Home » Opinion » Opinion Columns
Cocooned, we lose sight of our communities
Print Edition
ONE of the salient features of modernity is a cultivated responsiveness to events that do not really concern our immediate environs. Today only a pristine country bumpkin in a backwater village is still interested in gossiping about his neighbors. A thoroughly bred urbanite can be more interested conjecturing about what is happening in the bedroom of a third-rate Hollywood actress.
For Chinese, the latest sensation is about Tang Wei, a movie star enshrined as a “goddess” for her skills in performing acrobatic sex stunts in “Lust, Caution,” an adaptation of a novel by Eileen Chang. Tang recently became engaged to a South Korean director.
For children, such conjecture comes on a different but still faraway level. Last Wednesday my 11-year-old son returned to his school for a social practice event. All of his classmates were talking excitedly about the World Cup in Brazil.
My son was so infected by the pervading fever that he insisted on watching the whole of the final match at 3am Monday. In their excitement, these children do not realize that for them soccer is strictly a spectator sport. In my experience, the only high school with an impressively spacious soccer field here is an international school in Jinqiao.
At a matter of fact, for the past semester my son and his class spent more time during their PE classes doing homework or watching TV than running around outdoors. The PE teacher could always cite rain, slippery ground, or smog.
According to the Xinmin Evening News last Thursday, today registered young and adolescent soccer players in China number 30,000. That is half the number for Tokyo. In the Netherlands, of its population of 16 million, 1.5 million play soccer on a daily or weekly basis.
Notwithstanding our excitement over the World Cup, the kind of exercises of a truly national nature is practiced by millions of elderly women, who do morning and evening workouts to the beat of music in parks. Unfortunately, this vigorously healthy national pastime is generally referred to with disdain.
The practice could be questioned when the music becomes too noisy — but in China, while our powerful real estate developers continue to be encouraged to turn limited public space into exclusive real estate compounds, should our government be held responsible for its failure to create public space so that these women can do exercises without disturbing other residents?
But I fear the “park dance” would continue to be held in scorn because this uniquely Chinese practice is something you do not observe elsewhere. For instance, at an appointed hour, a troop of about 20 middle-aged women will walk briskly along the small lane in a small park near my home. After a half-hour session, they will sit around in a pavilion, chatting loudly, occasionally with bursts of laughter. These exercises are quite harmless, but they lack the sophistication associated with an air-conditioned gym complete with all kinds of fancy equipment.
How I wish those office slaves perpetually crouching over their handsets and iPads could join the fun.
For one thing, it curbs soaring medical expenditures. I am rather suspicious about the hype about “free” medical care, for it boils down essentially to providing for those individuals who, for many reasons, fail to take good care of their own health. In addition, unlike those exercises in gyms, collective physical exercises manage to salvage a semblance of community life that is being murdered by standardized apartment blocks, inhumanely expanding cities, and growing demographic fluidity. In our modern apartment buildings, the self-sufficiency and insulation save any excuses for visiting neighbors. It even saves the trouble of venturing outside at all.
This insulation is overtaking villages in rural areas, where the sense of neighborhood used to be very strong. In suburban Shanghai (formerly rural), with the steady erosion of the sense of neighborhood, the supermarket becomes the only venue where some elderly citizens might experience a semblance of community life, evocative of Western church-going. But e-commerce is making supermarkets obsolete.
It was reported recently that in Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, at appointed hours thousands of local residents would march rapidly in uniforms as a kind of exercise, braving motorized traffic and incurring the discontent and jeers of motorists. In the eyes of many, those virtually paralyzed beings cocooned in tons of steel should naturally take precedence over those not yet baptized by consumption of gasoline. But compared to the excitement over a rubber ball chased thousands of miles away, these community exercises exude a welcome sense of participation and community.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
