the spinner spins his tale

my roommate came into my room yesterday and started talking about the democracy statue outside the SUB and about the wreath of flowers around it. partly because my mandarin is so bad and partly because i had been watching korean dramas (dongwoo, you really are to blame for this addiction) and had to switch gears in language again, i didn't understand what she was talking about first.

but then slowly, piece by piece of information filtered in and i recalled that yesterday was june 4th, the anniversary of 六四屠杀.

i didn't know how to comfort her at that point. the tiananmen square incident is only a line, a sentence in chinese textbooks. a line saying that a disastrous protest took place on june 4th 1989 and nothing else. having people tell you your country's history from an entirely different point of view probably rattles your paradigm to the core.

what is truth? history is not objective. I would hate to have an outsider tell me that he knows my own history, my country better than i do. but the fact is that sometimes all we receive, wherever we are, are only sediments of truth. american history is littered with folklore as well. no, george didn't really cut down a cherry tree. the problem as we try to take off our blinders is that there's always another rose-tinted lens readily available. and then in struggling for free, clear vision, what can develop sometimes is a deep-seated cynicism, an ambivalent attitude that believes that real truth can't be grasped anytime soon.

is it crippling? possibly. seems like there's only two ways about this. you can run forward into life, shed skin after skin and hope that in peeling off these layers, something more refined unveils itself. or you can stand from afar, detached, wary, scrutinizing everything that's handed to you before taking any dive in anything. either way, you eventually still have to live life somehow and it might just be that these two roads merge anyway.

but if you know of secret option number 3. do tell me!