The Burden of Language and the Politics of Silence
The techno-state and the techno-culture and the disappearance of thinking in US and China
A few weeks ago, I had tea at an old friend’s house. She is well-connected throughout China, operating seamlessly in a cutthroat world of shifting alliances and power dynamics.
In China, everyone is a friend. It covers all manner of sins and relations. It obscures how much business and personal life merge into one. I call her a friend because I scratched her back enough times and she in turn helped scratch mine. It suggests a relationship far more complex than mere business associates or contacts.
We have been in some absurd situations together. Details that we might joke about or nod to each other, but things too private to divulge. And yet, there is distance between us. I have learned to keep my guard up. I do not know who else she speaks with, if her frank observations to me would mean she shares the same about me to others. I have trained myself to share enough to maintain our relationship, to remain skeptical of how the information I offer might be misused, and to achieve the ends I might have in mind: to be close but never too close.
Are we friends then? I might say she is probably one of my closest friends in China. In the sense that we both understand that how much we say is problematic. Silence and omission are our best friends.
It was over rare tea and savory nuts that we began to discuss the latest buzzword circulating in China: keep silent. It has been given the positive spin by those who might originally become skeptical of the term: paid to keep silent. The intimation is that one should be grateful to have a job. He or she is paid to not have an opinion.
It called to me because it reflected rather aptly how I had operated in China. I spent my entire experience saying as little as possible about what I thought. I sat quietly and listened, or on the small occasion I might discuss something it was in the narrow area of which I had an expertise or about corollaries in Western history. My rare comments about China and its challenges were always couched in what I felt it was not doing sufficiently, how it could improve.
I often rewatched Casablanca, finding refuge in the agnosticism of Rick Blaine. Others came to find me harmless or otherwise an open vessel that could receive speculation and rumor. I learned what I could listen to and remember. I learned to leave a room or exit a WeChat group if something would become problematic. I learned to be quiet. I learned to forget.
The vibrancy and contested nature of life in China has become muted of late. There are grumblings in private conversations over drinks, but it is not as omnipresent as it once was. This was often how I came to define myself as different than my Chinese peers. I neither deigned nor desired to have an opinion that might move boats.
They were less restrained. In a world where silence has become the norm, does that render my own silence suspect? It is a changing of the norm, enough that it makes life in China less predictable, less certain, and something that my conflict aversion would prefer to do without.
On the other hand, silence has become more political in the United States than ever before. The lack of an opinion is seen as tacit approval. For instance, those with any ties to China are asked to defend all the complex actions of the party-state. What was once a stratagem for survival has become an unexpected burden. Words and non-words have become so filled with meaning and open to interpretation.
In the US, we are asked to form opinions about things for which we have little knowledge. And the result then is the pretense of free speech in which careless billionaires speculate wildly about the nature of war and life. Failure to speak fast enough is punished; the time it takes to express our opinions is a measurement of our sincerity. Gone are the days that it would take days or weeks to align on phrasing or evolve in our understanding.
These movements are of course different though analogous. The rise of the techno-state and the techno-culture that have come to police language and its ancestor, thought. I recognize it is impure to conflate both, but I find them both related not because they are the same experiences but that they have changed contemporary life in China and US.
Language has become so burdensome that I find myself becoming hoarse.
Will we ever be able to speak again as we once did?
What is Truth Anyway?
I have always had an uncomfortable relationship with the truth. As an immigrant and the child of two psychiatrists (my dad trained as a Freudian psychoanalyst in the 60s), I spent my childhood living other people’s lives while trying to obscure my inner thoughts at home. I learned to be a chameleon of sorts.
My family was one of a dozen or so non-White families in town. It was the kind of town where everyone had straight hair and a bowl cut, and only a handful of my classmates understood the pain that came with having hair that wouldn’t go down like Nick Carter’s. My frizzy hair stood out. I didn’t want to stand out. But I found that no matter how hard I tried, I stuck out like a sore thumb.
There was a time in elementary school where my teacher put me in the corner every day for a month, as I would sheepishly tell my mom every day I came home before she decided she would get to the bottom of it. It was just a coincidence that the only Latino kid in the class was given such punishment. But magically after my mom’s intervention, it stopped.
After I moved to the US, I spoke English without a problem, but for whatever reason my mouth couldn’t keep up with my mind and out would come a rather stubborn stutter. I went to the speech pathologist weekly for a few years train my brain to slow down a little. I can’t remember stuttering now. It is as if decades of my own voice have obscured that little boy, as the only memories that remain are the moments of shame that I had when forced to leave class to go deal with my little problem.
As I realized I was gay, I moved from wanting to be invisible to wanting to construct a public image that might be palatable enough while weird in ways that wouldn’t lead anyone to suspect I was gay, least of all my parents.
To be this deceptive, I needed to become a master of sound. I learned to modulate my voice to throw people off the scent. I borrowed the rhotic accent of Philadelphia dropping my water to wooder. I began to overpronounce words like Wednesday and Salmon, inflecting in my speech enough oddities that would make me seem weird but being gay was never on the table.
The Last Word
Writing became a refuge—poetry most of all. I enjoyed the way that words sounded, how repetition could invert things, and how I could convey complexity into such short phrases. It was through writing that I finally came out to my mom. It was through writing that I probably got into college. It was writing where I think I showed my greatest promise.
By college, I had come to own my weird shell and all the odd barnacles that I had collected along the way. It was a world full of contradictions, but one that made me feel equally at home at the Chicano Caucus and Queer Sushi, at the snooty St. A’s and the rowdy SigEp. I listened endlessly to Belle & Sebastian, but I grinded up on the likes of Graham Norton at Heaven.
I enjoyed the diversity of these worlds, carrying them as part of me but in some ways as different representations of the same world. I commemorated them in my writing, producing a polyphonic orchestra that felt intelligible even in its dissonace.
But it was in love and heartbreak that my voice most found its texture. Each love ended was immortalized in a poem that expressed in such simple terms what the relationship had meant to me. It was in loss, in pain, in destruction that my own voice became stronger and more capable.
I submitted pieces to the annual literary magazine that were accepted and gave me co-starring with some of the better writers at school. I never pursued it much further as I never quite knew if it would be much more than a hobby, but that lyricality, that disregard for syntax and structure, lived on in my academic writing.
Soon, I discovered, that speaking gave me a similar joy. I loved the ability to connect with an audience, feeling as if you and the audience have become one. This was most powerfully demonstrated in the years that I worked in college admissions where once a fortnight I would need to give a lecture in front of 100 to 150 people who had bothered to travel all the way to New York to visit campus.
I wanted to leave them with an auditory experience of the school that they might take with them back home. Perhaps one of my favorite tricks during those years was that I would ask questions at the beginning of the 30-minute session, promising to cover each question over the course of my homily. I would go through adapting the storyline of my tripartite narrative to fit the examples that would cover the half-dozen or so stories, pointing to each person as I arrived at their answer.
That I thought I wanted to become a professor now seems to make far more sense than my more demure characterization in my previous piece.1 I thought it represented my rather odd-ball interest in rare knowledge, a requirement to write and convey interesting thoughts, and the chance to build an aural connection.
And then, I met the professor who questioned my writing, who wondered aloud if I might be the worst writer he had seen.
And suddenly, it was taken away. I didn’t write another poem or anything of great art for 8 years after the incident. I wouldn’t write something I would say of true merit and talent until 2022. And it wasn’t until last year that I finally began to dust off the carcass of my own identity and give new life to it through recounting my own memories.
In fact, this latest iteration is quite new to me. I had always lived in the powerful world of double-entendres and deception. It is through prose about my own life that I cannot hide as much as before, and for which I have had to get over even my own greatest fears.
The Stranger’s Dilemma
China became a place where I could reinvent myself. It was so far from home that memories of my past, my challenges, and my failures could be forgotten. I relished once again in anonymity. It became infective.
No one in China knew about or cared much about my past. They cared mostly about my present. Would I stay in China? What had I done that year? They filled my background with their own biases. I was White because they had never seen a Mexican my complexion. I must love the ladies of China. I must be an expert at Chinese. I must be rich because all Americans are rich.
There was a consistency in such projections that my own existence became just as socially constructed as I had felt my life in the US. I think this is the great problematic for minorities when we come to China. In a way the projection in China is more cartoonish and therefore less real. Accordingly, it never feels as vitriolic. You are able to disappear into the two-dimensional character that has been created of you.
I don’t recall the first time that I went along with the statement that I must be married to a woman, but I did. As I became more and more involved in the life of Chinese companies and businesses, my primary concern was never admitting anything about myself that might create waves or challenges toward my upward momentum.
What began as simple sins of omission grew to more and more elaborate stories about tā, the homophone that could be male or female. We were concentrating on our careers and that is why we didn’t have kids. I cared about my career too much to just live on a spousal visa, avoiding the fact that I wouldn’t have been eligible.
I had become comfortable with deception before. And though the interluding years of college and graduate school saw me grow into an unapologetically politicized person, I resigned myself into another gear, another mode, another understanding of myself—someone who wanted privacy above all.
I wonder if I had openly corrected others that I was Mexican and I was gay and I was not what they imagined me to be, if they would have listened or cared. I wonder if I would have made it through the gauntlet of Chinese corporate life. I wonder if I would have had a good story to tell you at all.
If time stood still
The first time I worked for a Chinese firm was when I was sent to Indonesia, which was in the midst of a conservative revival that still persists today. An ocean away, the conversation was centered on #metoo and the rapidly growing chorus demanding resolution to decades of mistreatment.
I was far away from Kansas. I sat in a brothel with my boss as I hid my own gayness from him by forming the kind of brotherhood that is critical for growth and success in Chinese firms. I made tactical choices that seemed right at the time but also because I had no reference point, no other foreigner from whom I could commiserate. I went forward blind into a world of old mores.
There was a huge dissonance in hearing my friends talk about what was going on in the US as I lived between China and Indonesia, a world that clung to second wave feminist ideals as if the 60s had only finally arrived in the region. Even women who were connected to the West often would defend the local reactions, arguing how unnecessary the conversation about #metoo was because in a proper society women needn’t be protected.
After I returned to China, I moved to an internet company founded by one of the most visible women in Chinese tech. I watched as a cabal of men began to bit-by-bit eat away at her authority. As snickers about how she could really be a good leader if she wasn’t married and didn’t have kids, I had to listen on and wonder if my face gave away what I felt in either direction. But no, I didn’t have an opinion, I had learned not to have an opinion.
The fascination in Chinese companies in those days was not so much about extending more rights to employees but demanding more for less, and in this, the women and the men agreed, the foreigners were weak. My arguments about asymmetry of information and power structures, borrowed from Marxist scholars of yore, were quickly disregarded. China was beginning to close itself off from the rest of the world, and in its bravado and confidence it soon began to align on a single thought—the West is weak and an ascendent China would pass it in quick order. China began to listen less to outside voices.
But they would always carve out a special place for me in their list, no longer was I westerner, how could I be? I worked like them. I was modest like them. I was driven like them.
Did they ever wonder that I did it to survive? Or maybe we were all just surviving and so they didn’t care too much about the complexity of my internal motivation. But I became more and more affected by my life in China and the way it seemed to reflect antiquated cultural positions while simultaneously becoming less and less integrated to the outside world.
I realized how much I had become trapped in that world when I was stuck in the US during the early pandemic. I was in Upstate New York avoiding Covid with my family when George Floyd’s murder changed everything on the ground, especially the pliant phase of the lockdown.
I didn’t think much about the protests. I was too busy running a startup every night and morning with the team back in China. All I cared about was getting back there to be with them and my partner, and I used my free time to upload old photos and videos I had in an account regaling my years of living on the road.
A few people wrote to me angered. I was tone deaf. I didn’t even know that these people still even looked at my social profiles. They hadn’t commented, liked, or otherwise engaged with me since I had moved to China. I had assumed that my bridge to them and that world had been severed. My audience in these posts was in large part myself, but also the people whom I had befriended over the years—those of us who had lived in the alternative universe that was Asia. I had completely forgotten that there was another world, one that I felt increasingly I did not understand.
The American right fetishizes a pre-woke world—where speech is unfettered and pain is unidirectional. I lived that life. I came to adapt to its linguistic particularities, to its antiquated nature, and to find unique joys within it. Indeed, there is something sweet and nostalgic about gay life in China because it reminds me of my youth when I found common cause and common self-destructiveness in being an outsider. It feels more comfortable than going to a gay club in the US where the pageantry of self-promotion is on full display. It is why I can sympathize with the Right in some ways. I, too, don’t fully understand the layers of identity that have come to bring noise to our modern life. There are so many more layers than when I last lived here. There are far more layers than exist in Asia.
Perhaps the Right should move to China instead of disparaging it.
How to talk in public
I suppose my bona fides on this subject are not as some grand scholar of language but as someone who has spent most of my life running away from it. It has given me a keen appreciation to the subtle ways that speech has shifted meaning and how much we have come to talk past each other.
It is in this that I feel the struggles on both sides of the Pacific are part of a single cultural moment instead of divergent tracks. We misunderstand each other more today than we did only a few years back. This is internally within our countries just as much as it is cross-cultural. It is not because we speak too much or too little, but certainly we listen less.
Too often we like to point to the cause of our quietude—the state, the libs, the maggots—and portend that it is different, when in so many ways it feels like one in the same. It is a fear of understanding that has become stronger and stronger.
Alongside the rather naïve assertions about my whiteness or wealth, I used to receive far more incisive questions about the world from my Chinese friends than I do now. There was an interest to learn, a desire to understand, a passion for creating bridges. It was what I loved most about my friendships and relationships in China. But what becomes lost is not just speech but also identity. The reason why the malaise argument about China has caught on so much is precisely because there is a sense that Chinese don’t speak as they once spoke. And the speech that exists today is far less dynamic than it once was.
The US speaks too much. What was once a culture and language of concision as hundreds of cultures descended on the country forcing us to speak with brutal honesty has blossomed into a smorgasbord of insincerity in which we say things we do not mean.
No, they are not the exact same and yet they are similar. They are similar enough that they descend from the same source—what does it mean to disagree?
It was in my last year of college that my professor introduced me to Jurgen Habermas, the last remaining member of the famed Frankfurt School of Marxist thinkers that revolutionized the social sciences in the middle part of the Twentieth Century. That he was a Marxist might today be reason enough to brandish him with foul words, if even he created one of the most important frameworks for understanding human society.
Habermas’s Public Sphere theory underpins Elon Musk’s pretense of his Town Square. It is the philosophical underpinning of almost any scholar who talks about what it means to talk in public. In a Kantian vein, it appears quite easy to understand but in practice the rules that Habermas constructs makes the act of a truly open public sphere exceedingly difficult to realize. We haven’t had a true public sphere for a long time. Without a public sphere, how can we debate and disagree and do so in a constructive way?
Over the intervening years, I have forgotten his words and how much they once impacted me. The chaos of these years. The demagoguery of these years. The decay of thought of these years. All has led me to forget where I once came, left only with a rather primitive understanding of myself and the world around me.
I wonder if Habermas might have virtue if we had the patience and the tolerance to read him strictly and thoughtfully. But do we read nowadays anymore? Or do we just absorb the energy we wish to put out into the world in a process of recycling our own babble? But I do encourage all of you to read Habermas. He is not easy to read. It is a brutal go. But once you can dissect him with clarity, you will realize how hard it is to build a vibrant social life.
Another Me Decade
I wish to end with a touch of optimism, a saccharine word or two that all will get better: we have been here before. In the late 1970s a flurry of scholars and social commentators, chiefly Chrisopher Lasch, wrote about the innate selfishness of Boomers the same way we deride Gen-Z . It was a moment of inflation and heightened anxiety, much like today, though there is a unique capacity in which social media has not caused this moment but certainly driven it to greater heights. It is worse because we are for the first time in human history self-aware of our own madness at a societal level and not just at a personal one. We realize just how out of control we are that we push ever deeper into the hole hoping, praying, expecting that we might make it out.
We will. It just takes time. It takes patience. And it most likely requires some brave individuals to go against the grain and pursue the thankless work of listening and thinking and removing our biases and bridging with others. We cannot falsifiably know that such effort will be what prevents calamity, but we will pursue it with conviction as if it might because we must believe in something, we must believe that there will be a brighter tomorrow. And because those of us who try all suffer from a savior complex, we will take credit if crisis is indeed averted never knowing truly, unquestionably, and fully if it was indeed our misplaced faith.
But that is also what is particularly special about life and worth appreciating. We cannot predict our individual nor collective futures. We can only experience them with the full range of human emotion: embarrassment, confusion, terror, and, most importantly, joy.
And there is a tool at our disposal that we have used for millenia to document these emotions, anxieties, expectations, and stories. Once we depoliticize it from this current moment, we might discover that there is great power in speaking and it needn’t be a burden anymore.
Though I would caution you from taking me too seriously, remember I am purposefully writing all these pieces about my own life to give you a Roshomon sensation of truth.