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Windows to that mysterious world: My American experience

Discovering America through a hodgepodge of popular culture, highbrow and low, helps a young man connect with the real and the abstract, Raymond Zhou, columnist of China Daily, recounts his American experience over the past three decades. The following is the first installment.

My earliest impression of the United States was positively negative.

Back in the early 1970s, America was one of the bad elements, together with bourgeois and the "Soviet revisionism", that we were supposed to "struggle against". It popped up in slogans during mass parades and in limericks for children, preceded by "down with" and followed by "imperialism". It had a face, too, in cartoons with the eagle nose as the most striking feature. We also learned that American soldiers would put up a white flag in war without much provocation, hence the term "paper tiger".

Yet, to a child who had never been away from the small town in eastern China where I grew up, America remained vaguely abstract. Less than abstract. It didn't represent anything. It was just the other.

My second impression of America came almost a decade later. The occasional visiting professors from the US were the first flesh-and-blood representatives of that "other" country. I was not the type who wrangled an after-class Q&A session, so I knew them usually from a dozen rows of seats away. And they were invariably friendly and ready to crack a joke.

My serious contact with the US was initiated via the radio. During my college years, an evening ritual included several hours of tuning in Voice of America and its language teaching programs. A news show was tailor-made for people like me with slower-than-normal reading speed. I also got my first exposure to Mark Twain stories and Christmas carols this way. Sometimes a classmate with better reception would tape a show and share with the rest of us.

A jazz hour on the dial was met with resistance as none of us could make head or tails out of this "strange" music. Someone got a cassette of American pop songs. We devoured it as the lyrics were easy to decipher. It was not until years later that I learned they were hot tunes from the 1950s.

The earliest American movies available to my generation, during the late 1970s and early 1980s were just as haphazardly selected as the rest of my crash course in American pop culture. Most were second-rate titles few Americans had heard of. We were told China could not afford the expensive ones, but it turned out a blessing in disguise because we saw a lot of imports from other countries, particularly India and Japan.

My movie vista was not monopolized by Hollywood blockbusters. As a matter of fact, I was so ill-equipped with necessary knowledge that when I saw the first blockbuster from the US, I was utterly disappointed. It was Star Wars. I was expecting a serious film with social themes.

Likewise, an Oscar winner with racial discrimination as its subject matter sent people running from the theater because the Chinese title suggested a thriller. Such was my confusion about America's most popular cultural export that I'd laugh my head off if anyone suggested back then I'd write volumes and volumes on American cinema.

My only "systematic" approach to America and its culture was through its literature. I was an English language major and literary writings were the means to achieving language proficiency. Under normal circumstances language should be the means to the end, say, appreciating great literature. But I didn't know better. Anyway, I got to read Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Stowe, O. Henry, Mark Twain, etc.

The Scarlet Letter struck me as shockingly reminiscent of the "cultural revolution", which we had just suffered through. Call it witch-hunt or revolution, it has an eerily similar manifestation - mass hysteria, and it could happen any time, anywhere.

I picked Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as topics for research. How could one country produce two great poets that were almost the polar opposite of each other? I was curious. Years later I saw newsreels from the 1920s and awakened to the spirit of Whitman - the vast landscape, the boundless energy, the open-hearted embrace. To fully understand Whitman, one must step on American soil and mingle with its ordinary people. As for Dickinson, about which I wrote a book-length Freudian analysis, I still cannot figure out a trace of Americanism in her. She was more a soul sister of Li Qingzhao (1084-1155), China's pre-eminent poetess, both great observers of the mental horizon.

By the 1980s, the US was a dream that beckoned young Chinese. Not many could articulate what it stood for, but it must be something nice. An education on the other side of the Pacific was out of reach for most of us and information about what was happening there was by no means consistent or reliable. A magazine a tourist left behind, a tape received as a gift, or even a Sears catalog were used as windows to that mysterious world where everyone drove a car and every family had what we'd call a "villa".

From those tidbits of information, I, like many of my generation, gathered that Americans did not seem to work that much, yet they were fabulously wealthy. Racism seemed to be the only problem. African-Americans probably lived like "class enemies" of China of yore, hunkered down and threatened with beatings from the foremen.

As my study of American literature stopped at the early 20th century, my mental picture of that country was based chiefly on the 1930s murals with class struggle as the leitmotif. America was more a notion than a nation. We would use the little material we could access and build a framework upon which we simply fleshed out with whatever we had.

The image that came out of this process was a hybrid - America on the outside and China on the inside.

For example, my dad once told me Harvard University was surrounded by thick walls on all sides and no students were allowed to leave for a home visit during their years of excruciatingly assiduous study. Instead, they spent their days memorizing classics, waving and nodding their heads.

For him, America's best-known institution of higher education had to be a modern replica of an ancient Chinese school. Many also thought the American president was an emperor who wore a suit and a tie.

We didn't get the fuss about Nixon and Watergate (we all hold him in high regard because he was the one who first showed friendliness to us) but the Clinton sex scandal taught us something we could not learn otherwise - an American president does not enjoy half the privileges of a Chinese emperor. That was quite a revelation.

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