![\"colin08\"](\"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/05\/colin08.jpg\")
<\/a>If you dig straight down, you\u2019ll come out in China<\/em>, as the saying goes. What a startling cultural disconnect. If you dig straight down, say, from Deering Oaks, the closest civilized spot (I use \u201ccivilized\u201d in the lightest sense) on the extreme opposite side of the Earth is a few hundred shark attacks southwest of Perth, Australia, 524 miles into the blue.<\/p>\nWhy, then, when Western Europeans and North Americans feel the need to dig, do \u201cwe\u201d imagine China to be the most distant spot away from us on the marble, geography be damned?<\/p>\n
That \u201cwe\u201d again. The antipode of London is actually Christchurch, New Zealand (at least Lewis Carroll gets it right in Alice in Wonderland<\/em>). Maybe it\u2019s because \u201cwe\u201d see the Chinese as our cultural \u201cothers.\u201d From this neck of the woods, we\u2019d have to take a major left turn to dig to China, because China\u2019s in the Northern Hemisphere, too!<\/p>\n The web site tvtropes.org lists mistaken references to digging to China, led by The China Syndrome<\/em>. My favorite: \u201cIn the Buster Keaton short film Hard Luck<\/em>, Buster goes off a diving board at the end of the film and misses the pool, leaving a hole with no discernible bottom. An indeterminate amount of time later, he emerges in Chinese garb with a Chinese wife and their two small children.\u201d<\/p>\n What\u2019s the antipode of Beijing? It\u2019s just a rainforest or two away from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Maybe Evita Peron started the (Keith) urban legend?<\/p>\n As for you, Joni Mitchell, maybe you can see the world from both sides now, but the rest of us just seem to want to conduct a sporting match on who\u2019s the most \u201cfrom away,\u201d presumably so we can bully them, marginalize them, misunderstand them, exoticize them, or at least tell them they can\u2019t park here.<\/p>\n In Lancaster, England, a person from away is an \u201coffcomer.\u201d In Hong Kong during the Opium Wars, they called Scottish East India trader William Jardine an \u201ciron-headed rat\u201d because he was so utterly exotic to them, from worlds away.<\/p>\n