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Sign up with Google Sign up with FacebookQ: What did you think of China when you where a kid?
My view of China when I was a child was a mixture of the comic from Tintin "The Blue Lotus", the pictures of Hong Kong and the great wall in one old encyclopedia that I had and a few Bruce Lee movies.
To be honest I didn't learn much more about China until several years later. I am actually surprised about how ignorant I was for a long time
How about you? Was China an interesting place for you when you were a kid, somewhere you would like to go, or didn't you even think about China until much later in your life?
When I was a kid I actually thought China was one of those isolated countries where they really don't allow foreigners in etc., That they just kept to themselves just like N. Korea is doing now. Oh, wait a minute they were just like that. But that's what I always knew and thought about when thinking about China.
When I was a kid I loved the old style Kung Fu movies!!
Interesting question.
Been so long since I was a kid, but I never paid much attention to China other than what may have made the headlines in my dad's newspaper.
As a boy, initial impressions of China: Mao and Mao jackets (at one time, fashionable in the West). Other than that, not even the Great Wall or cool Flying Pigeon bicycles.
Oh, yeah. I do recall a reference made to a United Nations assembly with Chiang Kai-shek in attendance. But, for the boy of me, the New York Yankees took precedence at that time.
Guess I led a sheltered life back then...
Yeh, I had an interest from when I was in secondary school. I think it was from watching David Carradine in Kung Fu that did it, oddly enough. Then later I developed an interest in Buddhism, then later still an interest in Taoism. I also found the people seemed to smile a lot. It was always the first place I really wanted to travel to. The States too, but that was more for the love of Starsky and Hutch.
a place where dragons and kung fu fighters live harmoniously togheter
i read about that in the university, but i didnt watch the movie.
GuilinRaf:
FINALLY a person whose knowledge of history-literature does not come from the movies! Thumbs up!!!!!!
I was told that poor Chinese kids only got a hand full of rice a day so eat all your food up. My father if he did not understand something would say it is all Chinese to me. Franck3
I thought it was a place with mystical Kung Fu fighters, lots of old wise men, and a place where people were starving to death. Coming here, I realized only 1 out of 3 were correct.
I was always told to eat everything on my plate because people were starving in China, and that wasting food is a sin. I still believe that it's a sin today, and I almost never waste food. I cringe when I have to do it, though.
MissA:
I hate wasting food.
Our fridge at home is full of cartons of leftover food, because I won't throw leftovers out. It drives my partner crazy - takes up all the beer space and occasionally stuff gets lost at the back of the fridge and new life forms start developing.
That was one thing I actually struggled with in China, the giant banquets full of uneaten, leftover food. I know the staff get it, but still...
Hulk:
Part of the reason I keep getting sick (5-6 times in the past 7 months) is that I'm eating a lot of old food without heating it back up. I gotta heat it up next time, haha.
And yeah, I'm the SAME way. My wife doesn't like wasting food, but she's "Wasted" like 3000 RMB of food in the past 2 months. She feels bad about it, but can't eat it due to pregnancy fickleness. I don't mind this, so I just eat what she wont eat.
It was that place I would get to if I kept digging that hole in the back yard. I don't think my parents wanted me to get there
I remember the David Carradine Kung Fu show, and I always wanted to visit the temple where Caine grew up.
Not sure if it was the right one, but I did get to visit the Shaolin Temple in Dengfeng, which is supposedly the same one. I strained my back trying to throw a kung fu kick like Grasshopper's Master.
This is a really good question.
China was on the other side of the planet. As a kid, in the late 70ies, that means really really far away. The Chinese eat with sticks and they pretty much only eat rice. At least one cartoon taught me that if you dug a hole, and kept digging, you would be able to get to China that way.
I think a lot of my childhood thinking about China has been a blend of all of Asia. I actually thought that China and Japan were happy neighbors and they were a little like Austria and Germany. (Who really knows the difference except slight variations in food)
Being a little older I remember from the news talks about Deng Xiaoping's political reforms, in the late 80ies I think China was often reference to as part of the communist block, and I think I considered it to be behind the iron curtain, even though that term defines the borders between The Soviet Union and western Europe, it seems to not be completely wrong.
People starving and being sent to prison for no good reason, not being allowed to travel was something I think would hit the news once in a while. There is of course the summer of 89 that brought a lot of attention to affairs in China.
As a young person, I had a lot of stuff that was Made in Hong Kong or Made in Taiwan, didn't really make the link to China until much later.
I think I have always had the image of the Chinese as a people that smiles a lot. Which is true, even though they don't smile for the reasons a kid would imaging (the insecure smile/laugh for instance)
I was kinda hoping people would still wear hair in cues, rickshaws were still around and more women wore cheongsam dresses. I tried to get my girl friend to model one for me, no way, so I tried one on, surprised they had my size, but no heels. I look good in red.
Scandinavian:
I really would like to experience China with no cars, mobile phones and personal noise boxes. It must have been so nice getting rickshawed around, the only pollutants in the air being the exhaust from the rickshaw-chauffeur.