Stereotype.
My gf is going to give a presentation to a bunch of 8th graders in a small Michigan town about China and her experiences there. My first reaction when I heard about this, and being borned in China, was "don't just feed these kids stereotypes of China and the Chinese people." She agreed. But it got me thinking, what exactly are the stereotypes that Americans have about China?If you are a teenager that watches movies and sports, would it be Jackie Chan and Yao Ming? Do all Chinese people speak broken English with funny accents? Are all of them friendly if only sometimes puzzling, but physically gifted?
Or is China still the land of Terracotta soldiers, buried underneath two millenia of earth, each one embodied with a unique physical features and personality, but forever preserved in military formations, deadly and merciless? A land of dead philosophers and failed dynasties and ancient history?
Or do all Chinese people wear pointy hats like the ones you still sometimes find in cartoons, working the field of rice patties behind a water ox?
Or do you see China as a nation of bicyclists, where the rush hours in the morning and evening filled with tin-tins of bike bells and muddled coughs of motopeds?
Of course, if you have been watching Lou Dobbs every night on CNN, China may be a place where 1.3 billions of people are single-mindedly hell-bent on working for 1 dollar an hour to steal the good paying jobs that fun-loving Americans with high school diplomas used to expect.
Well some of these are really only stereotyped fantasies, but the rest are simply many facts of life in a country that is ever changing. The point was that my gf and I have very different views on what the true identity of Today's China is. Is it a nation where 800 million people still live in small rural towns and have to farm for a living, or a nation where the decadence and excess of its cities rival that of anyone in the world? I don't know.
But seriously, is it so easy to distinguish fiction from reality? Do you wonder what stereotypes that non-Americans have about the U.S.? McDonalds? Movies with killer robots fighting with an Austrian hero? Badly designed, highly unefficient automobiles? Land of freedom and liberty? Best schools and even better companies? JFK? Donald Trump? George Bush? Michael J... nevermind. We can laugh and cry about all these things, but they are all part of us. Our perception about ourselves are all shaped by our experiences, therefore our recognition about other's stereotypes about ourselves inevitably becomes a part of us. We aspire to some while simultaneously struggle to fight off the rest. See, stereotypes can be useful.
posted by hedgehog @ 12:23 AM
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