Wish Lanterns / China’s New Youth - by Alec Ash

ISBN: 195069156X
Date read: 2024-11-24
How strongly I recommend it: 7/10
(See my list of 360+ books, for more.)

Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.

20-something British author living in Beijing got to know six Chinese people his own age, and profiled them deeply here through age 30, through 2016. Feels almost like fiction, following each character’s inner and outer life, switching between the six people in stages. If you feel that wide cultural profiles are too broad, and miss the personal touch, this format and writing is great.

my notes

There are 400 million Chinese millennials, which is more than the total US population.
They have the most buying power and travel the most widely.
They are the driving force behind China’s urbanization, lifestyle reforms, and engagement with the world.
They are becoming the new backbone of Chinese society and will shape its politics in the near future.

When the children of this generation grow up, China will be unrecognisable all over again.

My focus is on Chinese born between 1985 and 1990.
They are the first generation of single children (a policy that came into effect in 1980 and ended in 2016).
Their parents and grandparents grew up in times when conformity was prized, when to be different was dangerous.
This generation is defined by its individuality.
They have the freedom to pursue the different lives.
This resulted in a diversity of subcultures.

The gulf between city and countryside still looms large.

You could belong to the ‘ant tribe’, commuting into the city from the outskirts, or to the ‘three haves’, with a flat, car and nest egg.

It is common in China for grandparents to raise a child while mum and dad work long hours in cramped city conditions, sending back money.

Nicknames are common in China, where the full name is too formal and a single character alone sounds odd unless duplicated.

The south of China can feel like a different country entirely from the north.
Differences in personality can be summed up by their respective cuisines:
Northerners quick-fry their meat and speak just as directly, with a toughness that is sometimes only skin deep.
Southerners braise, boil and stew, but a soft exterior can hide subtle and sharp flavours.

Hainan is the same latitude as the Caribbean.

All of those bands sang in English, which for Li Yan became the language of escape.

Young Chinese say there is a generation gap every five years (some have it as every three)

The two digits of your birth year is essential information, often the first thing out of your mouth after your name and home province.

The 80s has been likened by those who lived through it to coming out of the dark to be dazzled by the day.

Students at Beida were exposed to fresh culture and ideas - free to experiment with long hair and listen to jazz.

Politics isn’t something one can’t afford to care about.

North-eastern men have a reputation for being tall and tough.

China has even more Christians than it has Communist Party members. Estimates vary wildly but most put the number around 100 million.

The political spectrum is reversed in China: the left is conservative, the right is liberal.

China’s only democratic election, in December 1912, ended when the winning candidate was assassinated.
Some form of authoritarianism, meanwhile, had kept China functioning for millennia.

The word for “loyalty to your nation” - in Chinese, guojia, doesn’t differentiate ‘country’ from ‘state’ and includes the character for ‘home’.

Fenqing, the ‘angry youth’. By switching the first character to another with the same pronunciation, it became the ‘shitty youth’.

Leftover women: a deliberate campaign to match educated women with the millions of surplus bachelors.
Without wives, those men were a potentially restive threat to social order, and the true demographic leftovers.

As with most traditions it wasn’t taken too seriously but carried more weight with the elderly.

There are various tribes to identify with.
The ‘working grunt tribe’ (shangbanzu) or ‘urged tribe’ (beicuizu) are the nine-to-fivers pressured into conformity.
The ‘strawberry tribe’ (caomeizu) are nice to look at but soft inside, flitting from job to job and avoiding responsibility.
The ‘moonlight tribe’ (yueguangzu) spend their monthly wages shopping - a punning double meaning of ‘moonlight’ and ‘spend it all’.
The ‘bite the old tribe’ (kenlaozu) still live off mum and dad.
Almost everyone’s in the ‘rush-rush tribe’ (benbenzu),
But those who can’t hack it might join the ‘crush-crush tribe’ (nieniezu), named for a brief craze where stressed young workers took out their frustrations by crushing packets of instant noodles in supermarket aisles.

If the post-80s were on a conveyor belt from exams to college to work to marriage, the post-90s wanted to get off the track.
Their tribes were as often subcultures that marked them as nonconformists - making up for the lost youth of those who came before them.
They were the punks, skaters, cosplayers, graffiti artists.
The shamate youth (named for the English word ‘smart’) whose over-the-top hairstyles and outfits were somewhere between goth and Japan’s counter-culture Harajuku street: The metalheads and the skinheads.

If a visitor to Beijing doesn’t venture outside a square kilometre from the hotels near here (as sometimes happens) he or she might get the false impression that China is just like the West, or years ahead.

Inside the street entrance, a series of connected courtyards extended deep in an intricate maze of unmarked doors.
It was called a ‘big mixed courtyard’, with over thirty households squeezed into the same address.
If a package arrived, the delivery boy would just yell the recipient’s name until someone opened their window or pointed at a door.

The apartments were spartan and cheap, and tenants tended to be in either their twenties or their sixties.

With the piratic Beijing accent that adds an ‘r’ to the end of words.

Any foreign holiday in China is an excuse for young Chinese to party.

The only issue where major protests were given full licence was against Japan.

Since the late nineties, in part due to a drive to create more college places, China has had more university graduates than jobs for them.
Those who are gainfully employed still barely make enough to afford rent and noodles.

Almost all high-rises in Chinese cities have a basement, generally one to three floors deep.
Thousands have been converted into mazes of cramped flats, just enough space for a single bed and a suitcase.
Technically illegal to live in them but that is uniformly ignored.
One million people - mostly young graduates and migrant workers - live underneath the other nineteen million as a literal underclass.
There is a name for them too: ‘rat tribe’ (shuzu).

A favourite expression of anyone talking about marriage in China is mendanghudui: ‘the doors match, the windows fit’, meaning your partner should come from a background close to your own.

China has more students overseas than any other nation.
There are over 300,000 in American universities and more than 60,000 in Britain.

When American classmates talked to her, Fred came to realise two things.
First: no one knew much about China.
Second: everyone had an opinion anyway.
The same sense of American superiority seemed to underlie each conversation, along with the implicit question: why don’t you hate your country?

Overseas Chinese students every year choose to apply their new skills back home - not drain but gain.
Nickname for them: ‘sea turtles’, haigui, a punning play on the verb ‘to return’.

She admired many aspects of the US that China lacked: friendly strangers, trust in society, assurance of legal rights.
On the flip side there was a dynamism to China that she didn’t sense in the States, a drive and an upwards movement.
Both had a strong sense of exceptionalism.
Both wanted to be number one.
Both were obsessed by personal and national quests for money and power.
They were the same in opposite ways.

Every other word out of his mouth was ‘niubi’, a common slang that means ‘friggin’ awesome’ but translates literally as ‘cow vagina’.

Chinese New Year is a time to take stock.
Like Christmas it’s a natural break, a chance to reunite with family and eat far too much before beginning the next year refreshed.
Also like Christmas, as childhood magic fades the festival becomes less about you being treated by your parents and more about your parents getting to see you.
For the Uighurs it wasn’t their festival - they had their own, Rosa at the end of Ramadan and Corban at Eid al-Adha - and they went about their business as usual.

The character for fortune - fu - was tacked upside down.
The custom owed its origins to another homophone: ‘upside-down fortune’, fu daole, sounds the same as ‘fortune has arrived’.

China years are dog years: they fit more in.

There are few vestiges of antiquity in modern China, where the iPhone is better loved than the I Ching.
Taiwan, meanwhile, has since 1949 considered itself a legacy-holder of Chinese civilisation.
Uninterrupted by the upheaval of Communism, for many the island is where Chinese culture truly continued.
The traditional characters in books and on street signs are more faithful heirs to the first oracle bone pictograms.
The cadences of language aren’t infected by sloganeering Mao-speak.
The architecture is inspired by Chinese and not Soviet tradition.

The wedding ceremony began at exactly 10:58, as the digits 5-8 when spoken, wuba, sound (with a generous stretch of the imagination) like wofa, ‘I make money’.

China is supposedly a classless society - certainly a socially mobile one where you can transform your status by making enough money - but the real class divide is between rural and urban.

They would cross the river by feeling for the stones.

Shanghai is an international hub - a city that looked out to the West whereas Beijing looks inwards to China.

I (author) found the six subjects variously:
Snail in a World of Warcraft online forum
Lucifer at one of his gigs
Fred through her teachers at Peking University
Mia on a geo-location app as she lived near me
Dahai and Xiaoxiao through their wedding photographer.
All interviews were conducted in Chinese, as even if some of them could speak some English, we are different people in a second language.
Three years spent with people of my own age in their own language, much of it not ‘getting material’ but building trust and getting them.