Every time I leave a place that I’ve spent some time in, it feels as though I’m leaving just as I was really starting to get settled in — whether that’s after two months, or after a year and a half. Part of it, I think, comes from the obligatory round of final-week coffee dates, which always make you realize how amazing your friends are and how much you’re going to miss them, but only happen because of the fact that you’re about to leave.
This time around, there’s an added element of only just having settled in, in that it’s only really in the past month or so that I’ve been able to have substantive discussions in Chinese instead of in English. When the only things I could discuss in Chinese and others could discuss in English were food, weather and travel, building friendships was a much slower process. I’ve noticed in my own learning process that the more energy I’ve had to spend on thinking about how to say things, the less energy I’ve had to think about what I’m saying — and so up until now, I’ve stuck to simple, safe topics when I’ve been speaking Chinese, and on the whole most Chinese people I talk to have probably done the same when we’ve been speaking English. Maybe partly for this reason, I’ve gotten the impression during my year and a half here that Chinese people my age are generally very apolitical and relatively uninterested in social issues, since those topics never seemed to come up.
And then today, I’ve had three really interesting, several-hour-long discussions about politics, society and life, with friends who, I’m realizing, have impressively smart and thoughtful things to say. Obviously there’s sample bias — I probably shouldn’t be surprised that the people I’ve liked the most and chosen to become friends with are also people who have intelligent and thoughtful perspectives on these types of issues. In the taxi on our way home from dinner, a (Chinese) friend said that the others I had invited to the dinner were unusual among Chinese university students in terms of just how intelligently and critically they thought about these kinds of topics. So obviously there must still be a lot of people here, just as there are in every place, who care more about celebrity gossip than social justice. But now that we’re having the discussions in Chinese, I’m realizing just how many of my friends actually do care more about social justice than about celebrity gossip — which makes leaving my life here behind that much more difficult.
The common theme in the conversations was that while on one hand there are lots of social problems and a growing and worrying income gap between the haves and the have-nots, as an individual you have to find a job and find a way to pay for a home and provide for a family, and there’s nothing that one small person can do to fight strong forces in such a big country. If things get bad enough, the only feasible option is to emigrate. My opinion: China is at a crossroads, and right now it’s being decided if this will be a country where people will be left to fend for themselves (more like the US), or a country where there’s a social safety net that catches those who fall behind and gives everyone the opportunity to succeed (more like Western Europe). It’s only if you guys get angry and speak up for social justice that there’s any hope of going the route that I consider to be the better of the two. Everyone talks about stability and seems to worry that there’s a revolt brewing just below the surface, and you guys know better than I do if that’s really is a risk. But it’s at times like this that people who are brave can influence the course of history, and I think that harmony is overrated.