This week I finished China Road and have loved every minute of reading it. Living in China you don’t hear many conversations about religion. Gifford devoted a couple chapters touching on religion in China. I found it very interesting to learn about religion in China, since I don’t really know much about it. Gifford visits Hua Shan also known as Flowery Mountain in Xi’an. While he is there he visits a Taoist monk. This Taoist monk lives in a cave by Flowery Mountain. He talks to him about the ways of being a Taoist monk. While Gifford converses with the monk he poses a question that I found very interesting. He poses the question about his religion while living in China and how it affects him. Gifford states, “He tells me more about his spiritual search, and the frustrations of living in China when all people want to do is earn money.” Trying to put myself in the monks shoes I pondered how it would feel to be him. He lives amongst people who do not believe in a higher power at all. Instead of religion that defines a person it is money and materialistic items. On this topic I think believing in a higher power can be a benefit to a persons life. It doesn’t necessarily have to be to be God but believing in something that creates a higher power in your life. China doesn’t have that influence of a higher power and so those values rely solely on money and attaining success. Chinese recently are being raised as engineers instead of moral people. They have been driven to succeed, work harder than others to attain more money. Referring back to the conversation Gifford had with Ye Sha. Ye Sha made a point about the growing generation now feels very lost. Most teens don’t have a foundation of morals and standards. I know that if religion had some part of their life that they would not feel as lost as they are now.

Another chapter focused on the Tibet situation in China. Tibet for years has yearned for their freedom as a country. I am embarrassed to say this but just recently learned that China had exiled the Dalai Lama. He told China that he would not persuade people to follow him. And even though he has done this, “Sometimes the police come and take the pictures away, says the monk. Once they even smashed it. But someone always puts it back.” Rob Gifford made a point that “many people, especially the young, and the urban, have accepted that Tibet will never be independent, and that they had better just make the best of a bad situation.” I felt so sad reading this and knowing that the growing generation has accepted that they will never have freedom. I don’t know what it would take to change the situation. But I hope that one day Tibet will gain it’s freedom and be an independent state. I hope that they can religiously be free and not be afraid or hide what they believe in.