I think everyone is guilty of wanting more than we need. Huang Xiaoqiang is a great example of this. He owns a great restaurant called the Students' Home. He has a big apartment, a driver's license, a color TV, a public telephone, a stereo, and a camera. He also has a big family that supports him. His parents, wife, sister, and son help with the work at the restaurant. Yet, with all this, he still finds plenty to complain about and to want. He wants a videodisc player, a cell phone, a car, and more money. He complains that his life is hard even though all he does is make dumplings and let his mom and wife do the rest.
We have so much but we never take the time to be thankful for it. Lots of people around the world's main concern in a day is if they will have anything to eat. We never have that problem. We are concerned about having the new coolest cell phone or ipod. We need to remind ourselves how fortunate we are and how easy our life is.
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I'm definitely guilty of being ungrateful for my possessions. I have so many things--tons of clothes, a laptop, an iPod, a cell phone that works, and much more--that people elsewhere would consider luxuries for the wealthy, yet I often wish I could trade in the things I have now for the latest, newest, shiniest versions, simply because mine have become "old." People like me, like Huang Xiaoquiang, probably like you and almost everyone else who reads this, might lose some simple appreciation for life because there are just so many distractions in life itself. There's a great moment in Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury where the main character, living in a time when books and the written word had not only diminished in value, but had been banned altogether, is struggling to memorize the lines to a book, but an advertisement playing over the radio was distracting him to the point where he wasn't able to concentrate on anything but the words to the tune playing. It was a great metaphor for how society and the media, among other things, can really distract us from parts of our lives for which we've lost appreciation. It's only when you separate yourself from those distractions that you'll really be able to regain that appreciation. Hessler was able to do that with his stay in China; without all of his usual luxuries like Internet and cable television, without the usual chaos of his everyday life, he was able to spend two years realizing how the things he owned and the way he lived shaped his attitude toward his life and possessions.
ReplyDeleteI had a more posive view of Huang Xiaoquiang. To be certain, he did always want more. Yet he was neither selfish nor a workaholic; he got to work with his entire family all day, hung out with his friends a lot, and was known for being generous. I think he just wanted to make sure that he and his family were economically secure and could enjoy a few of the good things in life as well. He did, after all, grow up under Mao Zedong; its not all that bad to want a cell phone and a car after nearly starving to death and suffering the Cultural Revolution. Besides, he wasn't rich; he lived in a five-room apartment with his entire family and didn't actually own the videodisc player, the car, or the cell phone. By Chinese standards, he seemed middle class; by American standards, he wasn't at all affluent.
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