Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Cultural dissonance often provides linguistic hilarity. At a hotel in the Norwegian fjordland, I found a menu that announced, “Breakfast is available daily from 7:30 to 8:00 a.m. Lunch is available daily from 12:00 to 12:30 p.m. Dinner is available daily from 7:00 to 7:30 p.m. Midnight snacks are available until 10:00 p.m.” One has to admire that thrifty spirit. I was very taken with the room service menu in French West Africa that offered for appetizers either “Rolled crepes with smoked salmon and egg of lump” or “Small bags of eggplant tomato-mozzarella”; for main course, the “Gratin of Molds, breadcrumbs with parmesan” or the “Roasted Captain, Olive Oil Sauce” or the vegetarian option, “Indian Jumps of Lentils.” For something sweet to end the meal, the only thing to be considered was the “Dessert Opera on custard.” In Xi’an, we were introduced to a pianist who explained over lunch that he gave few concerts and supported himself by performing at night in a bar. We decided to go to the bar to hear him despite his efforts to dissuade us. With the Chinese gift for lyrical euphemism, a sign outside identified the establishment in English as the SUNSHINE-AFTER-EIGHT FRIEND-CHANGING CLUB. It was a brothel. Whenever a friend has since needed changing, I fantasize a trip back to northwest China, and I remember the young women from the provinces, some defiant and many sad in their flimsy negligees.

Even when one is paying attention, it is easy to become confused in alien surroundings for lack of reference points. In Prague in 1985, my friend Cornelia Pearsall and I studied the only available tourist map and decided that we ought to visit the Jewish ghetto, number sixteen on the map. Expecting squalor, we were pleasantly surprised to find a complex of beautiful apartments, many with spectacular views. Since all the signage was in Czech, we had to work out the narrative for ourselves. Cornelia noted the large number of pianos about, and I explained that the Jewish community in Prague had been highly cultured and artistically accomplished. Only two days later did we discover that the Jewish ghetto was actually number seventeen on our map, and that we had spent the afternoon at Mozart’s villa.

Sometimes one simply doesn’t understand what one is looking at. I got to know former US secretary of defense Robert McNamara when he was in his eighties. The man behind the draft that had so terrified me in childhood had destroyed a country, occasioned a million needless deaths, and accomplished nothing. He was now a congenial senior citizen, regretful of the gruesome crossroads of history that he had traversed. He described returning to Vietnam and meeting some of his military counterparts there. The conversation, as he described it, consisted of the Vietnamese asking, “Why did you do X?” Then McNamara said, “Well, because you did Y, which meant such and such.” Then the Vietnamese would counter, “No, no, no, it meant the exact opposite of that! But then you did this thing that was clearly an attempt to escalate!” To which McNamara would comment, “No, we did that to try to quiet things down, because we thought you . . . ,” and so on and on and on. McNamara’s errors proceeded from his ignorance about his opponents—a problem much exacerbated by the dismissal of Asia experts from the US government and universities during the purges of McCarthyism. Like Cornelia and me in Mozart’s villa, McNamara was applying off-base assumptions to a place he had completely misunderstood. Had more than a million deaths not occurred in the Vietnam War, his encounter with his former foes could have been something out of a French farce. To learn a place is like getting to know a person: it is an exercise in depth psychology. You must understand those with whom you communicate to understand the content of their communication. It takes modesty to recognize that your coherence is someone else’s incoherence and vice versa. “We argued in the language of war,” McNamara said to me, “which I wrongly thought was a universal language.”