US Ambassador Disassociated From His Roots

By China Uncensored

Gary locke Jan. 12,214 A Chinese blogger has posted a mock letter on his blog putting himself in Locke's shoes. The mock letter purporting to be from the US Ambassador to China, Mr Gary Locke to the CCTV journalist, Mr Rui Chenggang is reproduced below: I’m Chinese, and when President Obama assigned me to be the US Ambassador to China, he must have thought that my Chinese background could bring a big turning point to the Sino-US relationship, but unfortunately what happened was contrary to what he expected, my Chinese background didn’t bring much good fortune to the Sino-US relationship.   I didn’t really expect to be continually criticized by both CCTV and the Guangming Daily. The first case was because I took the flight to China in economy class , which made Rui Chenggang, the journalist of CCTV, think that Americans are very poor, so poor that their ambassador had to take economy class to travel. So I explained that all American officials take economy class to go on business, a statement that Rui refused to believe, so he kept on quipping me about it on his microblog. Maybe the journalist was familiar with the custom of Chinese leaders to take business class for travel with five bodyguards beside them, but what I want to tell Rui is that your leaders are wasting the tax-payers money; then reconsidering it, I thought that Rui might still fail to understand me. So I wanted to tell him, we Americans are not poor, but China always likes to lend money to America, so I didn’t say it. Anyway, I was afraid that he would not understand it. I really don’t know what happened with Rui. Then, after I took a taxi to the embassy and sent my child to the school for kids of common Chinese migrant workers, to my surprise, this even annoyed a journalist, Xiang Xiaodong, who wrote an essay criticizing me in the Guangming Daily, saying that I wanted to disassociate myself from Chinese customs. I suppose that this journalist might be very familiar with the situation of Comrade Xu or Comrade Zhou who had five cars driving along  to protect him, and the fact that the leader had the right to knock down  passers-by while driving, and the news that one leader slept with 90 ladies, and he might not even be ashamed if he happened to know that one of those ladies is a close relative of his. On the contrary, he might be proud of his relative as she slept with a 'leader’. That might be the reason why those Chinese journalists are not familiar with the fact that a leader can be very thrifty.  It might be because they got familiar with the leader being a bully, that they are not used to being respected, for you have to be a sadist rather than a masochist, otherwise they will not respect you. When I was young, my grandfather told me that you should remember your roots are in China, you are a Chinese. But now, I realized that my roots must be completely rotten. I am wondering, what is really happening to China - my roots - if being thrifty by an official can be divisive; do you really expect me to be as luxurious and bad as Mr Xu (or Comrade Xu?) to make my Chinese compatriots happy; are you, my Chinese compatriots, really masochistic? Sending my kids to the common school for Chinese migrant workers can annoy Chinese people, however, while many Chinese bigwigs send their children to the most expensive American schools, no Americans will be surprised, because they all know all those corrupted bigwigs are filthy rich. In the view of Americans people are equal, nobody would want to be superior to others merely because his or her father was well known. Even though I have been in China for only one month, there are a lot of things I just can’t understand, for example, many kids who get into trouble, get off the hook merely because they mention their father’s name. This situation would never happen in  America, as no American child would make their living merely depending on the fame of their parents. Americans can only depend on their government if they are in trouble overseas, for example, when caught in a natural disaster, they would say "I am an American", just like those Chinese people who would boast mentioning their parents. Because, they know that the American government would protect its people. For example, last year, two Chinese-American female reporters were detained by North Korea, it was former American president Bill Clinton himself, who flew to North Korean to rescue them, which is the strength of the American system. These are my thoughts after being in China for one month, and my reply to all those criticisms of me.