Thinking Chinese and being Ugandan

The team being introduced by a host at one of the parks just before their performance.

What you need to know:

Dancing in china. After living for four years in China, the writer got over his cultural shock and started to live life both as a Ugandan and Chinese. He shares his experiences.

The character Su Lee from the classic Mind Your Language, and kungfu film stars I watched growing up (Jackie Chan, Chow Yun Fat, Bruce Lee, Sammo Hung, Donnie Yen, Jet Lee, Yuen Biao) influenced my primary impression of China as a nation of Chairman Mao zealots and fierce ambassadors of their heritage.

My stereotype thinking never evolved much until I first visited in 2009. But four years intermittently touring China while working as an African-cultures dancer, learning Mandarin Chinese, and experiencing the different Chinese ethnicities and cultures firsthand has stripped the romanticism from my previously uninformed views on China.
Though obviously not enough for me to claim expert knowledge of the culture aspects that constitute China’s 5000-year history, those years showed me eye-popping differences between China and Uganda, and oppositely gave sharper focus to curious similarities.

The Concept of “Face”.
Mandarin Chinese describes embarrassment as having lost face (diu lian le), and being shameless as not wanting face (bu yao lian), and giving or seeing face (gei /kan mianzi) is the one for honoring or respecting someone. Simple in theory, there are extremes like the boy who sold his kidney for 2000 pounds so he could buy an iPhone and iPad.
I quizzed a Chinese friend who had travelled extensively in Africa regarding why face can be such a life-or-death issue. Her response? “Face’s isn’t copyrighted to China. I’ve heard introductions that go ‘This is Anita, she drives a Surf, works at a bank and her children are studying abroad’. Really, show me where the difference is”.

The little sip for business’ sake.
Regarding the face concept, a personal application for me was the obligatory drink-up at a lunch or supper organised specifically to talk business. An absolute teetotaler before China, I had to ganbei (bottoms up) whenever I was caught off-guard or plainly forgot to carry the bottle of pills I used to beg off from drinking down the tot which is a crucial part of the Chinese deal-making process.

In practice, you would be cajoled, coaxed, or “fined a shot” for some hastily made-up charge, anything went as long as you swallowed whatever amount of drink that is called sake, offered. What initially felt like selling out for monetary gain, my principle on consuming alcohol was again put in perspective by my Chinese friends. As they explained, if I was too self-centered to accept even one sip for the boss’s sake, would I really expect any consideration to come my way when I wanted to do business with the boss?

Of weddings and daytime fireworks
Fireworks at weddings were initially a sore point for my Ugandan sensibilities which are accustomed to fireworks at events like New Year’s Eve, or at concerts and mega church dos.
Originally to chase jealous spirits away from the couple, the duration and volume of the fireworks is now one indicator of how moneyed or not the wedding is.
Extremly loud fireworks for the well-heeled, fewer and less powerful ones for the putongren (common people). Not as annoying is the comparatively hassle-free wedding organisation and even shorter receptions.

Instead of the “begging meetings” we now use to make celebration events happen, a hongbao (red envelope) sealed with one’s contribution to meeting wedding costs is given at the entrance to the reception hall.
We performed at a wedding in Shaanxi, where two hours were enough for dinner, speeches, the guests receiving their gift packs from the couple, and the obligatory fireworks display which continued unabated for 15 minutes.

No Sunday fun day
Our contractual work was always in amusement parks like Beijing Happy Valley, and Baiyangdian Island Park in Baoding. Our experience with Ugandan troupes was that paying crowds mainly appeared for the Sunday family shows. Midweek shows never attracted people as many or as enthusiastic.

Thus we marveled at how, rain or shine, weekends or not, public holiday or not, we always had large audiences, even in parks considered backwater by Chinese standards. In Qinhuangdao’s Yesheng Dongwu (safari park), for three months we never had a day off because the audiences just kept coming. Our pleas for one met no success, as it had no business advantage to both the park and our boss if we dammed the stream.

The Price of a foreign face
Like some parks, Yesheng Dongwu made its money from tourists taking photos with the waiguoren (foreigner) dancers. We initially thought our agent too optimistic she said our salary and return tickets would be realised from those sales. She was right on the money.
Each person appearing in the photo paid 20yuan (Shs8,000 ) per print, or 10yuan if they shot using their own camera. Thus a family of five adults and one baby paid 100 yuan(Shs40,000) for one print, and 20 yuan for every extra print they ordered.

In such parks, our performances merely served as curtain raisers for the photo sessions. For a typical 10-hour day, on average we did three five-minute shows every hour, with photos taking up the time in-between.
While in Uganda such a business would likely fail in its infancy, in China it has become standard park practice that in parks like Happy Valley, I continually refused money from tourists whose resultant glee was so visible it amused me no end.

Foreigners behaving badly
As exotic as we waiguoren seemingly are, I respected that China generally tolerates no bad behavior from foreigners of whatever stature. A Brit who raped a girl on a subway, and a Russian cellist who put his feet up on an old woman’s headrest and then insulted her when she complained inspired “the 100-Day Crackdown” which started on May 15 2012.
It was a campaign to weed China of foreigners with questionable visa issues, and the ‘floating ticket citizens’ (tiao piao ren) who have neither passport nor address, despite being obviously non-Chinese.
Sweeps and spot-checks were conducted by Chinese police in areas with high numbers of foreigners.

Contrast that with Uganda, where a certain “Ugandanised” foreigner I know has for years driven her DMC without getting stopped even once by the traffic police, even to merely ask for her non-existent driving permit like they do the rest of us.

The flag-raising at Tian’anmen Square
On a Monday morning in July 2009 I witnessed with admiration and envy as military honour guard executed with much decorum a tightly-choreographed march while carrying the Chinese flag across a temporarily-blocked Chang’an Avenue to hoist it on the flagpoles at Tiananmen Square.

I watched fascinated as at the split second the sun appeared behind them, they unfurled it. Literally in surround sound, the mostly Chinese tourists /pilgrims hemming me in sang along as the Chinese national anthem came over the installed speakers.
I admired their fervor because it was not a national holiday, and yet about 10,000 citizens mixed in with the usual busloads of foreign tourists had braved the dawn drizzle to watch the ritual which is accompanied by a military band on the first day of every month.
I was envious because I never imagined a similar ceremony at Kololo national grounds would evoke even half the patriotism the crowd’s presence personified if the dates were not January 26 or October 9.

Inland tourism
The crowd also showed me too how being inward-looking can sometimes be good for a country’s tourism.
Four years after the 2008 Beijing Olympics for which they were constructed, the Bird’s Nest and Water Cube daily continue to attract hordes of tourists.
Remarkably, most of them are Chinese, some coming provinces as far flung as Kunming (Kyotera, if Beijing is where Gulu is).
There is also an inland travel mania on the weeks preceding the China National Day and International Labour Day celebrations which start October 1st and May 1st respectively.
It is partly the result of the government lengthening these holidays to week-long festivities.

The idea was to encourage the Chinese to spend their bank savings, the world’s largest, in order to boost the economy. Hence known as ‘the holiday economy’ (jieri jingji), it earns super-profits for the tourism industry while creating attendant problems like traffic congestion, plus overbooking and overcrowding at tourism and entertainment venues.
The successes like more and higher-paid gigs for entertainers like us, and the ‘purchase headaches’ like how finding a train or plane ticket almost becomes gambler’s luck, are things I wish Uganda achieves in my lifetime.

Later, longer and fewer
In 1974 China incorporated birth control into its economic program. What began as the wan xi shao (Marrying late, waiting longer between births, and having fewer children) suggestion became the highly controversial one-child policy (yitaihua jence) in 1979.
Working in tandem, both policies have received acclaim as necessary interventions for the world’s most populous nation and a factor in China’s current economic prosperity. Equally, they have garnered criticism for state interference with women’s fertility and reported cases of forced abortions.

In discussions I told Chinese friends about Hajji Abdul Nadduli, who back home was cheerleader of the opinion leaders encouraging Ugandans to have larger families. When tasked to compare the standard of life of China’s mostly single children with those from “football team” families, I grudgingly acceded that mostly fewer are better.

The Middle Kingdom’s little emperors
Naturally, that conversation graduated to xiao huangdi (little emperors), the colloquialism coined to
describe the spoiled brats who are a direct side-effect of the 1979 one-child policy. Unlike previous
generations, the ‘onlies’ have no siblings to share and compete with.
Thus they easily get the undivided focus of the so-called ‘4–2–1 indulgence’: four grandparents and two parents indulging one child. In urban areas, in particular, where the one-child policy is most
strictly enforced and where income has risen most sharply, parents are showering such children with
love and money.
The result is an entire generation of children who, because they are also equally pushed by their

‘tiger mothers’ and ‘wolf fathers’, are as higher-achieving and confident as they are egocentric and most likely to denounce the filial piety Confucianism made part of traditional Chinese culture.
To even things, I played and interpreted Ngenda mu Kyalo (Looking for a Villager Boyfriend) and
Njagala Mpase mu kyalo (Looking for a Villager Wife) to show that in Uganda, townsfolk are increasingly of the belief that in rural areas where the relative absence of nuclear families and elitist
upbringing is where well-adjusted spouses are more likely to be found.

Career women and kept husbands
Some female xiao huangdi may outgrow their forever-young psychological makeup to become nüqiangren—strong, career women whose success in originally male-dominated professions is a mixed fortune.
Greater financial and intellectual independence means no absolute reliance on men for social validation or financial security.

But it also means they are the least marriageable, since few men want to be kept husbands a.k.a ‘eaters of soft rice’ (chi ruan fan), the description for those who either earn a lower salary or are in lower positions than their wives. Discussing the subject with my Chinese buddies, we concluded it is seemingly a worldwide phenomenon that on lists of the types of women to avoid when seeking marriage partners, nüqiangren with their successful careers and high education usually come out tops.

The China-Uganda epilogue
Our differences with China are several. Their civilisation is much older, and the country’s size and population amplifies their every success and challenge.
It is a nation of money-worshippers, but in their case it is not leading to ritual murders and moral corruption so ingrained as to be a national character the way “Nigerian” (unfairly) denotes conman.

Families of three with five cars between them exist alongside those who literally lack two coins to rub together.
But China is called the new America because “the Chinese dream” means the bowing beggar can fairly work or study his way up the ladder. Hopefully, in time the Uganda dream will have similar possibilities.