Saturday, May 26, 2012

Maybe I'm Growing Up

   It has been quite time since I last wrote. My family came in to visit me for two weeks, which was absolutely fantastic. We went all across eastern China and saw some awesome sights. It was great fun to haggle my brother, banter with his girlfriend, and see another part of the world with my mom. But then two weeks was over, and they hopped onto a plane back towards Tennessee. It was at this moment when the most incredible of realisations hit me: my life right now solely concerns China.
    This sounded like an absurd epiphany, even to me at the time. I had at that time been here for nearly three months, but it still had not occurred to me that I lived here. Whenever I was on a vacation to the north or southwest, the north or Canada, I always returned back to a simple home in the rolling hills of the Valley. After traveling once again with my family, and them returning and I staying, made me fully realize this is my home right now. So rather than talk about all the places my family and I visited (I'll be sure to post pictures), I'd rather talk about this feeling I had of China being a home, and my reaction to it.
  My reaction to it was fairly violent, at least in terms of ethnocentricity. I began to react against everything and everyone that wasn't Tennessee(meaning how I was raised). I began to complain ceaselessly about the pollution, and how it covered every single sky my family and I attempted to see in our travels. I began to boycott the food, and would only rant about how they ruin good, fresh food. I even began a campaign agaisnt the very language I am here to learn, only studying it mediocrely. My friends here received the worst of my anger of being here, for I began to nit-pick at every northerner, coastie, and/or European and their culture. My reaction to my home no longer having a lake to swim in, trees to climb, healthy food to eat, no car to drive and no sky to see was almost on the verge of madness. I was mad at myself for leaving my friends back home, mad at China for not being a more developed country, and mad at the people here for being so complacent with everything. I became everything I was proud of not being: an ethnocentric typical American not caring for the rest of the world and wanting only to live in between some mountains for the rest of his life.
   Why did I have such an extreme reaction? I had complained about the food and air, but went living on nonetheless before this. I hadn't really met many Chinese people and maintained a steady friendship with them, so why be angry at them? The government controls most of what happens here, but the influx of capitalism has made the people happy, most of them gaining better life styles. As a result, I wasn't living in too different of a place. As a matter of fact, McDonald's even delivers here, there's a few subways, and Lotus is just a different name for Wal-Mart. So again, why should I suddenly despise this place, and everything it contains?
   Most of my free time is spent with some people from New York City. Some of these people are from the west coast, as well as attending a northern school. Now in the South, we love to joke about those yankees and their odd ways. But being with these people made me realize that for some, there still is a major difference. I began to even realize, that compared to their views on life, politics, and religion, I was easily seen as the traditional Southern Baptist preacher(we all know the stereotype), whereas I'm usually seen as the most liberal. I had not the same extreme opinion on guns, gay marriage, or religion that most of them share. My views on drugs and drinking also were very conservative. As I looked around, I saw that many of my European friends shared the same views as my American ones. Then my family came, all of us from the same place. Then they left, and I was again thrown back into a world devoid of "ain't" barbequed ribs, and talking about UT football. As I mention previously, my reaction eventually came to startle even me.
   Of all things to jar me back into sensibility, it was a tourist spot in Beijing to do so. A long awaited beautiful day finally dawned just last Wednesday. I looked out from the classroom I was pretending to pay attention in, and saw nothing buy puffy white clouds back-dropped by a deep blue sky. It wasn't hard for me to convince myself to skip work, and my friend to skip class, and an hour later we were off to the center of the city. It was to the Temple of Heaven  that we trekked to. And after stopping and asking people for directions in Chinese, we finally arrived. Walking around this place and looking at the signs, I realized I could read the majority of what was written on them. This startled me a bit. Today, I didn't mind the always-in-a-Chinese-tourist-spot crowd that was there. I was in love with the view before me.

      It was then my brain reached into the recesses of itself, and pulled out a memory, of me talking to myself, in fact. I was promising myself that the reason why I wanted to go to China, when very few people supported, was that I always heard about how great of a place America compared to the rest of the world. About how we are the light and so on. I always scoffed at that, and now here I am thinking exactly like those people, all the people I despised with their bigotry. At this realization, I remembered all the wonderful things I've seen and done here. All the friends from around the world that can speak four, five, even six languages. The Chinese people not as complacent as I believed, with petitions being made, and organisations wishing to protect cultural sites always at work. As I gazed at the people bowing and praying, burning incense and only making whispers, I was appalled at myself for not being able to see the good in something I was now becoming a part of. I may sometimes be embarrassed to be an American, but this trip taught me I love my home, my culture. However, this trip has so far also taught me that we do not have all the answers, and are not even close to figuring out half of our problems. Just because a country has different food, different sites and different rites, doesn't mean I have to hate it. Nor does it mean I have to love where I'm from.  I now appreciate coming here, and now again appreciate wanting to learn the language. All this paragraph amounts to is that while yes I know now that I am proud of my roots, I also know that the roots are only the beginning, and if I don't branch out, I won't ever be able to see what's around me.