Smile

Last week we had a record heat wave. It was 80 degrees Farenheit and we were barely into the second week of April. The air managed to be both parched and sultry at the same time, as if a kettle of ashes had decided to see what it would look like dressed as fog. For a few days I was really afraid that spring was over for the year.

During this period I kept finding myself thinking of a favorite couplet by the medieval Chinese poet Xie Lingyun. He was a great hiking enthusiast and is said to have invented a kind of clog specially designed for climbing mountains, but poor health often confined him indoors. After one such illness he complained:

未厌青春好，已睹朱明移。

I had not yet had enough of the green spring's joys;
Now I must see the summer passing too.

Sometimes it seems to me that these lines say all there is to be said.

But then on Wednesday the weather turned round. Light winds blew the soggy dust from the air. Sunlight slanted on the deep green pines. The new leaves on the poplars looked impossibly fresh and cool against the bright blue sky. Chastened by the memory of the recent heat, I tossed all my work to one side and set out on a late-afternoon ramble through a nearby park.

This park -- it's actually more of a garden -- is really something else. It includes a kindergarten and two playgrounds. It has a small ornamental hill criss-crossed by flagged footpaths and terraced with small green plants, two stone bridges (though the stream they span is almost always dry) and dozens upon dozens of weeping willows. And, as I discovered this spring, it has an almost indecent profusion of flowering trees and shrubs.

There are peach trees, cherry trees, plum trees and flowering crab-apple trees. There are lilacs, both purple and white. There are dogwoods and magnolias. There is a wisteria trellis and a hawthorne hedge. And those are just the ones I recognize. There are also bushy plants with yellow flowers something like fluffy anemones, little purple bulbs something like a cross between an iris and a hyacinth, and many other things as well.

In order to furnish my ramble with a sense of order and purpose, I decided to start by visiting all the clumps of lilac in the park and then work my way through the peach trees down to the unidentified yellow bushy things.

The park was full of people. Late afternoon seems to be a popular time of day for airing toddlers, I suppose because they're just up from their naps. Their grandparents sat chatting on benches, turning their faces to the sun. The afternoon session at the kindergarten was drawing to a close; parents stood waiting by the gate.

At first I was too engrossed by the lilacs to pay much attention to the park's other visitors, except as a pleasant backround to all the flora, but then I noticed something. No one was returning my smiles. Every time I passed someone I smiled in the rather mild, sunny way you do when you want to suggest that it's a nice moment to be living in the world and you're glad the person you're smiling at is there to share it with you. And each time I smiled, all I got back was a blank stare. Deflecting the minor complicity I offered -- hello, there, comrade, God speed you -- the stare took nothing in, offered nothing back. It was very dispiriting.

The thing is, this particular expression used to be a standard experience for foreign visitors to the Middle Kingdom. I first heard about it from a teacher in high school who had traveled all over Asia. She told me that the only country she hadn't liked was China, and she hadn't liked it because of the way people looked at her. Sometimes the looks were merely blank -- taciturn, inward, unsmiling -- but other times they were actively hostile. I didn't quite believe her at first, but not long afterward I visited China myself and found that she had been telling the truth.

Though it was disappointing to feel so unwelcome, there were compensations. Plenty of people were eager to make friends. One had only to find them. "The China look" as I came to think of it, usually managed to remain part of the background, part of what made China what it was, like third-world toilets and pebbles in the rice.

But on this trip I have generally met with very different treatment. Until Wednesday, I had thought that the China look had vanished from Beijing, perhaps driven away by China's meteoric rise to wealth and power, or perhaps swept away by the pluralism that might be expected from an Olympic city. I'd been imagining telling all my friends about it when I went home for the summer: "You'd never believe how friendly people are. When you smile, they smile back. Sometimes they even talk to you. It's as if they think you're a real person. It's like a -- well, it's like what it is, a modern country."

So, my experience in the park was particularly unsettling. It set off a chain of resentful memories and began to eat away at my pleasure in the flowers. For a few moments, I found myself wondering if something had happened -- if President Obama had said something inflammatory about Tibet, or Taiwan, or silenced dissidents -- and imagining what I would do if the situation really got out of hand.

Then, after a few more minutes, I found myself thinking of something that had happened in one of the lessons I taught during my last sojourn in Beijing. I had asked the class to invent an English word and explain its meaning, and one of the students came up with the word "pandasmile," which she said described the face that China showed towards the world. I remember thinking at the time how ironic it seemed: "smile" was the last word I would have used to describe the way the Chinese faced the rest of us.

Later, though, I began to see the word my student coined in the very different context provided by Peter Hessler's remarkable book River Town. The book contains a number of descriptions of the "Chinese smile," all of them suggesting a tough and understated ethos -- brave, controlled, suppressed-- but the one I find most haunting is last, near the end of the book:

After our last meal the family lined up at the door and waved goodbye, standing stiffly and wearing that tight Chinese smile. I imagined that probably I looked the same way -- two years of friendship somehow tucked away in a corner of my mouth.

Every time I think of this moment, I feel as though I've seen that smile myself hundreds of times -- I can almost see it in my mind's eye -- but then it slips away and I realize that I am only imagining it.

I thought of these things, of pandasmile and River Town, of confusion, hope and disappointment, as I made my rounds among the lilacs. Then suddenly the scene changed. My path was blocked by a mother who stood waiting near the kindergarten. She was chatting to another mother, and, as I edged past her, she gave me a bright, absent smile -- the sort you might give to a stranger when your attention is taken up elsewhere but you are glad to spare some cordiality. My heart fluttered. This is what I mean, I thought. People are so friendly now. They treat you like a real person. Not an intruder, not an alien, not a foreign guest, just someone who passes you on the road.

It was as if a spell had broken. By the time I turned for home, several other people had smiled at me. There was an old lady trundling a toddler on a sort of combined pram and tricycle, and a young girl in a school uniform, and one or two others as well. As I passed a clump of the unknown bushy plants with the bright yellow flowers, Mr. Hessler's tight smile flashed again across my mind's eye, but, before I could quite get hold, it was gone.

La Belle Superpower

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that practically the second you become an expat you find yourself cultivating new attitudes towards your homeland. This can happen in a lot of different ways. Sometimes the changes are pretty subtle -- just a slightly altered set of emphases on the things, positive and negative, that you consider important about your country. Decent ice cream, say, or an insufficiency of municipal parks. But sometimes the changes are more drastic. Ferocious critics of the way the home store is run suddenly find themselves lobbing mortars in the other direction. Doves get hawkish. All kinds of stuff starts to sound different when it comes from people who grew up singing a different national anthem.

This thought occurred to me during my English lesson yesterday. In a review of the word "powerful" and the different ways it could be used, I found myself discussing the idea behind the word "superpower" and its various implications. It was all rather over my students' heads (hey, they just turned eight last month), but sometimes I like to talk to them about things they can't possibly understand. Just occasionally. You never know what will stay with them, after all.

So, I told them that America was, for a time, the world's sole remaining superpower (they liked hearing this, as they are very pro-America), but that China was also a rising superpower (naturally, they liked that too). Then I mentioned the Cold War and invited them to guess who the other superpower had been. I thought they might know the answer, actually -- might have heard their parents or grandparents talking about it, perhaps -- but in any case I have noticed that when they don't know something they like to guess. What I wasn't prepared for, though, was one of the first guesses: France.

Actually, what I should say is, I wasn't prepared for my reaction to the idea that France might have been the Other Great Superpower, the US's rival in the Cold War. I mean, "derisive laughter" doesn't begin to describe it. I just hooted.

See, the thing is, back home, I don't make fun of the French. I mean NEVER. It would break my Proust-reading, Paris-map-memorizing parents' hearts. But this time I laughed so hard I almost fell over. I was wiping the tears from my eyes. I felt so American -- so classically "freedom-fry"-eating, flag-waving, SUV-driving American -- I had to resist the urge to rush to a mirror to see if I looked any different. (People over here often ask if I am French, English or Russian and even quite frequently if I am Chinese -- I suppose they must think I am one of the Turkic minorities or something -- and they are always astonished to find I am American. "You don't look American," they say.)

I clearly remember the first time this sort of expat Americanization happened to me. It was during my last sojourn in China, right after college, and it was much more dramatic and sobering. Bill Clinton was President then and the US was riding high. But I knew that we still had plenty of critics. I was one myself. And so I wasn't too surprised when a grad student at the university where I taught began to voice anti-American views. One day, though, he stepped over the line. He told me that if he were President of China he would order an air raid on some random US cities, just to give us a taste of our own medicine.

"Well, that's awfully civilized of you," I said. "Very mature."

"Yes, that's right, that's your civilization. You boss everyone else around. You should see what it's like on the other end."

Being told that the US is bossy and overbearing (which is actually a fairly polite description) didn't really bother me. What bothered me was my interlocutor's phenomenal, staggering refusal to think rationally or argue fairly. After all, I wasn't the one proposing to bomb random cities. He was. It wasn't my civilization; it was his twisted, childish thinking. And while I was ready to engage in a real discussion of the complexities that inevitably attend the conceptualization and prosecution of any foreign policy in a geopolitically interdependent world, this grad student didn't even know what real discussion was. I guess that was really the scary part. He was a grad student at an excellent university, and he didn't even understand how far from the rational he had strayed; he had no concept of rational thought in the first place.

So, perhaps it's not surprising that I snapped. But what is surprising -- what surprised me at the time, anyway -- is the way I did it. Without warning, I switched from Chinese to English and said, coolly, "You want to take on the US? Good luck." The chilly arrogance in my tone startled even me. It was as if some brooding external force had been lying in wait and seized the moment to transform me from an individual person, a liberally-educated citizen of the world, into a living epitome of American power and American will.

Then the moment passed, and things shook themselves right again. Or almost right. I did lose contact with that particular grad student, though we had once been very close. I also developed a keener sensitivity to the national chauvinism that seemed to be becoming endemic among China's young people. Then I went home and startled all my friends with my endless complaints about China: how rude and unfeeling people could be, how ruthless in their pursuit of personal advantage, and, most of all, how determined to regard world culture in a competitive context, as if it were a contest they felt entitled to win and injured at having to entertain any doubts about. You're a rising modern power built on a five-thousand-year-old civilization, I wanted to shout. You have nothing to prove! But I never said it, or not to the right people, anyway.

Things have been very different on this trip. After eight years of the galactically unpopular Bush administration, I had dreaded playing the part of the American abroad, but I should have known better. We're too easy a target now. Bashing us is no fun anymore. Besides, now China is the one to be riding high. If it's a competition, China won it -- she's got the Olympic gold to prove it. If it's a question of personal advantage, well, there's nothing like the threat of a global depression to shift one's perspectives. We're all in a ditch; no one has the advantage now.

But of course now things are changing once again. As I sit here gazing out my window at the bright moon hanging over Beijing, I think about the coming inauguration of Barack Obama and the renewal of America. Of course, I don't know what this renewal will mean or what shape it will take. No one does. But the prospect makes me think of a strange question one of my students raised in our lesson yesterday. When I said that China was becoming a superpower, my tone must have left room for some doubt about whether I meant to say China would take America's place on the world stage, or merely join her there. I can still see my student's great, big, anxious eyes fixed on me: "China and America, right? China and America?"

As I said, I don't know what will happen. No one does. But, as I listened to the implications behind my student's question, one certainty suddenly shot through me. A lot of people have been suggesting certain parallels between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy. Maybe they're valid, maybe not. But here's the thing. I don't know what kinds of dangers will prompt President Barack Obama to dispatch aides in the middle of the night to seek audience with heads of state in foreign lands -- maybe to France, maybe to China. I"m just pretty sure there will be such perils. And, for the first time in a long while, I think there's a good chance that those heads of state will find it reasonable to say, as once before, "I don't need to see pictures. I trust the word of the President of the United States."

"That's right," I assured her. "China and America. Both of us."

Milkshake

Earlier today my lesson was cancelled on me without explanation. This happens a lot and it ticks me off every time, even though I know no rudeness or disrespect is intended. It's just one of those cultural things. The Chinese operate in an ad hoc fashion. Advance planning is not a popular concept. In many ways this is a terrific national characteristic and I would do well to learn from it, because I'm about as flexible as a two-by-four.

Which is probably why I can never seem to get past the initial stage of my response: "How can these people just up and cancel my class without telling me? What the bloody hell do they think they're playing at? What about my plans? Doesn't my timetable matter?"

On this particular occasion, as so often in the past, I'd orchestrated my day around the scheduled lesson. I could have gotten a lot else done if I'd known I wouldn't need to hang around this afternoon. In particular, I could have returned my books to the library. In fact, that's what I had originally hoped to do with the afternoon -- they're due tomorrow and I am so frequently ambushed by bad health that I am really, really chary of letting anything with a deadline run right down to the wire -- but then I was asked to teach my lesson instead. The lesson that never happened.

The thing to do in these situations is to find some nice activity to take your mind off how irritated you are. After a while, you look up from your tea in a cafe or your walk in a park and wonder how you could have gotten worked up over such a piffling little thing in the first place. My problem today was, I was too tired to go out and treat myself to a nice dinner or a movie or some other cheerful little adventure.

So here I was alone at home -- only not at home because I am sort of a hired guest -- wondering what to do with my extra time and my bad temper. Alone, that is, except for the maids, who are very nice indeed. On the whole I try not to bother them too much. I'd like to be friends, and we do sometimes have nice chats, but I don't want to intrude. They work hard, and I have the feeling that when they have any time off they'd really just like to relax with each other and not be forced to take part in a cultural exchange.

I felt too tired and cross to start working on anything productive, so I just sat at my desk feeling sorry for myself.

Then I found myself thinking about milkshakes. I started wishing I could just hop in my little yellow Beetle and take a trip to one of the many first-class creameries that are sprinkled across Eastern Massachusetts. Well, all of New England, really. But my car is in Massachusetts and I am in Beijing. There are milkshakes here, but I would need to go downtown to get one -- probably an hour on the metro, and I've never been to any of the establishments that serve them, so there'd always be the risk that whatever place I chose from an internet directory would have closed or moved or changed its hours or gotten pregnant or something.

Then I thought, "Hey, wait. We've got a blender here, and the local supermarket is still open, and I know they sell both ice cream and milk. It's probably terrible ice cream, but still, it's likely worth a shot."

So I told the maids I was heading off to the supermarket for some ice cream because I was going to make milkshakes and asked what kind they wanted. Nobody specified a kind, so I bought both chocolate and strawberry.

We finished the chocolate up and left the strawberry for another time. One of the maids, who has quite a sweet tooth, drank two glasses. As she poured the last of it into her glass she said, laughing, "I'm not being at all polite." Only she said, "Like a guest," which is the most common Chinese way of saying "polite."

"That's right," I told her. "We're all mates here."

I was right: the ice cream was absolutely terrible. But it was good enough for us. Our party had no guests.

The Same Election As Everybody Else

I'm looking to make some international phone calls tomorrow morning. Tomorrow morning Beijing time, that is, which should translate to this evening Central Daylight Time -- more specifically, this evening in the states of Ohio and Michigan.

It started with some email from MoveOn.org. As grassroots Get Out The Vote initiatives across the country shift into high gear, the folks at MoveOn are asking members to call potential volunteers in swing states and rally them around the flag. It's worked before (midterms '06) and I sure hope it will work this time.

When I first opened the mail, I thought to myself, "I'd have liked to do this; too bad I'm out here in Beijing. I love being here, but I sure wish I could be more involved in this election. Kind of makes me feel left out, being stuck here away from the action." Then I started thinking about what I could say if I did call. I mean, I know MoveOn gives you a script -- I've used it before, and it's pretty good -- but I figure I might be able to come up with something a little more tailored to my particular circumstances.

The conversation I ended up imagining features an antagonist rather than a fellow liberal, but even when you call the MoveOn demographic you occasionally run across the odd Republican, so there's a decent chance I'll get to use it:

Me: Hi there! My name is Flyingfish. I'm a member of MoveOn.org and I'm calling you all the way from Beijing, China.

Swing State Resident: You're calling me from Beijing?

Me: Yep, that's right. I'm calling because I'm seriously concerned about the direction our country is taking, and I want to know if Senator Barack Obama can count on your help to win the Presidential election this November.

Swing State Resident: You're calling FROM BEIJING? To find out how I'm going to vote?

Me: Yes. And I'm calling because Barack Obama doesn't just need your vote, he needs the votes of all the people you talk to, all the residents of the great state of [insert name of state stupid enough to consider the McCain-Palin ticket as anything other than an obscene joke] who can swing [repeat state name] for Obama this November.

Swing State Resident: You're calling from BEIJING to tell me all this? Must be pretty expensive. You one of those rich liberal types from, I don't know, Massachusetts or somewhere like that?

Me: Yeah, well, never mind where I'm from originally. I'm CALLING from Beijing. And let me tell you, if this call WERE expensive, it would be worth every penny if it meant we could prevent John McCain from continuing the Bush Administration's policies, which aren't just expensive; they're drowning our entire country in red ink. They make Katrina look like a day at the beach. And John McCain just doesn't get it. I mean, this is the guy who recently described "the fundamentals' of our economy as "strong." In the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression? Maybe the worst financial crisis EVER? He says the fundamentals of our economy are STRONG?

Well, maybe we should give him a break. He is 72, after all. Maybe he was dizzy from trying to count his houses. Or his foreign-made cars. He might not really have meant "strong." He might have been trying to say "strange." Or maybe "staying," as in "staying right in the toilet where the Bush Administration dumped them five years ago when he pitched us into this disastrous war which has accomplished nothing constructive, cost trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives, acted as a great recruiting tool for Islamic extremism across the globe, lost us the goodwill of pretty much every nation on earth, and which I have consistently supported."

But, actually, no, this call isn't expensive. I'm using software that you can download over the internet for free. This call is costing me just a few pennies a minute.

Everyone here in Beijing uses this software. It's all the rage. It brings the whole world closer together than ever before. I can talk to my family every day if I want to.

And I love talking to my family. I've got family values like John McCain's got lobbyists. I've got family values like Sarah Palin's got the pelts of Alaskan wolves slaughtered by bounty hunters from helicopters and low-flying airplanes.

But I have to admit, when I first got MoveOn's email asking me to call you, it did take me a minute and a half before I realized that I could do it through the internet. Yeah, I know, call me a 20th century mind in a 21st century world. It took me a minute and 30 seconds to cotton on.

But hey, I'm not running for president.

I know I may need to adapt this script a bit. Can't expect everyone I call to say his lines on cue. But I figure if I make enough calls, I'll get to say most parts of my script at least once. And I plan on making a lot of calls.

As the fellow says, "Pennsylvania. Michigan. Ohio. That's an election."