As a graduate student, I interacted with quite a few Chinese students. But, I could never breakthrough a wall that I felt existed around them. Interestingly, Taiwanese and Korean students were very easy to talk to, have coffee with, and go to restaurants. I recall very well how one of those students, "RL", tensed up when I brought up the topic of Mao. I never talked about Chinese politics with him after that. My curiosity about China continues on. One of my favorite things to do if we fly Singapore Airlines to India is to watch Chinese movies. All I know is that I simply am not able to peek beyond the wall.
This essay in the New Yorker further complicates the image I have of China and its youth. And the review essay in the NYRB has many interesting insights. Excerpt from the NYRB piece:
After a century and a half of famine, war, weakness, foreign occupation, and revolutionary extremism, a growing number of Chinese—overseas as well as inside China—had come to look to the Olympic Games as the long-heralded symbolic moment when their country might at last escape old stereotypes of being the hapless "poor man of Asia"; a preyed-upon "defenseless giant"; victim of a misguided Cultural Revolution; the benighted land where in 1989 the People's Liberation Army fired on "the people." In one grand, symbolic stroke, the Olympic aura promised to help cleanse China's messy historical slate, overthrow its legacy of victimization and humiliation, and allow the country to spring forth on the world stage reborn —"rebranded" in contemporary parlance—as the great nation it once had been, and has yearned for so long to once more become.
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