We lived in a little house on the danish prairie -no just kidding- but it was a little house on the country side in Jutland. my father worked on a big farm just next to our house. We had a lot of space to play and fool around my brother, sister and me. Also a big garden with a lot of vegetables and berries and places to dig; and that is what I did. I loved to dig big holes down in the corner where we had the rhubarb plant, coz it's huge leafs would cover the big hole. So there I was with 4 or 5 years digging a huge hole in the ground, hoping that no one would find out.
Maybe it was because I'd been so silent for so long time that my mother suddenly stood behind me, asking what I was doing, and if I continued digging I would come out on the other side, in China and that the Chinese people would be able to come through.
"In China?"
I wanted to know what China was, and why the people might come out through there.
She explained that China was the big country just on the other side of the planet, and it was full of Chinese people, and if I didn't cover the hole again over night, they might walk through it and be in our garden the next day!
What a story to tell a 4 year old, and it just made me just more curious and I wanted to know more.
What she then told me can for some people seem to be of a kind of racist nature, but it wasn't, it was just her way to explain this 4 year old digger what a Chinese was like, so she said;
"They are small yellow people with a coned hat!"
I really cannot remember the image I got when she said that, but I must have thought that they were a size like a rat or a mouse, coz my answer to her was;
"Well, if they should come up through that hole in the night, the cat's would eat them!"
This conversation for sure made me interested in China, so I started to find out of more by asking and by looking in books, and later when I could read, I read comic's and offcorse I also read "Tin Tin and the blue Lotus" where he is in China.
And this could have been my first real visual experience of how it looked like in China; from a Tin Tin comic. But anyway, I was interested and over the years when I got more mature, my picture of this huge country also did, but still I didn't know how it was there. I've seen many films from China, read books and seen pictures and stuff, but until now never been there. Well at the moment I've only been to Shenzhen, and that isn't the real China, just like Hong Kong and Macau isn't, but after this summer this should change, and I am really excited about that.
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