Cultural Musings and Hedgehogs

Original Post May 22, 2009

American life occurs in cars, stores, bedrooms, classrooms, and offices. Chinese life occurs on the street. Children do their homework sitting outside their parents’ shops (which in some cases double as homes). Grandmothers knit and grandfathers play poker on the sidewalks. Laundry is washed, and then hung to dry outside. The elderly receive massages and have their blood pressures taken on the streets. Occasionally, a young boy or an old man will use the relieve himself in the gutter, corner of building, or bush near the street.

It’s not rude, and it’s certainly not wrong; it’s necessary. At mealtimes, the Chinese sit with their bowl of rice and chopsticks on little wooden or plastic stools by the curb. In the afternoons, carts and chairs become beds as workers enjoy their naptime. (During naptime at the kindergarten, the children strip down to their underwear and T-shirts. The children’s bathrooms are not gender-specific. Imagine what lawsuits would ensue if this happened in an American kindergarten!) The Chinese lives are one, and they share everything.

What’s privacy? In “Encountering the Chinese: A Guide for Americans” by Hu Wenzhong and Cornelius Grove, this is part of their “collectivist” culture, where the basic social unit is not the individual, but the group.

Unlike the social contract theory, which states that governments are instituted by individuals for the benefit of individuals, the Chinese believe that the individual exists to benefit the government or society. According to an article I read in the English version of the China Daily, the government-syndicated newspaper, this is why Western and Eastern powers disagree on many human rights issues. China does value human rights, they claim, only in a different way that the U.S. does. Simply put, national rights and social goals take priority.

On Tuesday I went to the children’s after-school art class. Each student was given a big sheet of white paper with a semi-circle of colored paper glued in the middle. Using the paper semi-circle as the body, the children were to draw hedgehogs (ci4wei), adding one big eye, a nose, a mouth, and spikes along its back. Then, they were to add delicious things to eat to the hedgehog’s stomach: apples, grapes, lollipops. As the students began their project, the teachers, myself included, walked around the classroom helping the students and keeping them on task.

The students, for whatever reason, finished this art project very quickly and there were still about fifteen minutes left of class when most of the children had handed in their papers. So, Xi Lao Shi, the lead art teacher, called the students to attention. She held up the first picture and asked them if it was good. They said it was.

“Where?” she asked, and the students pointed out the bright colors and delicious things to eat. The student whose picture it was came up to the front of the room to redeem his picture and a smiley face sticker.

Xi Lao Shi came to the next picture, and again, asked the class if it was good to look at. They said it was. The hedgehog’s eye should have been a little bigger, Xi Lao Shi said, but it was still pleasing to look at, and the class applauded the little artist, who collected his picture and sticker calmly.

The teacher continued in the same way through the stack of papers, comparing the children’s hedgehogs to the example she had drawn at the beginning of class. One hedgehog’s spikes were too short. One student’s hedgehog was especially good because he had used two colors for each spike, instead of one color per spike like everyone else had.

One poor student forgot to fill the hegehog’s tummy. One student should have used a little more color. Each student’s artwork was publicly criticized, but regardless, each student who completed a hedgehog received a smiling sticker.

When each picture had been returned to its owner, Xi Lao Shi told the students to show their parents their artwork and the sticker that they had been given by her.