The Unimportance of Being Oxford

This is an experience I had after returning to my home town in China.

Although people generally lavished praise on me upon hearing that I am now a doctoral student at Oxford University, in private they have actually very specific and already formed idea of success. The Chinese society (or perhaps East Asian societies in general) is now satuated with a cultic attitude towards personal financial success. And the dissemination/circulation of discourse therein seems a point of interest. Students who have gone abroad to study (usually in the U.S.) are typically viewed as having absorbed the advanced technological expertise, capitalist concepts, ideas, and innovative/entrepreneurial spirits. Thus, the successful entrepreneur returning from the US with advanced concepts and who makes fortunes based on the application of those concepts in China is the archetypal heroic overseas-educated student figure in the Chinese imagination.

From their reading of news papers, listening to news and browsing the Internet, many halfwitted Chinese people have become very familiar with such a figure, and can usually list examples, sometimes even among their own acquaintances.

If another academically successful individual who has gone abroad to study in prestigious institutions does not conform to their conceptual stereotype, instead of moderating their views, the Chinese actually view this atypical individual, such as myself, with suspecion.

So, when I disclosed that I was interested in no more than becoming a university academic, I was immediately greeted with ambiguous smiles, and sometimes downright disapproval, for 'lacking ambition' or for 'being complancent with petty comfort and security'--that they don't know inseurity is in fact rapidly becoming a hallmark of the academic profession is, of cousre, not their fault.

Fair enough, what I usually do not disclose is my academic ambitions, which I admit are rather hollow and unrealist but not necesssarily more so than most entre/technopreneurial ambitions, but I doubt they would understand even if I did. Perhaps an 'academic ambition' is a contradiction in terms for them, because, in these Chinese people's mind, being an academic teaching peacefully in a university is a sign of mediocraty, if not prima facie failure. Ambitious people, in contract, go out into the world and make billions. Of course, such a misconcpetion is forgivable, because these people themselves have never in their lives met a truly brilliant academic, nor have they ever actually opened their eyes to the world of ideas and contemplation, which is almost a spiritual world, if we are talking about a sufficiently high level. Their myopia is a historically determined condition, which is not to be blamed. But I am at least glad that I have a more open mind, thanks to a broader vision and experience of the world -- on in certain senses, of course.

But my point remains, that people DO actually have their already formed ideas of success and achievement and, speaking more broadly, of normativity. They won't easily alter these ideas, if at all. One of the attendant merits of being intelligent should be the capacity of imagination--imagining alternative forms of living and meaning, and sadly they aren't capable of it.