patience

It is said (by someone) that the advantage of trail running is that you are not stuck so much in your own thoughts as you are when you are pounding the concrete, since you must remain mentally alert to stones, tree roots, etc. and that this gives your mind something to play with as you run. Well, trail running is not really an option here in Beijing, given (as I’ve noted previously) that the entire city is being paved over. However, there is really no excuse for mental boredom here, either—as I’ve also noted before, running here provides its own set of obstacles. I particularly pondered this today as I ran my 10 miles in the Purple Bamboo Park. It is supposed to hit 90 degrees here today, so I headed out early (-ish, at about 9:30 a.m.) and the park was already jam packed full of people, probably also trying to beat the heat. It truly is a test of one’s patience to run or even sometimes just to walk here. It is a constant game of dodging people to avoid causing upset or international incident. For instance, there is the “little emperor” syndrome—six adults (two sets of grandparents and one set of parents) walking their only child/grandchild, all six abreast on the sidewalk, the child pondering this phenomenon Buddha-like in his or her stroller, still blissfully unaware of the pressures to be heaped upon him or her as the only realization of the expectations of six grown-ups. Or there are the crowds of people gathered around pigeons or ducks, feeding possibly the only wild animals some of them are likely to see in their lives.

My parents in Purple Bamboo Park:

I’m sure this has been written already to death by Max Weber and other observers of the religion-culture-society link, but I’m not sure it is accidental that Buddhism, with its emphases on patience and compassion, arose in crowded Asia (yes, I’m aware that it is more crowded now than when the Buddha was around). I know that being here is all too often a test of my own patience, as well as my social-science derived convictions of the structural causes of much of the human condition. (By that I just mean, greatly oversimplifying, that if one is rich, or poor, or gets into Harvard, or is a poor peasant with “low quality,” is not just determined by one’s own good efforts but is also a product of the pre-determined conditions of one’s birth and existence.) For instance, when I was in Beidaihe, the seaside resort town, for the May Day holiday this past week I was often greeted by “Hellloooo,” said as if I was on exhibit in some zoo of laowais. After awhile, this drove me quite round the bend, but I also tried to remember that many people here never see a foreigner in the flesh. (Beidaihe is another story, entirely. The high leaders spend much of the summer there and so a very large chunk of beach is closed off for their private use, complete with lush-looking bathhouses.)

In any event, such contemplation of the need for patience also makes we rather aware of the manifold contradictions in the Chinese zeitgeist (is that some sort of oxymoron?) these days. On the one hand, China has historically been, and still thinks of itself as, the “Middle Kingdom,” the center of the civilized universe. On the other hand, everywhere you go people are being told to be more “civilized” (often for justifiable reasons). Today in the park I noticed various posters promoting “Pledging civilized behavior for Chinese citizens traveling domestically [or abroad],” such as this one:



Who wouldn’t be confused about their national identity with these messages?