What Made Me Different

I meant to write this one a week ago but well... Here I am anyway.

I left the Japanese kitchen that I'd been working for almost a year in Central Market, and started my new job as a cellarhand in Clare Valley. When handing me my last payment my boss included a thank you card in the envelope. My boss' wishes were brief and straight forward but his wife gave me a relatively long one, in which she said I was the first Chinese person she met that is reliable and modest when it comes to topics about China.

I was thrilled to be given such a comment, but I wasn't that surprised because I know exactly what sort of Chinese people she's talking about and I've met plenty of them. They are brainwashed going through the Chinese education system that aimed at anti-intelligence and reverse-elimination of elites. I would have been exactly the same had I not come to Australia to study. The thing is, those other Chinese people she's talking about also live in Australia, what do I have that is different?

They did not open their eyes to what the Communist Party hadn't informed them. Although there are no heavy censorship of the internet in Australia (The fact that the government is proposing one enrages me) as in China many of those people are still voluntarily limiting their internet experience to what they were used to offered back in China, using the Chinese mimic of Facebook, Twitter etc instead of the real thing. I was like that for the first few months being in Australia, reading news from Xinhua instead of Reuters and other trustworthy news outlets.

But then I accidentally discovered a Chinese forum rxhj.net, which were set up by overseas Chinese who are extremely hateful towards China, Chinese people and the Chinese government. They hated the brainwashing education and came to realize it after going overseas and they set it up to tell the truth, reverse the brainwash process and try to educate people to adapt to a conservative Western life, they discuss current Chinese events on the forum but in a very different perspective than the official news outlets in China. I was pretty angry the first few times when I read about what they were saying, but I was also extremely curious so it started to become a daily task for me to check on there for new posts and see what they have to say about things. I started comparing their version of the story to what was told on Xinhua just to see how different people interpret or how they lie about an event, using my conscience instead of what I was told when it comes to judging. And gradually I dropped Xinhua as a source for news, and when it showed up on google I try to avoid clicking it. I realized I have been living in a big fat lie for such a long time, and all the Communist Party cares about is stupefying its citizens so no one voices up against its dictatorship. The result is immensely arrogant and greedy creatures that is not fit to be called human, and there are 1.5 billion of them. They do not have morals, they scream out their patriotism towards China whenever they can and they claim you being racist when you have anything against their views. It is until you got rid of every bit of "Chinaness" in you that you are reborn to be human.

Now I am living a China-free-wherever-possible life, simply to survive. Chinese people put toxins in infant formulas and heavy metal in toys, they produce vaccines that kill, cars that guarantee death during a collision and online chat clients that scan your computer for 'suspicious' files and report them secretly to the National Security. How could I trust anything Chinese? There are genuine and good quality 'made in China' goods out there but for now they have lost my trust completely and wherever there is a possible alternative to Chinese made goods I will go for it and I am willing to pay more for the quality and trust. I use English operation systems on my computers and avoid any Chinese software running on it as much as possible and I pay for German antivirus software instead of Chinese ones which themselves are like viruses. I buy Chinese books published in Hong Kong or Taiwan instead of the mainland. I own a $10 Swiss made potato peeler and a pair of $20 made in USA scissors (as opposed to Chinese made $1 peeler and $2 scissors), I am proud of them and they have never let me down. Anyone that got to use them have expressed surprise of how good a potato peeler can be. What I told them was that they are always supposed to be that good but the Chinese just never made it that good. People that fell for cheap Chinese made goods had severely cut back their quality of life.

My attitude towards things had also changed over time, I will focus more on human life above anything. For example historic events such as the Big Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Chinese people are too used to avoid the damage these events had done to them and only call them minor mistakes made by Mao Zedong that should not harm his glorious reputation. The fact is during the 28 year regime of Mao, which is a period of peace instead of war, more people died than the sum of casualty of the two World Wars. It is rightful to say Mao is eviller than Hitler.

I feel there are things here that I could expand further but I think I might do it later.