In week 7, beth continued the project management component of last week’s response session by organising group projects to focus everyone more on their roles and skills learned.
In this she grouped people around similar conceptual themes so that each group’s concepts could in a sense complement and contrast with each other, which improved the efficiency of thinking about the themes and the soundness of the content between each other, but I think this may have led to a certain sense of homogenisation of the content. This is not just an idle theory, as I have often encountered it in design seminars before. In fact, the sudden categorisation of each other’s themes into broad general categories and the presentation of some aspects and examples of projects by those who have thought more deeply about them can lead those who have thought less deeply and are still thinking in fragments about their own themes to a situation where they are in a hurry (to fit into that standard line of the collective project) height and forcing their consciousness in another direction, which I think is terrible). I was put into the SOCIETY group in this subgroup, and I was a bit surprised by this division. Because I thought my content might be related to purely feminine themes and collective sexual memory, but somehow these two turned out to be related to SOCIETY, but apparently I felt that the themes of the other two groups were also more incongruous with mine.
On the definition of identity
I was somewhat intrigued by Zekun Yang’s theme, which was about identity perception, particularly multiple identities and identity transitions. The topic explores the relationship between social identity, self-perceived identity and family identity, freeing the real person from the shell of a cold mask. And she also plans to use the common video format to present her content, which is more conventional, but also the way I like it. As I was listening, I wondered how I would think if I were working on this project.
This reminded me of a documentary I was watching recently, I Am Li Xiaomu, about a Chinese man who has been in Japan for thirty years and is now living his life in Japan. During Li Xiaomu’s twenty years in Japan, he opened a restaurant in Kabukicho, one of Tokyo’s busiest neighbourhoods, famous for his hometown cuisine, and at the time he was advertised in the Chinese-speaking world as a very successful “Chinese”, that is to say, he integrated himself into Japanese society as a Chinese and struggled to get an equally glamorous position, which seemed to be The end of the line for the “Chinese”. This leads one to inquire into the definition of “Chinese” identity. Li Xiaomu, who is in his thirtieth year in Japan, has renounced his Chinese citizenship and is preparing to run for the Tokyo ward council. He mentions that there are many elite Chinese in Japan, but they have stopped in their own field, and none of them have thought of going further to integrate into the real Japanese mainstream in terms of identity (an awkward situation, as they can neither go back to the ‘past’ nor enter the ‘future’). “They have maintained a state of “present”). The video shows Li Xiaomu giving his all for the election, no longer a glamorous businessman, Becoming undignified for the sake of the election, but his views do make you reflect. In the UK, when I fill out the paperwork, it seems that “country” and “nationality” are defined separately, and that nationality only seems to include the subject nationality at the national level (even the nationality part). When you fill in your nationality in China, it is specific to your actual ethnicity, for example, if you are Russian, you will be listed as Russian in China.
In the context of the current international exclusion of China, the populism of public opinion voices within China is gradually rising. This is actually a bad sign. On the Chinese internet, with the introduction of a policy of making IP addresses visible in overseas countries, sarcastic abuse from China is directed at every Chinese comment from overseas. To put it bluntly, “going abroad is considered unpatriotic”, and Chinese people who have changed their nationality have been severely criticised, with such political turmoil even sweeping over innocent international students. So at the moment the Chinese government is directing public opinion in such a way that the definition of Chinese is limited to people of Chinese nationality. But this is obviously inappropriate. On the contrary, India, also a major country of emigration, and also a minority overseas, still identifies itself as Indian.
One of my favourite Chinese artists, Chen Danqing, who now holds dual American and Taiwanese citizenship, gave a talk in Singapore in 2014 entitled ‘Mother Tongue and Mother Country’. In this talk, Chen Danqing treads very narrowly into a mainstream issue that has confused many people in the Chinese-speaking world, namely: how to define identity and belonging. It explains the awkwardness of perceiving Chinese identity through the lens of language, from dialectal identity, which implies the continuation of a patriarchal society, to ‘mother tongue’ in the context of the official language of multiple political monolithic societies formed for political reasons, to the ‘mother country’ of self-identification. He is a local resident who speaks a foreign language, who runs a supermarket, a Chinese restaurant or is an ordinary office worker in a foreign country, whose children attend local schools and who receives a local education, but who is also inseparable from the old continent where he was born, and whose parents are typical Chinese living in their homeland.
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