Jonathan C. Lewis
Author and Artist
Charade
A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.
His Beijing pedicab is a deep, rich, Chinese-flag red. The driver—he never tells me his name—is as spindly as a prepubescent eight-year-old. Whether from hours of bicycling or undernourishment, I can’t say. He wears skinny jeans and a thin blue sweater. His greying hair is trimmed in a buzz cut.
He is alert. Like a hovering hawk until a kill turns up. No book to read, no music, no diversion from watchful waiting.
His face wears a weary mask. To my Western eyes, his expression is inscrutable, frustratingly so.
As I climb into his pedicab, before I am even seated, my driver asks about my age, marriage status, income. Taken aback, I stammer out a vague verbal retreat. As I learn later, my fumbled reply is rude. In China polite conversation includes intrusive personal questions, except they’re not considered intrusive.
My driver smiles at my garbled reply. But I can’t tell a warm smile from a mocking smile from a wan, awkward smile. When he looks away, what does it mean? Is he keeping his eyes on the roadway or rejecting me? I fall into myself. A queasy quagmire of ignorance.
The unsettling thing about dropping into an entirely different culture, besides not understanding the basic, everyday patterns of life, is not knowing how to read another person. Is a local woman’s smile a flirtation or an awkward timidity? Is a man’s lingering touch an overture or merely a soft handshake?
With eight billion people living in it, the world is bursting with every imaginable custom, practice, belief, superstition. Tastes and textures, principles and no-principles, sexual practices and preferences, zealots for good and zealots for no reason at all. Every civilization offers something uniquely wonderful.
“Be open to new ideas, new perspectives, new experiences, new cultures.” That’s what I tell my students. The continuing sermon of my classroom teaching, my life’s work, the career that I curated for myself, is tolerance and understanding.
China tests my charade of acceptance.
I arrived in Beijing not knowing nearly enough about Chinese history and habits. My bad. But all those unfamiliar proper nouns, especially the emperors and dynasties, confuse me. If I were better-informed, I’d know to reject the myth that The Great Wall can be seen by astronauts, functioned as a successful military fortification, or—after a bottle of baijiu—was a large lawn ornament.
Only an arm’s length away, my driver is withdrawn, uninformative. Parks and palaces without names whiz by. Horse-drawn carts with large loads precariously weave between BMWs stuck in traffic. My clumsy ignorance encases me.
As nations go, China has a lot to answer for. Human rights abuses, censorship and mass social conformity churn my stomach. If the country were a person, it would be canceled.
Instead, the world looks the other way because the alternative is war. I look the other way because I am here to see temples with tiled roofs, landscaped gardens and quaint pagodas.
At my hotel, I pay the pedicab fare, miscount the yuan, tip too much or too little—and swiftly withdraw into the cocooned safety of my American hotel room to watch English-speaking television.
