Glutter’s Hong Kong, Transnaional Identities
This week China put their first person in Space. Which makes us the third country to do so after the US and USSR. The implications are significant. I am yet to grasp them all. I doubt I am the only one. I am sure, the US government, the other world powers and North Korea is scrambling to think about what it means too.
China going to Space.
It’s means something bigger than us sending some guy orbiting around. This is another symbol that China is moving faster towards being an even bigger world power. It will mean that we too will start having defense programs in space, even if the government is denying such plans (for now). This means in the future we are less likely to be attacked. It cements our status as a world threat, much like having nuclear weapons and gives us the technology to go forward.
I don’t agree on that on an ideological level, because I believe in peace. We should be disarming rather than building more dangerous weapns to kill each other. That’s me and my personal commitment to a better world.
On the other hand, the more pragmatic Chinese side of me says, I am glad we have this technology because I don’t want to be Iraq in 2003. I don’t want my country attacked 40 years down the line because America needs more resources, may it be land or water, and in turn using our government policies on human rights as an excuse to attack.
Moments like this, I wonder why I struggle with who I am. For I realize that it doesn’t matter how little I understand the language and culture. Those things are just small aspects to being Chinese because it can be grander.
Something innate makes the survival of China, my race, my motherland of great importance to me. Doesn’t much matter I spent a lot of my life abroad and that I can simultaneously love the US in a personal way. Somewhere, call it my soul, my heart, China’s history, those ties and responsibility can still call to me. It doesn’t happen much, but when it does, it’s like setting foot deep into the ground.
Amy Tan talks a lot about when you are Chinese, you are Chinese. When you set foot in China, you know what it means. She’s right. I have experienced that in a physical way. And at other times, like right now, this happens in my mind.
A journalist asked astronaut Yang if he saw the Great Wall of China from Space. It’s the only human made object that can be seen from that far away. It’s actually the only hand made human object that can be seen that far away. Other machine made things can also be seen.
He said he didn’t.
I wish he did or even lied and admitted to doing so.
The Great Wall is something to behold. It’s massive, it puts the voluptuous 100 plus storey buildings in my neighborhood to shame. The wall is not tall in this day and age, but it’s long, and seeing it on a still photo or from one spot doesn’t start to tell the story of what it is because it goes on and on and on.
In order to grasp the concept and size of what the wall really is like, one has to catch a train through China.
It comes along with you, even if you are on the train for days. Even when it goes out of sight for hours because it’s just fallen down or turned a corner. It continues, no matter what, until you get close to the border of the country.
It will always come back to you.
To remind you where you are.
What part of the planet you are on.
That this land, its history and people have survived until now and will go on.
One constant line of decent.
If you’ve gone on a long train ride through the Middle Kingdom, The Great Wall is like a constant companion, a best friend.
It comes to you and you go to it.
You and it will merge after days and days of vast landscape. It’s the only thing that is familiar, that’s you’ve seen before, and will pop up everywhere: on the mountains, next to factories, standing alone on the fields, on the side of a city. There will be a flash of excitement when it appears, and either you or someone else will point at it and go, “Cheng Xing, Cheng Xing Ah!”
It’s is the vein, the soul of the country and the people.
And when you talk about China, you can’t help but use words like soul, country, and people. It’s how we talk about it in Chinese. It is how we have to talk about it in English.
And when I was catching the train to Europe at 15. The great wall teased me, pushed me to thinking about being Chinese. It’s was as if the pigment of my skin takes makes me part of a universal consciousness over blood lines. It made me meditate on how my ancestor’s genes mixed and passed down to create me, and how many thousands and million people I am related to. In return how through me, it will be passed down when a child starts its life in my womb. And that’s why it is so important to pay respects to my ancestors. Those who are dead, because they link me to the past and makes me who I am.
Thinking about China going to space, I am reminded of another time, when I thought of something else for the first time. I was seven years old. One of the US shuttles must have gone into Orbit. My teacher described to us about how everything changed when a man first went to the moon, the hysteria that happened and how it made people view the planet in a different way. It took me a while to understand that she said, “before,” “when it happened for the first time.” Like hasn’t life always been exactly the same?
That was my first awareness of “history.” How the past was different from that second and the future will be again not be the same.
How “time” passes and things change.
She said she wondered what will happen in the future, if we could live in space. Maybe she would not be alive then, but we might be.
It made me comprehend “death.” That some of us will die off and the others who remain will remember something else: everything continues that way.
I don’t know how I could be seven and be able to put those thoughts together through my teacher’s story of humans in space. But I did. I am sure I was seven because Mrs. Garner was my teacher. I was in primary three.
This week, the themes of space, technology, history, time and the future along with my ancestors and China came together.
China’s gone to space. To me that’s profound.
—
For More Glutter’s Hong Kong (Please Navigate Backwards On the Calendar)
Yan Sham-Shackleton Online 