Three Globes ｜地球仪
(本文为我在学校Toastmasters Club的一篇演讲稿）
Growing up, I had 3 globes.
I got my first globe when I was 6, my family had just moved to a new town and bought our first house. The previous owner was an old couple and they left a wrinkled and yellowed globe, which to me was the kind of treasure I could only imagine covered in dust in some abandoned and haunted house.
With the globe, I learned for the first time that the world was a ball. I learned for the first time where my Motherland was and it looked like a rooster. I learned for the first time that there was us, China, and the others which we call the foreign countries. I remembered one of them was the Soviet Union, shadowing over us on the globe like vast and gloomy clouds. I was also told they were no longer there.
I grew up fast, and so did my country. From 2002 to 2007, the GDP of China was growing and the growth rate of that was also growing. (Much more significant than my own growth in height.) It was 2008, I had just turned 12 and it was a big deal in China to celebrate the 12th birthday. We had hundreds of guests and I received my second globe, a small beautiful, delicate globe made of glass and my third globe, a giant globe twice the size of a basketball.
At that time, I had just read the book Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne. So you would find me spinning the globe with my eyes closed and pointing randomly, making it stop and decide where I would travel in the future. There were also times when I would look at the lights or books through the small delicate glass globe-- to get a global viewpoint one can even say.
The small town was developing and soon it was clear that our house was part of the teardown and rebuild plan. With the house gone my family got a decent amount of compensation. And then Boom! A global financial crisis that started in the US in 2008 cost my family, a family living in a small town of 25 thousand people in northwest China, a fortune. For very long I didn’t get how my parents managed to do that.
Now I know it’s just “globalization. ”
Fast forward to 2020. The big globe became wrinkled and yellowed in a dusty box in my old bedroom. I am on the other side of a much bigger globe. I have lost the delicate glass globe and the lovely young cousin who gave it to me has been dead for 10 years. It’s 2020, 1.43M people around the world have died from a pandemic. I no longer consider the world as my homeland and foreign countries. It’s not one and another, but one among others.
I know that in the end, human as a whole has always won. We would see the end of the pandemic as we always did, but our lives will be forever changed and the globalization we knew would also be gone. But that’s not a bad thing -- the old globalization was one of Consumerism and Neocolonialism and it was never ideal.
Imagine with me the globalization that people care for others regardless of their nationality, race, or religion -- a community of shared future for humankind. After all, the world is just a much bigger and older globe spinning alone in the vast universe. We are all we got.
Thank you！
