Oil in Your Lamp to Keep Your Literary Flame Burning
theamericansun.substack.com
As a Chinese ‘paper American’ born in exile in America, unable to square the Chinese identity of my fathers with the American identity of my passport, I view matters of immigration in the West with a perspective different from those of natives. There are things about America in its current state that I feel more keenly as an outsider of sorts, things that perhaps an actual American could not both notice and articulate. I have spent thirty years with the Americans, and I do not think them obliged to understand the habits of my people, sojourners in the land, as much as I feel myself obliged by Providence to understand them, the posterity to whom this commonwealth’s Founding Fathers wished to secure the blessings of liberty. Almost ninety years after Lin Yutang 林語堂 wrote My Country and My People (1935) in English for Anglo-Saxons to understand the Chinese, the need of the moment is not a new book explaining the Chinese psyche, but an understanding that both Americans and Chinese are under threat from the same globalism that first grew out of the West.
Oil in Your Lamp to Keep Your Literary Flame Burning
Oil in Your Lamp to Keep Your Literary Flame…
Oil in Your Lamp to Keep Your Literary Flame Burning
As a Chinese ‘paper American’ born in exile in America, unable to square the Chinese identity of my fathers with the American identity of my passport, I view matters of immigration in the West with a perspective different from those of natives. There are things about America in its current state that I feel more keenly as an outsider of sorts, things that perhaps an actual American could not both notice and articulate. I have spent thirty years with the Americans, and I do not think them obliged to understand the habits of my people, sojourners in the land, as much as I feel myself obliged by Providence to understand them, the posterity to whom this commonwealth’s Founding Fathers wished to secure the blessings of liberty. Almost ninety years after Lin Yutang 林語堂 wrote My Country and My People (1935) in English for Anglo-Saxons to understand the Chinese, the need of the moment is not a new book explaining the Chinese psyche, but an understanding that both Americans and Chinese are under threat from the same globalism that first grew out of the West.