"Big Cats" or "Scary, Man-Eating Tigers?"
By Sylvie Packard
July 19 2008
After nearly two weeks in Beijing, I'm finally beginning to feel accustomed to the whirlwind of Mandarin dialects that follow me into my sleep, the dense humidity covering me in a thick layer of sweat and the constant clash between a modern city skyline (if you're lucky enough to view it through the smog) and the vast array of hutongs holding on for their last gasp of breath as Beijing works to modernize in preparation for the Olympic Games.
Yet, I have come to find strands of shared culture between China and the United States in the most unusual places, particularly during my trip to the Beijing Zoo. As technology has shrunk the planet into an interconnected, "global village" (as remarked upon by a Chinese friend I made playing ping pong at the CUC,) I have, in turn, wondered more about the human relationship to nature or, more particularly, the human desire to overcome the natural world. And at the Beijing Zoo for 20 RMB admission fee, or three American Dollars, I certainly got my money's worth in food for thought.
The Beijing Zoo had a great deal to offer in spectacle. The Giant Panda House, its main attraction, was where we started off. I viewed around a dozen panda bears chomping on gigantic carrot sticks, rubbing their noses against the glass for adoring Chinese tourists and pacing the confines of their jungle-gym homes dressed in a synthetic "outdoor" scene. The pandas seemed friendly and were absolutely adorable, and for a few minutes I forgot about the fact that they had been wrenched from their natural habitats. That fact, however, became impossible to ignore as I moved on to the rest of the attractions. Along with the Giant Panda House, the zoo offered zebras, rhinos, elephants, giraffes, tigers, exotic birds, monkeys shipped in from all over the world and an extensive aquarium for the extra price of about 10 RMB.
Our next stop at the building labeled "Big Cats" proved to me that something was not "quite right" at the Beijing Zoo. The rectangular room was about the size of an elementary school gymnasium, and the walls were lined with cages along with an extra row of steel bars allowing for a three-foot gap between the humans and the animals. Confined to this prison was a variety of cougars, lions, white and orange tigers, each locked into their own concrete room, squinting their eyes to the onslaught of flashing cameras. It was clear that the Chinese zookeepers had made no attempt to replicate the natural habitat of these short-tempered, stunning creatures, and one of the white tigers paced his cell back and forth in a fit of frustration that made me question my false sense of safety at the zoo.
A Chinese man led a group of rowdy children from cage to cage, shouting Mandarin obscenities at these animals in an attempt to provoke them, as if that would illicit some type of reaction pleasing to the crowds. It was clearly in distaste, yet I was reminded of my home country, as my first thought was that this Chinese man's ignorance and disrespect towards the animals was something that I have come across again and again in American attitudes. Along with the tigers, the elephants were trapped in a tightly confined space in which they could move their bodies one step back and forth in their cells, and their tails wagged towards us as they ignored tourists and picked whole apples off the floor with their trunks to swallow in one, smooth gulp. Although the giraffes and the zebras were allowed to be outdoors, they seemed peculiarly still and sedate as if they had been drugged.
In spite of my realization that American attitudes can be just as ignorant and disrespectful as the Chinese man in the "Big Cat" house, it was my natural instinct to pin it on the Chinese, blaming their policies for the treatment of these animals. It was on second thought that I began to understand an essential similarity between Chinese and American policies that, in spite of the constant culture clashing, was essentially the same. Both China and the United States, in some form or another, use propaganda in order to make everything seem to be a certain way. The main difference is that the Chinese, as products of a Communist upbringing, make no attempt to hide the fact that everything must seem a certain way for society to function as a whole.
My ping pong buddy explained to me that, in China, people truly believe that the country is a gigantic ship, and that every person must serve a purpose to the best of his/her abilities in order for that ship to move through the sea. This came as a shock to my American sensibilities, which have always been individualistic. I watch immigrants, including a large percentage of from China, flock to the United States for nothing but opportunity and, in many cases, actually arrive to find next to nothing.
In the case of the Beijing Zoo, I eventually had to give in to my original tourist inclinations that brought me there and forget my discomfort with the prison-esque atmosphere facing the animals. After all, more often that not, American zoos confine the animals on the same level as the Chinese do-- the Chinese, ironically enough, are just more honest about it.