After Words about China

[liralen]

Dad asked me, a while back, to actually write something about how I felt about going to China. Not just the things we saw, the history that was there, or what it was we did, but how it made me feel

Comments

"Swiftly running water does not reflect the sky"

[amberley]

Perhaps once a year on this anniversary you could write how you feel about the trip, eventually to serve as a view of the process of sorting out your feelings through the backward lens of memory?

Re: "Swiftly running water does not reflect the sky"

[liralen]

I love your title for this comment.

Yes. I may well have to do that. Especially if we do plan to go to China again, I'll have to think some more about it all.

It may well be that I had hoped to have no ties, or something like that, but I'm having to deal with the fact that I really do have a lot of ties, but most of them are in the negative. Or that they were legendary and were dragged into everyday. And they do define what I'm not as much as what I am, in the negative, they're still a fence on who and what I am. Even when one of the ladies on the tour called me "the Ohio girl who looks Chinese..."

And the backward lens of memory keeps getting reshaped with experience...

Re: "Swiftly running water does not reflect the sky"

[amberley]

Title taken from a phrase in one of S.J. Rozan's Bill & Lydia mystery novels.

Re: "Swiftly running water does not reflect the sky"

[liralen]

Ooo... and I now have another half dozen books that I should sit down and read.

Thank you so much!!

[randwolf]

[Aaagh. I wrote a long reply, and something in my Firefox security eated it. Fortunately I have been able to recover it, so here it is

[liralen]

Yay for recovery!!

I don't think they ever will be, honestly.

You point at some of it with your thoughtful comments about your wife's background. Yes. That. There is a lot that's hard to engage with the callous carelessness of individual lives, but it's not like that doesn't happen here as well as there... just on a different axis. And, yes, if my confusion is a reflection of the overall cultural confusion over how much of the past need affect the future... then yes.

*hugs* Thank you so much for your thoughts!

[archangelbeth]

Thank you for writing on it. *cannot say much to add, but only read and absorb*

[liralen]

*hugs* Sometimes it's enough to simply know I've been heard.

[silkiemom]

I loved your trip report, and I love your reflections now. It makes me wonder on how I would react to visiting China. It's more remote for me, more culturally distant. I know more Japanese than any kind of Chinese, and the Japanese is mostly from having to take a foreign language in high school. :) But I still wonder if there would be bits that I would recognize.

I also didn't grow up with people asking where I was from. That didn't happen until I got married and moved to California. It's not something that happened all my life, so I find it more amusing than annoying or alienating.

I do hope that if you visit China again you will get to enjoy it for what it is, and not what it ought to be. Your write-ups made me feel like I was enjoying it for what it is.

[liralen]

It would be an interesting thing to find out! I think it surprised me how much was echoed

[silkiemom]

I think it's interesting how it seems like other people expect you to identify with your race rather than your culture. Just being around other people who look like you isn't as comfortable and familiar as being around people who are your own culture. I think that the "where are you from?" and "what are you?" questions not usually meant to other and alienate, but the cumulative effect of being asked those questions does become othering and alienating. I think the issues with those questions are an understandable reaction after a while.

[liralen]

Yes... I think you have it on the nose.

Especially the "Just being around other people who look like you isn't as comfortable and familiar as being around people who are your own culture." It's soooooo true...

Thank you!

[kjc]

You write about this very well, as you do with most things. Damn you are an articulate person! Anyway, thank you for writing

[liralen]

And you're so good at relating and contextualizing...

That was one of those things I was thinking... that the "Where are you from?" question feels oddly different to me when someone asks John where his surname name came from or when someone asks about John's Scottish heritage. Still thinking over why that is and what it means to me, really.

Yes! On learning the Irish history making more sense of what was going on and why, even if one doesn't condone it, but yeah, knowing far more of the history of China and Japan, I now have a far far clearer understanding of my parents' early reflexive dislike of anything Japanese. There's a lot there, and yes, just like that.

And, yes, the need to sort is very common, and I think it stems from the ability and need to generalize to a certain point on a lot of things just to make sense of the world. It's just easier to know where you stand if you can sort someone into a category that works and sometimes safer. I think I just get grumpy when I get sorted into the wrong bin. *laughs*

[liralen]

And I have to say... that being called "articulate" by you made my day. XD

[kjc]

YAY!

*grins*