My father was a grassroots bureaucrat who hung out with other grassroots bureaucrats. A few years ago I attended a family banquet, as you usually would when returning home after being away for some time. There would usually be relatives who were grassroots bureaucrats. They were talking about local politics and policies at some point. I was interested and asked a question, which I don’t really remember what was. The relative said: they are children. How would they know politics? Telling them would be like 对牛弹琴 (lit. playing the lute to a cow, an idiom meaning speaking to someone who cannot appreciate or understand at all what’s being said).
At the time I was in my late 20s and presumably had a PhD in politics. The remark certainly had a high dose of 爹味 (lit. dad-flavoured, a digital slang term referring to a patronizing, paternalistic tone often adopted by men) and 登味 (a more recent slang term associated with 老登, also referring to condescending male authority vibe) that I, growing up in Shandong – which is often stereotypes as a place where “women don’t sit at the main table” (女人不上桌), know too well. There’s some degree of truth to the stereotype, although as with everything else, things on the internet tend to get exaggerated and transformed into 地域黑 (regional discrimination). In my experience, people usually sit together regardless of gender in smaller family meals (hence I got to listen to men’s insights about politics). But in larger, multi-table banquets, there is indeed often a spatial arrangement where men sit at one table, women and children at another.
But I wouldn’t dismiss it as just annoying diewei either. It was of course also about what politics and knowing politics meant: experiential tactics of survival or abstract, disembodied academic skills. I may develop anthropological skills in observing, describing, and theorizing the interpersonal power dynamics, but it doesn’t mean I can play the game. What’s interesting here is the two forms of knowledge are not only different, but also considered by many to be oppositional: the higher my academic qualification is, the less experiential knowledge I’m assumed to have when it comes to the “real world”. How would you know anything about the world if you’ve only spent your life within the confines of the university? For Shandong parents, children will always be children, especially daughters who have humanities degrees.
A few years later, the state took an interest in me and sent a state security team down from the provincial level to our humble town. There’s no state security agency at county level. They were sent from above – let’s say above the pay grade of all my relatives. It was quite a scene and probably quite embarrassing for father – his daughter is now considered a dangerous subject by the state. Why would I, someone who’s done nothing in her life but writing useless papers, be considered a dangerous subject? Somehow I also had a weird sense of validation from the fact that my knowledge turned out to be not so useless after all, in a setting (hometown) where no one thinks my knowledge matters. The inadvertent “validation” was unfortunate: it matters only because it’s seen as a threat.
**
Let me now introduce an additional character, my high school classmate X. Before the encounter I’m about to describe, I hadn’t seen him or had any contact with him for 20 years. I didn’t remember his name or knew his existence. There’s another classmate Y, a friend of mine with whom I did have some occasional contact, like once every two years or so. One day I was chatting with Y about something else and he video called me on WeChat. He was with X. Y asked me if I remembered X. I said yeah vaguely.
But to my surprise, X knew everything about me. He said “you are an assistant professor at Z now, nice”. “I read your papers – not bad” (写得不错, with an unmistakable dad-flavour again). It was very unusual because even Y didn’t know where I work – our exchange was limited to a “happy new year” every couple of years. I didn’t ask how come though. I asked what he does for a living now. He said he works for the PSB.
OH. I SEE. He’s a cop and part of his job now involves watching me.
20 years ago, back in the high school classroom, little did we know…
**
Although this is embarrassing news for my family, as an academic I have the habit of contemplating over unfortunate events, especially when there’s some surreal and amusing dimension to it, like the classmate having to “read my paper”. For my politics-knowing relatives and classmates, I got myself into “trouble” and became a “shame” precisely because, again, I don’t know politics. I chose not knowing and know my not knowing. I guess my comeback is, they chose knowing, but do they know their not knowing?
Chenchen Zhang 
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