Culture's Consequences: "A Tale of Two (Chinese) Cities".
In China, How You Say It Is as Important as What You Say...
HONG KONG.
“Where are the birds?”, the Customs Agent in the Hong Kong airport asked me.
I had been working in China for a few weeks, the last few days in meetings in Hong Kong. I was exhausted, and decided that I would luxuriate on my final day before my flight back home to New York with some well-earned downtime in pre-Covid, pre-Umbrella Movement, pre-Xi, Hong Kong. So the day before my flight, I enjoyed my final sail on the creaky Star Ferry, crossed that amazing jumble of a harbor from Central, and found myself strolling through an outdoor bird market in a park in a sleepy neighborhood in Kowloon.
“I don’t know where the birds are, I guess in the trees?”, I answered sincerely.
The Agent wasn’t amused. “You have birdcages, but no birds. Where are the birds?”, he insisted, finally looking up at me after mechanically examining my passport.
Over the years, I’d made many trips to Hong Kong, and whenever I could, I would treat myself to a Sunday morning stroll through the Kowloon Bird Market, a pop-up in a local park, where I would buy one or two of those delicate, hand-made bamboo birdcages that the old men hung in the branches of the park trees. A souvenir of my trip, a reminder of my beautiful moments in China, and not of the all-too-common difficult ones. My birdcage collection has grown over the years, and now they hang, bird-free, as the beautiful works of art they are, all together on another island in the tropics, this time in my Virgin Islands home. On this trip, I spied two particularly curious birdcages, one with tiny little bamboo rats scampering along the hanging hook, and I just had to have them. This meant that I would, once again, need to schlep these in a carry-on bag on the plane, as I had done many times in the past. But first, I would have to get them through customs. I did not expect any problems.
“I don’t have any birds”, I insisted. “Just the cages.”
“Why you buy cages, but no birds?" Cages without birds?”, and he shook his head. “No, where are the birds?”, he insisted.
This reminded me of the time a few years prior when I had traveled from Shanghai to Hong Kong and irresponsibly forgot to arrange for my return visa from Hong Kong back to Shanghai, which meant that, despite my best pleading at the airport, I had to spend 24 hours in the Hong Kong airport waiting for a visa to be processed. Since then I had learned that pleading, and other dramatic tactics often used by westerners, never succeed in China, and no matter how much jumping up and down one does, the Chinese response is usually to let you jump up and down until you dig a hole underneath you and disappear into it. So this time, I needed a different tactic to get my birdcages past this Customs Agent.
“You go here”, The Agent motioned to his right, and I dutifully stepped out of line to the right. And waited. Five minutes. Ten minutes. Watching everyone else behind me on line move on to their flights.
“My flight…” I interrupted, motioning to my watch, hoping to engender some sympathetic response from the Agent.
“You wait here”.
Several other agents eventually came by and conferred with “The Agent”. Then one of them turned to me and asked me where the birds were. Obviously, I surmised to myself, the Chinese government was seriously concerned about bird smuggling, maybe a result of some lingering issues from the nasty bird flu epidemics that periodically flare-up in China. I explained I had no birds. They looked perplexed.
“Birdcages, but no birds?”, I was asked again…and again…and again…reminding me of that old Chinese adage, “Striking the iron bar a thousand times turns it into a needle”. An important metaphor about how goals can be achieved through the simple repetition of the same task…or in this case, demand…over and over again. Since metaphorical or symbolic statements have always had great communicative power in China, I strategized to myself, if I could just find the right metaphorical proverb that explained the missing birds, I might just solve my problem in time for me to catch my flight. After all, I didn’t have the time - or the authority - to play my Agent’s repetition game back to him (“I don’t have the birds, sorry”, over and over again), so my job was to find some metaphor that my Agent would understand, and right now, as my flight departure was fast approaching.
My mind raced through a number of old Chinese proverbs I happened to know that I hoped might offer an explanation my Agent would grasp. “A journey of one thousand miles begins with a single step”…nice, and certainly appropriate to describe the anxiety I felt about catching my flight, but not a solution to his question, I thought. “A bird does not sing because he has something to say, he sings because he has a song.” Well, definitely getting closer with the bird-focus, and a lovely thought, but clearly not on the mark. Suddenly, all sorts of proverbs started popping into my head, Chinese and otherwise, as my brain went into overdrive trying to find a metaphor that my Agent would understand. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”…oh God, no, I thought, definitely not supporting my case. "Birds of a feather flock together”? Well, true, but so what? And then suddenly, I channeled that old movie Field of Dreams, and in my best Kevin Costner , suddenly blurted out,
“If you Build it, They WIll Come!”
“Who will come?”, my Agent looked blankly at me.
“The birds! If I build it, they will come! That’s why I only have the birdcages. When I get home, the birds will come!”
Five very long seconds passed by. Then he smiled, said something about liking the film, stamped my passport, returned the bird cages to me, and waved me on to my flight.
SHANGHAI.
Today, when I stroll the Bund (the waterside park) on the Shanghai side of the river, I am one of many Westerners, among tens of thousands of Chinese and other tourists from around the world, and I go about mainly unnoticed. But that wasn’t always the case. When I first came to Shanghai, the US still referred to the mainland as “Red China”; the economic reforms that unleashed the modern Chinese dragon had not yet been put in place; and Pudong, now the gleaming iconic symbol of modern China, with its business towers and neon-lit Western hotels, was just a sleepy patch of farmland across the river from a still very colonial Shanghai. Back then, I couldn’t stroll but a few feet on the Bund before I would surely be stopped by a Chinese local:
“Speak English?” he would say, always with a big smile.
“Yes,” I would respond.
“Can we be friends?”
And that was the beginning of a conversation that always revealed more about the differences between how Westerners and Chinese think than anything actually discussed. The rest of the conversation would usually go something like this:
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