Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing by Judith Farquhar, Qicheng Zhang (review)

The book Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing is an ethnographic and philosophical investigation of Beijing residents’ health practices and discourses in the early 2000s. It is sophisticatedly written by two scholars from different academic traditions: Judith Farquhar, an American anthropologist based at the University of Chicago, and Qicheng Zhang, a Chinese philologist at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine. Their data is drawn from questionnaires, interviews, and ethnography of residents in the West City District of Beijing. In addition to this book, the collaboration between Farquhar and Zhang has yielded several journal articles in Chinese and English.

Coming from two distinct academic backgrounds, Farquhar and Zhang found their common ground in cultural traditions of self-cultivation. Yangsheng (nurturing life) is a term that Chinese people use to refer to various practices to promote one’s health, including dancing in a park, practicing Chinese calligraphy, singing patriotic songs, doing Tai Chi, and so on. Yangsheng is an ancient word; it is also a modern form of self-help that combines Chinese traditions with global science, medicine, and psychology and infuses the state’s public health programs. The authors approach yangsheng as activities of daily life management—personal projects to achieve health, deep personal ties, patient craftsmanship, and a good life. They see such activities as deeply rooted in Chinese culture and argue that yangsheng is an invented tradition as well as a living tradition. This view renders historical depth to their analysis of self-care. An individual exercising for health reasons is also a living vehicle embodying the cultural meanings in which he or she is immersed. In this sense, the authors reject the idea of universality and singularity of “the body” that biological sciences invite us to take (279). This framework makes their analysis of yangsheng unique, and it stands out among books on similar subjects.

Throughout the book, Farquhar is the major narrator, but both authors’ individual voices are presented, especially in chapters 3 and 4. It is interesting that the second author, Zhang, becomes the subject of analysis in reviewing the literature on yangsheng in chapter 2, because he himself is a popular author in this genre. The conclusion, based on a dialogue between Farquhar and Zhang, makes readers aware of the intellectual tensions between the authors. For example, while Farquhar uses the term culture to refer to anything social and cultivated, no matter how mundane, Zhang’s usage of culture narrowly includes only high culture. Also, Farquhar attends to the body, that is, the materiality of life cultivation; Zhang, however, approaches yangsheng from a relatively idealistic perspective. The dialogue, instead of a monotone analysis, makes the book’s value go beyond its discussion of self-care practices and reminds us to contemplate the relation between researchers and their research subjects and what flexible relations between the two parties we can imagine.

The book is structured to present a thick description of self-cultivation in China. In the first chapter, “City Life,” Farquhar and Zhang sketch recent changes in the city landscape and peoples’ lives in Beijing to portray the urban space in which people pursue self-care. Chapter 2, “How to Live,” analyzes the contemporary literature on yangsheng. The authors discuss the social factors contributing to yangsheng’s popularity in the last twenty years as well as the contents and rhetorical styles of these books. The popularity of self-care literature is a recent phenomenon related to a publishing boom and the withdrawal of state-provided medical care in China. As many people cannot afford the increasing fees at both state-supported hospitals and private institutes, health care books with information on prevention and management of chronic disease meet people’s practical needs. Yet the authors rightly remind us that yangsheng should not be reduced to a solely utilitarian reaction to the state’s health reform, because many people enjoy self-cultivation activities. Writers emphasizing Chinese traditions, such as Qicheng Zhang, have to...