Contradictions

I had to draw a map of the eastern half of the United States and the name of my hometown to make my point. Above the name of Jacksonville I wrote out "Andrew Jackson" and explained that the name of my town was a French way of saying Jackson's Town. My town, indeed, had been renamed after Andrew Jackson's exploits.

Those exploits were a consistent policy of genocide. If he had been a Balkan general in the 1990's, he would have been an "ethnic cleanser." He wanted nothing less than the wholesale relocation of the native American population to somewhere more convenient. Death, to him, was even more convenient.

I illustrated on my ad hoc map that I drawn on my Chinese language book where the mountains of North Carolina were. I drew a line showing how far Jackson had pushed the Cherokee Nation. I explained the conditions under which thousands perished on this hike, and many more after the relocation. I entitled this part of map the "Trail of Tears."

I then showed another line moving from west of the Mississippi River down into Florida. This time to persue and slaughter escaped slaves and other Natives hiding in the swamps of Florida who had rebranded themselves as Seminoles. I erased the line seperating Florida from the rest of America to show how he annexed Florida in the process of trying to slaughter even more Natives.

The point of all this was showing the contradictions in the national character of both China and America. I was extremely surprised to learn that Chinese textbooks very clearly explain that the Cultural Revolution was a terrible thing. How it is taught that Chairman Mao was a very good man during the Long March, but not such a great leader once in power. This is the official history. This is what children were taught in school. Students were made to memorize the missteps leading to the creation of the People's Republic.

I told my Chinese teacher, Dorothy (most Chinese working with Americans adopt an English name), that issues like the Trail of Tears were only briefly touched upon in American History textbooks. That no citizens really speak out against having there town named after a genocidal maniac. Likely this is because so few Floridians know what the Trail of Tears was and even fewer would know that Jackson was behind it. The same freedom that allows us to remember and talk about such events is the same freedom that allows us to willfully forget or shrug off as unimportant.

America, Home of the Free, chooses to celebrate Columbus Day and forget that there used to be a people called the Arawak. People can speak of such issues, but they largely do not. It is an inconvenient truth washing away the illusions of an illustrious past. It is mud in some uphill creek version of American history that we are people on the way to Providence... that every mistake we make is OK, because it's part of a progressive trend. After all, America would have never arisen as a world power capable of doing the world good without first building itself up with slavery, right?

This isn't some rag-on-America-history essay. As I told my history students in America, every nation has horrors in its past. Almost every nation that exists today has at its roots one people who displaced another violently. What is noteworthy though are the contradictions that arise almost daily when comparing China and America. In the land with less freedom, there is more historical criticism. In the land of the free, a shiny white gloss lays dense on all but the most recent historical events. It is sad to think that it takes an "official history" to make people aware of their own heritage.

Tags: Treyopia China Stories Life Students Teaching Jixian politics Cultural Revolution