Change of Heart

Food aside, just about everyone complains about the Chinese.

I recently watched a documentary, Last Train Home, that made me regret some of the things I've felt, thought, and maybe even written about my take on the Chinese.

Conservatives simply hate the Chinese because, well, they're communists. Many liberals have trouble with them because of human rights issues, and I think Americans all over the political spectrum are upset about financial things. True, a lot of that is just hysteria and it's also true that buying US debt is simply us acting as their bank, but we all got excited about Japanese investment a couple decades ago and human nature hasn't changed at all since then.

I avoid buying some Chinese goods some times simply because I often want to use something like a screwdriver more than once. If it's something I expect to use once and throw away, like paper towels or eyeglasses with plastic lenses that are going to become less useful every time I use them, I often go with cheap.

This upsets people who think whenever I do that I'm supporting a slave state. While this may be true, it's more the government of China than its people that I think most have trouble with. That documentary, Last Train Home, changed my thinking about the people.

Dramatically.

I don't know what Lixin Fan wanted to do when he made his film. I rarely about things like that choosing, instead, to let the work speak to me for itself. He may have wanted to show us how the people suffer or it may have just been to show us the largest human migration on the planet.

What I got out of it was a deep appreciation for how the people in China struggle to survive and better themselves, things I cannot fault them for. Peasants living on farms have no money and (not surprisingly) want to get things for themselves and their families. To get any money at all, they have to move to cities, work in sweatshops that allow those with little or no education to assemble things, and live in horrifying conditions.

This film, by the way, shows us one such family.

After making the heartbreaking choice to leave their children, mom and dad scrape out a dismal life only to return, as most Chinese do, home to celebrate Chinese New Year. In a touching scene, they give their teenage daughter the present of a phone, and I tear up even now just thinking about it.

It's easy for us in America to take our way of life for granted. Seeing how the other 95% of the world lives is always humbling, especially since those of us who were born here had nothing to do with it.

I can no longer turn my nose up at Chinese goods, not knowing that someone, somewhere in China needs a job so they can pack their meager goods in a cardbox suitcase to travel and hope to live as well as I do.

My heart isn't stone.