Photo by Mike Bravo on Unsplash

THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA

The Great Wall of China is not just a wall, but a wall of prejudice

The Barriers in Our Minds

We are all familiar with the Great Wall of China — the world’s longest defensive wall — from maps, photographs or history books. That colossal pile of stone, stretching for thousands of kilometres, was built over the centuries to protect an empire from the outside world. Today, however, we are faced with a wall far more insurmountable than those stone walls: the walls of prejudice in our minds.

For most of us, China is a "scary" closed box. However, since I started to delve into the Chinese language and absorb the essence of its characters, I have discovered that behind that vast wall, there is actually a world that is so familiar and "ours".

As I looked into the rich "loyalty" tradition in Chinese culture, the ancient "respect" rituals at family meals, and the serenity of a tea ceremony, I realised that Turkish, with its wide and emotional vocabulary, is a bridge between these two ancient cultures.

This bridge is not just a linguistic similarity. Both cultures have internalised the collective value of respect for age, wisdom and roots; they have learned to position the "I" within the "We". Because Turkish contains these codes, reading Chinese evokes a sense of familiarity rather than alienation. The bridge between the two ancient cultures is actually silently established within my own native language.

The Great Wall of China: A Physical Manifestation of Prejudice

Whenever I look at photos of the Great Wall of China, my gaze always lingers on the same spot. Not the wall itself, but the magnificent greenery around it. I have always dreamed of being there, lost in that greenery, perhaps having my photo taken. The wall? It has always been in the background in my mind, but for the people around me, the wall is everything and the only thing they know.

“They were so afraid of the Turks that they built huge walls.” I've lost count of how many times I've heard this sentence. There is also this version: ‘The Turks were so strong that the Chinese couldn’t contain them, so they built wall after wall.’ It's a bubblegum idea: the colour fades quickly and the taste disappears, but they keep chewing.

When I tell people that I learnt Chinese, the wall moves. Now, it's not in China, but in the eyes of the person in front of me. “Do they even go there?” “Don't they eat everything?” “Did you forget about the Coronavirus?” Then there's the evergreen classic: 'They all look the same anyway.'

It was at that moment that I realised the Great Wall of China was actually never in China. It was in our heads.

When I started learning the language, I didn't find a monster. There was a red thread that we tied, a dragon that we loved, and a horse that we considered sacred. Two peoples who had separated from the same steppe thousands of years ago had continued to revere the same things without knowing each other.

Fear? I fear Afghanistan, I fear Gaza, I fear Syria, but not China.

The Great Wall of China never really worked, it couldn’t stop the Huns or the course of history, but stopping the wall in our minds is far harder. That wall still stands, still being built, still has a guard. When we begin to see the Great Wall not as a monument of fear, but as a vast scroll on which the shared stories of two ancient cultures are written, then that last guard in our minds will also relinquish his post.

The Great Wall of China was actually never in China. It was a wall that we rebuilt every day because we turned our fears into stone. I chose to look at the greenery that climbed over the wall rather than the wall itself.

关系 (Guānxì)- Connection, relationship, bond

真正的桥梁不在于石头，而 fun 在于我们心中建立的关系。

(Zhēnzhèng de qiáoliáng bù zàiyú shítóu, ér zàiyú wǒmen xīnzhōng jiànlì de guānxì.)

True bridges are not made of stone, but of the connections we form in our minds.