Lost in translation

At the 5:30 mark -

CNN host: Jay, you're a wealthy, single guy yet you still live at home with your mum. How come? Doesn't the bachelor life appeal to you? Having your own space?

Jay Chou: I don't think I'll move out. My parents divorced when I was a kid, and I've made up my mind that even if I get married someday, I'll still live with my mum so that I can take care of her and keep her company. I've been having this thought for many years. No matter what happens in the future, I'll live with my mum.

CNN host: [Laughs] You're kidding!

Jay Chou: Yeah, perhaps there are some cultural differences between Chinese and Western people. The Western kids grow up to break away from their families, to become totally independent and make their own lives, but I think Chinese people are very different. We value our roots a lot. No matter how much money you make outside, you still have to go home because we have this duty, this responsibility to take care of our parents. This is the difference I see, at least, from what I know.


I found this part of the interview particularly fascinating. I had a similar conversation with my British friends when I told them that I would live with my parents when I returned to Singapore. In the Western context, living with one's parents post-university comes close to an admission of personal failure - you do so because you cannot make it on your own. It's also seen as a compromise of personal freedom and individuality, signifying a prolonged adolescence and an inability to fully assume the responsibilities of real adulthood. It’s also seen as a failure of parenting, the failure of parents to equip their children to be independent adults. A recent example would be Matthew McConaughey's character in Failure to Launch. The title says it all. As a single man living at home with his parents, he is like a rocket that has failed to launch. In fact, his parents are so desperate to get rid of him that they hire Sarah Jessica Parker's character, a "professional motivator", specifically to achieve just that.

Almost the exact opposite is true in the Asian context. Asian graduates tend to live with their parents until they get married. In fact, parents are often dismayed when their unmarried adult children express a desire to live on their own (if they work in the same city where their parents live). Parents like to be able to provide and care for their children as long as possible, even when they are grown. Family unity is more important than individual liberty, and generally, the most "acceptable" reason for moving out of your parents' home is to start a family of your own.

Instead of individual independence, in the Asian context, being a responsible adult includes caring for your elderly parents. The Confucian ideal of "filial piety", a respect for parents and ancestors, is one of the most important virtues in Chinese culture. The point of view that Jay Chou expresses in this interview is not considered strange, but admirable. Though not all families would choose the same living arrangements, many adult children choose to live near their elderly parents so as to better care for them. There are also attendant benefits for these adult children, such as free child care for grandchildren, which elderly parents/grandparents are more than happy to provide in most instances. This happily symbiotic relationship is openly encouraged by the Singapore government through generous public housing subsidies.

This is not to say that one approach is necessarily better than the other. Each culture tends to be built around a dominant cultural narrative and the potential ill-effects are not hard to see. Excessive individualism can lead to an overly atomised society in which people only care about their own selfish interests, to the detriment of the greater good. Casual viewing of any Chinese TV series based on a large family would sufficiently inform the viewer of the potential pitfalls of exalting the family above all else. These shows are generally peopled by overbearing patriarchs, unreasonable mothers-in-laws and beleaguered adult children.

Different cultures hold up different versions of the good life and so very often, people are driven into the ground chasing after it. Tim Keller points out that the Bible says that all cultures are fallen (because all people are fallen), and that all cultures oppress. Every single culture, puts in front of men and women certain objects and says, "If you don't have them, you're nothing. If you don't have them, you have no worth, no significance. Your existence isn't justified."

Traditional societies tend to make the family unit and the clan into an absolute, ultimate thing. This can lead to honor killings, the treatment of women as chattel, and violence toward gay people. Western, secular cultures make an idol out of individual freedom, and this leads to the breakdown of the family, rampant materialism, careerism, and the idolization of romantic love, physical beauty and profit.

In Ezekiel 14:3, God says about the elders of Israel, "These men have set up their idols in their hearts." ... God was saying that the human heart takes good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, even family, and turns them into ultimate things. Our hearts deify them as the center of our lives, because, we think, they can give us significance and security, safety and fulfillment, if we attain them.


In Romans 1:21-25 St Paul shows that idolatry is not only one sin among many, but what is fundamentally wrong with the human heart:

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him... They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator. (Romans 1:21, 25)

Paul goes on to make a long list of sins that create misery and evil in the world, but they all find their roots in this soil, the inexorable human drive for "god-making." In other words, idolatry is always the reason we ever do anything wrong. No one grasped this better than Martin Luther. In his Larger Catechism (1528) and also his Treatise on Good Works he wrote that the Ten Commandments begin with a commandment against idolatry. Why does this come first in the order? Because, he argued, the fundamental motivation behind law-breaking is idolatry. We never break the other commandments without breaking the first one. Why do we ever fail to love or keep promises or live unselfishly? Of course, the general answer is "because we are weak and sinful", but the specific answer in any actual circumstance is that there is something you feel you must have to be happy, that is more important to your heart than God himself. We would not lie unless first we had made something — human approval, reputation, power over others, financial advantage — more important and valuable to our hearts than the grace and favor of God. The secret to change is always to identify and dismantle the basic idols of the heart.

Tim Keller in Counterfeit Gods,
and How to Find Your Rival Gods

One has only the choice between God and idolatry. If one denies God ... one is worshiping some things of this world in the belief that one sees them only as such, but in fact, though unknown to oneself imagining the attributes of Divinity in them.

Simone Weil

Soweto Gospel Choir

I went to watch the Soweto Gospel Choir at the Esplanade on Friday. As their soaring, sonorous voices filled the hall - without any instrumental accompaniment - I was moved to tears. They sang songs of praise to the Lord in a language that I did not understand, but the joy that they exuded as they sang and clapped and danced... I think a had a little taste of heaven that night and it was absolutely amazing. "These are the gospel songs that we sing in our churches, songs of praise that echo our thanks to the Lord who means a lot in our lives," said one of the choir members by way of introduction. And sing they did.

Some say the zeal of the early European missionaries in Asia and Africa was just another form of cultural imperialism. In response to this, Tim Keller quotes Lamin Sanneh (an African theologian currently teaching at Yale) in his sermon on Culture. In his book "Whose Religion is Christianity: The Gospel Beyond the West", Sanneh points out that every culture has a baseline narrative. The apostle Paul, when he talked about the cultures of his day, said that the Jews wanted power and the Greeks wanted wisdom. Every culture has a theme. Sanneh says that African culture understands that the world is filled with spiritual forces, and especially a lot of dark spiritual forces. Africans were looking for a way to address that.

They looked at their tribal religions and found that even though they believed in those spiritual forces, they had no answer for how to overcome them. And they looked at the modern secularism that was coming and they realised that modern secularism laughed at their Africaness because it said, "Oh no, you can't believe in miracles. You can't believe in demons." (That, is cultural totalitarianism.) Then they looked at Christianity, and Sanneh says, "Christianity answered the great cultural challenge of our hearts. People sensed in their hearts, that Jesus did not mock their respect for the sacred, and Christianity did not mock their clamour for an invincible saviour, and so they beat their sacred drums for Him until the stars skipped and danced in the skies. And after they danced, the stars were not little anymore. Christianity helped Africans to become renewed Africans, not remade Europeans."

Africans have made Christianity entirely their own. They praise the Lord in their own tongue, with their own songs, with their own dances, as only they can.

But even though we sing praises in different languages, we praise the same God. And even though we come from different countries and different cultures, we are brothers and sisters in Christ. When He said all the nations, He meant it.

Driving in Taiwan

Last week we went on a field trip to Taiwan as part of our foundation course, and one of the Singaporeans we met there told us that many Singaporeans find Taiwan messy and disorderly. He said that you can tell the difference between Singaporean and Taiwanese culture just by looking at the way people drive. In Taiwan, cars swerve in and out of lanes and traffic lights are more like suggestions rather than legal requirements. The Taiwanese have this proverb that means "order in disorder", and they are very tolerant of inconsiderate driving. If you pull up alongside the road to let people off, causing a backlog of cars behind you, people will just wait because everyone recognises that they would have done exactly the same had they been in your position. But if you did that in Singapore, the drivers stuck behind you would be pounding on their horns.

We Singaporeans are a very law abiding lot, but we are extremely intolerant of people who do not obey what we perceive to be the rules. At the same time however, the Taiwanese are also extremely intolerant of intolerant people. Quite of few of them see Singapore as inflexible and authoritarian, and China is regarded as the antithesis of democracy and a system that just cannot be accepted.

I was keenly reminded of how Tim Keller once pointed out that all cultures are oppressive - they set up an ideal (say, of law-abidingness or liberal tolerance) and everyone who does not conform is "condemned". The Bible tells us that all cultures are fallen (because all people are fallen), and that all cultures oppress, because every single culture puts in front of people certain objects and says “If you don’t have them, you’re nothing.”

Ancient cultures, and traditional cultures today, tend to have collectivistic idols: Follow the rules! Obey the law! Toe the line! But modern Western cultures tend more to have individualistic idols: Break free! Define yourself! It’s your choice, so choose! Every culture that ever existed and that exists today, is telling you to build your identity on something.

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?"

"The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."

Mark 12:28-31

It is no accident that Jesus tells us to love our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength first, before telling us to love our neighbours, because the latter would be completely impossible without the former.

It is impossible to love your illiberal neighbour just as much as your avowedly liberal self, if you do not love God more than your liberal credentials.

If you build your identity on being liberal, you will despise illiberal people. If you build your identity on being law-abiding, you will despise "law-breakers". Only if you build your identity on God, a God who loves you with an everlasting love despite your weaknesses and flaws, a God who will tear himself apart to make you whole, will you be completely incapable of despising anyone.

Lectures: Prof Joseph Nye and Prof Sir Adam Roberts

I've had two very exciting lectures in two days - Oxford surprises me at every turn, and I am just so glad to be here. Yesterday the eminent Professor Joseph Nye of Harvard University, recently retired Dean of the Kennedy School, who served in the Carter administration and headed countless thinktanks, whom, as Cherfy tells me coined the term "soft-power", and as I just found out attended Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship way back when, was delivering the 2nd of his three-lecture series on power.

He was talking about the IT revolution and about how different countries dealt with it. He talked about how China was rather paradoxically trying to harness the economic potential of an open information network and yet at the same time trying to restrict its citizens access to other types of information. He recalled a particular conversation he had with a certain Mr Lee Kuan Yew, Senior Minister of Singapore. (He must not have heard about the revamp in the Cabinet and re-branding of the "Minister Mentor"...) He had asked Mr Lee about the paradox of equipping the younger generation with IT skills and yet at the same time trying to limit the information that they could access online. The eminent Mr Lee apparently replied that if the younger generation were tech-savvy and literate enough to circumvent the censorship, then he would not care if they did.

After the lecture I went up to him and asked him if he thought Mr Lee had gotten it right. He said that he had lots of respect for the man, that he didn't agree with everything he did, but that you had to give the Singapore government credit for being so astute about the impact of technological change, and recognising that they wouldn't be able to stem the tide forever. He said Singapore was wildly economically successful when they could just as well have been a poor immigrant city-state. I asked if he thought the attitude that lay behind the policy was somewhat patronising and instrumental in its conception of freedom of information. He was of the opinion that change could happen faster and that the administration tended to err on the side of caution. And, well, it is a very paternalistic state. He said that he'd often thought of Singapore as the closest thing to Plato's Republic on earth. I said that that was not an uncommon sentiment. He said, however, we have had several Singaporean students over the years, and I'm always very impressed by them.

Professor Nye was very liberal and non-reactionary for an American. But I suspect this is more the case within American academic circles, which unfortunately, are hardly representative of the whole country. In speaking about soft power, he emphasised the importance of credibility and legitimacy, and he admitted quite freely that on that front, America had bungled up the Iraq War. I'd like to think that his time at Oxford had something to do with it, because there are quite a few eminent American IR professors who belong to the more hawkish, realist school of international relations, and who, unfortunately are advising George Bush, and I would put good money on the fact that they weren't educated at Oxford. At least, I hope they weren't.

Today I went to an IR lecture given by Professor Sir Adam Roberts - possibly the coolest title on earth, and a very big mouthful. He spoke about democratisation. At the end of the lecture he took questions and I raised my hand and asked what he thought about the culturally deterministic view that some countries just cannot have democracy. He had referenced Fareed Zakaria a couple of times during his lecture, and I remembered reading an interview that Zakaria did with LKY in Foreign Affairs back in the 1990s. Essentially, what LKY was arguing was that culture is destiny.

Prof Sir said that history tends to prove these culturally deterministic theories wrong. He said in the 1960s in Europe there was quite a lot of literature that argued that there was something about Catholic societies like Spain, Portugal and the Latin American countries that meant they weren't amenable to democratic change. Of course history has since debunked that theory. Also, in Asia, there can be seen to be a distinct move towards democratisation in countries like Taiwan and South Korea, where before people had argued for the existence of a distinctly Confucian form of government. By the way, has anybody been championing Asian values post-Asian Financial Crisis? Yep. That's what I thought. Although, he said, it's very important to note that culture is hardly irrelevant - there is no single route to democracy or any single model and each country has to develop at its own pace and within its own culture. But culture is not destiny.