Ping Pong as a Survival Skill -a Story from the Chinese Cultural Revolution

When we think of survival skills, many don't think outside the box or limit the range of such skills. Recently, I spoke with a Chinese friend who is from Wuhan, epicenter of the coronavirus. While he teaches at a college far from Wuhan, his parents still live there. As the entire city has been quarantined with no one going in or out, there is good cause to worry.

He said they are doing well but running low on food. He said he has been ordering food off the internet to deliver to them but it takes a long time to get there and he is worried. I asked if there was anything I could do. Of course, there's not really, and reminded him that his parents had survived worse and that his mother had once survived based on her ping pong playing skills.

Apparently, during the Cultural Revolution, a period of total chaos and dysfunction in Chinese history due to insane political extremism, at some point she'd found herself homeless and adrift in territories far from home. (I'm not sure how this happened, but it was not uncommon at this time. The authorities would occasionally order urban people, particularly intellectuals, to move to the countryside to "learn from the peasants" and since the peasants (farmers) often didn't particularly want them there, and society was falling apart, people would find themselves far from home without resources or food or means of making a living. It didn't help that young people were joining the Red Guards, roaming around unsupervised and trying to force the implementation of poorly thought out government mandates. They'd sometimes quite and try to find a way home too.

So this young woman, all by herself, far from home, found herself in need of food and shelter. Often one step in doing this was to find the local ping pong table where she happened to be and use it to make friends with strangers. Which often led to offers of a meal and food for the night.

(As an aside, due to China's high population density, people tend to often live in small, crowded houses or apartments. In a city like Wuhan, this would have made it difficult to stockpile a long term food supply, although a lot of the Karen (Burmese hilltribe) refugees I know in the USA have a few 50 pound bags of rice around somewhere in their houses or apartments. It's not a bad idea dn it makes them happy.)

Pulp Fiction Asian Bandits

People seem to like seeing pictures of nicely painted figures so here's a recent project. If anyone asks these are "modern day Pulp-fiction Asian fantasy Bandits" and should not be seen as representations of any historical or modern day people. The figures are actually 28mm Montagniards from Westwind Productions Vietnam War range and while nice figures, they don't resemble any photos of Montagniards from the period that I've ever seen. As for the Buddha in the tree trunk scenery piece that came from the aquarium decorations section of the pet area of a particularly large Walmart. Again, I refuse to comment on whether or not it's actually representative of anything anywhere.

Close ups of some of the figures. What's with the guy in the gasmask? No idea.
If someone has ever heard of SE Asian people donning gasmasks please let me know. 

Again, no idea if it's historically accurate but it'd make a great pulp fiction character. 

   

South East Asian Cultural Boundaries of the Pre-Modern World and their Continuing Effects on the Modern World.

Author's note: Originally written almost 9 years ago. Still significant today. I've spent a lot of time in the last ten years studying, visiting, teaching, and hanging out with refugees from this part of the world. This is the map that made a lot of things click.
SUNDAY, APRIL 26, 2009
Asia / Refugee Stuff : South East Asian Cutural Boundaries and the modern world.

Ah! I wish I could go back to graduate school and make writing and researching about Asian culture and history the focus of my life. Alas! It shall not be so anytime soon.

Therefore, for the moment, I must be content to speculate, pontificate and elucidate in these pages instead of elsewhere.

The importance of this map is explained in the text. 

One of the joys of academic research is when you get those wonderful "Eureka" moments. That great "Ah ha!" feeling sweeps throughout you and you realize that a great deal of once complex information suddenly makes sense and fits a pattern. (Of course, one must be careful of assuming this feeling actually means your conclusions are making sense. Conspiracy theorists and schizophrenics, for instance, are blessed with brains that misfire this way all the time. Still, the sensation is blissfully exciting, which explains perhaps why schizophrenics and conspiracy theorists spend so much time lost in their own odd thoughts.)

Recently while reading "In Search of Asia" I had such a moment while viewing this map. The map is entitled "Centers of power in Southeast Asia at the end of the Eighteenth Century" and appears on page 98 of the 1987 edition of "In Search of Southeast Asia."




Essentially what the map shows is the extent of cultural power and cultural influence in various centers in southeast Asia at the beginning of the modern era. At the time the kingdoms and cultures that are now dominant in Burma, Thailand and Vietnam did not have boundaries in the sense of anything resembling the modern sense of the term. And the role of the king was often different than in Europe of the time as well. Simplifying greatly for ease of transmitting a concept, the king hd less of a political role and more of a ritual role in the lives of his citizens. His power was not seen as uniform through a given geographical territory. Instead, his power radiated outward from the center, becoming weaker the further one was from that center. Instead of there being a strict boundary to the state, instead the state just sort of faded away becoming less and less important until it faded away altogether at the edge of civilization. Then came the rugged lands of hills and forest and jungle, the lands where the uncivilized people who existed outside the pale of civilization.

And that's what this map shows. The black "core area" is the center of the civilized area. Beyond it is a gray realm, where civilization exists but there's a certain lack of sophistication although the people are still part of the dominant culture. Light gray is a "fringe area" and the striped lines represent the areas where two different relatively equal states vie for control.




Now if one examines the map of Burma what you essentially see is the way in which Burma is divided between a dominant, Burmese culture, and a surrounding area with many other minority cultures. And it is from these minority cultures, i.e. the Karen, the Chin, that many refugees come. And to some extent the reason they come here is over a dispute over their relationship with the central government of the state now known as Myanmar.

In neighboring Thailand this map also shows the difference between the areas where hill tribes (some of which overlap with Burma) live.

As for Vietnam, the map shows the area where the so-called montagniards live.

A similar map could easily be made for China.