The Things Parrol Said

There were a few things that Parrol told us in his introduction to Beijing that threw me off.

He noted that there were many towers in China that were left over after the walls came down. He said this was a symbol for China’s past tendency to be a closed country and that the walls coming down mean the country is becoming more open. Another guide told us that the walls came down to expand the city and that the towers were a reminder of growth and how far China had come. It seems to me that although China was very closed-off in the past, once it was realized that its privacy was damaging its ability to compete with the western world, an extreme eagerness to westernize, or at least appear westernized, developed. With this in mind, the latter symbolism of the towers seem more valid in that the people remember how far they have come and how far they must still go rather than reminisce of a time that hindered current success.

Parrol also told us that family wasn’t as important as Dr. Hinderer had originally said. He told us that many children hate their parents because they are pushed too hard in school. He said that’s why they go away to college or go to Beijing – to get away from their parents. He did admit that he ran from his parents but eventually went back to them because of how much they helped him. But it seemed like such a different presentation of family and respect than we had learned about in class. Even when we visited the hutongs, we saw a private family owned hutong that, although worth a lot of money, would never be sold because it was a family heirloom and family was of the utmost importance. Our guide told us many families also lived in the public hutongs and that young couples would move away from their families in those situations to get more space and privacy, but she did not say anything about disregarding the importance of family. I asked Yeyi about it later and she simply laughed and said Parrol was probably a bad student in school and that family was just as important as we had seen in the other situations. It made me wonder how many of the things Parrol said we should take with a grain of salt.