True Son of Heaven

I finished reading a book called True Son of Heaven in which the author talked about how Jesus actually fulfilled the Chinese culture. The book, while sparse in some aspects, especially about the richness and complexity of being a Chinese, was a good primer about the 'inscrutable' Chinese mind. In my review, I made the following interesting observation:

In Chapter Eleven, “Spooks, Bandits, and Power Saws,” Marshall talks about the significance of walls (and by corollary, doors) to the Chinese, noting that “Every Chinese defines who he is by which doors he sees from within and which from without. (p. 153).” As a member of a Chinese church (with its overly protective wall over its ‘lingua franca” – in my case, the Fujian dialect), I appreciate this wall mentality all so well, when more often than not, our board of elders and deacons deal with church matters the way the Qing mandarins would deal with state affairs – “What the ordinary members don’t know is good for their spiritual well-being.” It seems that transparency is a concept totally alien to most Chinese, Christians or not). The power of walls is even evoked in the West when we use the term, “Chinese Walls” to describe a need-to-know system of confidentiality and disclosure. The Great Wall is more than a great monument to a tyrant’s paranoia; China sees this as the defence of the civilized against the savage; and there is, with the Chinese’ bitter experiences of nomadic raiders like the horde of Genghis Khan and more recently, the Europeans’ humiliation of China during the Opium War, a reminder of foreigners as the savages. The wall, in the Chinese psyche, becomes its solid emblem of xenophobia. Although I agree with Marshall’s assessment that China is now changing and the unreasoning fear of outsiders is subsiding, my own personal experience in Beijing during the Great Cultural Revolution in 1967 indicates that outsiders are still not quite welcome and certainly not to be trusted with information about Chinese events. At the park, together with my Filipino student group which had been invited by a government-regulated Shanghai youth organization to enjoy the sights of China’s “flourishing” of a “Hundred flowers bloom and a thousand thoughts contend, (their slogan for the Cultural Revolution),” I inadvertently walked into ZhongNanHai Park across from Tiananmen Square, where we were rudely confronted by a group of angry, screaming red guards. What we thought was a short walk to burn off our sumptuous dinner turned into an accidental incursion into a “study camp” where the red guards were doing some forceful lectio divina of Mao’s little red book, a collection of his quotations (more like his revolutionary aphorisms), perhaps with the re-education in mind of some bourgeois-revisionists whose dunce caps marked the nature of their disgraced status. Through my somewhat broken Mandarin, I succeeded in convincing them that we were friends (‘peng-you”) of the great proletarian society and that we did not hear anything nor see anything (sometimes the monkey’s “no see, no hear, no talk” works), but not after we were pushed around a bit. Back at the hotel, someone commented how we were seen immediately as outsiders. Perhaps, I replied, still somewhat unnerved, my Beatles t-shirt with Ringo Starr in his mop-head hairdo, might have given us away? In 1967, almost all Chinese wore those drab olive Maoist uniforms. 1984 came early in China. The next day, at BeiDa (Beijing University), I recognized a few of the red guards I encountered the night before. This time, after one of our members made his rousing speech about how the Filipino proletariats were united with the Chinese people in the overthrow of imperialists and capitalists, these same red guards came over and hugged me like a long lost cadre.