Journal Entries - Closed Doors

Entry 1
So, Ni Laoshi gave us two topics for our midterm paper. One was called Fall Travel (秋游), and since I had just gone to Korea for the Fall break, I decided to go for that topic. I wrote a paper, I think it is decent enough. It was mostly about traveling around Korea, making friends with several different people.
But today in class, it was clear there was a problem with the content of my paper. Although she did not explain this when giving the topic, the term “Fall Travel” in Chinese implies that you will discuss the changing of the seasons. Of course, I say “she did not explain this” as if she was supposed to explain it, but it is more complicated than that. Chinese culture emphasize the beauty of the changing seasons, particularly in literature, much more than American culture does, so there is an expectation to write include the season as a part of my essay in the Chinese context.
Linguistically, this expectation is etched into the language. “Of course, you have to write about the changing of the season. Why else would I have made the topic ‘Fall Travel’?” Ni Laoshi told me. Of course, in English this sounds a little absurd, but there is a very clear logic.
This is clearly a cultural and a translation problem, but its left me with a low grade for my midterm. But, in the spirit of trying to be more Chinese, I am going to try and concern myself less with grades. I suppose this serves as a notice.

Journal Entry 2

A couple of weeks ago, we went to Huangshan. While we were climbing down, one of my friends started talking to one of the workers, and he dismissively said, “We do not like Americans.” My friend came over and told us what he said. I, half curious, half belligerent, went over to chat with him.
“So you do not like Americans? Why not?”
At this point, his friend, a fellow worker, stepped in. “Oh that, that was just a joke. We were just joking about that.”
I could not really take the conversation any further, but I did try to open it from a few other angles with them. I was not successful and had to go back and sit down with my hiking buddies.
My friend was pretty sure that when he first approached them, the guy was completely serious about not liking Americans.
Why would he suddenly change? I seriously doubt it was the threat of violence. My friend is much taller than me, and he had already left by the time I came to ask them once again. If it was just for face saving, it seems strange that he would have brought up the topic originally.

Journal Entry 3
At the front of our building, the one made for foreigners to study at, are four sets of glass doors. The first day I arrived, late in August, three sets were closed, leaving only one set open. I had seen this before in China, but I still wanted to hear how the security guard, the guy who was in charge of these doors, would explain it. He said, they were closed because classes had not yet started up.
The first day of classes two sets of doors were open. The next day it was back to just one set of doors, and I have not seen them open more than one since then.
I asked my roommate why they do not open the doors, and he said they would open all the sets of doors if, for example Wen Jiabao came to the school for a visit. Otherwise, they would keep them closed because of laziness. He said that having all the doors open was a sign of welcomingness, that if they did not want to offer that message of welcome. Did that mean that to keep all but one of the doors closed was to suggest that they did not really care whether anyone came or went, but they were going to let you come in anyways. He shook his head and dismissed this thought out of hand, but I was not convinced that I was not partially right.

Journal Entry 5
In my last entry, I mentioned that my roommate said the reason the only one door was opened was because the security guards are too lazy. I do not buy that explanation. It takes an extra twenty seconds to open take the locks off the doors. Furthermore, I have seen this elsewhere in China. At Yunnan Normal University, they also had four glass doors and they also only opened one of them. I have since this elsewhere; at the Shanghai South Railway station, three out of every four doors is locked. This is a national phenomenon, not the result of a couple of security guard’s laziness.
Furthermore, if this really is the result of the all of China’s security guards being lazy, there is a real disconnect between China’s architects and it’s security guards. These architects must realize that their doors are not opened, so why do they continue to insists on building them?
After I did not accept his first explanation about laziness, my roommate offered up another explanation. He said it was probably just because Chinese were used to keeping gates closed in their home, so that custom has been transferred to various levels of Chinese society, saying that this is something that came out of traditional Chinese life in rural China. That is true, space in village China is defined by gates and fences. But is it really this rural lifestyle has made its way into this very different part of China’s modern urban lifestyle?

Journal Entry 6
I am suspicious of this “transfer to various levels of society” explanation. If that is the case, I would be surprised that I have not seen this anywhere else in China’s periphery. I spent a summer in Japan and I do not remember anything like what I saw in China. I went to Korea and looked specifically for this phenomenon, but found nothing like it. My friends have not seen similar things in Taiwan. I just went to Hong Kong and Macao, and there was nothing like it there. Hong Kong and Macau were quite similar to the Chinatowns that I have seen in Kuala Lumpur, Penang and Bangkok.
One could argue that these were not built by Chinese, but that does not really hold water. Korea and Japan were built by their own nationals, but they often followed Chinese rural tradition, sometimes so well that they preserve things that are no longer available in China today. Some of Hong Kong and Macao’s large government buildings were built by the British and the Portuguese, but most of their apartments and other buildings were clearly built by Chinese people, and they resemble Penang’s apartments. Penang and Bangkok’s Chinatowns were also built entirely by Chinese people, and I do not even need to address who built Taiwanese buildings.
So, this proves that it was not just external influences acting on these areas’ architecture (and door locking habits), but that they all share something and it most necessarily be from their shared Chinese origin (except perhaps for the Japanese and Korean examples), and that my roommate’s explanation does not pass muster. So why do security guards all over China (but only mainland China) keep three out of four doors locked?
That will have to wait until my next set of journal entries.