The Chinese Attitude as Enjoyment

As we walked from the supermarket home, the not very long and quite narrow sidewalk was occasionally filled with cigarette smoke. My girlfriend has always been angry about these second-hand smoke damaging non-smoking people's health, but this time an idea occurred to me that made some sense not to be missed out. The idea is, as long as negative externalities like these aren't punished a bit, it really doesn't matter whether you smoke or not, either way you get exposure to nicotine and are more prone to get lung cancer. So why not join the smoking people? that way at least you get some enjoyment, some relaxation out of the smoking.

This is a very nasty version of the Gresham's Law. I wonder how many people actually got into smoking because of the reasoning above. Probably not so many. But it reminds me an almost permanent characteristic of the Chinese people, which is the attitude towards life as enjoyment and nothing else. Life is supposed to be enjoyed, no matter what. This has something to do with wealth and power, for sure, which means the Chinese people are always experts in accumulating wealth and power (but never interested in the driving forces behind, like science and religion). But the Chinese are so obsessed with enjoyment in life that they actually developed infinite ways to enjoy life in almost all circumstances, including in sickness and penniless. The Chinese cuisine is incomparable in this respect. Neither the French nor the Japanese can be so good at making delicious food with the poorest materials at hand. 

And so an enjoyment as smoking can hardly be banned, unless a painstaking effort of public health education is enforced together with a high fining policy, like what the Hong Kong did for many years. 

The Chinese attitude differs from the Japanese in that, although both see life as enjoyment of some sort, the Japanese cherish the aesthetics in it, so much so that at some point they are willing to give it up because of the ugliness of it. But never the Chinese. This is connected to the thriftiness of the Chinese attitude. Nothing is too small to be enjoyed. A dish, a cup of tea, a piece of cloth, a corner for napping, a walk in the mountains, all can be enjoyed as long as one get the idea of the Chinese attitude. Confucius' favorite student Yan Hui (颜回) was just such an expert in enjoying life with almost nothing in life:

子曰：「賢哉回也！一簞食，一瓢飲，在陋巷。人不堪其憂，回也不改其樂。賢哉回也！」

The Master said, "Admirable indeed was the virtue of Hui! With a single bamboo dish of rice, a single gourd dish of drink, and living in his mean narrow lane, while others could not have endured the distress, he did not allow his joy to be affected by it. Admirable indeed was the virtue of Hui!" 

The greatest man worshipped in China would never do things like the ancient Greek philosopher Thales supposedly did, that is, to use his wisdom to speculate on the market and become wealthy. Because it is quite easy to enjoy life when you're wealthy, but very difficult if penniless, and the expert in enjoying life are the ones who can do so even when life's poor and hopeless.

The cigarette in hand is just such poor enjoyment a poor Chinese man can have, which, to his mind, should never be deprived precisely because it is the perfect symbol of his life, of his attitude towards life.