Whose Comments Are They Anyway? (1)
Reputation Management and Manipulation of the Internet
In addition to water-boarding it is apparent that government interpreters world-wide now learn social media, SEO and RSS management during their program of study. It is no secret that many blog comments on opinion-shaping sites are made by full-time surfers or “trolls” as some call them, with nationalist or agency mandated agendas; some get paid for their performance. The real weapons of mass destruction in a digital world are words and the technology is readily available even when we don’t send fuses to Taiwan.
Several recent comments, meant to manipulate media have come back to deservedly sound-bite the perpetrators in their virtual asses.
John McCain campaign aide, Soren Dayton was suspended from the campaign because he Twittered a link to a YouTube video blasting Barack Obama’s minister. And the Chinese government was a bit slow on the draw when they led reporters into the lama’s den in Lhasa last week.
Multi-national companies now hire ethical as well dubious administrators of propaganda to sow seeds of content across the blogsphere when a ruthless competitor, frustrated consumer or PR gaff has sent a brand or image into the cyber-stool. Internet Word of Mouth is an ICBM with a guidance system that can be more unpredictable than a cold war space laser.
I read a news release today written by the folks at 5fad.com. 5fad.com is suing Baidu.com for copyright infringement and then speculating, during trial, about the outcome and impact of the verdict.
Written in something akin to English and suspiciously fed out of a UK media outlet, the release contains suppositions meant to influence public opinion in advance of a judicial ruling.
Some highlights: “The MP3 search engine is of crucial importance for Baidu.com to gain an advantageous position in its competition with its business rival, Google.com. Once the MP3 search engine service is ruled unlawful, Baidu.com’s leading position in the search engine market may topple” Remember that this news release was written by the Plaintiff!
The take a break from legal commentary to do an infomercial about 5Fad: “5fad.com, ranking among 2007 Red Herring Asia Top 100, was founded in 2003. Though headquartered in Hangzhou, it has branch offices in Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo and New York…5fad.com is the leading digital entertainment and culture company in China. Its service network covers a total population of 300 million.” With a Google Page Rank of 4 and a purported audience more than twice the size of the China Internet user base the claim is dubious at best.
I have become so jaundiced that when JWT’s Tom Doctoroff, a man I have long respected as an authority on China, makes statements concerning Tibet like:”…I instinctively empathize with the impulses of the protesters” I wonder if he is just careless and failing to weigh the consequences of the potential spin of his comments as sympathy for murder or arson? Or I question whether or not the soon-to-be Olympic torch bearer has intentionally inserted psycho-linguistically charged language about Tibet, in an article written against calls for an Olympic boycott, in order to draw in more readers for the Huffington Post?
I am a poet and the keeper of an online diary. I am not a journalist or political pundit in blogger’s clothes. I love and cherish the written word–despite my occasional acts of grammatical or stylistic annihilation. And because I am a creative writer I attempt to ferret out the real meanings of a work and the reasons for the choice of diction.
I am becoming less cavalier about reading or writing. I now am casting a cold eye on much of what comes to me via RSS or social networks and so it seems should we all….
Update: Head over to ESNW for an important addendum to the newest China Photogate…
Posted 29 March, 2008 in SEM, Chinese Media, SEO, Internet marketing China, Seo China, Violence, Human Rights, Taiwan, Human Rights China, Beijing Olympics, SEO China Expert, Chinese Internet, The Internet, China Olympics, China Editorials, Intercultural Issues, War, Personal Notes, cartoons, Censorship, 中国, In the news, Tibet, China web 2.0
Zhu Lu Zhongyuan… (2)
How is this for synchronicity?:
I study at least one Chinese idiom, parable or allegory a day. Today, honestly, I opened my study text and immediately saw:
At whose hand the deer will die is unknown
It is an idiom that implies that the outcome of a struggle or rivalry is still undecided. It has roots in the first Han dynasty in 203 B.C..
The story behind the idiom takes place in what was once known as “China Proper” which originated in the Tibetan Plateau and was bordered by the Yellow and Yangze rivers: The advisor to Han Xin, King of Qi, urged the King to break away from the Emperor Liu Bang. In 196 Han was executed for plotting a rebellion even though he had not followed the advice given to him by one Kuai Tong.
Later Kuai Tong was brought to Liu to be executed. Kuai Tong told the emperor among other things: ” A dog barks at people, not because it is bad, but because they are not his master. At the time my duty was to help Han Xingain gain power, so to execute me would be unjust.”
Liu Bang pardoned him.
I am hoping for the same fate for other Yellow River inhabitants showing support for their beliefs. I am hoping for the safety of my friends very near the confrontations. I am praying for an end to the violent conflicts– though the outcome of the struggle may long be undecided…
Posted 16 March, 2008 in Human Rights, Violence, 中文, Human Rights China, China Law, Chinese Proverbs, Chinese Media, Tibet, In the news, 中国, Censorship, China Editorials
When Bad Things Happen… (1)
Reflections on the 70th Anniversary of the Rape of Nanjing
“The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.”
Steinbeck, in his speech at the 1968 Nobel Banquet that honored him, expressed a belief in the perfectibility of man that he thought could come, in part, through the artist’s inherent mandate to speak honestly. I believe that historians too are charged with the same task; because man has “…taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have.”
Several years ago Rabbi Harold Kushner made popular a treatise on the Old Teatament Book of Job. When Good Things Happen to Bad People took on the daunting task of explaining why God, in the allegorcal text, might have subjected his dutiful servant Job to all manner of physical and emotional trauma while expecting him to be obedient and adoring. The book purportedly meant to give us comfort by explaining what laymen already had resigned themselves to knowing about Job: adversity just happens and we need to content ourselves with the knowledge that God has a greater plan to which we are not yet privy.
I never accepted Kushner’s easy out; so when tasked with teaching the Bible as Literature to Chinese students this year, I studied Job knowing the first question my young scholars would ask was identical to my own: why would man’s creator willingly torture a loving being, cast in his own image, for the sake of a cosmic bet with the devil? I found the answer in the actions of Job’s friends, not those of God as he was portrayed by the allegory’s author: Job’s friends willingly abandoned him. It was with that realization that Job became, for me, less of a lesson about obedience and worship and clearly a moral guide to my responsibilities to my fellow man.
When the Japanese invaded China in 1937 the world chose not to respond to reports of atrocities that were themselves biblical in magnitude. In one of the most perfect examples of repeated cosmic irony, John Rabe, a member of Germany’s Nazi party became the “Angel” or “Living Buddha of Nanjing” alongside its “goddess” an American Christian missionary by the name of Minnie Vautrin. After being rebuffed by their respective diplomatic liaisons they established a “safe zone” that saved more than 250,000 people from being tortured, burned alive, buried alive, decapitated, bayoneted raped or shot for sport. They acted for God, or in God’s stead, as a behavioral contagion of evil spread through the occupying Japanese Army.
The irony did not stop there: Vautrin, suffering from exhaustion, returned to America soon after the six-week ordeal and succumbed to the darkness of disillusionment by committing suicide. Rabe was arrested by his own party for his involvement in Nanjing, and then tried after the war for his earlier Nazi affiliation depleting his resources, devastating his health and forcing him to live in poverty.
After learning of Rabe’s plight the survivors of Nanjing took up collections to assist him in holding on to a life Vautrin could not bear to live out. Both Rabe and Vautrin now have monuments erected to their memory in the city of Nanjing where they are rightfully memorialized as icons of goodness and charity.
If it is the duty of the artist to expose the truth to the light, it is the job of the historian to frame and disseminate the events that can re-shape our souls whether we think them to be temporal or divine.
Rabe and Vautrin did not leave the Jobs of Nanjing to suffer the mysteries of fate: They were courageous against uncertainty, raised rational voices amidst the absurdity of war, and thankfully were more committed than the closest of personal friends during a time of horror and anguish.
Just yesterday I read where 46% of people answering a poll on the social networking site Facebook said they had no desire to see the recently released powerful documentary on the massacre at Nanking. It is likely the emotional cost, not the price of a ticket keeping them away from the film. Some, like Job’s fair weather friends, do not feel the need for humanitarian counsel. It seems some things are slow to change, but that should not stop anyone, artist advocate or historian, from authenticating the past by giving voice to those are not heard even in the terrible silence of indifference. Carolyn Forche, in her award winning book, The Country Between Us writes: “There is nothing one man will not do to another.” Steinbeck was right: we have usurped the authority and have supposed ourselves to carry the omniscience once ascribed to God.
while I agree with Steinbeck, Kushner and I diverge: I don’t think God, in any any of the earthly renditions we have supposed for his form or character, plays cosmic dice at our expense. And while I know first-hand the pain man is capable of inflicting, I choose to include charity among the many intentional acts that we might choose to commit.
Post Script:
True friends are hard to come by in any age. I am blessed with the unconditional love of long-time associates. within hours of writing this post one of my long-suffering allies lost his son. Bob, Sharon, Barb: My heartfelt condolences during an ordeal no family should ever have to experience.
–Lonnie
Other Nanjing readings and resources: Peking Duck
Asia Times and The Sunday Independent CND and ESNW
Posted 23 January, 2008 in Charity in China, Human Rights, Heartsongs, American Professor in China, Nanjing, Human Rights China, Violence, 中国, Intercultural Issues, War, Expats, China Editorials, Personal Notes, Japan
Ghost Whispers…. (15)
I learned today that my sister passed away. I learned over the Internet that she died in November of last year. She was much older than me and never in great health, so I had wrongfully assumed she had “crossed over” years ago. Tonight in the still heat of a stifling Guangzhou I smelled the sour scent of some hard traveled memories and heard her whisper to me….
No, we were not close. Marriage came early for her, when I was 5, and before I was developmentally mature enough to crave or mourn losses. My military family was turning corners in or out of countries every three years or so and making the word “home” an abstraction. My sister was never in our family pictures. I saw her only a few times through the years and her face in my mind’s eye is blurred. I can remember her often speaking of pain and that remains palpable.
Until tonight I had almost forgotten I had a sister. She had been adopted by my unmarried mother at birth. She saw herself later in life as a stubborn vine that connected all of us to my mother’s alcoholic ex-husband and his mistress: She was the offspring of an affair, so her past was kept secret by my simple and well-meaning parents until she was a teenager. My mother and father, emotionally unsophisticated and afraid, asked a Catholic priest to substitute for them and tell her that she was adopted. It did not go well.
I have been watching DVDs this week “expat style.” We often buy two or three seasons of a show at a time, ones we cannot watch on regular TV and then air them from beginning to end in only a few days. It is a way to keep current with our abandoned culture and remain bonded to the lexicon, fashions and familiar emotions of our birth home. This week I have been storming through two seasons of Ghost Whisperer. And I have come to love the show for its generally positive outcomes, its promotion of health through acceptance and forgiveness and its desensitization of our collective fear of the unknown.* The protagonist of the show, who can see troubled spirits, helps earthbound souls unpack the heavy emotional baggage that holds them here. She helps them release after-longing and pain from the past so they can peacefully migrate into their future. It is not a story about religion, or eschatology (life after death), but about how to live well and without regret.
My mother developed Alzheimer’s disease and never was able to finally confront the trauma of being abandoned by her impoverished mother during the Great Depression. Too, she rarely spoke about the man who had deepened her emotional wounds later in life. She did so to protect herself and to maintain some illusion of normalcy for my sister and me. There was no malice in her deception, though my sister never forgave her or my father and never found emotional nourishment that would sate the pain. Where my mother insulated herself with delusions ( and maybe her disease), my sister did so with anger and distrust. After my mother died, I read in another Internet article that my sister had embarked on a public journey to discover more about her origins. I hope to learn one day that she was successful.
I wonder if other expats learn about their vacated lives past and present as I do? I view time compressed, via boxed sets of information that arrive in emails, letters, DVD’s and Internet entries. It was almost five years ago to the day that I leaned my sister’s husband had died an improbable death: an avid outdoorsman, he had contracted Bubonic plague from an insect bite while hunting. He was the first man in America known to have succumbed to the disease in decades. He was the most gifted craftsman I have ever known, but held back from his dream of being a woodcarver and gunsmith by the needy gravity of my sister’s suffering. So, I grieved my loss and his because his short fame was only in the peculiarity of his demise. We wandering expats may seem not to care about what happens to you, but we do. I do. And I, like others, frequent the few paths we can find along time’s rivers looking for signs of you. But can be a lonely and overwhelming journey when information flows so fast from so far away.
I laugh, mourn, celebrate and educate in absentia. Memory also presents to me as a frightened bird that requires patience to keep it nearby long enough that I can study, appreciate and accept both its beauty and its flaws.
I pray that both my sister and my mother are finally at peace. I long ago forgave them for simply being human. I hope they forgave this homeless child for the manifestations of his confusion .
I am the earthbound spirit now: I am on the banks of the river, coaxing the birds and vigilantly listening for whispers….
————————————————
* In another coincidence, I was surprised to see that the crystal ball mind reader on the GW website was created by my old friend and British doppelganger Andy Naughton .
Posted 29 July, 2007 in Violence, The Internet, past posts, 中国, Veterans, Heartsongs, China Expat, American Professor in China, 中文, Personal Notes, Confucius Slept Here, Intercultural Issues, China Expats, Asia, Expats, Teaching in China, Weird China, American Poet in China, China Editorials, Uncategorized
Interning the poor…. (0)
One online dictionary defines interning as:
- The act of training someone for a job or vocation
- Restriction to a locale, country or prison
Recently a group of girls in Guilin who were training to be dancers were sent by school officials to intern in their craft. They lived in Guilin, a part of the exceedingly poor Guanxi autonomous region often in the news lately for civil disturbances related to government enforced birth control and abortion.
I don’t know about Guanxi, but in areas of Guangdong, arts schools and their charges are not held in high regard. Dancing, painting, contemporary music and poetry are often thought to be frivolous activities meant for those not expected to succeed in life. Business, marketing, engineering, medicine, and law are more socially acceptable here.
But most students in China, regardless of their vocational choice, are hungry for life experience in their chosen fields. They believe that transferable skills are learned in the workplace rather than the classroom and they trust teachers and authorities to guide those experiences. And most of the teachers there, a dear friend of mine among them, make about $100 USD a month for their efforts, but take their responsibilities seriously.
Xinhua news euphemistically reported this week that “The law was broken” when one school lost its moral compass and arranged for its students to work as bar girls: Guilin Intermediate Vocational Dance School’s cadre arranged “internships” for 22 teenagers in Hangzhou, China nightclubs.
The school officials told parents that their children would perform at “well-regulated places” and would each be paid 750 yuan (US$94) a month, a very hefty salary for an ethnic minority student in Guanxi, but the dark reality was they earned 100 yuan ($12.50 USD) and paid 50 yuan to an “agent,” 25 yuan to the dance school, leaving 25 yuan (a little more than $3 USD) for their them.
The most bizarre part of this story is the spin some educators and officials have put on the event: Yuan Bentao, a professor at Tsinghua University, said, “It is even more important that private schools like this maintain a respectable image so that they can survive in China’s competitive education marketplace.” Ya, that was the first thing that came into my mind.
Internet chat-rooms have called for jail time for the school officials. The school’s Chairman Guo Guisheng claims he believed he was “doing a good deed” for the impoverished girls and their families.
In all of the reporting on this issue I have seen no indication that anyone has done anything to dress the wounds that were surely opened for the girls involved. My mother and her sister were abandoned on the steps of an orphanage during America’s Great Depression because my grandparents could not afford to feed them. They never got over it emotionally and they were not morally degraded like these girls were: The students were often forced to share toasts with middle-aged businessmen then sent to bed to cry themselves into a drunken sleep.
A law firm director, Qiu Baochang, of the Beijing-based Huijia Law Firm added, “These schools have to improve their teaching if they hope to have good reputations; otherwise, they will easily fall into a vicious circle.” Alleged professionals like these make a case for the re-thinking of industrialized education in China.
It’s too late, counselor: The vicious cycle involves the haves and have-nots in your new China. The internships given to those underprivileged children better fit the definition of imprisonment. They are now socially and psychologically locked in to a wheel of poverty and trauma. The only thing these girls learned is that a lack of self-esteem for a poor child is not a self-induced psychological condition, but part of a realistic self-assessment. A prospering economy has driven off and left these dancers on the steps of bankrupt orphanage.
With big thank you to Virtual China /China.org
Posted 23 July, 2007 in Charity in China, Human Rights, 中文, Human Rights China, China Law, Education in China, Violence, 中国, Intercultural Issues, Asia, Teaching in China, China Editorials, In the news, China Cartoons, Asian Women
Dreams, Repression and Violence…Part I (1)
This week I taught two seemingly disparate classes: one obliquely encouraged students to dialogue about their inner-most dreams and the other, coincidentally and disturbingly scheduled on the day of the tragic shootings in Virginia, had much in common: Students were asked to differentiate between the words job, vocation and calling and apply it to their own lives. I was deeply moved and, as is often the case, I exchanged my role as teacher for that of student. Those of us who have taught ESL for a number of years know well to listen to the sounds that return to us from across the cultural divide. Chinese students are noted for their silence in the classroom and for their rapid adaptation to accepted or expected classroom ideas. Much of what they will express is meant to be superficial; hence, safe. But, occasionally, if you listen closely enough, you will hear the overflow of the heart become word. The sounds that I heard this week were not the echoes of my own voice and I listened carefully.
Most of my students lamented that their jobs upon graduation were likely to be menial and unrewarding. They expressed awareness that because they were students at a second-tier college the likelihood that they would join the ranks of millions of unemployed graduates was great. Many of them spoke of their vocational “choices” as inevitable: preparations foisted upon them by parents, poor entrance scores, or a lack of financial resources needed to pursue their true calling.
In my class of would-be lawyers, traditional Chinese medicine practitioners and those training to be businessmen there were actually singers, visual artists, humanitarian aid workers, writers, Olympic athletes and more….. My students spoke with passion about their dreams now being relegated to meditations of what could, or should, have been.
But when I asked them how they felt about giving up or belaying the calls of the heart they were not able to answer. They have practiced for so long to give the outward appearance of gratitude and acceptance that they cannot see the dissonance. for them, to grouse about their lot in life while spending their parents’ hard-earned money on tuition would be to completely dishonor their families. Few Asian students would ever defy the wishes of their parents in such matters. Instead, it is easier to dissociate or suffer in silence than to profess displeasure at one’s lot in life. It is at once admirable and heartbreaking to see students inexorably tied to the dreams of others while abandoning their own.
It is my guess that so many suicides on Chinese campuses are directly related to this sense of familial duty and the inability to express feelings of displeasure. I see student denial of feelings as type of socially induced alexithymia that is pervasive in Chinese culture. Alexithymia is a condition characterized by a disconnect between emotions and actions. Individuals who are alexithymia cannot accurately describe feelings they are having nor are they in touch with how the feelings are being manifested in other parts of their lives. Such disconnect breeds addiction, somatic disorders, difficulty in relatioships and, in rare cases, suicide or violence.
I have long considered suicide as the ultimate and most devastating act of domestic violence. Suicide is more than anger turned inward: it is rage brought to fruition. And last year four students and two faculty members, unknown to each other, jumped to their deaths in Guangzhou in the same week. I believe that at least two of the deaths were acts of aggression.
Coming: Dreams….Part II
Posted 19 July, 2007 in Censorship, 中国, Guangzhou, Chinese Proverbs, Violence, In the news, Personal Notes, China Editorials, Teaching in China, China Business, American Poet in China, Confucius Slept Here, Intercultural Issues
Memorial Day (1)
As part of his therapy while trying to recover from a head wound suffered in Vietnam my father used to make the poppies that the American Legion sells on Memorial day.
Here is the poem that was written three years after the famous In Flanders Fields that most of us know….
We Shall Keep the Faith
by Moina Michael, November 1918
Oh! you who sleep
in Flanders Fields,
Sleep sweet - to rise anew!
We caught the torch you threw
And holding high, we keep the Faith
With All who died.We cherish, too, the poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led;
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies,
But lends a lustre to the red
Of the flower that blooms above the dead
In Flanders Fields.And now the Torch and Poppy Red
We wear in honor of our dead
.Fear not that ye have died for naught;
We’ll teach the lesson that ye wrought
In Flanders Fields.
Retrieved from an earlier post:
I had the chance to mountain climb with an aging PRC Army Veteran of Tibet and Tiananmen Square. He had that “thousand yard stare” soldiers who have been amidst senseless death can see in the eyes of another.
Years ago, as a corpsman at the Army’s Academy of Health Sciences, I was almost detailed to collect bodies in the Jonestown Massacre. Many of my friends went and are forever changed. I know medics, who went to Vietnam as conscientious objectors, and came back morphine addicted. It was one way, albeit not a good one, to cope.
Soldiers and Paramedics in New York, Iraq and New Orleans have acknowledged that there was a self before the tragedies and a different human, with a different world-view, that emerged from the devastation.
When most of the school children of a Chinese rural village, dozens, drowned in their classrooms, and left these hand prints on the windows trying to escape, it was the army who first saw the prints and then had to search through the mud for their bodies….
When I traveled, during Vietnam, in uniform I was vilified by many as part of the Military Industrial Complex. I did not get too many salutes.
As the war becomes more unpopular in Iraq, as the world increasingly calls us a police state, remember this: Governments declare war. Officials deploy troops. Hurricanes and earthquakes obey no warnings. And it is the soldier, and the victim, who carry with them, forever, the stench of death. It is like a house fire: you can never seem to rid yourself of the smell of smoke.
Love the soldier. They all write poetry and letters of longing home to their loved ones.
Hate the war, hate the floods, hate the notion that we are not close to getting it right, socially or environmentally, just yet.
Pray for the men, like my father, and soldiers of all nations who gave up sleepless nights and often, like my father, their lives, before and after battles, for you and the missions that they were asked to fulfill.
Salute them all with words and deeds today.
With special good wishes to the Wed. Heroes crew/blogroll. Most of you are not accessible from China, so I cannot get to you and often cannot receive mail or link out to you properly. Keep up the good work.
Posted 28 May, 2007 in Vietnam, 中国, Violence, Veterans, 中文, Holidays, In the news, Poetry, Intercultural Issues, Homeland Security, cartoons, Tibet, War
Violent Protests Rock Macau (2)
While literally hundreds of thousand of would-be gamblers stood for hours in line at Chinese customs stations Macanese locals used their May Day Holiday to scuffle with police. Well-armed Macau policemen fired warning shots into the air, but there were no reports of injuries resulting from the gunfire. According to one report: “Chaos broke out when a group of protesters tried to force their way through a police cordon, to access a busy avenue that leads to the Government headquarters. Over a hundred police, in full riot gear, struggled in vain to hold the crowd back.” Some three thousand people joined in the May Day rally to condemn corruption, rises in real estate prices and to call for tougher action against illegal workers. Dozens of protesters and police were hurt last year, when a similar protest turned violent. Some protesters used the occasion to carry placards in Chinese protesting various casinos and in particular the Sands whom some locals blamed for last week’s suicide jump inside the casino by a gambler from Hubei province.
Many official reports are putting the numbers of protesters in the hundreds, The taxi drivers, who took the circuitous route around the center of the ruckus near world famous Senado Square, say the figure was certainly in the thousands.
Posted 1 May, 2007 in Violence, Human Rights, 中国, In the news, Asia, Macau
Dreams, Repression and Violence…Part I (2)
This week I taught two seemingly disparate classes: one obliquely encouraged students to dialogue about their inner-most dreams and the other, coincidentally and disturbingly scheduled on the day of the tragic shootings in Virginia, had much in common: Students were asked to differentiate between the words job, vocation and calling and apply it to their own lives. I was deeply moved and, as is often the case, I exchanged my role as teacher for that of student. Those of us who have taught ESL for a number of years know well to listen to the sounds that return to us from across the cultural divide. Chinese students are noted for their silence in the classroom and for their rapid adaptation to accepted or expected classroom ideas. Much of what they will express is meant to be superficial; hence, safe. But, occasionally, if you listen closely enough, you will hear the overflow of the heart become word. The sounds that I heard this week were not the echoes of my own voice and I listened carefully.
Most of my students lamented that their jobs upon graduation were likely to be menial and unrewarding. They expressed awareness that because they were students at a second-tier college the likelihood that they would join the ranks of millions of unemployed graduates was great. Many of them spoke of their vocational “choices” as inevitable: preparations foisted upon them by parents, poor entrance scores, or a lack of financial resources needed to pursue their true calling.
In my class of would-be lawyers, traditional Chinese medicine practitioners and those training to be businessmen there were actually singers, visual artists, humanitarian aid workers, writers, Olympic athletes and more….. My students spoke with passion about their dreams now being relegated to meditations of what could, or should, have been.
But when I asked them how they felt about giving up or belaying the calls of the heart they were not able to answer. They have practiced for so long to give the outward appearance of gratitude and acceptance that they cannot see the dissonance. for them, to grouse about their lot in life while spending their parents’ hard-earned money on tuition would be to completely dishonor their families. Few Asian students would ever defy the wishes of their parents in such matters. Instead, it is easier to dissociate or suffer in silence than to profess displeasure at one’s lot in life. It is at once admirable and heartbreaking to see students inexorably tied to the dreams of others while abandoning their own.
It is my guess that so many suicides on Chinese campuses are directly related to this sense of familial duty and the inability to express feelings of displeasure. I see student denial of feelings as type of socially induced alexithymia that is pervasive in Chinese culture. Alexithymia is a condition characterized by a disconnect between emotions and actions. Individuals who are alexithymia cannot accurately describe feelings they are having nor are they in touch with how the feelings are being manifested in other parts of their lives. Such disconnect breeds addiction, somatic disorders, difficulty in relatioships and, in rare cases, suicide or violence.
I have long considered suicide as the ultimate and most devastating act of domestic violence. Suicide is more than anger turned inward: it is rage brought to fruition. And last year four students and two faculty members, unknown to each other, jumped to their deaths in Guangzhou in the same week. I believe that at least two of the deaths were acts of aggression.
Coming: Dreams….Part II