Coming Home Crazy?

A typical American single-family dwelling; or, as we like to call it, “Home Sweet Home.” Remarkably, this 1800 square foot, three-bedroom home is considered “modest” by American standards. It includes central heating, air-conditioning, underground sprinklers, and one bathroom with a western-style flush toilet and bathtub.

As I write this, it is over two weeks since returning from Hohhot. For the last week, I've been--for some mysterious reason--telling people that I "just came home about a week ago," as if the proximity of one week (but no longer than that) would explain to them that I was still in the grips of China. People already don't care. The "I just returned from China" conversation usually ends after a "Wow," a pause, and then a shift to another topic. Most Americans, I find, don't really want to talk about China. This is even true about academics and scholars, who I supposed would at least be curious. I found this out at a conference in Boise "about one week" after returning home, which, given my new deceitful calculations, was actually closer to two weeks.

Why the lies? I guess I want people to know just how close I am still to China. I am holding on to, even cultivating, this sense of "reverse culture shock," worried that all my changed perceptions of the world--my new ideas about food, exercise, wealth and poverty, globalization, family and community--are fading from me quickly.

In fact, the most shocking thing initially about returning home was that everything seemed so familiar. Was I in danger of slipping back into my old world without even a short phase of awkward contemplation? Had the trip been a failure? I kept telling people that it was "life-changing" but perhaps it was not life-changing in the way that travel is when you're young. I remember returning home to Seattle in 1988 after my youthful backpacking trip around Europe and Turkey and seeing the world through different eyes. Were my eyes different now?

It didn't seem like it. Coming into Bellingham (our first stop in the US) was familiar. The awesome power and beauty of nature on the Pacific Northwest Coast was a striking contrast to Hohhot and Beijing, but the culture shock was not serious at first. We hung out at my Dad's house. I rode my Dad's bike around town. The city seemed empty but also normal. People driving, jogging, sipping on coffee.

I really wanted to "come home crazy" like Bill Holm did in the 1980s. By the end of his year teaching in Xian, "the ancient Tang capital grown into a grimy cement industrial city," he was beaten down by China:

"The lying, the fawning, the false smiles, the categorical no, the stifled anger, have worn me down. The call that never connects on the half-dead phone, the enervating heat, the army of flies, the endless bargaining over small potatoes, the chorus of "mei you" (not have) that sings out in reply to every request, whether for canned tomatoes, cold beer, or train tickets, has finished me off. I am exhausted and ready to go. I do not need a second opinion."

My China, of course, was totally different than Holm's. I wasn't beaten down by stone-walling bureaucrats or consumer deprivation. My China included western conveniences, the internet, and even a Starbucks smack in the heart of Holm's "cement industrial city" of Xian. Unlike Western travelers to China in the 1980s and before, I didn't have to conjure up an imaginary America that served as an idealized (other word?) antidote to China. In Holm's words, "The old China hands who came in the thirties invented a bourgeois monster, and the foreign expert of the eighties invents a republic of pizza, good bourbon, T-bones, Chevrolets, and clerks who are happy to finger your credit card."

My China had come a long way since the 1980s. All of Holm's longings could be found even in Inner Mongolia by 2008. Maybe my experience was a degraded one--like going to a Chinese theme park rather than China itself. Those first days had me questioning the value of my experience and grasping onto to every hint of reverse culture shock, as if to validate my experience.

Most things seemed so familiar they didn't seem strange--like the Interstate 5 heading south. I've driven down it so many times over the years it seemed like an old friend. But I was amazed by the big cars, the big people, and the lack of multifarious modes of transportation (no donkey-carts, no three-wheeled flat-bed pick-ups with two stroke engines spewing noise and plumes of black smoke). The freeways in America are fast and orderly--a monotonous procession of shiny cars and well-fed drivers.

I went to Target on my first night back in town and encountered bright alienating fluorescent lights, wide aisles, and even wider people. A few hulking forms wandered through the store. The employees seemed drugged. There was something disturbingly degraded about the environment. A lack of human energy, vitality, beauty, aesthetics.

For days I was not able to write anything more than simple words and phrases. The first week back in the USA was total chaos. We were jet lagged. We were overwhelmed and underwhelmed all at the same time: overwhelmed by the magic of modern air travel and the tricks of the international date line and underwhelmed by the bland familiarity of everything. I had no energy. All I could do was scratch down some ideas that would later help me to reconstruct my first thoughts upon re-entry:

pedestrian right of way
water out of tap
toilets/shower in barefeet
poop discussions
space--to move around
greenery
birds--bald eagles, fields of swans

relationship with weight and food--obsessed with food and with losing weight
mondo government buildings (China) vs. mondo pick-up trucks and SUVs (US)
ability to get goods anytime
disposable society
lack of culture shock: things at home aren't different but maybe outlook is different?
1st bike ride in US--in jeans not lycra tights
self-serve gas and other labor saving devices
dilapidated barns: abandoned peasant villages?
woman in behemoth truck with "Got Jesus?" sticker

The first part of the list suggests just how much we take for granted in the good ole USA. A pedestrian right of way? I mean--cars actually yielding to pedestrians! This is something that only happens in China when pedestrians finally muster the numbers to push forward and overwhelm the momentum of the automobiles. I was shocked the first time a car stopped just to let me--one lone solitary individual--cross the street.

Water out of the tap? It's obvious how much we take this for granted. After being told to brush their teeth on our first evening back, Samuel walked into the living room and told Arienne, "Mom, there is no water in our cups. How can we brush our teeth?" Arienne said, "Just turn on the faucet and fill up your cups!" They had forgotten what a luxury it is to trust that your faucet will not poison you. We were completely thrilled to walk into bathrooms and showers without our rubber slippers, which for seven months had protected our feet from the terminally wet and dirty bathroom floor. It was also nice not to have the sewer stench emanating upwards through our bathroom drain. So our Chinese bathroom culture was gone forever, and happily. The only thing that remained was continued family discussions about stool. Those would also disappear as soon as our bodies settled back into life and food in America.

We were now luxuriating in space. My dad's house is spacious, carpeted, and clean. It is also situated in the bluffs above Bellingham Bay in what seemed to us a living postcard of natural beauty. I took the kids to the park on our first day and we watched a large bald eagle hover overhead.

Bill Holm describes the Chinese environment as "ruined" by human use and occupation. "Every inch of Chinese soil," he says, has been "remodeled, refertilized, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again, rebuilt again, dense with six thousand or so years of corpses, ruins, tries, failures, secrets, catastrophes, treasures." He flies from Shanghai to San Francisco and encounters the city--the one he used to view as "big, exciting, corrupt, polluted"--as "instead, a cultivated garden surrounded by almost empty nature."

We had a similar experience flying from Beijing to Vancouver, B.C. The landscape was sparkling. The air was translucent. We saw three bald eagles on the way home from the Vancouver airport. Flocks of Canadian geese. Wooded hillsides, mountains, forests, bays, sailboats. We were overwhelmed by the physical beauty of it all.

The “green, green grass of home.” Pictured here are two travelers who did not “come home crazy.” This photo is taken in front of the Peace Arch at the US/Canada border. Even after nearly twenty-four hours of travel, Sam and Grace were dizzy with euphoria. They took the first opportunity available to them to pile out of the car and run on grass and not worry about anyone yelling at them (most of the grass in China is strictly “keep off!”).

Ok, so the Northwest Coast is one of the most beautiful places in the world. It is awe-inspiring to arrive there from the brown deserts of eastern Washington, not to mention the degraded grasslands of Hohhot. The Northwest Coast is a lush inhabited wilderness that underscores just how degraded the Chinese environment really is.

But I also wondered what Vancouver or Bellingham or Seattle would have looked like in the 1890s when sawmills still lined the shores pumping smoke and noise into the skies and denuding the surrounding hillsides at an alarming pace? Is the industrializing American West of a century ago a fairer comparison to the industrializing Chinese West of today? Both are characterized by vast labor migrations, largely unregulated capitalism, and environmental devastation.

Certainly America of a century ago was not filled with overweight people with fat cheeks, sunken eyes, and double chins. Nor were the streets so somnolent. I imagine more activity, more vendors, more pedestrians, more carts, much like the China I just left. Modern America seemed to have fallen into a high-calorie, low-exercise coma. I missed the activity of the streets, the walkers, the bikers, the fruit stands, the street food. Everything here felt comfortable, prosperous, lush, lethargic, and dead.

And yet, the landscape alone made us feel as if we had arrived in the most beautiful country in the world. We didn't begin singing "America the beautiful" in the car as we left the airport to drive to my dad's house (partly because we were still in Canada), but that's how we felt.

It was not until we pulled into the Tri-Cities some days later that we began to encounter profound reverse culture shock, suggested by the phrases in the second half of the list above, beginning with America's pathological relationship to food and eating. We were glad to be home, but our little hometown--in contrast to bustling Hohhot--appeared to be a desiccated landscape of broad streets, big people, and even bigger cars. As if to force myself to continue to acknowledge the striking differences between the Tri-Cities and Hohhot, I kept asking aloud, "Where are the bikers, the pedestrians, the vendors?"

G-Way (George Washington Way) is, no kidding, the busiest street in Richland, and this photo is taken, no kidding, just after 5pm (rush hour) on a Thursday evening. Notice the empty sidewalk, the absence of bike lanes, bikers, and street vendors. Also notice the parking lots on the other side of G-Way which front the stores in the Uptown Shopping Center. American cities and towns are laid out with preeminent regard for parking automobiles.

Waiting at a stoplight near my house, all three cars around me contain large people eating. I watch an overweight woman in a Ford Explorer finishing-off an ice cream cone. It is 9:30am. Arienne encourages me. "Remember, we experienced culture shock when we came here from Los Angeles." It's true. American cities are actually slimmer and healthier than the suburbs, the exurbs and the countryside. They reflect a modern inversion of the age-old relationship between wealth and weight. In today's America, for the first time in world history, the urban bourgeois are thin and "in shape" while rural and exurban people tend often to be overweight. This was not true for my grandmother's generation. She was a poor farm-wife in Walla Walla. Her family's diet was filled with meat, grease, bread, butter, and potatoes. But they also worked their butts off--quite literally. This was true for most Americans before the 1970s and it is true for most Chinese today: they eat real food rather than packaged food and they exercise a lot. (Go rent "Jaws" and watch the beach scenes in Amityville--are those skinny Americans or did all the extras come from Europe?)

By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the only people eating "real food"--meaning, in Michal Pollan's formulation, unprocessed food that would be recognizable to our great-grandparents--were educated, high-salaried urban folk and some alternative rural foodies. Because, ironically, "real food" in America is often more expensive than manufactured food and because "exercise" seems to be largely the province of the middle and upper classes, only those Americans who can afford it are skinny (or alternatively, those working poor who are "lucky" enough to be manual laborers--migrant workers tend not to be overweight!). Generally speaking the American poor and working classes are fat. They don't "buy organic." They don't read the plethora of modern bourgeois books about real food and food production. They are buffeted about in a world filled with job insecurity, reality television, and cheap, fattening, fast-food. We really are a fast-food nation. The same trend is occurring in China, but most Chinese today still live and eat like Americans did before the 1950s when we became the richest nation on earth and our chain supermarkets became filled with convenience foods. In China, peasants are still skinny and party officials tend to be the chubby ones.

As I stand in line at my bank at mid-day, I count ten other people waiting, none of whom look physically healthy. They are all overweight to varying degrees. They have sallow skin and pot bellies. No one sports rosy cheeks or a thin mid-section. They all have poor postures. I wonder how we have become THE global superpower and how long it can last. Can these flabby bodies continue to hold up the greatest modern empire the world has ever seen? I think of those skinny, dignified, healthy (and poor) Chinese women clad in their boots and long winter coats walking with perfect postures or biking through the city streets, their baskets filled with fresh vegetables from the market.

Michael Pollan's new book about food came out while we were in China. His recipe for good health is simple: "eat food, not so much, mostly plants." He might have called it the Hohhot diet. There is no mysterious secret to good health. The Chinese have largely mastered it: a lot of vegetables with rice or noodles, a little meat, a lot of walking and biking. The irony, of course, is that as the Chinese grow richer as a society, as they give up their long mid-day lunch breaks for greater worker productivity, as American and Chinese fast-food becomes an increasing part of China's food landscape, as more food becomes produced and manufactured in distant locations, they will begin to look more and more like Americans. They will drive cars instead of riding bikes. They will eat more fat and sugar. Wealth will destroy health in the long run. Another irony: a middle-class American (myself) who enjoys all the benefits of living in a wealthy, well-structured and prosperous society, is romanticizing the health benefits of relative poverty.

Later that week we travel to Walla Walla and have lunch with my 91-year-old grandmother and my mom. My grandmother has made good-ole American food: turkey, potato salad, and jello salad. We follow the main course with candy. I have a terrible craving for rice. After lunch, we recline in the living room watching television. I fall into a heavy, lethargic trance. Later we stagger around filling our car with junk. My mom has given the kids a bunch of Chinese-made plastic toys. The car is stuffed with crap. We are stuffed with crap. We drive home and promptly fill our giant plastic garbage can with crap. We knew this time, however, that Mrs. He would not be sorting through our waste. Welcome back to America--the disposable society. I knew I was really home when an overweight woman in a large truck sped past us with a "Got Jesus?" sticker on her rear bumper. In America, even religion can be reduced to an advertising jingle.

The biggest reverse culture shock, however, comes upon re-entering an American college classroom less than a week after coming home (this time actually truly "less than a week"). For seven months I have taught students who have been socialized into submission by teachers, parents, and the larger currents of Chinese culture, which places much value on respect for authority, especially in the classroom. My students may have been playing porky-pig cartoons in their heads, but if they were, they didn't let on. They sat quiet, attentive, and upright as they awaited my next command. I was shocked. I remember the first time a tardy student waited outside my classroom doorway until I "invited" him to come into the classroom. "John, are you going to come in?" "May I?" he asked. "I'm so sorry to be late. I apologize, teacher."

This didn't happen often. I can count on two hands the times that any of my 150 students were late or absent over the course of the entire semester. In America, I'm already counting toes on the second day of class. As I've mentioned before, my Chinese students moved through campus, and college-life generally, as "classes" not as individuals. They arrived and left class en masse. When I arrived for class five minutes early, there they were--"Travel 1" or "HR3"--in their seats and waiting. "Hello Teacher!"

Each class had a student monitor and a Chinese teacher as an advisor. Absences and misbehavior (which I rarely experienced) were reported. Bernie, of "Software 1," was my most problematic student in China. He was a radical--a hiphop dancer with blue-eyes, thanks to colored contact lenses. He wore his hair in the chaotic entropic style that is so popular among hip Chinese boys. He missed a few classes. He sometimes didn't have a pencil. His mind wandered. He Qing, his Chinese class advisor, and I had many conversations about how to deal effectively with poor, faltering, inattentive Bernie. I didn't have the heart to tell her that most my students in the States were Bernie-esque: quietly disengaged but not actively disruptive. I could tolerate his kind in spades--he never talked, whispered, or challenged my authority in the classroom.

It was thus a shock when I entered my colleague's modern American history class and found a room full of Bernies punctuated by a few actively disruptive students. It is generally-speaking not cool in America--at least at our community college--to be inspired by school, so most of the students strike a pose of disengagement. Some go beyond passive disengagement and sport the sullen look--resistant, resentful, and distracted. Some of them lie with their heads on their desks. Some of them stare off into space. Many whisper. A few fiddle with cell phones. Examining them from the front of the class, they are an unruly bunch, not nearly so neat and conformist as my Chinese students.

I look at them and wonder why they even come to class. My students in China were compelled to by many layers of social control and authority, but these students are gloriously free. I want to give them their freedom. I don't want to be an agent of oppression. In fact, I liberate two of them before class ends. One is a girl who is obsessed with her cell phone, on the one hand (her left), and her boyfriend, on the other hand (her right). I encourage both of them to leave. "You know, I'm not taking roll today. There is nothing keeping you here," I say. She snarls at me and says, "We were actually just about to leave!" "Great!" I say, "Enjoy your freedom." It was the first time I had to ask a student to leave my classroom in a very long time.

In defense of American students--and in particular our students at CBC--many of them are great: open-minded, eager to question, argue and laugh. Their willingness to talk (once you get them going) is a refreshing contrast to my shy, reticent Chinese students. I remember how great American students can be in my colleague's Cultural Geography class. What a contrast. They were eager to ask questions and discuss. They were curious and engaged. If we could only combine their lack of inhibition, individualism, and creativity with the respect for authority, discipline, and work-ethic of my Chinese students. (Wait! We can build a master-race of students!)

I come home from CBC and, in keeping with my Chinese habits, decide to ride my bicycle to Safeway for groceries (ok--for beer). I rode my bike everywhere in Hohhot and I was always joined by thousands of comrades. But this was a lonely and alienating ride. I was the only rider. Big cars and SUVs blazed down G-Way, sparing precious little room for bikers. There were no bike lanes. There was no bike lady at Safeway ready to watch my bike (and a thousand others) in exchange for 3 jiao (about 4 cents). Just an empty steel bike rack near the electric doors. Perhaps even more alienating: it took me nearly fifteen minutes to suit up for my short ride. I put on a helmet, sunglasses, gloves, biking shoes, a velcro strap on my ankle, and a reflective vest. So much for my Chinese habits of riding with no helmet or "gear."

The next morning I wake up at 4:30am and walk out into the darkness down to the edge of the Columbia River. I stand there totally entranced by the force of nature. There is a wide gash in the clouds revealing bright stars which dribble their light across the river. I feel an overwhelming sense of patriotism, as defined by love of the land and a desire to save it all from destruction, war, and degradation.

That evening Samuel, Grace and I walk down the river to Howard Amon Park. In Hohhot nature was so muted. We marvel at the clouds and the mirror-calm river which is dappled by the occasional trail of a duck or goose. In Hohhot, the city was so chaotic. Here the solitude is overwhelming. No one else is walking along the river at dusk on this Monday night in early March. We can see the blue-flickering light of televisions pulsing from homes along the river. The kids are giddy with freedom and wide-open spaces. They run down the path with flashlights, they race across grass, they tumble down to the river's edge to examine rocks.

The path along the Columbia River just one block from our house, or, as we like to call it, “Paradise.” Notice the absence of humanity. (Not that I’m complaining about it.)

We are not so far away from strip malls and busy streets, but the Columbia provides a natural refuge and we have it all to ourselves. I am exhilarated by the solitude and beauty of it all. But I also get this weird sense of how solitude, on the fringes of the city in modern America, can become isolation and alienation. Where was the web of humanity that placed you in your proper social role? Where were the people with whom you were supposed to share the world--the vegetable lady, the meat lady, the tofu lady, the bikers, the pedestrians, the street vendors? Where was the shared sense of struggle and humanity? Where was everyone? At home, in their cars, at the mall, at McDonalds, living out their lives of quiet desperation in isolation and solitude.

I am having these over-dramatized thoughts as I walk towards home along the river. Arienne had picked up the kids at the park and I was walking alone. All of the sudden I emerge from my "Death of a Salesman" reverie and begin to feel very vulnerable in a way that I never felt in China. I walk past a large truck idling on the edge of the river. A lone bearded man in a baseball hat is listening to the radio. He had that loner, woodsman, Unabomber look, the gun-rack type, outwardly confident to the point of belligerence; fiercely independent, but dependent upon weapons to ease the creeping paranoia.

I suddenly realized I was less comfortable in the US than in China. All those conversations with Chinese friends came rushing back. "Does everyone carry a gun in America?" "Is it safe in America?"

I would scoff at those naive questions. "You've been watching too many American movies. America is very safe. Not that many people have guns, and most who do use them for hunting, sport, or self-defense."

But now I realize how much guns matter. Anyone might have a gun here. No so in China (thanks to the state-controlled monopoly of force). If you are a protester or a Tibetan Buddhist Monk you might not feel safe in China, but most everyone else can rest easy. Not even the police carry guns. I used to tell my Chinese friends that I had never seen a "fight" in my hometown (where I've lived for nearly ten years), but in a few months in China I'd already seen a number of conflagrations. I would say this to undercut the stereotype that America is dangerous and China is peaceful. Upon reflection, however, I began to realize that I never felt personally threatened even while witnessing a fight in China. I knew that no one would pull out a gun. I once watched a melee on the sidewalk involving about ten people, including women in high heels and a man with a long two-by-four. As far as melees go, I thought it was almost quaint. I felt like I could have waded through it without getting much more than a couple bruises (about four people were holding the two-by-four so the guy never really had a chance to swing it). But now I was wondering if the guy in the big truck had a gun.

As I passed the boat launch, a white sedan filled with young rowdies screeched into the parking lot. They were playing music loud and hollering. They stopped so their lights shone directly on me. I hurried across the parking lot to the river path and they idled in my direction. Was I going to get beat up? I started looking for rocks to hurl and thinking about exit strategies. I remembered the time I was riding my bike along the river further south at Columbia Point and some teenagers screamed profanities at me. It angered me and I stormed up to them and began lecturing (yelling at) them about being more respectful to strangers, etc..., when one of them pulled a gun out of his coat. He didn't point it at me and it was probably just a pellet gun, but it was enough to get me moving. And yet, I had never ONCE felt threatened even when pedaling my bike through the worst of Hohhot's slums--the types of neighborhoods a guy like me wouldn't dare enter in Chicago or Los Angeles. Now I was feeling vulnerable just blocks from my home.

Wow, "first week" back. The other side of paradise: isolation, alienation, fear and loathing. Guns and weirdos with trucker hats and big beards.

Add to these feelings the paranoia emanating from the American news media. The panic. The fear of disorder. I lived for seven months with nothing but good news from the Communist Party. Things were getting better. President Hu's Scientific Development Plan is working! China is balancing high growth with environmental stewardship! Good news! Good news! On the day of the riots in Tibet, while Western papers reported the violent eruptions in Llasa, the People's Daily beamed "China posts double-digit growth in LPG import in 2007." No mention of the trouble. It was startling to go from that happy censorship to American news reports filled everywhere with signs of the apocalypse. Senseless violence. America's slide into recession. I could not even bear to read the morning paper. I was scared. I started to have visions of a road-warrior-esque post-apocalyptic landscape. I started to think about getting a gun so I could defend my family when things got bad. In China, fear was so predictable--it was used by the state to enforce conformity and submission and, as a foreigner, I had less to fear than the common Chinese person. But in America fear was more unpredictable. It came from all quarters--from terrorists, from students, from your next-door neighbor, even the psychotic mother across the street.

As soon as we came home I began paying close attention to the news from China and about China. The week we arrived back there was an uproar over the growth of the Chinese military--a topic which seemed to me patently hypocritical, given that the US military budget is bigger than the next four nations combined, including China. There were stories, as usual, on the safety of Chinese imports, which also seemed hypocritical given that American corporations and consumers had driven the growth of China's cheap-labor unregulated export economy. There were stories about air-pollution in Beijing, which I also found hypocritical, given that, here again, American consumption and corporate flight had facilitated not only the exporting of our manufacturing economy to China, but along with it, our pollution. I wondered how it was that a free and democratic press gives you nearly as much nationalist cant as a state controlled press like China's. The whole chicken and egg question of press coverage--does the press simply report on the news or does it actually shape and even manufacture the news in the service of powerful interests--seemed no less relevant in America than in China.

And then came the protests (or "riots," depending on your perspective) in Tibet, which, like a swift blow across my forehead with a bamboo shoot, knocked me out of my panda-hugging trance and reminded me of my deeply ambivalent feelings about China. The Chinese government cracked down harshly on Tibetan Buddhist protesters, lied about it, and then locked down Tibet--a territory nearly as large as western Europe--denying access to western reporters and controlling press coverage through Xinhua, its state-controlled news agency. The BBC and other Western news agencies reported causalities and deaths numbering close to one hundred, while Xinhua put the number at around ten "innocent people [who] were burnt to horrid piles of scorched flesh and skeletons by the mob, who resorted to nothing near peaceful protests, as the Dalai clique asserted." According to Xinhua, no rioters were killed by PLA troops, which the Chinese government claimed had not even fired a shot. The Chinese government, through Xinhua, blamed the riot on "rogues and ruffians" who "smashed windows, robbed shops and set cars ablaze...in a plotted sabotage in the regional capital." The state-controlled news agency claimed that "Hard evidence, mounted by the Chinese government, tells that the Dalai clique was the hand behind the bloody Lhasa riot." The People's Daily quoted Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang who said, "We have ample evidence to prove that the Lhasa riot was organized, premeditated, masterminded and incited by the Dalai Lama clique."

Xinhua trotted out denunciations from Tibet's regional government as well as from Chinese-appointed Buddhist lamas, like the 11th Panchen Lama and Dazhag Dainzin Geleg, vice-president of the Tibetan Branch of the Buddhist Association of China, who claimed that the violence was orchestrated by "A handful of Buddhist monks [who] didn't study the scriptures, didn't follow our religious canon, but echoed the Dalai clique in splittist efforts to undermine the stability in Tibet and destroy the order of the Tibetan Buddhism." The news agency quoted Dawa Toinzhub, president of Lhasa-based Dashi Group, who claimed that "The rioters' evil acts have not only hurt our businesses, but also brought negative influence on regional economic development." And, in case the Western reader didn't get that Xinhua was simply trumpeting the party line, it quoted Lhazom Zhoigar, vice-chairwoman of the regional Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, who said, "I am a witness of old and new Tibet. Before the peaceful liberation in 1959, poor Tibetans lived worse than beasts of burden. The new Tibet, especially since the national reform and opening up in 1978, experienced rapid development in all fields of politics, economy and culture. It's the common aspiration of the Tibetan people to maintain national unity, ethnic solidarity and social harmony. The attempts of [the] Dalai clique to undermine the normal life and harmony in Tibet is doomed to failure. Tibet's development and progress can never be held back by any reactionary force." The most vicious rhetoric came from Tibet's Communist party secretary, Zhang Qingli, who called the Dalai Lama "a wolf in monk's robes, a devil with a human face but the heart of a beast."

Xinhua's reporting went beyond the wildest propagandistic rantings of Fox news. No reports from the perspective of the protesters themselves. No concern for the root causes, the motivations, the possibility that government policies themselves might have contributed to the unrest--the kinds of topics that one encountered in the American press even in the stunned and nationalistic aftermath of 9/11.

So here I was at the end of my journey, faced with the same deeply ambivalent feelings about China, a rich, diverse country populated by nearly 1.5 billion people who are warm, hospitable, honest, and generous. And yet, those same people continue to make a devil's bargain with the Chinese government, a bargain that allows them their relative freedom in exchange for uncritical acquiescence to the party line. And the Chinese government, this one-party state that does not even come close to resembling Orwell's totalitarian regimes, that seems in fact to barely control Chinese society, is nonetheless able to--when it wants--enforce conformity and submission to its will. It is able to control information (even in this globalizing world), to monopolize political and military power, to stir up nationalist zeal among the people, and to wield propaganda so effectively that the whole thing appears to work.

So upon my return I had found Orwell, both in reports from the "People's Republic" about Tibet and from the U.S. about our own endless war, "Operation Enduring Freedom." Rob Gifford talks about "panda huggers" and "dragon slayers." Where do I stand? Perhaps somewhere in the grey netherland of confusion.

Ok, so maybe I have come home crazy. What a relief!

Antidote to craziness: Tom and Grace tucked in and ready for bed.