and rightly so).  But I’m also seen as clever and knowledgeable (often undeservedly).  The complexity of the term gweilo is an illustration of this ambivalence.  Gweilo is not a racial slur in the sense that an American would think of one, nor is it a purely positive or even purely neutral term.  Like most things in HK, the meaning of the term gweilo depends on context.

But in general, being a gweilo in HK is hardly something to complain about.  There are advantages with women, and there are the corresponding disadvantages with men (mostly just a few nasty looks on the trains so far).

Sullivan also mentions that Chinese feelings toward non-white and non-Asian minorities (“blacks, browns and reds”) are considerably less complex.  Here, Chinese racism approximates white American racism; racist Chinese people see themselves as racially and culturally superior to dark skinned people.

But Sullivan seems to be drawing a distinction between the uniformly tolerant Americans and the uniformly intolerant Chinese.  Here, he completely misrepresents reality.  There is racism and ethnocentrism in both the US and China.  The difference is a matter of degree.  And particularly in HK, which has attitudes the mainland is likely progressing towards, most educated young people are not racist.  Do they stereotype?  Of course, but I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t.  I don’t see a lot of racial hatred here, and I don’t see (open) expression of racial superiority.  It’s pretty similar to the US in these respects.  In fact, I see much less than I saw in Alabama before I left (the ride from Birmingham to Atlanta on the airport shuttle was quite educational, to say the least).  But I can’t understand conversations between two Chinese people, and my minority status doesn’t make me privy to the kinds of conversations I heard as a white person in a group of white people in Alabama.  So like all my observations here, these are biased by what I can understand.

Still, there are differences that I can detect.  Having worked in the same industry in both the US and HK, things are definitely different here when it comes to race.  In Boulder, if a parent actually requested a white teacher, we would absolutely refuse to accommodate such a request.  And everyone knows that, so even if some Boulder mom really was that racist, she would no better than to ask.  In HK, we get this request fairly often, and though my co-workers think it’s ridiculous, racist, and unreasonable, and they push against it to a certain extent, in the end they generally find the mom her white faced tutor.  My predecessor was Indian, and he experienced several incidents of racism: people assumed he wasn’t qualified to teach classes that required native English ability because he didn’t “look” like he was a native speaker, and some students just made up excuses not to work with him.  But generally it’s the older generation that holds these beliefs.  The cops in HK, like the cops in the US, have their favorite ethnic groups to target: here it’s mostly South Asians they mess with.

But when speaking of the US, Sullivan forgets his own history, and present.  It wasn’t that long ago that the US had all the problems he currently ascribes to China.  And though the US is far from perfect when it comes to race relations, we’ve come a long way.  We aren’t the only ones capable of such progress.  Sullivan assumes that Chinese racism is a fixed characteristic of their culture.  He writes, “It is thus hard to imagine China welcoming millions of hard-working Nigerians and Bangladeshis with open arms. This could change over the next couple of decades as China’s labor shortage grows acute. I wouldn’t bet on it.”  Why not?  It’s been changing in most parts of the world, why not in China?  (As for his prediction that China will have an “acute” labor shortage in the near future…I wouldn’t bet on it.  But I’ll save my discussion of technological unemployment for another day.)  And what planet does this guy live on?  Is he under the impression that Americans are all welcoming hard-working Mexicans with open arms?  Has he seen Fox News?

I love my country.  Now more than ever.  I’m proud that people of different backgrounds can live, love and learn together in the US.  I’m proud that my identity as an American is broader and more inclusive than just my ethnicity or race.  But like the Chinese, not all Americans are so cosmopolitan in their love of country.

HK is in between China’s past and China’s future.  As the planet becomes more globalized, and people move around more and more, egocentricity will continually decline.  I’d say the Chinese are moving in this direction at least as fast as the Europeans.  This idea of “the West” being ahead of “the East” seems particularly misguided, given Europe’s recent troubles with immigrants.  Hopefully, China, HK, the US and the world continue on this track.

So I addressed the issue, and I tried to do so evenhandedly, from limited information.  I encourage comments and debate, particularly from anyone who has seen these issues from a perspective different than my own.

This is also the first in what I intend to make a regular series on my blog: USA vs. HK, so I have to decide on a winner.  The winner in the “who’s less ethnocentric” contest, as Andrew Sullivan framed it, is the USA.  Not a big surprise, but it’s a lot closer than Sullivan implies.  And it’s a matter of degree, and neither society is static or homogenous when it comes this stuff.  But if I have to choose a winner, I choose the USA on this one.  Parts of the US would surely lose to HK, but to be fair, I’m comparing HK to the places I’ve lived in the US (places like Madison, Denver, Boulder, and Minneapolis, not Louisiana and Mississippi).  That will be my comparison throughout this series.  I think it’s a reasonable comparison; after all, HK doesn’t represent mainland China any more than Madison and Denver represent the US.

The main reason for the US victory here is the intolerance of racism by non-racists.  Both countries have laws officially outlawing racial discrimination of any kind.  The difference is that the US (at least my parts of the US) has a cultural norm that reinforces the law against discrimination, and this completely changes the whole equation.  That is one area where I see a qualitative difference.  By being more intolerant, the US wins the battle of tolerance.

The Tao of Walking

In HK, there’s one thing every Westerner complains about.  The seemingly oblivious way Chinese people walk around in public spaces can be very aggravating.  Indeed, it’s been a major source of mini-temper tantrums throughout my  days so far.  This is one area where it’s easy for foreigners to feel like the Chinese are just flawed.  They are simply inconsiderate to strangers; they don’t even acknowledge the existence of others when walking down the street.  But I think there’s more to it than that.  There must be.

Chinese people have been living continuously in cities for perhaps longer than any ethnic group on Earth.  And they’ve been doing it thousands of years longer than Anglo-Saxon Europeans.  HK has one of the densest populations in the world, yet there is virtually no violent crime.  It’s hot as hell and twice as humid in the summer, yet people don’t seem to want to kill each other like in the US.  It’s safe to say the Chinese have a few things figured out when it comes to getting along in dense urban areas.

When Chinese people acknowledge my existence, they are unfailingly polite.  This politeness requires energy, and it requires patience (and dealing with foreigners always requires more patience than dealing with culturally competent adults).  Since energy and patience are things humans possess in limited supply, it just doesn’t make sense to acknowledge everyone’s existence.  The population density is just way too great for than; and in China it has been that way for thousands of years.  One can incur no immediate moral obligations toward people one cannot see.  The Chinese way of walking is the product of thousands of years of cultural evolution, and it’s not to be taken lightly.  It may very well have many positive effects, and it may be the future.

As a level 2 gweilo, I thought I had it all figured out, including the walking thing.  But what a gweilo learns as he begins to progress beyond level 2 is that he doesn’t have anything figured out.  At level 2, my walking strategy was basically to go with my instincts, and exaggerate them.  So I walked like a Westerner, except with a little extra swagger.  I put on my head phones, bumped some hip hop, and walked to the rhythm of the music, not the rhythm of the city.  I looked directly at people, and essentially intimidated them into getting out of my way.  This is the way of the bully.  I’ll do it my way, and force 7 million people to adjust to me.  To a point, it works.  A swagger gets noticed more than a hesitant walk, and people did stay out of my way to a certain extent.  But it only works with people who are going the opposite way; people in front of me who are going the same way don’t see me and therefore aren’t bullied into getting out of my way.  And it upset the whole flow of the sidewalk, which often created traffic jams that I would get stuck in.  If I’m really going to exist in this city, I need to adapt.  My gas bladder issues are recurring. Back to beginner’s mind.

On my last two days off, I devoted some time to practice walking.  I went to all the most pedestrian packed areas, and the ones with the most Chinese, the fewest foreigners.  I went to Causeway Bay, to Mong Kok, and to Sham Shui Po.  I observed.  And I practiced.  I’m still practicing.

What I’m practicing is walking without ever looking directly at people.  I look up, I look down, or to the side, but I don’t make eye contact with strangers.  In the process, I’ve discovered why the way of the bully only gets you so far.  When I looked directly at Chinese people on the street, there were two likely outcomes: they would either just totally get out of my way, or (more likely) they would just look further away from me.  By forcing people to actively, not passively, avert their gaze, I made it really difficult for them to see me, even peripherally.  And there were collisions.  And traffic jams.  So I’m working on being like water.  Going with the flow.  By never focusing on any individual, I get a better sense of the crowd.  I see the empty space more, the path of least resistance.  The way of water is at least as effective as the way of the bully when it comes to getting down the street quickly.  And it’s much easier on my emotional state.

Though the way of water is not aggressive, it’s not passive either.  When I first got here, before I discovered the way of the bully, I was very hesitant in my walking.  Constantly trying to avoid people, I looked at people and tried to anticipate which way they would go so I could avoid them.  Hesitant is the worst way to walk in HK.   When I tried to be polite by my standards, I just got in the way.  The failure of this supposedly deferential walking style leads many foreigners to adopt the way of the bully.  It’s really funny, nowhere in the world will you see white people walk with more swagger than in HK.  It’s like everybody’s bumping Biggie.  The hyper-aggressive and the hyper-passive both involve too much attentiveness to individuals.  The way of water is ego-less and self-centered.  As long as I’m going with the flow, nobody sees me and I see nobody.  When I see no individuals, I incur no moral obligations.  As a result, I just go to the empty space.  I don’t think about whether others are going for the same space or not.  I can’t see them and they can’t see me.  And it just works.  I’m more synchonized with the city (sometimes), and with a little more practice I may be ready to start moving toward level 3.  But for now, the terrible twos continue.

Soul in the City, part 2

Since it seems to have become the custom in my my sequels, let me start by correcting a potential misinterpretation of my last post.  Chinese people go soul too, just as much as anyone else.  But they just don’t show it to me as much as other people do here, like the Filipinas, the Indians, the Europeans, or the Africans.  Everybody got soul, but culturally, some people show it more than others, that’s all.  And if Chinese people think I’m making fun of them for being a little reserved in public, keep in mind that I’m a somewhat shy white guy from Wisconsin.  I’ve been on the other end of that stereotype.

But even as a white guy from Wisconsin, HK is a bit of a shock in terms of the lack of emotionality I see on the street.  And it’s taking some getting used to.   That’s why the Filipinas are such a reprieve, they remind me of home.

I’ll admit it, I was that white kid who was fascinated with black culture.  I always secretly wanted to be a minority, but Irish was about the best I could muster, and that totally doesn’t cut it in the US.  In HK, I finally got my wish.  I am definitely a minority, though I’m definitely not oppressed at all.  In fact, if there is one group of people I’m almost completely invisible to, it’s the police.  This comes in handy; my invisibility makes it really easy for me to jump police barricades undetected.  Oppressed or not, as a minority, I find other minorities easier to understand, as general rule.  For one thing, they’re a lot more likely to speak English to each other, but it’s more than that, minority culture seems more transparent here.  As a result, my understanding of minorities here is deeper than my understanding of the Chinese.

I’m working on that last part.  I’ve recently gotten to know a few Chinese people on a more personal level, and their depth of character shows up a lot more in one-on-one converstations.  Not a big surprise, I know….but this culture is thick.  It’s dense and complex, it’s unspoken and unwritten.  But these are things that I really can’t speak of until the gweilo reaches level 3.   And I’m not there yet.  In fact, I recently realized I’m not quite as adept at walking as I thought.  More on that soon.

W

Soul in the City

Compared to the US, the correlation between income and happiness is negative and steep in HK.

Just one of many Filipina gatherings in Central on Sunday.

At the top of the happiness hierarchy are the Filipina housekeepers.  Sunday is the housekeeper’s day off, and every Sunday they come to Central en masse, put cardboard down on the walkways, and eat, talk and be merry.  Big, beautiful smiles and hearty laughs all around.  I have Sunday off too; so every Sunday that I’ve been here so far, I’ve gone to Central to spend some time with the Filipinas, even if only for a half-hour on my way somewhere else.  When Filipinos bump into me on the street, it’s completely different from when a Chinese person does so.  When a Chinese person bumps into me, they just keep moving.  No big deal, my gas bladder adjusted to that a long time ago.  But when Filipinos, and particularly Filipinas, bump into me, they always turn around, say sorry and give me a big, genuine smile.  I love them.  (It helps that they seem to love me too, I pretty much never get hit on in bars, except by Filipinas.)  The Filipinas in Central bring me back to life every week.  I don’t know what I’d do without them.  Filipinas got soul.

A rare a status-free scene in Causeway Bay

At the bottom are the bankers.  These miserable assholes wear thick, black business suits in the hot, humid summer, and drive manual-transmission Ferraris down some of the busiest, most pedestrian packed streets I’ve ever seen.  They spend 80-90 hours per week working feverishly to transfer as much wealth as possible up the economic ladder.  And somehow they seem to feel unfulfilled.  Go figure.

In between are people like me.  We wear a “business casual” wardrobe.  In HK, this means wearing long pants and long sleeves even when it’s way too hot to be comfortable in such clothes.  It’s certainly true that the correlation between misery and income is strongest in the summer.  But even as the weather gets more bearable, there just aren’t many smiles amongst the middle class.  My multi-cultural office actually has a really great, amiable atmosphere.  But I think we’re actually the exception, not the rule.

Middle-class malaise

The construction workers and other manual laborers get to wear whatever they want, and this usually means wearing shorts and no shirt, and making the bankers and I feel insecure about our body fat.  Unfortunately, I don’t have the money to buy a Ferrari to compensate, so I’m trying to work out more.  Not really because of the construction workers, but because I do feel fat in HK (and I didn’t really feel that way at all in Boulder, which is one of the thinnest cities in the US).

Even though I believe this negative correlation does exist, there are certainly outliers, obviously.  I’m just saying that if you were to actually graph people’s happiness vs. income on x and y coordinates; it’s definitely not what standard economic theory would predict.  The homeless people seem pretty miserable; though it’s no worse than US cities, and everyone has access to health care here that’s so cheap it’s practically free, so that mitigates their misery a bit.  And there are people here who make good livings doing engaging, creative work.  This is not a linear data set, to be sure (in either the positive or the negative direction).  But I think that the extreme unhappiness and extreme wealth of the bankers pulls the slope downward.

Outside of my office, I rarely see Chinese people smile unless there’s a camera pointed at them.  I rarely see anger either.  Compared to Westerners, the Chinese have strong social taboos against showing emotion in public; this is seen as something that children do.  I’m sure that part of my experience is that I just don’t know many Chinese people (besides my co-workers) well enough to see them really smile.  And since the taboo against public displays of emotion doesn’t apply to minorities as much, I see them smile more.

It shouldn’t be surprising that as a level 2 gweilo, I’m also expected to show emotion from time to time.  Which is good, because I’ve been emotional lately.  I don’t know why, but I get choked up a lot in this city (and not just because of the pollution).  For example, when I was standing on a street corner recently, a bus went by belching black smoke.  A man with a baby carriage quickly tried to turn around and get his baby away from the smoke.  But he didn’t make it, and the smoke completely enveloped the baby carriage.  The gesture was so beautiful, and the pollution so ugly, I was emotionally overloaded.  I’ve always been a pretty emotional, Scotch-Irish type of guy, but it’s different in HK.  It’s like I have permanent PMS.

Considering that it’s easily a top 5 World City, Hong Kong is deeply insecure, and it may be this insecurity that causes some of the status-obsession, and its consequent misery.  HK has NYC envy.  There’s a Times Square, but no Times.  There’s also a SoHo (South of Hollywood Road instead of South of Houston Street).  HK Times Square is pretty lame by the way, but SoHo is a very cool neighborhood, very popular with the gweilo.  In addition to NYC envy, HK has Shanghaiphobia.  HK is worried that Shanghai will usurp its role as the economic and cultural capital of Greater China.  Unlike NYC envy, there’s actually good reason for Shanghaiphobia, since Shanghai is also a deep water port, it’s at the mouth of the Yangtze river, it’s closer to Beijing, Tokyo and Seoul, and it has roughly three times HK’s population.

Because of the English language, HK has an inherent advantage relative to Shanghai, particularly when it comes to trade with India and English-speaking parts of Africa (notably Nigeria and Kenya).

English bridges the cultural gap in the multicultural Chungking Mansions

An ABF(Australian Born Filipino) recently said to me that these days, the Indian firms are just paying local Chinese to translate language and culture for them in Shanghai.  People are cheaper in China.  But for trade that’s done mainly between small groups of friends and family members (like the mobile phone trade in India and Africa), HK retains a huge advantage because of the English language.  The following is not a reference, but a link.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/4609e212-eb64-11dd-bb6e-0000779fd2ac.html

All this insecurity, both global and personal, may be driving the rampant consumerism in HK.  Much more than the US, people wear their status on their sleeve.  When bankers go to the bar, even on Sunday, they dress like bankers.  What’s the point of being a banker if nobody knows you’re a banker?  Where I come from, mostly Madison, Wisconsin and Denver/Boulder, Colorado, this kind of thing is frowned upon.  Because so many highly successful people walk around in shorts and a t-shirt, status isn’t as easily observable. It’s a big change for me.  I find myself compelled to buy expensive clothes that I would have laughed at back in the States.  It’s not a healthy thing to spend lots of time and mental energy on, but it’s happening to me.

Besides the twin pillars of cheap people and excellent infrastructure, China’s growing hegemony in Asia is fueled by its consumerism.  Asian countries like Japan and South Korea are increasingly dependent on China, not just as a source for cheap goods, but as market for their own products.  And if HK wants to play this game, it needs to consume at a Chinese level.  And China is really catching up to HK in this area, quickly.  One problem for HK is that their citizens tend to prefer well made products over cheaper ones that have to be replaced quickly.  This is a problem in a hyper-capitalist society.  The solution is to encourage status obsession.

But the real reason HK won’t completely lose out to Shanghai is it’s diversity.  And it’s relevant that this diversity is what keeps a foreigner like me sane.  When the status-obsessed hyper-materialism of this place starts to weigh me down, it’s always the diversity that lifts me back up.  Sometimes it lifts my spirits, as with my beloved Filipinas, but sometimes it literally lifts my body as well: it has generally been minorities of various kinds who have taken me up into the world above the street.  It’s this diversity that gives the city it’s vibrancy, and it’s cultural edge, and it’s because of this diversity that HK will always be more attractive to foreigners than Shanghai could ever be.

Level 2 Gweilo (The Terrible Twos)

If you want to understand the mentality of a level 1 gweilo, read my first three posts.  A level 1 gweilo has three stages: learning to eat, learning to walk, denial, and acceptance.  (More complex skills like forming sentences and reading don’t begin until at least level 5.)

I have now begun my transition into level 2.  My gas bladder isn’t exactly functioning at an adult level,  but I’m not longer stuck on the bottom of the tank all the time.  I know of some clubs that aren’t advertised from the ground, and are at least 9 floors up.  I can navigate above or below ground with ease, and I even occasionally use public transportation that’s not on fixed tracks, like buses.  In other words, I can now get around under my own power; I don’t have to be carried anymore.

At level 2, I have a few words in my vocabulary, and I can even use a couple of phrases to help me get what I want.  I’m constantly listening to the sounds that other humans make, in hopes of producing them myself at some point.  I have become like a sponge, taking in vast amounts of visual and auditory information.  Occasionally, my brain is able to organize visual information in a way that gives me a reasonable idea of which real world objects correspond to which sensory stimuli.  As a result, not only am I able to walk down the street relatively easily, but I’m able to do so without running into other people all the time.

Still, when things don’t go my way, I tend to get cranky.  For instance, HSBC, my bank, still hasn’t given me the PIN number for my ATM card.  When I went down there to collect it, they told me that they couldn’t give it to me.  It had to be sent to my address through the mail.  I asked them why, and they said “for safety reasons.”  I told them that my mailbox wasn’t actually safe, and that the safest thing was to simply tell me the PIN, or write it down and give it to me right then.  I had  my Hong Kong ID, my passport, and could verify my signature and my account number.  Clearly, the safest thing from my standpoint was for them to just give me the damn PIN.  But protocol dictated otherwise.  It was one of those DMV experiences discussed earlier in In Defense of Sloth. And so I threw a bit of a temper tantrum.  It wasn’t pretty.  And I didn’t get what I wanted. You would think that a level 2 gweilo would be less likely to get annoyed at these cultural differences, but you would be wrong.  It’s actually the pattern that pisses me off, not so much the isolated instances.

That said, a level 2 gweilo is certainly much more capable than a level 1 gweilo.  Just capable enough to be dangerous to himself.  At level 1, a gweilo can barely get around, and when he does he’s carried by public transport.  But now that I’m moving about on my own, I have more opportunities to hurt myself.  One of the things that a level 2 gweilo needs to protect himself from himself is someone with more experience, more cultural and linguistic skill, who can help him learn the ropes.  A parental figure, if you will.

This is why it’s so important for a level 2 gweilo to know his ABCs.  In HK, an ABC is an American born Chinese.  And knowing your ABCs is a major part of the transition from level 1 to level 2.  I’ve now met a few, through work and other places.  There’s this great little pub down the street from my house, and there are a couple EBCs (English born Chinese) who have brought me into their Cantonese conversations.  Obviously, once I join the conversation, the percentage of Cantonese goes down, and the percentage of English goes up.  But still, I’m interacting with locals, I’m learning some useful phrases, and I’m picking up cultural nuances that would otherwise take years to learn.  Cantonese in the bar is very different from Cantonese in the office.  It’s like the difference between Italian and German.  In the bar, there is much more gesticulation and inflection, which makes it easier to understand what people are saying, even though I don’t really understand the words at all.  It’s really a beautiful thing: something a level 1 gweilo is incapable of appreciating.

So now I can move around on my own, say a few words, and I know my ABCs, but I still get cranky sometimes.

W

In Defense of Sloth, part 2

My Vietnamese commentator makes an interesting point about the Confucian Ethic.  Economists often use  the Confucian Ethic (the Eastern version of the Protestant Ethic) to explain the economic success of countries like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and most recently China.  Basically, the argument is that Confucius in the East, like John Calvin in the West, taught the value of hard work, this lesson then became a part of the culture, and that hard work leads to prosperity.  These economists would no doubt disagree with my assertion that it is this same cultural trait that hinders economic success by inhibiting innovation.  So that’s good.  Because if there’s one group of people out there who inhibit innovation by requiring unnecessary rigor, it’s economists, and social scientists in general.  In the social sciences, like in China, interesting new ideas are effectively illegal.  Because the peer review process forces new ideas to get past a group of people who all share the same assumptions (demonstrably false assumptions in the case of economists and Big Beijing), new ideas don’t get very far.  There are two ways to get an idea past the peer review process: 1. show that its not new, in other words, cite it, or 2. do rigorous (and usually expensive) research.  I’m glad I’m not in grad school anymore.  Academics, like authoritarian regimes, are incredibly closed-minded and insular.

And that brings me to my next point.  Insularity may be part of the reason that my least innovative students are also in the ethnic majority.  In my experience teaching in the Denver Public Schools, and later at the University of Colorado, the white kids were always much less interesting than the African Americans, Mexican Americans or Asian Americans.  When I tried to get white kids to think a little cynically, they often just couldn’t.  When I tried to get them to see things from other perspectives, they sucked at it.  This week, I met my first student from a Confucian culture who is also a minority in HK (he’s Korean).  And man is this kid smart.  And not in the way that my smartphone is smart (data storage and calculation).  He’s quick witted, adaptable, and cynical.  He didn’t know what the word eloquent meant, so I gave him a definition, and used the example of Barack Obama’s eloquence vs. George Bush’s lack of it.  This prompted him to ask me if I was a Democrat or a Republican.  I told him neither, but that I voted for Obama.  He asked what I though of Obama, and I told him that I was disappointed that his policies resembled Bush’s way too much for my liking.  He then told me that he hated Bush, but didn’t really like Obama much either, and said he thought Obama was a puppet of corporate power.  He’s 14 years old, and has never been to the US!  We then had a fairly nuanced discussion about politics, something my Chinese students seem completely incapable of.  I’m beginning to think that the reason I like my Indian students so much here is simply because they’re minorities.  There’s something about not being from the dominant ethnic group that makes you question established wisdom more.  So maybe it’s not hard work that kills creative thinking, but just being a member of the group that’s in power.

Throughout history, the cities that have been economic, social and cultural innovators have often been places where cultures collide.  New York, London, ancient Rome, Alexandria in Egypt, and Byzantium are just a few examples.  That’s one of the benefits of colonialism; both the colony and the colonizer can’t help but be exposed to different ways of thinking.  There’s nothing like a clash of cultures to shake things up, and get you thinking differently.  Lord knows I’m experiencing that these days.  And on that note, I’ll return to my gas bladder issues shortly.  Stay tuned.

In Defense of Sloth

I’m beginning to think that laziness, not necessity, is the mother of invention.

Recent Chinese economic success has largely been driven by a combination of two factors: wages comparable to much poorer countries and infrastructure comparable to much richer countries.  No country on Earth seems to be able to beat the Chinese in both these areas simultaneously.  They’re very good at taking a product developed elsewhere, dismantling it, and figuring out how to mass produce it at a lower cost.  But they aren’t innovating as well as the West (for now) and they definitely aren’t innovating as well as other Asian countries, like Korea, Japan, or India.

It hasn’t always been this way.  Of the four major civilizations on the Eurasian landmass (the Chinese, the Indians, the Arabs, and the Europeans) the Chinese are probably responsible for more inventions than any of the others, historically.  And Taiwan, which is culturally Chinese, seems to be fairly good at innovation these days.  In HK, Westerners often complain about how difficult it is to get the locals to deviate from their rigid protocols and flow charts, and actually engage in creative problem solving.  Sometimes it feels like everyone here works for the DMV (that’s the Division of Motor Vehicles, for those of you who aren’t from the US–known to be a bureaucratic hellhole).  But not really, because DMV employees aren’t exactly known for their assiduousness, and the Chinese definitely deserve that positive stereotype.  DMV employees are frustrating to deal with because they’re too secure in their jobs, and therefore lack motivation to perform well.  In HK, people work their asses off because they know that there are always thousands of people ready to replace them.  As a result, they are determined to demonstrate that they’re never looking for shortcuts, always willing to work harder.

At work, my students generally fall into three cultural categories: local HK Chinese, local Indians, and Western expats.  All three speak excellent English, and all three tend to be quite affluent with well educated parents.  Of the three, I have the most trouble teaching the Chinese.  In many ways, they are the ideal students.  When I tell them to do something, they do it.  They never complain, they do all their homework, they remember what I tell them, and they do calculations quickly and efficiently.  As a US company in the test-preparation industry, we teach people how to “game” standardized tests: how to avoid doing calculations, how to approach sections holistically, and how to solve problems creatively.  Our techniques and strategies are developed in New York, and they’re largely designed with North American students in mind.  Though my job is to train teachers, I’ve been trying to learn as much as possible from my trainees, many of whom have been working here for years.  What they all tell me is that the HK Chinese are resistant to our techniques; they always want to do math the “hard way.”

I’ve always been a bit lazy myself, and part of that is probably due to the way I was raised.  Like many Americans, as a child I was always praised for being smart, not hardworking.  Perhaps that’s why I’m a bit of an underachiever.  As a teenager, and in even college, I was actually proud of being an underachiever.  I saw myself as better than the nerdy overachievers, who always did things the hard way.  As an adult, I’m not proud to be an underachiever, and I wish my parents had emphasized hard work more.  Chinese people do not raise their kids this way, it’s safe to say.  And that’s a good thing.  Their kids are less likely to end up living paycheck to paycheck at age 31, like I still am.  My Chinese students always seem very modest when it comes to their intelligence, even when they’re quite bright.  But they’re proud of being hardworking.  I think there needs to be a balance between the two.  I don’t have the right balance, but neither do they, at least not if they want to close that innovation gap.  What both the US and China need to maintain their dominant positions in the global economy is a new way of thinking, somewhere in between California and Beijing.  No, not Hawaii, but India.

My Indian students seem to come from somewhere in between the Western expats and the HK Chinese (in this case both geographically and culturally).  And I’m beginning to think that India, not China, is the future.  Generally, these are my favorite students.  They usually have a better work ethic than the Westerners, but aren’t overly attached to doing things the hard way.  They are receptive to looking at the answer choices first, and appreciate it when I help them see that they actually already know the answer, no calculations needed.

Culturally, the Chinese seem resistant to this approach; my teachers are right, sort of.  It’s like they think it’s cheating.  But when I remind them that all the test knows is what answer they picked, and I emphasize that the gweilo are always going to do things the easy way, they come around.  Slowly.  First I have to convince them.  Then I have to make sure they actually follow my advice in the pressure situation that is a standardized test.  The second part is the hard part.  For the Indian students, this seems to come more naturally.  They don’t need to be convinced that the easy way is better, and so they have fewer mental blocks when it comes to applying the techniques.

If India can solve it’s substantial infrastructure problems, watch out.  Because India is a democracy, not an authoritarian regime like China, I think India has an inherent advantage when it comes to innovation, and cultural export.  Currently, China is trying to make a push toward exporting its culture, but because everything has to be approved by censors, its all very banal compared to Korean, Japanese or Indian culture.  In many ways, China has made real innovation illegal.  And even though HK has robust freedoms of speech and expression (for now) the shadow of the Big Beijing still looms large in the back of people’s minds.  We’ll have to wait and see what the future holds, but unless there’s a revolution of some sort, I’m betting on India in the battle of the world’s two most populous nations.

W

Gas Bladder Issues

Wikipedia defines the gas bladder, or swim bladder, as, “an internal gas-filled organ [that] contributes to the ability of a fish to control its buoyancy, and thus to stay at the current water depth without having to waste energy in swimming.”  I think mine’s out of whack.  When a goldfish has issues with its gas bladder, it’s often found on the bottom of the tank, having to swim hard just to rise up toward the surface.

In Boulder, my gas bladder worked perfectly.  I rode my bike, drove my car,  took the bus or walked around town, found addresses easily, and went up unfamiliar staircases with confidence.   In Boulder, there just aren’t that many levels for a fish to operate on, so my gas bladder didn’t have much work to do.  In Hong Kong, 95% of what goes on is over my head, literally and figuratively.  Just dealing with the added pressure takes some adjustment.  My body has to become denser, more impervious to shock from the outside.  As a bottom feeder, I don’t always have time or energy for the little flourishes that used to be part of my behavioral repertoire.  Take, for instance, being nice.  The population density is just too crushing for expenditures like that, so I skate around it as much as everyone else.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m able to get by just fine here; the bottom feeder niche in this habitat has plenty to offer, actually.  I can communicate with almost anyone I make the effort to communicate with, as almost everyone has passable English ability, and many are totally fluent.  And government signs are all in Chinese and English (since those are the two official languages).  There are plenty of good restaurants that are either on ground level,  or advertise their location in English, so I can find them without too much difficulty from the street.  But there’s an awful lot that goes on above the ground level here, and there’s a lot that’s written in Chinese and spoken in Cantonese.  In fact, everything that doesn’t directly involve me or some other foreigner happens in Cantonese.  Despite the many visible minority groups, HK is 95% Han Chinese, and that’s why 95% of what goes on is over my head.  The language issue, plus the verticality of the city, make for a strangely easy, strangely daunting environment.

Because of my gas bladder issues, when the going gets tough, I find myself getting even lower.  Navigation is much easier underground; it’s cooler, drier, and visually simplified.  Underground, 100% of the signs are in my language, and there are nice clear maps that show me which train goes where, and maps of each station that show me which exit will get me closest to my destination.  Super easy.  It’s only when I try to swim up, toward the surface, that I experience resistance.  When I get to the surface, I’m met with a visual clutter that almost shuts down my mind, compared to the easy swimming I just had underneath.  I shake off the cobwebs, and try to look for something that has meaning for me: a street sign, or an address.  Finding none, I often resort to wandering and asking for help.  But that is happening less frequently these days.

This kind of thing only exacerbates my gas bladder issues

As a teacher, I try to be as Socratic as possible in my job.  But that’s when I know all the answers.  Now I have to be Socratic in life, and that’s a bit different.  It’s like being a child again, except that having an adult brain makes that kind of learning difficult.  So I’m starting with baby steps: I can now cross the street like a pro (only took me 2 weeks!), and I can, mostly, find addresses without being given extensive directions.  That’s about it really, and those two accomplishments took considerable trial and error.  What I need to cure my gas bladder infection, is what the Zen Buddhists call “beginner’s mind,” and that is what the real Socratic method is all about.   I know one thing: I know that I know nothing.  This is the real Socratic method, the painful Socratic method, but it’s the one that you must resort to when you don’t know any of the answers anymore.

 

I guess I’ll start by trying to learn Cantonese?  That’s gonna put one hell of a strain on my gas bladder.

W

Gweilo, part 2

Let me begin by clarifying my last post. I was not trying to construct an argument that established a causal relationship between Chinese racism and Chinese behavior.   I was reacting to my new environment, and I observed two things: they refer to me as “ghost man,” and they often act as if they can’t see me.   Also, other “ghosts” appeared to be able to see me much better than non-ghosts. These things I thought were amusing, and made for a nice metaphor which I could use to describe my experiences in my first few days in HK. That was the extent of my intent with “Gweilo.” “Why” is a strong word, and I will be more careful with it in the future. Lesson learned.

My invisibility here has been a bit surprising. I had been to mainland China before my immigration, and experienced what most white people experience in poorer parts of the world; people really noticed me, and went out of their way to get my attention. “Hello, English! You come here. We have special English menu for you!” In HK, it’s not like that at all.  I could stand on a busy street corner all day,  and the only people who would see me would be other ghosts.

Copy watch? Rolex?

Another contrast with mainland China is that in HK, I feel small sometimes.  I’m about 5′10″.  In Beijing, I felt big, both in body and in bank account.  In HK I’m not big, and I’m poor.  People just aren’t small here; that is one Asian stereotype that definitely does not apply to the HK Chinese.  And the gweilo here are giants.  Americans are shorter than Western Europeans, and most of the gweilo here seem to be European, or English.  I was prepared for a lot of the emotions this city can elicit, but I was not expecting to feel short.

In Beijing, my name was “Hello! English!” In HK, my name is gweilo (except in Tsim Sha Tsui, where they refer to me as “Copy watch?  Rolex?”).  I prefer gweilo to “the European,” which is what people who don’t know me refer to me as (when they’re trying to be P.C.).   At least gweilo isn’t factually inaccurate.  I’m coming to terms with my status as a gweilo.   As I said before, the term is surprisingly apt.