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Cultural Blind Spots

I had a conversation with some of my classmates the other day about eating meals with our Chinese companions. The fact is, noisy eating doesn’t carry the taboo of bad manners here the way it does back home. Notice your own reaction as I describe this– lip smacking, loud slurping, and that “chuk chuk” sound you get when someone chews with their mouth open. How did you react? Did you crinkle your nose, or have a little involuntary shudder? It’s pretty ingrained in me to have a fairly strong reaction to these behaviors, and I gather that most other westerners feel the same way.

Change gears for a second. I once watched an lecture on TV about wine tasting. The instructor talked about essentially slurping the wine. Our sense of smell is such a large part of our sense of taste, so getting air into the wine and the bouquet into your nose lets you taste the wine more completely.

So what if our Chinese companions are experiencing their food more completely than we are thanks to eating habits that we won’t even consider because we have been taught to find them gross? Please don’t misunderstand, I am not arguing for slurping and open mouth chewing. But I think this example illustrates pretty clearly the idea of a cultural blind spot: an idea and experience that people of a given culture can’t even perceive because a cultural inhibition stops them from even looking in that direction. And I think this example also makes clear how subtle these inhibitions are. Coming to another country, living here, and being forced to deal with this culture as a daily reality instead of a holiday novelty has made me question many such customs that I had taken for granted before. I have been forced to reconsider the difference between being of a specific culture and being human.

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Teaching in Hunan

For the past three weeks, I was away from Wudangshan, teaching a summer program for kids at a new Wudang Kungfu school. My younger kungfu brother’s new school is located in Yiyang city, in Hunan province. The summer program is a 40 day session, but because I am still a student and need to continue to work on my own kungfu, my classmate and I agreed to split the time in half. I did the first three weeks, he will do the next three weeks.

It was a pretty interesting experience. Over the last few years I have settled into the rhythm of life in Wudang, where we have a nice expat community to take the edge off of the culture shock of living in China. This assignment in Hunan was my longest period spent alone exposed to China. For three weeks, I saw no foreigners, I had no fluent English conversations, and I had to try to be comfortable with Chinese culture in all its unblunted glory. To make matters worse, Yiyang’s local dialect is completely incomprehensible to me, and colors the local’s Mandarin so strangely that even that is painfully difficult for me converse in.

The teaching itself was fine. I taught basic kungfu and English to a group of ten kids ages 8-11 for four hours a day six days a week. I am growing more and more comfortable as a teacher, though starting out with a fresh batch of students is always hard. They have no experienced students for role models to imitate. Every detail of training and behavior that is so ingrained in me requires real effort to remember to explain them. For example, being ready for class. Often we would start class, and the kids would still be in denim shorts (to tight to stretch or kick in) with no shoes on, and have not eaten breakfast though they had been sitting around for an hour previous doing nothing. In Wudang, the standard is set and understood, that when class starts, you must be ready to train and if you are not you must live with the discomfort. To have to step back and teach that surprised me. This is something that the kids’ parents need to understand as well, but communicating with the adults was difficult for its own reasons.

Honestly, all my biggest problems were with the adults I dealt with down in Hunan. In my observation, mainstream Chinese culture seems at times to revolve around gaining face by pushing food, drink, and other indulgences on other people to demonstrate your own generosity and express your affection for them. The aspect of Chinese culture that I am studying, kungfu and Daoism, is much more healthy, restrained,  and disciplined. As a foreigner, it seemed impossible for me to make the adults I met appreciate these qualities in the way they treated me or the way they approached their children’s studies. I constantly walked a line, trying to be friendly and help promote the fledgling school, and still trying to avoid all the cigarettes, beer, rich food, and excess that was so insistently thrust at me.

As I re-read what I have written, I think it is funny that an American is complaining about the excesses of Chinese people, American life being what it is. What can I say, it’s the kungfu talking 🙂

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Squat Virtue

I’ll start this one off by saying that I hope no one minds a little frank discussion of bathrooms and their function. I am only writing this because in my own transition to Chinese plumbing, a little frankness might have saved me some trouble, and taboos aside, it is interesting contrasting two solutions to this most basic of human problems.

Many people in the US and elsewhere have probably never even seen a plumbing fixture like the squat toilet that is the standard in China. It is essentially a porcelain hole in the floor, rigged to flush (hopefully). I think most westerners, when they first come to China, are a little shocked by this and try to avoid using one as much as possible. Admittedly, China’s sub-par standards for plumbing installation further aggravate the issue, because the squat toilet room is frequently badly built and quickly becomes filthy as a result. But I believe that many if not all of us eventually come to accept the squat toilet for its virtues, and may even prefer them to western seat toilets. As the saying goes, “You know you’ve been in China too long when the footprints on the toilet seat are your own.”

Learning to use Chinese toilets is further complicated by social taboo. When we are children, adults teach us to use the facilities provided. When the available facilities change, however,  a little instruction would be valuable. But as adults the subject is not easily broached. I know I could have used the following hints: First, bring your own toilet paper with you, everywhere. In the West, if you need tissue, you can count on finding something in a public restroom. In China, only the fanciest hotels provide this service, and you don’t want to get caught out. Second, gathering your garments around your ankles gets in the way; gather your garments around your knees. Third, if a toilet brush is visible nearby, it is very good manners to clean up after yourself a bit, especially if you are someone’s guest (squat toilet design is a little inefficient in the flushing department).

As for the virtues of squatting, there are several, of which here are two. For one thing, regardless of the hygienic standards of the bathroom you are using, squatting means you won’t really be touching anything objectionable. You may find yourself in a closet that is a far cry from an interior designer’s dream of an airy, sunlit commode, but you are not actually risking infection if you squat.

Second, the daily repetition of the act of squatting is fantastic for the health, flexibility, and strength of the ankles, knees, and hips. The squatted sitting position is iconic of China; you can see people relaxing in this position on door steps, on the street, and in the park– just about anywhere. Think about the West, however. When if ever do we support our weight with our hips below the level of our knees? This kind of strength is crucial for standing up from sitting or lying on the ground, say, after falling down. But in our culture of chairs, we never exercise our legs past the range of motion defined by 90° angles at the knees and hips. So we reach, say, age 40, and getting up from the ground has become an exhausting 12 step process, prohibitively difficult. We chalk it up to getting old, but that’s just not right. Elderly people here get up and down pretty easily. And I think it all starts with reps in the bathroom.

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Reconciling Opposites

Trying to lower my stance with a straight back at May competition

It’s been well over a month since my last post. Our training schedule has been in chaos for the last month, and it just seems like every time I might sit down and write, there is a competition,  or a performance, or a meditation period, or a bad internet connection, or something else to get in the way. A change is as good as a holiday, though, and I feel refreshed and ready to go now that training in Wudangshan is settling back into normal routine.

The month of May and the beginning of June were fairly stressful, because it seemed like we were never going to get a real day off to recover from all the events mentioned above. Everyone in our class, I think, felt this tension building under the calm we are trying to maintain. The harder we tried to keep a lid on stress, the more rigid our emotions became, and that rigidity fanned the embers of the stress inside. The calm produced was not really calm at all, but a facade over inner turmoil. One has to somehow face stress while staying light and happy. This seems impossible; the two seem mutually exclusive. One feels one must either escape the stress or embrace unhappiness. But we can’t do either.

This balancing of seemingly mutually exclusive elements is a reoccurring theme in my training. From day one, coaches yell at us to sink our stances lower, but keep our backs straighter. This seems impossible. To keep balance, you feel that you have to stick out your butt and lean your head forward if you want to get your stance lower. Or the coach tells you to do the movements faster and clearer, but you are already going as fast as you can and you feel the only way to go any faster is to fudge the movements. But though you ask the coach again and again to choose one of the opposing criteria for you to focus on, he keeps you on both horns of the dilemma. And then one day, through long, hard work, low and straight becomes possible, and fast and clear becomes fierce.

Often in our decision making, and particularly in the processes by which we find our emotional response to stimuli, we are too lazy to seek an ideal answer. Instead, we try to determine which extreme reaction will give the best result most of the time. Psychology calls this heuristics, and it is a very real part of how the human brain works. These shortcuts save time and reduce the amount of thinking we really have to do, but they also oversimplify  our inherently subtle world and thus make our path through it clumsy and misguided.

I think this is one reason meditation is so important: meditation changes the way one values time and helps prioritize balanced thinking instead of headlong speed. By slowing down and observing with greater sensitivity, we can hope to face each challenge with the right calm-happy, lazy-driven, optimistic-pessimistic, black-white, free-disciplined, push-pull, fast-clear, low-straight, give-take, yin-yang response.

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Illusions of Power

On the subject of internal arts and the effects of emotions, I’d like to talk about anger a bit. It is the emotion that I am most aware of struggling with in my own training, and I see it every day in others.

I think the allure of anger is that anger feels powerful. When the world is not as we want it to be, or we don’t like how we are treated by others, it is comforting to feel we are kings, as if our displeasure has the ability to reform things to our liking. When we are angry, we do not feel helpless, we do not feel vulnerable.

For an example of anger, let’s consider weapons shop vendors here in Wudang. My classmates and I are learning spear, so the other day I had to go to one of these shops. I struggle to finance my training, and I can not afford to throw money around carelessly on anything. However, it is standard practice in these shops that when a foreigner walks in the first quote rockets up above %1,000 and no amount of haggling will lower it to any realistic value (I am not exaggerating, and thank the rich, gullible tourists for that). Despite my best efforts, the best price I could get was 70 yuan, down from an original quote of 110 yuan, while my Chinese kungfu brother walked out of the store with the same spear for 20 yuan.

This makes me angry, and in my anger I feel righteous. I think, ” They’ll regret making me angry. My friends and I will never shop there again. I’ll write a blog about these jerks and ruin them internationally. I ought to go back there and throw a brick through the window of the shop, I’ll… I’ll…” But reality sets in and each of these angry thoughts is revealed as pointless and wrong. I will have to go back to that crook the next time I need a new weapon. My friends will do the same. Gouging customers is how these guys make their living, and no one blinks at it. That brick, though tempting, would be cowardly, petty, and probably make a lot of trouble for me, my master, and other foreigners in the area. Once I have left the store with my purchase, I am every bit as powerless as I feel. My anger does violence to me, and that vendor doesn’t lose any sleep at all.

Truly that vendor is part of my training, a sparring partner of sorts. I have to accept the fact that he is part of a system that is so much larger than me that I can not fight it. What can I do? I must proceed in a yielding way. I can try to learn to haggle better. I can make friends and they can shop on my behalf. I can be thankful that as a white American male, I have been given an opportunity to understand discrimination and compassion as I would never have understood it had I stayed in my own culture. But most importantly, I have to learn that though is nice to imagine myself as a king in my castle, inviolable and potent, there will always be forces in this world greater than me and lesser than me. And regardless of my actual ability to change my surroundings, I must be able to relate to them with tranquility. Thus, China itself tempers me.

I sometimes worry about how I will someday teach these lessons to Americans at home, where everyone tells you you can, “have it your way.” Anyway, more next time.

And if, in the unforeseeable future, I find myself in charge of regulating commercial tourism practices in Wudang, that salesman had better keep his head down ;-p.

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Kungfu Blog

Lately as I think about what I want to write in my blog, my ideas seem to move in a more philosophical direction. I hope that I can still provide anecdotal illustrations of life in China, but for the next few months I expect I will be writing more about what I am thinking related to my training. First, however, I feel like I need to lay some groundwork for this kind of thing.

First, I want to reiterate that what you read in this blog is distorted by the imperfect lens that is me. What you read here is not a faithful record of my master’s teachings or Daoist practice or Wudang martial technique. I am a student working through some rather difficult lessons, and you are reading the flotsam and jetsam of that learning process. I am likely to be wrong, or at least incompletely correct.

Second, the nature of my training is in essence unintellectual. By writing a blog about it, I bring it into the intellectual realm, but it can not be entirely expressed here. Language bridges the gap between your mind and mine, but this training is a thing of bone and muscle and character, not of the mind, and only a shadow of it can cross that bridge. It’s an common mistake to think once you have read and understood some piece of martial arts theory, you understand martial arts.

So if you read my blog and like what I am talking about, please remember: practice is what makes this stuff real, not comprehension. The Chinese say, “Kungfu equals time plus sweat,” and that is just as true for internal martial arts as external. Reading is fine, but training is what it’s all about. And that training should be monitored by a good teacher, not a blog.

Phew! 🙂 Now that I feel like we won’t fall into the more common pitfalls of this type of writing, I can get on with it…