Wu Qi: Being back in Wenzhou, we should talk about the local gentry again, since it was your experience of living here that is the source of your gentry spirit.

Xiang Biao: If the gentry spirit gives you a sense of autonomy, then what sustains the spirit itself? To my mind, it is an interest in the details of daily life. For example, in Wenzhou we talk about how to make a sponge cake and how to make fish balls, going step by step, spending a lot of time. This is the collective labor of the entire family during Spring Festival, as well as the local culture constructed over the centuries, in which people take great pleasure. In fact, this is something very valuable in China, namely, that every place is different. I am interested in folk culture.

Folk culture has been dying out as a field of study, but suddenly became one of the most profitable disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, because when you apply for World Heritage recognition, build museums, or promote local images, you need displays and justifications. I try to remain optimistic, thinking that this is a good thing, that using these resources to probe local culture is always better than nothing. The key is the next step. Scholars should adopt the spirit of taijiquan,*Footnote 1 in which “propensity” (shi*) is the key. Wang Hui often says that propensity is a latent force that is uncertain. Conditions are always changing, and you have to follow the potential where it takes you. Now the question is how to turn the resource for folk culture research into something more than a museum display, turn it into a foundation for something. It should become a series of narratives, a strong sense of self-awareness, which, once articulated, allows you to feel grounded in this world, so that if you don’t understand something from the outside, you have the courage to say that you don’t understand it.

This kind of detailed observation, if practiced in an amplified way, is one way of giving life meaning, allowing you to feel that life is all the more interesting, and to avoid getting lost in life’s flickering images. Why do some people make this kind of observation? Many people never bother to observe, but observing is the particular character of the gentry. One of the things the gentry used to do was to write local gazetteers, which prompted them to carry out this kind of observation. This goes back to the cultivation of learning, a certain curiosity about people and life, and constant questioning: observation becomes a pleasure in and of itself.

Humanities education should start with this. What we call knowledge means having a well-grounded understanding of what is happening in the world, and on that basis, to observe, to let your observations settle in, and ultimately to build your own foundation.

Wu Qi: You mentioned earlier that your uncle had a great impact on you, and when I met him in Wenzhou this time, he turned out to be a Wenzhou expert, who seemed to know how everything works in Wenzhou, and he stands out as a concrete example of the local gentry. In fact, China has always had many such people, found in all walks of life. It’s not easy to come up with a unified definition of them, but they know a little bit about everything, and can talk about things in an interesting way, in a way that reveals the many textures and levels of social life.

Xiang Biao: This idea of texture is important. We used to watch local propaganda documentaries about Wenzhou, which were completely over the top, and they would mention fish cakes, but there was no texture, so it was like explanations you read in a museum. The difference is subtle. Students can go to museums but not feel the texture of the objects, not to mention their underlying spirit, because museums have a preconceived narrative framework. My emphasis on empirical evidence is typical of empiricism, the idea that all truth comes from things that have happened. This is obviously philosophically untenable, because what happens in your head has also happened, but external things cannot be so readily shrugged off. The specifics of a fish cake are important and you cannot lightly “conceptualize” it by saying that it is a “symbol of Wenzhou,” and so on. You have to know how it is made in the physical sense to grasp its underlying spirit.

Wu Qi: Your uncle’s expressions were also very vivid, all very colloquial, and all grounded in something specific, such as a family member, or a dish at the dinner table, which led him immediately to a story or to something in his network of local knowledge. I can feel the influence of this kind of description on your work and your way of thinking, and I think we will need a lot of training if we want to master this kind of description.

Xiang Biao: It’s very difficult. With my students at Oxford, my goal is to get them to have a clear vision of what is going on around them, out of which develops a clear vision of their research project, because this is what empirical work really is. When he was young, my uncle did processing work for other people. There were a lot of people in Wenzhou who would ask him to build one part of some production process they needed, so he bought a precision machine and set it up in his kitchen, where he worked with my aunt. He learned an incredible amount and constantly observed life in its most minute details. My mother said that when he was a child, he could never finish cleaning the windows because he was using newspaper to clean the glass, as soon as he saw the words he would start to read. It’s a pity that his education was interrupted; there are too many people like that in China.

Wu Qi: What was the most exciting for you, coming back to Wenzhou and seeing your family and classmates? Especially in comparison to Beijing.

Xiang Biao: It gives me the feeling of moving between different worlds, which in itself can serve as a reminder that the world is many different things. Another thing is that talking to my classmates and family reminds me to try to be more organic. In fact, I am a fairly nerdy person, although I try to speak in normal language. For example, at yesterday’s class reunion, there were a lot of jokes about romantic and sexual relations, the kind of thing I don’t hear very often as jokes and don’t really know how to participate in. Being aware of this sort of thing is quite important for anthropologists because jokes like these make up a big part of what daily communication is for everyday people, and romance and sex are a big part of life too. So for me, it is a reminder that I must remember that there are different ways of communicating.

This also makes me wonder why sexual relations have become this kind of teasing, an important part of what former classmates talk about. This may have something to do with age because Chinese people in their 40s and 50s are already “degendered,” or maybe they are “beyond gender,” in the sense that their children are all grown, and they no longer talk about falling in love and things like that, but at the same time they may also be a little nostalgic for their youth.

In addition, this also has to do with our perception of sexual relations, and gender relations. In the West, for example, these jokes would be unthinkable in middle-class groups like my former classmates, especially when men and women are both present. If you make this kind of dirty joke with a Westerner, like someone is making out with someone, they at first think you are talking about something factual and may freak out. When you tell them, don’t worry, it’s just a joke, they don’t get it, because they don’t see anything funny. For Chinese people, however, there is a sense of liberation, which within the group may create a sense of intimacy, so it’s interesting. This kind of joke is also quite rare in India and Japan, also it depends on specific social circles. This in turn is related to the understanding of gender relations. At Chinese class reunions, men and women are fairly equal in how much they talk and how much alcohol they drink, but women also generally accept specific gender roles and don’t care about off-color jokes, and sometimes they even defend the mainstream gender roles.

Everyone is at the same time a young daughter-in-law and an old mother-in-law, living the life of the daughter-in-law and speaking the language of the mother-in-law.Footnote 2 Gender relations are both equal and unequal.

Wu Qi: On these kinds of social occasions, are you an active participant or more of a spectator? Is there any social pressure to join in?

Xiang Biao: I do my best to stay on the sidelines and laugh. Of course, since I’ve come back from abroad for the dinner, I was a special guest, so I won’t be left out, but I don’t participate all that much. It is quite important to directly perceive what this social scene is like. There is no pressure, and it’s a good opportunity for me to observe. My ability to integrate into a group has declined in recent years, probably due to issues of energy, because it requires a lot of energy. In this respect, I was lucky that I was not born into a high-class intellectual family, which can be quite closed, in the sense that their friends and colleagues are probably all high-class intellectuals, so my ability to interact with larger, more diverse groups would be even worse.

Sometimes, these kinds of exchanges give me interesting ideas. Yesterday at dinner, we were discussing whether to send our children abroad to study. One classmate said that someone had recently posted a post to the classmates’ Internet chat group, saying that the children should go abroad, but they should have a serious girlfriend or boyfriend before going abroad because then the parents would know that he or she was “normal,” and they won’t have to worry that the children would “become” homosexual overseas. The discussion is directly related to my topic “social reproduction,” and to the connection between mobility and conservatism that we talked about earlier.

Wu Qi: So this becomes new material for research.

Xiang Biao: It was more of a learning experience than a data-gathering occasion. You have to understand what is “reasonable” for each person. I think this kind of socialization is more interesting than when you hang out with people like yourself. It can be a little uncomfortable, but it is interesting because it is more stimulating. Communication among intellectuals is more about self- and mutual recognition, so it’s not that different from a panel discussion.

I have an aunt who used to work in a school-run factory and then went to a leather buying station in a county town, and then opened a noodle shop, where she worked for a long time, and she sometimes inspires me. Frank Dikötter (b. 1959), a scholar who works on modern Chinese history, has talked about documents he found revealing how much beef, rice, and tea Communist cadres consumed at meetings during the famines created by the Great Leap Forward. At dinner, my aunt’s husband said that in the past they didn’t have enough to eat, and said that it didn’t make sense that the peasants who cultivated the land couldn’t get enough to eat, and my first reaction was to talk about Dikötter’s research, and how much was taken by officials, which we now know from archival materials. My aunt immediately said: they didn’t eat it, they took it home. This was a completely intuitive response, and contains two messages: first, she did not question the relationship between forced grain procurement and the famine; second, she did not think like scholars did, i.e., that these cadres were corrupt and greedy and ate their fill, but in fact, they probably wrapped the food up carefully and took it home. This is also a kind of redistribution, extracting it from the bottom, redistributing it at the top, then redistributing it within the cadres’ families. This is not the same as the wasteful behavior I originally imagined during the meetings, based on Dikötter’s finding. I think my aunt’s judgment is probably spot on, that at that time it was impossible to waste things, nor could they stuff their mouths and splurge in this way, and we might see it as a bottom-up redistribution, or a reverse redistribution. My aunt’s insight instantly brings out the richness of how the system functions.

This kind of patient and relaxed approach to daily life is not felt in Beijing. Beijing is a big city and no matter who you talk to, everyone talks the same way. Wenzhou is different, and the Wenzhou dialect is strange to start with, much of which cannot be directly translated into Mandarin, which may help people to think relatively independently. Another thing is that Wenzhou has a sense of distance from the system. Without this sense of distance, it is too easy to either defend the system or to go to the other extreme and imagine the cadres during the Great Leap Forward as being as greedy as wild animals. The sense of distance creates accuracy.