Week 8: "Homage"
The Marvelous and the Mundane:
On a cold October night in 1860, fire and ash came to Yuanmingyuan, the Old Summer Palace. Four thousand British and French troops spent three days going around the complex, sacking and looting everything not bolted down. Once they were finished, anything that could not be taken was put to the torch. Over a hundred years of history reduced to cinders, three hundred souls burned alive, and countless priceless historical artifacts stolen. Thirteen buildings survived the brutal assault, and for forty years they stood until the Palace was once again sacked and fully destroyed in 1900. Over the following decades, the marsh that surrounded the complex swooped in like a vulture, picking its carcass clean until only the bones of the once grand structures remained.
Despite everything, a great effort was made to preserve the site and keep it pristine. As modern-day Beijing rose up and around it, the complex and the marsh that surrounded it became time-locked, and the beauty that was once specifically reserved for royalty became open to the people. Children laugh and run around, parents follow wearily behind, couples find those ever-so slightly isolated benches, and vendors hawk at sweat-soaked visitors, promising some form of relief from the blistering heat. A chorus of frogs, cicadas, and ducks fills the air, and for a moment, it becomes hard to imagine that, a little over a century ago, this was the site of such mass destruction. Then you turn a corner and you see the ruins, and the reality of it all hits you at once. Beauty, history, and tragedy are all conveyed solely through the visual medium. Simultaneously solemn and awe-inspiring. Words alone cannot do the feeling of being there justice.
Before I was in China, I believed that spots like these were the places where I would stand out the most. In places like this, culture has a real weight to it, a heft or an importance, which, especially given the context of a place like this, would serve to highlight my distinct role as an outsider. However, after visiting these locations, I’ve found their importance had the opposite effect. From my perspective, one of the reasons places like this are so vaunted is because they clearly convey culture in broad strokes. There is no risk of something being lost in translation because the ideas are communicated entirely through observation/ This leads to tourists like me being commonplace rather than the usual slight oddity that I am elsewhere. It's as close to a clear understanding as I can reach with my (lack of) language skills, and that desire to gain a better understanding of the culture around me is conveyed by my presence. This sense of normalcy continues up to the end of the day. As I’m taking in the sights, I feel the pressure in the air drop, the clouds darken, and rain comes pouring down in buckets. A wave of color fills the horizon as umbrellas rapidly pop open while those of us without them rush towards buildings, awnings, and overhangs. For a moment, I feel as if I am simply part of the larger crowd, and although I was too preoccupied with being soaked to the bone to fully appreciate it, in hindsight, it was a nice moment.
Of course, this all raises the question of where was the place I felt I stood out the most? The answer may surprise you, but before we get there, some context is required. See, I love going to the cinema. Not just to simply watch new movies, but for the full experience. Sitting in that dark room, the full sound system, the massive screen that completely takes up your vision, the previews, the cheap popcorn, a soda roughly the size of a particularly small baby, and getting to hear people’s reactions to the film is its own kind of universal language. It's the kind of atmosphere and experience that I find immensely relaxing and enjoyable. Of course, one of the perks of being in one of the largest cities in the world is that there is a plethora of IMAX theatres to go to. So I spent two of my evenings heading to malls nestled in some extremely random locations, the first of which was by far the most out of my depth I’ve felt in China.
On the way over, I got a fairly bad bloody nose. By the time I reached the mall, I looked like Carrie, and so I stumbled in to find a bathroom and get myself cleaned up. As I was shambling around with my new ghoulish visage, I couldn’t help but notice a pattern emerging stores with brands I was familiar with, but all followed up with phrases like “Junior”, “Kids”, and a lot of other phrases and stores which queued me into who the target audience was for this particular mall. See, although this was a large mall, it was clearly designed for parents and their children, locals, who would send their little ones to go play games in the arcade while they did spin class or some other analogous activity. So that fact, in tandem with the other one that I was walking around looking like Bela Lugosi, gave my presence a significantly heightened sense of oddity and perhaps even a bit of a scare factor. Even after washing off my face, I still felt like an intruder. A space so clearly not designed for my presence, yet here I was wandering ever upwards towards the movie theatre.
Given some time to reflect on this really strange experience, I think that feeling was so distinct because I was experiencing a very specific, undistilled slice of someone’s day-to-day life. I want you to take a second to imagine the heyday of the American mall, think about how many memories were made there. Imagine a whole family going out and spending their whole day wandering from store to food court to movie theatre to more stores, imagine all the people who had their first kisses right above those disgusting tiled floors while the romantic smell of hot dog water drifts through the air, and then imagine all the people who spent a significant portion of their careers working in the wide variety of shops that filled their halls.
Now imagine those same malls at night. Shuttered storefronts line the darkened halls, distant music drifts through the otherwise silent space, and faint moonlight illuminates a desolate environment. What makes these spaces so uniquely haunting? The answer is that the human element, which once gave them that life and culture, is now gone.
Most people would hardly consider malls hallowed ground, nor would they attribute a great cultural significance to them. Their destruction is not some monumental tragedy, and their preservation is of little to no importance. Yet in my opinion, they are still spots of cultural significance because culture is more than those pinnacle bits of art; it is also the daily routines, rituals, and lives of a people. The kind of culture that exists at places like that is an intimate look into that side of things. Human connection in its most unrefined and pragmatic form. In China, as far as I can tell, mall culture was alive and well; that heyday I had you imagine is still ongoing, and that awkwardness I felt was a clear sign of that. I was reaffirmed in this position when I arrived at the next mall to see another movie extremely late at night. It was roughly around 11 PM when I got there, and that familiar sensation of liminal unease crept over me.
That same beating heart existed there as it did at many of the malls I remember from when I was a kid, and its absence was just as notable. After spending a while and taking it all in, I headed into the theatre, grabbed my seat, and as the lights went down. I again felt that sense of normalcy. All the night owls like me huddled in, quietly reacting to the movie, munching away at our caramel corn(Chinese movie theatres don’t have regular popcorn for some reason). We all had a clear shared sense of purpose, a perfect understanding without ever speaking a word. That's also why I tend to gravitate towards comparisons like these, because by viewing things through the lens of my own personal experiences, I may gain a better understanding of them which I otherwise wouldn’t be able get by fumbling through a translator or my few key phrases(or maybe I’m dead wrong, this isn’t exactly a hard science). 
The Trouble with Translating:
On the topic of bridging the language gap, I’ve been continuing to write my research paper for the firm, and I’ve run into a very interesting problem as I start to go over everything and revise it. See, Zhicheng is planning to take my article and translate it into Mandarin so that their audience(the variety of lawyers and legal scholars who may be browsing their website) can read it. So what’s the problem? Well, the problem is that I need to write something that, when translated, is still clear.
There are a lot of linguistic landmines that I believe could very easily lead to misinterpretation or misunderstanding of what I’m writing. For example, I use idioms extremely frequently in my writing, which includes phrases that even people who are native English speakers have to have me explain to them because they are colloquial and context-based. Words with double meanings are, of course, another big one. They are easily mistranslated and can convey the wrong concepts, emotions, etc. Lastly is consistent usage of terminology, and this one is the real kicker because when you are writing a paper about new technology, these terms may be entirely novel. Now that doesn’t mean that people don’t know what that technology is, but rather they may have their own terms(Especially of course in another language). So if you keep switching up the terms even slightly, especially while discussing the same general technology and its many nuanced variants(like AI), that could lead to significant confusion.. So I’ve had to alter my writing style to accommodate that, I’ve had to take more care in my choice of words, and had to learn how to be a better editor for my own material. Frankly, clarity has always been my worst enemy, so knowing that someone is relying on me to do a good job, so it won't be as hard for them to translate, has been a great motivator to improve my prose.
As always, thanks for reading,
Logan Smith