When I was a kid in southern Ontario, our favourite mind-altering impossibility was to imagine digging, not to unearth potatoes or worms, but straight down “until we get to China!” We understood, in a five-to-seven-year-old way, that since the world was round – there was a globe in my brother’s room, so that part was obvious – then the Chinese people must be upside-down. (And their children were starving, as I knew from my mother’s frowning over every uneaten vegetable.) In places like Canton, Ohio, or Pekin, Illinois, or half a dozen other American towns, apparently even the grown-ups nurtured the same fantasy about the inscrutable other side of the planet.
We’ll be there by lunchtime, I think.
Now I live in northeastern China. I don’t feel upside-down, well, not most of the time, and my little family is proving the old global-awareness mantras: yup, people are pretty much people, wherever they are, and they love to eat and sing and laugh, and they love their families and get mainly-unexplainable pleasure when “one of theirs” wins a game or a race or the Nobel Prize for Literature. They want peace and a better life for their kids. The usual.
The longer I’m here, though, the more I think of my old backyard dreams, because in ways mostly silly and insignificant, there is a definite strain of oppositeness. It starts with food. (Doesn’t everything?)