From having little interest in the outside world to an obsession with being number one to a feigned concern for its own minorities' protection, China has a lot of the qualities negatively attributed to the US. In the past three and a half months, China often left me completely frustrated, as I struggled to understand so many things about its culture. From the six-fold leap in decibel level to the staged "minority shows" to strangers on trains telling me I would catch cold to the baffling continuation of Mao-worshiping, I felt like a martian who had disembarked a spaceship in a parallel universe. While Beijing may be an area of comparatively free political expression, my experience is that it in no way reflects the countryside and smaller cities, which might as well be another planet.

What really drove me nuts was that not only did China have very little idea about the outside world, but it pretended that it did, and would claim influence in a realm of areas in which it had very little business. I'm not being facetious; a country that prided itself on isolation for centuries is still very obviously dealing with the consequences.

On one of my last days in Beijing, I was riding a taxi and picked up a copy of Taxi Magazine, available for passengers' reading pleasures. There was a feature on a festival called "Christmas," which was suggested to be a spinoff of China's Spring Festival.

Not only was the introduction unapologetically uniformed ("Americans celebrate christmas for 7 days while Europeans celebrate it for 14"--really, how difficult is it to google the 12 days of Christmas?), but sexist: "even the stingiest Danish housewife will make sure her family has enough goose live paste to celebrate the holidays." Everything was stretched very thin to allude back to Chinese history, as the article proceeded to literally make shit up about each country, claiming that Mexicans ate only fruit on Christmas and that Swiss fondue was inspired by Chinese hotpot. This greatly offended my Swiss friend, to say the least. I went home and searched the web for anything to back up this connection; there has not been so much as a facebook note crediting the Chinese with fondue. The Chinese also claim that Italian pasta is not actually Italian at all, but brought from China by Marco Polo when it was in fact introduced by Arab traders in the 8th century. And for a piece on one of the most celebrated Christian holiday in the world, there was not a single mention of Jesus Christ.

I have a lot of good things to say about China, because I really did have an extraordinary and eye-opening experience, one of the most rewarding of my life. But I cannot with a clean conscience go on to tell any of that without first getting something off my chest.

China, get over yourself.