With those simple words, I find myself preparing to live in Shanghai for the next 6 months.
Despite being a child of the Chinese diaspora, I've had an Anglophile upbringing. My links to Chinese traditions only surfaced several times a year when I collected angpows for CNY or ate mooncakes, chang or tong yuen. Anything else I learnt came from books written from a Western perspective: adventures of Marco Polo, evangelistic missions of Hudson Taylor and Gladys Aylward or the fiction of Pearl S. Buck. In recent years, there's been more literature written by Chinese authors in exile e.g. Nien Ching and Adeline Mah which is full of traumatic stories of war, suffering and the Cultural Revolution. I must admit the books felt a little whiny and depressing.
Then came the rise of China as an economic powerhouse. I began to pay attention to the data and reports in the late 1990s, but was still ambivalent about experiencing China for myself. The fascination was sparked by my parents' first visit to China in 2006. Listening to my mother (who's chiefly responsible for my Anglicization) wax lyrical about the Great Wall in Beijing, the Nanking memorial, and the boatwomen of Suzhou, I realised that the time had come to re-discover my roots. I found it quite liberating (and scary!) to admit that to myself.
And so when my boss said "Go to China", my reply was "How soon?".
In fact, I've begun to set some goals including:
- learning to speak enough Mandarin to conduct a workshop
- learning 1000 Chinese characters
- calling on the Forbidden City and Summer Palace in Beijing
- seeing the terracotta army of Xian
- climbing the Great Wall of China
- experiencing another Olympics (this time in Beijing!)
- touring the war memorials of Nanjing
- visiting the Longjing tea plantations of Hangchow
And most importantly, I hope to come to terms with my Chinese ancestry - whatever that turns out to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment