My first encounter with China began several years before I ever set foot there.
When I was thirteen, my father gave me a huge, 654-page edition of The Four Books of Confucius: The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean, The Analects and Mencius. Bound in heavy black leather, its cover was deeply embossed with a traditional Chinese scene of robed figures framed by intricate architectural designs. Along the spine, Chinese characters and delicate figures appeared in gold and silver against the black leather. Inside, the pages were fine and pale, and the two languages faced one another: Chinese on the left, French on the right.
I could read the French. The Chinese characters, at that age, I could only contemplate.
Sitting in a classroom in 1993
I would turn those pages slowly, moving my eyes from the words I understood to the mysterious characters opposite them. The physical beauty of the book—the black leather, the embossed figures, the gold and silver decoration, the delicacy of the paper—was inseparable from what it represented to me.
It was my first doorway into China.
A few years later, in 1986, I was living in the middle of the Indian Ocean when my school organised an extraordinary journey to China. A group of students from the region who had passed an examination in Chinese as a second language were selected to take part. I was fortunate enough to be among them.
We travelled to Guangdong.
I could not possibly have known it then, but that journey would change the course of my life. Until then, China had existed for me mostly through that book, the language and imagination. Suddenly, the characters I had stared at on those pale pages had streets, faces, voices, smells and movement. Guangdong was my first real China.
Picture taken in 1993, ordering niuroumian (beef noodles) at a street food stall.
Something happened during that journey which is still difficult to explain nearly forty years later. China ceased to be a foreign country I was visiting and became a place to which I somehow knew I would return.
And I did. The following year, in 1987, I returned to China, this time to Beijing and Tianjin, where I stayed until 1993. Then, life brought me back south again, to Guangzhou, where I enrolled at what was then the Guangdong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine.
I lasted exactly one year.
Traditional Chinese Medicine was already difficult enough. I was trying to understand meridians, anatomy, biology and an entirely different conception of the human body—all in Chinese.
Then came the clinics. The patients spoke Cantonese. And even when the teachers began explaining something in Mandarin, little by little, almost without noticing it themselves, they would drift back into Yueyu, Cantonese. I would follow for a while, then lose them completely.
Chinese medical terminology was difficult enough. Another variety of Chinese on top of it was simply beyond me.
Yet those months in Guangzhou remain among my most affectionate memories of China.
I made a close Japanese friend there who was also studying Traditional Chinese Medicine. Behind his decision to study traditional Chinese medicine lay an extraordinary family story.
His grandfather had been a Japanese military pilot during the war and had taken part in the first bombing of Shanghai. He carried a deep remorse for what he had done and repeatedly told his children, and later his grandchildren, that their family had a responsibility to repay something of that debt: they should learn from China, respect China, and help others discover what was best in Chinese civilisation. My friend chose medicine. There was something profoundly moving to me in that choice: one generation had flown over China carrying bombs; the next had come to China to learn how to heal...
There was another companion during that year in Guangzhou, rather less philosophical but equally unforgettable. I had a white pigeon.
During the day, when I was in class or at the clinic, he was completely free. He would fly away somewhere over Guangzhou, disappearing into the city, and eventually return. When I was at my desk in the evening, he often slept on my shoulder, pressing his small warm head into the space between my neck and my ear.
Studying with him was more complicated. Sometimes, perhaps deciding that meridians and anatomy had occupied enough of my attention, he would attack my pen as I tried to write. I would move it across the page; he would peck at it. I would try again; he would peck again. Eventually he would always win; the lesson would have to wait.
When I remember Guangdong from those years, strangely, these are the images that come back first: the sound of Cantonese flowing around me in a clinic, a Japanese friend studying the art of healing because of a promise inherited from his grandfather, and a white pigeon sitting on my shoulder while I tried unsuccessfully to study Chinese medicine.
Picture taken in 1993, at the clinic with a doctor and a patient.
Much has happened since then.
I could not have imagined in 1986 that Guangdong would continue to return throughout my life, or that decades later I would once again find myself travelling through the province, this time working to build friendships and cooperation between China and the Pacific.
But perhaps the beginning of that later story was already there.
Guangdong taught me very early that relationships between countries are ultimately made from relationships between people. History may leave wounds. Languages may sometimes separate us. Cultures may appear impossibly distant. Yet a student can cross an ocean, a grandson can choose healing in response to his grandfather's war, and friendships can grow in places where none were expected.
Nearly forty years after that first journey, when I think of Guangdong, I do not first think of buildings, institutions or economic development.
I think of people.
And perhaps, somewhere behind all of them, I still see that black leather book my father placed in my hands when I was thirteen—the book that first opened the door.
Picture taken in 1993, on the terrace of the Foreign Students Guesthouse at Guangdong University of TCM
And, occasionally, a small white pigeon that refused to let me study.
The author is Dr. Hiria Ottino, President of the Pacific China Friendship Association (PCFA).
Photos provided to South by the author
