Before joining the International Chinese Language Program at National Taiwan University (NTU) to study Chinese, 29-year-old American student Mate Kutolowski had been to mainland China three times.
In 1994, still a high-school student, he represented the US on a basketball team that went to the mainland to compete for two weeks. During his trip, he visited such places as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. Without knowing even a word of Chinese, he still took a deep liking to this ancient Eastern country.
Befriending China through qigong
Studying in the Department of Comparative Religions at Swarthmore College in Philadelphia, the wisdom of different cultures inspired his interest in Eastern religions, and in his junior year he began taking Chinese classes, many of them with teachers who had studied Chinese at NTU's Stanford Center. In 1998, Mate Kutolowski won a scholarship to go to Beijing's Capital University of Economics and Business. Upon arrival, however, he was struck with some unknown illness, which caused him to decide to return home after only two weeks, robbing him of a chance to get to know Beijing.
In June of 1999, Kutolowski was awarded another scholarship, this time from the Inter-University Program for Chinese Languages Studies, and went to Tsinghua University in Beijing with a plan to stay for at least one year. Aside from sharpening his Chinese skills, he also had a special goal in mind-to study qigong, especially Falun Gong.
From his training in religious studies he had been deeply impressed about the sources of folk religions and qigong. During his college years, Mate Kutolowski had to take a year and a half off from school for health reasons. During this time, he visited about a dozen Western and Chinese doctors, but none of them could find the cause of the problem, even as he lost more and more weight and had serious symptoms such as poor digestion, severe allergies, and low body temperature. But he was looking actively for a way to feel better, and practicing qigong helped him to see the essence of Eastern cultures.
Mate Kutolowski says that he has rarely been sick and has been in good spirits in the eight years since he began practicing qigong. It was only after he arrived in Beijing that he learned that there are thousands of different qigong styles in China, each with its own different movements.
"Not long after that," Mate Kutolowski recalls, "Jiang Zemin gave the order to crack down on Falun Gong," and propaganda attacking Falun Gong flooded the country's media. For an American who had grown up in an open society, it seemed unthinkable.
"One of my best friends was arrested and even beaten," he says, remembering the atmosphere of paranoia that gripped the country. Teachers at the Inter-University Program for Chinese Language Studies at Tsinghua told him that inside news showed the overall atmosphere was not positive for him, and warned that he needed to be careful even when calling or writing e-mails to family and friends.
When he returned to the United States in February of 2000, Kutolowski decided that he would devote his life to the human rights movement in the mainland.
Classmates with future sinologists
In September 2003, Mate Kutolowski and his wife came to Taipei together to continue working on their Chinese. He says that the courses at NTU are very demanding, requiring at least four hours per day for homework. Many of the students at NTU are future Sinologists interested in academic research, and Kutolowski says that taking classes with them can be like discussing problems with professors, something that is very helpful to enriching his knowledge.
"The openness of Taiwan society can be reflected in the classroom." For example, Kutolowski says, in the mainland there were still some questions that could not be discussed openly in the classroom, such as the Tiananmen Incident. He remembers that at one point, the Inter-University Program forgot to send a Chinese language textbook for official review; in the end, about 70% of its content was deleted. Mainland officials even thought that lines of dialogue in the text such as "When going out, do not forget to take toilet tissue" would make China appear backward. Naturally, these lines were also stricken from the text.
Although mainland officials often speak of greater religious freedom, Kutolowski certainly does not see it. "We all hoped it would be that way, but at the same time we discovered there are still many problems." He says that the mainland still limits Christians to attending churches that have official approval. "What kind of religious freedom is that?"
Mate Kutolowski says that he plans to return to the US in August of this year to attend graduate school and to immerse himself in research on traditional Chinese religions. Studying Chinese and practicing qigong will be the starting points for his research.
@List.jpg?w=522&h=410&mode=crop&format=webp&quality=80)
