Gaining, Saving, Keeping and Losing

Tomei Thomas

The Face Experience

Gaining, Saving, Keeping and Losing

After stumbling around Hou Hai, a beautiful lake area; renowned for its bars and “lady clubs,” many of us in our group of five, male partygoers began to desire a little more than what this tourist destination had to offer. Back at our hotel, we found ourselves speaking broken English to our concierge, Mr. Tan, and begging him for advice on the whereabouts of a local party scene. Tan quickly wrote down some address in Mandarin with the word “Babyface” underneath. He mentioned that the so-called Babyface was a solid 20-30 minutes taxicab ride from the hotel, but it was surely worth it. Trusting our concierge, we put on our dress shirts and designer jeans, and cabbed the long ride to the seemingly mysterious Babyface. On the way there, we began to question our decision making for the night:

“Do you think this is completely safe?” I asked,

“Once we arrive,” said Tyler, “how will we know exactly where to find it?”

Before any of us could answer back, there it stood in all its glory- Babyface. Her outsideswerelittered in magical clusters of LED lights- all pulsing to the vibrations of the music inside. We walked in ready to pay the 200 Yuan cover charge, but one of the bouncers appeared shocked to see Westerns and insisted we waltz right in for free. Glass eyed and stunned at her insides, we were guided through a sea of Asians to a table at the very heart of the club’s floor. Strobe lights would only momentarily light up the club, but in these brief, split seconds intervals, we overwhelmingly witnessed a sociological concept ingrained in China’s culture-face.

Flares were attached to countless bottles of Dom Perignon and scattered across VIP tables. Fireworks lit up the bar while the beat of a song dropped. Soap bubbles, like the kind you blow during playtime as a toddler, floated through the sky. Exotic dancers danced, well, rather exotically. While this was insanity to university students, there was a greater purpose being served. Businessmen were entertaining their clients, perhaps, in hopes to gain face. Besides us, there were no other youngsters in this club. Everywhere you glanced, clients were drunkenly wooed by the brilliance of Babyface. Around 4 am, the bathroom was predominately filled with males purging their brains out in the urinals. Ms. Elinore Fresh later explained this was a common practice and strategic in nature- they were purging to sober up, and in turn, save face.

My description of face thus far might leave Bernie Machen’s actual face cringing in distaste. Yet to the Chinese, face goes far deeper than some obscenely awesome nightclub tucked away in Beijing. Without a doubt, face is critically important to understanding both implicit and explicit behaviors of the Chinese.This cultural nuance cannot be overlooking in business either, and has lead California State University professor, Stella Ting-Toomey, to hypothesis a theory based on face and identity management while negotiating with Asian businesspeople (Ting-Toomey, 73).

Therefore it is probably true that you cannot buy face, but Chinese cities have done a remarkable job of gaining face, even in itssmaller cities. Face is partly the reason why even third tier cities, like Yingkou, have gone to massive lengths to build scaled down models of what the future will look like. These models put LEGOLAND to shame, and while any drawn out plan would be enough to impress an American who knows Ben Bernanke’s “plan,” they still sit you through a 3D simulationto show how the city will eventually mature. The list goes on and on, and on: Bank of China’s grandeur role in the laser light show over Hong Kong’s harbor- Shanghai’s 430km/h Maglev train, that will unnecessarily turn on its side during G turns - The 30 minute line just to get into a Louis Vuitton store in Chengdu.All this time and investment dedicated solely for the pursuit of a concept that many westerns can hardly articulate.

Though, conceptualizing face into words has been tough even for China’s natives. Lin Yutang, an influential Chinese writer, described face as an aspect of Chinese culture that can neither be truly “translated or defined (Lin).”Albeit tough to verbalize, you feel face everywhere in China, for its something China’s central government has spent billions ensuring you do. More than just material observations, face is certainly a part of a man’s dignity, honor and it, sometimes obsessively, becomes his livelihood to keep face (Bedford).

Bibliography

Bedford, Olwen. "The Circle of Face."Taiwan Review. Government Information Office, 10 Jan. 2005. Web. 10 June 2011.

Lin, Yutang.My Country and My People. Singapore: Heinemann Asia, 1989. Print.

Ting-Toomey, Stella. (2005) The Matrix of Face: An Updated Face-Negotiation Theory. In W.B. Gudykunst (Ed.),Theorizing About Intercultural Communication(pp.71 92). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.