A twenty-one year old woman in small-city China is generally going to be much less mature than an American woman of similar age. Most of my students that age were on their first (and probably only) boyfriends, had never had more than a few sips of beer, had never travelled on their own, had never held a job, would only go downtown (a ten minute bus ride) maybe once a month in a group (it’s too dangerous, they say), spent most of their weekends with their parents and generally just didn’t have a lot of the life experiences that aid us in developing critical thinking. Colleges in China have lights out at 10:00. Hell, I’d been to colleges that didn’t allow undergrads to leave campus. It’s often (but of course not always) a pretty sheltered existence.
If you date a naive woman, you have to deal with a lot of dumb stuff coming out of her mouth. The flipside if sweet and innocent is clueless and facile. Unless she really isn’t all that smart, she’ll grow up a bit eventually, but by then she’ll probably be a “crazy” 25 year old.
Are you saying intellectual curiousity in China is a crime? If it is, what is that based on? Or just a stereotype you picked up but never looked beyond news headlines to understand?
You can always try the *Ninotchka *method: is there any way you can get her to Paris, make her laugh by falling off a chair, buy her a funny hat and have her wear Ina Claire’s jewelry?
No I am not. That was a sweeping statement, and I didn’t specify China. I’m just saying that in some societies the result of intellectual curiosity will be dissatisfaction, and a temptation to behave in a way that will be punished. You can tell me the conditions that exist in modern China.
Apparently, neither have you. The modern lefty has very little regard for classical Marxism, more like a droll nostalgia for a bygone era. Like modern psychiatry has outgrown Freud, modern lefties have long since gotten over Uncle Karl.
