Peter Hessler is one of my favorite writers on just about any subject, and this month he has a story about how he lost his job teaching English in China. Nobody is exactly sure what the real rules are, and everyone denies having said anything when contacted by fact-checkers, but Hessler clearly became slightly too controversial for administrative comfort after one of his comments on a student’s essay was misquoted and went viral on Weibo.
What fascinated me was how the students navigated the Kafkaesque political landscape of nebulous rules with inconsistent enforcement. They all had to use illegal VPNs to do better research for term papers. They all know the cruelty and capriciousness with which success can be granted or taken away, no matter how hard they work. But the system, cruel and capricious and corrupt as it is, still seems too immense to change, and grants them enough rewards that it seems worthwhile. So, they live with it, even though most aren’t strongly nationalistic and don’t believe the propaganda. The idiom that keeps coming up is that one should not yinyefeishi, or give up eating for fear of choking. As long as living standards continue to rise generation to generation, the failures of the current system are acceptable, and radical change isn’t necessary or desirable to most people.
The article doesn’t guess at what might happen if the system fails to deliver, if a gerontocracy refuses to relinquish its hold on power, if standards of living and life expectancy start to drop for the next generation. Perhaps the US will find out before China.
You Were the King of Carrot Flowers
- The Atlantic has features on Dread and Sad Teens, but the absolutely shattering must-read is the New Yorker’s Andrew Solomon on a rise in child suicide.
- About that kill-switch… you know they can do that to anything, right?
- Reminder: right-wing political operatives deliberately selected abortion as a rallying cry only when they could no longer fundraise on segregation.
- On the craft of writing about sex.
- On banning math textbooks.
- On the post-Roe future in Florida.
- On phalloplasty: “It is easy to stand up for some vague and glittery right to gender self-determination; fighting for the penis is like rooting for the Yankees.”
Oh Comely
- Lead Industries Association ad, 1940.
- New music from Africa, “immensely popular on the unofficial mp3/cellphone network from Abidjan to Bamako to Algiers, [with] limited or no commercial release.”
Secretly Ironic 