People Learn By Considering

My older daughter has been loath to take in movies in movie theatres for the last year or two.  It's one of those teenage positions that are futile to argue with.  So it caught my ear when she said she’d been at the pictures last night.   “Cool.  So what did you see?”  “Dunkirk.  My friend wanted to see it.  And Nai Nai had said it was good.” We talked a bit and she’d enjoyed the film.  

This morning my wife wanted to discuss the movie around the kitchen table over fried eggs and blueberries.   The older one took us through the plot and explained some of what she’d enjoyed.  But soon I realized my wife had a different agenda.  She had read something in a public wechat thread that had complained about the movie.  Patriotic Chinese people, she commented from the article, shouldn’t support this film, because, on the one hand U.S. theatres weren’t showing “Wolf Warrior 2”, the top grossing Chinese nationalistic flick. (One assumes, U.S. audiences simply voted with their wallets, much like Chinese movie goers can do with Dunkirk, should they choose).   We won't bother to delve into the fact that one is a fictive adventure and one is a depiction of a historical event.  

More ridiculous to me, this thread suggested that the movie had failed to note the Chinese contribution to the events of the film.  Must we? I could be wrong, and I took a quick look for a sanity check to be absolutely sure, but to my knowledge there was absolutely no overt Chinese military contribution to the battle whatsoever.  The Chinese government was pinned up into Chongqing doing its best to resist the ruthless and relentless bombing of that city.  In May of 1940, Japan controlled the east coast of China.  The Guomindang was in no position to project power into Wuhan, let alone Western Europe and the CCP were holed up in the caves of Yan’an. 

I don’t mind that one person or another yells something unreasonable and thin skinned out in social-cyber.   We all know how hard it is to find vile and absurd positions germinating from the American soil.  And my Chinese reading isn’t fast enough to know whether there is much of a debate or not.  One just hopes that there are plenty of other educated Chinese folks consuming social media who have the courage to say, “Dude, your critique is irrelevant.  It was a ‘world war.’  Much of the world fought.  Much of the world suffered.  It’s OK to tell a story that features one part of that story and doesn’t mention another part.  That’s how people learn, by considering other perspectives.”  I know your out there.  I know your are. 

I forever hope those voices are percolating.  They needn’t apologize for western hegemony.  But they must be strong enough to confront different narratives to those this nation’s ruling party holds as doctrine.  I started a book this morning after finishing one yesterday.  It’s off to a good start.  “The Writer at War” by Vasily Grossman is an account of the Nazi invasion of Russia.  Neither England, nor the U.S. nor indeed China, has featured thus far.  I don’t suspect they will.  It was a different theatre of the conflagration, which merits consideration on its own. 

Sunday, 09/03/17