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Great White North
I have been able to fit in a lot of socializing and shopping in my few days here in Sudbury, the largest city (100,000) in Northern Ontario. It has been great to see my parents and all my relatives from different parts of the province. I really hope they get a chance to visit me in China some day, but I am not holding my breath. Each of them is very involved in their work, school, and families, and will be hard pressed to check out the Middle Kingdom any time soon.
My brother, a psychology professor, has only ever heard bad news stories coming out of China, and I had the chance to explain that while there certainly are injustices done there (as elsewhere, just different ones), it is actually a safe, and very compelling place to travel. Living there is like existing on another planet and indeed often does seem like a world unto itself. Many Canadians seem to understand the relative smallness of their place in the world community, especially with Big Brother just south of the border. But with 1.3 billion people and with its rapid and uneven economic development, other events in the world often seem blotted out and faded in the background in every day life in China.
News reporting is a funny thing to start with. They say that in North America "If it bleeds, it leads", and certainly I cannot stomach for more than a few minutes all the horrible images coming out of the world's troubled spots that the western media harps on endlessly. China seems to be at the other end of the reporting spectrum. When I first started studying Chinese 12 years ago, my classmates and I always were amazed that in China they only broadcast the "The Good News" and very little of the down side of life there. West and East, at least North America and China, are at opposite ends of the spectrum. There is good and bad to both ways of reporting things.
One a lighter note, one thing that is funny is that most of the stuff I have wanted to buy here in Ontario is made in China, but not available at the manufacturing source. I guess the export all the good stuff! Even my refrigerator stickers of Canadian flags, the Toronto skyline, Niagara Falls, along with beavers, moose, and Grizzly Bears, etc. etc. were all made somewhere near Shanghai, I imagine.
last modified May 26, 2004 at 14:30
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