I spent the last two weeks in China with my dad to visit my
grandmother for her 80th birthday. The last time I was back I was
16, still…. Young. This time around things felt different. My family’s
expectations of me were different; the way they talked to me was different. I’m
becoming my own person, setting my own rules, and am, more or less, an adult,
capable of my own thoughts and feelingsintuition.
This intuition helped me realize how different my life in
China would have been. Had my dad chosen to come back to China after getting
his PhD in France, I would have been born in China. My dad would have been a
professor, like his father. I would have had my incredible family around me,
all the time. I would have grown up with this incredible family, and they would
have molded me, and shaped me, and fed me.
There’s something about a family rooted in tradition that
feeds you in a way that no one else does. And that’s the biggest difference
between America and China. Tradition. While on this trip I was reading The
Agony and the Ecstasy where I tasted Renaissance Italy, which even then was
steeped in tradition. The citizens in the book and the citizens I saw took
extreme pride in their region, their arts, and their people. That’s true in
China as well. My family is from the Jilin Province- my dad from Changchun, the
capital of the province, and my mom from Shenyang. Both cities are in the
Northeastern part of China, making my family “Northeastern People.”
Northeastern people are taller, stronger. Our food is better… in my opinion.
You don’t mess with a northeasterner. But if you were to talk to someone from a
different region, they would without a doubt inform you of the superiority of
their region over yours.
I had a unique inside look on China during this trip. I look
Chinese and I speak Chinese so people treated me like just another citizen. What
made it unique was my American perspective.
I frequently ran into the opinion that economically, China
parallels the US in the sixties. Growing fast with lax regulation. The streets
are still under construction so some days you’ll be able to take one road home,
and other days you won’t. Some regions of China are really rich while other
regions are really poor.
Deception still exists, but if you're smart you can stay out of trouble. My dad told me about an experience he had with my grandpa. My dad and my grandpa were at the market buying meat. My grandpa had picked out a good piece of meat, and after the seller turned around with the meat wrapped, my grandpa asked him to open the package. Turns out the seller had replaced some of the lean meat with a huge portion of fat. Without saying a word, the seller replaced the fat with lean meat. You just have to be aware. Problems like this are rare among larger companies who have a reputation to uphold, but street sellers or taxis will never see you again, and have every reason to take as much of your money as possible. The key, though, is kindness. My dad made kind small talk with most of the sellers, taxi drivers, etc. And I noticed that they either treated him with extreme kindness right back, or tried to deceive him. Usually the former.
National parks are gaining traction, but they’re different
than the national parks in the US. The ones we went to dropped us off at the
head of a trail and had us trickle down the mountain or the path. The majority
of the park is still inaccessible to the public, but the trails that are
accessible are pretty well maintained. My dad and I weren’t used this system,
so we requested a stop as they were shuttling us up the mountain. We were
confused that they were confused, but they obliged. It was so quiet and it felt
like we had the entire park to ourselves. About an hour later we ran into our
first group and ran into NOISE. That noise never subsided. The next day, we
planned it smart. We again got off the shuttle as quickly as possible and
enjoyed the silence. We took paths less travelled by. My dad and I attributed
our plan to American Individuality, and the desire to have the freedom to do
what we wanted when we wanted.
Honestly though that mentality made a huge difference during
our trip, and really differentiated us from the rest of the population, and I
didn’t realize how big of a difference it made. Rather than a “me too”
mentality where we want to make sure we get what everyone else had, we sought
to discover what no one else would see, or taste. And we did.
The language is obviously different. The reason people struggle with languages is because they try to translate their language into another language, when really, you have to immerse yourself into that language's world and way of thinking. When you speak in another language, you think in a completely different way.
One thing that is absolutely universal, though, is the love
of family. I haven't seen or talked to my family in over five years, but from beginning to end, my family showed me nothing but love. We went on a family trip, which was really fun, but my favorite memory was the last night of my our trip. My dad and I were flying out the next day so we had a family barbecue. We ate, we sang, we danced, we reveled in each other's successes, turns of phrases, talents. At one point the kids had to perform for the adults. My cousins sang, and I danced. The adults loved it. I
struggled with my Chinese pretty much the entire trip, so I struggled to express how much they meant to me.
How much their small acts of kindness and love really meant to me. I think they knew.
There’s this idea that you can’t paint something you don’t
understand. That’s hard to do with cultures because it’s hard to leave behind
biases and predispositions. I’ve learned that no culture is better, just
different. To the outside world, Americans come off as arrogant, loud, and
ignorant. But spend a few days in the US and you quickly learn that it's a superficial notion that the world has decided to adopt. The Chinese come
off as humble, weak, and quiet. But spend a few days in China, and you quickly
learn that the smallest old woman can bite your head off with sharp words, and
to their peers, they are far from humble or weak.
China is rising. The government has allowed economic
prosperity without political freedom. The lack of free speech feels so
counterintuitive to me, but the people are happy. They will continue to be
happy as long as money is coming in. Will that money flow ever stop? Is it
possible to prosper economically under such rigid governance?
Everyone needs to establish their own educated opinion about China, or
decide what point of view to adopt. A working relationship among nations will require a mutual understanding of the true nature of each nation's cultures.
Back to art next week...
Love // Christelle
John Hunter....Likes boys
