Monday, April 19, 2004

Love by Action

In Chinese traditional movies, we don't always use kissing to represent love, nor do we say 'I love you' all the time. We represent it by action or we use other symbols to represent it.

It is very typical for me, and for Chinese people, in fact to express love in a hidden form. Love is hidden in the heart. We don't express love with things such as flowers in our films but by actions.


(Gordon Liu, who was a fighting monk in Shaw brothers kung fu films, interviewed in Metro today)

The dominantly used concepts of love that exist here in London are firstly those from Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, and secondly those from the globalized Hollywood Mass Emotion Machine, (which was controlled and influenced for most of the Twentieth Century by a handful of ex-Pogrom Jewish immigrants). You can think about what they are.

Love by action, instead of just romantic words or chocolates and flowers, leads to tangible growth. Compare that to getting a crappy bunch of flowers, or some lame chocolates that have been carelessly picked up in the supermarket. Love by action involves directly helping the other person, and taking some responsibility for their future best interests.

The population of China is estimated at having already been 100 million at 0 A.D., and today is a billion people representing nearly 20% of the global population. Despite this, there is a limited perception of Chinese people which is gained only from Bruce Lee/Jackie Chan movies, and the post-drinking trip to the Chinese restaurant/takeaway. The old stigma of Chinese inscrutability lives on. Children immediately break into a Kung Fu routine or a Banzai! joke (a British comedy which is witty but plays on old Oriental stereotypes) as soon as they see someone Chinese.

By comparison, could you imagine the uproar if children were doing "Black and White Minstrel" or "Golliwog" impressions everytime they saw someone Afro-Caribbean?

Today, British people are actually more knowledgeable about Thailand, because of its popularity as a tourist destination, than they are of China. So how can Britain delude itself into thinking it can be multicultural when most of its people scarcely have any intellectual understanding, let alone feeling, about the history and culture of this fifth of the world's population?

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