Back through the Dragon Gate
Apr 9th, 2007 by Michael Max
Language evaporates faster than last night’s dream. My ears still wring meaning out the sounds of Chinese, but it is as if I am speaking through a mouth filled with cold oatmeal. The muscles that move the tongue in Chinese have gone bedriddenly weak.
I can not imagine what it is like to be Shanghaiese. They think nothing in that city of tearing down entire extended neighborhoods and replacing them with something fantastic from the future. It makes those little development projects in downtown Seattle look like mosquito bites.
The rate of change is so accelerated it makes my foreigner head spin, if this kind of rate of change was occurring in Seattle the government would have to put the entire population on some kind of mood altering drug. But, then those drugs are already freely prescribed for everything from anxiety to “we can’t figure out your diagnosis.”
China, it is rather like watching a butterfly emerge, even as it spins its cocoon.
