Blast From The Past
Me and four of my college buddies recently went to a meet-up for all those, who were lucky enough to recieve a one-year scholarship by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) this year. The DAAD really takes care of it’s scholarship holders, and while the event focused on discussing such topics as insurance, how to submit our documents to the Chinese Scholarship Council and why we need to print them on light green paper, they also inconspiciously slipped us a little book called “Abenteuer China – DAAD-Alumni aus vier Jahrzehnten erinnern sich” (Adventure China – four decades of DAAD-alumni think back).
A few days later I was on the plane to China and decided to take a look at said book. It turned out to be a little treasure. Just like the title suggests, it’s basically a collection of retrospects by former German scholarship holders, starting in the mid-70s. All the more recent ones, from the past 5-10 years or so, are nice to read and made me smile a little, because they mentioned those situations that any laowai in China experienced himself at some point.
But what really made the book unique were the older reports. Some alumni actually didn’t write a recap but instead published a letter (yep, a real old school letter) they sent home back then or a page from their diary. The first west German students came to Beijing in 1973 – due to political reasons that was even before the first Americans arrived. And as much as I was taught about the different times in China, to read how the very streets I have been walking on the past few days used to be nothing but piles of cabbage and a few dudes on mules from people who experienced all those things first hand was actually pretty fascinating.
I feel like there is such a big difference between simply knowing that most areas in China used to be inaccessible by foreigners 30-40 years ago and hearing about it from people who got arrested by the police multiple times because some dopey Chinese bus driver accidentally drove them into closed areas.
So I started wondering, weren’t those times in some crazy way more charming, more interesting than today’s China?
I don’t think they were.
In spite of all the old school socialist Chineseness that got lost on China’s journey to a modern society, I think there is hardly anything that can compete with the drive, the dynamics China’s modernized spots like Beijing can offer. They form a totally new kind of intercultural point of contact, where expat communities are built by “First World Westerners” instead of Asians, East Europeans or Africans. (And as for the other parts of China… I believe in 让一部分人先富起来.)
And now I am really curious what someone who reads a little book just like the on I got in another 40 years will think.
