My Time as a Human

In my brief time with Weishi’s Da Gu, we talked quite a bit about censorship in China, something that fascinated me. I had already spent a little time watching some of what passed for television news. Each day there was a long string of stories about officials shaking hands or greeting each other on the phone in some likewise congenial matter. The content of the stories didn’t get much beyond the fact that they were on good terms. Then, suddenly, no more than a few frames flashed by of empty fields as a voice mentioned massive famine in northern China. If you blinked, you’d miss it and be right back to the safe world where well dressed men politely shook hands.

At the China Daily where Da Gu was an editor, every collection of news stories for the day would have to pass by a party official who would strike through most of them with red ink. It was just part of the process that you had to accept as a journalist in China. It certainly explained the news.

When television is about as entertaining as a sleeping beagle, it’s no wonder that so few people stayed indoors to watch it. Instead, people piled out of their houses at night and filled the streets. Neighbors laughed together and swapped stories over games of Chinese chess until late into the night. It was actually quite wonderful, and something I never experienced in all my time growing up in America. It wasn’t until years later, when I moved into a much poorer, older neighborhood, that I experienced the same sort of evening camaraderie.

There was also no sense of crime. Not that there wasn’t any crime, but no one had any idea how much there might be or where it occurred. There had been a murder in one of the many huge buildings of apartments we were visiting, somewhere around ten years earlier. The rumor, which was the only information available, was that it was about drugs. Without any legitimate news sources, rumors and the stories of travelers were the only information available about the rest of the country. Some talked, for example, about drugs problems that were growing into an epidemic in Shanghai, but no one knew anything with any certainty.

I have to wonder whether not knowing about these things gave people a sense of security that we lack in the U.S. Here, every act of violence is held up and flashed before our eyes. Stories of violent crimes are used as tactics to frighten Americans into owning guns and dogs or giving up their civil liberties. It certainly doesn’t encourage anyone to meet or talk to strangers. It certainly doesn’t create an environment where neighbors become friends and spend time together outside on the streets. With the China streets filled with people, I’m certain that this in turn makes it safer for everyone to be out.

The real solution is clearly not to tidy up our world into a baby’s playpen, but rather to educate people to the point where every scary story doesn’t create an instant fear response. Marvin Minsky talks a bit towards the end of this talk and there are many better talks by brain people about how reverting to a purely emotional fear state strips we humans of our higher level resources. Steven Levitt talks (if I’ve found the right talk here) more about the general inability of human beings to evaluate the scale of a threat, and how quickly humans will base their estimations of risk or danger on the proximity of single events.

But I’m still hopeful that education can help, and you can’t properly educate people without free access to information. So despite some of the potential downsides to what might be available, I will continue to believe that in the long term, full and open access to information will bring the population up to a level where they can better understand the viability of threats, the world around them, and each other.

I was extremely fortunate to have been in China just weeks before my girlfriend Weishi’s Da Gu (first aunt) died. For some reason the thing I remember most about her house was the old wooden box full of smooth stones near her back door. Each morning she took off her shoes and walked barefoot up and down over the stones. Whether a way of stimulating certain nerves in the soles of her feet or just serving as a meditative practice, it was supposed to help somewhat with the extreme pain of the stomach cancer that was slowly killing her.

Da Gu was an extremely tough woman. She never once let her physical ailments get in the way while spending time with us, and she insisted on making us tea and having ranting, passionate discussions with me. After growing up in China as a child, she had traveled to England to study english literature. She returned to work as a reporter and, ultimately, editor for the China Daily, China’s english language newspaper. Her use of the english language was so far superior to my own that I felt almost as ignorant saying hello as when I tried to discuss American history and politics with her.

Da Gu’s ex-husband was a literature professor, and apparently just as tough, opinionated, and stubborn as she was. They had been divorced for more than fifteen years, and to the day still took the time to argue with each other. She explained that two people so strong willed could simply never make it work. What she said next etched itself forever into my brain. “But if I was ever going to get married again, it would only be to him.” Weishi assured me that he had said the same thing to her.

Several weeks after I left China, the cancer finally won out. Someone likely scattered the smooth stones that took in so much pain, leaving them, too, to rest. I wonder how her ex-husband felt now that she was gone. To me those almost, but not quite, solvable problems that linger forever are the most tragic. Is there a point when they should have given in and cut off communication forever? Or was it the dynamic struggle that made what was left of their relationship so irresistible? Maybe, once again, the only answer is to continue to ask.

One of the greatest gifts my parents have given me is my ability to deal with a wide range of living conditions. Summer vacations were tours of the U.S. in an old Chevy van. My favorite spot was the “way back”, giving up the relative comfort of the bench seats where my sisters slept for the joy of flopping amongst piles of camping gear and supplies. On the extremely rare nights that we got a hotel room instead of camping, I was the one sleeping on the floor in my sleeping bag, developing even further my flexible lifestyle and affection for cold, hard sleeping surfaces. I naturally evolved into the guy who slept under the drum kit, rolled up in my leather jacket, even when the party was at my own house.

One of the many unique components of our house was a full sized pipe organ my parents scavenged from an old church. (Actually, I believe the first organ they got had already been scavenged and they picked it up off of a guy who was building a house himself.) The console sat on the floor below me, but the pipes were right next to my room. My mother would practice as I lay in bed, the soothing sound of air blasting through massive metal whistles coaxing me to sleep.

All told these adventures crafted some handy life skills. I can sleep through any kind of chaos and noise. My favorite way to crash is in the middle of a raging party or listening to someone learning to play the piano for the first time. When I was on a documentary crew and had to sleep on the floor of a trailer so tragic dogs refused to stay with us, we all rolled up in sound blankets like human burritos and I was happily dozing in no time.

Then I arrived in China. Weishi and I were picked up at the airport by a massive exuberant family who tossed us into cars and got us back to the apartment. We were surrounded by laughter and fed incredibly delicious dumplings that they had been cooking all day and then, suddenly, everyone was gone. The apartment fell instantly silent and there we were. Despite all of the love, I felt strangely uneasy and I couldn’t quite figure out why. I stepped out onto the balcony and looked around. Something about the place, as quiet and peaceful as it was despite being in the center of Beijing, made me very nervous. Then I discovered the switches.

The buildings around me were simple blocks of grey cement. Birthed during the communist era, they were not unlike low income housing projects. It suddenly occurred to me that if I was in a similar environment in Chicago when I grew up, I would have to worry about being shot. Here in China, however, this was just how everyone lived. Somewhere in my chest the first contextual interpretation switch popped and I relaxed immediately. Moments later the second switch, this one for “camping mode”, made the general level of cleanliness and lack of sophisticated tools fall right into place. The boiled water bucket bath was a luxury compared to cold river water. A pile of blankets is all I really needed. The tension lifted, clearing my eyes to see all of the magic that was China for the remainder of my visit.

By the time I reached India these switches had become so loose and fluid that I didn’t even hear them snap. I brought a sleeping bag and my own lights and supplies and was perfectly content hand washing my clothes or sleeping without heat. Oddly, I’ve even come to relish the challenges of living in different ways. It was only once the second camera crew arrived, however, that I realized how far I had come and how privileged I was. They were completely unprepared for the environment and were so caught up in their struggle to deal with the lack of Taco Bell, Starbucks coffee on demand and hot showers that they spent the majority of their trip blinded to the wonders around them.

So I have to give another couple of bonus points for my whacky upbringing. I hope my sister subjects her kids to more of the same. I’ll certainly do my part to make sure that whenever they come to visit me, I’ll be sure to clear off the floor and set up a drum kit in the corner.