Dragon-i. Around One thirty in the morning.
Ran into my cute little Swiss friend Jeremy who wanted me to meet his new friends, one of them having a birthday that day.
He held on to my hand as we navigated through the crowd of Armani suits and martini glasses. I was introduced to three girls. Nicely dressed. Quite attractive.
“Oooh, so you’re the Birthday Girl! Happy Birthday!”
--Just being my bubbly self.
She forced a polite smile and nodded.
“We’re going to Volar,” she said to Jeremy.
“Let’s go together!” Jeremy said to me. “Do you know where it is?”
“Yeah, but sorry, my friends are still here, I think I’ll just stay. But you should go! You’ll love it, that’s where all the models and hot girls hang out. Like these girls.” I was totally serious.
But that’s when the attack started.
“Yeah I know we’re hot.” Said one girl, not entirely jokingly.
I smiled.
Jeremy continued to convince me, “Come Come!”
“Sorry, my friends are here and….”
Yeah-I-know-we-are-hot-Girl stared right at me, raised her hand halfway and waved, “Bye.” She said curtly before I even finished my sentence, not smiling.
I tried to continue, “Because I haven’t hung out with them for awhile so…..”
“Bye.” She cut me off again, her head tilted sideways a bit.
“Bye.” She said for the third time.
I was appalled.
She turned to her friend and said, “我係唔係好寸呀?" --which roughly translates to "Ya' think I was being snotty?"
May be I didn't have the right handbag, may be I wasn't well-dressed enough, may be I was not pretty enough, may be they didn't like how I'm friends with Jeremy, or may be they were just plain miserable people. Either way, I don't think any stranger has ever managed to upset me so much. And the worst thing was, they kind of made me question if it really was my problem.
My friend S asked why I got so upset, "Hong Kong is full of girls like that." She said.
“No way. I’ve never met anyone like that.” I kept complaining to S on our way back home.
As upset as I was though, by the time I got home, I still had to do my readings for a course I just started taking, Cultural Policy and the Media, taught by Taiwanese writer Lung Ying-tai, also former Commissioner of the Taipei Department of Cultural Affairs. The first class was to begin at 2pm on the following day.
So at 5:30 in the morning, with my mascara and low-cut top still on, I find myself flipping open my reading materials at the kitchen table.
“Culture. Why?
--Lung Ying-tai”
September 1999, she said, she first stepped into the Taipei City Council as a bureaucrat, beginning a 4-month long consultation period. Everyday, she'd sit in the City Council, questioned by the councilors. Most of them would howl into the microphone; and her ears buzzed. She'd stumble back into her office everyday, semi-unconscious, and continue to read documents until midnight.
By the end of September, things were more pressing as the budget must go through three readings before it can be passed, before policies can be carried out in January. The City Council that had been hollering away for four months, always very dramatically dragged things on until the very last days of December, to demonstrate their commitment to defending the public good. Then, questioning of the budget would have to go around-the-clock during those last days, starting from 2 pm, and continuing on for 24 hours, even 48. During the process, the 52 councilors would take turn one after another, they could go back for a nap, attend a banquet, before coming back to the meeting again. The Commissioners of various departments however, were not allowed to leave even for a second.
“I was sitting in a corner of the large hall, the rain tapping against the windows, the window pane rattling. A chill went through my spine.
It is on that kind of a wet, cold and demoralizing winter night, at the utterly ridiculous hour of three in the morning, that I heard “Commissioner Lung Ying-tai” being called upon to the interrogation platform to defend the Cultural Affairs Budget for the City of Taipei. A councilor who had just come back into the room, red-faced, looking a little buzzed from alcohol, howled, “Commissioner, you tell us, what is culture?”
Staring at the half empty council hall, three in the morning on a winter night, the Commissioner of the Taipei Department of Cultural Affairs spoke,
‘Culture? That is when you see just anyone approaching: his every gesture, his expression, his smile, his overall disposition. He walks by a tree, the branches hanging—does he breaks it and tosses it away, or does he bend over to walk through? A stray dog with spotty skin approaches –does he yield with sympathy, or does he kick it right in the stomach? When an elevator door opens –does he let others go in first, or does he pushes and shoves to get in? A blind person is standing next to him at the crosswalk, the green light comes on—does he give the blind man a hand? How does he brush pass other people? How does he bend over to tie his shoelaces? How does he take his change from the hands of the wet market vendor?
If he vocally talks about democracy, human rights and labour rights in meetings, in lecture rooms and on television, when he is in the private confines of his home, does he respect his wife and children? Does he treat the nanny or helper at home with respect?
When he’s alone, how does he deal with himself? All the teachings, principles—when no one is watching, how is he really like?
Culture is embodied in how a person regards others, regards himself, regards his natural environment. In a culturally deep and rooted society, people know how to respect themselves—they do not get swept along, and therefore they have “taste”; they know how to respect others—they are not dominating, and therefore, moral; they know how to respect nature—and therefore do not rob, and because they do not rob, they have sustaining wisdom.
Culture is the sum of taste, morals, and wisdom.’”
Instantly, I felt better.
And self-servingly I tell myself, they are afterall just, well, not cultured.
I really need to stop hanging out with the Dragons and the Witches.
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Postnote:
1. I suspect the word "文化" in this article, doesn't translate directly to "Culture", may be "Cultured", or "Civility" is a more accurate translation in this context? Or is it the relativism prevalent in the more multi-cultural West (the US at least), that makes the concept difficult to translate? I've found that Chinese people I talked to respond more to this article than Westerners.
2. In the original article, Lung Ying-tai used the relatively gendererless pronoun "他", I translated it to "him" for easy reading.
3. Anyway, the following is the original Chinese version.
