Great blog post.

“Our ancestors are very great, the principle of Taichi is very mysterious and beyond every word,” I heard this all the time.

I am not denying the greatness of that circle composed with two fishes, although according to some experts, the two-fish circle can only be called yin-yang diagram, the real taichi diagram is just a plain circle. Besides, it really looks cool when a person practices taichi in that circle or builds a house by drawing that circle at the center of the house or puts that circle on the clothes. It is so popular that as long as Chinese culture is mentioned, it mostly probably comes out covered with a mysterious face with the introducers’ blinky words. If you have some questions, they would say, “it is normal that you don’t understand, it is very deep and our ancestors are too smart.”

I think just this can best show the attitude of modern Chinese to traditional Chinese culture— they pretend to know it by pretending not to know it.