During a pleasant conversation I had the other day with Mr. Mitchell, CEO of the Athens News, he shared with me an interesting anecdote.
When he was traveling in Beijing this January, a tour guide, a 40-something-year-old guy, told everyone that when he was a child, his mother would always force him to eat up all the food on his plate.
She would tell him: “Finish it! Don’t you know that there are children starving everywhere in America?” All the American tourists burst into laughs because, well, guess what American parents told their kids when they were growing up?
But what I would like to talk about today is not parenting tricks on how to make your children finish their vegetables (and this one sucks, by the way), but about the world in different perceptions.
I think what’s behind the laughs is not only “how interesting that our parents are telling us the opposite thing,” but also the belief that the opposite side is so absurdly wrong on this. At least, that would’ve been my reason if I hadn’t known better.
I don’t know whether there were really starving children everywhere in either America or China during that time period, and that’s not my focus.
My point is, there are two worlds out there: the one that objectively exists, and our perception of it — the one in our eyes. The latter defines the actual world we are living in and shapes logic so that what we do makes sense to us.
And by saying “us,” I mean people within a community, a society, a country. Because our perceptions are shaped and limited to the culture and value shared within the society and because societies differ so much one from another, it’s obvious that we have different perceptions, that we see different worlds from different angles.
So, when I think other people are absolutely wrong, chances are they are thinking the same about me. And I have as much of a chance to make a mistake as they do.
But it would be so hard for people to see it. Self-centered as we all are, we’d like to believe, probably out of instinct, that what contradicts our values or what we have always known as “correct,” is wrong.
There is a phrase in Chinese called “a frog in a well.” It is used to describe people with very limited vision: When a frog lives in a well for his whole life and never gets out, he thinks the whole world comprises the well around him and the small part of the sky above his head, and he would laugh at those who told him otherwise.
Now, if you think about it, everybody, in a sense, is living in a sort of well, and what you perceive from the world is quite limited to where you live, what you see or hear from the place you live, and whom you are living with.
Thanks to technology, it doesn’t have to be this way anymore: Frogs can know better by simply sending each other a message, saying, “Hey, what’s your sky look like?” or maybe, “Hey, I heard there are little frogs starving everywhere in your well. Is that true?” Or they might just go out there and have a look at a different world.
Technology has facilitated a better understanding of this complicated world, yet this cannot be realized with the following two obstacles: First, the lack of freedom and access to different opinions, which is a problem Chinese audiences are facing now; second, people do not care enough to know what others think or do not know any foreign language well enough to read in-depth what other countries’ media are covering.
And I think that is the problem here in the United States, and it’s really a shame because I sincerely think that freedom could be better taken advantage of.
Once you try to see the world through the eyes of different people, you are going to realize that what you have always taken for granted might not be the case for others. That does not necessarily imply that you need to change your perception, but you’ll see the world better.
And I can assure that you are going to have so much fun.
Bixi Tian is a graduate student studying journalism and a columnist for The Post. Are you a frog trapped in a well? Call Bixi for help at bt121511@ohiou.edu.
