there is a general lament that china is changing too fast. a bulldozer mows down the hutongs. an art warehouse is replaced by a parking lot. the students who once cried for justice now simply cry for more money. in taiwan too, a middle class has emerged and along with it, an endless striving for gucci and lv.
a fact of life is that the world turns and people change with it.
but in man's search for a historical and modern china, i wonder if a chinese identity extricated from an ever-changing society lies in the ones who went overseas. it is as if china itself is a television screen with its constantly fluctuating images, and those who leave its shores are the single stills--eidetic snapshots of the chinese worldview taken out, placed aside. and on the shores of a foreign land, they held on tightly to the home in their minds and that worldview became inculcated, calcified deeply within their beings.
they are in that sense, living history. i sense that here, at least. freed from the momentum of a changing society, the inertia sets in. and somehow time and change occur much more slowly, if at all.
a taiwan of before, a china from the past. here in buenos aires.
Monday, September 1, 2008
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2 comments:
i agree...the gang, we embody a slice of beijing...the year before the olympics, in a particular hybrid of expat and local culture, which will always live in us!
Not to keep drawing parallels to the Iranian diaspora... but I feel the same way about the Persians who fled to the US, Canada, Australia and Europe after the Revolution. They cling to the memory of an Iran that has since been completely destroyed by the Islamic Regime, and the images and sounds, the ethnic and historical identity, and the values of Persian culture that the ex-pats transmit to their children are drawn from a culture that, in many ways, no longer exists in today's Iran.
I often feel like I'm Persian in a way that my peers in Iran just aren't.
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