artsy fartsy, hoity-toity, and all those other highfalutin words

[warning: personal invective against high society follows; read at your own discretion]

A couple friends and I attended a session of the Shanghai International Literary Festival last Sunday. The session was titled "Beauty and the Cultural Revolution: China Travels." The email blurb promised: "the author of Shanghai Girl Gets All Dressed Up relates her tales of traveling in China during the Cultural Revolution."
Despite the fact that the author had an extremely non-Chinese-sounding name, I still held out hope that she might provide some firsthand insight into Chinese culture and society during that dark period of their history. After all, if she'd traveled extensively around the country during that time, then surely she could discuss common social practices of the era or Communist propaganda that she observed. Or maybe she could provide an analysis of the impact of the government's policies on those she met during her travels.
I imagined that I would be but one of many in the audience who wanted to learn about a part of history that I was not taught in school. I also imagined that the lot of us would be joined by academics and historians eager for a new perspective on the Revolution or, perhaps, a few political activists searching for validation.
Instead, my friends and I intruded upon a veritable country club of pastel-colored expat wives and pompous businessmen sipping cocktails at three in the afternoon. My friends and I were clearly underdressed for the occasion (how were we to know the dress code for the book talk was Martha's-Vineyard-casual?), but it wasn't just this that made us uncomfortable. Even more noticeably, we were the only three Chinese in the room. In the heart of Shanghai, in the middle of the day, at an international literary festival, we were the only people of color there.
The speaker proceeded to make us regret our attendance even more. Not only did she fail to teach us anything about the Cultural Revolution, but she spent half the time name-dropping people she'd met, known, or otherwise had some connection to at the time – Jane and Audrey Meadows, George Bush Sr., the wife of Zhou Enlai – and the other half displaying her own ignorance and a profound bigotry against the Chinese. Every Chinese person she mentioned was either a "fierce" Red Guard or a layperson whose behavior was so ridiculous as to be the subject of a joke in her speech – a joke heartily appreciated by her white and privileged audience members. Only one Chinese person she mentioned acted nobly – unexpectedly offering her and her travel companion tea on a long voyage – but she used this anecdote to demonstrate her own moral education ("never assume") rather than to shed any positive light on the Chinese population as a whole. And if you think this interpretation is born solely from my defensiveness - as a Chinese American - against racial prejudice, then consider this: throughout her speech, the author repeatedly referred to the shirt she was wearing as evidence of her originality and love of Chinese culture.
"I'm wearing a Chinese pillow cover," she proclaimed at the beginning of her talk, "You won't see anybody else wear a pillow case, but I had my dressmaker make a blouse out of this."
Her blouse was black with a square, colorful, pop art print of a Chinese woman in the middle.
"I bought it at Shanghai Tang. Isn't it great?"