Discussion

judy and anonymous; this is just the kind of awareness we (in the minority world) need to enable us to start to understand different experiences of childhood (and parenting for that matter). i think we have to be careful about how we set ourselves up to "judge" (and comment upon) how other cultures address child rearing etc...who are we to say what's right?...i'm sure if you ask chinese parents about this, they may not be phased!

Andrew:

Too often the Western world has a fear of "judging" one another. When I started this blog, I was determined to make it a resource, and as a resource, there are things we like and things we don't like. A resource place is a little like a pier store used to be - you see some nightmare trinkets you are not sure are particularly legal - like dried monkey heads, and you see cute things and funny things, and things you just have to buy and take home. I remember the giant Tahitian wine bottle my parents brought home with the one pound spider living inside it.

To understand a culture or a person, one has to have a home base of reason - I believe that's called formation. Real formation doesn't narrow the scope, it allows a person to stand on rock. That rock comes from understanding the pros and cons of one's own culture well enough to embrace the pros and cons of other cultures.

In the West, we have a certain standard of cleanliness. That includes a daily bath, diapers, and a certain standard of clean beds, food, cooking utensils and water clean enough to drink from the tap. In the East, these things are not always available to everyone. That says something about the development of both cultures. When my children went to China, they knew the standards they were accustomed to would be left in the States, and they went anyway, and did the job. My son built a cyclotron for cancer treatment there.

What they experienced was very different than they expected. The playground - what there was of it was covered in human feces. People urinated in the streets. The public bathrooms were difficult at best and covered in unmentionables. In the restaurants, the people spit on the floor and threw their food on the floor as they finished with something.

There are no ovens in China, and all cooking was done on an electric platform that was either too hot or too cool. Because my children lived in housing provided by a hospital, they had a small washing machine that would wash one or two items at a time. It was broken half the time. The tap water was undrinkable, and there were open sewers all over their town. You could not open a window for the pollution. The skies were dark much of the time. It rained once, and they realized the sidewalk was green not brown.

Yet these were the asides of living there, the second part. My children liked China very much and made a lot of friends I hope they will have forever. They shopped and ate at public places every day. They learned some of the language, and their one year old daughter enjoyed the attention of the curious Chinese people. She came home speaking more Chinese than her parents!

Are these judgments? Would I care to take my school children to a playground covered in human feces? Would you like a trip in an elevator in the UK while the child being held next to you urinated on your foot? I'm thinking no to both questions. I'm thinking that the sense of culture might actually get in the way of "who is right" at that point.

The fact that my children are formed allows them to travel abroad well. My son especially is a great traveler and has been to the North Pole. He said Santa is a great guy. His teen son, Sam as well enjoyed his visit to China and found the eating and drinking a real test of his early formation. He said the jellyfish soup was interesting and tasted like a raw egg with a crunchy center. The sea slug was a little rough at first, and Brendan had to nix the cocktails for Sam after the third round, and he said no to eating the donkey - simply because no one else was eating it.

If I could pick a place to travel, I would like to go to Irian Jaya and go out into the wilds to visit with the tree people or the Kombai. I think it would be so neat to visit one of our remaining stone age peoples. To wake in the morning fifty feet in a tree would be an outstanding adventure. To learn to cook without utensils, without pots and pans would be a real treat. Not sure about eating larvae - they say it's a bit like exploding pus pockets.


So in lieu of visiting the tree people and feasting on palm pulp and wild pig, I'll just post stories about people here and there and try to bring us all closer to understanding one another. Because understanding ourselves and embracing one another as we can is what it's all about.