A Long Fence (Sunset Trail off SR 80)

This morning, I suddenly felt an urge to paint. Even though It's alomst 10 AM. I put the painting kit in the trunk and hit the road. I drove down Palm Beach Blvd. (SR 80). I made a right turn into a small lane named Sunset trail simply to try my luck. There was very little traffic. I passed a country gravel road which was blocked by a cow farm door. I was impressed by the gravel road, shaded by heavy foilage of oak trees from the September sunlight. Also, I saw a long fence that skirted along the road as far as my eye could reach. I liked the way the fence went a zigzag line following the topological surface of the ground. So I backed up my car and set up my easel on the roadside.

Whenever I saw fences, I always thought of Robert Frost's Mending Wall. I believe he was talking metaphorically about the prejudicial or even xenophobic wall in human minds:

...We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence...

Talking about walls, I think Chinese are well-known for their passion for walls. An English writer calls Beijing "a city of walls within wall." This obssession doesn't mean Chinese are very particular about privacy. Personally, I guess they are meant to be the line of demarcation between your jurisdiction and mine. In other words, if behind the walls I am torturing or even killing my slaves, servants, etc. that is within the sphere of my power. Maybe that's why today's Chinese government keeps accusing this country and the Western world of interfering their internal affairs when we protested against persecution of pro-democratic advocates like Liu Xiaopo and Ai Weiwei. Like the perspective of the farmer in the poem, Chinese government thinks it is your fault not to be a good neighbor. Humanitarianism is just a fashionable facade. Who's going to take it seriously? Deng Xiaoping killed so many students in Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. Did that stop Western businessmen from coming to invest in China or to exploit the cheap slave labor?

I still remember an experience more than 30 years ago when China began to open its door to the world and I was a junior faculty member at one of China's universities. Our university invited, for the first time, a group of college professors from different Western countries to teach. One American professor asked a Communist official on campus an interesting question: "Why do Chinese have so many walls? You have walls around every house, every school or university, every factory and government building." The official thought for a little while and then, in order to make an effort to show how fair and objective he was in discussing social issues, he replied, "We call our country a socialist nation, not a Communist one. On this socialist stage, there are still crimes. However, when our society enters the stage of Communism, there will be no classes in the society and there will be no crimes. By then, if you come to our country again, there will be no walls because there is no need for them."

Later when the professor saw me, he told me that he regretted that he forgot to respond to the official by saying that in America almost all houses, schools, government buildings, etc. have no walls even now and he would like to know how the official would respond.

Well, today, nearly 30 years since I became an American, I have noticed that more and more Americans began to have a passion for walls like the Chinese. Is it true?