Okay, here is my first writing goal for the next year.
Every Monday, I will post a China-centered article. I have a lot of China study and experience to process, and writing is my best hope.
I have been trying to figure out who I am as a traveler (I am almost resigned to the fact that I will be fervently trying to figure out who I am for the rest of my life, in one way or another). I am often unsure of how to talk about my experiences to others-- to Chinese people, to other foreigners in China, and especially to other Americans who haven't traveled, or have traveled only as tourists. I am realizing that much of the time what an outsider says about a country is about 90% a reflection of themselves and only 10% a reflection of the country they are describing.
I come back to the quote in "84, Charing Cross Road" (which I don't remember precisely and can't look up from the dorm room in Korea where I'm writing this) in which Helene Hanff tells Frank Doel that when she comes to London, she will be looking for the London of Classic English literature. Of Shakespeare and Austen and Dickens. He replies that if she looks for it, it is there.
This is a lovely moment in a sweet story, but outside of Helene's story, I am torn about what to think of it. It is very true, for just about any version of any country. If you go to China expecting to see a country ravaged by the evils of socialism, you will find evidence to support that and could easily come away with a renewed love for capitalism. If you go to China expecting to find a country where people value community and avoid the isolation and greed of the West, you will find it. If you come to China looking for an economic wonder, the next global superpower in the making, it is there.
Of course, if a traveler in China has meaningful conversation with anyone while in China, they will have some of their horizons broaden and some of there understandings deepened, but I don't think it's by any means necessary that they will come away with even the beginning of an accurate view of what China is, or what it feels like to live there.
I am hoping to put down on paper (or, well, the internet) what I experienced studying about and living in the Middle Kingdom, and in doing so begin to sort out what's me and what is China. I will choose a topic a week- a place, a concept, a tradition, a historical change.
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Living on Jeju island has given me a new perspective on the possibilities of travel; thinking about the classic touring destinations most people set out for, I suddenly find myself fascinated by the potential of settling down and making a living in places most folks would only visit in passing, if at all. For example, what would it be like to live in the Pacific Islands, where land is at such a premium that one cannot buy a house -- rather, property can only be passed on by inheritance. How would that affect the concept of property and ownership in general? Or Mongolia, a place so barren that only the most hardy and intrepid foreigners venture to live there? Or Jeju island? Travel is suddenly exciting not for the escape and the spectacle, but for the opportunity to slip into a new paradigm, to be able to boast you've done something no one else has ever done.
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