Journal of Psychology in Chinese Societies !"#$%, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2003), 269–283 Marrying the Dragon () to the Phoenix (): Twenty-Eight Years of Doing a Psychology of the Chinese People MICHAEL HARRIS BOND The Chinese University of Hong Kong !" !"#$% When drinking water from a stream, remember its source. Chinese admonition from a song by Yu Hsin It has been a privilege to pursue my quest for intellectual harmony among the Chinese people over these last 28 years! In contrast to the British Canadian culture of my origin, Chinese culture appears big, deep, remote, strange, mysterious, and impenetrable. As a psychologist, how was I to understand persons socialized into such a different reality? Early in my adventure, I intuited that, if I could wrestle with that mighty dragon and find a satisfying psychological balance, then surely Confucius had been right when he proposed that !"#$%& “Within the four seas, all people are members of the same family.” In this presentation, I will describe my journey into the heart of the dragon, aided by the idealism of This is an invited keynote address given to the Fourth Pan-Chinese Psychology Conference, Taipei, Taiwan, November 9–11, 2002. Correspondence should be sent to: Michael Harris Bond, Department of Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T. Hong Kong. E-mail: [email protected]. 270 Michael Harris Bond the phoenix, to discover a representation of our unity as human beings arising from the ashes of cultural separateness. This has been yet another “Journey to the west”, and like all monkeys I have been assisted in my intellectual labors, most especially by yet another monkey. His welcoming, respectful and scientifically grounded conversation has provided the challenging counterpoint necessary for me to integrate cultural diversity into my present apprehension of our human unity. !"#$% !"# !"#$%&'()*&+,-. By the blending of breath From the sun and the shade, Equilibrium comes to the world. Lao Tzu, The Way of Virtue, poem 42, lines 7–9 “Sire, now I have told you about all the cities I know.” “There is still one of which you never speak.” Marco Polo bowed his head. “Venice”, the Khan said. Marco smiled. “What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?” The Emperor did not turn a hair. “And yet I have never heard you mention that name.” And Polo said, “Every time I describe a city, I am saying something about Venice.” “When I ask you about other cities, I want to hear about them. And about Venice when I ask you about Venice.” “To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me, it is Venice.” Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities What a validating prospect this is — an invitation from my much respected friend and colleague, collaborator and intellectual gadfly, Kuo-Shu Yang ( ), to address the Fourth Pan-Chinese Conference on Psychological Research about my experience of doing psychology with the Chinese people. I have practiced as an academic social psychologist these last 28 years at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and appreciate Dragon and Phoenix 271 this opportunity to explain myself — how I arrived here in the first place, my struggles to understand the psychology of the Chinese people, and how my career lived with, about and for the Chinese people has taken me beyond the Chinese face and “onto the four seas where all people are members of the same family.” At the same time, what an intimidating prospect this is. In 1997, I edited a book of auto-biographies by some luminaries in the field of cross- cultural psychology, called, “Working at the interface of cultures: 18 lives in social science.” I asked each contributor to reflect on his or her time spent in foreign cultures, and assess how those experiences had shaped the development of their thinking as a cross-culturalist. My assessment then and now is that we psychologists, so skilled at formulating the behavior of others, fumble about when portraying our own lives. We grasp at details, organizing a chronology, as if somehow a pattern, a drama, a mythical script will emerge from the litany of events. Millay’s poem captures this frustrating quest so well: Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour, Rains from the sky a meteoric shower Of facts … they lie unquestioned, uncombined. Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill Is daily spun; but there exists no loom To weave it into fabric; Edna St. Vincent Millay, Collected Poems So, I am not optimistic about my capacity to shed light on my formless darkness. But there is more behind my ambivalence about attaching words to my life. Any attempt at self-discovery and self-presentation, especially in a public forum, runs the risk of self-inflation and self-deception. And an audience of psychologists should be even more acute than most at detect- ing and flagging such artful dodges. This could be an embarrassing expe- rience were it not for the tolerance and forgiveness that I have come to expect from my Chinese colleagues. And who needs my reflections anyway? I do, for one. Discerning, formulating and writing out my understandings of my career doing Chinese psychology will bring clarity for me on these matters, by removing me from “business as usual” to consider “the nature of my business.” It will also enable me to acknowledge and repay some small part of the many debts I owe for this magical life I have been leading. “When drinking from a river, remember its source” ( !) . 272 Michael Harris Bond But how will my talk be of use to you? You are my academic peers, and now my audience, as I have been and will continue to be yours. I value your time, especially in a forum on indigenous psychology. I sincerely want “not to do unto others as I would not want done unto myself” ( !"#$). In the present context, not connecting vitally to your spiritual adventure in committing your academic life to Chinese psychol- ogy would be such a failure. The prospect of that failure worries and humbles me as I write this reflection on my life in Chinese psychology — how can the intellectual development of this 58-year old, Canadian-born male, educated in America, inter-culturally tempered in Japan, and most recently researching in and out of Hong Kong possibly connect to yours? I don’t know, but if you attend to my story, perhaps you will discover mirrors along the path- ways I think I have been traveling. And in their reflections, you may discover yourself more fully, more clearly, more justly revealed. A people is a mirror in which every traveler contemplates his own image. Andre Maurois How Did I Come to be Studying the Psychology of the Chinese People? The initial mystery that attends any journey is: How did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place? … Some step started me toward this point, as opposed to all other points on the habitable globe. I must consider; I must discover it. Louise Bogan, Journey Around My Room I am often asked this question by both Chinese and others. I chose my answer carefully, since most questioners want a perfunctory recounting of a job search and the discovery of favorable working conditions at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Of the others, some want to hear that I recognized the drumbeat of the Dragon’s dance early and dedicated the rest of my life to following that drumbeat in all its manifestations — childhood fairy tales, Szechuan cooking and chopsticks at the dining table, music of the erhu () and the pipa () during my teenage years, the study of Chinese language and history at university, mastering a martial art in China Dragon and Phoenix 273 while teaching English, later returning with a fellowship from some funding agency to study linguistic socialization or such topics, followed by a job approach by an academic institution in some Chinese society keen on bringing Chinese culture into the international community of scholars. No, it was none of these. My first recollection of anything Chinese was as a young boy digging in the sandbox, and my mother observing that if I kept digging I would soon reach China. China? China was apparently a country like Canada, but opposite Canada, at the very end of the world, remote from us, at the end of a long tunnel that required Herculean effort to dig and the resourcefulness of Ulysses to travel along. I knew these Greek heroes and even then my mind took a metaphorical turn, so I thought of myself as a mighty adventurer forging a passageway with my plastic shovel! However innocently extravagant was that boyhood fantasy, China had been firmly implanted in my spirit as the object of my quest, my Golden Fleece, the litmus test of my resolve. Thereafter, I carried on with my life, mastering the various academic challenges required to take me to the next level and in the process discov- ering what I enjoyed doing. What I found was a love of travel with the constant stimulation that differences provided. Being somewhere new ap- pealed to my hungry, restless mind. But I also discovered that one could travel without traveling, by exposing the mind to new sights through visual art in books and sounds through music on records and symbolic representations, especially in literature and its less structured, more invit- ing form of poetry. What I did with all this novelty was play at making it understandable, of figuring it out as best I could. I was not always or even usually fun, but it absorbed me.