Critical Mass by Philip Ball

Suddenly it has become a fad to read or write a science best seller that are essentially about quantitative modeling, although they cross many disciplines such as marketing research, economics, finance, sociology, and political sciences. Blink, The Tipping Point,Freaknomics, Wisdom of Crowds…they have been churned out one after another and are catching fire among readers. Scientists have been using statistics, probability modeling and data mining techniques in a wide range of applications for decades (if not for centuries). Why does it only appeal to a broader readership until now? Since American education is especially poor in developing mathematics skill for its students, the current trend may help reignite some interest among a maths-fearing general public, especially when real problems that seemingly have nothing to do with mathematics can eventually solved by maths.

Critical Mass, a new book by acclaimed British science writer Philip Ball, went further than his American peels and presented actual maths models instead of sheer anecdotes. Ball has a doctor degree in Physics and this inevitably lured him to write in more rigor and abstraction. Ball’s essential interest lies in the human society modeled as a self-regulating system that consists of “a statistical melée of many individuals doing their own idiosyncratic thing”. Starting from here he quoted freely from statistics physics, chaos, evolutionary game theory, network, and stochastic models in economics and finance, while real examples are manifested through models used to explain traffic jams, flocking birds, bacterial colonies, urban growth, market crash, and, in one of the most fascinating chapters, the six degree of separations in social network. Underlying the large spectrum of these unrelated phenomena, there is one common thread: The mass of smaller individuals are to interact and evolve and change the collective nature of the system under the influence of both internal and external forces. This is exactly what the applied mathematics is about, the ability to model and predict the system behavior. Applied mathematics has become both a broader and narrower field as more branches get developed and grown out. My own field, operations research, is essentially one small branch, but nowadays more or less stands at its own.

It is easy to deviate to too many other topics as Ball undertook such an ambitious subject. Nevertheless he primarily focused on the human society and various topics in political science or political philosophy since he recognized that as the most significant. After all, peace and war and social engineering have the most impact on all of us. If any of the maths can be used to prevent war and positively construct a more civil society, that would be the most important science of all. But as the God is still rolling the dice, maths does not seem to lead to one final utopian solution. The system will continue to oscillate, just as the invisible hand of capitalism that may help regulate the market but can't stop the economic downturns or polarization, and nobody can predict where the human society will end up with. That is one of the most important reason why life is worth living -- the unknown destinations!

Peace Corps, and a Chinese in Africa

American literature has one unique genre of writing that has not quite been labeled. For decades young graduates from liberal arts majors have been going aboard right after school, teaching or working in oversea programs such as Peace Corp and JAP, and many of them come back with rich experiences and in-depth knowledge of these far-flung countries most of people may have never heard of. Many of them, driven by deep empathy of humanity and literature ambition, start to compose both fiction and nonfiction, portraying characters in exotic settings, providing American readers slices of life that are alien and unfamiliar, helping bridge the understanding of each other. Of course, there are often Americans in the plots: aid workers, Peace Corp members, and ex-pats who are simply lost. They are used to study how Americans look at the world and how world look at them. For reference check website: http://www.peacecorpswriters.org/

I came across a few writers who turned their Chinese experiences into books, and among them, the most famous ones are Vikram Seth (From Heaven Lake: Travels Through SinKiang and Tibet), Mark Salzman (Iron and Silk), and Peter Hessler (River Town). The first two went on and became major writers of our time and stretched their literary careers way beyond travelogues. Mr. Hessler, the youngest and the latest, become a New Yorker correspondent and still focuses his reportage on China, although the day is not far for him to move on and write about something else.

But I am still surprised when I found Tony D’Souza’s short story called Club Des Amis in the recent New Yorker. Set in Ivory Coast, it centers on a Chinese man from Shanghai who shares the same last name as mine. The story is heart-wrenching. The main character, whose name is Wu, came to Seguela in the 1990s to make a fortune and eventually brought over his wife and his teenage son. His teenage son ran away with a African girl and died of tropical disease in a local village, leaving the girl a half-Chinese half-black infant. Devastated by this tragedy, Wu’s wife left him and went back to Shanghai. Wu stayed and tried to take the custody of his grandson so that he would not grow up in war and in poverty. But the mother was determined to keep her own son, hiding and running away from the police commissioned and bribed by Wu. Using force, Wu eventually took his grandson away from the mother and brought him back to China.

I traveled extensively and often found Chinese restaurants in the most unexpected places. I wondered how hard and how lonely it must be to be the single Chinese family surrounded by a culture so different from their own. Deprived of opportunities in an overcrowded country, Chinese always looked out and traveled far to survive, and since China opened its door in late 70s, Chinese diaspora has seen waves and waves of immmigration to so many different countries. When cultures clash and integrate, interesting stories are bound to happen in unprecedented circumstances. Unfortunately I have not found any Chinese writers who would dig this goldmine of materials. Maybe they are too busy struggling in their adopted lands? Souza’s new story, however, captured such an unusual situation from the perspective of an aid worker, but it was framed in a larger context of globalization and political turmoil. Wu in the end was ultimately destroyed by Africa, but a new life, together with hopes, was also born out of the ruined lives.


Souza lived in Ivory Coast between 2000 and 2002, and without that experience, who would conjure up such a plot? You have to live first before you can write, and more aspiring young writers will probably take the same path to go to more remote places. After all, life is stranger than fiction, and I only wonder whether there is actually a good ending in the reality version of this story of Wu.

The Loner in the Sky: Wang Jia Xin

In this information overloaded times, poetry, as one of the most ancient and prestigious literary forms, continues to become more marginal and irrelevant. China, where every child starts with his early education by reciting famous poems from Tang dynasties, where poetry writing was once considered the essential part of being a scholar, is no exception in this crisis. Compared to the west, Chinese poetry did enjoy a few more recent golden years in early and mid eighties. But after the student protests in TianAn Men the entire poetry community suffered and never ever recovered. The very economic and internet booms not only did not help but further diverted more readers to other mediums. While the Chinese avant-garde visual art blossomed in the nineties and attracted more and more international interest, the few well-known poets from the eighties either went exile, or went mad, or killed themselves.

Wang Jia Xing was not the biggest name from that talented pool of poets sprung from those eventful years. He first came to my attention when I read his London poems and felt very moved by them, due to our shared experiences of drifting oversea and missing home. Last year, I finally got a copy of his colleted poems which was published in 2001 as one of the Blue Star Series. After I flipped through the book and reread some of my favorite poems, his whole life and his entire artistic trajectory started to take shape in my mind. Wang’s writing career covered two important decades after the Cultural Revolution. His works are the best testimonials of the opportunities and the predicaments Chinese poets faced in this dynamic time period, and his own life, reflected through his works, is very typical of his generation.

Wang JiaXing entered the poetry scene as a late member of the misty group when it already started to disband. He did not become famous until he published a set of poems titled under “Chinese Paintings”. The series has been used as a representative piece for the “root-finding” movement started from late 1984. All of sudden everyone went back to ancient Chinese myths and philosophy to look for inspiration and spirituality, and Wang seemed to be particularly enlightened by the minimalist and naturalistic philosophy of Zhuangzi and Tao. Here is one stanza from “Blankness”:

You painted the mountains, 
Painted the clouds
But you stopped your brush
At this blank spot
Were you afraid of something
Or this is a puzzle within puzzle
A dream that was dreamed
So you sidestepped
And made the pine tree extending its arms 
From the rock
Towards this emptiness……

Wang in this period demonstrated a very genuine and positive attitude towards every thing he was experiencing. He dreamed an ideal pastoral life in which he could both withdraw from the world yet remain an active participant. These two conflicting and polarized urges are common among Chinese poets. Since ancient times, scholars always wanted to play the role of a public intellectual. When they spoke they wanted the world to listen. But in the meantime they longed to become a hermit. Wang is no exception. On one hand he idolized the reclusive Beat poet Gary Snider, on the other hand, he looked up to Russian public poets such as Pasternek and Mayakovski.

1989 was a year of political turbulence, and it also turned out to be a critical year that put a final end to the prospering and noisy post-culture-revolution poetry scene. Almost over night, Wang changed his style. Gone with that child-like joy and calmness, instead his poems became increasingly dark and emotionally charged and showcased a tortured romanticist in all his nakedness. The same image of snow, which used to be a symbol of wonder, repeatedly appeared in his new poems as an image of repression, clinical pain and shattered hopes.

Pasternak
It is you who has found me, put me through trials
Through countless catastrophes
And inject pain into my bloodstream
Against the snowy sky I am reading your poems
On the roaring bus in Beijing
I am crying out those noble names
Those exiles, sacrifices, testimonies, those,
Trembling souls gathering for the final Mass

Poets are often the most vulnerable under the authoritarian government, and the whole Chinese poetry suffered collectively after the student protests of 1989 ended in bloody massacre. Following the suicide of Haizi, Luo Yihe died of a sudden stroke when he was barely 28. Other prominent poets went to exiles: OuYang JiangHe and Ju YongMing went to New York, BeiDao ended up in California, and Gu Cheng drifted around in Australia and eventually settled in an isolated island outside New Zealand. Wang joined the migrating flocks and went to England. The change of environment, and the close distance to observe the Western world from an underprivileged position, seemed to have affected Wang profoundly. The intellectual freedom came with homesickness, loneliness, marginalization and prejudice, and the suffering was no less inflicting than the oppression back home. Melancholy and solitude were prevalent in the poems of this period, echoing the gloomy weather and grey skies of London. While images of the British landscapes and references to Magarite, Picasso, Auden and Yeats made their presence in his works, Wang also missed China intensely: 

Now you can recognize
That china man who is walking through the West End:
Through rose garden and Lady Chatterley’s white villa
You speculate on the discreet charm of the bourgeois
In the midst of the chopping sounds from the basement kitchen
You think of Marx and his On Capital
The family letters arrived frequently
Passing false news
You don’t remember who you are
Until you wake up in the heavy sweat
You have seen everything
A China man, a loner in the sky
Still wanders in the West End…..
On your own departure you don’t need to say goodbye
But you have to go to the art museum 
Tucked under the heavy fog
You finally understand that one man’s pain
Can brighten up the entire hall
And your own future…

Wang wrote these lines two years after he left London. He saw his lonesome self drifting rootlessly in a country that was not his own, and this unease finally made him come back to Beijing. Wang never ceased to look for connections and the reconciliation with his surroundings, but his refusal to copromise destined him to be the loner in this rapidly commercialized world. Not surprisingly, Wang also failed in his personal life while his marriage disintegrated shortly after he came back to China and his only son was taken away from him. Relationship dramas could be particularly powerful for poets. Some were ultimately destroyed (such as Gu Cheng, who killed his own wife and himself), and some gave up poetry completely. In the end of 1997, Wang got a writing grant from Germany and spent two coldest months in a Stuttgart castle. It was two prolific months. The isolation finally made it possible for him to sit down and focus on writing, and it was only through writing that he could vent out the pain, the anger and the sadness. The following stanza is from a long poem titled “Replies”, which could be read a letter addressed to Wang’s divorced wife:

For a long time I have been accompanied 
By these nonexistent women
Now I understand: 
These fake angels
Have destructed my life, poisoned my heart
But could never be the protagonist of this book
My only lead, is destined to come from a small alley
In Beijing. 
What we have known since our childhood
Made what is the present, and the shared pain we were never aware of
Made us come together:
From the very beginning
We compromised neither to life, nor to each other
It made us alike yet so different
It brought us the dark night which we still have not walked through
It writes on us, loves us, threatens us 
-----It is violent, but we are as loyal as a dog.

Life would never be easy for a poet. The muse brings in both wine and poison. In late nineties Wang moved to ChangPing, a small town close to Beijing. Here he built his own house with a yard and seemed to become increasingly reclusive, just to live up to his earlier admiration for Gary Snider. But his withdrawal was more motivated by a disillusion with the real world rather than an urge to calm his own ego down, and he could not stop writing even if he knew fully well how useless this is: 

As if in a dream, in this long but beautiful summer evening 
When I look up to the sky
Another plane is flying by 
But I already know,
The miracle will no longer come
I am no longer holding flowers 
And waiting at the airport
My heart has been hardened to a stone
In the evening of silence, with scissors in my hands
I am repeating the ancient and useless craftsmanship
Until the night falls

But are all that all totally useless? I hope Wang would feel a little comfort if he knows that someone in San Francisco have reread his poetry collection again and again and spent hours typing this blog piece.

Black-White Song Village (Hei Bai Song Zhuang) - Zhao Tie Lin

The Chinese avant-garde art movement in the last two decades is probably one of the most unique events in the art history that deserves some attention of the future historians. It is still unclear whether this movement would leave behind any significant works that would be long remembered, but study of this unusual phenomenon would shed some light on some very basic questions about art: Why do people make art, sometimes against all odds and out of all kinds of madness? What is the function or role of art in a society that is rapidly transforming itself? How does art survive and move from fringe to the center?

Zhao TieLing’s new book, Black-White Song Village, is not an ambitious project to set about to answer these big questions. Instead it focused on daily life of a dozen free-lance artists who live and work in a rural village on the outskirt of Beijing, which has also been compared to early SoHo in New York or Montmartre in Paris. The village is not the first congregated living environment for Chinese artists. As early as 1990, YuanMingYuan Painter’s village was once made quite famous due to over-exposure to media. The artists in that village were eventually dispersed when the district government decided to clean up the neighborhood. Quite a number of them moved further away from Beijing and settled in Song Village. Over the time the village grew in reputation and became a magnate for artists of all kinds, some of whom have already been well established internationally, while most of others are struggling and little known.

Zhao selected a range of characters and devoted one chapter to each of them. Mixing dialogues with black-white snapshots, he used the usual photojournalistic format. The style of the dialogues runs from casual chitchatting to serious conversation on art. The photo shots are usually candid and intimate. The featured artists, often seen from the back and at a low angle with light lit behind, rarely stared straight into camera and did not seem to even notice the camera’s presence. If they did happen to look at the camera, they appeared slightly coy. Zhao must have got to know them fairly well in order to shoot at such a close distance. The artists were chosen not by their success but by how well they represent certain group or certain hierarchy in the village. They often had more interesting stories to tell, although some of them seemed to waster their time away in the village because it offered an isolated utopia where irresponsibility and craziness could be tolerated. Zhao’s intention is quite clear: He wants to give a more comprehensive view with their most private moments. Observant but not intrusive, these pictures give no embellishment of such kind of bohemian life but shows the unpretentious and the unforgiving sides.

Zhao was trained as a computer scientist but had a true passion for photo-journalism. After a few years in Computer Science Institute in Beijing, he gave up on science and devoted himself full-time to photography when he was well into his 40s. In the early 90s this could be seen as unusually rebellious and might have raised many eyebrows. From mid 90s, he published a series of books on marginal characters of the society: prostitutes, migrant workers, artists, people who exist outside the official system. It is a very rich and provocative vintage point: As China reformed itself from state-controlled socialism into a market driven free economy, more and more people left the land and old work units and ventured into migration without the official system to fall back on. Zhao wanted to document these changes and capture all the human dramas, both tragic and comical, with his lenses. By exposing the life of the poorest and most marginal characters, he also aimed to educate the prejudiced mainstream readers and hopefully bring changes to the system.

But with Black-White Song Village, Zhao hit a homerun since the material itself was highly relevant for his own artistic endeavors. His specialties, or his signature themes, are still there: The liveliest parts of the book are the anecdotes and life stories, narrated by the artists themselves. Their personalities and the hardships they encountered came well through the interviews. While letting the artists talked about their own ideas and strategies, Zhao also peppered his questions with his own thoughts on art and practice of art. He knew well that both the artists and himself faced the same questions : How can one maintain his atristic integrity while surviving in this market-oriented society? How does one pursue his/her individual freedom and financial success while remaining socially responsible? How far can one go in terms of self-promotion and making his/her works known? The answers are not so simple, and there may never be good answers.

As China continues to change and move forward, its internal art market is also slowly developing itself and the government also started to organize exhibitions and reform the art schools. Gone are the days when avant-garde artists had no other means to survive other than selling works outside China. Zhao’s first-hand sketches froze a particular time moment at a particular location, and his efforts would prove invaluable in the near future when the art scene could be entirely different from what is now. After all, the initial growth is often painful and slow and the pioneers often have a lot to pay.

My Visual Diary - Wang Xiao Hui

Chinese female artists, whom once went aboard and established themselves, would always rush back home and publish autobiographies, which typically feature success stories of conquering the West and tons of photographs of themselves schmoozing with foreign dignitaries. The Chinese saying, “returning home with all the glories”, applies perfectly well here: They have a lot to tell to their own people after all the loneliness, struggling and humiliations. After all, they succeeded in the West, and for Chinese people whose inferior complex still lingers after a colonial past, that means a bigger success than what can be achieved home.

Wang Xiao Hui’s “My Visual Diary” was first published in 2001 but has been printed more than ten times since then. I got a copy in Changsha this February, a month after I came cross her photobook “Close to Eyes” back in San Francisco. In the international art circuit, Chinese photographers are still rare species, and it is more unusual to have a published collection from prestigious art publishing house. My interest in her was thus elevated to the degree that I not only finished her book in a few days but also googled her and checked out most of her latest works. Wang is not a household name in the photography world, but her status is on the rise. Even if she may be still the second-tier artist in the scene, her success is an interesting phenomenon that deserves some analysis.

Unfortunately the book’s boastfulness almost distracts a reader from understanding her art. It babbles on like a psychiatrist’s patient who suffers self-esteem problems and relies on other people’s complements to feel good about herself. But the book serves its purpose for teenage girls who are not so exposed to photography but want so desperately to become an artist. It opens eyes for the more provincial and the less traveled. But for serious artists in-the-knows, even though the book helps give a roadmap on how Wang arrives at where she is now, it is not so artistically inspiring.

Wang came out of age in eighties and was one of very first batch of architecture college students after Cultural Revolution. She continued her graduate study in Germany under an official scholarship but her interest in photography and a few unexpected incidents pushed her to a completely different career path. From her own account, Wang showed artistic gift from an early age but it did not blossom until she got to Germany. The extensive traveling, the very nurturing environment supported by her husband and her friends, the unique position as the first few Chinese female artists in post-Cold-War Germany, and two rather tragic events that took place when she just started out as an artist (which includes a suicide and a fatal car accident of her husband), all contributed to her maturing into a true artist. Wang, like other prominent Chinese artists who gained their international fames in the nineties (such as Xu Bing, Cai GuoQiang, etc), belong to the same generation who went through much of their childhood and teenage years in Cultural Revolution and in a rather isolated society. All the new art movements developed in the West since the end of the World War II dazzled and stimulated them during their first few years of self-exiles. Driven by a sense of mission, they experimented and tried to adopt the new aesthetic strategies and combine them with various Chinese elements and traditions. Wang is not particularly so keen on making modern Chinese art. The Chinese influence in her photography is rather subtle and minor. But she does know how to ride on the curiosity of the West and take full advantage of their interest in her and her works. She takes it as her mission to represent well-educated, elegant and talented Chinese females. But in the meantime she still holds much of the traditional values from the past and feels awkward to cross any gender, political or sexuality boundaries. A few of her figurative works and her film “Shattered Moon” all expressed her own frustrations in her pseudo-feminist quandaries. 

Wang’s photography can be roughly separated into three phases. In her early days, from late 80s to early 90s, she was basically a good photographer. Self-taught and with a natural eye for composition and visual metaphors, she did mostly commercial photo projects. For much of the 90s she traveled more, shot films and her best works were portraits and human figures, in which she often used tricky lighting and long exposures, with focuses on eyes and human forms. From late 90s on, she discovered large color prints (which indisputably had put German photography in the center of attention) and started to make huge prints with abstract patterns. Abstraction is far from being new in photography. Generations of photographers have been using macro lenses to shoot floral or surface close-ups and render them into abstract expressionism. But the sheer sizes of the new abstract photography have made them much more impressive to look at. Wang was clearly inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe and Wolfgang Tillman and made her floral shots very sensual and decorative. There is something very consistent in all the stuff Wang did. They are always very beautiful and flawlessly composed, but for the price of good looks they lack spontaneity and wit, and sometimes even degenerate into clichés. Compared to other German photographers such as Thomas Struth and Andrew Gursky, Wang’s photography is short of intellectual substances.The most exciting contemporary Chinese photography still comes from China itself. The latest exhibitions on YangYong, Shao YiYong and Mu Chen at Goedhuis gallery, have shown very diverse set of visual language and potent political urgency. After all the postmodernism experiments and imitation in the late nineties, Chinese photographers have collectively made a quantum leap into the new century and pushed their individual styles much further than where they started. The art curators have taken the note and just started to organize shows and exhibitions to promote and showcase their works. The upcoming exhibition on Chinese photography and Video works at Asia Society and ICP New York would be an exciting and ground-breaking event to see true modern Chinese photography.

Taking Roots (Zha Gen) -- Han Dong

NanJing has always been an ideal place to produce writers. As the ancient capital for a few dynasties, it lacks no history and culture heritage. Situated close to Shanghai but still far enough, it gives itself enough metropolitan atmosphere but with much slower pace. In mid 80s there arose two very influential poetry groups: The one from ChenDu was called “MangHan”(Mucho Guys), and the other, from NanJing, was named “Ta Men” (They). Both groups made splashes with manifestos and reading gatherings and claimed to be antithesis of an earlier poetry movement called “Misty Group”. But by late 80s both groups had dissolved and most of the members went different directions. One of the major players, Han Dong, dappled into fiction-writing and stayed on the periphery of the poetry scene for a number of years. But his most famous poem, “About the Big Goose Pagoda”, remains the representative work from that period and has been quoted again and again:

About the Big Goose Pagoda
What else can we know
We climb up
And look at the scenery around
Then we come down
Big Goose Pagoda is a famous and the best-preserved Buddhist temple complex built around AD 600 in XiAn. Han Dong borrowed its historical meaning to tell readers that the world was neither as meaningful as was told nor as absurd as it seemed. It exists within your own perspective but also quite independent of you. Han Dong is an expert in revealing profound thoughts using the plainest language. He speaks with a cool and slightly detached manner, while his metaphors are masked between the most commonly-used words. An impatient reader may find them plain and banal, but once he gets it, he would feel the stir and occasionally certain enlightenment.

Han Dong’s debut novel, “Taking Roots”, was not published until 2003, when he was well into his 40s. It attracted more media coverage than any of his poetry works and won him the fiction prize of the second Chinese Literature Communication Awards (hosted by two major newspapers). In a time when most writers are focusing their attention on the contemporary and fast-changing China, Hang Dong chose to base his first novel on a particular period of Cultural Revolution, which has been an unpopular subject since the earlier “Wound Literature” period (late 70s to mid 80s). He dug out details from that period as well as many forgotten political terms coined up in the Cultural Revolution and gave a chronology of a sent-down family living in the rural northern JiangSu Province. Han repeatedly denied that the book was autobiographical, but by comparing the writer’s own life with what is described in the book, it is easy to believe that he used many of the real events and real characters he encountered. Although most of the book was told from someone who seemed to know everything about the family yet had nothing to do with them, the real point of view is from the grandson, who observed the six years of countryside life with fascination, fear and horror. In the very end, the book summarized the impact of the six years on the grandson, which, from my view, could be read as Han’s own:

The Tao family spent no more than six years in SanYu. After than Little Tao went to ShanDong for the college and only returned to NanJing for the summers. After graduation he was sent to another city and worked there for twenty years. Six years is neither big nor small proportion of his life, but LittleTao never dreamed of his home in NanJing, nor the blue-tiled-house in the HongZe county, or the HongWu Street 69 before the family were sent down. In the forty years, from south to north, for east to west, little Tao had been to many places, lived under many different roofs and had many different homes. But in his dream, there is only one home, which is the house in the SanYu village, with mud walls and tiles, built by his father from the scratch…...maybe that is the meaning of “taking roots”?

Han Dong went to great lengths to describe those six years, from the very first day how the family managed to adapt to the rural life, to the very end how they left the village with one deceased grandfather and terminally-ill father. Every story, every character, no matter how absurd they seemed, or how painful they could be, was always told without judgment or heavy charge of emotions, but always with plenty of details and senses of humor. The novel resembles his poetry, sharing similar narrative strategies and general atmosphere. As a novel, and especially as a semi-autographic novel, it planted more emotional punches than his poetry, but it still followed the anti-climax rule, narrating the most heart-wrenching scenes with disciplines and minimal words. If compared to Western writers, Raymond Carver may call to mind, whose pared-down and “dirty-realist” style probably had some influence on Han.

Much has been written about Cultural Revolution from several separate generations of writers. Depending on their age and experience, each wrote their works from different angles and under different motifs. Collectively they give a paranormal picture of a very unusual period of history in which lives of all social classes in every corner of China were changed or affected. Han’s “Taking Roots” filled one of the many gaps in this genre of writing. The depiction of a whole spectrum of characters explained Han’s own ambition to use this book to keep historical records for a bygone past. He embedded larger events in ordinary people’s life and showed both human resilience and human weakness. Yet, his sentiment is rather personal, his nostalgia is quite detectable, and the point of view never goes beyond Tao family. Han also aimed to use this book to come to terms with a childhood that changed him forever. In the end it should be read as literature instead of a history book.

Want to be Westernized? Bring on the Booze !

While reading Paul Bowles' travelogue in Turkey I came across the following paragraph:

Cannabis sativa and its derivative are strictly prohibited in Turkey, and the natural correlative of this proscription is that alcohol, far from being frowned upon as it is in other Muslim lands, is freely drunk...since the psychological effects of the two substances are diametrically opposed to each other. Alcohol blurs the personality by loosening inhibitions. The drinker feels, temporarily at least, a sense of participation. Kif abolishes no inhibitions; on the contrary it reinforces them, pushes the individual further back into the recesses of his own isolated personality, pledging him to contemplation and inaction. It is expected that there should be a close relationship between the culture of a given society and the means used by its members to achieve release and euphoria. For Judaism and Christianity the means has always been alcohol; for Islam it has been hashish. The first is dynamic in its effects, the other static. If a nation wishes however mistakenly, to westernize itself, first it gives up hashish. The rest will follow...

Bowles was definitely not the first one to compare alcohol and hashish. In the history of Marijuana, as early as in the 16th century, a poet from Baghdad, Mohammed Ebn Soleiman Foruli, wrote a well-known epic poem named Benk u Bode, which dealt allegorically with a dialectical battle between wine and hashish. And, even in the Castro crowd, there is a clear separation between the bar-hoppers (who consume alcohol in large quantities), the club druggies, and the stoners who prefer smoking pots and staying home. Any of them would give you the reason why they prefer one to the other. But Bowles could still be the first who associated the substance usage with cultures and westernization. If his theory holds true, does that mean the bar-hoppers are aggressive happy social butterflies, while the potheads are introspective and isolated from each other? And by further deduction according to Bowles, the bar-hoppers should be more “dynamic” in their personality and more “westernized” and thus holding some competitive advantage in this western society; and the potheads would be “static”, can’t cope with the change and would be left behind like the aged hippies. Then I am also wondering how we categorize the speed freaks and ecstasy addicts. They show enormous energy, openness and love when they are on. Does that mean they are more "westernized" than all the others?

There is a bit a truth in Bowles' assessment, but by close inspection, we see flaws in his logic. Bowles forgot that substance or alcohol always creates the illusions, which are elusive and don’t always relate to reality. Just like socially-inept person using alcohol to break the ice, a high-strung one may seek pot to calm down and relax. The effects are temporary, and they won’t change the personalities that easily (although sometimes they do). It is too simplistic to explain the culture differences by the usage of substances. On the contrary, why one drug is more popular in one society than in the others has complicated historical and cultural roots. The popularity of certain substance is the consequence instead of the cause. We can find many examples: the persistant chewing of qat in Yemen, the once ubiquitous opium dens in China, their rises and falls do not necessarily time with the westernization but actually act the otherwise.

Although Bowles lived in Morocco for his entire adult life and based almost all of his writings in third-world countries, he was a colonialist in his heart. As a sharp observer and an avid traveler, he was fascinated with “the other” and probably took a few lovers from the locals he encountered. But he remained critical of these cultures, which he constantly compared to the West and found them uncivilized, hostile and sometimes incomprehensible. The fear and distrust of Islam lies in the collective consciousness of the western mind, and Bowles was no exception.