After several months of on and off planning, I finally have an arrival date in Shanghai. I’ll be flying in on August 20, to begin training for my job teaching 7-10 year olds. The whole process has been something of a leap of faith, really. Trying to organize things with people who live on the other side of the world—who were waking up on Friday when I was eating dinner on Thursday—requires trust and patience. I’m very glad that it all came together, and I thank anyone who has read me here and the people at TalkdaTalk for their help.
This blog was mainly conceived as a cultural exchange that focused on the difference between American and Chinese students. The idea was for me to talk about my specifically American college experience, something about which it was assumed my Chinese readers would need explanation. The trouble is the American college experience, upon just a few months’ reflection, is a more complex thing than I could hope to explicate in just a few blog posts.
What has been more on my mind lately is the sad state of our international situation. The news lately, if you have been following it, has been alarming. It’s an old joke that the news is always negative (tragedy sells papers, after all), but it seems like more so than usual lately. I can’t pick up the front page of the New York Times without seeing a headline about rapid global warming, conflict in Iraq, conflict in Israel, nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea. On days when all four of these concerns are in the paper at the same time, I begin to wonder if the crazies professing an eminent Armageddon are perhaps on to something.
It’s no secret that countries that have strong economic ties with each other—countries that have realized it is in their mutual best interest to remain friendly—have a much smaller chance of fighting each other than two countries who have no economic entanglements. I can be confident that America will never attack China because if it did America’s economy would collapse.
I’m less interested in economics, though, then I am about the larger idea that exchange creates entanglements; and that entanglements aren’t always a bad thing. It’s nice to think that the movement in China to learn English (and the corresponding movement in America to learn Chinese) will have other than purely economic effects. If we speak each other’s language, we can read each other’s book, and understand each other’s ideas and cultures on a much deeper level.
East and West have never understood each other very well, perhaps even when their relations were good. Now that peace between the cultures is essential to the survival of both, perhaps a greater understanding will grow. An almost organic consequence of our increased exchange. It’s a clichéd hope, but who knows, maybe its time has come.