Читать книгу CHINA BOYS: How U.S. Relations With the PRC Began and Grew. A Personal Memoir - Nicholas MD Platt - Страница 13

“You should know something important about Chinese feelings as you start your study of our language. Americans may think we are yellow, but we think you are purple.” Dr. Ma was sitting in his office under the fluorescent lights at a drab steel table that was standard Government Issue for classrooms. He wore a shawl, a scholar’s wool cap, and calligrapher’s gloves (with the fingers free) to protect against the fierce air-conditioning blast in Arlington Towers. An elderly, exiled editor of a major Catholic newspaper in Peking before the revolution, Ma was a fund of lore on Chinese attitudes, beliefs, and history. He had suffered when the Communists took over in 1949, was in poor health, and died a few months later.

Ma’s jolting description of the wide gap in perceptions that Americans and Chinese have of each other, of course, applies more widely than to mere appearance, but the sense of how strange Chinese think we look was a good place to start a long journey of learning. Later, when traveling in Taiwan and provincial Mainland cities where huge crowds would gather in the streets to ogle my family and me, I already understood that they saw us as odd zoo animals from another world.