Below is the new foreword I wrote for the Chinese edition of my book WANTING: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, published by CITIC—I’m sharing it exclusively in English with you here. I thought I’d publish it in this space since it contains some pre-history to the events that open the book, and many readers originally found this newsletter because of it. (For this week only, I’ve also removed the paywall to the English prologue of Wanting.)
Thank you, as always, for reading.
Foreword to the Chinese Edition
This book begins with a story that happened nearly seven years after I moved back to the U.S. from China.
I chose to take a language course in Mandarin as one of my elective courses when I was an undergraduate studying business at New York University. Within 18 months of graduating, I would be knocking back Baijiu at business lunches in Beijing and Shanxi province as a junior investment banking analyst.
How I ended up there—and why I ultimately left—brings us to the topic of this book.
In September 2004, I was sitting in my New York City apartment dissatisfied with my life as a finance analyst. I got the idea that a change of scenery would solve my problems.
I had heard about the explosive growth of the Chinese economy, and I had read several books about Americans who had moved to Asia and become wildly successful. So like Miguel de Cervante’s title character of his novel Don Quixote (my favorite work of fiction) who read about the adventures of the knight Amadis de Gaul and set out to imitate him, I was inflamed with a desire to make a journey to China myself.
I reached out to several alumni of my university who were working in Asia. By the time of my birthday in late November—not even one month later—I had a job offer and was on a plane to Hong Kong where I would take up my post. I was twenty-three.
An American pilot seated next to me on the plane (he had recently taken a job at Cathay Pacific) asked me what I was doing. When I told him that I was traveling to begin a new job in Asia without knowing a single person at my destination, he looked at me sternly and said: “You’ve got stones.” (This is a somewhat vulgar American expression which means that I must have ample levels of testosterone.)
The man’s response made me nervous, though. Maybe I did not know what I was getting myself into.
I did not know at the time that my journey would take me back to the U.S. from China within one year—but not because I did not enjoy my time there. It was one of the most enriching periods of my life. At that point in my life, though, my desires were violently changing directions and I was simply trying to keep up.
I thought of myself as independent-minded and strong-willed, able to determine what I wanted and then to go get it. It turns out that I was completely deluded as to how the process of desire works, and why I had come to desire certain things and not others.
Many years later, I would learn about a pervasive force in human affairs which, until now, has not been widely known or understood—yet it drives a large degree of human behavior at both the interpersonal level and societal level, and perhaps even at the geopolitical level. This book is about that force.
I hope that you will find in these pages a key to understand both the world around you better, but also yourself. And I hope that René Girard, the thinker who inspired many of the ideas in this book, will eventually be interpreted and re-interpreted and applied to phenomena in China in ways that I never could.
You will notice that most of the examples given in the book are taken from American culture, which represents my own limitations. But it brings me satisfaction to know that many more people will read this book and come into contact with these important ideas who have the ability to do what I cannot.
And to you, dear reader, whom I probably do not yet know: our desires will come into brief contact in these pages, but they will not remain there. Desire, as you will see, is always moving.
—柏柳康 (Luke Burgis)
Note: A very special thank you to Sabina Knight (桑稟華), Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature at Smith College in the U.S., for giving me a fitting Chinese name.