Diego Kusak in China

My "China Experience" personal page

Thoughts & Stories

Living in Kunming has given me the opportunity to see and feel things in China. I love China in many ways. There are stories I want to write and thoughts I want to share.

This page is just started and needs more work.

It is full of nonsensical thoughts and stories.

 

About (A museum story).

When I was 6 or 7, I don’t remember well, I lived in a very special world. On one hand we had Flying Tigers, Pilots and American artists living In Son Vida. On the other hand, my aunt started to date the son of Robert Graves. Apart from Son Vida, we also started to go to Deia many times.

 

The English speaking colony in Mallorca of the 60’s was very special and unique. I was a free spirit and a crazy sponge absorbing many things. There was a famous archeologist by the name of William H. Waldren who gave my sister a fossil of a Myotragus Balearicus.

 

Around this time National Geographic Magazine came to do a special on Mallorca. Of course we were all spending time with all these people. Someone, I can’t remember who taught me how to look for fossils. I was a wild natured child that loved the wilderness and loved to find mushrooms or whatever was of importance. Good, now I knew how to look for fossils, minerals, and go into caves.

 

Pretty soon I had a large collection of rocks.  I had an Ammonite that was about 25 cm in diameter (2 meters for a child my size!). Several stalactites and stalagmites (imagine me at seven saying those words and knowing which one is up and which one is down).

 

One day I decided to make a museum. I put the rocks in my bedroom and labeled them. Put a paper on the door saying “Museo de Diego”. I remember making a cone of paper to put the money for the entrance. That was one Peseta (about a cent of a dollar).

 

My father finally came home from work. It would be my first paying client. He put his peseta and went in. I was so excited that he paid that I took his large finger, and made him walk out of the museum so he could walk back in. I did this so he would have to pay again. This is the only memory I have as a kid of holding my father’s finger with my whole tiny hand.  I think I managed to do this seven times. Imagine I had made 7 pesetas that day!

 

Still what good is to have a nice picture or a nice rock of you can not share it with the world. I once heard that you can only keep what you give away. However, no one taught me how to live doing that.

 

 

Thoughts

The End of the world will happen when all Chinese abandon traditional methods to raise children and begin to use diapers. Please I do not mean any disrespect towards local ways. In fact, I am telling this story to reflect in some of our ways from the West that I dislike (overconsumption, irresponsible advertisement and lack of human touch).

Many westerners are appalled when they see a Chinese mother holding a baby or young child near a tree. They are allowing the baby to go to the WC.

I am not, in fact I admire it.

I find amazing the level of love and connection to the baby. Imagine the ability to tell when the child needs to go to the bathroom.

The material disposed by such young humans is hardly toxic and it is even beneficial to the tree.

Furthermore, imagine the future problem with waste management if all these families begin to use disposable diapers.

Psychologically, I look with envy how these babies are not abandoned to minutes or hours with dirty diapers as I was at that age. Imagine the sense of disconnection we must feel in the West when we are left to take care of our own discomfort by screaming until a parent figures out that we have.

I sincerely hope Western methods and advertisements do not manage to shame Chinese away from this fantastic bonding procedure.

More to come...