I was born in Canada in 1947. I went to China in 1985. It had opened up to the outside world only a few years before with the Open Door Policy of 1978. I stayed for over thirty years. During that time I kept diaries. My Chinese friends often said I should share them. “Not many foreigners lived through those years of dramatic change. It would be interesting to see the process through the eyes of a ‘wai guo ren’ (outside-country-person)." Below is a sample from December 31, 1987:
"My students invited me to their New Year’s Party. I walked in around 9:30pm. They were sitting in two groups, one on either side of the studio classroom. They all shouted a welcome, offered me a seat and filled both my hands with sunflower seeds. The desks had been pushed aside to make an open space in the middle. The game they played required one team to sing a song and the other team, across the room, to sing a different song whose first word was the same as the last word of the song just sung. I was asked to perform. I wrote the words for 'Frere Jacques' on the blackboard and led a few verses. They divided themselves into boys and girls to sing it alternately. I hesitate to call them “boys” and “girls”; they are 19 and 20 years old. To Western eyes, a party where people sing songs, perform for each other, play volleyball with a balloon using their foreheads, cook food (bao jiaozi), take pictures of each other, laugh a lot as a group, dance ballroom dances with grace and modesty to music that is not deafening, where girls can dance with girls and sometimes boys with boys to learn the steps (with very low temperature sexual overtones), dancing with different partners…no strong pairs; all has the innocence and exuberance of children at play.
Why is their peer’s party in the West so different? Deafening music, strong pairing - or wanting it badly - dancing with sexual flavours, a lot of alcohol, cigarettes, and some drugs…Although I was about twice the age of my students, I was welcome. There was cheer and beauty; pure hearts. There was no sense of cliques, who’s in, who’s out, who’s cool, and who’s not. Even the somewhat ostracized, socially-challenged student with terrible health was there. He wrapped himself around a guitar most of the night. I moved closer for a while to listen and he played me Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and finished it with a beautiful shy smile."
As a preamble to these diaries, I have added a description, also in diary-like form, of some of my life before I went to China. I felt the diaries would be better understood knowing something of the standpoint from which they were written. Most of us acculturate locally, then rub shoulders increasingly with other groups and social strata in our ever-shrinking, globalizing world. The story is in the rub.
This site is under construction. It is fairly complete up to 1995.
I have another website with examples of my architectural design work in China at www.townsnet.ca.