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'Orientalism' has successfully built my critical awareness to question and see the big picture of knowledge, perspective or idea from a Western point of view and always see things from different perspective.

Oriental reality is called ideology in Europe and America, and Western ideology is called reality in the Orient. Those viewpoints eat into people's souls and form two distinct kinds of beings.

My tendency to idealize Western civilization arises from my nationalistic desire to use the West in order to reform China. But this has led me to overlook the flaws of Western culture.

I have viewed the West as if it were not only the salvation of China but also the natural and ultimate destination of all humanity.

The Oriental thinks everything in the sense-perceptible world is 'maya'; everything perceived by our senses and all thinking connected with sense perceptions is 'maya,' the great illusion. The only reality is the reality of the soul. What a human being achieves in his or her soul is reality.

Our ascendancy of the past two centuries - first Europe and then the U.S. - has bred a western-centric mentality: the West is the fount of all wisdom. We think of ourselves as open-minded, but our sense of superiority has closed our minds. We never entertained the idea that China could surpass the U.S.

Especially in the West, people want to understand Asia on a deeper level because it's become the engine of the world economy, like it or not.

The relationship between East and West needs to be and can be fixed via pop culture.

That vision of a common culture is now simply a remote wistfulness.

All the traditional westerns are about choice and the individual. When progress comes it's much more difficult to define the individual in that world.