Juan Villoro
With nearly 1.5 billion inhabitants, China has a remarkable standard of living. But societies can be abusive, and certain achievements can come at a terrible cost. Amazingly, this variant of progress benefits from two flaws: the ruthless competitiveness of capitalism and the authoritarian control of communism.
The truth is that China’s influence has spread from Beijing to the unconscious since Marco Polo brought spaghetti to Italy. One of its greatest admirers, Christopher Columbus, was inspired by that journey to seek a route in the opposite direction. Historian Serge Gruzinski has emphasized the importance of New Spain for globalization. The Nao de China activated a trade that has not stopped. Just look at what is happening in our families.
At the age of ninety, my mother organized a home Mass with a priest friend. The priest wanted a cross to place on the table. I went to buy one at a store that sells everything from a bust of Beethoven to a life-size brass giraffe. They had two types of crosses with stands, made of rustic wood. I thought they came from Michoacán, but they were made in China. A Buddhist country dominates the trade in Christian talismans.
The examples multiply. In 2014, I attended the book fair in Panama. I was with my daughter, and we wanted to see the canal. Those who had arrived before us told us, “Don’t bother; not a single ship passes in four hours.” Luckily, we went to a Chinese restaurant. I remembered that the world’s waterway traffic depends on that country, and I asked the captain if he knew when a ship would arrive. He asked us to go to the kitchen. I witnessed an incomprehensible conversation. The cooks shouted until the captain told me, “There will be a ship tomorrow at two o’clock.” We took his word for it and found that the Chinese were right.
Umberto Eco pointed out that Mao’s Little Red Book was so successful because it was not necessary to read it; it was enough to brandish it. Its design was that of a perfect ideological poster. All the members of my family had their own Little Red Book.
My father remarried the philosopher Margarita Valdés, who, true to her political beliefs, hung a portrait of Mao on the wall. “How beautiful your grandmother is!” commented the cleaning lady.
I had other reasons for veneration. I wanted to write scripts inspired by two Maoist counterculture films: La Chinoise, by Jean-Luc Godard, and La Cina è vicina, by Marco Bellocchio. For her part, my sister Carmen found another way to be Chinese: ping-pong. That story began tragically. We were playing in Juan José Arreola’s apartment, where the living-dining room had only one piece of furniture: the table that the author of Bestiario had built with his own hands and varnished with Chinese lacquers that guaranteed a 17-centimeter bounce.
Carmen was the smallest in the group, and no one wanted to play with her. She would wait in a corner for hours. She wore tiny gold-plated earrings, which made Arreola call her “Lagrimitas” (little tears). The nickname described the sadness of a girl who was only allowed to play when everyone else was tired, but who would become the best of us: she was a national champion, was on the Olympic team, and—most importantly—traveled to China. My mother has a three-meter-long photo of the participants in that tournament.
Like objects reflected in mirrors, China is closer than it appears. A few days ago, I picked up a pile of books and suffered a muscle spasm that was relieved by a curious acupuncturist. He is Mexican but speaks as if he had just arrived from the Yellow Sea: “The wound will heal soon,” he said. I suppose he is imitating his teacher, and that language seems “technical” to him, or at least mysterious. Or perhaps it is something more significant. The fluttering of the butterfly has lasted for millennia. It is useless to want to be Chinese because, in a way, we all are.
This was initially published in Spanish by Reforma on July 11, 2025.
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