Manufacturer of joy: China’s opening to the world

Until the last few decades, only a privileged few Westerners knew the real China. To the common man in Europe, China was a mysterious civilization with cuisine, designs, and artwork that shocked us at first, but then dazzled our imaginations. Much of what came from traditional China was a smash hit in Europe: the Pekingese dog, the kite and in the United States, the silkie chicken. In fact, I just finished watching a documentary about chicken breeding competitions in the United States, and the silkie took the prize. My dogs, toy spaniels, were bred into existence using the Pekingese dog as a baseline.

My grandparents, for example, had very little interaction with Chinese people, Chinese food, or Chinese goods and to them, China was so foreign it was almost scary. To my generation, China is a manufacturing hub of the world, which we would all very much like to visit. That is to say within only two generations, China’s status, image and respect has grown remarkably.

We have a saying in the West, that joy is your strength. The more joy you have the more strength you have, and the more strength you have the better life you can live. So much joy has come to the West from China’s opening to the world.

Perhaps the greatest change that came from China opening up to the west was a change in the type of goods that came from China, one I can attest to having watched Chinese goods change from the early 1990s to the 2000s. Chinese products have become brighter, happier, more expressive. In fact, some of my favorite toys and kites have come from China. For example, I purchased bells I bought from Beijing, which I used to write my first children’s music book. I can say from observing Chinese goods change over the years that everyday thought in China has changed as a result of opening. There is a greater premium placed on joy.

Today I bought a kite manufactured in Weifang and read about the history of the city. Legend says the man who invented the first kite worked on it for three years, only to watch it crash and burn after its first flight. How much it must have crushed the inventor’s heart to watch three years of labor crash into the ground! How true his story is for so much of China’s history: great pains, stumbling toward a vision in the darkness with great persistence, only to one day transform that vision into great creations that change the world. Little did the man know how his invention would be transformed over the years into an instrument of worldwide joy. In America, a famous song is Let’s Go Fly a Kite, from the film Mary Poppins. Through interaction with the West, kite designs have changed over the years, even including kites with LED lights. You see, it is joy in the little things like flying a kite with our families on a windy day that allow us to live life with strength. An inventor’s tears, transformed into worldwide joy.

Jelena Bubalo Fine is a divorce attorney based in Palm Beach, Florida.

The opinions expressed here are those of the writer and do not represent the views of China Daily and China Daily website.