Closing Thoughts on China

Most of my posts on China were taken directly from emails that I wrote while I was in China. I could have edited them to make me seem less shallow, ethnocentric, obsessed with toilets, complaining, and convinced of the superiority of Western toilets and breakfasts. I could also have edited them to make China seem more like the exotic, beautiful place which you see in travellogues (and which it sometimes actually is), but I didn't, for two reasons.

First of all, this is not a travel ad for China, and I didn't want it to be. Because it was taken from emails, it reflects my immediate experiences, unsoftened by time, in all their sweatiness, smelliness, and itchiness. It is an honest portrayal of how people can feel when placed in a culture very different from their own, with little knowledge of the language, without a guide to show them the way, and how they are reduced to bewildered, frustrated, illiterate, homesick foreigners. (In China, they don't call tourists or international students "internationals" or "tourists"; we're uneuphemistically called "foreigners". And we certainly were - foreigners, that is.) Thus, my journal has been less about China and more about the experience of being in a strange place.

Secondly, there's a lesson here for those of us in our own countries who encounter foreigners - as tourists, expatriates, or international students. They're in a place where the people are backwards, or at least sideways, and they had to eat nasty things for breakfast, and the toilets are strange, and for God's sake, why would you drink water and milk COLD instead of hot, and the streets are so pedestrian-unfriendly and the people so fat, and the waiters always rush you out of the restaurants by giving you the check...

Let's be kind to our foreigners. I cannot forget how grateful I was for the strangers who were kind to me.