During my Chinese Literature class on Thursday, my professor explained in depth the three most common schools of thought in China: Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.\u00a0 During this discussion, my professor noted that Eastern thought focuses on the collective, while Western thought focuses on the individual.\u00a0 I knew this before, but it can still be a difficult notion to grasp.\u00a0 How does this apply to the people living today?<\/p>\n
The very next day, I had my one-on-one session with my professor.\u00a0 Instead of going over my homework, we decided just to talk.\u00a0 We discussed the recent changes to the One Child policy, driving in Xi’an (it can be like a parking lot sometimes!), and life in Beijing.\u00a0 She began to describe what a \u7761\u57ce (shui cheng) was.\u00a0 It literally translates to sleeping city.\u00a0 The rent it so expensive in Beijing, many people sleep (and live) in smaller towns just outside the city limits and come by train everyday into the city to work.\u00a0 She was describing commuting!<\/p>\n
However, I noticed that when I described the same situation that occurs in Washington DC, our descriptions weren’t quite lining up.\u00a0 Although similar, it felt like we were talking about two different things.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When she was describing the situation, she described what the people did, whereas when I was describing the situation, I described the people.\u00a0 There is no Chinese word for ‘commuter’.\u00a0 The individualism and collectivism in both our societies are so engrained that it appears in the language.\u00a0 I’m sure there are many other examples of this phenomena but when you stumble upon it for yourself I feel as though it has a more lastly impact.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
During my Chinese Literature class on Thursday, my professor explained in depth the three most common schools of thought in China: Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.\u00a0 During this discussion, my professor noted that Eastern thought focuses on the collective, while Western thought focuses on the individual.\u00a0 I knew this before, but it can still be a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/evacohnchina.summitbiztech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/evacohnchina.summitbiztech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/evacohnchina.summitbiztech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evacohnchina.summitbiztech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evacohnchina.summitbiztech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/evacohnchina.summitbiztech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/evacohnchina.summitbiztech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evacohnchina.summitbiztech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/evacohnchina.summitbiztech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}