A Trick of Less Expectation

Jingyuan Wu

ENG01: Written Expression

Sheila Boland Chira

Jan 26, 2016

A Trick of Less Expectation

There are something called the national pride since human being first has a sense of nationality. People are born to belong to somewhere. And they always determine the place where they born as “home”. However, as technology and the concept of globalization develop, human settlement starts to change, people change. Children can be born in a place but raised up at somewhere else, and that group of children who do not have a chance to live years in their original “home” will not have some kind of relationship with the people from there. The others do. As Meri Nana-ama Danquah mentioned in the article Life as an Alien, home is where the heart is.

When I was a child, teachers and parents and all people around me are reminding me the concept of China and things I should do as a Chinese. Elementary school advisors are checking out whether a kid did or did not help elder people cross the road when they get back from winter break, because according to them, Chinese are born to help others. Aimed to show the national advantage, and to make people from the other country think Chinese is a country having their own believe to gain respect from others are a smart strategy. I am not saying the strategy is wrong, but sometimes what it shows is not true. Nationality can be positive as energy for people to support their own country, but it can also become negative which leads to severe conflicts, people to people, countries to countries. Citizens want to protect their country, and which might lead to “wars”.

Once people want to gain sympathy, one of the trick is only to show our loss without the reason we loss. To be the one who always get pain from others. Back in my middle school, the history class is about how we become a great empire before the year of 1939, and how we became a victim and was treated unequally after it. We learnt the pain we get century ago from Japan, from the world, and all I can remember from the textbook is that it is the loss we should carve in our deeper mind and the corner of heart for national pride and the dead people. This kind of brain washing is planned to start since we were born. The concept of hatred is seed and planted in our subconsciousness. Our history taught us all the things happened are not shame, but something that as a Chinese, we need to fight for.

They are right. To show the world that Chinese are the one who loss is a smart strategy. There is no doubt that happiness equals to reality minus expectations. When we are setting people up together as a group, working for a project, the smart one will not do all the things he can at first. Because it is hard to refuse for the second and third time once he did it at the first time, and also there are possibility that he failed the task. Once he failed, people will not honor things he did because people would believe he deserved to, but to criticize the failing he did once by mistake. Reality cannot be changed easily, but expectations can, for example, the expectations of the ability of Chinese by learning Chinese history in China and in the United States. Like a kaleidoscope, people look at it in the different angle, and the images they see will be totally different. For me, the result of chose to tell sad stories is negative, and it is basically showing how weak we are.