My folks blazed into town last Monday from their vacation in Hokkaido. My dad only stayed a week, as he had a series of meetings across Asia and, my feeling is, was looking to get away from my mom a bit. The 2nd night they were in town I biked back from work and met up with them for dinner around our neighborhood. Though Gubei is quite the mecca of dining in Shanghai, on this particular evening my dad was looking for something convenient and spicy, and so we settled upon a small Sichuan restaurant along the Hongmei Road Pedestrian Street. Though I looked longingly at the new Simply Thai and Blue Frog, I am a good filial son and acquiesced.
20 minutes after ordering, having snacked on nothing but neighboring patrons’ comments on the ineptitude of the waiting staff and the long waits for food, our first entree arrived: 毛血旺, or as Chace calls it, “disgusting blood shit.” I quickly dug in with my chopsticks, only to discover the very unpleasant surprise of a long strand of human hair in the oily broth. I proposed to my folks that, since it was not super late, that we cut our losses and head to another restaurant. Of course, this was all to be preceded by a good verbal spanking of the restaurant boss, as is custom here in Shanghai. I beckoned for the manager to come to our table, where I was prepared for a tongue-lashing from my mother. Instead, my dad gently told him: “老板 (boss), we can see that you’re extremely busy today and are having a tough time satisfying all your customers, which is probably how we ended up this hair in our dish. How about you just give us the bill for what we ate so far, and we’ll come back another time when you’re less busy?”
I was stunned. I couldn’t help but imagine what would happen if either Lucy or Pei Pei were there instead of this seasoned-politico of a man who had been a model example of class and courtesy. No doubt Pei Pei would have whipped out one of her patented, sarcastically dumbstruck stares and Lucy would have revealed her amazing ability to rap a string of hysterical insults at double time. At no time would I have thought to refrain from attack and simply let the man down with what amounted to, at least here in Shanghai, a verbal bear hug.
I first read excerpts from Francis Fukuyama’s book “The End of History and the Last Man” when I was a sophomore at Berkeley in a class entitled “Peace and Conflict Studies.” His was a complicated argument that history as defined by the clash of ideologies was no longer relevant with the end of the Cold War, and that liberal democracy was going to be the way to go in the future. At the time, he was also aligned with the neoconservative school that greatly informed the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. Since then, Fukuyama has publicly declared that he no longer sees himself as a neocon, and in this week’s New York Times Magazine he writes a very engaging account of the neoconservatives and Iraq, which he very much calls a mistake. In conversations with my friend Jamie, he often brings up his disdain for critics of the war and the way they express their arguments, and how the media glosses over the many good things that are happening there as a result. Hey, I think it was great when people started to regrow endangered plant species on Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez wiped out a crapload of coastal vegetation, but if it were up to me I would rather have not had tons of oil spilled onto the beach in the first place. Fukuyama writes:
The United States has played an often decisive role in helping along many recent democratic transitions, including in the Philippines in 1986; South Korea and Taiwan in 1987; Chile in 1988; Poland and Hungary in 1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in 2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the overarching lesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can’t “impose” democracy on a country that doesn’t want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.
Sometimes, when you yell and scream and get angry for finding a hair in your “disgusting blood shit” dish, you may find yourself pissing off the manager or the waiter, and then having a few more unwanted things put into your dish that unfortunately aren’t as visible as hair. I think the key message here, after watching my dad treat the manager as another human being and not as an embodiment of evil, is that one can rarely get what one 100% wants through chest-puffing and asserting invisible, classist (or racist) rules of demarcation; the resulting backlash and resentment can really fuck you over down the road, whether you’re at a restaurant or invading a country. You can’t really change a people or a culture by being pissed at it and forcing it; you have to let the natural political and societal forces play out its course, as such. And though a few of my friends may disagree and say that here in China, one needs to act decisively to quicken the ripening of such Western values as democracy, etiquette, and decent customer service; I say that I will always try to prioritize nuance and savvy over brute force in the name of some neoconseravtive-like imaginary ideal (see benevolent hegemony). That is, until the next time a cab driver cuts me off on my bike and I am forced kick down his door, fling him from his seat, and then pee on his face as he lies quaking in fear in the shadow of my powerful, American weapon. Hoorah for liberal democracy in a communist world!
I must preface my critique by saying, a most excellent piece overall.
“Hey, I think it was great when people started to regrow endangered plant species on Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez wiped out a crapload of coastal vegetation, but if it were up to me I would rather have not had tons of oil spilled onto the beach in the first place.”
this quote, however, i think is pretty exemplary of some of what goes on in the media’s portrayal of Iraq. can the situation in iraq before the war reasonably be portrayed as resembling Prince Willilam Sound before the Exxon Valdez spill?
My gripe is not that the general conclusions that the media has about Iraq are wrong, I agree with most of them, actually, and if i don’t outright agree, i can certainly see the logic in a lot of their arguments, including fukuyama’s.
what i take issue with, however, is the portrayal of events. when nearly all journalists go into a situation with a certain outlook on that situation, their reporting is obviously going to reflect that outlook. when, then, journalists and talking heads, who almost universally have a certain agenda (and a similar one i might add) start dissecting that information and writing articles in the new york times about our situation in iraq, that perception of events is again magnified.
our left leaning (socialist may be a better term-argue with me on this one if you want) educational system and professors(id be the first to praise it over the rest of the worlds of course) then adds their two cents to that information, and out comes the educated elite (my friends) of our country, comparing Iraq before the war to prince william sound before the Exxon Valdez spill.
Beigege
Beigege, thank you profoundly for honoring this trifle of a blog enough to feel the need to respond so eloquently.
However, your Bill O’Reilly-esque jump on the Valdez-Iraq comparison misses my intended point (my rhetorical fault, entirely). What I was trying to say was not that Iraq was some peaceful utopia completely set on its head by the evil Republican empire (a depiction in Fahrenheit 9/11 that I deplore). I was merely trying to point out the invalidity (to me, at least) of saying something to the effect of: look at how we’re building schools and roads and setting up infrastructure, why can’t the leftist anti-war camp acknowledge that there really is good being achieved from the entire affair?
I can’t agree with you more that the idea of a purely objective journalistic view of the situation has proven to be, for lack of a better word, elusive. I don’t want to get into a discussion of media bias because, well, it would take forever and I think we both would arrive at the same conclusion. All I can say is that, hey, they need schools and hospitals and infrastructure in more than half the world, and there are other places where people are suffering a lot more than they were in Iraq.
I’d say that if I were a reporter, regardless of political leaning, the bigger story in Iraq to me is how they got it all wrong to begin with, rather than the collateral goodness that has come from the mistake. And therein lies the Valdez analogy.
Perhaps a better example (in the spirit of pre-war intelligence) would be to make one up. Imagine coming home one day and finding your apartment completely ransacked and your furniture destroyed because the cops obtained a warrant under (false) pretense and evidence that you were running an illegal prostitution ring consisting of kidnapped girls from Chinese villages (this really is irrelevant, I just wanted to add color to the situation). After realizing that you were nothing but an innocent, Church-going, law-abiding and smut-free citizen, they buy you a nice, new coffee table that is worth three times as much as your older one. Except now they the tore holes in the walls, you’ve got termites and rats running all over your stained carpet, biting at your ankles and infesting your kitchen with disease. And then the termites start eating away at your coffee table. Wouldn’t you rather the cops never raided your apartment in the first place?
The irony of this is that I think you and I are both on the same page regarding the current administration. I agree that the Valdez comparison is faulty if you want to compare the two straightaway. Perhaps we only disagree on the how the left (of which I am a mbmer) chooses the colors in which to paint the painting. Or, draw the cartoon. In any case, I agree that there the argument can be made more tactfully and with a more comprehensive scope, since it is a superior argument to begin with.
Thanks for dropping by, your insights are always welcome.
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I don’t agree with you in 100%, but you covered some good points regarding this topic…