The First Step in the Journey

This is the beginning of a new “adventure”, of a common 华人 (Hua Ren, ethnic Chinese living outside China) trying to reconnect with his ancestral land, armed with only his curiosity, imagination, and hope of uncovering something interesting. I intend to explore the Chinese world, which includes the numerous languages of its peoples, the arts and cultures, definitely history and politics, as well as other related kinds of stuff. Oh yeah and I intend on doing this with only an intermediate level of mandarin knowledge, no academic background regarding sinology (I studied law back in my university days), and with no prior experience visiting China, I hope it all worked out somehow.

My upbringing is nothing special, and it is precisely why I chose to embark on this journey, you see my dear audience, although my family is fully Chinese in our lineage, through a combination of living in a foreign land, amid other cultures, and Christianity, we sort of losing some of our heritage, this is also the fate shared by millions of 华人 not just in the country where I was born but also in the western world. Anyway, this is intended to be a personal story about the pursuit of my roots, so I’ll be using lots of first-person pronouns and vernacular language, although I shall do my best to be academically credible and worthwhile.

For I don’t know the exact term to define this, I simply going to use the term “Cultural Imperialism” for what I am going to describe, I felt sad and also disoriented regarding the rampant westernization overdose that happened to me, my family, and millions of other 华人 in the country I live in (even though I live in Asia). In the country where I live now, most of the 华人 have lost their names due to government policy of stripping down our name our identity and other acts of cultural genocide, the ability to speak and understand the languages of our ancestral land is not passed down to younger generations, some cultures dying out and replaced by western cultures, lots of 华人 think that western way of life is better and Chinese culture is old, backward and should be discarded, well I’m not saying that the local culture and western way of life is bad, I’m just saying that Chinese culture is not inferior and there should be no shame in embracing Chinesehood. So this is my effort to go against the trend and get myself Chinese-ized.