Mao Zhu Xi bu pa la!

The title of this blog is pronounced mao joo she boo pah la. It means 'Chairman Mao is not afraid of spicy.’ It's from a skit that somebody performed recently...I thought it was funny but I guess you kind of had to be there...Again, I really apologize if this entry is incoherent in any way...

First I'll start out with the more "What I've Been Up to Lately" entries. Recently, I have decided that things around here have gotten a little too 'routine.' So every week I'm going to try to do two Beijing cultural experiences per week. This week on Wednesday I went to 798, which is sort of an indie, up and coming art district. I don't really have pictures because they are all art galleries and stuff, but it was really interesting to see what Beijing considers controversial art--not much different from the states to tell you the truth. It's refreshing to know that even though the Chinese government censors a lot of things (more on this later) that you can still go places and see where peoples ideas and things are being allowed, even if they are all segregated from everything else all in one place. Yesterday, my cultural experience was going out to get Peking duck, which although expensive by Chinese standards, was actually not bad at all if you converted it back to USD, and was pretty darn delicious.

This week in Chinese class we watched the movie Huo Zhe (To Live) which in my mind was sort of like the Chinese Forrest Gump in that it followed one person’s journey through many events in one country’s history. In the case of Huo Zhe, it follows Fu Gui through the 40s – 70s, during the time of China’s Great Leap Forward, and Cultural Revolution. This movie sort of brings me to my next topic. In the movie we saw just how much individuals suffered during this time…all because one group of people thought what they were doing was best for the country—they sort of…subordinated the rights of their individual people in order to progress to the point that the government thought that the country should be. In short, they were stupid, and very very wrong and in the end it ripped their country apart. No matter how economically advanced the country became or is now, they will always have that as a black mark on their history…

I guess my point is—how come we can’t learn anything from history…

I know probably a lot of you are wondering about my thoughts on the recent Tibetan riots, and I guess the reason I’ve been avoiding talking about it is the fact that 1) I hate giving my opinions on things to have them discussed to death and 2) I probably know a lot less then you all do because China censors all news. This doesn't mean that the are entirely pretending it's not happening, but simply swaying things in the direction as to make them look in the right.

To get this out of the way, I am not personally affected in terms of my safety or anything because of the riots but I do know that some students in the Contemporary Issues program are having to change the itinerary for their trip to Yunnan because the Napa village (which one group of Language Intensives visited during OUR trip to Yunnan) is made up of Tibetans and is too close to Tibet to be safe for the students.

In any case, it’s really hard for me to separate myself from this country because it is both my heritage and my current location…and so when people talk about how ‘rotten’ China it stings…even though I know I’m not the Chinese government not even close. Kind of how when you hear about the things the Americans do in Iraq, it makes you ashamed to be an American (unless you have no heart), when I hear about this stuff, it kind of makes me ashamed to be Chinese.

Back to my point, we have to look at history and see that even if China considers Tibet PART of China, it is not ok to continue violating their human rights in order to MAKE them conform. At the same time I don’t know that it’s a very effective way to make people listen to you plight by violating their rights in return, simply perpetuating the cycle of violence. I guess my point is, in the future when all of this is (hopefully) just something that is intellectual discussed, rather that a pertinent reality, I don’t think that Tibetans or Chinese or anyone will ever look back at this point and time and say, that’s when everything was solved because of violence and riots and revolution. No matter what point either country’s are at, nobody’s ever gonna say that’s when they did everything right. 

Just my two cents…