All that Glitters

Column by Tara Overzat - Aug 13, 2008

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Beijing was my home. For two years I lived and worked in the People’s Republic of China as an English and International Law teacher.

The people I met were like people anywhere with their dreams and hopes for a better life, not only for themselves but for their families.

My students were generally optimistic about their futures, with a booming economy and the sudden emergence of a middle class — but over time it was hard to ignore the set phrases about wanting to serve their “mother land” and achieve great things not for themselves but for the “whole of society.”

In this land that demands the needs of the whole over the needs of the individual, I oddly enough discovered Ayn Rand. Despite the Orwellian bans put on the media and internet in China, the foreign expat community regularly brings books into the country.

In fact, mini-libraries have popped up wherever foreigners have gathered — major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, but also places some Westerners have never heard of like Guangzhou and Dali. It was at one of these library/bookstores in Beijing that I found a beat-up copy of Atlas Shrugged, and later found The Fountainhead.

Ayn Rand’s accurate conclusions about what occurs in a Communist or Socialist country — a “people’s republic” — was both chilling and informative as I was watching it with my own eyes in a country where people are, at times, afraid to talk. The novels changed not only how I viewed China, but how I viewed my life as a whole.

I saw both spectacular and hellacious events while I was a stranger in China. On the positive side, I saw a people struggling for freedom — not only financial freedom, but spiritual and personal freedom as well.

The students I taught were all looking for an individual identity, as if fighting the indoctrination of “One China” they received in their formative years. Perhaps trickle-down influence from the western media contributed to this shift.

Though movies from the west are sometimes banned in movie theatres, these same illegal movies were easy to find on DVD if one was willing to go to one of the myriad black market DVD stores. There you could find, for example, Scorsese’s The Departed, which the government had banned from theatres for its portrayal of its Chinese villains.

On the negative side, people were frightened, ill-informed, and stripped of the basic freedoms of speech, press, and religion. Even if you are not a religious person, you cannot justify restricting another individual’s spiritual or philosophical journey. Banning religion is banning another’s right to think, to congregate, and to know another side of life.

And now I sit on my couch back home in America watching the Olympic Games in the city whose triumphs and flaws I came to know so well. I sit without surprise as our media reports about underage athletes with fake passports, a terrifying murder in a tourist mecca, and a sweet little girl not pretty or “pure” enough to sing at the opening ceremonies.

It’s a tragedy that the world will remember the gaping holes in China’s façade after the Games have gone, but the bigger tragedy is that the Chinese people have lost face.

The curtain has been removed, and nothing but a Politburo full of schemers has been revealed — this time not quietly on a few lone websites, but rather under the harsh media glare of arguably the world’s largest event.

Through all the glitz and glamour of the Opening Ceremonies, we must remember the wise saying “A fool judges people by the presents they give him.”

That, by the way, is an old Chinese proverb.