“The convenience of the high trees” [Ted Hughes]
Convenience is a hot topic in China. There is much talk of the convenience of life here, all of us app-tapping our way to easy food, shopping and travel. Convenience had a super-boost with the advent of translation apps, allowing many to bypass or completely abandon their Chinese learning efforts in favour of waving a phone in a stranger’s face. And of course everything got that much more convenient after the lifting of the COVID restrictions.
The flip side of this, as you may already have sensed, is that what we gain in convenience, we can lose the attendant rewards for the struggle.
Small daily interactions get minimised, shrunk down to saying “xie xie” to the Meituan delivery driver.
Many studies have shown that the fragmenting of our social lives and communities is detrimental to mental health and community cohesion.
Trying and trying again to get the tone right for a taxi to the (correct!) train station is left behind, along with the chance to gradually get better at saying that tone. But don’t worry, I won’t pretend there’s a positive flip side to losing the COVID restrictions.
So it appears convenience can be a double-edged sword; we must balance what we gain in ease with what we lose in human terms.
Whether or not you actively pursue a more “convenient” life is something you may not have thought about explicitly. But it is something worth thinking about.
What values drive you? Do you want ease and a frictionless life? Or is the struggle sometimes worth it?
One area this self-reflection and idealism breaks down is the world of work. There has been much discussion since the pandemic of burnout, overwork and sustainability. If you actively seek a convenient and relaxed life (which is not a sin), how does this stack up with the need to earn money? And what if this comes piled with extra pressures of over-work and under-pay?
An interesting trend has risen, as is so often the case, from Douyin (well, its western wing, TikTok): the “lazy girl job”. This provocative name invites an interesting debate on convenience. In essence, the lazy girl job fights back at overwork culture and China’s 996 working hour system (09:00 – 18:00, 6 days a week) by demanding a healthier work environment where workers have time for themselves and their own hobbies, interests and lives.
While there is no strict definition, a lazy girl job should give a sense of safety (no dangerous working conditions or punishingly long shifts), a “comfortable” salary, a healthy work-life balance and should be remote or hybrid compatible.
This last point does raise a chuckle from me and other teachers in the room, but I can still appreciate the sentiment.
Pause a moment and examine your response to these criteria.
If you scoff and disregard them as, well, lazy, why? Are these (perhaps minus the remote requirement!) not reasonable demands for a healthy job? To be clear, the trend does not advocate actually doing your job lazily or badly. The idea is still that workers should meet requirements and perform competently. But by packaging the demands up under the title “lazy girl job”, attention is drawn to the fact that the overwork is now viewed as normal, and that the idea of just doing a job has been diminished to not doing enough.
How did we get here? And who does it benefit? Or who is it conveniencing?
It is clear in China that 996 work culture is immensely inconvenient for almost everyone, except those reaping the profits. According to China’s state-owned media People’s Daily, a 2013 survey showed that 98.8 percent of Chinese IT industry workers self-reported health problems. It is not difficult to imagine it hasn’t improved much in the intervening decade.
Having limited access to family, friends, downtime and exercise has obvious disbenefits. Unhappy workers are inefficient workers, so it is strange as well that employers push for untrammelled productivity at the cost of humanity. In August 2021, the Supreme People’s Court deemed 996 working hours illegal, but there is no confidence that companies will follow the ruling.
To return to the opening quote… the phrase comes from the poem, “Hawk Roosting”, written from the perspective of the titular bird of prey, sat at the top of the forest, surveying the world below him and his power over it.
The personified bird describes his ability to fly, swoop and soar over his domain, to hunt and kill at ease, and the culmination of the powers of Creation that led to his being.
The bird interestingly contrasts the purity, directness and brutality of the animal world (“my manners are tearing off heads”) with a “falsifying dream”, presumably human life.
Many have taken the hawk as a metaphor for a dictator, perhaps even a tyrant. Someone who rules his world with an iron fist and brooks no challenge to his dominance. But I like to see, in some of the softer, gentler images of the poem (such as “the air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray”) a more positive image; that of a being in harmony with its surroundings, not in friction against them.
An image somewhere between the frivolity of the lazy girl job and the life-risking grind of 996.
In “the convenience of the high trees”, perhaps we could all find our balance between ease and struggle.
