Cultural Differences, the Ignorant American and Western Imperialism

May 21, 2010

Before Western Imperialism attempted to change Asia during the 19th century, China was a regional super power for more than two-thousand years. Over time, the Chinese believed they were too civilized and powerful to be threatened by anyone on the planet.  Then the British, French, Portuguese, Germans, Americans, Russians and Japanese arrived and waged war in China for a century starting with the First Opium War.

Opium Wars

China learned a lesson from all of these wars. It only took a century to recover and start over.

The leaders of China are called Communists, but the men and women who rule China were born Chinese and the decisions they make are based on being Chinese—not being Communists. The Chinese culture is a collective culture and when an “individual” crosses the line and breaks the rules doing or saying something that is unacceptable to the collective culture, they are erased (given a death sentence) or reeducated (if possible). That’s how the Chinese collective culture on the mainland does things.

In time, interaction with other cultures may change that.  In fact, China already has changed to some degree. Friendly, harmonious interaction is the key—not hate and accusations like those from Americans like Timothy V.

See Respecting Cultural Differences are Out-of-Focus

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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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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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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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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.

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The Gu Zheng

May 19, 2010

While at the 6th  Annual Asian Heritage Street Celebration in San Francisco on Saturday, May 15, I saw my first Gu Zheng. No one was playing it. The band was playing with other instruments, but this stringed instrument was silent as if it had been abandoned.

The modern-day Gu Zheng has movable bridges and may have 15 to 26 strings. In ancient times, the strings were made of twisted silk, but by the 20th Century most players use metal strings (generally steel for the high strings and copper-wound steel for the bass strings).

The Guzhen has been around since The Warring Kingdoms (402-221 B.C.). I invite you to join me and listen to Bei Bei playing Under the White Wind. 

If you enjoyed Bei Bei’s performance, discover the Jing-Hu.

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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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