journal6

Naipaul’s book the Enigma of Arrival has such a hypnotizing effect that I was lulled to sleep several times in the week when I wrestled with it. Therefore, I made up my mind to reread it when I suffer from insomnia sometime. It is true that his English is elegant and smooth but his content has been diluted in too many pages while there is a lack of an interesting plot. It occurs to me that Charles Dickens wrote for a lucrative purpose and that is why he devoted a lot of space in his novels to some sentimentalisms and verbosities. Charles Dickens was capable of prolixity but he didn’t overact to such an extent as to offend the readers. On the contrary, Naipaul preferred to indulge in his writing to relieve his anxiety of the identity crisis while ignoring the fact that most of the readers read for fun not to share his piled-up emotions. The only justification I can give for his indifference to his readers is that he had earned much money and fame and now it was time that he mixed much of himself with a large volume of details to torture the readers’ nerves. Anyway, I do not sympathize with him about his disillusion of the British Dream. He, self-assuming, laughed at the world and ultimately the world laughed at him.

I notice that he is an Indian subject to the British colonial education and as a result, he cherished the British ideals and shared the values predominant in the British colonial system. I just feel it strange how his mind was poisoned to such a degree that he identified with the British whites. Didn’t he realize that he was different from the British whites and just played a marginalized role in the colonial system? After reading Isaacs’ Scratches on Our Minds: American Views of China and India, I learn that one of the reasons why the Indians are despised is that the Indians, though denounced as an inferior breed, are inclined to take it

journal5

This semester the term I have heard most often is colonialism. In P.R.’ course, we talk about it. When I meet Roger, he will talk about his boredom of reading the books of post-colonialism. Even in my course exploring the Chinese identities, the professor talked about China’s competing with Great Britain and Japan in colonizing Hong Kong and Taiwan while I was sitting there dumbfounded still in the firm conviction that Hong Kong and Taiwan are inalienable parts of China and China’s sovereignty over these two areas is self-evident and universally-known truth. I have hated the term for long since I knew it, not because I hate the evils of the colonialism, but because much exposure to this term has given me a traumatic experience. Just think of a Chinese student, who has to listen to the teachers denounce the evils of western colonialism and read the anti-colonial rhetoric in the politics books all the way from the primary school to the college, and you will have to sympathize with him much: He feels hurt as his country was hurt; he feels revengeful after his indignation is incited; and he feels that the unfairness is the forever theme and what he needs to do is to elevate his country to the highest position in the world hierarchy because he is taught to believe that only the lion has the biggest share. Rather than know the cruelty of the world where many nations strive for supremacy by whatever means, I prefer to live in an illusion of mankind’s brotherhood and philanthropy. Then I begin to think about why people talk about colonialism. It is easy to understand that in china the discussion of colonialism is an important channel to vent the national anger about wrong done by the western powers before, a good chance of blaming the some of China’s trouble on the colonial perpetrators, and also a good way to boost nationalism to mobilize the Chinese people to strive for the rise of China. In the former colonial countries such UK and France, the government allows the topic of colonialism to decorate their democracy as long as the discussion will not interfere with the mainstream discourse and will not target at the overthrowing of the established system. In USA, the legitimacy of colonialism discussion has a specific significance. Not only does the American government show its merits of speech freedom, but also by the discussion it can weaken its imperialist image and glorify its image of a freedom fighter. It is known that the USA has succeeded in transforming itself from a colony to a superpower and now expands itself in the name of promoting democracy in the worldwide area. It occurs to me that the discussion of colonialism has no moral purport because it fails to provoke the sense of guilt of the brutal colonialists, who, on the contrary, figure out many justifications for their colonization and continue to bully the former colonies in new means, leaving the deprived third-world people moping and terrorism fomenting.

It dawns on me that colonialism is the phantom in the opera that haunt the people in their soul as I experienced two incidents today: In today’s class, Peilin told me that his engineering friend complained that if China had colonized the world, there would be no Taiwan strait crisis and he would not have to learn how to speak English. Shortly after the class was over, I received a call from one of my Chinese friends, who told me he was ready to return to China after aborting his study in USA. I felt surprised at his decision because he was eager to do his study here before and he has been here just for a year, far away from his PhD. “My boss is so pushy,” he said, “I can not put up with him any longer. The American ghost treats me like a slave, or rather, less than a slave. I must return to China… I hope one day China will colonize the USA and I will let the American students, who go to work for me, know what a boss is.” I can not help sighing. Colonialism, colonialism…