I’m rereading a novel set in Beijing this American Memorial Day holiday weekend, and came across a passage that might be one of the things that inspired us to start Guanxi: The China Letter.

“[Laura] was prepared to like the[American] novelist, but all the same she was aware of the faint irritation with which Americans nearly always inspired her. ‘They won’t use their eyes,’ she thought, ‘it’s always the same. They want uplift, and uplift they’ve got to have; facts must take their chance. And it must be their idea of what is uplifting too. They’re so deafened with the clamor of their own synthetic idealism that they can’t hear any of the funny little tones of reality.’ ‘She’ll waste her time here,’ she thought, ‘like all the rest of them–she’s come to look for exalted ideas, and she’ll get them all right–American ideas of Chinese ideas. But she’ll learn nothing about China.” From Peking Picnic (1932) by Ann Bridge.