A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East

by Tiziano Terzani

I find it tragic to see this continent so gaily committing suicide. But nobody talks about it, nobody protests—least of all the Asians. In the past, when Europe was beating at the doors of Asia, firing cannonballs from her gunboats and seeking to open ports, to obtain concessions and colonies, when her soldiers were disdainfully sacking and burning the Summer Palace in Peking, the Asians, one way or another, resisted. The Vietnamese began their war of liberation the moment the first French troops landed on their territory; that war lasted more than a hundred years, and only ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975. The Chinese fought in the Opium Wars, and in the end trusted to time to free themselves from the foreigners who ruled with the force of their more efficient weapons. (The last two pieces of Chinese territory still in foreign hands, Hong Kong and Macao, are returning to Peking’s sovereignty in 1997 and 1999 respectively.) Japan, on the other hand, reacted like a chameleon. It made itself externally Western, copied everything it could from the West—from students’ uniforms to cannons, from the architecture of railway stations to the idea of the state—but inwardly strove to become more and more Japanese, inculcating in its people the idea of their uniqueness. One after another the countries of Asia have managed to free themselves from the colonial yoke and show the West the door. But now the West is climbing back in by the window and conquering Asia at last, no longer ...