Autonomy and Love

Ali: Fear Eats Soul“A different language is a different vision of life.” – Federico Fellini. Too bad Fassbinder didn’t say it that would be too tidy. It was some “F” director(that’s not a grade). Ali: Fear Eats Soul is about a widowed German maid and a young Moroccan boxer/mechanic who meet in a bar and fall in love. The film focuses on the prejudice the interracial couple face from the community. Inspired by Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (by the way Steve, another great movie we could watch in class if you don’t already have Ali: Fear Eats Soul lined up), the triumphs and failures of love are the products of societal persecution and individual strength.
In Guo’s book, however, the societal persecution has almost been internalized as cultural differences and language. There are no tenses in Chinese? You’ve got to be kidding me. How does anything get done over there? Family, home, and house are subsumed under one character? To the Western mind, it’s hard to see why three often vastly different concepts (who can say subdivisions of the same thing even?) are united in one word. Have they a less abstract connotation to the Chinese mind? Family, home, and house are not concepts but concrete? Besides the incomprehensibility a vice-versa Chinese-speaker would feel towards English, there are linguistic oddities that even English speakers can pick up on: how can and why do we use “love” for a cup of tea? Social oddities as well: pornography is sold nearly everywhere; so why can’t you “read” it in public?
Privacy. I remember talking to a girl from India once who asked what my house was like and as I described my room and my parents’ room and my sister’s room she interrupted, vaguely disgusted I thought, and asked why we didn’t all live in the same room where we could be together and live together always. I remember that I couldn’t begin to answer her. I considered asking her if she minded shitting in front of someone as long as it was a family member but thought better of it; if “privacy” wasn’t in her catalogue I doubted that “crude semi-satire” was (after all, “humour is a Western concept”). As with many such questions, I deferred to cultural differences: agree to disagree: shake hands walk away.
And why don’t I live with my family in the same room? Do I not love them as dearly as one who does? That I need time away from them; how do I qualify my love? Are there different loves? “How,” Z writes, “can intimate live with privacy?” (p.87) Z sees this conflict of love and autonomy at the root of a culture opposed to her own. For her, family is everything. Westerners have their own friends, their own bank accounts, and this need for autonomy, in contrast to the community and dependence of Chinese culture, Z thinks, may be the cause for retirement homes, frequent divorce, isolation, loneliness, “peterfiles”, and perverts.
To delve into the cultural dimensions of East and West is too large a topic for this 500 word post, even for Guo’s book. There is in Guo’s book, however, plenty of food for thought that is all but put on a plate and pre-chewed for you. It might be Z’s insights into language, love, food, or travel. Or it could be a young Chinese woman interspersing these insights with tales about her vagina: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ydGWSdgDrw (We know how much she liked David Lynch)