Cupcakes and Colonialism

He was looking for an intern. I was looking for a reason to stay.

I had just finished a semester of studying Mandarin in Beijing. I made friends with locals. I had pictures taken of me by strangers. I drank qsingtao by the half-liter. I produced a three-thousand character report on the conflict between environmental protection and China’s market economy. I was immersed. After my program ended, I traveled all over the country. Taking over night sleeper trains, touring new cities, visiting my host family from high school in Xi’an, and meeting eclectic characters from across the globe. Everyday that I traveled, I felt China’s magnetism pulling me closer and closer, while I simultaneously felt less and less of an obligation to return home on my flight to Boston at the end of May.

When one of the many people I met in my hostel-hopping in Shanghai offered me a translation internship, I knew that I had found my reason to stay. Less than 24 hours before my scheduled flight home, I made the decision to leave Beijing, and move to Shanghai to live and work in a new city for the following two months. I rented an apartment in a neighborhood riddled with brothels, gambling joints, and the best xiao long bao restaurants I’d ever had the privilege of eating at. Within hours of my decision to relocate, responses to my applications for English tutoring jobs were already rolling in. As a white-presenting native English speaker, I was a hot commodity.

My boss, on the other hand, was a Philadelphia native who had worked a few odd jobs in China but had had some trouble finding jobs that would hire him as a black man. He had decided to capitalize on his baking skills and started a small company called NE Cakes. He was the victim of anti-black racism imported from the west, but he found a way to make the best of it. He was my cake boss, and he was my ticket into Shanghai’s immigrant community, members of which because of their white, rich, or western identities were granted the social license to be labeled as “ex-pats.” Cake boss and I got along great, and I was happy to be helping him spread his delicious cream cheese frosting cupcakes all around the city. My charge was to translate his menu, attract new Chinese customers, and help him with marketing strategies to effectively make his brand appealing in the context of Chinese culture. My first tactic was convincing him that his American-ness was a commodity worth capitalizing on, a marketing technique in and of itself.

On the third of July, I chatted with my roommate in Mandarin as I spent hours turning paper and toothpicks into three hundred tiny American-flag cupcake toppers. What could be more American than spending hours creating things made to immediately be thrown away? The next morning, I delivered hundreds of red-white-and-blue cupcakes to vendors all over Shanghai. When my cake duties had concluded, I did what any reasonable American would do on the fourth of July: I headed over to the French concession with high hopes of meeting up with my American friends. We planned to stroll along the ex-pat-inundated bar streets, namely Youngkang Lu, a street infested with English speakers and craft beer. The concentration of American flag paraphernalia was overwhelming. As I walked through the ZUTRAU.cupcakescrowds with my friend, I looked around at the mostly white faces. There were native English speakers, and there were a few Chinese people who spoke enough English to associate with Shanghai’s elite. The most salient feature of the Anglophone mob was my cupcake toppers hanging out of the mouths of so many of the revelers. People shot-gunned Budlight, listened to American pop, and haphazardly set off fireworks in the street. Happy Birthday, America.

This debauchery was a manifestation of all that I’d grown to resent about “ex-pats” in China. Throughout my six months in China, I grew to think of myself as separate from the “ex-pat” communities of the big cities; after all, I spoke Chinese, had Chinese friends, and loved Chinese food.

What amazed me most about living with and talking to my Chinese friends was that, not only was no one similarly resentful, but that people seemed happy and even grateful for it. So many young people throughout the country seem to want nothing more than to learn English and get out while they could. Meanwhile, Western imperialism continues to choke China. On China’s shores, Western factories produce Western products to be shipped to Western consumer economies, ensuring that those Western countries maintain their blue skies. 500,000 people a year die from air pollution in China.

My time in Shanghai forced me to reckon with my status as a colonizer. It is true that I love and am committed to the Chinese language, food, people, and culture, but I benefited from Western/American privilege every single day in China. And when I used that privilege to market an American product, to put Chinese money in American pockets, I exploited that privilege. I found myself in the cross-hairs of an international, interlingual, interracial, and intercultural diplomatic sociopolitical issue. I feel more committed now than ever to using my American privilege to preserve what is amazing and important about China. If I ever move back, I’ll surely have ex-pat friends, but I’ll go out of my way to refer to myself as an American immigrant. As a beneficiary of a long history of imperialism and exploitation, it was absolutely crucial for me to realize a simple truth: even though the medium was cupcakes, the method was still colonialism.

 

ZUTRAU (1)Gabriella Zutrau is a linguist with a proclivity for social justice education and organizing. Although much of her time at Smith has been taken up by organizing for fossil fuel divestment, she also has a keen interest in how language and culture affect each other. More specifically, she is interested in language as a tool and a metric that can be used to liberate or oppress, to humanize or objectify. As a language-learner and traveler, she has forced herself to examine her many identities as politically charged, shifting her views of her role to accommodate new contexts as she move from place to place. She will graduate from Smith in 2016 with a double major in Psychology and Linguistics and a concentration in Translation Studies focused in Mandarin.

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