PureInsight | May 3, 2004
Chapter 16: Culture Shock in North America
[PureInsight.org] Waking up, I asked the flight attendant how much time we had left in the air. When she answered "two hours until we land in Vancouver," my jaw dropped. I had slept for over eight hours and it felt like five minutes.
We landed in Vancouver to cameras and reporters at our exit gate. There was a long walkway for the arriving passengers, and at the end I could see the media. Some local Falun Dafa practitioners whom I had met in the past got my attention and welcomed me with open arms. After being handed some flowers I turned to face the media. My mind was blank and I just figured I would take it as it came. After the most obvious question of "how does it feel to be home," the reporter almost knocked me over with the next question. She asked me if this was a "media stunt." I looked at her a little confused replying, "excuse me?"
After giving up everything I knew to be me at the time, after struggling to write Chinese banners, shouting in Chinese and spending the past 20 odd hours trying to reason with every Chinese person I saw, exhausting every Chinese word I knew, simple English and even many hand gestures and charades just to tell these people the truth, I was being asked if it was all just a stunt. After I checked if she was serious, she continued, "you had a taped statement prepared, and a written statement, what was all of that for?" At this point I tried to stay very direct and to the point. I was there for the Chinese people. When I was in the square I shouted in Chinese, my banner was in Chinese, the reason I had those statements prepared was that in the event that something very bad happened to me people could understand what I was doing. It is my responsibility. If I hadn't been prepared to take responsibility for my actions then I would have never left Canada. After answering their questions, my fellow practitioners whisked me away to my connecting flight.
I couldn't help but be a little taken aback by this line of questioning. Had the woman no heart, I thought to myself. Then I realized it was me who wasn't using my heart to judge the situation. She had a job to do. It was that simple. Every time a reporter wakes up in the morning they know they have to tell a story and they have to tell it by a deadline. They have to get it prepared for the six o'clock or the eleven o'clock news. It's got to be hard for them. They have to work pretty fast and hard and it shows. I barely felt like I was being treated like a person. She got her questions answered and that was it. When I thanked her for her help she barely even looked at me. You could see her mind moving so fast, it was almost unreal.
While thinking about this kind of surreal yet very real life we live, I watched the flight attendants smile the same way at each person. They would take the tickets of each passenger, give him his boarding pass and send them off down the ramp, only to twist their torso back around and smile the exact same way to the next person who would hand them his ticket, get his pass back and get sent on down the ramp. Even with such a bright smile, was she really fulfilled or at least happy or was she just doing her job and getting through the day like the reporter who didn't have time to look me in the eyes and see that I had a heart?
When I was in China and that young student told me I was speaking "forbidden words" in the streets of Beijing, I felt like I was in an alternate reality or a movie. When I came back to Canada I didn't feel like my original reality still existed. Or it did and I changed, which is a lot more likely. I had indeed been through not only a very intense ordeal but I had just finished one of my most significant life changing experiences to date.
Sure enough it was my turn next and I returned the attendant's smile with one of my own and headed off down the ramp toward the plane which started to feel much like a conveyor belt. Why did it all seem so fake? Then I remembered one of my past jobs as a telemarketer and I would always end the calls the same way: "Thank you very much, take care and have a nice day." Well I am sure you can imagine how my coworkers felt after listening to that over a hundred times in one day. To them it started to sound fake but each time I said it I meant it. That was back in my early days of cultivating Falun Dafa. I began to learn that my job was not just a means to make money, neither something I had to just get through so I could do what I wanted to but instead it was my service to society.
Where was the sense of purpose that you can read about in the history books or even in the stories from our elders? Why has the term "love" been used to describe "lust"? Why has the respected and divine name of Jesus been used as a common curse word? Why are sex, fame and money more popular than virtue, honor and nobility? Why doesn't this matter or phase anyone? My trip to Tiananmen Square had made me re-evaluate many things about myself and now this unexpected culture shock I was experiencing in my home country caught me a little off guard. The surreal nature of everything automatically set me a few steps back inside myself and I was just kind of watching myself walk down the ramp to the plane.
Flight Attendant: Hello sir, 33 b, first right, all the way to the back.
After thanking her and returning her happy smile I continued on down the plane towards my seat. Although I was looking straight ahead it seemed my peripheral vision became stronger and without looking around I could see all the people and their movements as I walked to the back of the plane to find my seat. Some were tucking their baby in, others read newspapers, or fumbling with their luggage. The line of people walking to their seats stopped as we waited for someone to fit his luggage in the overhead compartment. Regardless of what he was doing, I wanted to seriously ask each one of them if they knew why we were doing all of these virtually mundane things endlessly. Travel here, go there, buy this, sell that, talk with him or her, who is that girl, isn't she gorgeous? The sense of clear purpose, of why we are living, doesn't seem to be here with us at all. Is it just to accumulate possessions or is it just to find comfort and pleasure, have some fun, fall in love, or have a family grow old and die? These brief few moments were somewhat unnerving. That sense of lack of overall purpose in our modern day society that I felt when I was a child seemed to have resurfaced in a mild dull ache in a microcosm of my heart. I thought if someone told me that they did indeed only live for pleasure and comfort, I just couldn't believe them. In this wave of uncertainty I forgot my seat number and I glanced back at my ticket - 33b.
Looking back on it now I can see more clearly what I was going through. I had just been through a rather traumatic and surly life altering experience and it seems I was a different person re-evaluating everything. At the time it was almost impossible to recognize. You just experiencing this drastic change in the way you see things.
