// essays //
Fall 2006
Schnorrientalism: Mutual Stereotyping in the Far East
Nicholas Frisch
As anyone traveling in China with even the most tenuous grasp of the language will tell you, the same Inevitable Conversation will play out dozens, if not hundreds, of times. "Oh! Your Chinese is excellent." ("No no," politeness compels you to reply, "it's really nothing.") "Where are you from?" "What is your salary?" "Are you married?" "What do your parents do?" "What are you doing in China?" Of the literally hundreds of times I've gone through this routine, one exclamation has come up often enough to raise an eyebrow: "Oh, Jewish! Very clever! Very good at business!"
First, a disclaimer: I am not, strictly speaking, Jewish. Well, I'm half (the wrong half, my dad), but I grew up inNew York on a steady diet of bagels and guilt, find my way to temple on the occasional High Holiday, and know a schlemiel from a schlimazel. More importantly, I'm 50% more Jewish than anyone my Chinese interlocutors have ever met, and if the subject does come up, the other half doesn't seem to matter: I'm already "very clever!" and "very good at business!" "But," I protest, "those are other Jews! Really! I'm terrible at business! I'm not here to despoil you with my position at the apex of the world economy! I want to study history and-"
"So clever!"
"No, but-"
All to no avail.
This type of admiration is not limited to the Chinese. During WWII, Imperial Japan's secret Fugu Plan tried to harness the Jews' alleged financial sorcery by rescuing refugees from Europe and resettling them in China's occupied northeast. Japan's alliance with Hitler derailed the plan, but the arms of the Japanese were never entirely open to begin with: the plan took its name from the Japanese blowfish, which is lethal if incorrectly handled. On a Mongolian train, an old man who'd made my acquaintance effusively pointed to my brain and gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up after my inept rendering of "Jew" from a phrasebook. In Hoi An, Vietnam, an ethnically Chinese local spoke admiringly and empathetically of Jews with no prompting at all. The same thing happened in Thailand. Within China, people from the coastal city of Wenzhou— renowned for its residents' considerable business acumen— are frequently described as the "Jews of China" in books, in the classroom, and on the street. When I told my (admittedly gullible) Chinese language partner in Beijing about a US law requiring doctors to be Jewish, she nodded and said "oh, probably because they're so clever..." before I let her know the awful, awful truth.
It seems that for the vast majority of Asians, we can say at least this: they don't have that whole "killed our Savior" chip on their shoulder, and they admire smarts and success (and let's admit, between the Nobel Prizes and names like "Goldman Sachs," Jews do all right for themselves). But in China, this reaction is particularly pronounced, and it's not just an outsize love and respect for wealth (although it's certainly true that traditional Chinese well-wishing phrases for holidays and celebrations heavily emphasize wealth and prosperity where Westerners often invoke love and happiness). So nu?
First off, we might acknowledge that the Chinese are pretty much the Jews of the Pacific Rim (and the aforementioned ethnic Chinese in Vietnam who told me so unprompted was far from the only one).
From Hanoi to Bangkok to Jakarta and beyond, it is often the well-educated Chinese diaspora whose connections to the homeland and each other are particularly responsible for their oversized slice of the commercial pie. They are also, like the Jews, periodically expelled (from Vietnam), repressed (under Indonesia's Suharto), and rioted against (in Malaysia, Thailand, and really everywhere else). Like Jews, they are fiercely proud of their ancestral heritage and ancient civilization and often manage to assimilate somewhat while keeping temples and congregation halls to maintain their identity and community. Unlike the Jews, the Chinese diaspora has a continuously sovereign homeland with a population of 1.4 billion people, but who's counting? Finally, both Jews and Chinese have a deep and lasting love of the latter's cuisine. With so many similarities (which even extend to guilt, demanding you become a doctor or lawyer, and telling you "Eat! Eat! You're so skinny!"), it wouldn't be too surprising if the Chinese found a certain appreciation for and resonance vis-à-vis the experience of any Jews with whom they came into contact.
Well, with so many wandering Jews over the past few millennia, chances were that at least a few would stumble into one of the world's most powerful and ancient civilizations, and indeed they did. The first recorded settlement of Jews in China dates from the 9th century, with some Silk Road merchants schlepping into the Song Dynasty capital of Kaifeng and settling down, building a Chinese-looking synagogue, futzing around for a few hundred years, and surfacing in the occasional Jesuit account. They eventually became completely intermarried and assimilated, and their synagogue was lost to the floods of time (and the Yellow River). But despite the loss of all Judaic languages, books, and customs, some in Kaifeng still consider themselves Jews. China's reasonably benign policies toward statistically insignificant and politically unambitious minorities (e.g., not Tibetans) have even led a dozen or so descendants to file for official minority status, which brings special exemptions and protections.
The next notable appearance of Jews in China came in the 1840s, when a Baghdad-born Sephardi named Elias David Sassoon moved to Shanghai from his family's home in British-controlled India. The Sassoons made a fortune in opium and invested in the Shanghai real estate market, better known at the time as "rice paddies." By the early 20th century, patriarch Victor Sassoon was throwing bashes, building a world-class hotel, and quipping with the best of them: "there's only one race greater than the Jews, and that's the Derby." His chutzpah notwithstanding, anyone who laid eyes on Shanghai's classically opulent waterfront architecture, whose crown jewels were built in the 1930s, would be hard pressed to disagree. Other Sephardic families like the Kadoories also dominated business in Shanghai, and the collective result was a dizzying array of real estate and business interests which shape the city to this day.
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 brought a flood of Tsarist refugees (Jews among them) to Shanghai's open port. A similar flood passed through the far northeastern city of Harbin, childhood home of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's father. Later, as the Holocaust engulfed Europe's Jews, a few courageous Chinese and Japanese consular officials defied orders from home and granted desperate Jews passage to Shanghai. The city's Japanese occupiers interned the Jews in a ghetto but refused requests from their German allies to kill or hand them over, preferring instead to intern the mostly Ashkenazi refugees (perhaps for the ultimately unrealized Fugu Plan). With the war's end in 1945, and the approaching Communist takeover of 1949, the Jews of Shanghai decided to leave. The wealthy Sephardim fled for British Hong Kong while the Ashkenazi refugees mostly went to England, Australia, the US, and the newly-created State of Israel. Throughout nearly a dozen decades of heavy Jewish presence in Shanghai, more than a few ethnically Chinese Jews were sired, among them my step-grandfather's London acupuncturist ("What time shall we say next week, Dr. Chang?" "Sorry Mr. Cohen, it's the High Holy Days." "What?"). But by the mid-1950's, there was scant remainder of Shanghai's once flourishing but disparate Jewish community. Besides a handful of Chinese Jews in the outlying district of Hongkou—one of Asia's earliest and most dramatic skylines—served as a testament to the Sephardim's ruthless business prowess and a powerful symbol of what Jews meant to the Chinese collective memory.
Besides the classic money stereotype, China has played host to another: the radical, bourgeois, Trotskyesque (if not Trotskyite) revolutionary intellectual, who's Jewish. Joining the Chinese Communist Party as a foreigner required direct approval of the Politburo's highest-ranking members (Mao et al.). Of the tiny number of foreigners who joined the Party or became Chinese citizens. the Jewish presence sticks out like a sore thumb. Sidney Shapiro, Sidney Rittenberg, and Israel Epstein were among the most famous; while none of these leftist expatriates was particularly influential either as Jews or Communists, their mere presence in Beijing reinforced a whole schmageggie of clichés articulated in everything from Woody Allen's Annie Hall to Woody Allen's wife. (Rittenberg, who now runs a consulting firm for multinationals investing in China, seems to have lost some of his Red zeal, though that probably has as much to do with his sixteen years in solitary confinement as his Jewish business acumen.) Under Mao, the Chinese people suffered one catastrophe after another and were impoverished and battered by half-baked economic schemes and destructive political campaigns. When Mao's death finally ushered in market reforms, making money was ready to swing back into fashion. As Deng Xiaoping kvelled, "to get rich is glorious." When Chinaopened, legions of foreign investors—inevitably, you guessed it, Jews among them—poured in.
While the Jews themselves are fairly easy to trace, Chinese conceptions of them aren't. An important concept in Chinese society is diwei, or status, and it is expressed by forms of address, protocol in table manners, who follows whom through the door, and a myriad of other everyday social interactions. Besides mere curiosity, the purpose of the questions random Chinese always ask in the Inevitable Conversation is to gauge your diwei through the normal indicators (salary, education, marriage status) and see where you fit in the Chinese scheme of things. Needless to say, intelligence and moneymaking ability are highly respected, and if Chinese people know that you're Jewish—even if you insist you're here to study literature or observe rare tree ants or overthrow capitalism—it may nonetheless give your diwei a boost. You can tell them that not all Jews are smart or good at business or controlling the earth, but it won't make much difference—"well," they often say, "I was simply always told that Jews are smart and good at business." They wouldn't be lying; they were told that. This is not exactly racism in the institutionalized, second-class citizenry, and generally American or European sense. Rather, there simply aren't enough Jews—or blacks, of whom many Chinese have a vague, animalistic fear—to disabuse those Chinese of any prejudiced notions which are in any case irrelevant to their everyday lives.
While Jewish history in China is long and noteworthy, China's Jewish population today is almost entirely expatriate, secular, and indistinguishable from other foreigners, unless one of them should let their affiliation slip during the Inevitable Conversation. Conscious, visible assertions of modern Jewish identity are generally restricted to the odd Chabad House or event at the Israeli Embassy. Historical sites are just that: historical, with scarcely any culture or community that can claim direct descent back to the earliest Jews in China. For anyone who likes to play the Jewish parlor game of looking everywhere for tribe members and traditions, there is plenty to see—Kaifeng, Shanghai, Rittenberg, and more. To see any essentially Jewish cultural connection or overarching pattern would be extremely myopic.
Yet tantalizing anecdotes surface constantly, and one is never sure what to make of them. This past summer, my gullible language partner scored me tickets to a production on the campus of Peking University (PU), which I found out only minutes before seeing it would be Fiddler on the Roof. The show was entirely in English, and the cast was, with the exception of Tevye and the constable, wholly Chinese (Tevye, the lead, was played by PU's imported Artistic Director). If it doesn't sound mind-blowing yet, try to imagine a stage full of Chinese college students jumping around and singing with accents, but clearly: "Who must know the way to make a proper home, a quiet home, a kosher home?" "At three I started Hebrew school," "L'Chaim, to life!" and the like. Yet the student-actors I spoke with afterwards (mostly English and International Relations majors) didn't seem to think much of the Jewish connection, or really about Jews at all; neither did the director/Tevye, a talented but slightly spacey goy from LA who had chosen the musical. Though the "clever Jew" stereotype still wafts somewhere tantalizingly, the mutual cultural isolation is much greater than the connection anecdotal experience might suggest. Yes, the Chinese might vaguely be aware of "clever Jews," but after so many centuries of history, what else is there to show?
In modern China, Jewishness and Chineseness are almost entirely separate affairs. I was dragged to two Shabbat dinners, one Reform (expensive) and one Chabad (free, but a little too intense). The Reform service was in an upscale hotel, and the only ethnic Asians present were the odd girlfriend or wife. At the Chabad House, they were restricted to the kitchen, and the house itself was in an expensive and isolated gated community favored by diplomats. One depressingly consistent feature of the two services was a line like the following: "Hi, I'm Morty Steinberg, and me and my wife Rachel are here on business." Sigh.
In any case, it's not as if Jews don't have their own preconceptions to worry about. We do indeed seem overrepresented among foreigners who take an obsessive and possibly unhealthy interest in the Orient, and China in particular. Rittenberg and Shapiro—who, like Woody Allen, took Asian wives—are the most extreme instances, but the Jewish "Yellow Fever" stereotype is nonetheless alive and well in less radical circles, to say nothing of our clichéd predilections for chow mein and mahjong. New York narrowness? Perhaps so, but even within the restricted and unrepresentative universe of New York City, the prevalence of both the stereotype and its frequent confirmations are food for thought.
Stereotypes of both cultures collided when a friend of mine and I stumbled across the Jewish Studies Office of the Shanghai School of Social Studies. We could hardly believe what we found: a Hebrew-speaking Chinese girl with an interest in Judaism that tended irresistibly towards fetish. The conversation was Upper West Side meets Crown Heights:
"Hi! Thanks for coming! Sorry, my English isn't so good, how's your Hebrew and Yiddish?"
"Uh," we stammered, dumbfounded, "we...don't...speak..."
"I've been to Israel twice, how many times have you been?"
"Actually...we've never..."
Before we could steer the conversation back to Trotsky, Freud, and Heeb magazine, she had already revealed her ambitions to marry a Jewish guy and move to Israel, and as we perused the contents of the office, she explained she had learned Hebrew at the only university in China that teaches it (Peking University, incidentally). Seeing a Chinese girl with such an acute—nay, fetishistic—interest was both informative and mystifying, because really, what the hell? My friend and I had been trying not to read too much into experiences, in avoidance of the "who's Jewish" parlor game myopia, to not get carried away with the whole Jews in Asia thing. And then this girl—an isolated case, yes, but what a case!—comes and hits us in the face with so many inverted stereotypes that we were rendered nearly speechless (too speechless, in retrospect, to get her phone number).
What to make of it all? The Jewish history in China is interesting but not necessarily all that special. After all, Jews were scattered all over the world and did all sorts of interesting things. Taken together, the parallels and encounters are undoubtedly striking, but the connection between China's Jewish past and Jewish present is dubious. But our American Jewish love affair with mahjong and mu shu—to say nothing of the famous leftist Jews living in Mao's Beijing—can scarcely be said to lead back to Kaifeng or Shanghai. So nu? I'm not sure—but I guess that the Chinese and Jews can, at the very least, agree that clever folk do get around.
First, a disclaimer: I am not, strictly speaking, Jewish. Well, I'm half (the wrong half, my dad), but I grew up inNew York on a steady diet of bagels and guilt, find my way to temple on the occasional High Holiday, and know a schlemiel from a schlimazel. More importantly, I'm 50% more Jewish than anyone my Chinese interlocutors have ever met, and if the subject does come up, the other half doesn't seem to matter: I'm already "very clever!" and "very good at business!" "But," I protest, "those are other Jews! Really! I'm terrible at business! I'm not here to despoil you with my position at the apex of the world economy! I want to study history and-"
"So clever!"
"No, but-"
All to no avail.
This type of admiration is not limited to the Chinese. During WWII, Imperial Japan's secret Fugu Plan tried to harness the Jews' alleged financial sorcery by rescuing refugees from Europe and resettling them in China's occupied northeast. Japan's alliance with Hitler derailed the plan, but the arms of the Japanese were never entirely open to begin with: the plan took its name from the Japanese blowfish, which is lethal if incorrectly handled. On a Mongolian train, an old man who'd made my acquaintance effusively pointed to my brain and gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up after my inept rendering of "Jew" from a phrasebook. In Hoi An, Vietnam, an ethnically Chinese local spoke admiringly and empathetically of Jews with no prompting at all. The same thing happened in Thailand. Within China, people from the coastal city of Wenzhou— renowned for its residents' considerable business acumen— are frequently described as the "Jews of China" in books, in the classroom, and on the street. When I told my (admittedly gullible) Chinese language partner in Beijing about a US law requiring doctors to be Jewish, she nodded and said "oh, probably because they're so clever..." before I let her know the awful, awful truth.
It seems that for the vast majority of Asians, we can say at least this: they don't have that whole "killed our Savior" chip on their shoulder, and they admire smarts and success (and let's admit, between the Nobel Prizes and names like "Goldman Sachs," Jews do all right for themselves). But in China, this reaction is particularly pronounced, and it's not just an outsize love and respect for wealth (although it's certainly true that traditional Chinese well-wishing phrases for holidays and celebrations heavily emphasize wealth and prosperity where Westerners often invoke love and happiness). So nu?
First off, we might acknowledge that the Chinese are pretty much the Jews of the Pacific Rim (and the aforementioned ethnic Chinese in Vietnam who told me so unprompted was far from the only one).
From Hanoi to Bangkok to Jakarta and beyond, it is often the well-educated Chinese diaspora whose connections to the homeland and each other are particularly responsible for their oversized slice of the commercial pie. They are also, like the Jews, periodically expelled (from Vietnam), repressed (under Indonesia's Suharto), and rioted against (in Malaysia, Thailand, and really everywhere else). Like Jews, they are fiercely proud of their ancestral heritage and ancient civilization and often manage to assimilate somewhat while keeping temples and congregation halls to maintain their identity and community. Unlike the Jews, the Chinese diaspora has a continuously sovereign homeland with a population of 1.4 billion people, but who's counting? Finally, both Jews and Chinese have a deep and lasting love of the latter's cuisine. With so many similarities (which even extend to guilt, demanding you become a doctor or lawyer, and telling you "Eat! Eat! You're so skinny!"), it wouldn't be too surprising if the Chinese found a certain appreciation for and resonance vis-à-vis the experience of any Jews with whom they came into contact.
Well, with so many wandering Jews over the past few millennia, chances were that at least a few would stumble into one of the world's most powerful and ancient civilizations, and indeed they did. The first recorded settlement of Jews in China dates from the 9th century, with some Silk Road merchants schlepping into the Song Dynasty capital of Kaifeng and settling down, building a Chinese-looking synagogue, futzing around for a few hundred years, and surfacing in the occasional Jesuit account. They eventually became completely intermarried and assimilated, and their synagogue was lost to the floods of time (and the Yellow River). But despite the loss of all Judaic languages, books, and customs, some in Kaifeng still consider themselves Jews. China's reasonably benign policies toward statistically insignificant and politically unambitious minorities (e.g., not Tibetans) have even led a dozen or so descendants to file for official minority status, which brings special exemptions and protections.
The next notable appearance of Jews in China came in the 1840s, when a Baghdad-born Sephardi named Elias David Sassoon moved to Shanghai from his family's home in British-controlled India. The Sassoons made a fortune in opium and invested in the Shanghai real estate market, better known at the time as "rice paddies." By the early 20th century, patriarch Victor Sassoon was throwing bashes, building a world-class hotel, and quipping with the best of them: "there's only one race greater than the Jews, and that's the Derby." His chutzpah notwithstanding, anyone who laid eyes on Shanghai's classically opulent waterfront architecture, whose crown jewels were built in the 1930s, would be hard pressed to disagree. Other Sephardic families like the Kadoories also dominated business in Shanghai, and the collective result was a dizzying array of real estate and business interests which shape the city to this day.
The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 brought a flood of Tsarist refugees (Jews among them) to Shanghai's open port. A similar flood passed through the far northeastern city of Harbin, childhood home of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's father. Later, as the Holocaust engulfed Europe's Jews, a few courageous Chinese and Japanese consular officials defied orders from home and granted desperate Jews passage to Shanghai. The city's Japanese occupiers interned the Jews in a ghetto but refused requests from their German allies to kill or hand them over, preferring instead to intern the mostly Ashkenazi refugees (perhaps for the ultimately unrealized Fugu Plan). With the war's end in 1945, and the approaching Communist takeover of 1949, the Jews of Shanghai decided to leave. The wealthy Sephardim fled for British Hong Kong while the Ashkenazi refugees mostly went to England, Australia, the US, and the newly-created State of Israel. Throughout nearly a dozen decades of heavy Jewish presence in Shanghai, more than a few ethnically Chinese Jews were sired, among them my step-grandfather's London acupuncturist ("What time shall we say next week, Dr. Chang?" "Sorry Mr. Cohen, it's the High Holy Days." "What?"). But by the mid-1950's, there was scant remainder of Shanghai's once flourishing but disparate Jewish community. Besides a handful of Chinese Jews in the outlying district of Hongkou—one of Asia's earliest and most dramatic skylines—served as a testament to the Sephardim's ruthless business prowess and a powerful symbol of what Jews meant to the Chinese collective memory.
Besides the classic money stereotype, China has played host to another: the radical, bourgeois, Trotskyesque (if not Trotskyite) revolutionary intellectual, who's Jewish. Joining the Chinese Communist Party as a foreigner required direct approval of the Politburo's highest-ranking members (Mao et al.). Of the tiny number of foreigners who joined the Party or became Chinese citizens. the Jewish presence sticks out like a sore thumb. Sidney Shapiro, Sidney Rittenberg, and Israel Epstein were among the most famous; while none of these leftist expatriates was particularly influential either as Jews or Communists, their mere presence in Beijing reinforced a whole schmageggie of clichés articulated in everything from Woody Allen's Annie Hall to Woody Allen's wife. (Rittenberg, who now runs a consulting firm for multinationals investing in China, seems to have lost some of his Red zeal, though that probably has as much to do with his sixteen years in solitary confinement as his Jewish business acumen.) Under Mao, the Chinese people suffered one catastrophe after another and were impoverished and battered by half-baked economic schemes and destructive political campaigns. When Mao's death finally ushered in market reforms, making money was ready to swing back into fashion. As Deng Xiaoping kvelled, "to get rich is glorious." When Chinaopened, legions of foreign investors—inevitably, you guessed it, Jews among them—poured in.
While the Jews themselves are fairly easy to trace, Chinese conceptions of them aren't. An important concept in Chinese society is diwei, or status, and it is expressed by forms of address, protocol in table manners, who follows whom through the door, and a myriad of other everyday social interactions. Besides mere curiosity, the purpose of the questions random Chinese always ask in the Inevitable Conversation is to gauge your diwei through the normal indicators (salary, education, marriage status) and see where you fit in the Chinese scheme of things. Needless to say, intelligence and moneymaking ability are highly respected, and if Chinese people know that you're Jewish—even if you insist you're here to study literature or observe rare tree ants or overthrow capitalism—it may nonetheless give your diwei a boost. You can tell them that not all Jews are smart or good at business or controlling the earth, but it won't make much difference—"well," they often say, "I was simply always told that Jews are smart and good at business." They wouldn't be lying; they were told that. This is not exactly racism in the institutionalized, second-class citizenry, and generally American or European sense. Rather, there simply aren't enough Jews—or blacks, of whom many Chinese have a vague, animalistic fear—to disabuse those Chinese of any prejudiced notions which are in any case irrelevant to their everyday lives.
While Jewish history in China is long and noteworthy, China's Jewish population today is almost entirely expatriate, secular, and indistinguishable from other foreigners, unless one of them should let their affiliation slip during the Inevitable Conversation. Conscious, visible assertions of modern Jewish identity are generally restricted to the odd Chabad House or event at the Israeli Embassy. Historical sites are just that: historical, with scarcely any culture or community that can claim direct descent back to the earliest Jews in China. For anyone who likes to play the Jewish parlor game of looking everywhere for tribe members and traditions, there is plenty to see—Kaifeng, Shanghai, Rittenberg, and more. To see any essentially Jewish cultural connection or overarching pattern would be extremely myopic.
Yet tantalizing anecdotes surface constantly, and one is never sure what to make of them. This past summer, my gullible language partner scored me tickets to a production on the campus of Peking University (PU), which I found out only minutes before seeing it would be Fiddler on the Roof. The show was entirely in English, and the cast was, with the exception of Tevye and the constable, wholly Chinese (Tevye, the lead, was played by PU's imported Artistic Director). If it doesn't sound mind-blowing yet, try to imagine a stage full of Chinese college students jumping around and singing with accents, but clearly: "Who must know the way to make a proper home, a quiet home, a kosher home?" "At three I started Hebrew school," "L'Chaim, to life!" and the like. Yet the student-actors I spoke with afterwards (mostly English and International Relations majors) didn't seem to think much of the Jewish connection, or really about Jews at all; neither did the director/Tevye, a talented but slightly spacey goy from LA who had chosen the musical. Though the "clever Jew" stereotype still wafts somewhere tantalizingly, the mutual cultural isolation is much greater than the connection anecdotal experience might suggest. Yes, the Chinese might vaguely be aware of "clever Jews," but after so many centuries of history, what else is there to show?
In modern China, Jewishness and Chineseness are almost entirely separate affairs. I was dragged to two Shabbat dinners, one Reform (expensive) and one Chabad (free, but a little too intense). The Reform service was in an upscale hotel, and the only ethnic Asians present were the odd girlfriend or wife. At the Chabad House, they were restricted to the kitchen, and the house itself was in an expensive and isolated gated community favored by diplomats. One depressingly consistent feature of the two services was a line like the following: "Hi, I'm Morty Steinberg, and me and my wife Rachel are here on business." Sigh.
In any case, it's not as if Jews don't have their own preconceptions to worry about. We do indeed seem overrepresented among foreigners who take an obsessive and possibly unhealthy interest in the Orient, and China in particular. Rittenberg and Shapiro—who, like Woody Allen, took Asian wives—are the most extreme instances, but the Jewish "Yellow Fever" stereotype is nonetheless alive and well in less radical circles, to say nothing of our clichéd predilections for chow mein and mahjong. New York narrowness? Perhaps so, but even within the restricted and unrepresentative universe of New York City, the prevalence of both the stereotype and its frequent confirmations are food for thought.
Stereotypes of both cultures collided when a friend of mine and I stumbled across the Jewish Studies Office of the Shanghai School of Social Studies. We could hardly believe what we found: a Hebrew-speaking Chinese girl with an interest in Judaism that tended irresistibly towards fetish. The conversation was Upper West Side meets Crown Heights:
"Hi! Thanks for coming! Sorry, my English isn't so good, how's your Hebrew and Yiddish?"
"Uh," we stammered, dumbfounded, "we...don't...speak..."
"I've been to Israel twice, how many times have you been?"
"Actually...we've never..."
Before we could steer the conversation back to Trotsky, Freud, and Heeb magazine, she had already revealed her ambitions to marry a Jewish guy and move to Israel, and as we perused the contents of the office, she explained she had learned Hebrew at the only university in China that teaches it (Peking University, incidentally). Seeing a Chinese girl with such an acute—nay, fetishistic—interest was both informative and mystifying, because really, what the hell? My friend and I had been trying not to read too much into experiences, in avoidance of the "who's Jewish" parlor game myopia, to not get carried away with the whole Jews in Asia thing. And then this girl—an isolated case, yes, but what a case!—comes and hits us in the face with so many inverted stereotypes that we were rendered nearly speechless (too speechless, in retrospect, to get her phone number).
What to make of it all? The Jewish history in China is interesting but not necessarily all that special. After all, Jews were scattered all over the world and did all sorts of interesting things. Taken together, the parallels and encounters are undoubtedly striking, but the connection between China's Jewish past and Jewish present is dubious. But our American Jewish love affair with mahjong and mu shu—to say nothing of the famous leftist Jews living in Mao's Beijing—can scarcely be said to lead back to Kaifeng or Shanghai. So nu? I'm not sure—but I guess that the Chinese and Jews can, at the very least, agree that clever folk do get around.
// NICHOLAS FRISCH (CC '07) likes whiskey and yachts. He spent the spring of 2006 studying in Beijing.