Eric's Beijing Diary

I don't go down to the Sanlitun bar street very much, because, well, I'm just not into that sort of thing. Every once in awhile, though, they have an interesting lecture night at the Bookworm, and then I will take the subway to Dongsishitiao, and catch a bus over to Sanlitun.

They guy they had tonight was Sir Joseph Nombri, who grew up in a small village in New Guinea. He left his village to go to school, and eventually became ambassador to Japan. He told of stepping into an elevator in Japan once and meeting a young lady. She fainted. This guy really is pretty bushy. He makes me look mild, folks. I should have had my camera.

He talked about the first white men who came to his village. He saw them reading from a book (evidently the Bible). He was struck by the fact that this thing they were reading from contained ideas and thoughts from some other place. I asked what he thought was the primary contribution of these foreigners who came to his home village. He said, "They disrupted our lives." Disruption. That is the key word. But it was interesting--he seemed a bit conflicted in answering my question. Part of him seemed to be viewing the interruption negatively. At the same time, though, it was quite obvious that everything he had become really derived from this "unwanted" disruption.