The Arts of Making Do and Working out in Beijing, China
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What are friends for?: The arts of making do and working out in Beijing, China Michelle Yang Zhang Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2020 © 2020 Michelle Yang Zhang All Rights Reserved Abstract What are friends for?: The arts of making do and working out in Beijing, China Michelle Yang Zhang Through a second look at the now twenty-five-year-old literature on guanxi, a form of reciprocal relationship making and using in China, I examine how the kinds of opportunities and challenges possible for young people intersect with who they know and how this has changed (with its own set of reflections on and consequences for a still-rapidly changing China) since China’s rural to urban transition. My dissertation project examines how young people in contemporary urban China form and produce guanxi ties (resource-full relationships) through the theoretical lens of practice and possibility, inspired by de Certeau’s conceptualization of practice, productive consumption, and strategies versus tactics (1984). Drawing on qualitative data gathered through participant observation and unstructured interviews, I sought to both describe and analyze when, where, and how social networks became consequential. Central to my methodology is an emphasis on people and their practices rather than the common sense categories used to describe them. The people in my field research were predominantly aged 18- 30 and came from a range of ethnic, professional, and education backgrounds. In so doing, I was able to examine the moments and contexts within which some people have opportunities and others do not, as well as when some are vulnerable while others are less so. I found that social networks can be formed in a variety of spaces, and sometimes most saliently in moments of serendipity. Chance encounters in spaces of play, without the artifice of traditional and structured gift-giving practices of building guanxi, provided people with opportunities and potential alternatives outside of more stringent work hierarchies. Ultimately, who people knew – their social networks – shaped the ways in which they experienced circumstances of precarity, instability, and possibility. Table of Contents Acknowledgments........................................................................................................................... ii Introduction: What are we to each other? ....................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Walking the city and writing the ethnography ............................................................ 10 Chapter 2: The body is the foundation of the revolution .............................................................. 37 Chapter 3: New occasions for sociality ........................................................................................ 61 Chapter 4: Sportifying ultimate frisbee......................................................................................... 88 Chapter 5: Gifts, favors, and reciprocity (or work + play) ......................................................... 116 Chapter 6: Making do in precarious times .................................................................................. 134 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 154 Afterward .................................................................................................................................... 161 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 164 Appendix A: The costs of living and playing in Beijing ............................................................ 173 i Acknowledgments Over the course of my doctoral program and especially in the research and writing of this dissertation, I have relied gratefully on the financial, administrative, philosophical, and emotional support of my social network. My coursework was supported by fellowships from Teachers College and a Foreign Language and Areas Studies (FLAS) fellowship from the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. My research and writing was made possible, with relative ease and little disruption, by generous funding from the Hanban China Studies Program, Teachers College, and two years of the C. Martin Wilbur Fellowship awarded by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. And of course, Bridget Bartolini and Rachael Simon patiently helped me sort out the paperwork and requirements at each major and minor milestone. I also have my own resource-full relationships that have been pivotal in my doctoral apprenticeship. In my first year at Teachers College, delightful serendipity found me taking classes with both Raymond McDermott and my advisor, Hervé Varenne, whose individual and collaborative work challenged me to think about practice, relationality, and categories. It was a brilliant introduction to my doctoral program. Professor Varenne’s mentorship and, while I was away, his blog posts, have shaped my thinking and writing in indelible ways. It is thanks to Ralph Litzinger, Myron Cohen, and Nicholas Bartlett that I can call myself an anthropologist of China. Juliette de Wolfe’s course on qualitative methods helped me think critically about how categories, in the framing of a research question, shape data collection. I organized a reading group on “play” in the semester before I left for field research; those discussions spurred me to think about ordinary play and the ways in which play is use, and thus, generative. The echoes of this reading group have also shown up in this dissertation. Through all of this academic training, I also owe a debt of gratitude and friendship to my cohort, especially Jessica Garber, Rodrigo ii Mayorga, and Rachael Stephens. Learning would not be, nor have been, nearly so fun without them. Similarly, my field research would not have been possible without people to get to know. I am thankful for all the people I met who shared their time with me, corrected me when I broke the “rules,” and patiently answered my questions. The students and teachers of Number Twelve Middle School have seen me through nearly a decade of research and volunteering. They’ve taught me much of what I know about Beijing and the possibilities and precocity of living in contemporary China. I am especially grateful to a group of women who, aside from teaching me how to play ultimate frisbee, have become dear friends. To Zoey, Rachel, Sarz, TQ, and Fanghui - thank you for making Beijing feel like home. And lastly, I must acknowledge the support of a few people whose presence in my life have greatly multiplied the ways I can respond, even in my most precarious moments. My family, Janet, and Jess have all housed and fed me, offered me their home for my own, and made my worst case scenarios all delightful indeed. iii Introduction: What are we to each other? During the course of my field research (2017-2019), many people asked me to explain my research topic, or more generally, anthropology. I struggled to answer these questions succinctly. People I met through ultimate frisbee assumed that I was interested in frisbee, people I met at the gym assumed I was interested in gyms and exercise, and people I met in restaurants assumed my project was primarily focused on health. I am interested, I explained, in all of these things, but mostly, in the people who are engaged in these practices of doing. I began with a very broad net - young people in Beijing, doing and making things together. I was interested in possibilities, as well as its much more studied counterpart, limitations, for young people in China. I noticed that, compared to when I’d last been in Beijing, there seemed to be a sudden uptick in gyms, working out, and a shifting mentality towards health and dieting. Specifically, young women who had previously used acupuncture or diet pills now spoke of losing weight in terms of metabolism, restricting calories, and exercise. Change of course, is something that has been written about quite frequently in the context of socialist and post-socialist China. But when I fell ill in my first few months there, and new and old friends exhorted me to take care of myself, I was struck by this explanation, “The body is the foundation of the revolution” (身体是 革命的基础). Reminiscent of Mao-era discourse that rhetorically privileges (peasant) bodies, it drew my attention to the possibilities of what happens when people come together. The 2019 protests in Hong Kong, momentarily paused, hinge their success upon the physical presence of many people; the very act of showing up, of putting the body in a space declared off-limits or to be a space of resistance, is a political act. This in turn led me to think about how people’s practices are contingent upon, influenced by, or made possible by others. 1 Aside from the more obvious analyses of state power using the language of science and health as a means of control a la Foucault (1978) and Greenhalgh (2008), I became interested in the possibilities generated where national policies, globalizing forces vis a vis media, particularly social media, and the particularities and peculiarities (de Wolfe 2013) of individual people and bodies collide. As such, this dissertation is both about, and not about, sports and exercise. In each chapter, introduced in the next section,