To Be or Not To Be Engulfed in the Falsehood of Information About the World?

Out of my classes in the Chinese school in Vientian, Laos in 1957, the young classmates of mine loudly sang the Chinese patriotic songs cheering the Communist Party that had recently won the civil war in China.  They believed that with in 10 years from then, China would catch up and surpass both Soviet and the US.  When the tricycle from the US Information Services came around to hand out copies of the colorful magazine, "The World Today," they ran after the tricycle and grabbed piles of the magazine.  Back home, they gave the magazine to their parents who then used the paper from the magazine for wrapping of the goods for the customers.  Almost daily, I heard them saying, "The American is lying and sarcassing about China.  China is a lot better than they said."

I did not believe anything they said because my father was an army officer under the Nationalist and he always told me about how bad and how cruel the communists were.

September 15, 1958, I arrived in Taipei for my high school studying.  My relatives in Taipei deposited me in the school dormitory in Panchiao, Taipei district the next day.  At the airport, all of the mainland China's stamps in my stamp collection books were seized without any explanations.

Each morning at the school we would wake up to the military horn signal.  Our dormitory were supervised by army officers ranging fromthe Majors to the Colonels.  Our upper classmen received military training with real guns (of course not loaded).  Then from the first moment of the morning the school's broadcasting system would fill the air of that roughly 20 acre campus with patriotic songs about fighting the communists and recovering the mainland.  At each week's school meeting we would stand for about 2 hours listening to the speeches about how bad mainland communists wee and how pitiful our countrymen in the mainland were suffering.  They always talk about how lucky and better off we were in Taiwan.  The speeches would always end with slogans about fighting back to the mainland.

In the dinning hall, our subsidized food consisted of unlimited supplies of boiled rice, a big bowl of untasty soup to each table of 10 people and each with a shallow plate about 5-6 inches in diameter half-filled with cooked cabage.  Each month we would have two special food days.  That means each student would ge an egg in addition to that plate of vegetable.

I tend to believe that whatever we got there were a lot better than the folk in China.  Of course all short wave broadcasting from mainland were interrupted.  Short wave radio owners much registered with the police.

In the US, most of the American I met realized how limited their exposure about the world were.  A few were convinced that American was the most important and the most significant place in the world.  Some asked me, "Hey, you are from Thailand, that guy is from Japan.  You wre both in Asia,  Do you get to see each other sometimes?"

Some American admitted that they could have been the least informed people about the rest of the world because the entire society overemphasized themselves, their own past and present, their own rationales, their own views.

In mainland China January 1991.  My colleagues at C.P. advised me to bring a lot of reading materials because their wouldn't be much interesting reading things in the mainland.  I asked for and received all of the in-flight newspaper and magazines from the very sympathizing air stewardess.  I even asked for the privilege to bring the in-flight silverwares  with me for uses in China.  People at C.P. told me not to make friends with anybody in Mainland because they were all bad, especially all the hotel staff, they were supposed to be all spies posted there by the government.  They told me that the only vegetable I could find in China would be the cabage and nothing else.

The next morning, as we drove through an open market in Ningbo, I saw scores of categories of vegetables and fishes being sold.  Then, I checked the accuracy of my "pre-trip orientation" with my Assistant Vice President who accompanied me to the work site.

"Oh, you cannot buy that.  Those are for the Chinese who has the right kind of coupons only!" he explained.  

Then in the lobby bookstore of the hotel, I found the latest copies of Time magazine, along with Sport Illustrated, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Fortune, South China Morning Post, Strait Times, etc.  This time I did not asked my AVP in order not to embarrass him.  With luck, I also found my favorite books there, three copies of Erle Stanley Gardner's "Perry Mason."  Of course, I grabbed all that I could get for fearing that they won't be there the next day.

I became friendly with almost everyone inside and near the hotel where I lived.  In summer, my room was always filled with big water melons because the price was only about 25 stang per kg., thus, each friend tend to carry two of them for me.  When I lost a tennis ball borrowed from the hotel in the grass outside the fence, five girls from the front desk and the hotel's dinning room agreed to guide me to downtown Ningbo to find the replacement for the hotel.  When more Thai staff came, I only need to ask to get the permissions from the hotel staff to use their bicycles to ride around the, then, mostly empty "development zone."

Today, entering the 18th year of my stay in mainland China.  Any time that I return to Ningbo, these friends now in their 30's would surround me and invite me to stay at their homes.    If any of them were ever the spies of the Communist, may be they should have more spies like these.

Now, these stories are told to you here just to point out how sad a society could be when it is blocked from news from outside or when they only received biased or prejudice news.  One most important point to make here is, history can never lie.  Don't allow youself to be fooled, especially by yourself.