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I'm such a liar.

I'm not proud of it, but I'm a great liar when I travel. I smile and lie and things are smooth. Every once in a while I don't just lie to smooth the way, I lie for fun. Once, I told a taxi driver in Beijing that I'd been studying Chinese for a week. This, after having painfully studied the language for four years and lived and worked (and lied) in Beijing for another year. I think I even told him that Chinese was an easy language to learn. Perhaps most people wouldn't think that's funny, but it was the only time a Chinese person ever told me my Chinese was very good and really meant it.

My restaurant companion looked at me more closely and asked, "And what do you think of the Chinese people?"

Cold and heartless, but nice if you're in their clique of friends. "They're great, too," I said.

"Really?"

Well ... I hedged and said that there were good people and bad people everywhere, and China was no different, but still overall, I liked them. This was actually true, at least on my good days. Then, because I was bored and tired of having the same conversations over and over, I asked about his own opinion of the Chinese people.

He looked at me, and then he looked away. I waited. He wasn't a rich man. Not poor like the transient laborers pouring into China's cities, but also not one of the new rich stomping around China courtesy of the economic reforms. He was wearing green army pants, and a turtleneck, and a leather jacket. Looking at him made me think laobaixing, "old hundred names": China's average man, backbone of the nation.

He said, "I think that we Chinese are lacking in quality."

I managed to say, "Oh," and then sat there feeling like an asshole for lying through the earlier part of our conversation.

I finally got my voice back and asked why he would say such a thing.

He shrugged. "I used to drive trucks. For the army, over in Africa. We were over there building dams, projects like that for the Africans. Water and electricity projects, mostly. The Africans had black hair and black skin, very black skin, and they were poor."

He shook his head thoughtfully, "Qiong de hen." Really poor. "But they were very good to us. We Chinese couldn't compare to them. They were better people. We were richer, but they had more quality. Bi bu shang tamen." We can't beat them.

I've stood on buses in Beijing and watched Chinese people refuse to sit next to an African student no matter how crowded the bus got, and I've talked to people in Kunming who, after accusing me of being a racist American, cheerfully went on to explain how black people were the stupidest people on earth. Of all the foreign devils in China, blacks get the hardest treatment. And now I was sitting with a guy who looked like a peasant, dressed in green cotton army pants and wearing a dirty leather jacket, and who had just said that the Chinese couldn't compare with the Africans. I wondered what it cost a Chinese person to say that anyone, let alone a black African, was better than his own kind.

I finally said, "I've never heard anyone in China say that."

"They haven't gone out of the country," he said. "When you're always in your own country, you don't know what's out there. You can't compare. But after you go, you see clearly. Economically, we Chinese are doing OK. But as people, we lack quality. Nobody here sees it that way. But they haven't gone away. They don't know what it's like on the outside. They can't compare." He shook his head.

I didn't have any answer, but his experience reminded me of going home to America and trying to tell people what I had seen abroad. It made me sad. Sad for his experience, and sad that I had spent so much time blithely lying my way across China, always well-shielded from the Chinese, and now that I was leaving, I had finally found a Chinese person I wanted to know.

We sat together for a while longer while he smoked, and then my boat came, and I left.

Now that I'm back home in America and feel like an alien, I think about him. I think about him sitting in that one-room restaurant, watching the darkness and smoking, surrounded by his countrymen, and all alone.
salon.com | Nov. 17, 1999

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