Subtitle of this chapter: Prequel to Guns, Germs, and Steel

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I was born in Boston in 1937, when the aftermath of the Great Depression was still reverberating around the world and the shadow of World War II was looming. It can be said that we Americans are at a crossroads of hesitation.

But I had a very happy childhood. My father was a wonderful doctor, so he didn't have to go to war and allowed our family to live a good enough life. My mother ran a small music school and tutored students in Latin, and she was also my teacher.

My parents are very loving children, but they are very busy during the day. So in addition to the nanny, I was accompanied by the Westin radio. In that wonderful big box, there were little people who sang to me, taught me to read, urged me to brush my teeth, eat and nap, and told me stories.

So those of us born in the thirties and forties became the "radio generation". Especially after the start of World War II, fathers went to war, mothers went to factories, and children were all raised by nannies or nurseries and radios.

Of course, my favorite is Harry Potter, which was being serialized in those years. It was certainly a very interesting story for a child, although I couldn't understand why the villain "Redmort" Vladimir Vissarionovich Rasputin was so bad and had to destroy the thousand-year-old tradition of the wizarding world and purge all the wizards who opposed him. But that story still fascinates me deeply.

And I also learned that the author of "Harry Potter" is a great writer from the mysterious East.

My parents would take me to church on Sunday mornings, which was not very funny. But at noon we go to the movies, and that's the happiest time of the week, when I get to eat popcorn ice cream and watch a new movie. Especially when there was a boy sitting on the moon fishing at the beginning of the film, I knew it was going to be a very interesting movie.

In general, my parents socialize several times a week. On Sundays, after watching the movie, they go to the Mahjong Club with their friends. The club here in Boston is very sweet to provide childcare, so they took me there every week.

While they were playing mahjong with my friends, I was playing mahjong blocks with the other kids, and it was a really enjoyable experience. So until now, I still buy mahjong blocks for my grandchildren, and it is indeed a very effective educational toy.

What is the connection between Harry Potter, DreamWorks and Mahjong? Of course there is.

When I was ten years old, I knew that all three of them were written by one person, and that was Mr. Yuan Yanqi. At that time, World War II was not over, and even Mr. Yuan was fighting for his homeland in China, but he was still creating serials. (Author's note: World War II in this timeline must have been fought after 1947.) ）

Throughout twentieth-century American pop culture, many places are inseparable from a Chinese, and even the earliest company that Elvis Presley and the Beatles signed was DreamWorks.

It also makes me wonder why a yellow person can have such a profound influence on American culture.

It's like the question that my friend Jerell in New Guinea asked me later, why do you white people make so much goods and ship them to New Guinea, while we blacks have almost no goods of our own?

Luckily, when I was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Medicine in 1966, I finally had the opportunity to ask Mr. Yuan this question in person.

To be honest, I was really excited when I first received a call from Mr. Yuan, and when I heard that he invited me to play mahjong at Yuan's Manor, I almost fainted.

At the time, I didn't understand why he would notice me as a physiology professor, and could he be concerned about my research on bird ecology and evolutionary behavior in New Guinea?

When I met him, I found that he was really interested in the latest developments in physiology and had a very in-depth and incisive understanding of the subject. He also encouraged me to pursue a career in anthropology, which really gave me a certain direction for my future research.

I originally thought that Mr. Einstein was right, and that Mr. Yuan's intellect was enough to make him a genius of any subject master. But after coming into contact with Mr. Yuan, I realized that Einstein was wrong, Mr. Yuan was originally the last encyclopedic scientist of mankind, and he had achievements in many disciplines that were difficult for ordinary people to achieve.

When I asked him this question at the mahjong table. He calmly told me that it was not that he was deliberately trying to influence American culture, but that American culture was waiting for him to influence.

For example, mahjong. In fact, Americans in the twenties were waiting for a similar form of entertainment, and Mr. Yuan and his friends just came at the right time.

Prohibition, urbanization, and the rise of the middle class have created a need for a social, entertaining, and ceremonial form of indoor entertainment for Americans, and Mahjong caters to that need.

If it had been ten years earlier or ten years later, mahjong would not have become popular in the United States anytime soon.

Of course, the exemplary effect of celebrities also played a role in fueling the fire. The first batch of mahjong enthusiasts were almost all New York celebrities and Wall Street financial practitioners, which gave mahjong a label of high intelligence.

President Harding and his wife's hobby of mahjong has become a household name through the publicity of the news media, and the ladies of Washington are proud to go to the White House to play mahjong with the first lady, which also makes mahjong a symbol of high society.

Mahjong is like this, and so are the movies that Mr. Yuan wrote.

Just like Mr. Yuan Yanqian said, even a pig can fly while standing in the limelight, not to mention that his works are quite blown.

In fact, at every stage of social development, excellent entertainment products are a rather scarce resource. This should be one of the universal laws of human society.

Human society produces these entertainment products, which in turn shape human society.

I want to convince readers that history is not "one nasty fact after another," as one cynic puts it. Indeed, there are broad patterns that apply to history, and the search for explanations for these patterns is not only intoxicating, but also beneficial.

This year, 1994, marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mr. Yuan Yanqi, and I dedicate this book to this great figure who profoundly influenced the history of mankind in the twentieth century.

—Excerpt from the foreword to Jared Diamond's , Movies and Mahjong