Confrontations / 对抗事件

Confronting emotionally tumultuous personal injustices seems to be a near-universal experience of Westerners who spend significant time engaging with China.

I’m currently reading Leslie Chang‘s terrific Factory Girls, which describes the emotional aftermath of such a confrontation perfectly. She’s on a “black” illegal bus from Guangzhou to Dongguan when the driver stops and demands everybody get off, long before reaching their destination. After an angry confrontation, she realizes she is powerless to earn justice for herself or the other passengers, even after playing the “foreigner card” and writes:

I was so mad I was shaking. I thought of all the young women I knew who lived here and how every single one of them had been cheated, abused, and yelled at… There was no recourse but tears and fury at your own impotence. In a confrontation, everything boiled down instantly to brute force, and a woman would always lose. I had money, and with money I could by my way to comfort and safety. They didn’t have that.

And yet there were also people who were kind… You had to focus on that or you would never survive.

A great, accurate passage.

The only thing I would add is that a single foreigner — if you can be readily identified as such — always loses these confrontations too, even if they are male. Groups of foreigners also lose if Chinese crowds get involved.

My friend Siragan told me a story about how he was riding his bike when he was bumped by a car full of young Chinese businessmen illegally driving in the bike lane. They laughed and he yelled at them, so they jumped out and accosted him on the street. He was alarmed so he went to the local police station. The businessmen followed him and accused him of various things in front of the police. Eventually the police drove him out to a vacant lot really far away, forced him to apologize to the businessmen — who were clearly connected to someone powerful, most likely the sons of someone rich or an official — and then left him there with his bike, forcing him to bike all the way back into the city center, where he lived.

Peter Hessler describes a classic crowd confrontation at the end of River Town, an account of his Peace Corps experiences in central China. He and some of his other Western friends are goofing around in a part of the city they hadn’t really spent time in before, making a spectacle of themselves as foreigners. An older Chinese man directs some vague insults at them — a near inescapable aspect of being a foreigner and something that can be hard to stomach after a long, unbroken period of time in China — so Peter escalates by tossing back some sarcasm about “foreign devils” and the like, effectively demanding what he considers to be fair treatment, provoked (I imagine) by months of minor slights and alienation. A crowd of Chinese onlookers forms, boxing Peter and his friends in. Things begin looking dangerous, since onlookers can instantly become a mob. They struggle to break out of the circle and run.

I found that passage of River Town really powerful, because it brought to mind a confrontation I experienced in high school. While traveling in an unfamiliar city (perhaps soon after we arrived in Beijing?), our gaggle of foreign students stopped in an urban city park for a brief respite. While wandering around we found a place where you could rent motorized children’s vehicles — like Chinese Power Wheels cars — and a bunch of students jumped in to try it. Our program directors and tour guides were not nearby. While tooling around in these cars, one student decided to sit on the hood of a car while another student drove it. This turned out to be too much for the little car and its engine died. The man renting the vehicle angrily demanded a bunch of money to replace it. As a group, the students reacted slowly to the developing confrontation, being confused and uncertain. A crowd of onlookers formed. Things started looking mob-like. Eventually, one of the Chinese-American students acted very conciliatory and gave the man the money he wanted. We broke out and walked quickly away. As we were leaving, one of the students remarked that the man had already gotten the little car running again.

I’m not entirely sure yet what to conclude from these experiences, both the ones I’ve experienced personally and the vicarious ones I’ve read about. There’s something here about Westerners expecting and occasionally demanding personal justice while in China and that expectation slowly being undermined and occasionally running head-on into these incidents of confrontation. And the other part goes: you nearly always lose these confrontations, so you need to find an alternative way of dealing with perceived injustices, both the minor, daily slights and the bigger incidents.

I only wish I knew what that was.