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

Not One Less (1999)

May 8, 2010

In the movie Not One Less, a thirteen-year-old girl is asked to be the substitute teacher in a small Chinese village.  The teacher tells her that when he returns, if he finds all the students there, he will pay her ten yuan—less than two American dollars.

Although money is involved, it isn’t much. When one student, Zhang Huike, stops coming to school, Wei Minzhim, the thirteen-year-old substitute, follows him to the city.

There are several themes in this movie. The most powerful to me were the value of an education and not losing face. If Wei loses Zhang, she will fail the responsibility the teacher gave her. To succeed, she must keep all the students and teach them.

Confucius taught the Chinese that an education was the great equalizer and the key to leaving poverty behind. Most Chinese believe this with a passion.

Zhang Yimou was the director. He says, “Chinese culture is still rooted in the countryside. If you don’t know the peasant, you don’t know China.” Because of this, there is a strong message in this movie about the urban–rural divide, which is being addressed as China sews the nation together with high-speed rail and electricity.

This a powerful movie about children, education, and poverty that shows the challenges China faces in lifting the lifestyles of almost eight hundred million Chinese, who don’t live in the cities. The challenge is to do this without losing the values that made China what it is.

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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 love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

His latest novel, Running with the Enemy, was awarded an honorable mention in general fiction at the 2013 San Francisco Book Festival.

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1 Comment | China, Chinese Culture, Confucianism, education, family values, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Where Does the Money Go?

May 6, 2010

“China doesn’t keep all the money paid for products made in China. Everyone in the supply chain shares.” I heard Zachary Karabell say this at the 2010 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

Today, I read a post in Bind Apple that emphasized the fact that Apple products are made in China but didn’t mention that Apple also manufactures in the United States, Malaysia and Indonesia and other countries. The post also emphasized the sixty-hour workweek and low pay as if it were a bad thing.

In fact, Apple says, “Their products and components are manufactured by a wide variety of suppliers around the world.  The final assembly of most products occurs in China.”

Most Chinese do not mind working sixty-hour weeks and the money earned may be low by American standards but is higher than most rural Chinese earn. 

These factory workers also send money home and manage to save, since China’s average saving rate is 40%. China’s culture is based on Confucianism, which focuses on collective rights instead of the individual.  Those workers are not working for themselves. They are working for their family and that includes parents and grandparents, who are contributing too.

Learn more about who Confucius was, or see what was going on at Apple’s Foxconn facility in Guanlan, China.

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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2 Comments | business, Chinese Culture, Confucianism, family values, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
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The Life of Confucius – Part 2/5

May 3, 2010

Life was hard for Confucius and his mother, who struggled to grow vegetables on a small plot of land. To survive, he helped by working as a common laborer, and his mother spent hours making sure Confucius had an education so he might have a better future.

A Chinese peasant grinding rice

Ugly, awkward and shy, Confucius had few friends, so he did not experience a normal childhood. By the time he was a teen, he had read the great classics of Chinese civilization and discovered that learning never stops.

Then his mother died. The grief almost destroyed him, because she had been the only person who loved him.  By the time he buried her near his father’s grave, he had lived through hardships that would break most men. Instead, he turned these survival lessons into strengths. With his mother gone, he realized that a family’s love was greater than gold.

Confucius was a poor, ugly giant—an illegitimate child with no family connections. His only advantage was his extraordinary mind, but fate was going to smile on him.

He lived in Chufu, the capital of the Duchy of Lu. One of three powerful warlords of Lu recognized his talent and gave him an important job. At 19, he married, but no one knows who she was. They had a son followed by other children.

Return to Part 1 of “The Life of Confucius” or move on to Part 3

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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 love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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2 Comments | China, Chinese history, Confucianism, family values | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Investing BIG in Education

April 21, 2010

China is making HUGE investments in education. In 1998, then-President Jiang Zemin called for a massive increase in enrollment in higher education. Since then, high school and college enrollments in China grew. Source: FP-Foreign Policy, April 14, 2010

Tsinghua University's east gate

In China, more than thirty percent graduate with degrees in engineering or technology. In the United States, only five percent of university students graduate in these fields, while U.S. universities produce more psychologists.

That is why President Obama has encouraged American students to study science. Source: White House

What’s going to happen if American students do not start working hard to become engineers and scientists?

Tsinghua University

In 2040, the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly three times the economic output of the entire globe in 2000.  It’s a fact that people with an education in engineering and science earn more and are more productive.  China and India combined are turning out more than 600,000 engineers a year—ten times that of the United States. Source: Rocketry Planet

To see the results of this push in education, discover Adding to Honor in One Lunar Leap

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. 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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