Nostalgia...

I’m reading an interesting detective novel by Qui Xiaolong, The Mao Case. The novel is set in Shanghai in the current day, and its author knows that world at first hand; he was born and lived there before settling in St. Louis, Mo. Nothing like eye-witness reports. The ordinary people in China are evidently looking at commie-capitalism with unsure eyes and many of them, if they are old enough, looking back with nostalgia to the days of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Fascinating material. I’d always suspected—based on what I know about East Germany and Hungary—that ideological cultures imposed from above don't erase  the status quo ante or totally transform a society. Xiaolong documents that sort of thing. China is exactly—well, just look around. It’s just humanity. Modernity is now exploding there like a vast chain reaction, and it can’t be captured by looking at GDP, foreign exchange reserves, or a few pictures captured by Western journalists showing middle-aged middle-class people doing Tai Chi in the morning in a park. I have a feeling I understand the strange nostalgia many Chinese now feel as another order—which was not exactly loved in its own time but had a certain quality difficult to capture—is now passing away in a glitter, a comfort, and the reek of corruption—soon to be institutionalized into something respectable. If we want to see that something else—again, we just need to look around. I understand the nostalgia because East Germans experienced it in spades after reunification. The facades have been painted, the cardboard cars replaced by shiny new vehicles, the stores have filled with goods, shabby has yielded to up-to-date smart, the bars are full, the music rocks, the media are free. And yet, and yet… I don’t find the words to express it.