Polarised views on the ground straining Sino-Japanese relations

Karen Ma examines how tensions in her family mirror Sino-Japanese quarrels at the national level, reflecting the fundamental problem of a lack of understanding between the two peoples

PUBLISHED : Tuesday, 08 July, 2014, 5:06pm

UPDATED : Wednesday, 09 July, 2014, 4:00am

Karen Ma

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The mood at my sister’s household these days is strained and becomes more so with each new bout of tension between China and Japan. She’s Chinese and her husband is Japanese and, despite 15 years of marriage, they haven’t been able to get beyond their different perspectives on this issue, a situation that in some way mirrors the distrust between the two Asian powers they come from.

Each new incident – from the Japanese cabinet’s agreement on July 1 to lift the constitutional ban preventing Japanese troops from engaging in overseas combat, to the festering territorial dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s official visit to the Yasukuni Shrine – has given the couple, and the countries they hail from, a lot to argue about.

Their fights usually revolve around a crucial issue – China’s persistent demand for an apology from Japan. “Why are you Chinese so persistent about Japan apologising for the war? Haven’t we apologised enough? Why can’t you move on?” my brother-in-law will snap at my sister, insisting that China has ruined the Sino-Japanese relationship. “Japan may have apologised, but it’s never sincere. And the Japanese need to consider how the Chinese feel,” she’ll counter.

The arguments go nowhere because neither one really listens to the other. Lately, they’ve resorted more frequently to passive-aggressive silence as they stew in their respective dismay at the other’s “lack of understanding”.

The quarrels underscore what’s going wrong between the two peoples – a huge perception gap over history, with neither side willing to give ground or consider that the other side may have a point. Sadly, that gap is widening, fuelling mutual animosity that undercuts the bilateral relationship, at a time of slower economic growth when Asia could really benefit from stability.

Many on the Japanese side have relatively little understanding of their own history. Despite all that’s been written about Japan’s military aggression in Asia, the topic is hardly mentioned in high school textbooks, shaping the thinking of generation after generation. Several years ago, while working at a Japanese radio station in Tokyo, a Japanese producer in his mid-30s asked me rather abruptly one afternoon why many Malaysians, citing Japan’s military past, refused to meet him on a reporting trip to Kuala Lumpur. “What happened?” he asked, genuinely mystified, admitting later that he didn’t know that Japan occupied much of the region during the second world war to the displeasure and resentment of its neighbours.

Many Chinese are equally uninformed. A young Chinese man I met recently in Beijing said until he visited Japan a year ago, he thought all Japanese were short, ugly and creepy, based on TV war dramas that are a mainstay of state-run networks. Japan is actually clean, polite and civilised and offers a lot that China can learn from, he added. He further noted that Japanese often see themselves more as victims of the war than aggressors, a recasting linked to the US atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Many Chinese are heavily influenced by state propaganda. In some social circles, hate for the Japanese is considered acceptable, even good. “To be patriotic is to be anti-Japanese” is a current that runs through much of the traffic on Weibo and various Chinese blogs.

Such unthinking patriotism is dangerous, as even some demonstrators realise. In a series of reports on Chinese views towards the Japanese, published on the news website of Phoenix Television media group, a would-be anti-Japanese demonstrator, Han Chongguang, said he decided against protesting after watching another protest run amok. His eyes were opened, he said, in Xian in September 2012, when several Chinese owners of Japanese cars were assaulted and saw their vehicles destroyed. One victim, Li Jianli, sustained such severe head and spinal injuries that he will never walk again. When anti-Japanese demonstrators lose their rationality and beat other Chinese, he concluded, something is seriously wrong.

Given the depth of distrust, the mutual animosity may worsen before it gets better. The Genron NPO, a private, independent think tank that conducts a joint China-Japan public opinion poll every year, notes that as bilateral diplomatic ties deteriorate, people’s views on both sides become more polarised. Last year, over 90 per cent of both Chinese and Japanese recorded negative impressions of each other, an all-time high in the survey’s nine-year history. A major culprit in both cases is the domestic media, because the vast majority of Japanese and Chinese never visit each other’s country or gain much first-hand experience.

In considering people’s impressions, the survey found that many Japanese tend to focus on the China of today, mentioning Chinese food and air pollution, while most Chinese focused on the Japan of yesterday, with a focus on the war, citing “the Nanking Massacre”, and the Diaoyu/Senkaku dispute.

Every nation has its myths, blind spots and different perspectives on history. But if Japan and China hope to resolve the current diplomatic impasse and blunt the risk of military conflict, the two sides must narrow this perception gap by dispelling their prejudices and shedding their one-sided views of history.

This is probably best done through non-governmental channels and exchanges, including more tourism, so the two peoples can foster more open, objective perspectives of each another and their shared history.

Karen Ma is the author of Excess Baggage, a semi-autobiographical novel based on her family’s experience living in Japan as Chinese immigrants during the 1990s

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as Polarised views

Hello Beijing——From India Back to China Again!

Yes, I know, I said I would be good about updating my posts.  But atlas, God always plans better than me.  So just as I was trying to keep up the blog and do my best as the new Mandarin teacher at the int’l school for the second year, my husband, out of the blue, got a new job with a new firm, and along with it came a new posting. Before I knew it, we were moving again, this time back to China.  We were out of India in no time. I couldn’t even finish my tenure at my school–one of my greatest regrets I must add (though I managed to snag a very enthusiastic new teacher to take over, much to my relief. )

This move back to the Middle Kingdom was a lot harder than anticipated, and it took a while for us to get settled in a new apartment.  But now that we’ve moved in, with all our belongings once again, I feel I’m ready to pick up the pieces and start blogging again. Blog about what? Of course about China and India and what comes between them.

I thought I would start by blogging about my thoughts on our reentry to China because friends and new acquaintances have repeatedly asked us “how does it feel this time around?”  I’ll talk a bit about my observations on the changing Beijing, and what are some of the biggest changes that I’ve noticed since our last stint living here between summer of 2003 till the fall of 2008.   Here goes….

Things that have worsened since 2008:

1) Air quality–we moved back to Beijing in January in the middle of the winter, and we noticed, from out of our hotel room, how awful the air quality was.  The smog was so thick we couldn’t see things clearly from a few miles away.   What’s more, I learned how to say smog for the first time–雾霾 （wumai).   During our past stay people didn’t have a proper word to describe it.  They would say 雾 （wu，） which best translates as “fog.”  But a couple years after our departure the smog problem got so severe the Chinese had to admit to themselves that this was no fog.   So the first reality after we moved back was buying masks, for every member of the family.    On the street we saw 60 percent of people wearing masks too (this is however more of a winter phenomenon, as the air quality is usually the worst in winter), which is an indication of a rising awareness.    Okay, now that summer is here, the air quality has improved quite a bit.  But our next goal is to find good air purifiers at home, just to be on the safe side.

2) Traffic Jam:

Traffic was bad before, but this time it felt a lot worse.  When we were here the first time, we our company driver drove us everywhere because of two reasons: a) the driver came with the job; b) the metro was yet to be fully completed and the buses weren’t so clean and we didn’t want/need to venture out to explore other options.   This time, however, we found we really have to rely more on the metro and buses because a) we don’t have a company driver at our dispense, b) traffic in the city can get so congested we can’t really get to places easily even if we want to pay a taxi; c) more importantly, taxis are hard to get in the city these days because there are just so many more new comers in the city to compete for the hired cars (and many taxi drivers don’t want to take customers after working a few hours because they don’t make much money.  So they rather go home and rest).

3)  Internet Connectivity:

We had a lot of trouble getting online when we first landed back in the capital in January.  This problem appeared at the very fancy hotel we stayed at, and later, at our apartment.  We were told to get a VPN to get around controls, but even then, connectivity can be very very slow.    I don’t know what the real problem is, but some suggests it’s supply and demand (more people are using Internet than they have supply for), though others say it’s because we’re at a time when many Big anniversaries of political events/incidents are coming up.  Hard to say, maybe it’s a bit of both.

4) Rising Rents:

Last time when we were living in Beijing, rents weren’t cheap, but  they were okay.   For an apartment somewhere between the size of 200 and 250 square meters, the average rents would go between 3,000 and 3,500 US dollars, depending on the neighborhoods,  (though there were also a few properties that went for much higher). We used to live in a DCR apartment near Dongzhimen, and we paid about 3,000 dollars.  This time around, however, we found rents in our old neighborhood of Dongzhimen, which we still like a lot (and I might add is the one neighborhood that is very popular with expats), are prohibitively high.   For a similar apartment we used to live in at the same DCR apartment complex, rents are now as high as 6,000 dollars, essentially the rents have doubled in the gap of five years.   We simply couldn’t afford the apartment we once lived in, and had to move to a totally different neighborhood.   Luckily, we managed to find a large enough apartment near Kerry Center that’s still fairly reasonable.   Yes, we’re paying much more than before, but at least we can still afford it.   My real estate agent tells me it’s not competition between expats that has driven up the market so much. Rather, there are simply a lot more Chinese who are wealthy enough to want to buy and rent expensive apartments.

5) Rising dissatisfaction:

Compared to our last stint here, we get the distinctive feeling that people are less happy now than before.   China was gearing up for the coming out party since 2005, and there was a huge push to show the best face to the world so more people from outside could come and witness China’s Olympics 2008.  Among the Chinese people there was also a genuine euphoria that China is finally being accepted into the world stage.   Those years were properly the best years of our lives in the capital.

But this time around, we hear a lot more complaints from the laobaixing (common folks). Now that the party is over, there’s no more need to be Mr. Nice Guy, and between the crackdowns and bad Internet connections, plus the bad air, bad traffic and skyrocketing rents and cost of living, and you get a lot of grumpy people.   Every time I get in a taxi and the driver would moan about the meager living they are making, pointing out in passing how the richer and the more capable people, including many a corrupt officials, have already moved to foreign countries, to the US, Canada, Australia and Europe, for cleaner and greener pastures, “leaving this dump to us.”   It’s not what it used to be, they say, and it’s so true.

Things that have improved since 2008:

1) Public Transportation

There’s a bright side too.  For one, we’re pleasantly surprised at how clean and easy and affordable public transport is now in Beijing.  We are right on several bus lines, and are now regularly riding to and from Sunlitun, where the action is, and bus fares are only 40 fen a ride (less than a penny).  We’re also on two metro lines, and the fares are about 2 kuai per ride anywhere you go.   Wow, that’s cheap, not to mention there are so many more lines to take from than before.   So that’s a big change for the better.

2) Fancy shopping Malls

I used to think the malls in the capital were a bit ridiculous.  Five, six years ago they only had the likes of Yashow, The Silk Market, Hongxiao Market and Alien Streets, which are not really malls but more like warehouses of wholesale shops, though, come to think of it, luxury shopping halls such as Sanlitun Village and The Place were already in the making or had newly opened at the time, both promised to be cool places with lots of fancy restaurants and open space where you can hang with family for the day.

Little did I know the major wave of luxury malls was yet to come.   Since 2009, there have been a whole lot of new additions, including Xidan’s Joy City Mall, Solana Mall near Lucky Street, Shin Kong Place near Dawanglu and Seasons Place in the financial district. My personal favorite is Parkview Green near Dongdaqiao.  Not only is it the newest of the lot, but also because it is interestingly designed, airy and filled with art objects and sculptures both inside out outside the mall.  The place is really more than just a shopping area because it allows visitors to relax and really enjoy the moment.   This is the one place I come visit often with a mac in hand.  I love to sip coffee and work in a space that is peaceful and quiet.  Being inside means I can forget about the crowds and hubbub outside.

All in all, I’d say I still enjoy Beijing.  The food choices are so much better for us Asian food lovers here, and the shopping is great.   Okay, Beijing is not what it used to be, but there are still a lot of things going for it.   Job opportunities for expats and locals  are still plentiful, and the streets are clean and safe for women, a big plus if you ask me.  I also love the fact that many young Chinese women are so dynamic and charging ahead in the workforce, which is great to see.   The best part about Beijing though, is that we still have many friends from our past, and conversations with them have always been very engaging.   When you have great friends, safe streets and good shopping, who cares about clean air, right?

The Chinese of India—Caught Between a Hard Place and a Rock!

The Chinese of India, whose forefathers first settled in their host country as early as two hundred thirty years ago, many as tea growers in Assam, are not a well-known group of people outside of India.  China and India may share one of the longest borders among neighboring countries (India has the second longest border with China after Bangladesh), yet if you come to New Delhi, you’d be hard pressed to find any real communities of the Chinese.

There’s little in the way of a Sino-Indian melting pot.  About the only Chinatown you will ever find in India is Kolkata, (formerly Calcutta, India’s capital under the British rule), and even then, the community is fast dwindling.  In the early 1990s, Kolkata’s Chinatown boasted some 19,000 people, most of them from South China and engaged in producing leather goods at tanneries—a profession off-limits to most Hindus.  But after the mid-1990s, the population there went for a nosedive.   People say Indian-Chinese there were never made to feel welcome, although an Indian high court’s decision in 1995 to close down many Chinese-operated tanneries in Kolkata out of environmental concerns was also part to blame. Many of the younger Chinese-Indians have left for Canada, Australia or the United States.

Nowadays, there are an estimated 4,500 to 2,000 Indian-Chinese remaining in Kolkata, depending on how you count and whom you ask.   In a recent trip I took with my family to this former capital located in eastern India, I discovered many Indian-Chinese feel they are caught in the middle of India’s difficult relations with their homeland since 1962, when the two giant neighbors engaged in a brief war.   With India becoming the host of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader, and China’s on-going border conflicts with India, the fates of many of these Indian-Chinese didn’t improve over time.  In fact, five decades on, many of them say they continue to feel caught up between the two rising powers as Chinese-Indian economic rivalry intensifies in recent years.

I have to admit I was very curious about the Indian-Chinese when I first heard about Kolkata’s Chinese community.  I have been a diaspora Chinese for almost all of my life.  And after over a decade-long of living in Tokyo as huaqiao, or an overseas Chinese, I was determined to find out more about the Indian-Chinese.  Who knows, the history of the Chinese in India could well have been mine had my parents decided to go west to the subcontinent instead of south to Hong Kong in the aftermaths of China’s great famines.   So when a rare window opened up in May from our crazy work schedules, I jumped on the opportunity and decided on a whim to visit Kolkata with my family.

Our tour in Kolkata pretty much started right from Tangra, what is known as the new Chinatown locally.  Once there, we headed straight for the Beijing Restaurant, with kids in tow, to meet with owner Monica Liu for a bit of history about the Chinese of India.  Liu, who looked to be in her late 50s, told us she and her family had hailed from Assam, (part of northeastern India which included the states of Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Assam, Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh).  Monica said this part of India was perhaps the most affected by the Sino-Indian War in 1962 because of its proximity to China.  (In a Telegraph article, a source said there was a general suspicion of the Assamese Chinese on the part of India because Chinese army was approaching Assam before the war drew to a close.  See “India’s Shame” http://www.telegraphindia.com/1100418/jsp/7days/story_12351075.jsp  )

Monica recalled in November 1962 one day, when she was about ten, she and her family were rounded up and taken on an exhausting eight-day train ride to the Indian desert of Rajasthan and herded like cattle to a concentration camp in Deoli.  No one was allowed any money, food or ornaments.  The excuse for their arrest was that they might be spies or Chinese sympathizers because her fore-parents had come from China.  Once there, she and her family, along with about a thousand other Indian-Chinese from Assam, were locked up in jail-like buildings.  There were never any trials or hearings.  Soon months turned to years, even though the war itself had only last for a short month.  While many of her “camp mates” who accepted deportation were released first, she and her people from Assam languished, and were kept on in the camp until 1967.

“It was as though we’d been forgotten,” said Monica at her restaurant office.  In the end, it was a complaint letter written by her uncle and signed by her that had eventually led Monica and her kin to their final release.  But for Monica’s family, their struggle for survival had only just begun.  When they went back home to Shilong, they found their house and properties had either been confiscated or occupied by former neighbors.   They were looked on as suspects, and were called “dirty Cheenas.”  They had no livelihood—and the only thing they could do was to sustain themselves on potatoes and sell momos to eek out a small living.

Although Monica has Indian citizenship, she said she feels like a second-class citizen all the time. The Indian authorities never let her forget about her Chinese roots, even though Monica speaks Hindi and English far better than she does Mandarin.  And yet she never felt fully Chinese either.    When asked how she feels about the economic rise of China, Monica’s answer was mixed.  “I’m always going to be Chinese,” she said.

The following morning, we met a few more of these “forgotten Chinese” in Tiretti Bazaar, the so-called old Chinatown of Kolkata, during our search for Chinese snacks and breakfast at an open-air market.    One of them was Liang Shuxian.  Liang, who was born in 1948, said she wasn’t able to secure Indian citizenship because there was an Indian law that restricted Indian citizenships to Indians of Chinese origins born after 1950.    This means people like Liang are forever treated like foreigners, even though she was born and raised there.   Speaking in Mandarin, Liang said when Sino-Indian relations were relatively calm, there was a time when she was able to secure a five-year resident’s visa without much hassle.  But two years ago, with border conflicts between China and India more intensified, Liang said she and her generation of Indian-Chinese suddenly found they have to go back to renewing their visas every year.  At the immigration office, “(the authorities) make us wait for hours for our annual visa in a bid to harassed us, and each time we had to pay a hefty 6,600 rps (about US $ 132 ) for it,” Liu said bitterly.

Paul Chung, a retired vice-principal, blames the hostility towards the Indian-Chinese on India’s shame at losing the war.  “The less confident you feel, the more you have to prop yourself up,” he said.

Yet Chung also blames the problem on the ethnic Chinese for their relative isolation.  He said every time he suggested to his compatriots to file a compliant in writing whenever they moaned about being harassed, they simply wouldn’t do it.

It’s interesting to note here that during Chinese Premier Li Keqiang’s recent visit to India in mid-May, he did not venture to Kolkata.  Those in the community noted that he made a hasty trip to Mumbai, before going on to Pakistan and Europe.  And this wasn’t the first time the Indian-Chinese had been conveniently forgotten by their motherland.  When premier Wen Jiabao made his first trip to India in 2008, he also bypassed the country’s only Chinatown.

It’s only recently that the plight of the Indian-Chinese’s past has become better publicized, thanks to the publication of Makam, a novel by author Rita Choudhury, which helped break the silence. The book chronicles the ordeal of Indian Chinese sent to the detention camp in Deoli.

People from both within and without the Chinese community now see there’s a real need for the Indian-Chinese to be better accepted into the mainstream India.  I found a posting from a non-Chinese Indian on Dapha.com, a community blog of the Chinatown, best sums up this sentiment: “the Chinese community should be given the Indian passport and citizenship and be accepted into the mainstream.  Proper representation of this community should be made on the regional and national level.  After all, they are more Indian than they are Chinese.  They might have a different language and culture, but they

Liang Shuxian at a Chinese Temple near Tiretti Bazaar in Kolkata

have accepted India as their country, and we should respect that. ” (http://www.dhapa.com/only-chinatown-in-india/)

The fight of the Indian-Chinese for better treatments in India won’t be easy.  But as their plight and past histories become more publicized, hopefully help is on the way.

Welcome back to Mist Over the Himalayas

It has been a little over a year since I last posted on this blog.  For those of you who didn’t know, I was asked to help build a Chinese language curriculum at an international school in New Delhi.  Phew!!! and what a year it was.  Exhausting but well worth it because as far as I know, the program I helped build is the very first Chinese program at any middle or high schools in New Delhi.  But now that summer vacation is here, and my load as a Chinese teacher has been significantly reduced (I’ve helped them hire a new teacher), I intend to pick up where I left off with this blog.  So welcome back to Mist Over the Himalayas, you readers out there!  My first blog after the one-year gap is about the Chinese of India.  Check it out!

Shekhawati Havelis, Pingyao Grand Courtyard Compounds

Over a recent school break my family and I went on a trip to Shekhawati, a region in North-west Rajasthan, and the place left such an impression on me I couldn’t stop talking about it for days. Shekhawati is a place known for its many beautiful havelis, or ornate mansions built around courtyards constructed by the affluent Marwari merchants between 1800 and 1930.

I’ve always been attracted to the Indian havelis found in Old Delhi, as they remind me very much of the hutong courtyards of Old Beijing: both types of architectures are traditional housing built around communal courtyards and found in older neighborhoods behind nondescript alleyways.  But in Shekhawati, which is nicknamed the “open art gallery of Rajasthan,” the Marwari merchants’ havelis offer something more—not only are they much more concentrated in numbers in this region, they are also more opulent and extravagant in designs, many often intricately carved and painted with colorful frescos depicting historical or mythical themes.  They opened up to me a rich legacy of a group of capable and wealthy merchants that in many ways echoed that of the Shanxi merchants of northern China.

We stumbled upon Shekhawati quite by accident, after making a last minute booking at The Piramal Haveli near Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan. The quiet, very spacious haveli hotel built in 1920s around two courtyards with very green pillared corridors soon whetted our appetite of wanting to explore more, after realizing the region is filled with similar havelis that were built even earlier than the Piramal.

We were told the region was once on a caravan route, which was what made many Marwaris living in the small towns of this region wealthy.  Although after 1820, many merchants left their families behind in search of better business opportunities elsewhere in the country, they continued to send money back to erect lavish buildings in Shekhawati, their homeland, as evidence of their success.  However, many of these havelis have now been left idle, after extended families of the Marwaris moved away en masse to join them in their new homes beginning in the 1930s, leaving the beautiful relics behind for accidental tourists such as us to ponder their past.

In the course of two, three days, in our search of these historical relics, we drove from Jhunjhunu to Mandawa, from Mukundgarh to Fatehpur, before ending in Ramgarh. Along the way we saw some magnificent, sometimes huge (double or triple-storied) havelis, as well as other smaller mansions that are equally beautiful and awe-inspiring.

As we toured these historical buildings, most of which accessible to anyone expressing an interest to go inside for a quick look, I couldn’t help drawing a mental comparison between these architectural wonders and some of the fortress-like courtyard compounds I came across in the historical town of Pingyao in China’s Shanxi Province—the Wang Family Courtyard Compound and the Qiao Family Courtyard Compound, to name a few—which were built about half a century earlier than the Shekhawati havelis. (Most of the Shanxi grand compounds were built between 1750s and 1820s.)  Among them the Qiao Family Courtyard is particularly famous, made known to the world by director Zhang Yimou’s film “Raise the Red Lantern.”

The Wang and Qiao families were two of four, five very influential business families from Shanxi who were both merchants and government officials serving Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799). Like the Marwari merchants, some of the earlier Shanxi merchants started from very humble backgrounds, building their business empires from commodities as modest as tofu.  Shanxi was a densely populated province, and many merchants learned to leave their hometown early on to travel afar to gain a living, their footprints reaching as far as Inner Mongolia, Russia, Japan and Southeast Asia.  When a policy required merchants to help procure and transport food supplies for the Ming and Qing imperial families, the enterprising Shanxi merchants jumped at the opportunity, and flourished as a result.

As their businesses became more and more successful and their influences reaching far and wide at the imperial court, they began building their lavish compounds to boast their accomplishments.  The Shanxi merchants’ grand compound constructions, which can sometimes contain close to a thousand rooms built around thirty, forty courtyards, are often much larger in scale than the havelis you see in Shekhawati, making them closer to being fortresses than mere buildings.  Perhaps because the focus of these enormous manors was more on scale, these compounds also tend to be much less ornate or elaborately decorated than their Indian counterparts.

Yet what the Marwari merchants and the Shanxi merchants both had in common, at least to me, was their human needs to bring home the glory by building lavish compounds and mansions for their families and extended families.  They say the Indians and Chinese are both very family oriented peoples.  Maybe it is this parallel and the opulent compounds they built that made me see the connection between these two groups of merchants.

Then again, people are people.  As my husband said, both the Indians and the Chinese are not very subtle peoples.  So when they are successful, they see the need to brag about it.  Perhaps as people, the Indians and the Chinese are really not that different at heart.

Wang Family Courtyard in Shanxi

A haveli in Fatehpur

 

My Take on February 13’s car attack in Delhi

I’d never been too worried about terrorist attacks in Delhi before, and neither had been my friends in the expat community.  Sure, there had been bombings of the Khan Market and the INA market before, but usually, we’d receive some sort of warnings well before hand from embassies and other organizations.  We are briefed from the very beginning to avoid crowded places or famous markets on weekends.  Besides, past attacks in India were rarely targeted at foreign high commissions or a specific nation—we always assume foreigners are somehow safe from these random attacks.

The February 13 attack on an Israeli diplomat car on Aurangzeb Road by a motorcyclist bomber, leading to the injuries of four, including two bystanders, however, did significantly change this presumption.   For starters, this is the first prominent attack on a foreign-government property in Delhi, and in this particular case, the attacker, who used a sticky bomb, was clearly going after the car because it had an Israeli Embassy license plate.  On the same day, almost at around the same time in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, a messenger for the Israeli Embassy helped diffuse a bomb planted under his car.  Some observers believe the attack could be the work of the Iranian secret service in retaliation of an Israeli attack on an Iranian nuclear scientist, who was killed by a sticky bomb only a month ago, although Iran has steadfastly denied any involvement in the attacks.

Another unprecedented fact about February 13’s blast is the route and the timing of the attack.  The Aurangzeb Road is the main road that links the Khan Market with the embassy area of Chanakyapuri and a few of the international schools in South Delhi.  This path is well traveled by many expats living in the south end of town to go to the north end for shopping and other errands.  And between 3 and 3:15 pm on a weekday such as a Monday, the day of the attack, the road is often dotted with parents traveling to schools for pickups of their young. Tal Yehoshua Koren, wife of a security official from the Israel Embassy who was injured in the unfortunate attack, in fact, was on her way to the American school to pick up her children.

A few days after the attack, separate sets of my friends who have children attending international schools in Chanakyapuri told me their cars were only a few meters behind the ill-fated Israeli Embassy car.    They all heaved a sigh of relief upon hearing the news, needless to say.  Yet talking to their kids about why this misfortune had happened to the mother of their schoolmates, they admitted, was harder.   They couldn’t explain to them why they must stay on in a country that seems so unsafe at times.  All they could say was they were so glad the children weren’t inside the car with the mother at the time of the attack.

More unnerved are the 60-plus families in the local Israeli community.  Several Israeli families I know told me they have either changed their car plates, or are only taking taxis to school or work.  One mom from the community became so nervous she begged a neighbor to allow her to park her car inside her gate, as her apartment doesn’t come with a parking space.  Another mother said the Israeli Embassy has decided to change the work schedules of staff every day in a bid to avoid further attacks.  “Every day in the morning, employees have to wait for instructions to find out what time they are to go to work,” she said.  Some whispered they have been holding meetings at discrete places, trying to come to terms with the new reality of changing terrorist tactics.

But then we’re all trying to come to terms with the gravity of living in Delhi now, particularly because two weeks into the bomb attack, investigators are still in the dark about the case.  That the attack took place in a high-security area barely 500 meters from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s residence, also offers little comfort.   One has to wonder how competent the Indian authorities are in tackling similar future attacks.  In a recent The Hindu article, Devesh K. Pandey points out how slow the special force was in responding to the February 13 bomb attack.  It took a good five minutes for the special force vans to reach the spot of the terror attack.  Till that time, policemen present at the spot had no clue about what had transpired.  Of course by then, the motor-cyclist terrorist who’d attached the bomb was long gone.

Worst, analysts suggest that the February 13’s blast marked the latest round of a campaign of covert and possibly state-sponsored, retaliatory violence between Iran and Israel, two arch enemies, and that India is being caught in cross-fire between the two countries, who are both close Indian allies.  Tension between Israel and Iran has been heightened since Israel is believed to have initiated a covert assignation campaign to slow Iran’s nuclear program, which it fears will be used against it.   Yet some critics believe India would be reluctant to directly confront Iran even if they had found links of Iranian involvement in the car attack, given the strong ties between India and Iran, with the latter being a major supplier of Indian oil.

Already, a senior Israeli official has claimed Indians are “close to fully solving the (February 13 blast) case but they are not saying so publicly” in a bid to avoid public confrontation with Tehran, according to a Times of India report today. The top Israeli official reportedly noted that the Indian security agencies, who have “already identified the owner of the motorcycle and know when the attackers arrived in India, have decided to characterize the incident as a case which, until further notice, is under investigation,” thus avoiding the pressure for release of details and the need to make serious decisions on how to proceed with the case.

If the claim is correct, those of us expats would have to brace for a likely escalated “shadow war” played out in Delhi or elsewhere in India between Israel and Iran in the future, and with the added concern that the Indian authorities might not be willing to do much about it.  It certainly paints a grimmer picture for those of us who must continue living in the city.

Already, some of my friends who live in Gurgaon say they feel luckier that they live further away from the hub of foreign diplomatic missions in the country.   Meanwhile, many of my friends who live close to the heart of the capital feel they definitely will have to watch a little more closely about where they go, and how they would choose to go about their daily routines in the future.  I tend to agree.  Next time a friend from outside of India asks me about life in Delhi, I’ll have to add the safety issue as one criterion for him and her to consider.

Jaipur Lit Fes: Chinese Voice Drown out by A Star-stubbed Circus

I’ve been going to Jaipur Lit Fes for the past three years, each time noting how much more unwieldy this event is getting to be.  This year’s author list alone is 260 names long, and they expected 70,000 or more visitors to descend upon the festival.  And honestly, if it weren’t for the lure of Geling Yan, one of the most accomplished and prolific authors to have come out of China, I would probably have stayed home and give the circus a miss.

I arrive at Diggi Palace late on the first day—a Friday—after a near-seven-hour bus ride from Delhi.  The first thing I notice at the venue is how much of the festival’s spontaneity, something the organizers take great pride in, has mostly been done away with.  Gone are the free music events. Gone as well are the free lounging areas (replaced instead by Fabindia, boutiques, and other paid outlets).  This means the tents are squeezed more tighter together, and seats at different events are even harder to come by, and that a scuffle for a priced spot can erupt at any time.

Because of the never-ending controversy over Salman Rushdie being barred from coming to the festival over his banned book “The Satanic Verses” (and later, his being barred from speaking to the event by video link), and the craze over the arrival of Oprah Winfrey, the mega star American TV talk host, even the gates of the festival venue are now blocked by thick layers of security police—a first in Jaipur Lit Fes history.

You never know whose interest the security guards are really after, however.  Are they there to protect the safety of the audience and the organizers, or are they there to spy on the event for the Muslim extremists’ sake? But one thing is ample clear: they won’t hesitate to pounce on any one trying to get too close to the “Big O.” Never mind she’s neither an author nor a publisher.  (Are the organizers that desperate to add more glitz to their already overly star-stubbed event?)

And while criticism about India’s diminishing freedom in the literary scene echoes throughout the front and back lanes of Diggi Palace, over at the more secluded Baithak Tent in one corner on the second day, Geling Yan voices her own concern about freedom of expression of another kind.

Yan, an international Chinese author who left Beijing in 1989 for a creative writing degree in the U.S. and has since been living overseas, has her first session on the morning that day under the panel “Three Voices,” sharing the stage with African writer Taiye Selasi and Indian novelist Anuradha Roy.  The moderator asks each of the authors to read from their works for ten minutes, and Yan chooses to read from “The Banquet Bug,” a satirical novel she published in 2006 about the social ills and hypocrisy of modern China.  She explains that although she’d written several Chinese works since, she wants to read from this particular one because it’s the only work she’s written in English, which she thinks is fitting for the audience at the festival.

In “Banquet Bug,” Yan presents a portrait of a corrupt Beijing where the nouveaux riches, profiting from China’s economic reforms, munch on raw fish presented on the backs of naked young maidens, all this while the poor sell pints of their own blood to get by.  Everything in the capital also seems to be a con: prostitutes posing as virgin college girls, soy sauce made from human hair, and unschooled migrants workers posing as journalists to freeload on banquets and “money-for-your troubles” in exchange for the promise of favorable press.

In passing, Yan mentions the novel has subsequently been translated into Chinese by a Taiwanese translator  and published in Taiwan, though critics bemoan the fact that the language of the translation is horrible, a far cry from the author’s own elegant Chinese prose.  That’s when someone in the audience raises an interesting, and very legitimate question: “if you can write Chinese beautifully, why did you choose to write this novel in English?”

Yan smiles and says she decided to try her hand at writing in English because she wasn’t sure if she could get away with writing about many of China’s modern-day problems in the Chinese language.  “I also found writing in English very liberating, giving me the sense of freedom I didn’t feel when writing in the Chinese language.”   Having lived in the U.S. and elsewhere for over twenty years, it seems Yan has not only managed to return to her home country with a fresher, more critical eye, but also managed to find an alternative voice to get around the censor bureau.  Perhaps her alternative voice has served her well, because the Chinese censor bureau never came after her.  Or maybe they were busy cracking down on more hard-hitting works by the likes of Yan Lianke, author of the banned novel “Dream of Ding Village”—a work about the sad lives of AIDS sufferers in Chinese villages; or Liu Xiaobo, a literary critic and political activist as well as the Nobel Peace Prize winner of 2010 who’s currently serving an 11-year sentence for “inciting subversion of state power.”

Yan’s remarks about the need to constantly think about ways to get around China’s censor bureau as a Chinese writer could have led to an interesting debate about literary censorship and freedom of expression in China.  But Urvashi Butalia, the moderator who herself is a writer, is ill-prepared to follow up with any intelligent questions to spur meaningful discussions.  A lost opportunity! It’s such a pity, especially given much of the clamor this year is all about freedom of expression the world over.

Then again, it’s not really Butalia’s fault.  From my experiences from previous years, many of the panels are run much like this one at “the greatest literary show on earth.”  Panelists, whose works have nothing in common with one another either in themes or subject matters, it seems, are hastily lumped together simply because the organizers don’t know what else to do with them. Hence you have sessions with such dubious and uninspiring titles as “Three Voices.”  By the time you add hosts brought over to the stage at the last minute, and you get half-baked results.

If you ask me, the event organizers of the lit fes would be well served to channel their energy better in the future on how best to create meaningful debates with authors and hosts given more time for preparations, not how many more Bollywood celebrities and TV show hosts they can get to come to this circus.  After all, this is a literary event, not some glitzy tourist trap.

Geling Yan speaking with Urvashi Butalia before the "Three Voices" panel discussion.

African Air Rage with Chinese Characteristics

On January 6, my husband, our two kids and I arrived late at Addis Ababa Airport to change planes for our final flight home.  After three weeks holidaying in South Africa’s Johannesburg and Cape Town, we were eager to go home to Delhi.  But we weren’t quite prepared for what was to greet us at the Ethiopian airport.

At the departure area, there were a few dingy-looking souvenir shops down the narrow hallway.  And though we were tired, we had close to four hours to kill, so we took to browsing these shops.  In one corner of a shop, we discovered shelves after shelves of long white boxes bearing Chinese characters—they turned out to be Chinese Zhonghua brand cigarettes.  More intriguingly, this shop was not the only one selling them.  Two, three other shops at the airport also carried them. I was amused: do they really get so much traffic from the Chinese tourists here?

“Yao bu yao yan?” My answer came a few minutes later, when an Ethiopian shopkeeper asked in perfectly understandable Chinese to a slew of incoming Chinese men if they might want to buy some cigarettes.  If the shopkeepers bothered to learn the necessary Chinese phrases to help customers, this must be serious business.  I looked at these men and decided that they must be migrant workers because they were dressed rather shabbily, their faces tanned from overexposures to the sun.

Soon, the shops and the waiting areas were filled with the Chinese workers—there were over a hundred of them.  They seemed to have arrived from all over, and were waiting for their next flights. But where have they come from and where were they headed, and why were they traveling in such great numbers?

I posed my questions to a friendly-looking man in his thirties, and he told me he’s from Jiangsu, a southern town, and was heading home after fulfilling a year’s contract of working in Angola at a construction site.  Another man looking to be in his early forties and from Henan, another southern Chinese province, said he’d been working for two years in Central African Republic building roads.  He told me he made 80,000 RMB (roughly 10,000 dollars) a year with benefits.  “But my contract’s up and it’s time to head home,” he said with a smile, adding he’s looking forward to returning home for the Chinese New Year. That’s when I remembered the Lunar New Year falls on January 23^rd this year.  Clearly the massive movement of heading home for the most important festivities of the year has already started with many Chinese migrants, with the exported Chinese labor force spearheading the trend.

It dawned on me that the flight we were taking would fly on to Hangzhou, a major southern city of China, after a brief stop in Delhi.   Could it be that many of the Chinese migrant workers we saw at the waiting area would be sharing the flight with us?  My guess was proved correct because a few minutes later, at around midnight, I saw many of the familiar Chinese faces boarding our plane.  After a long layover, we were happy to finally get moving.  Little did we know what was yet to come.

The first sign of trouble came about 30 minutes after we were scheduled to take off.  The co-pilot came on the PA system and mumbled something about having AC problems, but assured us they would soon be fixed.

Two hours later, another pilot came on and demanded us to deplane—back to the airport again.  Mind you, this whole time we weren’t offered one drop of drinks, much less any food. They also didn’t say when we might expect to get back on board, or if we might have to wait for a different plane.  But the 200 plus passengers willingly trooped back to the airport because the pilot had promised someone at the gate would “make appropriate arrangements” for us.  That turned out to be an empty promise. Not only weren’t there any agents to greet us, one Ethiopian Air agent, who happened to be passing by the departure area refused to be helpful, even though some of us, including me and a handful of Indian and African passengers, voiced our grievances.

By now, the groups of Chinese passengers became visibly agitated.  Several of them, including a couple of women, raised their arms in a fury, shouting to the lone agent: “We are not animals.  Treat us right.  We want five-star hotels.  We want human rights.”  After that some started to huddle together to discuss among themselves, clearly over strategies to draw attention, anything to get the airline to quickly resolve the problem.  I squeezed my way into the crowds to listen to their discussion, and all I heard was ‘check-point’ and ‘don’t let this agent off our sight.’

At one point, I asked one woman why there was the need to shout and get angry, and her answer was, the group’s previous flight had also been horribly delayed, and they were denied any just compensation.  “We’re really fed up with their (the Africans’) ways of doing things.  And if we don’t show some toughness, they’ll think they could take advantage of us Chinese, ” she said, adding they only got what they wanted at the previous airport after having corned a manager and threatened to beat him up.

Ah, it’s the age-old national pride thing again.  I remember an Internet article once pointed out that the Chinese arrogance and rudeness towards Africans is not usually racially motivated, but is more stemmed from a fear of being seen as weak because they aren’t white.  “If they ask you to do something and you don’t do it, they think you’re not doing it because they aren’t white,” a Zambian politician was quoted as saying in the article.  (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1063198/PETER-HITCHENS-How-China-created-new-slave-empire-Africa.html#ixzz1jh0mlEku)

When the lone Ethiopian agent disappeared into a stairwell, suddenly the groups of Chinese migrants, about sixty or eighty of them, all rushed to a security check point from where we all had to go through before boarding our plane.  They formed a human wall and began blocking the way out of the check point, making it impossible for any one, including passengers on other flights, to pass through.  Meanwhile, leaders from the groups began barking their demands to the security agents in broken English, insisting that the Ethiopian Air personnel come to them immediately.

There were some scuffles, but soon, some agents in suits appeared.  Words were exchanged, though the Chinese clearly didn’t like what they heard.  “We want food.  We want to go home, NOW,” they yelled.

This near-riot lasted for about thirty minutes, until one security agent told a few of us spectators that the plane had been fixed and we could go back and board the plane once again.   But the caveat was, we must go through security clearance the second time.  We did this at another check point far away from where the Chinese had staged their standoff. Before we boarded the plane, I heard someone from the Chinese groups yelling that they mustn’t go through security clearance the second time because “it’s unreasonable” and “infringing on our rights.”

After another two hours of excitement at the airport, my family and I were all too happy to get back to our seats on the plane and finally have a few drinks and some nuts to munch on.  But we weren’t going anywhere because the majority of the Chinese migrants still weren’t on board.   It was another 45 minutes before they finally got on the plane.  But did they get their way?

By then, I was too tired to poke around to find out if the Chinese had managed to save their face.  I was just glad that we were finally air-borne.  I looked at my watch—it was nearly four in the morning.

So what did I come away with this encounter with the Chinese mobs at the airport? On the positive side, it’s interesting to see that the migrants are learning quickly about equal treatments and the way of the world during their stints working overseas. The Chinese government will have much to worry about when more and more of these former farmers return home.  It will be a welcoming change which will surely help usher China quicker into a freer, more just society.

On a more worrying note is how easily a large group of Chinese migrant workers can be incited into riots and violence in the name of face and national pride.   What we witnessed at Addis Ababa was but a small window to many possible scenarios at factories and construction sites across Africa.  In Africa, there’s already a growing resentment over the use of large-scale imported Chinese labor on a continent that’s ravaged by poverty and joblessness, a trend that was started as far back as 1970s. While concrete numbers and figures are not well known, economists estimate that in Zambia alone, there are tens of thousands of imported Chinese laborers.   Frictions due to cultural differences and prejudices from both sides will no doubt further erode relationships between the Chinese and many of their African “friends,” a bad situation made worse.

 

Where Are All the Chinese Hiding in Delhi?

Where do the Chinese live in Delhi? From time to time, I’d come across this question from curious expats and Indians alike.  I wonder about that very question myself.  Just who are they, and where and how do they live in the capital of India?

I belong to a very small group (about six or seven) of mostly expat Chinese wives/working women married to NRIs, foreign nationals and other Chinese professionals who have been on overseas assignments for at least a decade.  I also know a few Chinese embassy friends through my connections with the international schools here.  But surely there are more Chinese than the sixty-plus diplomats and support staff living in Chanakyapuri’s Chinese Embassy, and the few Chinese wives I know in our circle.

From researching an article I did sometime ago, I know for a fact that there are roughly a hundred Chinese students scattered in the Outram Lines neighborhood near Delhi University.  (See ‘CHANGING PERCEPTIONS – Indian universities draw Chinese‘ in Mint, originally appeared on Oct 26, 2011)  Many of these students are hoping to learn some English while taking advantage of the cheaper university tuitions here.

I also heard a rumor that many of the working Chinese tend to live among the high rise buildings in Gurgaon.  So over the weekend, I invited myself to the residence of a Miss P in a rather posh-looking apartment complex near M.G. Road.

Ms P, hailed from China’s Hunan Province, tells me that she works for a large Chinese telecom company located in one of the DLF city complexes. Because of the location of her office building, she and her colleagues are given lodgings just a stone throw away from the office.  The apartments, each comes with three to four bedrooms and individual private bathroom, are rented for them free of charge by their company, though the workers must share each unit with two or three other colleagues, essentially making them functioning more like dormitories than private homes, Ms P says.

When I arrived at P’s apartment, her husband, who works with her at the same company, and another colleague from Fujian, were lounging on their sofa sipping tea and surfing the Internet.  Furniture there is basic and limited, but adequate enough for employees who typically stay for one or two years.  Ms P says at this particular complex, there are about 100 other colleagues sharing similar apartments like hers.  Other employees are scattered in a couple of different apartment housings nearby.  All in toll, there are about 150 Chinese from her company living in the general area of Gurgaon, she says.

But that’s only counting those from her company.  Another Chinese telecom company, which has an even bigger representation in north India than Ms Z’s, has probably two times as many Chinese employees living either in the vicinity of her apartment complex, or further down south in Gurgaon, she adds.  If you do the math, that’s roughly 450 Chinese living in Gurgaon alone.  According to Ms P, the majority of Chinese living in Gurgaon tends to be engineers and other IT professionals working for these two big Chinese telecom companies, making the area one of the most concentrated Chinese communities in India.

Before I parted ways with Ms P, I asked her the one question that all Chinese ask each other in a foreign country: what do you do about food?  Ms P says that’s not a worry—the company provides two sumptuous Chinese meals at the company cafeteria, thanks to the employment of two professional Chinese chefs.  Everyday from Monday to Friday, for the small fee of 100 rps, Chinese employees get to eat lunch at 12:30 pm and dinner at 6:00 pm if they so desire.   (Lucky her! Only two bucks for the real deal!  Not some imposter Chinese dishes at phenomenal prices. )

On weekends, shopping for food and cooking together with roommates is a form of entertainment.  She says every Saturday and Sunday, if I went to a supermarket at a nearby MGF mall around 3 or 4 pm, that I’m bound to run into a few fellow Chinese.  Gee—what a concept!  I bet many even at the Chinese Embassy didn’t know this bit of crucial info about their own compatriots.

Just when I thought I’d discovered all there is to discover about the local Chinese communities in Delhi and Gurgaon, I stumbled upon yet another one a couple of days ago.  This one is around the Karol Bagh metro station—a neighborhood I least expected to see many Chinese.

I met a Mr. A at a friend’s party recently, and it was he who introduced me to this community.   According to A, who lives around the area, Koral Bagh is home to roughly 100 Chinese professionals dispatched by cell phone companies or other telecom service-related firms based either in Shenzhen or Guangzhou.  It makes sense, Karol Bagh being such a “mobile hub of Delhi.”  Rent is cheap here, according to A, only about 600 dollars for a three bedroom apartment.

Most of the Chinese folks who live in this neighborhood tend to be single young guys in their 20s or early 30s.   But because the companies they work for are likely to be very small and lacking in resources, these guys typically don’t get much support in lodging or food services from their employers.

This lack of support can be a source of great stress for some Chinese, especially those who can neither cook nor afford to eat at an authentic but frightfully expensive local Chinese restaurant.  Mr. A, a Hunan native who claims to be a good chef, has his own solution.  Every now and then he would call for a pot-luck Chinese party with four or five Chinese friends at his apartment to share home-cooked regional dishes.  When we chatted over breakfast at his apartment, he was salivating over the prospects of eating many fine dishes that evening with a Cantonese friend who evidently cooks a very mean Hainanese style chicken.

It appears to me many single guys hailed from the Middle Kingdom (yes, there are a lot more guys than gals sent over to work in Delhi and Gurgaon) have learned to be better at picking up a spatula or a wok here, especially those who aren’t blessed with readily available company-provided Chinese meals.  This is certainly the case with the Karol Bagh crowd, and so is the case with the students living in the vicinity of Delhi University.   Indian curries, after all, are not something many local Chinese say they can handle on a daily basis.

I don’t know if there are more Chinese communities like the ones in Karol Bagh and Outram Lines hidden somewhere in the Delhi, but I intend to get to the bottom of this.     I shall share more findings about this subject in the near future, so stay tuned.

India’s Whirlwind Revolving Door

The last couple of weeks my husband and I have been so busy with farewell parties we were literarily doing three parties on one day.  Every year around May and December, it seems like expat folks are leaving Delhi en mass, all looking for greener pasture.  Then again, we have been losing friends since January.  All in toll, we’ve lost nearly twenty friends and acquaintances already, and the year is not over yet.  Some of the friends we’re losing are those we’ve made a connection with and meant to get to know better, and voila, before we know it, they’re exiting the door—rather sad and demoralizing really.

I don’t remember Beijing being such a fast revolving door.  Folks there seem to stay longer—at least four years, most averaging five years; whereas in Delhi, the average duration of stay seems to be between two and three years.  So what’s with that?

When I ask friends that question, especially those who have also lived in China (we get quite a few of those, in fact), some of them suggest that maybe it’s because China is a more popular destination, given that it’s doing better economically than India, and naturally more companies would want to send their people there, and for longer periods of time in order to better develop their businesses there.

There’s definitely some truth to that.  But I have to wonder if it’s not also because China is inherently a more challenging destination than India, it not being an English-speaking country,  which means people who are sent there are often required to do some sort of language training.  Some journalist friends of ours who work for certain large U.S. newspapers, for example, received a six-month language course before commencing on the job in Beijing.  This, in turn, ends up being an added investment on the part of the company.  That being the case, many international companies, I suspect, want to get their money’s worth by making sure their employees are staying in China longer.

Going to China also demands more involvement on the part of the individuals.  By the time individual employees have committed six months or more in learning Chinese, with or without their companies help, many people may have developed emotional attachments to the country and the culture.  In that sense, I think Japan is very much like China, as the Japanese language is equally demanding of individual’s time and commitment, it being a very tough language to learn also.

India, on the other end, is an English-speaking country.  Without having to spend the extra money on language courses, this makes it very easy for international companies to send or retract their employees anytime at will.  And it’s not just the companies—it’s also the individuals too, who tend to look at India as part of the bigger, former British colonial cluster.  Many who leave India will likely end up going to another English-speaking, former British colony such as Singapore, Malaysia, or Dubai.   It makes leaving that much easier if you haven’t struggled in the language-acquisition process, or haven’t made a substantial emotional investment in the culture.