Cultural Differences, the Ignorant American and Suicide by Railroad

May 21, 2010

There is always a spat of suicides in China when public school students don’t get into college. Recently, near Stanford, California, there were suicides by Asian students who weren’t doing well in high school and it didn’t look like they were going to make the grades needed to get into the US university they wanted to attend.

An example of Western religious intolerance may be seen in this post about the Gunn High suicides.

The students would lay on the train tracks and wait for a train to end their misery. As the suicides mounted, the city did what it could to make it difficult for more kids to do the same. The high school shut down and testing was cancelled to remove the pressure. Gunn High is one of the highest ranked public high schools in the country. The Asian student population is about 80%.

Behavior like this is shocking but it is part of Asian culture.  As a Christian nation, is it the responsibly of American citizens to change this behavior even if we have to use violence and war like we are doing in Iraq and what we did to the American Indians in the 19th century?

Learn about the important of an Education to the Chinese

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Cultural Differences, the Ignorant American and the Architect who Hung Himself

May 20, 2010

Another day, when our daughter was seven, we were hiking in the hills above a park in Southern California. On our way out of the hills along a steep-dirt trail leading toward the park, our daughter rushed ahead.

Minutes later, she was back looking shocked. She took us to her discovery.

An Asian man had hung himself in a tree beside the trail. He’d used an electric cord. It was obvious that he had climbed into the tree, tied the cord to a limb and around his neck and leaped off.

I called the police on my cell phone. They came, identified who he was and went to his mother’s house. The mother and sister arrived and my wife talked to them (for the police) since the mother and sister didn’t speak English.

The dead man was a Chinese architect from Taiwan. He was a partner in a business that had gone bankrupt and he could no longer support his family. Because he had lost face, he killed himself.

In fact, since the global economic crises caused by US, Wall Street greed, family suicides have been on the rise in Taiwan.

See how Power Corrupts

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Cultural Differences, the Ignorant American and the Japanese Wife

May 20, 2010

The Japanese wife’s two young children died and she survived thanks to one of the men fishing on the pier who jumped in and pulled her out. She was going to be tried in a US court.

However, the Japanese government requested that she be returned to her country explaining that what she did was cultural.

Japanese Geishas

Later it was revealed in the press that her Japanese husband had cheated on her and was keeping a mistress. The wife saw this as her fault and loss of face and the only way to erase that shame was the take her life and the lives of her children—at least that’s what the US media said. The US agreed and sent her home to be dealt with in Japan.  In fact, in 2009, there were more than thirty thousand Japanese suicides.

I never did find out what the Japanese did to the wife who killed her children.

Discover what Honor means to most Chinese

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of the award winning novels My Splendid Concubine and Our Hart. He also Blogs at The Soulful Veteran and Crazy Normal.

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Cultural Differences and the Ignorant American

May 20, 2010

Unlike the citizens of Europe or Asia, most Americans seldom rub shoulders with other cultures or spend time outside of the United States aside from Latinos from south of the border who washes the cars, mows lawns or washes the dishes Americans eat from when going out to eat in a restaurant.

Don’t mistake having a foreign friend as rubbing shoulders with another culture. To know a culture you have to live there or discover that culture through study.  Even then, nothing compares to living in another country as an expatriate like Tom Carter, who taught English in China before he went on the road to shoot “China: Portrait of a People.”

Recently I posted another response to Timothy V at Left of the Right. I used examples to show differences between cultures. Those examples appear in this seven part series.

It starts with the wife of a Japanese corporate executive working in the US, who tried to kill herself and her children by jumping into the ocean off the Santa Monica pier. She took her two children with her. (to be continued in the next post)

Learn about The First of all Virtues

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.

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1 Comment | China, Chinese Culture | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

The Tea Horse Road

May 19, 2010

Most of us have heard of or read about the Silk Road from China to Europe. I’m sure that few have heard of the Ancient Tea Horse Road, which I first read about this morning in the May issue of National Geographic.

Legend says that tea from China arrived in Tibet as early as the Tang Dynasty (618- 906 A.D.). After that, the Chinese traded tea for horses, as many as 25,000 horses annually.

But that isn’t what struck me the most about the piece. It’s the example that demonstrated why the peasants loved and possibly worshiped Mao Tse-Tung.

From May 2010 National Geographic, page 103

For more than a thousand years, men fed their families by carrying hundreds of pounds of tea on their backs across the rugged mountains into Lhasa. Some froze to death in blizzards. Others fell to their deaths from the narrow switchbacks that climbed into the clouds.

This all ended in 1949 when Mao had a road built to Tibet and farmland was redistributed from the wealthy to the poor. “It was the happiest day of my life,” said Luo Yong Fu, a 92-year-old dressed in a black beret and a blue Mao jacket, whom the author of the National Geographic piece met in the village of Changheba.

To learn more about Tibet, visit Tibet – Inside China (part one of five)

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

5 Comments | China, Chinese Culture, Chinese history, Tibet | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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