My Time as a Human

I was extremely fortunate to have been in China just weeks before my girlfriend Weishi’s Da Gu (first aunt) died. There was an old wooden box full of smooth stones near the back door, and she walked up and down on it with bare feet each morning. 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.

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.