Not of this World--in China?

Bill Brown ... Xiamen University

Go Into the World. I've long felt that China is not only a different country but a separate planet altogether--and apparently the Chinese think so as well. Red banners all over China proclaim, "Go into the world!" They would not have to go into the world if they weren't already somewhere else in the first place.

The Far Side of Earth. China may not be another planet but it is the Far Side of earth (forgive the Larseny, Gary), and enough unlike the world I grew up in to allow me to feel, at times, that I am in the world but no longer of it. I love China, but whenever I begin to feel at "home" here, the stares of Chinese who look at me and other foreigners as if we were from Mars remind me that I am in China but not of it.

Double Moon Festival. Actually, perhaps some do think foreigners are from another planet. I showed my MBA students a rendering of a night sky with two moons and told them it was a view from California, and a couple of students said, "We've never seen the moon like that. Is that when you have your Moon Festival?"

Hermit. It is ironic I live in the planet's most populated country because my childhood nickname, right up until I left home, was "hermit." I always had a penchant for solitude, rarely spoke unless I had to, and spent most of my time in the woods or hills alone, or reading books. When I was eight I saw an advertisement in a Classics Illustrated Comic and decided to join the Marion Fathers in Africa. I abandoned that dream a year later when I found out I wasn't Catholic. I then decided on South America, but in the end joined the Air Force, volunteered for two years of solitude in icy Greenland, was sent to Taiwan instead--and fell in love with the Chinese and have been Oriented ever since. And in spite of the crowds, being a foreigner in China is perfect for a hermit, because I can participate in Chinese life while maintaining my own identity and sense of privacy, and peace--rather like a drop of oil in a sea of humanity. And 20 years in China has shown me that I could have achieved the same state had I stayed in America.

While Chinese continually remind me that they love me but I'm not one of them, I wonder how my grandchildren will fit in? Our oldest son Shannon is marrying a 7th generation Xiamen girl on January 1st, 2008.

So what is "the world" anyway? In "Merton's Palace of Nowhere" (James Finley," Merton explains what he left by entering a monastery (and which I think we can leave even without entering a monastery):

"What do you mean by "the world" anyway?... My concrete answer is: what did I leave when I entered the monastery? As far as I can see, what I abandoned when I "left the world" and came to the monastery was the understanding of myself that I had developed in the context of civil society--my identification with what appeared to me to be its aims... "the world"... did mean a certain set of servitudes that I could no longer accept... Many of these were trivial; some of them were onerous; all are closely related. The image of society that is happy because it drinks Coca-Cola or Seagram's or bothy and is protected by the bomb."

Contemplatives/Marginal Persons Merton writes of the contemplative (Finley, p. 51):
"He does not belong to an establishment. He is a marginal person who withdraws deliberately to the margin of society with a view to deepening fundamental human experience... We (marginal people_ are deliberately irrelevant. We live with an ingrained irrelevance which is proper to every human being. The marginal man accepts the basic irrelevance of the human condition, an irrelevance which is manifested above all by the fact of death. The marginal person, the monk, the displaced person, the prisoner, all these people live in the presence of death, which calls into question the meaning of life."

Out of the Monastery I admire Merton, and appreciate the motives that led him to the monastery. But... while I too would feel right at home in a monk's cell, if we all retired to monasteries, who would run the planet? So instead of withdrawing, I have entered the world, and become active in it--but while maintaining the memory of who I am, why I'm here, and where I'm going. I too have a monk's cell, but it is my office in the MBA Center, where I can anchor my spirit in an inner solitude even as I engage with over 200 grad students each semester (if I am not so anchored, I have nothing to offer them).

I still envision, at times, how nice it would be to retire to the quiet of Greenland, or the green hills of Appalachia, or even rural China. But if we are here, then we are here for a purpose, so I withdraw each morning that I may more fully engage the day; I savor the solitude and listen to that still small voice within, and it gives me the anchor I need to not just enter the daily gale without but to even enjoy it.

But I still don't drink Coca-cola or Seagrams.