Which Part of the Elephant Did You Feel?

I belong to a PAMP-like Yahoo! group (PAMP stands for the Palo Alto Menlo Park Parents’ Club for those of you not from Silicon Valley) composed of 1,000 or so English speaking expatriates in Beijing. Last week, a woman put up this post:

    I am looking for western maternity clothes. Are maternity clothes even sold in Beijing?

When I told my nannies about this post, all of us had a hearty laugh. Given more than roughly 200,000 babies are born in Beijing each year (to give you some contrast, about 35,000 babies are born in SV each year), that’s like asking, “can you buy sweaters” when in New Zealand, “can you get ski boots” when in Scandinavia, or “can you find pianos” when in Vienna, Austria.  You get the point before I get carried away.

I wrote a reply to the list, saying that not only can you get maternity clothes in Beijing, they tend to be a lot more stylish than most of the stuff you find in the US. I especially recommended the pants, which always covered the midsection and were adjustable. I’m not a fan of the maternity pants I found in the US: they either left me baring my midriff ala Britney Spears, or became too tight during the third trimester.

From another angle, most of the designer brands sold in the world have been manufactured in China. As such, Chinese fashion tends to follow Europeans trends closely and were generally more forward than American styles. Therefore, you can imagine my surprise when another woman wrote this to the list:

    Chinese maternity clothes are horrible! When you find them, they are so ugly. Best choice is to go to     motherhood.com and have them ship from the US.

I was baffled and offended all at once that I felt the blood rush to my face. The ridiculousness of her post floored me: sure, Motherhood does offer some good stuff, but ship clothes to China all the way from the US? That’s like, lugging sand to the beach, bringing a sandwich to the buffet, shipping corn to Iowa…anyway, by now you know I have a penchant for analogies.

Later, a woman wrote me privately and said that she also found Chinese maternity ugly: all she saw were women wearing ugly overalls with teddy bears on them. At once, I finally understood why they thought what they did and it went beyond just maternity clothes.

Many of the expats in my Yahoo! group lived a secluded and privileged life in pockets of expat-heavy communities in Beijing. The Chinese they see and interact with are their nannies, people manning stores, on the street, in subways, etc, rather than people of comparable economic and educational backgrounds. As such, their impression of China is really of the poorest China has to offer. Ugly overalls with teddy bears? My Luis Vuitton toting Prada clacking Chinese friends wouldn’t be caught dead in them.

When visiting a foreign country, especially a developing country, please keep in mind that countries tend to be incredibly complex, especially a large country such as China. What you may see is not all there is. I find these narrowly sighted generalizations people make incredibly irksome and stupid. Let me give you another example.

A few years ago a Chinese friend of mine, while pursuing her Ph.D. at Stanford, made a rather thoughtless comment to me as follows, “Americans are ignorant and stupid; Stanford grads are no exception.” Given that I was culturally Asian American as well as a Stanford grad, twice, I was so offended that I briefly considered cutting her out of my life for good. Sure, I have met a good number of ignorant Americans who think that Asians are a different kind of black people (I’m not kidding here-it really has happened before), but how can one make such a blanket statement when it is America (and a few Stanford grads) who has brought the world Boeing, GE, HP, Microsoft, and Google? Talk to a few of my business school professors at Stanford, and their brilliance will blind you. How can you call those taught by the best teachers in the world stupid? I realized that her experience with Americans was simply too limited and she may have judged too quickly based on a few negative experiences.

When you come into contact with a different culture, please keep an open mind. Visiting and living in a foreign country is rather like the story of blind men feeling up the elephant: the man who grabbed onto the tail said the elephant was like a rope; the one who hugged the legs said the elephant was like a tree; the one who felt the ears said the elephant was most like a giant fan. Moral of the story: without keeping an open-mind to see the entirety of something, you are going to make an ass of yourself.

Ivy is a Silicon Valley mom who recently re-located to Beijing in May, 2007