Where Do We Belong?

In his book, My Country and My People, the Chinese writer Lin Yutang argues that the way to examine a foreign nation “is by searching, not for the exotic but for the common human values, by penetrating beneath the superficial quaintness of manners … by observing the boys’ naughtiness and the girls’ daydreams and the ring of children’s laughter and the patter of children’s feet and the weeping of women and the sorrows of men—they are all alike.”

Lin was writing about the world outside China and, having witnessed the end of the Qing dynasty and the birth of the republic, he understood that a country is an extremely malleable thing. Even if its borders stay put for a century (and what few countries, existing now, still have the same borders as a hundred years ago?) almost all the people who called it home will have passed on and been replaced by others, by new generations, new...