difficulty that drives

Rob Gifford's China Road remains by far the best book I've read about China: good stories and very truthful.

For one of our Wheaton classes, we had to write about what the most significant part in the book for us was.  I wrote about the end of the chapter "Women Hold Up Half the Sky."  I thought it was poignant then, and the words have been floating around in my mind ever since.

The context is the author, Rob Gifford, interviewing a girl who works at a KTV (karaoke) bar.  Her job is to accompany patrons -- to sing, chat, dance, and for a higher price to accompany a man to his hotel room.  Gifford was asking about her life.

We often fail to see that Chinese people are living, breathing, loving, hating individuals, who do things for complex psychological reasons, just like Westerners.  And as Wu Yan sits talking about her life, her story doesn't have that standard tone, which says, "I must do this or I won't be able to eat."  She is slightly laconic, and cynical and angry.

"So why are you working here?" I eventually ask her.

There is a long pause.

"There was a boy..." She pauses again for a long time, rattling the dice in the cheap plastic cup.  "Wo ting xihuan de... who I liked a lot."  She is looking at the floor.

"But he liked another girl."  She stops shakring the dice, then looks up at me with large, hurt eyes.  There is a long silence as I try to compute what she is saying.

"So... you're... doing this to punish him?  ...Or to punish... yourself?"

She doesn't answer but reaches out her arm to me, the palm of her hand facing up.  There are two jagged scars on her lower arm, as though her wrist had been cut.  She looks angrily into my eyes.

"It's difficult being a person, isn't it?" she asks finally.

I look at her and nod slowly.  She shakes the cup with the dice inside and slams it down on the table.

The last thing that he records Wu Yan saying -- It's difficult being a person, isn't it? -- are words that have haunted me for months.  

It is difficult.  And that is a good thing.

In the movie adaptation of City of Joy, one of the characters tells another, "Maybe the world is meant to break your heart.  From the moment we're born, we're shipwrecked, struggling between hope and despair."

It makes me think of Paul's words:

And He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined alloted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek Him, in the hope that they might feel their way towards Him and find Him.

Over and over, from my students and my friends, I hear the repeating theme that it is difficult to be a person.  There is the pressure of family and academic tests, the pressure to rise above the hard life that many of their parents have known, the stress of human relationships and all the normal craziness of being in college.  There is a void that many of them acknowledge, as China becomes more modern and farther away from the traditions that many trusted in for centuries.  A lot of them have questions about what the meaning of life is; some ask outright and others just tell stories about the way their lives are now and their voice aches.

Last night I was chatting with a friend on qq, and in the middle of the conversation, she said, "So it's hard to being human beings."

Yes, it is.  But it is a hardness we need so that we realize our need for Hope.