It takes a village?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

It takes a village?

And that was 1970s, so you can easily imagine what it was like in primitive times.

In those primitive times, that is to say, the village was their one and all community. Numbering several clans or a few dozen households at the most, the village was kind of like an extended family. I mean, those communities were very close knit. They had to be that way because together they were stronger, especially in times of trouble or danger, be it recovering from a landslide or fending off invaders.

Anyways, in these situations, it’s easy to see why it takes a village to raise a child, meaning everyone, young or old, some time, in some way may lend a helping hand to bring up a mother’s child.

That’s simply traditional village life, where everyone chips in and lends a helping hand whenever they can.

When I was in college, I had an American professor who always felt in debt to all of us because we Chinese, he said, were always trying to help him do everything even though he could more than manage by himself.

I understand the situation he was in perfectly. I myself tried more than a few times to help him, too, whether in reaching for a newspaper on the shelf or locating the can opener to open another beer, all sorts of things of that nature. It is the Chinese hospitality thing. We are too conscious (often to a fault) of the fact that this is a foreigner who, in a foreign environment, surely has a problem facing him every way he looks. Perhaps it’s precisely because we ourselves travel too little and therefore had a greater fear of the unknown than otherwise and therefore imagine that the foreign traveler must have a similar fear of everything to a similarly large and alarming degree.