My folks blazed into town last Monday from their vacation in Hokkaido. My dad only stayed a week, as he had a series of meetings across Asia and, my feeling is, was looking to get away from my mom a bit. The 2nd night they were in town I biked back from work and met up with them for dinner around our neighborhood. Though Gubei is quite the mecca of dining in Shanghai, on this particular evening my dad was looking for something convenient and spicy, and so we settled upon a small Sichuan restaurant along the Hongmei Road Pedestrian Street. Though I looked longingly at the new Simply Thai and Blue Frog, I am a good filial son and acquiesced.
20 minutes after ordering, having snacked on nothing but neighboring patrons’ comments on the ineptitude of the waiting staff and the long waits for food, our first entree arrived: 毛血旺, or as Chace calls it, “disgusting blood shit.” I quickly dug in with my chopsticks, only to discover the very unpleasant surprise of a long strand of human hair in the oily broth. I proposed to my folks that, since it was not super late, that we cut our losses and head to another restaurant. Of course, this was all to be preceded by a good verbal spanking of the restaurant boss, as is custom here in Shanghai. I beckoned for the manager to come to our table, where I was prepared for a tongue-lashing from my mother. Instead, my dad gently told him: “老板 (boss), we can see that you’re extremely busy today and are having a tough time satisfying all your customers, which is probably how we ended up this hair in our dish. How about you just give us the bill for what we ate so far, and we’ll come back another time when you’re less busy?”
I was stunned. I couldn’t help but imagine what would happen if either Lucy or Pei Pei were there instead of this seasoned-politico of a man who had been a model example of class and courtesy. No doubt Pei Pei would have whipped out one of her patented, sarcastically dumbstruck stares and Lucy would have revealed her amazing ability to rap a string of hysterical insults at double time. At no time would I have thought to refrain from attack and simply let the man down with what amounted to, at least here in Shanghai, a verbal bear hug.
I first read excerpts from Francis Fukuyama’s book “The End of History and the Last Man” when I was a sophomore at Berkeley in a class entitled “Peace and Conflict Studies.” His was a complicated argument that history as defined by the clash of ideologies was no longer relevant with the end of the Cold War, and that liberal democracy was going to be the way to go in the future. At the time, he was also aligned with the neoconservative school that greatly informed the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. Since then, Fukuyama has publicly declared that he no longer sees himself as a neocon, and in this week’s New York Times Magazine he writes a very engaging account of the neoconservatives and Iraq, which he very much calls a mistake. In conversations with my friend Jamie, he often brings up his disdain for critics of the war and the way they express their arguments, and how the media glosses over the many good things that are happening there as a result. Hey, I think it was great when people started to regrow endangered plant species on Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez wiped out a crapload of coastal vegetation, but if it were up to me I would rather have not had tons of oil spilled onto the beach in the first place. Fukuyama writes:
The United States has played an often decisive role in helping along many recent democratic transitions, including in the Philippines in 1986; South Korea and Taiwan in 1987; Chile in 1988; Poland and Hungary in 1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in 2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the overarching lesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can’t “impose” democracy on a country that doesn’t want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.
Sometimes, when you yell and scream and get angry for finding a hair in your “disgusting blood shit” dish, you may find yourself pissing off the manager or the waiter, and then having a few more unwanted things put into your dish that unfortunately aren’t as visible as hair. I think the key message here, after watching my dad treat the manager as another human being and not as an embodiment of evil, is that one can rarely get what one 100% wants through chest-puffing and asserting invisible, classist (or racist) rules of demarcation; the resulting backlash and resentment can really fuck you over down the road, whether you’re at a restaurant or invading a country. You can’t really change a people or a culture by being pissed at it and forcing it; you have to let the natural political and societal forces play out its course, as such. And though a few of my friends may disagree and say that here in China, one needs to act decisively to quicken the ripening of such Western values as democracy, etiquette, and decent customer service; I say that I will always try to prioritize nuance and savvy over brute force in the name of some neoconseravtive-like imaginary ideal (see benevolent hegemony). That is, until the next time a cab driver cuts me off on my bike and I am forced kick down his door, fling him from his seat, and then pee on his face as he lies quaking in fear in the shadow of my powerful, American weapon. Hoorah for liberal democracy in a communist world!
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