The Road Not Taken

My dad and I went on a walk today. I saw the leaves change color as though they were on fire: all shades of red, orange, yellow, purple, brown. I'm often taken back by how much beauty surrounds me. As we gingerly selected our path amidst twists and turns, muddy trails, fallen branches, forks in roads, I announced that I am not going to law school. Rather, I want to work as an environmental activist. I thought of the Robert Frost poem, which is never far from my mind.

The Road Not Taken

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5 Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, 10 And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. 15 I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. 20

Pleasure and Sorrow

My friend told me about a tradition among the Greeks who would follow an idea through their lifetime: wrestling with and writing down their thoughts on the matter at different times. Reading Liz Gilbert's accounts into uncovering pleasure in Sicily, whose only successful business is the Mafia running the business of protecting citizens from itself, I am inspired to reexamine an older post into my heartbreak in Indo-China.

Throughout my time in the region, I lamented their state of poverty and hopelessness. But now I think of Liz's Italian ventures and Krsa's mustard seed. And I ask that if Sicilians can take pride and pleasure in living amidst corruption, deaths, the Mafia, could I also find small havens of joy in Saigon? If the idea that the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one's humanity, can I connect to Cambodians in their delight as well as their sorrow? In place of pitying the woman who had no choice but to become a fruit vendor after the war ripped her life apart, could I instead see that selling the spiniest, smelliest, stickiest durian in town can be a source of pride in an environment where human dignity is in short supply. In place of cringing at the pending public health epidemic where dead meat, live fish, raw salad, fresh garbage, and open sewage are side by side, could I instead see the tantalizing array of aromatic foods, whose sales compose of banters and exchanges between regulars, reinforcing their connectedness. In lieu of bemoaning the under-employed young men lounging in the streets on a sweaty Monday afternoon, could I instead appreciate the circle of friends that surround them, each sipping a chilled coffee sweetened with delicate laces of condensed milk (even if the ice is made from undrinkable tap water).

In Sicily, Saigon, Phenom Penn: worlds of chaos, incompetence, broken promises, perhaps beheading a fish with perfection, making the thinnest rice noodles, drinking an iced coffee that cools your entire being are the only things to ground you in your humanity.

The activist in me is already throwing a fit at this apparent acceptance of grossly inhumane living conditions. However, I'd argue that dropping into a foreign culture and running around trying to improve material conditions at all costs can be disastrous. One looks at natives not as fellow beings but as children to be taught or objects to be bettered, mindsets similar to those of European missionaries in the 1600s. Of course, I do not believe in such a simple characterization of international development work. I still believe in its value, but only if it begins with an acknowledgment of our shared humanity: a recognition that we should grieve over common sorrows, but also to find pleasures where others find them.

Beauty

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

---

Again, Rumi

Guest House

This being human is a guest house
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

~Rumi

Where Religion Comes In

At the risk of sounding fearfully reductionist, I propose that the stages to a fulfilled life are foolishness, wisdom, love, hope. Not linear of course, more a spiral. Regardless, many do not get past the first.

We all begin as fools. Children’s greatest asset and liability is their ability to be educated, resulting in spelling bee champs or child soldiers. It's just that many stay at a child’s level with respect to passively taking in information. All their lives they think in accordance with their institutions of learning then wage earning. They rarely question why they believe something; it is sufficient that the Jones do it. Their lives compose of eating baby food someone else already chewed up, or memorizing handouts someone else already made. Minds are enslaved. And if that alone is not enough to make you think this is the greatest human tragedy, it also is the thing (perhaps only matched by evil) that causes harm worldwide. To not think is like shopping at Walmart. The dollar saved comes at the cost of lives, environments, communities, workers' rights worldwide. And that "bargain" is only a placebo effect to which they have been taught equals happiness. The effect wears off almost immediately, so they go back again and again in the same futile search for satisfaction.

To move past this conditioned human condition, we must think for ourselves. To think is the thing that makes us human, expounded since Socrates: "The unexamined life is not worth living." Descartes: "I think, therefore I am." Solomon: "Joyful is the person who finds wisdom, the one who gains understanding. For wisdom is more profitable than silver, and her ways are better than gold." We need to train our own minds: to question the consequences of driving a Hummer on the Iraq War, snorting cocaine on Latin American drug violence, eating high fructose corn syrup on farm subsidies... Hence thought is not only the quintessential human quality, to know how evil exists is the precondition to preventing it.

But wisdom alone is insufficient to sustain us. A whole life is one that loves and is loved. As Fromm points out: "Even if we knew a thousand times more of ourselves, we would never reach bottom. We would still remain an enigma to ourselves, as our fellow man would remain an enigma to us. The only way of full knowledge lies in love: this act transcends thought, it transcends words." To have a passion, connect with humanity, do no harm, we must live with a heart that is open. When we are filled with frustration and anger, it is love that carries us through. Wisdom makes us see that our lives are bound up with our fellow beings’. Love calls us to fight for their lives as we would our own.

Yet as Woodstock showed, love is not the answer to all our problems. It requires hope to be sustained. To truly know and love a world that is broken in so many places brings heartbreak and despair. It then is near impossible to have your strength come from the same source that is causing you so much sadness. So how do we maintain hope? Gramsci writes while being a political prisoner: “To maintain the pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.” This optimism is more likely obtained if you believe in a moral code, an all-benevolent Being of truth and justice; not in the sense that you will be rewarded but that you are not alone in your fights and tribulations. It is the one that Thoreau wrote upon and Martin Luther King drew on in their works of civil disobedience. There is a "higher law" that decides whether man-made laws are just or unjust. There is a force greater than you, than this world that is on your side. In this comfort lies hope.

"And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing." 1 Corinthians 13:2.

Day to Day in Rural China

A lighter post from when I lived in Tibetan China: a list of things I did in no particular order.

I cook. You laugh, but I like simple things.

I eat with my Tibetan Buddhist, Hui Muslim, Han Atheist friends (separately of course).

I walk the streets and parks watching families, grandmothers, roast-yam sellers.

I watch grandfathers concentrate on chess, majiang, card games.

I watch the same movies (I recommend Kunfu Panda).

I sleep without an alarm.

I realize I'm from the West.

I realize I'm from the East.

I read philosophy (in English), the news (in Spanish), essays (in Chinese), and sometimes textbooks (in math). The wonders and frustrations of languages.

I connect with family, with friends old and new, or just a friendly face.

I learn to fight.

I learn to let go when fighting is useless.

I teach.

And I do all these things without looking at the clock.

The Tibet Question

Having spent my year in Tibetan China, many have asked my thoughts on the Tibet issue. I usually dodge so precarious a question as whoever asks (Chinese or Western) usually has strong opinions either way, ones that will not hear fresh views in one conversation. Here, I attempt to articulate views that are entirely my own. I hope to convey some of its complexity and always remain open to new perspectives.

The most popular question: Do I think Tibet should be free?

China will never let allow Tibet independence because it will set the precedent for subsequent successions in the minority west that can lead to 40% land loss. China poised as the emerging powerhouse, will not allow itself to be broken up like the Soviet Union was in its decline. China has 56 minorities that it has fought to conquer and to assimilate over 5,000 years. Historical, cultural, religious differences between Tibetans and Hans will continue to be squashed through the pursuit of a harmonious society via homogeneity.

The question should be: How can Tibetans be treated equally, with respect by their Han Chinese government(CG)?

The answer does not lie in “Free Tibet” campaigns. The more the West portrays Tibet as a victim, the more the Chinese government feels the West (US especially) is trying to break up China as a potential super-power rival. This leads to more state oppression and propaganda. Oppression keeps taking away liberties from Tibetans. Propaganda tells Hans how ungrateful these vile Tibetans are where they are rioting and killing Hans when CG has poured in billions of development aid/Han tax dollars to Tibet. Ill-will between Hans and Tibetans multiply, giving CG more ammunition in enacting oppressive policies. CG feels no pressure from Western campaigns (evidenced by its human rights record), especially when it has national support. These campaigns (initiated by exiles in Nepal and India and financed by EU and US) rile those Tibetans already prone to 3/14 acts where Tibetans set Han shops on fire and Han police fire on Tibetans. Post 3/14 led to worse relations between the Dalai Lama and CG, no Tibetans granted passports, greater military presence across 4 Tibetan provinces, Tibetans losing any sympathy they previously had from Hans because they shamed China pre-Olympics. These campaigns do nothing to help Tibetans living in China.

The answer lies in less, not more hostilities between CG and Tibetan government in exile. Yes, the Dalai Lama(DL) cannot be more a peacemaker, but no matter how saintly DL is as a person, the position of DL is not one that CG will accept. The communist party is religiously non-religious. Anything that threatens the Party=god mentality is immediately squashed. Hence the go-to Tibetan representative cannot be a lama and should reside in China. CG also needs a Tibetan sympathizer who will speak genuinely with the Tibetan representative: non-religious, non-independence, non-discriminatory. CG needs to realize how its demonization of DL and immediate denunciation of Tibetan identities only strengthen Tibetan wishes for independence. Both sides need to give in, and this is best achieved through talks between two appointed representatives. The authoritarian Chinese system allows only ‘heroes shape society’, not ‘society shapes heroes’.

I am too aware that the latter solution asks for much ideological and cultural sacrifice from Tibetans. I have seen Tibetans escorted out of malls, harassed by police, looked down upon by shopkeepers. I have witnessed the same massive aid in-flows NOT benefit Tibetans as they do not the Mayans, Quechuas, Africans…then they are blamed for being stupid and lazy. One very educated Han told me: “Scientifically speaking, less oxygen exists above 3,000m, so Tibetans’ brains do not develop to the same capacity as us.”

I cry at the discrimination. But a Civil Rights Movement cannot exist in authoritarian China. Protests end in bloodshed and further oppression as they did in 6/4, 3/14, and many other failed movements.

To really have Tibetan people’s welfare and not one’s own ideology at heart, the T question is not: Should it be free? But, How can Tibetans have a voice in China?

3/14/08 (Lhasa protests) reference: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7941466.stm

6/4/89 (Tiananmen Sq protest) reference: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8057148.stm

Remembering June 4

"On that warm June 4 morning, Mr. Liu carried off the corpses of protesters, their blood spattering his shoes. Their sacrifice was too painful to face, much less reconcile.

Thursday marks 20 years since hundreds of students, workers and average citizens died in an army assault on the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in the center of Beijing. Inside China, the day is a nonevent; even oblique references to June 4 are taboo.

For the outside world, Chinese officials this year offer a tenable excuse: the protests, they say, threatened China’s stability. With stability restored, China produced an economic miracle that has lifted scores of millions from destitution.

For veterans of the June 4 movement, however, reconciliation is seldom so tidy or superficial.

...

He suffers nonetheless. He is appalled by the notion that China’s success was erected on the bodies of Tiananmen demonstrators. He struggles with the inability of Tiananmen’s ideals to gain more than a toehold in his homeland. And he despairs at the oft-expressed thought that his fellow Chinese have made a devil’s bargain, trading the freedom that he and his fellow protesters sought for a chance at a car and a bigger apartment.

'You can raise pigs to be very strong and very fat,” he said. “But a pig is still a pig. And a pig has no rights.'"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/04/world/asia/04protester.html?hpw

I sit in a tea house in Chengdu watching people go about their busy, prosperous lives, and this article so eerily rings true. Forced and selective amnesia setting in on a nation that is not allowed, does not want, does not care to remember a bloody, failed movement. My dad called to say he was frisked by armed soldiers when he tried to enter the square today, so eerily like 20 years ago when he saw his friends fall, but the atmosphere is more 'stable', more 'harmonious' today. When he walked out, people on the streets asked him why there were so many people in the Square today. It has only been 20 years. It was a day that saw idealism leave my parents, the beginning of many abandoned dreams. I think of the bodies that never walked out of the Square, those wronged spirits that haunt it, all the things that repeat because people forget. But I'm among the few thinking these things today.

Heartbreak in Indo-China

I moved through Indo-China last month with Jon Swain’s River of Time as a heartbreaking companion. Walking along the trash-filled streets of Phenom Penn, the never-ceasing noise of the 4 million motorcycles in Saigon, the eroded banks of the Mekong, I was pained to think these were the places of gentleness and beauty before the war. Now, crassness and penury dominate over any other characteristic.

But greater than my sorrow is my amazement at how quickly people have rebuilt their lives in a mere 35 years. In American efforts to obliterate the Ho Chi Minh trail and the Vietcong, more bombs were dropped on Laos (a country smaller than Texas) than during all of WWII. Today there are no traces of the flattened landscape (but unexploded landmines wouldn't be cleared until 2050 at the current rate). Saigon’s streets after streets of food vendors make it hard to believe it was anything but a city of people eating pho three times a day when it was actually a fashion show for the latest American and Chinese military gadgets not so long ago. An estimated 5 million Vietnamese died during the 16-year conflict, but its population jumped from 55 to 80 million after the war. How resilient people are, to have borne the unbearable and multiplied.

It’s not long (a few minutes) until I am broken out of my reverie as the next tuk-tuk driver or handicraft seller chases me down. I wonder if it embarrasses them as much as it does me that they are begging from me: a Chinese American, whose governments did them such atrocities. Women whose parched skins and hunched backs, making them look 100 years old, hold outstretched skin and bones to each passing tourist. Have we: the West, the East, driven them not only to their graves and destitution, but also robbed them of their dignity and gentleness? Are they as outraged as I am that they now have to beg from their perpetrators?

My sorrows come together in Cambodia as nowhere else. I watch the old, fat, white men with their arms around the local girls. And I wonder if they also mourn their exploitation beneath all the makeup that does not hide their youth. Cambodia has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS in SE Asia and a prostitution ring so cheap it is drawing customers away from Bangkok. This is its happy ending after centuries of occupations by the Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, French, Japanese, Americans. No concrete statistics could be taken, but it’s estimated that of its 5 million population pre-war, under a million were killed or wounded in the Vietnam War. 2 million more were tortured, starved, or worked to death by its own people: the Khmer Rouge. But its population stands at 8 million now with nearly no old people.

Do Cambodians mourn their bloodied past, impoverished present, and bleak future as I do? Do they demand justice and truth about why they suffered? Or are they too tired from just trying to survive the present? Is the war, one generation separated, already too far back to be of concern today? If so, perhaps that is a greater tragedy: to forget not only trivializes the dead but ensures that the blood baths, ideological wars will happen again and again.

Determinism

I was talking with a Tibetan girl in Beijing. She is graduating from the Beijing Forestry University, a first-tier university that many Beijingers cannot get into. She is the only Tibetan in the Computer Sci Dept. and among the dozen in the entire university of 10,000+. I cannot help but profess how impressed I was: she is studying at a top national university as a minority in her second language. Being a well-manned youth, she says she is even more impressed with me as I'm a Chinese studying at an internationally famous university in America. I tell her that it is much, much more difficult for a Tibetan Chinese to move from west to east China than for a Han Chinese to move from China's east coast to America. But she has by no means 'made it'. Of all the Tibetans I know, only a half dozen attended university in Beijing, and they are all back in their home province as racist, discriminatory laws limiting rural-urban mobility are strictly enforced in China.

I used to denounce determinism, arguing that perseverance, opportunities, luck play more important roles in where we end up in life. Just look at me, I live a completely different life in the US than I would have in China; and it all began with an unexpected turn of events in Singapore. How can I even entertain the thought of a life pre-determined!

But now I'm not so sure if I'm the poster child for counter-determinism. My cousins who grew up in Beijing now work in Chinese, British, French investment banks. My childhood friends are paving their way towards bright careers. It may be true that my personality, worldview, ideals would have been drastically different had I remained in China, but I would've continued to be educated, urban, middle-class just as my parents and grandparents were.

Traveling in SE Asia now I contemplate how my life would look as a 24 year old female born elsewhere (based on facts, I'm not this imaginative). In Laos, I married at 16 and am chasing my four children while pregnant with my fifth, but I do have time to chase after them as my husband is working in our small field and I don't have much to look after in the house since we don't even have beds. In Cambodia, I witnessed the massacre of my 4 brothers by the Khmer Rouge. And when the killings finally ended, my remaining 10 siblings starved as a human-induced famine swept over the country. In Vietnam, I lost both my parents to the war. Looking at old propaganda posters showing mothers carrying a rifle in one hand and a baby in the other, I wonder whether my mother was affected by those images while carrying me.

Instead, I am a 24 year old born in Beijing, lived in New York, traveled in Paris. I am free of family obligations, unaffected by social stigma, so independent that it worries my parents. My agonies include whether to study a masters or a PhD, to do it at Columbia or Cambridge.

(It's neither guilt nor blessing-counting that is prompting me to write this, which I never find to be productive emotions. Moreover, the stress and depressions we encounter in the West are very real and terrifying things. Like the others, this post is simply my effort to remember what I see and feel.)

Perhaps our lives are more like Indian ragas: each individual is allowed much innovation and flexibility in how she plays the notes, but the scale is fixed.

Tomb Sweeping

Today is Tomb Sweeping Day, a national holiday, we go to sweep the tomb of my dad's grandmother. It's no easy task. She was buried without a tombstone and nowhere near a cemetery. The only recollection my dad has of her burial ground is that it is next to a railway track outside of Gaoliying, a village under an hour’s drive from central Beijing.

But it may as well have been any village in the country’s undeveloped interior instead of the developed coast. Faces are sun burnt and wind blown. Men kick the dust with their synthetic shoes while twirling grass between their teeth. Youngsters whistle pop tunes while watching passing girls dressed in imitation designer jeans. Young mothers watch their babies play amongst thick dust and exhaust smoke. Matronly shopkeepers count change behind shelves of ramen, candy, and other past expiration date, non-perishable foods. Old men chat and smoke in heavy blue overalls dating to the communist era. Looking down at my T-shirt, I am reminded that heating in their homes is not central; they salvage their own wood or coal.

Like all country sides, Beijing's is all things to all people. Existing alongside are subtle charm and blatant poverty, green fields and brown sewage, four-star resorts and one-roomed huts, open skies and closed roads, where dirt paths rarely lead into city roads.

It takes numerous detours before we find that railroad track. Gaoliying, like the rest of China, has bloated in the last 20 years to beyond recognition.

“There it is: the circle of stones I made as a marker all those years ago. I can’t believe we found it.” My dad says softly.

It is a restful place. The sun makes a warm spot of it, nestled amongst peach blossoms in full bloom this time of the year, broken out of its tranquility by the occasional passing train. My dad pours baijiu on that circle of stones. The sweet fragrance of the 56% alcohol hits my nose and I cry.

My great-grandmother’s image immerges before my eyes. Tolstoy's Anna was born out of a friend, Kundera's Agnes out of a gesture, Laolao was born out of my dad's stories. She was a shy young bride, given as a concubine to a husband with daughters her age. Not coming from a wealthy family, becoming a small landlord’s concubine, i.e. a titled servant, was among the better options. She still had to work day and night, but it was mostly in the house instead in the house and on the farm. When she settled in the routine of serving her husband and children, as all women settled then, the Cultural Revolution came. She was publicly humiliated and chastised as a landlord’s wife though she had little more choice than a chair does in belonging to a man. They were both property. Her grandson watched helplessly as a crowd of people enclosed her, taunted her, and threw things at her. She survived, but parts of her died. In her old age, she moved from east to west China to live with her daughters’ families. In a foreign environment, she raised all her grandchildren. It was a life endured in silence; one spent taking care of others but not oneself. I cry not for her death, but for the life denied her.

I cry for the farmers and migrant workers in Gaolinying, for the lives they will never know. Beijing is an hour away, but it may as well be several life times. I cry for my illiterate grandmother. For her, every outing is composed of indescribable insecurities and fears. All the world’s a stage, and she's never a player. 

“Life is like this.” My dad breaks into my tears. “You never figure out its meaning. Once you do, it’s all over. To live is to seek, to be free to seek.”

I don’t quite comprehend his meaning, but I’m okay with that for now. I’ll seek it out by and by.

The alcohol evaporates, along with my tears. I place another stone in the circle and pray that my great-grandmother knows how loved she is by her children and children's children. The sun sets. I put my arm in my dad’s and we walk away amidst the peach blossoms.

On Exploitation

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire said the liberation of the oppressor and oppressed are intimately tied. One cannot be truly free while the other is enslaved. It is not that we the bourgeois are helping the proletariat. Rather we are working to free ourselves, for one man’s freedom based on another’s slavery is not freedom at all. It is living in fear of revolt, of all the things we could lose at any minute.

This brotherhood of man mentality is never as absent as in post-communist China. Though China was never colonized militarily by the West, it is now being colonized culturally. Most Chinese think all things white are better than things Chinese. The lack of experience with colonization in the past may have left it helpless to guard itself now. It did not fight for its identity apart from that given to it by whites, unlike India, Latin America, Africa. Hence China’s sense of unconditional self-respect is underdeveloped as it is untested. It has not know how/what to treasure and preserve that quality that is uniquely Chinese: to disavow unsuitable whiteness.

So there exists a dynamic between the cultural colonizer and colonized regardless of previous military colonization, one that permeates everyday Chinese life. Providing specific examples to this abstract idea needs looking no further than on the Wudaokou streets. Chinese girls fawn over white men just for being white. They look up to the guys with those innocent, watery, dark eyes of theirs. Their necks tilted, lips pouted, hands caressing. You really can’t blame the guys for enjoying all these attention.

Yet by allowing themselves to be fawned over, the white men are participating in a history of exploitation. They may not be exploiting the girls themselves where they do treat them well (but know that there is a line of pretty girls outside waiting to please them). However, they are perpetuating a system of white superiority by not actively renouncing the image that white, English-speaking is better. So they are committing a moral wrong through sins of omission. But practically, everyone likes attention, so there is not much wrong on a personal level. So what is to be done in this situation? Is all that a white man can do is to stay faithful to one girl and make her understand that he is no better than she is. In other words, just be a good person. But asking for personal sacrifice in exchange for making an unnoticeable dent in the world’s injustices is a big favor to ask of ones not already predisposed.

I experience the same conundrum as the white men where I am given special treatment as an American studying at Columbia. Butthat is also all I am to the givers of that treatment. They expect me to play the part they designed for me, which consists of them talking and I giving affirmation that they are right in their opinions of all things Chinese and American.

And I realize how much I’m used to the freedom of writing my own part in the play that is life. And if I don’t get to write the play itself, as no one does, then I at least get to choose it. So I become sympathetic to the white men in China. Though they are fawned over, they are also put in a script without their choosing. While that play makes them out to be the heroes and saviors, it also strips them of their individuality.

Now how do the Chinese perpetuate this exploitation: by not thinking critically. Initially I marveled at how seemingly reasonable, highly educated people can just repeat what they have heard without having thought through it the least bit.

Examples: “Korean women are prettier than Chinese women, but that is because they all have plastic surgery when they are 18.”
“You will get very sick going to Tibet because of the high altitude.”
“You should not marry someone who is not from Beijing as their families are too poor.”
“The Dalai Lama is an enemy of the state because he tries to separate China.”
“President Hu cares very much about children because he went to an orphanage today.”
…

I am aware stereotypes exist in the States. But they exist at a much larger scale, especially among the educated, in China. I used to think that education exposes one to different ideologies and peoples, making one more open-minded. I was not entirely correct. It depends on the type of education and where it is situated rather than on years of education alone. In the propaganda machine that is China, all the news repeat the same lines and stories. In universities, there exist separate accounts for national and international websites where the latter require payment. So rather than having your world reflect the diverse opinions that you are taught and learn to process, your world reflect mostly the ideologies of the party. While many young people do go to blogs and access international websites at home, that is no substitute for censored media.

So where do I come in in this rant of exploitive histories seeing from positions of both the oppressor and the oppressed? In China, I have a moral responsibility to make my fellow Chinese – those who script plays for me – to see their own worth, their countrymen’s worth: independent of and in spite of comparisons to Americans. Practically, this is a next to impossible task: teaching people about unconditioned self-respect, especially when they do not listen. Yet miniscule, incremental dents made on a person-to-person level are the only certain, doable options we have.