Turning from a Rose Colored World

Once I bought a pair of sunglasses with pink lenses because I thought it would be cool to have rose colored glasses. I am realizing recently that I am an optimist. I see the world the way I want it to be. I like to tell you about all the funny stories and show the beautiful pictures. I want you to think of China as a magical place. Maybe I want to think of China as beautiful and enchanted. But sometimes it’s not.

The other day when I visited my student’s house, it reminded me of the housing projects I visited in Nashville. Her family is rich. Her mom travels around the world with her job. All of my students are well off. Only the top class makes it this far – the ones who are smart and have good test scores or have parents to pay their way. And yet their neighborhoods look like our ghettos.

Today I rode my bike in a different area of town. I turned down a road off the main street. It was so dusty that I had to keep rubbing my eyes. When I looked into the faces of the people who stared at me, they were hardened by life. Several factories billowed smoke. I blew my nose when I came home and the Kleenex turned black. I kept riding and the road turned to mud. I watched muscles bulge out of thin legs that strained to pull carts piled with wood or bricks or debris. Under a bridge sat a woman who stared senselessly past me, and behind a fence I saw dirty tents set up by the canal. I was scared. I just wanted it to end. I don’t want life to be like this. I want to put on my pink sunglasses and stay on the main road. With my students I have a connection. We watch TV and listen to popular music and e-mail our friends, and they have eaten at McDonalds before. We inhabit the same world. But these people…even as I was riding through, our worlds did not meet. I just looked and then I left. I turned the corner and was back on the main road, headed back to the safety of my modernizing world.

Here in Yangzhou, babies are abandoned. Old people die because they can’t get medicine. What happens to the homeless when cold weather come? I am in China, but I’m still in my own world. I can afford McDonalds. I have a whole air-conditioned apartment to myself. I graduated from college and traveled across the world. How can I ever relate to “the least of these?” I don’t even know how to respond to a beggar on the street.

One of my favorite authors, Amy Carmichael heard the question this way: “Many follow…unto the breaking of bread, but few unto the drinking of the cup of the passion; art thou willing to drink of that cup, and to drink it unto the end?... Art thou willing to turn from all that would dull thine ear to the voice of thy brother’s blood that crieth unto Me from the ground?”