Take a trip back with me to the night my family and I watched Li Ning soar over the Bird’s Nest at the opening ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics. We were in the U.S., a family of two worlds.
When we lived in China, I worked closely with the waiban (foreign affairs office) of Shaanxi Normal University. In those days, few private cars were on the road. There were few cars period. Other than taxis which humped down the road like they were one wheel short, there were mostly only company cars, all black.
With having to transport foreign teachers and students, the school’s waiban had its own car, only one of a couple of cars on campus. It was driven by a delightful fellow named Li Ning, the same name as one of China’s most famous athletes. Mr. Li got a lot of ribbing for the connection, but it did make it easier to remember his name. And he had a great sense of humor. I always told him I’d never heard of the other Li Ning. Actually, I hadn’t until he told me about the gymnast.
Our family returned to the States the year before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Our kids had grown up in China, our oldest, Robert, graduating from high school just prior to our departure. So, we were thrilled to watch what we could of the games, though most of the televised events focused on the U.S. athletes. Just down the street from where we had lived in Xi’an, the Chinese rifle team had its practice camp, but you’d only know what it was if someone told you. Our kids passed it every day going to school, just a walled complex on the east side of the road.
China knows how to throw a big event. The 2008 Olympics were no exception. We were keen to watch the Opening Ceremony, which was televised to billions of people.
There was the usual parade of athletes from the nations of the world and speeches by dignitaries. But to us, the most thrilling part of the event was the acrobatics of Li Ning, the athlete, not the chauffeur.
Li Ning had competed as a gymnast, winning six medals (three gold) at the 1984 Summer Olympics, the first games in which the People’s Republic of China competed. He became a national hero and a household name. He went on to become a billionaire as founder of the sportswear company that bears his name.
As our family sprawled around the TV in our new home in Oregon, we cheered Li Ning on as he soared in the stadium. Hoisted high into the air with cables, he mimed running around the rim of the stadium, lighted torch in hand.
Public Domain photo: Li Ning in the air
The flame, the symbol of the Olympics, is a tradition revived from the ancient Greek games. It didn’t make its appearance in the modern Olympics until the 1928 games in Amsterdam, and since has become a mainstay of both the winter and summer competitions. The flame that reached Li Ning in Beijing had traveled across all six inhabited continents starting in Olympia, Greece – 137,000 miles in 129 days.
These opening ceremonies celebrate both the best of the Olympic tradition and the best of the host country’s culture and heritage. The event in Beijing was no exception. Although there were protests against human rights abuses in China along the worldwide trail, none of that appeared at the Beijing National Stadium, dubbed the “Bird’s Nest” for its unique architectural design. During Li Ning’s much shorter leg of the journey, images of China’s history were projected onto a vast and virtual unfurling scroll.
When we lived in Xi’an, there was an old filming studio with a storage area for cinematic props not far from our house. Filed in a box somewhere is an old photo of my young boys grinning as they pose alongside crudely built artificial military tanks. Cultural displays and live reenactments of some of China’s ancient inventions were set up in booths nearby. The one I remember most distinctly was the booth demonstrating the ancient art of handmade paper production.
China is the proud inventor of paper, which dates back a century or so before the birth of Jesus. The Egyptians had invented papyrus 3,000 years earlier and our English word “paper” comes from the Greek and Latin words for papyrus. But the invention of true paper had to wait for the Chinese. It would be yet another thousand years before the craft of papermaking reached Europe. Till then the Europeans wrote on sheepskin known as parchment.
Early in our days in China, we developed a friendship with an older American couple, John and Lorena Lake. His factory in Xi’an produced the large metal pins which formed the center of the giant rolls of paper used by printing companies. My dad’s cousin, Chuck Campbell, spent a career changing out those heavy spent rolls for heavier full rolls of paper in the basement of the Gospel Publishing House in the Ozarks. An endless sheet of paper flew off those rolls through the presses to where they were cut and bound. My Great Uncle Paul Bellinger, Chuck’s stepdad, ran the folding machine at the other end of the process.
Paper is very precious in Chinese culture – and not just because the Chinese invented it. It is what goes on the paper that makes it meaningful – artwork and the written word, especially the written word.
Spend any time in Chinese culture, whether in Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, or Mainland China itself – well, anywhere there are Chinese still living out their heritage – and you discover how full of meaning those written characters are. The characters, you see, are meaning-based, not sound-based. You cannot know how to pronounce them just by looking at them. In fact, they mean the same thing no matter what Chinese language (dialect) is used.
For example, the third character in my Chinese name is 德, which can be translated as virtue or integrity, depending on what other character it is paired with. In Mandarin, it is pronounced “duh.” In Cantonese, I am told it sounds like “dak;” in Japanese “toku.” Regardless how people sound it out, it keeps the same meaning.
I remember visiting Corregidor in the Philippines with my parents. Located off the coast of Manila, the small island is an historic military site dating back centuries. Today it is most famous as the place where Allied Forces surrendered to the advancing Japanese troops in 1942 – and then three years later, recaptured the island fortress. The ruins today are a military memorial to American, Filipino, and Japanese soldiers who served and died there.
At Corregidor, informational signs were posted in various languages, including Japanese. I watched as my mother, born and raised in China, read the Japanese script. Written Japanese has two components – kana and kanji. Kana, to me, looks like squiggles and swirls. The more approachable kanji consists of thousands of characters derived from the Chinese writing system. If you know traditional Chinese characters, you can recognize many of the kanji without knowing how to pronounce them in Japanese. My mother was reading the kanji.
One day while living in Xi’an, I was invited by Shaanxi Normal University’s waiban team to visit a very special room. It was the rare books room, containing paper scrolls dating back centuries. Because of the age of the paper, permission was rarely granted for these scrolls to be seen. But there I was staring at documents that predated Gutenberg.
Some of these scrolls were Chinese paintings in traditional style. Others were filled with characters in the old way of writing top to bottom and right to left. Still others contained just one character, supersized.
These one-character scrolls intrigued me the most. Chinese calligraphy, from the Greek for “beautiful writing,” is exactly that – writing as visual art. Some of the brushes used to make these characters are gigantic ink brushes. The artist is conveying the idea that one character – one word – can contain volumes of meaning to the beholder.
On the giant scroll in that opening ceremony in ‘08, China was projecting a message that this ancient culture was also as modern as the 21st century technology and architecture on display in the Bird’s Nest that evening. China was broadcasting to the world that it had both incredible staying power and modern relevance. After a century of upheaval, it stood front and center on the world stage.
Words are powerful. They are intricately bound to the speaker or writer. Which is why learning another person’s culture generally involves learning their language.
As a Mandarin Chinese language student in Taiwan, I began to grasp how important language is. My local pastor friends, Andy Chen and Peter Wu, would get me up to speak on Sunday mornings even though my Chinese was very rough. I’d spoken two or three times already when Andy’s mother said to me in Chinese after service, “I finally understood something you said today.” I could have taken it as a slight, but I knew she was approving of how I was working to reach out to her in her own tongue.
The Chinese are very generous about outsiders learning their language. They’ll applaud even the most basic of efforts, until you get fairly good and then it becomes “not bad.” When I cross over into another’s language, I put on their cultural clothes. I get into their worldview. I start seeing things through their eyes. Our word choices speak volumes.
Crossing cultural boundaries is at the heart of what we call the incarnation – when God put on our clothes and spoke our language. Jesus didn’t just come preaching straight from heaven; he was born and grew up a normal human being. Through parables, Jesus spoke eternity in the language of everyday mortals. Even his fellow townspeople said he was nothing more than just one of them.
One of the most powerful revelations of what incarnation means is when the Apostle John writes in the opening lines of his gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Note especially verse 14: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”
And that is what we are called to as well – to put on other people’s clothes, so to speak. To see things through their eyes and speak truth and love in their own words. To enter their world so that we may bring Jesus to them.
My kids are TCKs – third culture kids. They are U.S. citizens, born of U.S. citizens, but they grew up in Asia. Two of them were born in Taiwan. They’re collecting many more experiences as they get older, but you can never take China out of them. It remains as much a part of them as does their Americanness. Their hearts are planted in two worlds – maybe even more by now.
If you are inclined to watch any of the Summer Olympics this year, I encourage you to do so with all this in mind. For a few days, without leaving your recliner, you are invited to get out of yourself, your own cultural tribe, your own world, and catch a glimpse of what it means to be from elsewhere. Events like the Olympics, especially those opening ceremonies with all the nations represented, give us a glimpse of what it means to be from somewhere else.
Go ahead and cheer them on. They won’t hear you, but it will do you a lot of good. Maybe even bring you out of yourself.
I share ideas and stories from an intercultural perspective. Be sure to keep up with the conversation by subscribing for free at howardkenyon.com/contact/. You may also leave a comment below. And I’ve written a book on what it means to cross those cultural lines; Night Shift is available here.