On the 24th February, also my father’s 65th birthday, before the month was over, as I predicted, Putin made his moves. In a mere four days, scads of analyses, pontifications and flat-out ignorance have hit social media, showing us just yet another way it has changed even the face of warfare, especially its human one.
I do not wish to add to the Greek chorus except to say that the people of the beautiful land I visited in 2019 (and had hoped to visit yearly had the pandemic not struck) have not proven my instincts about them wrong. They are every bit as courageous, defiant, resourceful, resilient and fatalistic as I figured them to be. They share that last trait with us Chinese, along with the sensibility that whilst there is little glory in war, there is honour in sacrificing oneself to resist invaders, something we have also done for centuries.
The Book of Northern Qi, completed in 636, states in Volume 41, Yuan Jing’an’s biography: 《寧為碎玉,不為瓦全。》which translates to “better to be a broken piece of jade than to be an earthen tile intact”. Such elegant way to say that it is better to die heroically than live and compromise.
Ukraine is caught in a horrible situation, a pawn between world powers, an object lesson for client and proxy states, for unaligned and aligned alike. In their moment of defiance and resilience, let’s raise a glass to this nation of broken imperial jades. Slava Ukraini!