Why don't the Chinese ever say anything controversial? Why don't they ask difficult questions? Why don't they express their opinions? What are they afraid of?
These were questions I idly wondered about one evening on the train from Beijing to Chengdu as I read my book and waited for the lights to go out. I'd been through several days of boring lectures and careful answers from a young and articulate Chinese tour guide and participated, through translation by our Chinese-speaking tour leader, in more careful conversations with other Chinese people.
I had asked the front desk at the hotel if I could pay to have my hand-washed laundry dried, only to have them send up a man from housekeeping with a hair-dryer. He stood in my room, not looking at me, training the dryer on my shirts. Why hadn't I just been told, "No"?
Before the lights went out on the train I came across this passage in Paul Theroux's book, Riding the Red Rooster; he's talking about a Mr. Fang, sent by the Chinese government to watch him as he toured China back in 1989:
"He looked up and smiled at me, which depressed me even more, because I suspected that he was sad. Then I decided that he was not sad at all. He was like so many other Chinesereserved and fatalistic and steeling themselves against disappointment. Yes, the Great Wall was a masterpiece and the Tang Dynasty had been glorious and they had managed to thrash the Japanese, and they had invented poison gas, toilet paper and the decimal point; but they also had a long history of convulsions and reverses. Look at the upheavals that had taken place in just the past hundred years or so: the Taiping revolt, the humiliating colonialism of Europe and Japan, the Boxer Rebellion, the fall of the empire in 1911, the republic of Sun Yat-sen, the Sino-Japanese War, World War II, the battling between Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang and Mao's communists, the Great Leap Forward and all the other witch-hunts and hysterical purges that followed the emergence of the People's Republic, culminating in the Cultural Revolution. Who wouldn't be uneasy? And these sudden agonies were undoubtedly the reason that few people ever showed confidence in the future. It was better not to think about it. And it was a loss of face to seem disappointed, which was another reason the Chinese never opened presents in front of the giver (nor commented on the gift, no matter how large or small), and why their impulse when startled was always to laugh."
Thought totally out of scale in severity and scope against the "change is the only constant" world of corporate America, these constant tidal waves, and their effect on the jiggling corks in the water, are too familiar to ignore.
My sister was on this trip, and she noticed that our tour guide was careful in answering our questions about the continuation of China's one-child policy the diminishing of welfare benefits. My sis theorized that she was nervous because her employer, China International Travel Service, was a unit of the Chinese government. I replied that in the U.S., tour guides are generally bland and apolitical in their opinions, too. But not because they are afraid of offending the government; because they are afraid of offending a customer, and drawing the wrath of their employers, who censure any employee who speaks his or her mind with one bullying word: "inappropriate."
What, I wondered when my compartment turned black, is the difference?
