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.