George's Guide to Understanding Chinese Culture

Step 1: Be Chinese
If you’re Chinese, congratulations! By dint of blood and tradition, you understand Chinese culture implicitly and are in a position to constantly remind those who are not Chinese that there is 5,000 years of it.

Note: 5,000 is a conservative estimate. There is mounting evidence that Chinese culture actually caused The Big Bang.

Step 2: Give Up
If you’re not Chinese, abandon all hope. No matter how long you live in China or how many books you read, you will never understand Chinese culture.

Sure, Chinese people might be able to grasp your country’s primitive, flash-in-the-pan culture, but how can your feeble foreign mind ever hope to fathom 50 centuries of history?

Perhaps your time would be better spent studying one of the lesser cultures, like Rome or Japan.

Step 3: Acknowledge Its Supremacy
If you’re a foreigner and insist on effing that which is ineffable, grab a pen.

The first thing you need to know is: Chinese culture is superior to any culture that has existed or will ever exist because it is older, and older things, by definition, have more culture stuffed in them. Thus, Chinese culture is the best.

And even if some other civilization is older, they don’t count because they haven’t existed continuously. What does “continuous” mean? Now you’re asking too many questions, which shows that you don’t understand Chinese culture after all. How disappointing.

FACT! Questioning whether Chinese culture is the greatest means you don’t understand Chinese culture.

Step 4: Try in Vain
Many foreigners are under the mistaken impression that you can understand China through experience or by learning empirical facts. You fools.

Something like that might work for an ephemeral Western culture. For example, everything about British culture can be learned by watching Hamlet, French culture by visiting the Louvre, American culture by shooting people with guns, and so on.

But Chinese culture is exceptional. To even have a shot at understanding the essence of Chinese civilization, one must memorize nothing less than the Four Books and Five Classics, the Four Great Classical Novels, Three Hundred Tang Poems, and the lyrics to every Jay Chou song.

Of course, most Chinese people haven’t read, much less understood, those books, but they don’t need to! They’re already Chinese, which, if you’ve been paying attention, is all it takes.

DID YOU KNOW? On average, a six-month-old Chinese fetus understands Chinese culture better than most foreigners.

Step 5: Surrender
Let’s say, hypothetically, a foreigner masters the Chinese language and can comprehend the intricacies of Chinese culture. Even then, he will never be able to convince a Chinese person of anything. The Chinese interlocutor can always say, “You don’t understand. You’re not Chinese.”

It’s a bulletproof defense. Until the day you can make yourself Chinese through magic, you’ll never win. So take my advice and submit to the overwhelming force of Chinese culture, a culture that will continue on, forevermore, until the universe suffers a cold, lonely heat death. And even then, who’s to say that Chinese culture wasn’t responsible?

If, as a foreigner, you want to prove that you understand Chinese culture, the only way is to pretend that you know nothing. Whenever a Chinese person asks you a question, say you don’t know. When asked for an opinion on China, say you have none.

When asked about a historical figure or cultural legacy, act dumb and listen to them explain it to you for an hour.
Embrace your own ignorance and tremble before China’s all-encompassing majesty. That’s what Chinese culture is all about.

Photo: Free Great Picture

 

Comments

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Guest wrote:

Oh, gee, it's satired -- thanks Dankfart! The smartest man in the room speaks again!

LOL...Dankfart! I just cracked up.. I guess the 12 year old in me is alive and well!

mike

Quote:

Well, I don't know how many Chinese people one has to speak to in order to put things into perspective and come up with a guide to understanding the Chinese culture as such but It is interesting to see how it is interpreted despite the fact of it being satirical.

I'm not quite sure about your tone here. You appear to show some disagreement of this article while being aware that this article is meant to be satirical.

I find myself fond of this article and I don't think much political or contextual debate are helpful. It's just a satirical and funny piece to read and it means to be entertaining so nobody is disapproving anybody. So why people overreact as if it's some serious slander to a culture? 

"China has opened up for only a few years and we need time" blablabla. 

Yawn. Can we just read the article, have some fun---"yeah sometimes people are like that"---and not feel hurt?

 

Quote:

As a Chinese myself, there are times when I hear friends and colleagues claim that Chinese food being the best, given the fact that it is an opinionated conculsion when they haven't sampled foods from other parts of the world. China has been open for years and please allow us some time for the "mind" to catch up and by then diversity will be celebrated.

I think it's sort of an educational problem. Kids are taught in schools about the superiority of Chinese culture so they adapt everything they see in the future of their lives into this mind set.  

as a Chinese, i think John King Fairbank's《Chinabound:a Fifty-year Memoir》is a good book for ppl who wants to know something about China, even for Chinese. instead of the bla-bla of this "guide".

Guest wrote:

Hard to accept the fact that China has only "30 to 40 years" of exposure to foreign cultures when it's not true. More like 2,000 years if the Mongols, Vietnamese, Romans and a bunch of other barbarians qualify (not to put too fine a point on the article).

 

Influences are likely to make no difference at all when you go beyond say 3 generations, or let's say 75 years.

 

Books by current and former Beijinger staffers

http://astore.amazon.com/truerunmedia-20

Yawn and yawn.

The article is satire. The author, George Ding, is a Chinese-speaking, Chinese-American. Everybody relax.

I've seen this type of article written by dozens of frustrated foreigners. And it turns out that 90% of foreigners still refuse to even try to immerse themselves in the local culture. Still refuse to learn Chinese. Still refuse to accept the fact that this is a country where exposure to foreign cultures has thus far only been happening for 30 to 40 years. Still fail to see that such a society is still transitioning from autocracy to one that accepts differing views and new ideas. If you're in China enjoy the fact that you're living in a country that is experiencing one of the most fascinating economic miracles in human history. Yeah, nothing is perfect here and there's a lot of room to improve. But perhaps that means that there are some opportunities for advancement. And if you're not happy about the situation and can't seem to take this experience as an adventure then just f&@$ing leave.