I liked learning about how there’s always a balance between tradition and new concepts/ideas because change happens slowly and nothing ever truly stays the same. This makes sense because there are lots of traditions we’ve read about in the stories in Ha Jin “The Bridegroom” that are still relevant today, but maybe with a modern twist. I also found it interesting how there was a power shift in the modern era, which made it so that China was not the center of the world anymore like how they once were.
I also enjoyed how you compared Confucius and his teaching to Jesus because it made it easier for me to understand. We’ll never know exactly what either one of those prominent figures truly meant because we only have the translated versions (and we also don’t have either one of them on this earth anymore). I know there’s so much interpretation as to what Jesus meant in the Bible, so I found it interesting that that is how Confucius and his concepts were perceived as well.