Difference

In class on Thursday night, we talked sbout the James Baldwin story, "Sonny's Blues.". It's a story I love to read and teach, in part for what Baldwin has to say about suffering and the ways we can transcend it, if only for a while. It was an intense class, and, as usual, I was fascinated by the ways our different cultures react similarly to some things and differently to others. For instance, I was searching for an example of how people can believe a lie so fully that they don't even have a hint of its wrongness, and I settled on the example of a girl with an eating disorder--the way she might be rail thin, starving herself, but when she looks in the mirror she sees a fat person. It seemed like a serious enough example of the sort of thing I was trying to describe, but my students' reactions surprised me. They laughed. They laughed a lot. I thought to myself, "I must have said something they misunderstood," so I tried again, and again they laughed. It wasn't a point worth pursuing, so I found a different example and moved on. It made me think about cultural difference, though. I'll have to ask somebody about this: maybe eating disorders are uncommon here.

When I was at the Terra Cotta Warriors Museum yesterday, my Chinese companions and I were walking toward the first pit when we passed some stores and food vendors. My companions started chatting in a pretty animated way and then stopped walking. One of them turned to me and asked, "would you like one of these?". She pointed to a food vendor standing behind a steaming pile of sweet potatoes. So different from the kind of food we'd sell at a venue like this. Or maybe not. Maybe we'd just slice them up and toss them in a vat of boiling oil before serving them. Anyway, I ate a hot sweet potato (just peeling and biting it as we walked) at 9am yesterday.



Since two of my favorite blog topics seem to be intake and elimination, here's a potty story for you. At the museum yesterday, my Chinese friend asked me if I needed a restroom stop, and I admitted to her my fear of the eastern-style squat toilet. She seemed surprised. Of course, she knew we didn't have them in the U.S. I think she was surprised because she had a similar but opposite fear. Fear of the western public toilet. She told me that in China, nobody has a squat toilet in their home. The western style is the norm there. It's only in public places that you encounter the squat toilet, and that's a bow to keeping things sanitary. She said when she went to the U.S. for the first time, she was surprised and kind of grossed out by the idea of using a western toilet in a public restroom. All those people sitting there before her: to her, it seemed so unsanitary. I told her about how difficult I found the public restrooms here, and she understood. Difference. I see it everywhere I look.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad