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Special> 60th Anniversary of The People's Republic of China> Famous Foreigners
UPDATED: September-22-2009
Lisa Carducci: Finding Home at Last
The Canadian writer sees China as her home

Although her grandfather left Ripabottoni, a small town in Italy, for Canada in 1895, Carducci never found peace with her Italian origins and upbringing in French-speaking Quebec.

"All those years I was in Canada, I felt my body was in Canada and my mind was in Italy. I had two countries, but no motherland. When I came to China, I was 'all here' - body and soul; I was one, here. This impression was so good that I felt at home from the first moment. I felt good, at ease, satisfied."

This cultural recognition has been a slow process, says Carducci, who has won prominent literary awards in Italy and France and interviewed local people in Chinese. She first landed in Beijing in 1985 as a tourist, but it was in 1991 when her teaching career began in China that she gained deeper understanding of the country.

"As a teacher, I thought I was doing the most important job, because a teacher doesn't work on things, like one who makes cups that sell one yuan each," she says, rubbing the cup of Ningxia babaocha that she enhanced with roast sesame seeds and rose bud jam.

"It's not a money thing. You shape people, soul, heart, mind. For me, education is the most important thing for a person if you want to enjoy life."

Propelled by this strong faith, Carducci has supported 15 children through the Hope Project, to which she has donated all the money from her two art exhibitions held in Beijing.

Recently she got a gift from a 14-year-old girl she helps in Qinghai - an embroidery of lotus flowers. But there is a cigarette burn on it.

"This is something they had at home. It's more precious for me than if it were new, because it was theirs and they gave it to me."

However, Lisa worries about another girl, her "Tibetan daughter", who will graduate from Tibetan Medicine University this year. They have not been in contact with each other since December.

"I'm deeply worried about her safety," Carducci says. She doesn't know if the student is in Lhasa or Nyingchi in eastern Tibet, where she was taking an internship.

In 2006, Lisa spent the Spring Festival with Gemar Yumco's family in northwestern Yunnan. In three days, she took two planes, one bus, one truck and one horse before she reached the village. As Gemar Yumco's father put a white hada on her shoulders, she was moved to tears. "This was real life, not a TV show," she says.

The girl's sister and cousin greeted her the traditional way with yoghurt and buttered tea, not knowing if she could drink liquor. The neighbors brought many eggs to welcome her. "They were the most good-hearted people that I had ever met in my life," she says.

In the family's dim, smoky house, Carducci held the hands of Gemar Yumco's mother and admired her two rings. Upon departure, the 60-year-old woman insisted that she chose one as a souvenir.

"I really feel I belong to the family," says she, stroking the red stone on her right middle finger.

To learn more about the situation in Tibet, Carducci took a day off last week to find out what the Western press is saying. She says that two German papers "have acknowledged that they had fabricated news about Tibet".

Carducci has always been forthright in her opinion. When the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed in 1999, she wrote an article saying that the United States was responsible.

When China Daily published it on the editorial page, two journalists, one American and one German, called her to ask who paid her to write it and if she was really a foreigner.

"When I defend China, it's because I think China is right. And I believe that those who accuse China do it because they don't know.

"Give me $1 million, I will tear it up, I will burn the money. But I will never say something I don't think personally.

"I may make mistakes, but my mistakes are sincere," says Carducci, who has donated blood 108 times, including 22 times in China.

The latest piece in Carducci's studio was painted in 2005, a large board that she would add different elements to each month. That was an eventful year: She got the Chinese "green card"; Voyage - poems of her journeys, won the Dijon City Publication Award in France, and The Twin Yokes Egg - a collection of short stories, was awarded the 2006 Publication Prize of Editinter; she visited her Tibetan daughter's family in Yunnan; she underwent a surgery, and so on.

With the "green card", she can stay in China without a work contract or a visa.

"This is my country. I'm at home here. If I had to leave the country, for me it would be, [sigh] the end of the world. I would die."

(China Daily April 9, 2008)

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