My reason for writing this series of posts was to show how cultural differences bring about biased opinions due to religious, spiritual and/or cultural beliefs.
In fact, for that reason, I know my mother would have burned my first novel. Books have been written on the subject of sex in America that explains why she would have burned it.
America’s War on Sex: The Attack on Law, Lust, and Liberty by Marty Klein, Ph D. is one example, which “Spotlights the political, legal and civic battles raging in this country against what is arguably our most private and pluralistic right – sexual freedom.”
An anonymous reviewer known as “colorado outback” posted a one-star review on Amazon of My Splendid Concubine, “You should Not Buy This Book – Seriously, just Soft Porn.”
My mother would have agreed with “colorado outback”, but that was because she was influenced by her religion.
Outback said, “this seemed more like the sexual fantasy of the author and NOT the historical novel it is purported to be.”
However, “outback” was wrong. The idea to write The Concubine Saga did not bloom from a sexual fantasy or a wet dream, and I’ll explain the real reason later.
To be continued on April 1, 2011 in Part 3 or return to Part 1
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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The reason my mother would have burned “The Concubine Saga” was because she grew up in a country with the soul of a church. After my mother died, I found a video collection of the Bible, an audio version and about thirty different published versions.
I didn’t know then that there was that many ways to speak for one God.
After my father died, mother spent her last decade to the age of eighty-nine studying the Bible several hours a day. This was her attempt to discover the answer to salvation that haunted her most of her life.
My mother loved to read other books too, as did my father, who was not a religious person. However, if my mother ran into a vivid sex scene in a novel, she threw the book in the fireplace.
Since I was born and raised a Catholic and when I was twelve my mother switched to the Jehovah Witnesses, I know why she would have burned my book.
To Catholics, Jehovah Witnesses, and most devout Christians of all sects, lust is a mortal sin.
In fact, Catholic Questions in a Secular Worldsays, “The seven deadly sins are pride, avarice, envy, wrath, gluttony, sloth and lust.… Lust is the self-indulgent desire for gratification … without the sanctifying graces of marriage.”
When I was single in my thirties, I had a lusty relationship with a lawyer, who ended the relationship due to Christian guilt. She wasn’t a Catholic but she attended two different Christian churches on Sundays, and she made it clear that it was the guilt that drove her to stop seeing me.
By the way, the “Concubine Saga” is historical fiction about a real man that went to China in 1854, bought a concubine and stayed until 1908 to become the most powerful Westerner in China’s history and the only foreigner trusted by the Emperor.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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In a conversation linked to the Yuan-Xiao Festival, a post that appeared on February 17, Alessandro, a European with a degree in East Asian studies living in China with his Chinese wife, wrote a comment that helped me understand something I’d read years ago written by Lin Yutang.
Writing of the “Chinese Mind” on page 81 of the 1938 Holcyon House Edition of My Country and My People, Lin Yutang said, “The Chinese language and grammar … in its form, syntax and vocabulary, reveals an extreme simplicity of thinking, concreteness of imagery and economy of syntactical relationships.”
I didn’t clearly understand what Lin Yutan meant until Alessandro wrote in his recent comment, “The Latin alphabet is a phonetic one, and as such, it simply reproduces the sounds of the spoken language, making it more susceptible of changes whenever the spoken language changes. Chinese Hanzi, on the other hand, conveys almost no “phonetic” information by itself … (and doesn’t change much in its meaning as time passes).”
I talked to my Chinese wife of what Alessandro meant, and she said when she first arrived in the US what she missed most was the lack of books written in mainland Mandarin, which is different than Mandarin in Taiwan.
This explains why she buys so many books in Mandarin each time she/we visit China and brings them home to the US reading sometimes one or two a day until the supply runs dry.
Cultural Competence: Managing Your Prejudices
Alessandro went on to say, “Both Europe and China have had political upheavals and long periods in which they were divided, but (China) having a stable writing system that doesn’t change as much as an alphabetic one helped them not to lose an important element of cultural unity, therefore of “national” identity…
“The Chinese concept of “nation” has nothing to do with the “nation state” concept common in Europe (and North America).
“European nation states are more or less based on ethnicity, while in China it was – and it still somewhat is – based on cultural elements.
“You were Chinese because you shared a common culture, because you acted as a Chinese and assumed Chinese customs.
“Europe never regained the unity (also linguistic) that existed during the Roman Empire, while China always strove to regain unity after each period of division.
“The traditional saying “合久必分，分久必合” — means more or less ‘after unity comes division, after division comes unity‘.”
While the West has many written languages, China has had one for more than two millennia and this has been the glue that helps create a sense of unity and what it means to be Chinese.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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My family had a date to walk the mile to the local Sunday Farmer’s Market, which up until today has always been a pleasant experience.
However, at the Farmer’s Market, I came face to face with the ignorance and hate that surveys say about 40% of Americans have concerning China.
It started out as a conversation with a young man giving away free samples of a local newspaper as part of a program to grow subscriptions.
The feature story on the front page said, Walmart sex-discrimination case headed to the Supreme Court. This led to a conversation about Wal-Mart being anti union. The newspaper vendor said that in Europe Wal-Mart had no choice about unions then I mentioned that Wal-Mart had stores in China where all the workers belong to unions.
The conversation then turned to China. Eventually the newspaper vendor asked why I knew so much about China, and I told him that I write a Blog about China.
Since spending a decade researching Robert Hart for my first two historical fiction novels, it has become my goal to explain why China is the way it is since it was during that decade that I discovered how biased and ignorant many in the West are of China.
That’s when the fair skinned WASP with the ruddy winter blush on his cheeks stepped in. He was standing several feet away with his trained dog sitting on its box. He’s there almost every Sunday demonstrating what a great animal trainer he is. Since I have no interest in training animals, I’ve never had a conversation with him.
Without being asked, he said China was guilty of killing twenty million women. (I don’t remember the exact words but that’s close enough.) Within minutes, he would boost the number to forty million.
I attempted explaining that China’s central government cannot be blamed for centuries of cultural behavior and that there were laws against female infanticide in China today. I started to explain that even the one-child policy is misunderstood but he cut me off.
The WASP with the ruddy face waved his arms above his head and shouted I should get two Communist flags and wave them in the air so everyone at the market would know I was a China lover.
I don’t love China. I also don’t hate it. Instead, I want to understand.
America, with all of its flaws and there are many, is my country but I do not blindly love the US either. I wore the uniform of a US Marine and fought in Vietnam out of youthful patriotism decades before I discovered that in Vietnam then in Iraq, US presidents launched wars based on lies and deceit.
Standing there at the Sunday Farmer’s market, the adrenalin started fizzing through my body as my PTSD was triggered and I moved into combat mode thinking of all the China facts I could teach this ignorant, biased WASP, while realizing that he didn’t want to learn.
The Marine Corps taught me not to get into a fight that I couldn’t win and winning meant killing before being killed.
I decided to walk away but before leaving, I jabbed an index finger in his direction and said, “Your biased opinions are based on ignorance. There is a lot you should learn of China.”
That’s when the WASP doubled the figure of female deaths in China from 20 to 40 million.
If surveys are correct, about 120 million Americans hold the same ignorant, biased opinions of China that this WASP believed.
Most Sinophobes know nothing of The Opium Wars; Sun Yat-sen in the early 20th century seeking help from the British Empire and the US to build a democracy in China and being rejected; or the facts behind China’s Civil War and all the other history that led to China being as it is today.
It’s true that female infanticide has been a cultural practice in China for centuries. It’s also true that the CCP passed laws to end that practice and sends teams into rural China to teach the people that it is wrong. That doesn’t mean that all the Chinese will change.
In fact, The Society for the Prevention of Infanticide (SPI) says, “Infanticide has been practiced on every continent and by people on every level of cultural complexity, from hunters and gatherers to high civilization, including our own ancestors. Rather than being an exception, then, it has been the rule.”
SPI says, “One way to control the lethal effects of starvation was to restrict the number of children allowed to survive to adulthood.”
Even “Darwin believed that infanticide, ‘especially of female infants,’ was the most important restraint on the proliferation of early man.”
“Today,” SPI says, “At least 60 million females in Asia are missing and feared dead, victims of nothing more than their sex. Worldwide, research suggests, the number of missing females may top 100 million.
“Estimates indicate that 30.5 million females are ‘missing’ from China, 22.8 million in India, 3.1 million in Pakistan, 1.6 million in Bangladesh, 1.7 million in West Asia, 600,000 in Egypt, and 200,000 in Nepal.”
However, the ignorant WASP at the Sunday Farmers Market was “foaming” at the mouth about the evils of China when in fact, SPI says, “The colonists brought infanticide to America from England while at the same time finding that the Indians practiced it as well.”
In addition, “In 1646 the General Court of Massachusetts Bay had enacted a law where ‘a stubborn or rebellious son, of sufficient years and understanding, would be brought before the Magistrates incourt and such a son shall be put to death.’
“Stubborn child laws were also enacted in Connecticut in 1650, Rhode Island in 1668, and New Hampshire in 1679.”
In Modern American “In 1966, the United States had 10,920 murders, and one out of every twenty-two was a child killed by a parent.”
“Statistically, the United States ranks high on the list of countries whose inhabitants kill their children. For infants under the age of one year, the American homicide rate is 11th in the world, while for ages one through four it is ‘first’ and for ages five through fourteen it is ‘fourth’.
“From 1968 to 1975, infanticide of all ages accounted for almost 3.2% of all reported homicides in the United States.”
I learned something new today. I learned that it is easier to deal with ignorance at a distance on Blogs and Internet forums where there are others reading what I write than it is talking to ignorance face to face.
It took more than an hour for my burst of combat adrenalin to work its way out of my system and it wasn’t until I finished writing this post that I was calm again. I wanted so much to attempt smacking down that WASP and discover if I had remembered what the Marine Corps drilled into me of hand-to-hand combat. After all, that training kept me alive in Vietnam, and I’ve broken bones learning martial arts.
However, I’m glad I walked away. Violence is not a solution to ignorance and it won’t open closed minds. After Vietnam and the Marines, I was a teacher in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005) where I learned how difficult it is to open minds.
You cannot teach someone that doesn’t want to learn.
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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.
My last post was about The Role of Religion, and I quoted Henry L. Carrigan Jr’s piece published in ForeWord magazine.
Following Carrigan’s piece was another excellent review of nine more books. This review was also seamless but written by Diane Gardner. The theme was good parents rebel: atypical ways to raise a child.
Gardner says, “Grandparents, friends, and experts all suggest the ‘right’ way to parent, and there are countless books intended to help, but many only add to the pressure.”
She writes, “while providing thoughtful guidance, they (the nine books) explore nonconforming options for parents. From suggestions on how to give birth to discipline advice…”
Gardner’s review couldn’t come at a better time as the debate rages between the SAPs (the Self-esteem arm of Political Correctness) and Tiger Parents such as Chinese-American Amy Chua, the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, although Chua hasn’t put up much resistance.
If you do not believe a debate is raging, visit Amazon.com and read the four and five star reviews along with the following comments. Some of these people are obsessive and mentally disturbed.
Gardner writes of The Monster Within: The Hidden Side of Motherhood (University of California Press), “mixed or even negative emotions about motherhood are neither evil nor uncommon…. Some parents claim societal pressures go so far as to tell them how to feel and what to do.”
In Trucking’ with Sam: A Father and Son, the Mick and the Dyl, Rockin’ and Rollin’, on the Road (State University of New York Press), Gardner says, “sometimes the more unconventional ways to bond prove more effective than the traditional family dinners and game nights,” and of First the Broccoli Then the Ice Cream: A Parent’s Guide to Deliberate Discipline (Two Fish, Inc) Gardner quotes psychologist Tim Riley and why time-outs often don’t work and suggests using more meaningful penalties instead, such as loss of TV privileges (great idea).
In fact, the emotional debate that Amy Chua’s essay in the Wall Street Journal and her memoir caused arrives at the right time as the US ponders how to improve educational outcomes in the public schools.
The key to a child’s success in school is often the parent and while most children and teens only have one or two parent/s, those same students may have as many as fifty teachers kindergarten to the end of high school.
Just reading Diane Gardner’s good parents rebel: atypical ways to raise a childwill provide more fuel for the American parenting debate that is long overdue. The average American SAP parenting model is the real reason for the failure of public education in the US.
It is time for the average American parent to change course.
Discover how Amy Chua invaded Chinaand ignited a parenting debate in the Middle Kingdom.
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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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