不是复杂

Good news, finally, on the visa front! I've been twisting in the wind trying to figure out how to get my 2 x 90 day visa extended without having to go back to the US (or at least know that I need to return to the US); everyone seemed to think there was a way to do it but nobody knew how. My friend R (who invited me to speak to her class on Monday) gets things done! Turns out the kind of visa I have is not available for more than six consecutive months. But I'll be in Hong Kong - which counts as abroad - in ten days, where I can get a new six-month visa for Jan-Jun 2015. "No guarantees," the official in charge said, but this looks like the light at the end of the tunnel. He's issued me an official request for an 180-day visa on behalf of the university, which I will present to the visa folks in Hong Kong together with a letter describing that my "fruitful collaboration" with Chinese colleagues is going swimmingly but will require just a little bit longer than anticipated. Assembling that letter, with appropriate signatures and seals (for the importance of seals in China check out the chapter on "Revolution" in Yu Hua's China in Ten Words), was entrusted to a postdoc who's become a friend and has been following the saga of Mark's visa. "I'm sorry it's so 复杂 (complicated)," I said. "不是复杂," he said: not complicated. Someone finally told us what to do!

My tribes

To my great pleasure, two of the students in Monday's class have taken up my invitation to get in touch. (In fact, both of them came to talk to me the day of the talk, too.)

One wonders if I dismissed theodicy as a universal challenge too quickly. (It was the powerpoint slide in the third picture below, "Do most people even have a theodicy?") But doesn't the long influence of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy demonstrate that the problem of evil isn't just a misshapen modern thing, what happens when you lose sight of the parallel problem of good - and that philosophy can do religious work? What’s more, if we agree that philosophy functions as religion does as in making the “suffering sufferable”, the similarity of philosophy and religion is at once illustrated. Maybe both are deeply rooted in the nature of human that always try to give an explanation about the chaos.

The other, a philosophy major considering switching to sociology, is familiar with debates about secularization and with the idea that contemporary "spirituality" is really not that different from the "religion" it claims to distinguish itself from - though not the American discussion. I sent him a link to a short article by Nancy Ammerman about her recent study Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes which I hadn't got around to reading myself. I've read it now. Great stuff:

What became clear in this research is that seeing the world through a spiritual lens is something that is created and carried in conversation — in places where people tell each other stories. When we talk with others we hear them speak of God’s presence in the world. When we name something out loud as a spiritual presence in our lives, it becomes so. Those conversations happen among the people I came to call “spiritual tribes” — circles of companions who tell each other sacred stories.

I don't know what either of them makes of the current spiritual landscape of China (though the latter said he knows many people who do yoga but don't think it's religious). Perhaps I'll find out: I'm meeting one of them for coffee on Friday!

Teaching vocation

Oh, I miss teaching! I had the great pleasure of addressing Fudan's Introduction to Religious Studies class this evening and, if I say so myself, I put on a pretty good and super-interdisciplinary show. I'm so used to the interdisciplinary gambit of religious studies that I take it for granted. But here it was news that I moved from theology to philosophy to sociological theory to lived religion - and then to the arts. Actually, it is quite a journey from Leibniz' Essais de Théodicée to Religion & Theater. Indeed, it's my journey over my now not few years in the field. (I'm thinking in Chinese: not few = 不少!) My kind host (who provided synthesizing translations after each slide) seems to have enjoyed the show, too. Perhaps I'll have more teaching opportunities in the Spring - and even a Chinese Religion & Theater adventure!

My town

Had the privilege of taking our visiting French scholar on a ramble through Shanghai today, and I think we did pretty well. We started at Dongjiadu church, walked past a bare-bones fabric market in the remnants of old Shanghai, then checked out bookstores on Fuzhou Road, before a peek at Pudong, noting a monument to military women behind the Three Self Patriotic Movement's "red cathedral" and, in the adjacent park, dancers practicing with fans. All of these are places I've been before, some in my first weeks here - great fun to thread them together like this.

Off the map

It invariably amuses people when I pull out my big all-Chinese Shanghai map: each leaf is the size of a letter, so it involves a lot of unfolding and I probably disappear briefly behind it in the process. Isn't 百度地图, like google maps on the cellphone, infinitely more practical? Maybe, but I like to see where places are in relation to each other, and it's nice to have a record, too. You can see that I've mainly been in the four leaves at middle right (the Fudan neighborhood is the upper right corner of the second leaf down on the right) but Shanghai stretches out in all directions. The map, which continues on the other side into Pudong, includes a lot - even Jinze - something it accomplishes through a kind of fish-eye perspective: dimensions at the periphery are compressed. And today I fell off the edge of it.

I was going to meet some anthropologists of religion near the new campus of East China Normal University, which is at the bottom of the third leaf on the bottom. I took the subway - line 5, my first time - to the nearest stop and looked for a bus along the main road eastward 剑川路. Down there, though, the buses don't have numbers but names and I hadn't noted which one I should take. Still, I assumed that most of the buses would be continuing on that main road, right? No such luck! When a bus finally pulled up to a stop I got in only to find it turn right and then on to the elevated highway south! Next stop ten minutes later in a sleepy country town! Thankfully a young man who spoke English helped me find a taxi - another ten minutes - and I was able to return to the charted world. I was relieved; the anthropologists were amused.

For goodness sake

I've been asked to speak in 宗教学导论, Fudan's equivalent of "Theorizing Religion," next Monday. Yippee! The instructor told me it's two forty-five minute lectures around a break and that I could talk about whatever I wanted. Picking up cues from our conversations I've proposed "theodicy and the theory of religion" for the first half and "religion and theater" for the second.

More easily said than done... but here's what I'm thinking. It's a bit of a great American novel but the fun thing is how, along with the kitchen sink, my old pash "the problem of good" crops up!

Part I
Theodicy and religion
(lots of Max Weber, including his claim that traditional China had no use for theodicy)
Two critiques of the idea that religion is primarily an answer to the problem of evil:
- "lived religion" finds that people are less concerned with coherence than this presupposes
- what about the "problem of good"?
And yet life throws disappointment, pain, grief and heartbreak at us. Maybe religion addresses these in different ways than philosophers think

Part II
Theater and religion
Intro: The Book of Job, philosophy or theater, scripture or ritual? Or all of the above?
The "religion and theater" question cracks open the standard views of both (at least in much of the US)
is religion at its worst no more than theater? is theater at its best like religion?
liturgy, play, community
enacting and engaging the problems of evil AND good through theater, and religion

Near and far

Today began with おはよう and ended with à bientôt! My Japanese friend finished up her visit here just a couple of hours before a dinner for a visitor to the university from Paris. I'm happy to report that, just as my Japanese remains intact despite this Chinese adventure, I was able to follow and even contribute some to the francophone evening. Pas mal!

The middle of the day had pleasures, too. In Chinese class (where, it is true, Japanese was interfering a little) the teacher had brought me two poems which we read together. Here's the easier of the two, with my very flat-footed translation:

远和近（顾城）

你
一会儿看我
一会儿看云

我觉得
你看我时很远
你看云时很近

Far and near (Gu Cheng)
You / Look for a while at me / Look for a while at the clouds
I think / Looking at me you're far / Looking at the clouds you're near

Then I had lunch with a theater person and coffee with a young sociologist who works on gender and family in China. Good to be reminded that watching a performance in solemn silence, without refreshment or convivial conversation with friends, is a westernism. And to learn that China's new families fit neither models of nuclear nor of "stem families" but are something fragile and new? From the theater person I also learned that movies have a different legacy, as they started as propaganda demanding undivided attention. And the sociologist also opined that "familism" was the closest thing traditional China had to a faith, a faith now irrevocably lost.

いろいろ面白ろかった！

Hidden garden

After a somewhat underwhelming day overwhelmed by tourists in fabled Hangzhou yesterday, we had a great day in Shanghai being tourists. The view along the 外滩 Bund promenade and across to Pudong really is impressive, and then, just a few minutes' walk later, to find yourself in the otherworldly pleasure garden of 豫园 Yuyuan was lovely. Why haven't I been before? Perhaps there's a certain self-effacement to Shanghaiers, who've told me Yuyuan is the best in Shanghai but still nothing much, I should go to Suzhou. I'm certainly going to Suzhou, too!

Updates/supplements to past posts

Discovered today that banners have multiplied at the place next to West Shaanxi Road subway station. And the China map including the South China Sea appears on the big globe under Pudong's Oriental Pearl Tower.

西湖

My friend H and I went to Hangzhou today, famous for its beautiful West Lake 西湖. The weather wasn't so good (brownish) but at least the crowds weren't as bad as they apparently get on weekends. We went out in a boat to an island which itself contains a small lake with an island at its

center. It all makes for great views even in faded watercolor colors. Watercolors? No, floating in a paper scroll where water and sky are one.

 Later I sought out a Daoist Temple which turmed out to be up a steep hill, and led to a viewpoint impressive even in the murk - check out the panorama below of the city, the core of an old pagoda, and West Lake with one of its long walkways. Can you imagine it all in green and blue? I confess I couldn't quite.

中国は初めて

It's fun to see Shanghai (and China) through the eye of my friend H, whose first visit it is. Where the subways remind me of Japan, they remind her of Jakarta! Indeed, what I've learneda little reluntantly to call "former French Concession" she sees as standard-issue Southeast Asian colonial, the street life reminds her of Asian places south, too. (Not South Korea, which sounds more Japanlike in her estimation.) Interesting! She gets to discover things I discovered, too, like the speed with which the old is swept away to make way for the new. On our way to the theater last night we noticed some rubble from a recently cleared area being cleaned up, behind a temporary barrier we probably weren't supposed to be able to see over. After the play, everything was gone - barrier, machinery, and rubble. そうきれいになくなった..., so cleanly dis- appeared, she mused. I completed the thought: ちょっと恐ろしい, a little terrifying.

京剧

The talent of this performance of "锁麟囊" (Unicorn-trapping purse) at the Shanghai Art Theater was too bright for my cellphone camera. But notice the throng of fans - mostly men - who've mobbed the stage with their cellphones for the curtain call! I've never seen or got Peking Opera before, but by the end I was starting to appreciate it. The enthusiasm of the fans sitting around us up in the peanut gallery, rippling in waves of delighted applause, was infectious. It reminded me of the diehards in the Stehplätze at the Staatsoper, and the guys shouting the performers' names at the Kabukiza.

I can't get started with you

心配でしたよ、すごく。わたしは中国語が強よくなればなるほど、日本語を失ってしまわないかと。When I was learning Japanese it eroded my French in such an unnerving way - I'd start a simple sentence in French and be unable to complete it, totally paralyzed - that I thought I might only have capacity for one foreign language at a time. As my Chinese gets off the ground will it be sayonara nihongo? Perhaps not!

My friend H has been here most of a day, and I've been nattering on in Japanese without too much problem (to the amusement of Chinese bystanders). At two kinds of juncture, though, I sense that same paralysis approaching. The first is when a very ordinary word won't come to me - the Chinese word just squats there and won't let anything else through. That happened with the word twenty, whose Japanese I suddenly couldn't remember for the life of me or even reconstruct.

The second is more basic still - I can't get a sentence started because I'm thinking the Chinese sentence, whose structure is different; indeed I can't recall how to start the sentence in either language! That happened a few times as I tried chatting to myself in Japanese in preparation for H's visit; I find I need to leap into a sentence already in motion, since the starting point to speaking in Chinese won't disclose itself to me. It sounds odd, I'm sure, but I can get off and running if I can jump into a multisyllabic phrase like なかな出来ない or 思ったほど難しくない. Still I got stuck trying to say I had two slices of bread for H's breakfast and was reduced to English! 恥ずかしい and 不好意思了!

I suppose I ought tbe rejoicing that Chinese got into my system enough to cause such problems, huh!

(Picture above: the smog-reddened moon reminded H of the 日の丸.)

Bad air day

Ugh, I get my first visitor from overseas and Shanghai gives us the worst air yet - that's the view out the window at 8am! I hope it's just Shanghai factories making up for the hundreds closed so the APEC meeting in Beijing has blue skies, but I've also been told that November is when Shanghai gets bad...

Went with my friend B to see Kara Walker's "A Subtlety" in the soon-to-be-razed Domino Sugar factory in Williamsburg. Visitors (we waited in line 40 minutes) were encouraged to take photos and send them to a website assembling a 3-D version of the sugar sphinx, but visitors are also all over these pictures. They're all over most of what I've read online about it, too, usually disdain, disgust and disbelief at the inappropriate reactions. But what would be an appropriate reaction?

I found myself moving in the same direction of discrediting others. "What do they tell their kids they're seeing?" I wondered about the parents of young children there. But what would I say - to a child or an adult? This is what slavery looks like?

To live in China in the early years of the twenty-first century was to witness a spiritual revival that could be compared to America’s Great Awakening in the nineteenth century. The stereotype of the Chinese citizen content to delay moral questions until he was car-and-home-equipped looked increasingly out of date. The more people satisfied their basic needs, the more they uncovered the truth, the more they challenged the old dispensation. For new sources of meaning, they looked not only to religion but also to philosophy, psychology, and literature for new ways of orienting themselves in a world of ideological incoherence and unrelenting ambition. (308)

I'm enjoying Evan Osnos' book Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China (FSG), whose final section is called "Faith." (The first two are "Fortune" and "Truth.") Osnos was the China correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and then The New Yorker for eight years, and those years gave him the chance not just to talk to people in all walks of new Chinese life but to witness continuing changes in the culture. He wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in May explaining why he wasn't permitting a Chinese edition: the publisher found many of his interview subjects too sensitive. Having nearly finished the book I can see the publisher's concern. (Notice it's not the government censors but publishers self-censoring to avoid censure.) Indeed, I'm surprised that he requested Osnos only rewr

ite a fourth of the book! The power of the whole comes from the interweaving of celebratory and disturbing, and its upshot is that China, restless as it is, holds together better than Osnos would have thought.

The most difficult part of writing about contemporary China is capturing its proportions: How much of the story is truly inspiring, and how much of it is truly grim? How much of its values are reflected in technology start-ups and stories of self-creation, and how much of its values are reflected in the Great Firewall and abuses of power? It is tempting to accept censorship as a matter of the margins — a pruning that leaves the core of the story intact — but altering the proportions of a portrait of China gives a false reflection of how China appears to the world at a moment when it is making fundamental choices about what kind of country it will become. ... To produce a “special version” that plays down dissent, trims the Great Leap Forward, and recites the official history of Bo Xilai’s corruption would not help Chinese readers. On the contrary, it would endorse a false image of the past and present.

A complete translation of Age of Ambition is appearing, in Taiwan, so Osnos' sophisticated story will finds it way. But the proposed one-fourth-rewritten version intrigues me. Perhaps the editor knew what he was doing - knew how much obviously contentious material would have to be pushed aside in order to allow the book to appear, perhaps with its argument intact. Or, on the other hand, knew that changing the right one-fourth of a nuanced account could disable it. As Osnos writes in the book, censorship works even when people know it's going on; even when they know they're not getting the whole story it's too much trouble to track down the rest of the story each time.

中南海

What does China look like, on a map? Once upon a not very long time ago, it looked like this - here laser-carved inside an old temple pillar by Ai WeiWei (at his big show at the Brooklyn Museum earlier this year). But I've been seeing a different shape here. When I search for something on Baidu maps (百度地图) it first shows the big view above before snapping to the more local query, a third spur claiming most of the South China Sea. I saw this aquatic lobe also on a commemorative globe at Fudan from 2009. (Another.)

非常道

I didn't take this nice picture of Daoists priests doing their thing. It's from the new Norton Anthology of World Religions (reviewed in today's New York Times), which clearly aims to be the gold standard for the ubiquitous World Religion courses taught throughout American universities. I'm curious to see it - the Norton Anthologies tend to be excellent - but my first reaction is bemusement at a new canon of "major, living, international religions": Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This isn't the occasion to wonder about the monotheisms (two of them are incontestably "major" and "international"); I'm amused that Taoism has won out over Confucianism as the "world religion" from China.

"World religions" is a fraught category. Tomoko Masuzawa's The Invention of World Religions: or, How European universalism was preserved in the language of pluralism (2005) - mentioned in the Times review! - pretty much represents the view of my generation of American religious studiesists. As if "religion" hadn't problems enough already!

But the world religions are alive and well, and perhaps serving their own important function as a staple of American college education (since religion can't be taught in public schools), and bumper stickers. Houston Smith's The Religions of Man (now The World's Religions) ruled the roost for almost half a century with accounts of:

Hinduism

Buddhism

Confucianism

Taoism

Islam

Judaism

Christianity

The Primal Religions

Two decades ago, Arvind Sharma's Our Religions updated things but stuck with Smith's seven world religions (and a slighly more sensible order, at least on the monotheistic end):

Hinduism

Buddhism

Confucianism

Taoism

Judaism

Christianity

Islam

Often you get just five - two Indian and three monotheistic. The religious tradiitons of China don't really lend themselves to "world religion" treatment, though Max Weber already made a heroic effort with his Konfuzianismus und Taoismus a century ago.

I've long enjoyed showing students John Bowker's World Religions: The Great Faiths Explored & Explained (2006), which is more generous still:

Ancient Religions

Hinduism

Jainism

Buddhism

Sikhism

Chinese and Japanese Religions

Japanese Religions [=Shinto]

Judaism

Christianity

Islam

Native Religions

This is a hodgepodge but a good one, if you ask me, showing already in the heterogeneity of its categories (historical, national, native, -isms, and the lone -ity) that "religion" isn't one thing. Does it matter? Of course! I wonder what my Chinese religious studies colleagues think about it. I'll have to ask them!

城隍庙

This morning I thought it's two months in Shanghai and I haven't been to the City God Temple! That's been remedied and I've no regret about having taken my time to get there. It's a themepark of vaguely historical looking shopping arcades, like Nanjing's Confucius Temple, though on a grander, more vertical scale. Did olde Shanghai ever look like this?
There are still remains of the Old City nearby, though going fast.