Shah Angilee - Chinese characters: profiles of fast-changing lives in a fast-changing land

ANGILEE SHAH

I met with Megan Shank on the Upper East Side of Manhattan when we were making final revisions to this book. Over Darjeeling in delicate teacups, she explained compound annual growth rates and the ins and outs of an initial public offering. This quick lesson in finance was prompted by Ray Zhang, the founder of the car rental company eHi. Zhang had just told her that he planned to take his company public in the United States, and Shank realized that she needed to make some changes to her chapter.

It should not have come as a surprise: China's fast-changing lives don't slow down for book editors and contributors. We always knew that trying to pin down the stories of the protagonists of Chinese Characters would be an impossible task. The best we could do, we decided, was to narrate these lives as they were being lived in a fascinating moment in history. By the time this book reaches readers, we know, many things about the people in it will have changed.

When he initiated economic reforms in the 1970s, Deng Xiaoping envisioned prosperity as a bicycle for every household. Now Chinese citizens can ride a maglev train that breaks 250 miles per hour. The pace of change in China is so rapid, and the inequities and breadth of experiences so vast, that the human stories are unforgettable. Adam Hersh, an economist at the Center for American Progress, told me that what we are seeing in China is not newthe United States and Europe went through industrialization periods that parallel China's experience nowbut China's economic rise is, he said, the most rapid socioeconomic transformation in the history of human civilization.

Stephen Mihm, a historian of American economy and culture, explained further that China today is a lot like New York City in the mid-1800s, which began as a modest seaport and bloomed into a densely populated metropolis. In China, migrants are moving into cities, liberated from back-breaking farm labor. Some five hundred million people have been raised out of poverty since the 1980s, the greatest achievement in poverty reduction in the shortest amount of time ever. But like New York City's growth spurt, China's boom is not good news for everyone. In emerging economies, people's perspectives are skewed by where they stand. For some, like Ray Zhang and the artist-for-hire Chen Meizi, China's growth is an economic opportunity. For others, like Old Lady Gao and her son in their Beijing hutong, the boom has come with displacement and disenchantment. And for many, China's roaring economy has been a mixed blessing.

It is not just people's socioeconomic lives that are evolving. Identities in and around China are also being formed and reformed. As China takes greater strides into the rest of the world, trying to decide what constitutes Chinese for the purposes of this book was a challenge in and of itself. Is it a nationality, an ethnicity, a language? A film scholar once told me that in his field, they have begun to use the term Chinese-language cinema, instead of Chinese cinema, for precision's sake. How else could they distinguish between films from Taiwan or Singapore, or Chinese American films, often in Mandarin but not from the mainland? When Jeffrey Wasserstrom and I first began talking about this collection, we wrangled over what its boundaries would be. Could an expat or an immigrant teach us something about how people live in China today?

While I was waiting to board the plane that took me from my home in Los Angeles to New York, where I met with Shank, I got an e-mail from James Carter. His chapter's main character, the globalized monk Lok To, had passed away. There would be a wake on Saturday night and a funeral on Sunday in Queens. It just so happened that I was on my way to Queens, where I was to be a bridesmaid at the wedding of two Chinese American friends. After finishing tea with Shank on Friday afternoon, I took three trains to get out of trendy Manhattan and into Flushing. When I exited the subway an hour later, it was bright and humid. The sidewalks were spilling over with men and women carrying large grocery bags and students with giant backpacks. Pedestrians walked at varying speeds, sometimes slowly, maddeningly, arm-in-arm in the middle of the sidewalk. Vendors on the street side sold roasted nuts covered in caramelized sugar. The smoke mingled with the scent of seafood on ice and the sounds of fishmongers yelling their wares in Mandarin and Cantonese. Nothing could cover the smell of the pungent durian displayed by grocers under green and orange awnings. I had a half-mile to goand it would be slow goingdown Main Street to the wedding rehearsal in the Queens Botanical Garden. I felt as though I were walking down a boulevard in an Asian megacity. As I navigated the crowd, I was glad that, thanks to Carter, we could include the story of a monk from the Bronx in our China anthology.