Afterword: What Good Life, and Why Now?

Since attending and speaking at the conference titled "The Good Life in Late-Socialist Asia: Aspirations, Politics, and Possibilities" at Bielefeld University in Germany in September 2019, I continue to ponder several unanswered questions. Why do we seem to be obsessed with the notion of the good life? And why at this particular historical moment in late-socialist societies? What is particular about the pursuit of the good life in these places where socialism, capitalism, and globalization intersect? Are there any better alternatives to desire while living in a time of heightened precarity, anxiety, contingency, and impasse? Today, as we face a serious global pandemic brought about by a novel coronavirus, these questions become even more pressing. Indeed, as COVID-19 rages across the world bringing the global economy to a near halt and causing massive loss of life, widespread human suffering, and profound uncertainty about the future, we cannot help but ask whether the good life, or even the normal life, is possible at all in the immediate future. What will a decent life look like in this surreal age of frequent public health crises? In this afterword, rather than commenting on each individual article in this rich and timely collection, I would like to offer my recent thoughts on some of the broader questions with which many contemporary scholars are still grappling.Let us begin by returning to Lauren Berlant's acclaimed book, Cruel Optimism (2011), which has questioned the widespread enthusiasm generated by the good life discourses across the globe. With a profound and blunt unpacking of the harsh reality beneath such optimism and fantasies, Berlant reveals how often that which one desires and dreams of can become the very obstacle to one's flourishing. She raises a number of poignant questions about the existential crisis facing us: What happens when the good-life fantasies start to fray? Is it better to hold on to cruel optimism, or to have none at all? What is the price of embracing or rejecting our conventional ways of handling the variety of challenges facing us today? In my view, the power of Berlant's book is not that she offers easy answers or a way out of the impasse that many of us are facing. It is that, by poking numerous holes in the upward-mobility, good-life fantasies, she moves us to confront the complexity and (im)possibility of living and thriving in this contemporary world marked by precarity, insecurity, and crisis.Yet the publication of Berlant's book did not completely dampen talk of hope, resilience, and well-being in academia, let alone the general population's pursuit of a better life regardless of circumstances and obstacles. On the contrary, it seems to have stimulated more and more interest in exploring the power and complexity of optimism, even in the face of the ruins of shattered dreams: "the anthropology of hope" (see the curated collection of Cultural Anthropology, "Reclaiming Hope" [Kirksey and LeFevre 2015]), "the anthropology of the good" (Robbins 2013), and "the anthropology of wellbeing" (Fischer 2014), to name but a few. This special issue joins the growing body of literature critically examining why, despite potential pitfalls, disappointments, and cruel betrayals, people around the world continue to be drawn toward the good-life saga, finding constant inspiration and strength in the process. More importantly, these scholars seek to show that such dreams and the desire to attain a better life are always historically situated, and thus assume different meanings and significance in specific social and political contexts.The renowned cultural theorist Stuart Hall once suggested that the concept of "race" can be regarded as a "floating signifier." As such, its "meaning is relational, and not essential, and can never be finally fixed, but is subject to the constant process of redefinition and appropriation (Hall 1997: 8). Further, all floating signifiers consist of an "endless process of being constantly re-signified, made to mean something different in different cultures, in different historical formations, at different moments of time" (8). Yet floating signifiers are powerful and long-lasting, because they can adjust, mutate, and reemerge. I find Hall's insight extremely helpful and pertinent to thinking about what the increasingly pervasive idea of the good life suggests in different contexts in our present time. I argue that the good life has also become a powerful floating signifier, whose meaning is constantly being redefined and appropriated in specific historical and cultural contexts, or what Ilana Gershon (2019: 404) calls "multiple social orders that are interconnected and contingent." While this specific floating signifier circulates across different social orders, it also gains new meanings and is contested in diverse ways, as Gershon demonstrates. To speak of the good life is not to refer to any universal, fixed, idealistic scheme of living well. Rather, we need to attend to the distinct socioeconomic condition that gives rise to a particular set of aspirations and determinations, as well as to the obstacles, struggles, and prices that emerge in this process (Chua 2014). It is this historically conditioned pursuit—guided by resilient human spirits and yet, at the same time, accompanied by pain and suffering—that the authors of this special issue seek to unpack. As a floating signifier, the meaning of the good life is inevitably unstable, diverse, and relational because "the meaning of a signifier can never be finally or trans-historically fixed" (Hall 1997: 8). Further, as people, ideas, and information move across the porous boundaries between social orders, we are likely to see certain commensurable and incommensurable elements emerging in their understanding of what the good life means in the process.What does it mean, then, to pursue the good life in late-socialist Asian countries such as Vietnam, Laos, and China today? Despite their different social and cultural traditions, these three societies share a great deal in common. They all embraced socialist political and economic systems at one point in history, and then sought economic reforms through varying degrees of marketization and commercialization beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They all pursued a market-based mixed economy rather than full privatization, yet socialist political ideology and authoritarian control are still very much alive. The shared socialist experience and a bifurcated political-economic system remain important to our understanding of the meanings and implications of the quest for the good life. There are at least four elements worth exploring here.First, striving for a brighter future and hoping to move forward and upward is not a novel idea for people living in late-socialist societies. But there has been a remarkable shift in terms of the focus of this endeavor: a move from the promotion of primarily state-defined collective welfare and national well-being to private individuals' cultivation of personal and family happiness, prosperity, and harmony. If in the past, the national longing generated by official efforts largely eclipsed individual desires, in the last two or three decades personal aspirations to success, well-being, prosperity, and family harmony are increasingly sanctioned and even exalted in official and popular discourses. An early sign of this fundamental change was expressed vividly in a famous slogan coined by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s: "To get rich is glorious!" For the first time in Chinese socialist history, individuals were encouraged to pursue personal prosperity and getting ahead of others was not seen as a punishable wrongdoing. This emerging aspiration to a comfortable life quickly inspired millions of Chinese to seek new ways of generating private wealth.Further, if the vision of a better life was largely singular and top-down in the past, this time it has become rather diverse and bottom-up. There has been a shift from glorifying lofty national goals of strengthening the country to indulging in everyday consumer desires, fighting for cleaner air, creating better residential spaces, and individual well-being to reflect their concept of a meaningful good life. For instance, some younger generations of middle-class Chinese are keenly interested in living a healthier life, raising a perfect child, maintaining good mental health, and enjoying clean air and safer food with the aid of new science and technologies, including psychological science, environmental science, and cutting-edge biomedicine such as stem-cell treatment (Bruckermann, this issue; Greenhalgh and Zhang 2020; Kuan 2015; Song 2017; Wahlberg 2018; Yang 2015; Zhang 2020). Meanwhile, older urban residents tend to seek various forms of traditional yangshen 养生 (life-nurturing) practices such as martial arts, qigong, dance, and meditation to improve and transform everyday life (Chen 2003; Farquhar and Zhang 2012). In more recent years, we have seen a resurgence of the national quest for what the Xi regime advocates as the "New China Dream." However, this new effort by the party-state to define the good life is not likely to overshadow the myriad existing and emerging dreams and yearnings of ordinary people at the grassroots.Second, in the context of recent socialist history marked by brutal class struggles, ideological campaigns, and political turmoil, the ability and opportunity to talk openly about one's good-life fantasy and take action to fulfill personal dreams are themselves a daring political acts because, just thirty years ago, such undertakings were unimaginable or not endorsed by the socialist state. It is in this troubled socialist context that anthropologist Arthur Kleinman (2011: 267) suggests that "the quest for happiness is one of the most important stories in China today." Indeed, against the backdrop of devastating economic crisis and violent political struggles between party factions in Laos, Vietnam, and China, it was bold for ordinary people to embrace and act on their own dreams and hopes despite the political risks, particularly in the early years of the reform and opening. The yearning for personal joy and family prosperity is a hallmark of the late-socialist era, across the three countries and beyond.Third, although the quest for material comfort, wellness, and upward mobility in the three transforming societies is deeply personal and intimate, it is not primarily driven by individualism; rather, it is profoundly social. This form of sociality is foremost embedded in concrete families, friends, and local communities rather than expressed through abstract notions of the nation-state. Teresa Kuan's (2015) work on the politics of parenting in China demonstrates that child-rearing is often an interactive process driven by the desire to secure a brighter future for not only one's child, but also the family as a whole. My own research on the rise of psychotherapy in Chinese cities further suggests that young middle-class professionals seeking new psychotherapy and training do not wish to retreat into the private self but hope to become more resilient people, better at managing their families and social worlds (Zhang 2020). This task involves a dialectic process of what I call disentangling (engaging with a private and safe space to undertake the psychological work of self-exploration) and reembedding (returning to one's social nexus to perform duties and obligations as a more effective person) through psychological counseling. This special issue adroitly reveals the socially embedded nature of the pursuit of the good life in a number of areas including access to electricity, transportation, health care, and migration among Laotians, Vietnamese, and Chinese. Attending to one's family, community, and social nexus is a key element of attaining a desirable life.Finally, some groups' quests for the good life and modernity can be accompanied by the massive dispossession and devastation of others. This is the case for each of the three societies concerned here, and beyond (see Harvey 2005). Among the many examples, let me highlight just three: the anthropologist Erik Harms (2016) lucidly demonstrates this dual process by juxtaposing two striking images of luxury and rubble in his study of Vietnam's urban redevelopment. Saigon's march to global modernity is undeniably built on the shattered dreams of the poor and disenfranchised. Based on her research among waste traders in Hanoi, Minh Nguyen (2019) shows that Vietnamese middle-class aspirations for wealth and success are inseparable from dirty, harsh labor performed by those in the recycling economy. Nguyen argues that, here, waste and wealth, anguish and enjoyment are inseparable in the search for the good life. It has become clear that in such scenarios one person's dream can easily be another's nightmare. My own research in urban China shows that Kunming's middle-class residents' search for private paradises in the form of gated commercial housing compounds comes at the great expense of the interests of long-term, relatively poor residents. The latter, who had lived in the city core for generations, were pushed out ruthlessly without adequate compensation to make room for the city's modernization (Zhang 2010). This polarity of simultaneous urban development and massive displacement, security and exclusion, enhancement and marginalization, frequently plays out in the march toward spatial modernity far beyond Asia (Herzfeld 2009; Low 2004).The good life as a floating signifier will attract numerous people in different situations for many years to come, especially at times of intensified insecurity and crisis, as well as new opportunities for radical change. No matter what form it takes—passionate aspiration, resilient hope, cruel optimism, or mirage—people will continue to endow it with different meanings, values, and significance based on their specific life circumstances in order to endure hardship, push through a life of deadlock, and eventually flourish. In my view, the yearning and willpower to live well and live better under late-socialist conditions and beyond, despite such challenging circumstances as the current global pandemic, are not expressions of delusion. They are rather a story of embracing an everyday politics that validates the human propensity for happiness, well-being, and recognition, against the odds.I thank Minh Nguyen and Phill Wilcox for inviting me to deliver the keynote speech at the conference at Bielefeld University, and am grateful for the opportunity to engage with the conference participants' wide range of fascinating research and lively discussions.