A report to an academy (in the form of a travelogue set in the new/old China).

摘要

In the dissertation, I attempt, like Lu Xun in "A Madman's Diary" to evoke the terrible uncertainty, the menace, the dark underbelly of daily life, the nightmare within the comforting folds of the quotidian. The "lifeworld" as hidden horror story. A story which people may not want to hear: the ancient, infinitely sinister, and, at the same time, pathetic tale of patriarchal fear and insanity.;I present my daily life through the eyes of a rather pathetic, fearful North American patriarchal male recovering from alcohol addiction, because this identity profoundly colored what I saw in China and how I understood it. I don't intend just a convoluted exercise in Rousseavian "Confession" or a prolonged Alcoholics Anonymous-style Fourth Step ("made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves"). I seek not to justify what A. A. Calls "terminal uniqueness" as a man with these characteristics but to dispel it on a personal and cultural level. While the text on one level is largely about myself, it is about myself for a reason: to shed light on the problems of contemporary China and, hopefully, patriarchal societies in general.