young ones

            Recently, I’ve begun to think a lot about young people in Shanghai, and in China in general. Last weekend I got the chance to attend the X-games as well as some music festivals (the Midi music festival and the Strawberry festival). The music and dancing were fun, but I found myself mostly people watching. Like I have seen at most of the music festivals I have been to in the US, teenagers and twenty-somethings dress to be seen. At times it didn’t feel like I was in China at all, or at least the China you think you’re in when you see high school students crowded together on the sidewalk, each one dressed in the same white and red track-suit uniform. Instead, I saw in their outfits more fun and individuality than I have ever seen before. But one aspect that seemed purely “China” were the red scarves that many of them wore at the music festivals, around their arms and around their necks, and I didn’t have to look too far to find someone dawning a Mao-style hat with the unmistakable red star sewn right above the rim.

            I think that’s the most interesting part about seeing so many young people gathered together in one place. The fact that while there seems to be complete oblivion, there is also complete awareness; a social awareness and a historical awareness. The Mao hats and red scarves mixed with the wild ways that they dressed could be seen as the contrast between suppression and freedom of expression. But at the same time, those very scarves and hats unified them, each individual a part of a generation different from the rest. I recently talked to my friend Jessie, who is a student here at ECNU. She told me that the generation gap—between people our age and the older generation of our parents—is growing, and there is a clear clash between opinions and perspectives of both generations. I’m sure that no parent in China would go to a music festival flaunting their red scarves and Mao-attire. They were the generation who lived during Mao Zedong’s reign and the immense limit of freedom under his Communist regime. They lived through it all, so how could we, who did not live through that, possibly understand all of the ingrained emotions and politics and nuances?

I did not grow up in China, and I don’t know what it is to be young in China. But I think I understand what it is to be a part of a generation where you feel both powerless and full of a daunting responsibility; naive, but a historical conscience is embedded in you. We are at that age when we are still young, where we are optimistic, but this optimism is gradually being chipped away at to make way for cynicism. But at the same time, I think this is what makes our generation unique. There are responsibilities and challenges ahead of us; as the generation of our fathers and mothers grow old, we must take their place, and maybe clean up the messes that our leaders will have left for us. The future seems to be getting closer, but perhaps that’s what makes being young—in China or in the US or anywhere else—so exciting. We will be ready when the time comes, but for now, we can keep dancing to the music.