Author: jparson1

Recently when interviewing a friend of mine Mario, I found that he recently had an internship in Shanghai at Microsoft headquarters. During his time there while teaching English to many of the people who he worked with, they had a discussion about what it was like to live permanently in this government when working inside of an industry that has to use the internet so much. And all of these employees were totally willing to explain to him that everyone knew the government regulating the internet was a bad thing, so they all had VPN’s and they all had good ones. Even the business overall, the Microsoft HQ, had a company wide VPN. I found this extremely fascinating because VPN is a much less necessary thing in the US unless you have information to protect from the general public.

The other thing that he told me about this business culture that brand names were literally everything to these people. Your socio-economic status is everything that you are when walking down the streets and even inside the business. So he said almost every single person there would have some kind of Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Bradbury, and etc. whatever name brand you can think of people had it one their person. Mario was telling me that one of the crazy things about this business culture was the fact that rather than celebrating a big closing or deal with a dinner in an extremely professional setting. That these people would actually go get super drunk, and go on a shopping spree at super nice name brand stores. Which is honestly hard not to giggle at a bit, but pretty different compared to what happens here.

That’s all there is to this blog, a pretty simple one, although I found it extremely fascinating.

In a global historical studies class a discussion was struck on the topic of family loyalty. Whilst researching and discussing this topic you can very easily find that loyalty and honor in China are almost unbelievably unparalleled in the rest of the world. In fact in some philosophers words, there is no option but to completely respect your family and never turn your back on them. A question was raised in this discussion on whether or not people would turn their backs on their family if something bad/illegal happened. Many people responded that it depends on how bad this action was, but how would you really know unless something like this had really happened to you? Is it possible that this culture from China has bled into the United States, or is it completely lost? I may have an answer to these questions.

Listening to others claim that they would turn their parents in if they did something illegal, was really almost one of the most frustrating things on the face of the planet. They’re even claiming they would, when it was things that don’t even affect them as a human being. While as a person who has lived through an abusive household, I never told anyone what I went through. I could’ve told the police, I could’ve moved to my mom’s house. Yet I chose not to, because of an innate respect for family that I was just born with. Why didn’t I say anything? Why would I still care about the family members that did this thing to me? Because we’re human, and we don’t know how much we rely on our parents until we don’t have them. Sometimes people don’t say things about events even worse than this.

One of my good friends has known that his mother was having an affair for years, and still hasn’t told his father. He can’t bring himself to, in his head if he said anything he would be the reason that his parents separated.

The point here through these darker stories, is that I think people would be surprised how much they wouldn’t rat their parents out for. Some of me wonders if this Chinese culture isn’t necessarily just theirs, but that they actually just understand these things that people are born with. Not just something we study, but something we all also experience. I believe firmly that this “cultural” thing, is actually just a factor of the Chinese culture being able to accept the fact that this is “The Way”.

Feel free to agree or disagree, always love great discussion!

Whilst reading the “Tiger Fighter” piece by Ha Jin it was hard not to quickly catch on to the problem at stake here, which is a world wide message. Whilst taking a course on romantics, morals and religion there were many points in time where we spoke on the topic of morality. In Ha Jin’s ‘Tiger Fighter’ piece there is a problem at stake which is that these people are trying to recreate a book through film, in which there is a scene where a man must fight a tiger and defeat it. Already in the time that this story takes place there is no such thing as CGI, or computer generated interfaces, so this means somebody would have to fight the tiger. Where morals come into question is when this director allows somebody to do this, by tranquilizing the tiger.

Throughout this story the main character slowly falls into a bad mental state, it’s said that he had schizophrenia but I think if you look further into the text this fight with the tiger caused whatever mental state was triggered during the fight, not schizophrenia. I don’t believe a doctor at this time could diagnose something along the lines of PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Along with this the director also knows that he is putting people in danger, and still lets this man acting as a tiger fighter to try again and humiliate himself in front of his peers.

Morally, to me this is all wrong, and eventually this director decides to kill the tiger for its fur to fake the scene, in a safe way. In doing this, however, and allowing the man who he’s made mentally ill by having him fight tigers karma struck back and the mentally ill actor almost killed the man inside of the tiger fur. After all of this they got the scene “right”

To me the story has a hidden message of doing things ethically or morally incorrect can get you what you want. There’s no hiding that in life, it would be a lie to say that you couldn’t get something that you want the incorrect way. However look at all the repercussions this director now must face. A tigers life on his hands, one man not the same man as he was, and another concussed as well as almost killed. These all fall down to this directors poor decision making skills. Ha Jin seems to be saying, “you can get what you want by doing it wrong, but can you face what you may end up doing to those around you?” Let me know if you agree or disagree, I’d love to discuss.