It's kind of hard to get my head around that I'm going home in a little over two weeks. Except maybe I have been comprehending it subconsciously: I've been more homesick lately, and more likely to eat Western food--though having a cafe in the dorm helps with that, since in means I don't have to walk twenty minutes to get to the cafeterias on campus.
On the other hand, yesterday I had the most Chinese-y experience I've yet had here, and will probably ever have in this program: my tutor and I and a couple of my classmates spent most of the afternoon at a teahouse. The building was probably a hundred years old. The rituals of steeping and serving the tea (jasmine, by the way, and very good) may not have changed for centuries. The mahjong table was new--the electronic dice and built-in tile shuffler make it maybe thirty years old--but mahjong is mahjong, and all together it gave me a feeling I hadn't yet experienced. I've been to Tian'anmen, and to the Great Wall...but tea and mahjong are the real soul of China.
And the weather held for our excursion. There's been a lot of rain in Beijing lately. Last Saturday floods killed nearly forty people, and it's only supposed to rain more this weekend. Ah well, I guess it's a nice break from hot and humid. If it ever actually rains.
And speaking of last Saturday, that was the evening I finally watched Anonymous. It's a lovely movie; the only people I know of who don't like it are the ones who can't be buggered to put aside their pet theory about who wrote Shakespeare's plays. That the movie supports the Earl of Oxford theory only matters insofar as Edward deVere (said Earl) is a well-constructed and beautifully-acted character. (Not to mention attractive--he's played by Rhys Ifans, whom most people know from Notting Hill, and Jamie Campbell Bower, whom everyone will soon know from The Mortal Instruments.) The point of the story is that no matter who wrote Shakespeare's plays, they're still wonderful works of art, and powerful cultural icons, and a picture of the human condition at a particular point in history that still resonates with modern readers/viewers. All that good stuff.
And so it annoys me that people get bogged down in petty details, and stick to their biases to the point that they can no longer understand why anyone else sees the world differently. Which brings me to this week's episode of Crashcourse, in which John Green tells conflicting stories about the death of Captain Cook and asks whether, since transcending our own biases is so difficult, it's actually worth doing.
My answer: of course it is! As they keep quoting in Up the Down Staircase, "a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" The fact that something is difficult makes it even more important that we try to do it. Colonizing the Americas was difficult; so were uniting the United States and landing a man on the moon; so too will be curing AIDS and sending manned missions to Mars. Humans do things because they're difficult.
And learning to see things from someone else's perspective shouldn't be all that difficult. To return to the Enlightenment, which I mentioned a couple of months ago and which John Green seems to enjoy talking about: the scientists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries believed it was possible for man to see the world from God's perspective. I'm prepared to argue that we've accomplished that. Now that we can see what a god sees, why do we refuse to see what other human beings see?
No comments:
Post a Comment