Seeing My Motherland from an American's Eye

I have been reading novels concerning China written by Americans. I started to see things that my eyes had decided to ignore.

River Town is by Peter Hessler. He went to a remote small city, Fu Ling, in Sichuan province in the early 90s. He was a volunteer from the Peace Corps, and he taught English Literature in a local college. He got in touch with college students. His impression was that his students thought in the same way. In class it was like he was facing a group of people instead of many different individuals.

When he described the city, he wrote "Sichuanese cities are often timeless. They look too dirty to be new, and too uniform and ugly to be old. The majority of Fuling's buildings look as if they were dropped here about ten years ago, while in fact the city has existed on the same site for more than three thousand years. Originally it was a capital of the Ba Kingdom, an independent tribe that was conquered by the Chinese, and after that nearly every dynasty left it with a different name, a different administrative center. But all of those dynasties have passed with hardly a mask left behind. The buildings could be the buildings of any Chinese city whose development has allowed its history. Their purpose is simply to hold people, the more than 200,000 people who spent their days climbing the staircases, fighting the traffic, working and eating, buying and selling."

I wish I could see marks of ancient civilization in China. There are so many beautiful Chinese legends. I still remembered vividly when I first touched the warm West Lake water in Hangzhou, I was connected to Bai Niangzi for a second. I will never forget the touch. What would it be like if there were relics lying around.

There is a shocking fact I did not know--" ...even as late as the early 1800s it had been illegal for a Chinese to teach the language to foreigners, and a number of Chinese were imprisoned and even executed for tutoring young Englishmen. This bit of history fascinated me; how many languages had been sacred and forbidden to outsiders? Certainly, those laws had been changed more than a century ago, but China was still ambivalent about opening to the outside world and language was still at the heart of this issue."

Now I come to think about it, it makes great sense on my personal level. From when I was a little girl I was reluctant to share my stuff with my friends. I did not like others to hold my baby doll. As I grew older, I realized what I had been doing, and I tried hard to learn to share. I always contributed my smallness to my being the spoiled only child. However, it could also be explained by the Chinese tradition of keeping the good stuff to themselves and fight back foreigners, such as the Huns. As to attitudes towards foreigners, the Chinese distinguished themselves from other "uncivilized" ethnic groups, while the English chose to spread their culture and colonize them.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

From the title, I assumed it would be a sweet book, like a dessert, something that makes you happy and pink. However, it turned out to be graphic and blue.

I have always believed in love. It exists as long as you approach it from the right way. In a healthy relationship, a couple should be best friends. They should be each other's extended family, the one who the other could turn to and talk to when he/she is in distress.

In one story, there is a doctor, Mel. He talked about his day to his wife and friends over dinner. There was an old couple hit by a car driven by a drunk teenager. Mel said: I dropped in to see each of them everyday, sometimes twice a day. Casts and bandages, head to foot, the both of them. You know, you've seen it in the movies. That's just the way they looked, just like in the movies. Little eye-holes and nose-holes and mouth-holes. And she had to have her legs slung up on top of it. Well, the husband was very depressed for the longest while. Even after he found out that his wife was going to pull through, he was still very depressed. Not about the accident, though. I mean, the accident was one thing, but it wasn't everything. I'd get up to his mouth-hole, you know, and he would say no, it wasn't the accident exactly but it was because he couldn't see her through his eye-holes. He said that was what was making him feel so bad. Can you imagine? I'm telling you, the man's heart was breaking because he couldn't turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife."

Mel looked around the table and shook his head at what he was going to say.

"I mean, it was killing the old fart because he couldn't look at the fucking woman." 

Mel continued:"You guys (a couple) have been together eighteen months and you love each other. You have both been married before, just like us. And you probably loved each other people before that too, even. Terri and I have been together five years, been married for four. And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, you might say, is that if something happened to one of us--excuse me for saying that--but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we are talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I'm wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don't know anything, and I am the first one to admit it."

Can't imagine what life is like for two people so deeply in love. Bothering trivialities must have been a treat. Shopping for groceries would not be boring; sweeping the floor would not be tiring; doing laundry would not be bothering. How could a person be so lucky to find the beloved who loves back.