China Revisited 2013 [35]

Lessons in Obvious Wisdom

Our 13 day trip to China in January has taken me eight months to explore, a span I cannot explain simply in terms of laziness. Just as one does not easily turn down an invitation to go to China, so one does not quickly digest the experience.

Despite the time I have spent working out the narratives from my notebook accounts, with photographs to spur memory -- and to keep myself from wandering too far afield -- I am astonished both about how much material I still have not touched and about how ordinary my conclusions about China look when I set them down. Not everything will fit into this blog as an adventure. But I would like to end with some thoughts that I will try to pass off as insights.

 When I was a child, my small town American existence was so seriously White- Anglo-Saxon -Protestant that I knew only one non-white student before I graduated from high school, an African American girl whose family lived somewhere in our town. I did not know her well. She was very nice, but quiet; and, to put it bluntly, I did not know how to talk with her.

She was not the only person I did not know how to talk with; there were many. I was a shy person all of my early life. I might speak of similar uncertainties I held about interactions with kids who were Catholic, for example, although the religious differences were apparent mostly on holy days.

As for Asians, I did not know any -- except for a Japanese woman who figures dimly in my early memory, a friend of my mother's from church. I could not describe her. Unless my mother was with her, I did not actually detect her presence. She was, I suppose we could say, invisible to me. To make that statement now is both appalling and inexplicable; it speaks volumes about those time and circumstances.

What I am trying to say is that my homogeneous upbringing left me nearly totally blind regarding race and culture, a neutrality of attitude based on ignorance. Unlike many kids with a similar background, my parents did not burden me with a value system that made a virtue of this homogeneity.

Nor did my parents burden me with the language of dismissal or disrespect. To their great credit, they would never have tolerated such expressions from me.

My mother, as I say, had a Japanese friend; my father was given to inviting his foreign graduate students, always men and mostly middle-eastern or Indian, to Sunday dinner and on holidays when they would otherwise be alone.  We grew up aware of difference, but also of the dignity with which my parents treated these guests. Consequently, attitudes and language we now think of as abusive or inadequate or hateful or plain ignorant always surprised and shocked me when I witnessed those expressions in the world outside our home.

We might say that what I had to overcome, mostly, was not prejudice but a  poverty of exposure.

When my own children were able to attend a small, nearly rural school with Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Ugandan, Kenyan, Ethiopian, Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Russian boarding students, I immediately understood how much richer their upbringing would be for this cultural exposure and racial engagement.

When my children were growing up, we began to have a succession of international students live with us as they attended Houghton Academy.  We began with KeeDuk, a boy from Korea, and Michael Shih, who came to us as a seventh grader and stayed for six years.

In my childhood, China might as well have been the moon. Nobody, as far as we knew, was allowed to visit China.  Any Chinese person I might have encountered on some rare occasion hailed from Taiwan or required a visit to Chinatown in New York or San Francisco.

Today, as we all know, the Chinese are everywhere -- not as refugees or political exiles primarily, but as students, entrepreneurs, business people, travelers, tourists, immigrants. In short, they go where they go for the same reasons you and I might -- governments permitting, of course. Despite the commonplace nature of this information, I was astonished to find on a weekend in Scotland in November 2010 that many shop signs were in English and Chinese. In Wales, one finds signs in English and Welsh, so one might have expected English and something Scottish in Scotland.

And the little shop lady wearing the kilt in one Edinburgh store of Scottish woolens, to my great amusement as she turned toward us, was Chinese as well.

The world I had grown up in continued to influence my expectations.Think of it this way: In 1948, the year I was born, Mao's soldiers gained control of China, ending a war for dominance with the Nationalists that had dragged on for many years. Mao's victory was considered by many Americans as a victory for world communism and as a "loss" for the west. It was an event that added to our geographical distance from China; arguably, Mao's victory precipitated the war in Korea and the war in Vietnam, both of which we Americans saw as a necessary and, perhaps, desperate fight to "stop the spread" of communism.

As further by-products of this effort, the US experienced both the Cold War with its legion of anxieties and the disruptive cultural revolution/antiwar movement of the 1960s.

My point is not to argue the politics of that time, but only to suggest the world that shaped American attitudes toward what is "foreign" -- the cultural environment I grew up in -- no longer suits our world. And the China we were so privileged to visit for two weeks in January is not the China we imagined it to be either. 

That's all to the good.

Of course, I think now, this is so obvious. What took me so long to figure it out? Or, maybe I have really known it for a long time -- in the faces of all my young Chinese friends.