A Pity
Today is May Day. What would I do if I were in China now? Maybe I could go climbing Mt. Hua. Maybe I could travel to the rural areas and touch the growing tender leaves, smell diverse fresh wild flowers and the slow flow of steams. Back to the real world, I was writing my blog in a hostel located in a total city without all the things I just mentioned.
On the Friday few weeks ago, I was assigned to act as teaching assistant of my “colleague” (It is Give Program ^ ^). She planned to give students a class about the essay “Walking” written by a Chinese author. I went through the essay and found that there were some descriptive paragraphs about the beauty of early spring in southern China: “New green stretches casually. The tender twigs have grown… ”
Here I felt somewhat tough. How to present the pictures of spring for these Singaporean students? I thought most of them had never witnessed spring. Living in such a tropical climate, the concept of four seasons is rather remote to them.
I am sorry for them. I cannot imagine how great the loss is to the life to every Singaporean. The answers to some mysterious questions can be only sought in nature. Pitifully, the gloss of the eternity o life deceives everyone. I cannot tell how they feel after facing the permanent scene for 10 years, 20 years and even 60, 70 years. But definitely I can assert that many beautiful poems and sentences admiring the renaissance of lives, the joyance of harvests against the golden background and the peaceful world under the cover of soft snow would not exist without the circle of seasons. To Singaporeans, spring is in TV, summer is waiting outside the door, autumn is in books and winter is hiding in refrigerators.
Likewise, I cannot tell the specific differences between a child living in a city without seasons and nature and a child living in countryside with seasons and nature. Nevertheless, at least, I would prefer the second option. I was deeply shocked by the lines in “the Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring” : “It is not bad to celebrate a simple life”. Associating the life here, I can see that citizens run after lots of electric products and deal with lots of accounts and passwords, through which they are trying to anaesthetize themselves and struggling to mend their psychological blankness but they never find the real reasons why they need to behave like that. I really feel sorry for them. They nearly own everything except seasons and nature, which cannot be substituted by the clean environment and high GDP.
Would you like to let your children grow up here if you had ones? I would say “No”. The imperfection of childhood means the imperfection of the entire life. Some temperaments are taken away along with the disappearance of seasons and nature. The appreciation for nature, the cherishing of time, and the cognition of life…can they be perceived properly without the existence of seasons and nature? Isn’t it terrible?
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It is really a pity.
ReplyDeleteWe are so lucky to have four seasons in China. To tell the truth, I don't like winter. I don't like the cold weather and the feeling of so many clothes. Then I came here, without winter. When winter comes, I am always thinking that spring is coming. However, it's always summer, which comes after spring. Then I will think spring has gone. It is a season for our efforts. For the dream we have, we came here. I should say the season here is boring, although summer is my favourite season. However, we will hold on the dream and then go on. If we have children later, we can let them choose where he or she wants to live. Their life should be decided by themselves and they are supposed to be responsible for their choice. So do we. Once a person has decided on something, he or she may miss something else. At that time, we just choose what we value most.
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