Spring Waning Seed Moon
Back from Wishes for the Sky where I helped visitors read scrolls written in a callipgraphic English that looks, at first glance, like Chinese. There were some ahas, some head scratching. One guy, when told that organizers said Chinese had the most trouble with reading the scripts laughed and said, “I must be part Chinese.”
The Mississippi river was high, but the Harriet Park Pavilion, in which the inside part of the event took place, had several disconcerting marks on the wall, labled with high flood marks for various years, most of them well above my head.
I had a chance to have nice chat several folks Scott Simpson, a guy he knows who plays Native American flute and Ming Jen, one of the organizers of the event. When asked about Jackie Chan’s statement reported in the press yesterday, “The Chinese people need to be controlled,” Ming Jen surprised me by agreeing with him.
Her rationale surprised me and made me humble once again about my ability to sense things from within a particular cultural perspective other than my own. She voiced a concern Jackie Chan had, too, saying that Chinese people were individualistic enough. With as many people as their are in China and the economic unrest created by economic freedom she feared more freedom would create potentially chaotic situations. Besides, she pointed out, during the Han and T’ang dynasties, the controlling government was feudal in nature and highly centralized, but poetry and the art flourished.
China’s culture has a patriarchal and dynastic tradition stretching back literally thousands of years. Democracy does not necessarily fit well within that tradition and, she implied, is not necessary for the Chinese people to flourish.
Another aspect of this, I realized while we were talking, was the experience of Chinese culture between dynasties, usually following, as Ming Jen pointed out, weak emperors. Those time periods were chaotic, violent and the people suffered.
Always pays to ask someone from within the culture for their point of view.