They speak Chinese!

While it’s certainly entertaining to watch 251 lb. Cena stumble commendably through the language, his bilingual abilities are indicative of a trend far larger than himself.

Perhaps Chinese hasn’t reached the ubiquity of Spanish in institutes of learning around the United States, but the growth that it shows is exponential. Between 2002 and 2005 alone, there was a 52% increase in higher education students studying Chinese, and as of 2015, there are 550 American elementary, junior high, and senior high schools offering Chinese, a 100% increase from two years prior (data courtesy of Asia Society and USA Today).

What accounts for this rapid uptick? Besides being the most widely spoken language in the world, Chinese has recently entered the ring with English as a language of international business. More and more, people are taking up Chinese to bolster their corporate resumes, knowing that companies have a growing need for multilingual employees as they expand into the world’s second largest economy. Cena’s Mandarin abilities first came to light at a WWE press conference in Beijing at a time when the WWE was hoping to move into the Chinese market. And is it any coincidence that Zuckerberg’s knack for the language came out during a Tsinghua press conference in which the CEO discussed Facebook’s potential future in China (after years of being notoriously blocked by the Great Firewall)?

Due in large part to this increasing pervasiveness, it is no longer good enough to have Chinese as your only marketable skill. When I entered college in 2011, many around me applauded my choice to major in Chinese. “You’ll get an amazing job with that after graduation!” they said. And in 2011, they were mostly right. Simply putting “Limited working proficiency in Mandarin Chinese” on my resume was enough to land me a comfortable job. By the time I graduated in 2015, however, single-major-me was already obsolete.

Such a point was driven home when I attended a new student orientation for the U.S. Department of State’s Critical Language Scholarship program. An alumnus of the program, now working for Apple, stressed the fact that Chinese won’t get you the interview you seek. But, he said, it will get you the job. It will be your other skills and experiences that get your foot in the door, but when the hiring manager has one hundred nearly identical resumes to choose from, it will be the “Chinese” on yours that sets you apart and makes you the most hirable candidate.

Even if you go down a career path unrelated to Chinese, the fact that you speak the language will always be a point in you favor; it will always be notable. It says that you are capable of persevering through a frustrating, often tedious task. It says that you can tackle a challenge. It may no longer make you unique, but it makes you hirable.

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While my taste buds have matured past thinking that bologna is top-cut meat, I still refuse to eat certain foods. I knew that coming to China would present culinary challenges, but hey, there’s always McDonald’s right?

I dipped my toes—or tongue, if you will—into the Chinese food scene slowly, warming myself up with 宫保鸡丁 (gōng bǎo jī dīng – Kung Pao Chicken). The dish is a safe choice and available at almost any restaurant if you ask. It’s made with wine-glazed diced chicken, peanuts, and some combination of stir-fried carrots, peppers, onions, Sichuan peppercorns and garlic. Originally from the southwestern Sichuan province, Kung Pao Chicken has invaded the menu of almost every regional Chinese cuisine. Why? It’s delicious and hard to mess up.

Next I became infatuated with 四季豆 (sìjì dòu – green beans). Green beans you say? What’s so Chinese about green beans? When you throw in ground pork shavings, and enough 麻 (má – tingly flavor) and 辣 (là – spicy flavor) to fuel your work bathroom breaks for a week, you get a much different dish than bland old green beans. This is the dish that finally turned me on to spicy food. I asked the 服务员 (fúwùyuán – server) to add progressively more peppers and peppercorns until my tolerance to spice was at a level high enough to enjoy more daring epicurean offerings.

Of course, even the spiciest of spice connoisseurs needs a break every once in a while. For that, there’s 番茄炒蛋 (fānqié chǎo dàn – stir fried egg and tomato). The name of this dish says it all, but it can’t possibly make you understand how good the two ingredients can be when played off each other. A good chef will add just a hint of sugar, an element I never expected to be so delicious with egg and tomato.

Slowly, and with encouragement from those who eat family-style meals with me, I learned to love Chinese food. In fact, foods that I am loath to eat back home in the United States I jump at the opportunity to eat here. What do you think of when you hear the word tofu? Tofurkey? Tofu burgers? Generally meh cubes of nothingness? That’s what I thought too. Then I tried 家常豆腐 (jiācháng dòufu – home-style tofu) and 麻婆豆腐 (má pó dòufu – stir-fried tofu in chili sauce) and 豆腐卷 (dòufu juǎn – tofu balls) and realized that it wasn’t tofu I didn’t like, it was the flavorless way it was prepared.

Chinese food goes far beyond chicken and rice. There are Yunnanese mushrooms and Shanghainese soup dumplings. There are Xinjiang lamb kebabs and Shaanxi pork burgers. In fact, there are eight “Great Regional Cuisines of China”: Sichuan (川菜 – Chuān cài), Hunan (湘菜 – Xiāng cài), Guangdong (粤菜 – Yuè cài), Fujian (闽菜 – Mǐn cài), Zhejiang (杭菜 – Háng cài), Anhui (徽菜 – Huī cài), Jiangsu (苏菜 – Sū cài), and Shandong (鲁菜 – Lǔ cài). And those primarily just cover the east! With a wide range of culinary influences and offerings, China was always bound to have something I liked. It just took me opening my mind and stomach to something new to realize it.

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With mental images of rice paddies and millions of men who look just like Confucius, my friend, like many others I know, has a static view of a China that never really existed. To her, China is a homogenous society that stays locked in a hermetic chamber, sealed during a more glamourous time.

Before coming to Shanghai, I disparaged the city as too westernized, too cosmopolitan. The China in my mind did not include a place like Shanghai even though I knew that over 50% of China’s current population lives in urban areas much like it. My first exposure to China was Beijing, a hotbed of nationalism and requisite tourism. Ignoring the fact that the majority of sites in the capital were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and later rebuilt, I felt that Beijing satisfied my preconceived notions of what China should be. The hutong alleys gave me Instagrammable moments of the old generation drying laundry on lines and cherubic babies with split pants squatting over sidewalks. The facades of buildings matched my mental image of multicolored pagoda architecture, and Wangfujing food street confirmed my idea that the Chinese are resourceful in their cuisine. If Shanghai had none of this, how could it be China?

The single-frame image that many foreigners have of China—as I once had as well—comes largely from an amalgamation of Han history and culture spread through literature and propaganda. Han, the dominant ethnic group at 92% of the current population, is named after the second major dynasty of a united China, lasting from 206BCE-220AD. While neither the longest lasting nor the most successful dynasty, the Han solidified power and influence over much of Central, Southeast, and Northeast Asia. Yet despite the persistence of their name, the Han weren’t the only people group to rule a feudalistic China. In fact, two of the most successful dynasties in terms of area conquered—the Yuan and Qing—were both “foreign” dynasties (the Yuan being Mongol and the Qing being Manchu). Even disregarding these two major time periods in China’s history, the country has never been the uniform state many like to think it was. Just take a look at this GIF of China’s borders throughout history:

With China’s 56 ethnic minorities and its long history of outside influencers, what makes romanticized Han culture so fundamental to China’s internal and global image? Largely, a rewriting of history. Despite reliable historical records from the time, much of the public’s image of the mythologized Han Dynasty comes from an historic-fictional tale called Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三国演义) written some 12 centuries after the fact. The book is one of Four Great Classical Novels, a canon that idolizes a Han people triumphant in the face of barbarism and outside influence.

Literature has no doubt played a significant role in shaping public image of what China was and should be. If you don’t take stock in the significance of history and the way it is told in art, just take a ride on any metro in any city in China and you’ll see person after person watching Han period dramas on her phone. But perhaps even more significant than literary propaganda in perpetuating the idea of a homogenous China is the very modern conception of “nation.” China may have been unified over 2000 years ago, but it didn’t become a country as we know it until 1949 (or 1911 depending on whom you ask).

That’s right: before 1949, China was little more than a diverse collection of dynasties and tribes occupying the general area we know as the China of today. In order for the new, Communist regime to rally support, it had to rewrite and re-conceptualize its own history along a linear timeline. It had to convince the people to adopt one time zone, one language. Mao Zedong codified the Han Man’s Burden into law. The history of the nation would be that of the Han people, the Han culture. The language that would be adopted would literally translate as “the language of the Han people (汉语).”

Of course, not even forced homogenization created a singular, “real” China. The infographic below (courtesy of That’s Mag) of the current languages spoken in China demonstrates just how diverse China still is:

Nineteen forty-nine ushered in a new China, one obsessed with modernization, unification, and catching up with the West. As such, Shanghai is the perfect representation of the new China. No matter where you are in the city, you can’t walk five minutes without running into an extravagant shopping mall—and yes, a Starbucks too. Perhaps the city doesn’t have the rice paddies of your imagination, but it is as much China as Zhangjiajie or rural Sichuan. If the real China is a product of well thought out unification propaganda, Shanghai is as real as it gets. The city—the country’s largest—boasts a melting pot of a population. Walk down to the nearest bar street and you’ll see a woman from the mountains of Anhui chatting it up with man from South Korea, a little French baby being pushed in a stroller by his Hunanese ayi, and a jovial Shanghainese woman selling imported beers to a college student from Harbin. Shanghai is a well-oiled utopic machine: millions of diverse people and cultures coming together under one name. While that name is no longer Han but Capitalism, Shanghai is the unified city that leaders throughout China’s history have dreamed of.

So is the real China the sexy qipao worn by wealthy women during Manchurian rule? Is it the Great Wall that only remains preserved in designated tourist areas? Is the real China the mountains of Tibet or the deserts of Inner Mongolia? Is it orange chicken and Dim Sum and all things Cantonese? Is the real China the Han people and the Mandarin language? Perhaps it is all of these things and none of them at the same time.

I still haven’t found the real China. I wait in vain for a Schrödinger’s Cat that exists and does not exist, a Godot that will never arrive. And while I’m waiting, I think I’ll go get a Starbucks.

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