He wore the slightly dazed expression that you find among people who have lived through war and revolution and famine and now, in their twilight years, have been assigned the task of raising young children. (查看原文)
The longer I lived in China, the more I worried about how people responded to rapid change. This wasn't an issue of modernization, at least not in the absolute sense; I never opposed progress. I understood why people were eager to escape poverty, and I had a deep respect for their willingness to work and adapt. But there were costs when this process happened so fast. Often the problems were subtle - this was hard to recognize as an outsider. In the West, newspaper stories about China tended to focus on the dramatic and the political, and they emphasized the risk of instability, especially the localized protests that often occurred in the countryside. But from what I saw, the nation's greatest turmoil was more personal and internal. Many people were earching; they longed for some kind of re... (查看原文)