(via isawitonthetelevision)
Thanks for sharing this. Do you remember a while back when I thought I might be addicted to the internet? I found this quiz online, and was almost disappointed to discover that I fell into (but just barely) the normal range. I don’t know now what I’m supposed to think after reading this article - maybe that everything we experience in the West, no matter how tragic we think it is, is somehow always worse in some other places in the world.
For some reason I feel that way about children dying too, even though it’s obviously as bad as bad can be, no matter where and to whom it happens. But for some reason the idea of Asian parents who have lost their one child fills me with a kind of dull horror that is far more despairing than when I hear similar news from other countries. There is this mentality in China, this kind of everything-on-the-line mentality that drives much of how the people and the government work, from the insane need to control something as uncontrollable as the internet to the university admission tests that basically determine your life, and your parents’ lives. In the west, our prevailing media example is of people who are resilient, who recover after loss, who divorce and remarry, who find meaning and beauty in small things, who are mostly OK with the lives they’ve built. In China they are scared and proud, and scared some more.
I feel for my peeps, I really do, but they’ve got so much drama going on!!
