More Chinese Than China

What’s more Chinese than China?

In my opinion, a lot of places – including Penang.

This is a bold statement for a guy with no formal education in Chinese history, language or literature.

However, I lived in Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand, visited China and am a multi-time visitor and fan of Hong Kong. I’ve read up on various aspects of Chinese history and culture. I’ve also been extremely involved in absorbing it when I have been surrounded by it.

The only problem is – what is Chinese culture anymore?

The Communist period and the Cultural Revolution rocked China. The China I saw and have come to learn about seems very disconnected to its past and lacks much of the richness of the culture it developed over millennia.

Meanwhile, I have often observed that overseas Chinese – those who left the empire and disbursed themselves throughout Asia – seem devoted to their Chinese culture and heritage. In some cases, this is so much the case that they don’t fully integrate into being part of the national cultures of the countries they inhabit.

Here in multicultural Penang, that seems especially so. Penang – and I suspect Malaysia in general – isn’t so much of a melting pot as it is a bowl of Chex Mix. Everyone is all mixed together, while remaining distinct.

Conlan posited that the lack of social controls and government drive to create a unified national culture has led to a mild undertone of competition and territoriality as people make proud distinctions between their ethnic groups.

Chinese here are Chinese and proud. Their homes and shops look Chinese, they use Chinese signage and they pray at beautiful, perfectly maintained temples.

Penang, like Singapore, is actually multicultural within its Chinese population. Immigrants came from numerous provinces resulting in entire groups who share a system of writing and some cultural commonalities while speaking dialects completely unintelligible to one another including Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka, Hainanese and Teochew.

Singapore has engineered systems to break down barriers and force integration, including teaching only Mandarin – which none of the Chinese immigrant populations there spoke – as the official “Chinese” language of Singapore. Malaysia, on the other hand, decided to let it ride. People can identify as they wish and speak what they want, just so long as they all know Malay – the official language of Malaysia.

The result is that within the general Chinese subculture of Penang, there are a host of additional subcultures – all proud and all holding strongly to their respective traditions and religious practices.

Walking down a street or alley in the center of Penang, the Chinese-ness is striking. It feels the way I once imagined China might be. Two and three story shophouses with beautiful colors, shuttered windows and ornate Chinese decoration line the streets which eventually lead to a Taoist or Chinese Buddhist temple complete with vermillion archways, dragons and gold calligraphy.

I found this also the case in Hong Kong where a quick turn off one of the city’s central thoroughfares that could easy be streets in London, leads instantly into the small, narrow, red lantern filled streets of my fantasy China. In Hong Kong, Chinese art and decor are everywhere. If you collect Chinese art or enjoy Chinese jewelry, it’s Hong Kong, not China you want to visit.

All this should come as no surprise given that some of China’s greatest talent and wealthiest families fled to Hong Kong during the Communist Revolution.

Even Singapore that pays only a cursory homage to culture, has a Chinatown and several other old neighborhoods that have that Chinese-ness I never found in China or Taiwan.

Taiwan. The most confused place of all. Taiwanese are in some ways self-appointed guardians of Chinese culture who care for much of the Chinese Imperial Collection that Chiang Kai-Shek smuggled across the strait as his Republican Army fled to Formosa. He may have lost the mainland, but he would be damned if he left those bastards the Imperial Collection.

Many of his loyal supporters including the upper-class of Republic of China fled with him. And there they and their offspring have stayed sitting ambivalently between awaiting China to become “normal” again and moving forward with building a real Taiwan.

This ambivalence and confusion has kept them from investing in Taiwan to as great an extent as they otherwise might. Buildings – especially anything built before 15 years ago – are largely cheap and haphazard. There’s no sense into sinking too much into a place that might be lost to war or which they might abandon as they go elsewhere. Yet, for many, the desire to be truly Chinese and the feeling of carrying the torch of a China lost remains.

Little if any Chinese history has taken place in Taiwan. So it has an empty disconnect despite many people who stay faithful to their traditions including traditional written characters. Taiwan lives in a strange valley between being as Chinese as they can be and following American and Japanese influences into a new – and somewhat soulless – modernity.

In all of these places, I have witnessed a desire to be Chinese – an upholding of Chinese culture – a sense of Chinese-ness that seemed to me greater and certainly more beautiful than I saw in China itself. The people of Penang have been separated from China for several generations at best and in some cases centuries. But they also remain ardently linked to their past, their culture and a place they still regard in many respects as their homeland.

It all makes perfect sense to me.

My friend Ziv in Israel doesn’t know a word of Yiddish despite having a Romanian-born mother and grandparents. His family doesn’t do much to celebrate Hanukkah the way mine did growing up. He knows only a few of the foods my family – like so many American Jewish families – considers essential to events and celebrations. They aren’t important to him.

As he so aptly concluded, “We don’t need all that. We’re all Jewish here. You have to work to be Jewish. Those things are ways to stay connected – they help you.”

So true.

But I have often wondered what Israelis will have of their past. In Israel, the history and culture seems to tap into the environment – right back to biblical times. They live among the reminders of the Second Temple and the places where the Children of Israel could go, but Moses couldn’t. It’s right there – across from the supermarket and down the street from the bus stop.

Only it misses everything that happened between the diaspora and when the early Zionists showed up in the late 19th Century – at earliest.

If you’re an Ashkenazi Jew who can’t be verklempt after a shandah and you can’t distinguish nachas from tsuris – maybe something’s been lost? Is your past chopped liver? Why am I asking? You don’t even know what chopped liver is.

Modern Israel has had to be tough to survive and driven to succeed. It’s not the most sentimental of cultures.

In my limited scholarship of Chinese culture, I’ve come to believe something similar has occurred in the Chinese world. The people of places like Penang and Hong Kong place a premium on traditions and observances – on art and decor. In a strange way, these people so far from China are the guardians of Chinese culture. Walking their streets, I see a nobility, beauty and richness. Penang has a soul.

And I’m a little verklempt.

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