Rising crime and polarization in the United States make me miss my Chinese government co-parent.
My family's experience in China taught us that immersion in a culture with different answers to everyday questions alters how one sees the world. Practices that used to seem clearly right or wrong took on complexity and dimension. |
 | | Illustration by Zisiga Mukulu/The New York Times; images by Heather Bowie Kaye and Getty Images |
|
Governments, like parents, are involved in all of our lives to varying degrees. Around the world we have lax, negligent, full-surveillance-state government-parent models and everything in between. When my work took my husband and me to China in 2006 for a one-year stint, never did we imagine we'd live and raise our two daughters in Shanghai for the next 16 years. Our experience, which I wrote about in a Times Opinion essay this week, taught me that a government in line with your values and priorities makes for a great partner. Ours, perhaps surprisingly, was the Chinese government. |
China doesn't get a lot of encouraging press in Western media; one of my motivations in writing about our time there is to illustrate what we loved about our everyday life. Shanghai is one of the most bustling and vibrant cities in the world, and if such a poll existed it would likely have some of the highest quality-of-life ratings from expats. For me, as a woman walking her dog late at night and as a parent, the biggest privilege I enjoyed was the feeling of physical safety and the absence of violent crime — especially gun violence. |
What about local Chinese parents? It's not so simple for them. The enormous academic pressures on today's students — most of whom are only children — coupled with rising costs, limits on free speech and movement (you must live in the city of your hukou, or resident permit, to receive government benefits) and caring for elderly grandparents, are adding a mountain of stress and discouraging many young Chinese from having children. Pendulum-swinging policies, from mandated birth control to incentives for reversing the now declining population and from "zero Covid" to opening the floodgates, are tearing the social contract established between citizens and the Communist Party. |
I recognize that China faces immense challenges and that we enjoyed privileges as foreigners: the choice to opt out of the academic arms race, the ability to leave the country anytime the heat got unbearable and preferential treatment at times. But it appears to be more controversial for me to write "I loved living in China" while I'm in America than if I were to write the opposite in China. Censorship comes in many forms besides erasure: intimidation, uncivil discourse, trolls and threats of violence. I hope our government in the United States addresses the fact that we cannot enjoy our hard-won freedoms without safety and civility. |
| READ HEATHER'S FULL ESSAY HERE | | |
Forward this newsletter to friends to share ideas and perspectives that will help inform their lives. They can sign up here. Do you have feedback? Email us at opiniontoday@nytimes.com. |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment