Johnbosco Nwogbo
Jul 25, 2017 · 2 min read

I am not Chinese (I am Nigerian), but I come from a culture that is quite similar to the culture you describe in China. I’d like to say a few things:

(1) it is quite unlikely that what you describe there is a culture of China. There is rarely any such thing in any country. Different regions, states, provinces, etc., usually have very different cultural practices.

(2) I think you learnt the wrong lesson from that cultural practice. The truth, I think, is that just as your American culture teaches you to value your own individual feelings, aims, aspirations, wellbeing, etc., that culture teaches its adherents to value the feelings, aims, aspirations and wellbeing of others over their own. You had to drink, not so much because it gave you pleasure, but because it gave others pleasure. In order words, it teaches people not to be selfish. That culture has pitfalls, but so does a culture that wants you to care about yourself above all else.

(3) Your discussion of that culture is so shallow, it seems that you are either a hater of that culture based on some preconceived notions you have about it (perhaps formed by American propaganda), or you have a two-dimensional caricature of it in your mind into which you just squeezed your experience. Either way, you don’t really appear to be a reliable analyst of “Chinese” culture, in much the same sense as an alt-right guy cannot be relied on to accurately describe Jewish culture, or Donald Trump, to describe “Muslim” culture (assuming such a thing as a singular Muslim culture exists).

Johnbosco Nwogbo

Written by

Labour and Acorn in no particular order