Beijing -- Americans may be obsessed with race, but they're not the only ones. In China, race defines who you are and how you're treated -- be it seeing a movie or having your bottom pinched.
Take my friend Tinne (pronounced Tee-nee), a Singaporean art student who has lived in Beijing for five years and will soon be returning home.
The other day she had the sort of evening from hell that reminded me that race relations could have a greater bearing on this country's future direction than economics or a particular leader's death. What made her story so interesting is that she's ethnically Chinese, yet not a Chinese citizen. That makes her a foreigner (she also thinks of herself as one) and yet is often taken for a Chinese (and sometimes thinks of herself as one), giving her a double-whammy of China's racial mess.
The night started with Tinne and her two white American girlfriends watching a Chinese movie from the 1980s, "The Burning of the Summer Palace." It's about the Yuanmingyuan, literally the Garden of Perfect Brightness, which was destroyed in 1860 by French and British troops under the leadership of Lord Elgin (yes, the same guy who carted the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon to London.)
The garden was designed by Jesuit missionaries and Chinese architects and was reputedly a masterpiece of garden architecture, mixing white marble buildings with Chinese-style pavilions and pagodas.
The looting of the Yuanmingyuan and its demolition is still one of the most powerful symbols of China's humiliation by Western powers.
The film, unfortunately, is a piece of junk, a crude attempt to show that most peasants were proto-Communists waiting for a good leader while the Chinese emperors were good-for-nothings who could have resisted the Westerners if they hadn't listened to their concubines.
But whatever the film's merits or failings, it seems hard for any Westerner to watch the film and not squirm a bit. Although the French and the British destroyed the Yuanmingyuan, other Western countries, including the United States, happily
piggybacked on the Europeans' success and helped carve up China.
Foreigners looked funny
Yet after the film was over, Tinne's friends couldn't control their laughter. The foreigners in the film looked funny, they giggled, and spoke with funny accents. As Tinne's friends left the theater slapping each other's backs, several Chinese looked on with disgust. They didn't know what the foreigners had been laughing about, but it hardly seemed the right time or place to be breaking out in good cheer.
Later, over a drink, Tinne tried to explain to her friends why she had liked the film when she first saw it years ago. In one scene, a soldier holds up the Qing dynasty's flag as his countrymen gallop by, throwing spears and arrows, into a hail of artillery fire and rifle fire. They are mowed down by the hundreds but, inspired by the flag, keep coming. She may be Singaporean, but Tinne's ancestors came from China, and she had felt proud that the soldiers were portrayed as brave, if terribly outgunned.
The women, a lawyer and paralegal at a big New York law firm that hopes to expand into China, didn't get it. The film was a flop, and that was that. The giggling went on.
It may be too much to expect everyone to understand another culture's traumas, but it struck me as a bad sign that the foreigners now flooding into China have so little sympathy for the country where they're earning a living. I don't mean that they should have agreed with everything Tinne said, but they didn't try to understand her at all.
Gave him a mouthful
The evening continued at a restaurant, where one of the women was pinched on the bottom by a Chinese man. She told Tinne but was too lazy to confront the man. But Tinne, feeling like a stand-up-for-your-rights Westerner, walked over and gave the guy a mouthful. Not realizing that she was a Singaporean, he blasted back at her, saying she was a traitor to China for taking sides with the foreigners -- a response many Chinese get when they help out foreigners who are being ripped off or bothered in some way by Chinese.
Damned again, she thought, this time for for sympathizing with a foreigner.
So with the evening winding down, the group went to Poachers, a second-rate bar and third-rate disco that has become the unofficial hangout of Beijing's 50,000 or so foreign residents.
Poachers is the sort of place that can get ugly in the early morning: too much alcohol and too few other outlets for Beijing's foreigners.
Maybe Tinne herself had had one too many or maybe she was just acting like the assertive Singaporean she is, but when some lout from the U.S. Embassy grabbed her on the bottom she didn't think twice. She tapped him on the shoulder and said not to do that again. He smirked and ignored her, so she flicked a couple of drops of beer in his face and asked for an apology. He told her to buzz off and refused to apologize.
His friends snickered. Chinese girl, they probably thought, just there to pick up a foreigner -- for money or, if she's lucky, to snag a husband and a foreign passport.
She again asked for an apology. He responded by throwing his beer in her face. He turned away, and his friends laughed. She poured her beer down his back.
Grabbed by throat
He grabbed her by the throat in a choke hold and pinned her up against the wall. Everyone was silent. Finally the manager asked her to leave.
That's right, she had to leave. None of her foreign friends ventured to help. The bartender or bouncer didn't pitch the guy out headfirst. She had to leave.
What makes the whole incident even harder to bear is that she was asked to leave by a Chinese manager. The reason has to do with Chinese people's view of foreigners. They're so different, so strange and so incomprehensible that they are let off the hook when they should be meat-hooked. The bar manager's reaction was typical -- you're Chinese, you understand. Leave the foreigner alone, even though he's wrong.
For foreigners, the effects of this treatment are not always so happy. They're usually treated as rich idiot savants who get the best seats and the best treatment but also intense isolation and the highest prices.
Tinne should have got this treatment at the bar, but her looks made her get the Chinese treatment.
It's in the blood
This would have still been the case if the bartender had known she was Singaporean. Many people here believe that all Chinese, even if born outside the motherland, are Chinese and should be treated accordingly. It's in the blood.
For Tinne, this meant that she experienced a gamut of racial confrontations in one evening: the overseas Chinese grappling with patriotic feelings; the Chinese traitor being blasted for helping a foreigner, and the Chinese being forced to kowtow to a foreigner.
zTC The evening's fun probably amounted to little, but it shows how far things have to go here before there's even some good old American-style racial confrontation. It's a funny thing to wish for, but a small safety valve would sometimes be more welcome here than this superficial deference and deeper loathing.
Ian Johnson is chief of The Baltimore Sun's Beijing Bureau.