This article first appeared in THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

27th January 2008

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It should be easy to review this book. After all, Berold has demonstrated his facility with language as a poet of some standing in South Africa; as editor, anthologist and interviewer he has shown a knack for careful observation and unusual insight. Moreover, China is a fascinating place, and its crucial role in geopolitical and economic affairs is unquestioned. China as experienced by a foreigner (particularly, for local readers, by a South African) is almost guaranteed to be an entertaining, enlightening subject. Unfortunately, for this reviewer, it’s not quite so straightforward.

Like Berold, I spent a year teaching English in east Asia. I was based in Japan, not China, but – despite the obvious cultural differences, and despite the historical antipathy between the two countries – the similarities are appreciable. Thus, I found myself reading Meanwhile Don't Push and Squeeze with a mixture of nostalgia, uncanny moments of recognition and, if I am honest, a healthy dose of envy.

My own bias notwithstanding, I am confident that those who have never ventured further east than the India-China border will likewise find Meanwhile Don't Push and Squeeze a thoroughly enjoyable read. Berold’s detailed descriptions not only introduce but also offer a hesitant interpretation of the contradictory aspects of life in east Asia, where millennia-old traditions confront the industrial, consumerist and ecologically myopic frenzy of hypermodernity.

There is the constant noise of construction in cities teeming with human traffic. There are the multistorey computer malls and the obsession with bright, shiny gadgets, set against the often austere (even ascetic) tenets of Buddhism. There is the curious sense of optimism, patience and unquestioning loyalty to accepted ways of doing things that demonstrates the pervasive influence of Confucian social hierarchies: devotion to family and state, taken to an extreme under the highly controlling socialist regime in China.

Early on in the book, Berold writes of his students – he was employed as a “foreign expert” at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou to teach English to undergraduates – that “they all seem to have this positive outlook on life ... they are proud of being Chinese and look forward to a career and family ... I find myself asking where the shadow stuff is, the angst and scepticism I expect in young people.” In subsequent pages, however, we discover the profound strain experienced in all strata of Chinese society.

Competition for jobs between China’s 1,3 billion people is severe and the anxiety over employability means that an extremely high premium is placed on education. Doing well at high school and being accepted to one of the prestigious universities is deemed the sole route to future happiness. Parents who grew up in rural farming villages take on menial jobs in the urban centres, sacrificing all else to pay for their children’s schooling. As a result, children face enormous pressure to succeed academically, spending their teenage years doing little but studying. The one-child policy, although an attempt at curbing population growth, aggravates rather than alleviates the difficulties in family relationships, and so the cycle is perpetuated.

Loneliness and alienation seem to be part of the national collective unconscious in modern China. The trauma inflicted by Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution has been sublimated into a capitalist urge that has left almost no corner of the country’s enormous land mass untouched. The fusion of the urban and the rural into a sprawl of productivity-oriented concrete structures – there is an obvious disjunction with Berold’s conceptualisation of “rural” and “urban” spaces based on a life spent in the Eastern Cape – may be necessary to provide for the world’s largest population, but it is nonetheless disturbing.

These are not simply Berold’s observations. They are insights expressed by the Chinese themselves. One of the strengths of the book is that it is multivocal: it does not merely record the commentary of “a Westerner in the East” and eschews the kind of anthropological authority that often accompanies travel writing. Perhaps as much as a quarter of the text is taken up by extracts from essays and writing assignments produced by Berold’s students. These have been assiduously edited so that they are reader-friendly but preserve something of a sociolinguistic “otherness” to English first-language readers. The rest of the book is a compilation of diary entries, poetry (by Berold and various Chinese poets), correspondence with Chinese acquaintances and contributions by Berold’s partner, Mindy Stanford.

Both Berold and Stanford shift from present-tense to past-tense narration, giving the impression of that some of the book was produced while they were in China, and some of it in retrospect; but the balance lies with the “experiencing” rather than the “experienced” narrator. This endorses Berold’s approach, which is not to try and understand China – or encapsulate that understanding in words – but to absorb experiences and recreate these for the reader. One stylistic consequence is an occasional excess of commas and moments of syntactical sloppiness, but this is appropriate insofar as it reflects the associative or free-writing style one would expect in a journal.

Certainly, it pales in comparison to the delightful and utterly bizarre instances of Chinese English interspersed among the pages to keep the tone light (one of which gives the book its title). Curiously enough, they are often linked to fashion: a clothing brand’s slogan reads, “I’m not beautiful, I’m worse”; a hotel entrance warns, “Be sloppily dressed, no in”; and shirt labels discourage “Strongly rumpling and wringing dry to avoid crumpling and coming unstucking” or, my personal favourite, “Shatter by personal careless mistake against the washing introduction is beyond the guarantee”.