In college, I came across the original diaries of two Fuzhou missionaries that had been gathering dust in our library for more than 100 years. I’ve now lived in China for four years, which seems like long enough to revisit the stories of Mary Allen and Carlos Martin.

Many of us expats view ourselves as arbiters of cross-cultural exchanges and vanguards of Chinese knowledge unto the Western world. We’ve learned chengyu, written papers, blogged, photographed, dated Chinese people, opened bars, been screwed out of our money on multiple occasions, chalked up so, so much to “learning experiences.” But for a real look at how deep the rabbit hole goes, look before 1978, and especially before 1949. The absurdity of living a cross-/multicultural life in China is like a rock swept under rising waters; now, we only see the tip of it.

In August 1859, Mary Allen (20) and Carlos Martin (24) married at an Episcopal Church in rural Vermont. Within two months, the town waved its handkerchiefs as the young couple set sail for Fuzhou. After several months of acute seasickness and dolphin-spotting, the Martins were greeted by a band of Protestant missionaries that had rooted in Fuzhou a decade earlier. The Martins settled in; Carl proselytized while Mary bore children. They became members of the community, even befriending Chinese. Then, on January 17, 1864, the town stormed their cottage, demanding blood.

It’s easy to forget in this modern age of Foreign Babes in Beijing and Shanghai Calling, but China once experienced exhilarating schadenfreude in regards to the outside world (literally 国外), and outsiders who came to China lived a life of both privilege and perdition beyond what we now witness in Xintiandi and Sanlitun. Indeed, Mary Martin returned to Vermont after five years in Fuzhou having lost both her husband and infant son.

The Martins were devoted and enthusiastic offspring of the Protestant intellectual movement of the mid-19th century, wherein a middle-class self-evaluation proffered that overseas proselytizing was an undertaking of the highest moral caliber. Once in China, most of these missionaries realized that giving soapbox sermons in the broken local dialect was as effective as having stayed in Vermont. Nonetheless, they set up rice kitchens, orphanages, and hospitals. Slowly, the conversions came.

Still, great barriers rose to oppose them. The Opium Wars had made Chinese feel like second-class citizens in their own land, and paternalistic Confucianism remained ensconced in the aristocracy, as the privileged and influential were the least likely to change their beliefs. The threat posed by the “outside world,” in particular in the form of religion, was a sharp jab to the intellectual and aristocratic classes. “Protecting” and “defending” tradition were (and often still are) conflated with targeting and marginalizing anything foreign.

In the widely read Pixie Jishi (“A record of facts to ward off heterodoxy,” 闢邪紀事), written by an anonymous “Most Heartbroken Man in the World” (in reference to the Opium Wars) in 1861, the author indulges Chinese suspicions of Christians as sexual perverts and churches as loci of orgies. He writes:

During the first three months of life the anuses of all [Christian] infants – male and female – are plugged up with a small hollow tube…It causes the anus to dilate so that upon growing up sodomy will be facilitated. At the junction of each spring and summer boys procure the menstrual discharge of women and, smearing it on their faces, go into Christian churches to worship. They call this ‘cleansing one’s face before paying one’s respects to the holy one, and regard it as one of the most venerative rituals by which the Lord can be worshiped.  Fathers and sons, elder and younger brothers, behave licentiously with one another, calling it ‘the joining of the vital forces.’ … Hard as it may be to believe, some of our Chinese people also follow their religion. Are they not really worse than beasts?

Simmering suspicion – and certainly superstition – would have contributed to the gathering of a curious crowd outside the new church in East Fuzhou on January 17, 1864. Carl Martin and his fellow Chinese preacher Xu Yangmei had been preparing the new congregation house for months. As Christians, both Chinese and foreign, shuffled into the new building, unassociated onlookers pushed in as well. They played with the wall ornaments and hung around in the pulpit. When asked to leave, they grew indignant and suspicious. Some face must have been lost in the exchange. A few left and came back with a larger crowd, and actions occurred that today would be front-page news on The New York Times.

Xu Yangmei’s wife and daughters were beaten and raped in the new church, along with other Chinese Christians. Either the foreign members had escaped or were not put on record as having been assaulted at that time; Mary, Carl, and their two sons hurried home and collected their items, literally chased out the back door and into the woods by the mob. They escaped.

The idea of a “harmonious society” – in this case, glossing over punishments and repayments for the sake of maintaining family face and community stability – is by no means the handicapped child of China’s communist regime. The idea arguably originates in Confucian texts, and was certainly pertinent in Fuzhou at the time. The local officials demanded that the lead rioters and rapists apologize to Xu Yangmei, which they did. Face for face, and the incident fell by the wayside.

Carl and his newborn son died of cholera later that year.

Allegedly – I have never gone – the church still remains in East Fuzhou, tended by a direct descendent of Xu Yangmei. One of Carl and Mary’s direct descendants sought him out in the 1990s and was warmly received in that very church.

Paul French once said in an interview, “The laowai experience is a collective one. Everyone needs to stop thinking of their own stories as special.” Looking back on this incident in Fuzhou in 1864, I can’t agree more. And the more I discover incidents such as this, the more I want to shut up about my own experiences. There’s such a rich history that we may all benefit from giving our predecessors a longer listen.

Hannah Lincoln currently lives in Beijing. Her previous pieces for BJC include this airplane story about false assumptions, misunderstanding, and forgiveness.

Simply put, you should watch Living with Dead Hearts, a documentary made by the husband-wife team of Charlie Custer and Leia Li. The film follows four families who have been touched by child trafficking, and through their stories, we gain an understanding of an under-publicized issue that affects untold thousands in China every year.

(Disclosure: I helped subtitle some of the film more than a year ago.)

Here are three reasons you should watch:

1. The subjects

The movie is light on narration and heavy on interviews. The interviewers — presumably Charlie (founder of China Geeks, currently a writer for Tech in Asia) and Leia — allow the families to tell as much of their stories as they are willing or able to share. And share they do, even through sobs.

“We don’t eat. We don’t drink tea. Every day we dream of bringing our grandson home,” says one.

“Here is what I want to say to my son,” says another. “Your dad and mom were not good, we didn’t watch you close enough, that’s why you were kidnapped. Son, daddy and mommy are sorry. No matter where you go, as long as we’re alive, your mom and dad, as long as we have breath, we’ll be trying to bring you home.”

“For a month after we lost him, she and I couldn’t even tell day from night,” says Liu Jingjun, father. “We really couldn’t tell the difference.”

You won’t leave feeling warm and fuzzy — this isn’t that type of film — but hopefully you’ll be motivated to learn more.

2. The scope

The interviewees include: the family of an infant boy, the family of a pre-teen girl, the family of a teenage boy, and an abductee recalling his story as an adult. It’s clear why these were chosen: to highlight the complexity of child trafficking, and the number of lives it touches.

Trafficking is partially spurred by the one-child policy, which puts a premium on children, who are “precious for their scarcity.” Girls are targeted for forced prostitution and marriage, and young men are in danger of slave labor. Any of them can be sold to adoption agencies, or find themselves begging on the street.

But at the heart of it, trafficking starts with one person stealing another, and it’s the devastation of this act — the pain of that bereavement, the uncertainty the abductee’s family will likely live with forever — that this film poignantly captures.

3. The issue

China estimates 10,000 children are kidnapped each year, while the US state department says it may be double that number. There is an incredible urgency for something to be done, but try as lawmakers have — namely with capital punishment for convicted traffickers — abductions persist.

The documentary isn’t perfect, but what is there is undeniably powerful and moving. “He just disappeared… there are no leads… she vanished in an instant.” These are some of the voices that appear at the start of the film, as parents and grandparents gather around a wall of missing children posters, some that go into minute detail of what the kids were wearing on the day of their disappearance.

It’s unlikely the adults here will ever see their child again, but we can hope — as they hope, every minute of every day.

Anthony Tao contributed to this post. Follow Hannah @HannahLincoln1.

You can help the filmmakers by purchasing Living with Dead Hearts from their website.

Boarding an airplane can put you through the rawest five minutes of judgement you’ll ever face, especially if you’re a foreigner. Like a slow, awkward fashion show, you amble down the aisle in fits and starts while everyone already seated simply stare.

On my recent Guilin-bound Chengdu plane, I was generally spared of any finger-pointing or comments before I slid into my middle seat, wedged between A and C.

But then the 20-year-old boys came.

A hoard of these young men, jostling down the aisle in search for their seats, froze when they arrived at my row. I don’t speak Sichuanese, but by now I have a keen enough sense of when people are talking about me that I understood what was so funny.

“Oh, I have to sit with a foreigner!” one boy guffawed, and his friends pushed him toward his seat (Seat A, next to the window). “Switch with me!” he begged his friends. “No, no, you have to sit there!” they replied, and he edged in and buckled up.

I’ve never been one to 忍 (suffer silently, something the Chinese consider to be a virtue), so I turned to him and asked, “What’s wrong? Don’t like foreigners?”

“Huh?”

“I said, what’s your problem with foreigners?”

“Oh, you speak Chinese?”

“Yes…” By now the surrounding seats were silent. Those in the row in front practically had their ears pressed to the gap between the cushions. “So why don’t you want to sit next to a foreigner?”

“It’s not that, it’s just that… do you mind switching with my friend?”

His friend had been standing and watching, so I took the ticket out of his hand. Getting my baggage out of the overhead bin, I said sharply, “Don’t talk about foreigners like that.” Then I moved to the back of the plane.

~

I first came to China on a CET program in 2008. Teachers regarded my initial disgust with everything as culture shock. Within a month I got over — and even came to appreciate and enjoy — China’s dirtiness, its chaos, its underlying freestyle beat. One thing I could never come to terms with, however, was being made to feel like an outsider: the staring, the pointing, locals wanting to take pictures with you, and the never-ending line of inquiry, “You foreigners all like ___, right?”

“It’s just different,” my classmates would say, implying that I was simply intolerant.

“They don’t know any better,” they would add, absolving the finger-pointers and gawkers of responsibility.

“You have to understand their point of view.”

I was confused about how racism should be forgivable once you’re the target of it. But when you’re in love with China, as I increasingly was in those salad days of underground music and hutong prowling, what can you do? You take the good with the bad. I learned to shut my mouth and let the fingers point. I smiled in the tourist photos. I wrote a study abroad essay about how I learned to get along with Chinese people, and won $100.

Two years in Chinese grad school and two Chinese boyfriends later, I wised up. In tolerating ostracization, I had allowed Chinese friends and acquaintances to walk all over me, assign an identity to me, basically overlook everything about me to satisfy their expectations as someone they could understand. As the only person from my study abroad class to have become fluent in Chinese and still be here, I decided to rethink the mantra, “It’s just different.”

There is certainly value in recognizing that cultures have different standards, and to evaluate other people’s actions in respect to their intent. But to look the other way when racism is happening and write it off as a “cultural difference” is putting on a muzzle, a form of self-censorship.

For sure, I have real Chinese friends, as I’ve previously written about. They have the self-awareness to not make me feel like an outsider, and don’t care that we’re different. They are not like my many other Chinese acquaintances who speak to me slowly and applaud my ability to use chopsticks. While I recognize they think they’re being helpful, these aren’t the people I choose to spend time with.

Two summers ago in Beijing, I prowled down a Gulou hutong with two Chinese friends and an American classmate — a posse that had been forged over Tsingtao beers and shaokao and open mic nights. “It’s American Independence Day,” said Haozi, “so I have a question for you. When are you going to free China?”

I paused a second and then burst out laughing. Irony and humor are easily lost across cultures and languages. Unfazed, Haozi gave his two American friends a chance to join in the joke. He’ll never know how much I appreciated that.

~

Ten minutes later, sitting near the back of Flight CA 3241 from Chengdu to Guilin, a stewardess brought me a handwritten note.

Dear Lincoln,

Sorry for our behaviors just now. Our English is a little poor. We didn’t mean to trouble you. Hope you can understand us.

Nice trip!          <3

Thank you.

It looks like the boys got my last name off the ticket, but apparently over-thought the first name/last name thing.

I admit, I hadn’t really been angry with them — the questioning was partly for show. They were, after all, just boys horsing around, maybe on their first vacation without their parents. But hopefully, because I spoke up, they came away with an understanding that foreigners are not so foreign.

And I found myself endeared by their follow-up act, and affirmed in my belief that living in this country long-term is worth the effort. I am constantly still learning – among other things, about how you must recognize when to draw the line between being culturally sensitive and sticking to your principles. Stick with it long enough and this country has a way of rewarding you with surprises that you didn’t realize or had forgotten were possible. You’ll absorb lessons that you just can’t pick up from a semester abroad. Hope you can understand.

More from Hannah Lincoln: a tour of the world’s largest building.

The biggest building in the world recently opened in Chengdu, China. The New Century Global Center’s colossal undulating roof, which I’d been eyeing from my apartment window these past few months, is visible from any high point in the city. I hadn’t known what it was until last week, when relatives informed me through a flurry of news articles that it was part of a 1.7 million square-meter complex that is nearly the size of Monaco, and has an artificial sun.

So I saddled up my scooter and took my camera for a ride down south, halfway to the airport, where Renmin South Road stretches into an empty boulevard. One building out-sized the next until finally I reached the climax of the strip-mall crescendo. I circled half the building before finding an entrance.

From about 300 meters away, the new Global Center fades under a midday mist. Photo also in black and white below — the pollution allows about as much visibility in color as in monochrome.

Five fatigues-clad men watched me from their surveillance booth as I parked my bike nearby. “Do I need to take an ID number?” I asked.

“No,” one said, “but you can’t park there. Your bike will get stolen.”

“Then where should I park?”

He pointed to a spot about ten meters away, his official surveillance area.

“You mean to say that if you saw a thief take my bike, you wouldn’t do anything?”

“That’s right,” he smiled proudly, and his friends giggled.

I started to unlock my bike. “Aren’t you supposed to act on the people’s behalf?” (“为人民服务,” a slogan in all police stations, city halls, and military zones.)

They chuckled some more while I moved my bike to the anti-thievery zone. As I walked away, a manager chased me down to give me an ID number.

~

In Medieval times, European cathedrals were built to inspire awe. For a peasant cresting a hill and seeing a cathedral for the first time, it would have been an eye-opening, postively beatific moment.

I admit I felt a little of that while walking under the tin eaves of this building, but the awe was tinged with discomfort rather than admiration. Blank stares from behind service counters followed me as I entered two different doors that led to empty, unfinished offices. After realizing that more than half the building was unoccupied, I trekked to the front of the building to start my walk-through.

I’ve included a series of photos to share the prominent features of this complex — the elements that seem to define it. I’ve never enjoyed going to the mall, even in the US, but the Global Center left me particularly depressed. Rather than displaying China’s new wealth, it was a hollow projection of what commercial developers think wealth should be: big, gaudy, and gold:

It’s a pseudo-Victorian, faux-antique, ultra-Western look. It is this style that has come to define modern China, a knock-off of actual taste. Within this colossal structure, there was not a single trace of Chinese tradition.

Here’s the entrance hall:

If Hogwarts were to sell its castle to commercial developers, its entrance would be like this, with escalators illuminated with indigo lights and strapped to reflective metal sheets criss-crossing from floor to ceiling. Here, the mall is full of people, with benches crowded with grandparents who have brought their grandchildren to toddle around the marble floor. It’s a public park: a space to sit and watch.

Down a side wing stands a four-story bell tower (of sorts): ionic columns supporting a clock that is set to the wrong time. A closer look revealed that this structure is plastered with a cheap, grainy cement made to look like real stone. It is already chipping in several places.

Nearby, a double-door set stands inexplicably in the middle of the corridor:

While Donald and Daphne Duck greet shoppers at an electronics store, banners display sexy foreign women nearing orgasm as they bite cake and sip margaritas. 吃 says one banner, 喝 says another — “EAT” and “DRINK.” Do not forget to consume.

And now, some stores, including faux antique cafes and empty boutiques. A sparkling white cafe is decorated with more plastic shiny things that hang. A foreign woman’s face, this one cartoonish, casts a bashful glance on a wide column, reminiscent of the Starbucks mermaid. Faux-antique chairs and tables sit mostly empty in this massive cafe.

Expensive boutique clothing stores are guarded by uniformed workers. One store sells only black and white clothing. All are empty.

Finally, everyone who has heard of the Global Center know that it has an indoor beach. The Waterpark is currently open to the public, but its facilities are inaccessible. The beach has no sand, and the rumored “artificial sun” was nowhere to be seen, save for the massive glass ceiling that reflected the painful glare of the pure white sky. Pollution was visible within this massive room, obscuring the view of the unopened water slides at one end.

Finally outside again, the nebulous Sichuan sun glowered overhead as I hustled across the shadeless, endless parking lot. The bike lot was littered with pot holes and encased in a rusted iron fence — the Victorian touch had not yet spread to the mall’s far-flung properties. The five men in fatigues giggled again when they saw me approaching. Rather than being annoyed this time, I felt a touch of humanity, as if they were saying, “Welcome back to the real world, did you have a good time in there?”

The experience hung as heavy as the approaching thunderstorm clouds on my ride home. The New Century Global Center remains mostly empty, save for the front corridors, which are hollow in their own right. Questions abound: why create such a place? To what avail? Who will open businesses here, and who will visit? It’s a historic building that China has erected — the largest in the world by volume, engulfing the light of the sun — but it was done quietly, without fanfare, seemingly overnight. Is it a monument to hubris, or humility? Perhaps that’s a question for historians to answer — if this building isn’t, before long, relegated to the darker annals of history.

This week we introduced the 2nd annual Beijing Cream Bar and Club Awards (VOTE HERE), with 20 categories divided into four groups. Here’s Hannah Lincoln with a closer look at the group Little Miss Dance.

You’re two beers and three shots in, and it suddenly dawns on you that it is your God-given mission to share your sexiness with the world (or at least with Beijing’s other dance-floor lepers). Bearing that cross, you drag your friends to the nearest club (sidewalks of dancing ayis notwithstanding), ready to commit some serious sacrilege.

Vote in the 2nd annual Beijing Cream Bar and Club Awards! (Image credit Katie)

Chengdu recently hosted the 88th National Food and Beverage Fair (糖酒会), the seen-and-be-seen pimp show for anybody who’s anybody in China’s F&B industry. My own Belgian beer company basically ruled the catwalk with our four phallises of draft beer, freely pumping to more than 50,000 attendants who will now go about thinking that Belgian beer is a cheap product because it was located between the second-tier baijiu and the knock-off beer stalls.

Yep, knock-off beers. “Ganter” was their name, and they produce as a subsidiary of Tsingtao in Shanxi. As if name-dropping the province “Shanxi” weren’t enough to discredit them, a quick Google search shows that Ganter is a generic German beer that has no mention of China on its Wikipedia page. Even a Baidu search leads to the German company’s Chinese blog. Closer investigation revealed that these beers, labeled “Ganter” and engraved with Tsingtao’s mountainous design…

…may have drawn their inspiration from elsewhere:

Ganter China, whoever they are, must be doing well, since it costs a smooth 15,000 RMB to join the fair. As far as I can tell, each bottle contains the exact same content. Cheers.