A Playground Afternoon with Gege's Japanese Classmate

This afternoon I took Gege and his classmate to play at a playground. Yesterday morning the school announced the class assignments for the new school year. After the reshuffle they are no longer in the same class, but that didn't stop us from getting together to play.

The other child's mother and I talked in English, while the children ran around on their own. To the outside world, Gege is growing up in a family whose mother tongue is Chinese, and this classmate in a family whose mother tongue is Japanese. But if you go any further, these two seemingly simple labels quickly begin to break down. Both were born in the United States, and both now live in Thailand. They receive an IB education at the same international school, and meet teachers and classmates from different countries. In other words, each of us understands this world through different languages.

While they were playing together, I came across a news story: Japanese political figures had visited a certain shrine, and China had subsequently protested. For someone like me, who grew up in China, news like this is nothing unfamiliar. War, invasion, war criminals, historical responsibility: these words are almost naturally linked together.

I looked up. In front of me, two six-year-olds were playing together.

I know that before long I will have to start answering Gege's question: why is what's in the news not quite the same as what's in my real life?

The question looks simple. For nearly ten years I worked at a media outlet serving Chinese-speaking audiences around the world, and I could explain to viewers, with great fluency, the positions, mindsets, and expectations of different countries and peoples in the face of historical questions.

By the time I left that outlet, I no longer had to carry the values of a media platform. And when I tried to find an answer to this question within mainstream values and the space of mainstream narratives, I found that I myself had never been mainstream.

I have never much liked labeling myself, even though I have many labels. I am a father, I am gay, I am someone who has long lived in different countries. None of these labels is false. The problem is that when any one label is blown up large enough, what remains, the part most worth paying attention to, disappears.

When a living person is compressed into a single word, understanding that person seems to become very easy. Know his nationality, and you seem to know his culture. Know his gender, and you seem to know his personality. Know his position, and you seem to know how he will understand the world. Know his family structure, and you seem to know how his children will grow up.

So you see, labels have one huge advantage: they help us quickly sort out this complicated world. But labels also carry one huge danger: when the explanation is completed too quickly, we stop looking any further.

I know this all too well. The outlet I used to work for was not mainstream media, but with its distinctive choice of news and commentary it was able to move among different Chinese cultural circles. My past work and life have kept reminding me, again and again, that in understanding the world and ourselves, we should not stop at labels.

The arrival of AI made me start paying attention to language. In terms of linguistic expression, labeling is a compressed encoding of a person or thing. When I used encoding and decoding as a way of looking at complex questions, I thought of a news commentary program from years ago, Decoding Chen Wen-chien. I would re-edit Chen Wen-chien's commentary and news analysis from the program and push them out to different media platforms. When related news broke, I would also re-edit them as supplementary information for the latest stories. Seen from a certain angle, the program was decoded by me and then encoded by me again. In this way, commentators such as Li Ao, Qiu Zhenhai, and Ruan Cishan were decoded and re-encoded by me time after time.

In this news story, the shrine is a highly compressed label, a symbol that compresses and encodes an extremely complicated history into a node that very easily triggers emotion. What makes the problem even more complicated is that this labeled symbol is read as entirely different things in two semantic systems. For one side, it is encoded as a test question: "Has the history of aggression been properly acknowledged?" For some conservative forces on the other side, it can be encoded as a symbol of "mourning the war dead," "autonomy," and "refusing interference in historical memory."

I know that history must not be forgotten for the sake of removing labels. Japanese militarism once launched wars of aggression, and those wars caused enormous, real harm. Those deaths were real, those losses were real, the memories the war left behind are real. That decades after the war ended, historical memory still shapes how people of different countries understand one another is real as well.

Only when we are not satisfied with labels like "Japan," "China," "aggressor," and "victim" can we begin to ask questions like these: Who made the decisions? Who started the war? What kind of society did ordinary people live in at the time? Did different people have the same choices? After the war, how did different countries tell the story of that history? How did different families pass that history on to the next generation? Why can the same history, more than eighty years later, still stir up such intense emotion on one particular date?

These questions make history complicated again, but at the same time they also make the questions we face clearer.

I am not a historian, nor a sociologist. But as a father, sooner or later I will have to explain these things to my child. Not because of the labels I carry myself, but because his real life will become more and more complex. His friends come from Japan; his teachers may come from Britain, the United States, Thailand, or elsewhere. One day he will find that the world in the news is often full of nations, wars, conflicts, and positions, while what he actually encounters every day is one specific person after another.

When that time comes, I won't simply tell him it's because the news is politics. Nor will I tell him that the past is past. I hope to tell him that history shapes people, but it cannot determine them.

On this very ordinary afternoon, sitting beside the playground watching the two children play together, I want to keep this picture first. When Gege starts asking me those questions, I will think back to today.

Text: Leo, excerpted from Leo's Cultural Observations