The author lived in an era that traditional Chinese spirit was regarded as something worthless by both foreigners and Chinese. In order to build up Chinese people's self-confident and prove the superiority of Chinese tradition, the author wrote this book. It is well to be reminded that the entire passage was written in English. I have to say that Mr. Gu is a definitely knowledgeable scholar.

 

There is a sentence in the article which leaves me great impression, the real Chinaman is a person with the head of a grown-up man and the heart of a child. The Chinese spirit is a spirit of perpetual youth, the spirit of national immortality. I can't agree with it more. No matter what kind of goal we want to achieve, we have to remember our original intention in the first place. To get the human intelligence, we have to understand two things, sympathy and intelligence, for the intelligence is the product of the combination of two things. More important, all the two things can be found in Chinese civilization. Nevertheless, it is still a difficult business to get its true meaning. This makes lots of educated foreigners find it is too hard to learn Chinese. Only the language makes them give up. Although educated people are more intelligent than children and uneducated people, they are used to thinking and speaking with the language of their head or intellect. But the approach to take in Chinese civilization is to think and speak with a pure heart.

What's more, this book makes me feel proud of Chinese characters and Chinese traditional culture. Chinese is a poetical language from one's heart. That is the reason why even a simple letter in prose written in classical Chinese reads like poetry. There are different types of translation of Chinese poems, but the majority of them can't express the true emotion in the poems. In spite of this, I have to say that poems are very beautiful. Maybe just like the proverb said, all beautiful things are difficult. As for me, a Chinese college student, should learn more about Chinese traditional culture especially the poetry from the ancient Tang and the Song dynasty. Only in that way can I be a talent with all-round development. Meanwhile, Confucian culture has accomplished for the Chinese people in all ages, for instance, "I love life, but I also love righteousness: but if I cannot keep them both, I would give up life and choose righteousness." this is one of the well-known proverbs among our Chinese. Benevolence, justice and propriety, the main idea of Confucian, are important spirits of this new generation. For the contemporary education, people always attach great importance on children's study and ignore the necessity of quality-oriented education and Chinese history education. This is a behavior lacking long-term vision. To truly understand Chinese culture we must have our full nature--the heart and the head, the soul and the intellect equally development.

The real Chinaman may be ugly, but there is no hideousness in his ugliness. The real Chinaman may be vulgar, but there is no aggressiveness, no blatancy in his vulgarity. The real Chinaman may be stupid, but there is no absurdity in his stupidity. The real Chinaman may be cunning, but there is no deep malignity in his cunning. Parallelism is employed so much so that it makes the language elaborate, the rhyme and rhythm harmonious, tones convincing, and touching and moving in emotions. Furthermore, we Chinese people own the courage to face our problems and correct them, so being proud of them rather than regarding them as a shame is the thing we should do. Last but not least, this point also adapts to our attitude towards Chinese history.