The Voice of Entitlement

Let me set the record straight right from the get go, this is not an attack on any one individual or organization on Alive Not Dead or anywhere else.  I have just noticed since I have been on Alive Not Dead something that I want to call “the voice of entitlement”.  This is the voice that Westerners use, usually unintentionally, in their speaking in foreign spheres.  Foreign spheres means cultures that we have not grown up in , whatever the facts of our racial or ethnic identification.  Those of us from the West, primarily the United States, Great Britain, Canada and Australia, perhaps by virtue of being members of the dominant cultural, military, economic and political entities on the planet for the past 150 years, speak with a voice of entitlement, especially when we find ourselves in another culture.  Here on AnD, I have heard this voice of entitlement over and over again in the mouths of those who did not grow up in Asia.  Everything is judged and evaluated against the culture we grew up in, and too often found lacking in the comparative culture (Hong Kong or greater China).  It does not matter if you are ethnic Chinese, part Chinese or all Caucasian, that voice keeps coming forward.  It may be worse for those who are ethnic Chinese, but grew up in the West.  They return to Asia and think they are “home”.  They are surrounded by people who may look like them, but most of them don’t think like them.  This is where the trouble comes in and the voice of entitlement often comes out.  Often this voice sounds complaining, dismissive, or just plain judgmental.

Chinese values are often very different from Western values.  They are also much, much older.  Confucius was a contemporary of Socrates.  How many Westerners quote the words of Socrates today and use them as our moral compass?  Socrates and the other Greek philosophers were lost to the West for over 1,000 years and their works were reintroduced into the West not in the original Greek, but in Arab translations during the later Middle Ages.  Likewise, our much vaunted love of democracy really only dates back to a handful of influential French philosophers in mid-18th century France.  The United States’ Declaration of Independence dates to 1776 and the French Declaration of the Right of Man to 1789.  China had been living according to Confucian and Neo-Confucian thought for almost 2,500 years by then.  Perhaps this is why a  lot of Western ideas fall on such deaf ears in China.  How tested, really, are the values of democracy and individualism when compared with a 2,500 year old Confucian system (that helped codify much older cultural values).?  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think, especially as a woman, I would want to trade places and live under the Confucian system in China.  I do value my freedom and individuality and see great value in them.  But this has meant that I have sacrificed most of the values, such as filial piety, sacrificing the individual for the family and obedience of the Chinese cultural sytem with noticeable consequences.  

Chinese culture is at a crossroads these days—culturally, it is still quite traditional, but economically it is adopting Western models.  This has created confusion and tension as certain controls of the old system are being discarded and values that are divorced from the controls in place in Western society are being grafted onto a quite different Chinese culture.  Things can look, and often are, quite messy.  This is something new.  China didn’t adopt Western economic values until the 1980s and Hong Kong didn’t really exist before around 1800, and then as a strange hybrid of British and Chinese values that always had trouble comfortably co-existing, especially for the majority Chinese population of the colony.

Perhaps it is hardest for those who function primarily in the English-speaking expat communities in Hong Kong.  You may speak perfect Cantonese (though typically you don’t), look as Chinese as the native-born and Mainland immigrants in Hong Kong, but you grew up and/or came to young adulthood in Southern California, Boston, Toronto, London, Melbourne, etc.  Short trips to Hong Kong or Taiwan to visit relatives did not really indoctrinate you in the values of Chinese culture.  You may be more familiar with them than your average gweilo, but they are still not your values and not how you live.  Or even harder are those who were born in Hong Kong or China and lived your earliest years there, but then emigrated to the West and finished your schooling in a foreign culture.  In a desperate attempt to fit in you jettisoned most of your family’s values and became über American, or Brit, Canadian or Australian.  You had no use for that old-fashioned stuff your parents, and especially your grandparents stood for.

Any or all of these scenarios give rise to the voice of entitlement.  Being more self-aware when you come from an outside culture and are then judging Hong Kong and/or Mainland Chinese culture is necessary.  If outsiders are not self-aware, our comments on aspects of Chinese culture, however neutral they sound to our ears, end up sounding highly critical, and often just like whining and complaining.  At best, in Chinese culture, such behavior from guests (and we are guests because this is not our culture) is impolite and if often viewed as downright insulting.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t notice differences and acknowledge our value judgments in the face of this difference.  But how we express this difference becomes critical.  Who wants to listen to a bunch of foreigners who see themselves as so entitled that they don’t even understand how entitled they feel themselves to be, whining and complaining about how everything is so much better “back home”?  People complain about the “Ugly American” but, really, it is pretty much anyone from a Western culture confronting another culture who can come off sounding like this.  Yeah, this isn’t the way they do things back home.  Some of it (maybe a lot of it) stinks for you personally.   But that is how it is.  You are a guest.  This isn’t your house, you aren’t the host, and you really should be on your best behavior while you are here (even if it is for the rest of your life).  If foreigners, whatever the color of their skin and language they speak come off as a bunch of whining, immature complainers who only find fault and keep moaning about how everything is “so much better in X”, why should anyone listen to us?  We come off as a bunch of immature spoiled children.  If we really want to stand for what we believe, we need to talk less and act out of our values consistently each and every day.  Actions speak louder than words, especially if our words make us sound like a spoiled 10 year old.