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Cornelius: Point

Nick Southall, Stylus, 1 September 2003

WHEN I WAS 8 OR 9 YEARS OLD our school had a guest speaker come and talk to us about the years he had spent living in China. I can recall only two things from this distant lesson; firstly, that Chinese people apparently loved The Moody Blues, and secondly, that Chinese culture innovates and creates, whilst Japanese culture merely replicates and revises ideas drawn from elsewhere. How much truth there was in this I didn't know and still don't; in all probability it was just the unformed musing of a strange old man. I certainly don't give it any credence as anthropologically observed cultural fact. Yet it almost made a kind of odd sense to my formative self, and the notion has remained at the back of my mind through the years.

Total word count of piece: 973

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