Love Poem

Love,

It is holy,

We live for it,

We die for it.

 

Love,

Everyone has it,

Romeo and Juliet,

Valentine the Saint,

Even ones who fight.

 

Love,

It is not about difficulty,

It is not a duty,

It is a cure.

"Famous" Artist/Athlete I Want To Meet

It is hard for me to make a decision on the subject of this post, because of two reasons. First, I do not watch sports, at all. Second, I rarely listen to English songs (I used to listen only English songs until the music field ended up how it is today). So I am going to do a person that isn't technically "famous", though he is very famous in China. 

If I have a chance of meeting one artist or athlete, I would choose to meet Wang Feng (汪峰). He is a singer, composer, and a lyricist. He started to compose music during his years in high school (1988). His early works are largely influenced by Cui Jian (崔健), Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. He began a band called No. 43, Bao Jia Street (鲍家街43号) which is named by the address of his own university and made up of him and his classmates in 1993. In 2000, the band was dismissed, and soon, he released his own album. He and Cui Jian are both called the "Father of Chinese Rock Music" (highly disputed on the Internet of who is the actual one). Though his musics are mostly rock musics, it is not like hard rock music, it is more like smoothed rock music which expresses many actual feelings.

I first got to listen to his songs when I was very little (because my mom is a huge fan of him). It is not only the music, the lyrics really touches my feelings also. I listen to him sometimes to just get reflections to my own feelings. I look at him not only just as a singer, I look at him more as a poet. He himself is very talented, it is really hard to have someone who not only compose heart-touching musics, but also writes heart-touching words. I wish he can keep up the great work in the future also! 加油汪峰！

Jiahua (Tiger) Wang

1/21/16

Individualism vs. Collectivism

I do not have much experience with a collectivism society. Though I lived in a "Communist" country for 12 years, but in many ways, China is not really a Communist society anymore, even it does not practice Individualism completely. The first time I got to experience a "complete" indivualism society is when I came to the United States. Many ideas were new but I had experienced most of them in a somewhat "limited" way during my time in China.

One country that I definitely know that practices complete Individualism is the United States. Capitalism, a product of Individualism, is widely spread. The proposition that all persons shares the same rights, another great product of Individualism, is practiced everywhere. One good product of Individualism would be "inventing". If Edison was in a community which practices Collectivism completely, he would never have invented the light bulb, for the simple fact that individual thinking is "not allowed". Even though one has the ability to do great things, one could not practice them because everyone must be as the same as everyone else. If we lived in a Collective society, we would not have the advanced technologies that we have today. We would still use what is considered "old technologies" today. We would still be using candles, horses instead of light bulbs and cars.

Today's China is probably not a very good example, but China in the 50s and 60s definitely practices complete Communism without doubt. I did not experience these ages but I have heard them from my mom and my grandma. From the words my mom told me which my grandma told her, China seems like a different country from now. Political propagandas about Communism and how good it is was spray painted on walls everywhere, everyone had a handbook of Mao Zedong (Chinese Communist Leader)'s famous speeches, people and the whole society seemed like they were brainwashed. People actually worked in a collective when the Communist nation was first created. People worked in farms as a collective, ate as a collective, but that was soon canceled due to its low efficiency. Later, people were "assigned" farmlands to work on, and they got certain amounts of "Food Tickets", which can exchange for food, depending on the amount of grains/rice they produced. But they didn't really owned anything (even right now in China, nobody actually "owns" any property, when someone buys a house, he has the property for 70 years, and then it is returned to a bank which is mostly owned by the government). One advantage of a Collective community it is that it's very easy to manage, which is probably one reason that Chinese government chose Communism because of China's large population. If no one has individual property or even individual thinking, there would be no problem at all to manage the whole society. The ruler of the community would not have to worry about any rebellions either, because everyone is just trying to model everyone else.

Lastly, I do believe a Individualist Society is better for us, humans. Collectivism does have its advantages, but we are not robots. Whether the law is going to permit us think or not, we are going to. They have to relize the fact that it is not possible for everyone and everything to be the same—they have to relize that they are trying to reach a goal that could never be reached—they have to relize that we, humans, have their own ideas and are different from each other.

Jiahua(Tiger) Wnag

1/15/16