People are always telling one another that they are vulgar. I first assumed the criticism was meant to push a person toward elegance. Over time I noticed it mostly pushed people from one kind of vulgarity into another. The opposite being invoked was usually not elegance but novelty. Novelty is tied to newness: if it is not new, it is not novel, and so novelty is bound to become vulgar in turn.
At the end of the last century, a new hairstyle was fashionable in the town where I lived. For women, the most vulgar was two braids; one braid came next. More modern was a shoulder-length cut, then a small floral perm, then big waves. Color mattered too. Natural black was the most vulgar; yellow and red hair were more cosmopolitan; blue and green were the height of style. Big waves plus color was the ultimate. If several fashionable women stood together, the effect was like entering a bird-and-flower market. The braided girls of that time are now middle-aged women. The colored waves they once thought elegant now look vulgar to many, while women around fifty have started braiding their hair to look innocent.
At the start of this century, I began working. The office required weekday suits and regulated the color, the number of buttons, whether the jacket was vented, and which button should be left undone. The company brought in etiquette trainers to lecture on suit culture and dress for different occasions. They ended by praising Koreans for their manners: even in the hottest days of summer, we were told, they do not take off their suits.
I have never liked confinement. In casual clothes I can sit wherever I want and lean wherever I want; I do not worry about dirt or wrinkles. In a suit I felt uncomfortable all over. But rules are rules, so I wore one. Eventually I noticed that our leaders did not wear suits to work. In casual conversation I learned that the leader did not like suits either, but no one told him to wear one. Casual dress had become a privilege of rank. I do not know what the etiquette trainer would have made of that. Would the trainer still have had the confidence to say that casual dress shows bad taste and disrespect for others?
Only about a decade later, formal suits had become rare on the streets of Beijing, apart from real estate agents and insurance brokers. Meanwhile, the Mao suit—once considered the height of vulgarity—could be seen now and then. These were modified versions, something like a cross between the Mao suit and a Tang suit, rather like the casual suit.
When I first left university and looked for work, interviews often turned to English. Interviewers would toss out English phrases, and since my English was terrible, I often broke into a sweat. After I started working, I found that many companies mixed Chinese and English in the office. People dropped English words into Chinese conversation, and anyone whose English was weak was left baffled and sweating again. Around 2010, traveling abroad and even emigrating became fashionable. Now and then one heard that an acquaintance had emigrated to Australia or Canada. To shed my own thick rusticity, I decided to take a trip to the United States. My wife and I bought round-trip tickets. Her visa was rejected; my English was too poor to speak; the ticket money was wasted.
Around the same period, a client came to Beijing from out of town. I took him to a hotel to register. He produced a Hong Kong and Macau travel permit, and the front-desk clerk refused it, saying that mainland Chinese needed to show an ID card. From that I understood that he had just been to Hong Kong.
All of this works rather like the appreciation of plum, orchid, and chrysanthemum. The varieties considered elegant have nothing to do with elegance as such. They are merely novel—new or scarce. Once they are cultivated in large numbers, they become vulgar.
Today opera is still treated as elegant, while popular vocal music is considered vulgar. I would say opera is not elegant because its singing method or content is inherently more refined. Its threshold is high. If a tenor lived in an apartment building, the whole building might lose value. Is that because the neighbors are not elegant enough? Where have the true connoisseurs gone?
Cranes are naturally elegant. Poets and writers, after a few cups of wine, can always squeeze out a few lines in praise of cranes. But if the law allowed cranes to be farmed, I can assert that within twenty years cranes would be on ordinary tables like geese.
Su, the word usually translated as vulgar, also means custom. Because it is customary, it is common; because it is common, it produces aesthetic fatigue. Ya, usually translated as elegant, originally meant correct. It was extended to mean a norm—more correct than correct. Most things in the world have no distinction of correct and incorrect. To insist on dividing them into right and wrong, and then to find something more correct than correct, is only self-deception. What is too common is called vulgar; what is too elegant is vague and unreal. So people often mistake the novel for the elegant.
Let me end with a story I cannot remember where I read. In a county town lived a rich man and a scholar. The scholar envied the rich man's wealth; the rich man envied the scholar's learning. One day the rich man saw the scholar walking past in low spirits and asked why he was unhappy. The scholar answered, 'My string has broken.' The rich man did not understand. Later he inquired and learned that the scholar's wife had died. Another day the rich man met the scholar and put on a mournful, sighing manner. The scholar asked what was wrong. The rich man replied, 'An old string has broken.' His mother had died.
Which is more elegant, money or learning? From ancient times to the present, everyone would answer learning. Why, then, does everyone love money more? It turns out we are all vulgar people.