China girl

In your writing, you frequently create humor by relating a faux pas or mishap of communication just before you give the reader knowledge that you acquired much later. There's the time, for example, when you say "circumcised" instead of "strict." But how funny were all those miscommunications at the time?

Most of them were quite funny. Often in China, I was embarrassed by my own difficult grasp on the language. For me, fluency and eloquence -- these are the staples of my life. The thing I care most about is language. And I care very much about how words fit together and which ones I choose and other people choose. Grammar mistakes light up in my mind, as in Word. And so in China I just felt powerless in that regard. I had no nuance, and I had no ability to communicate subtleties, and I felt crippled by that. And in a way I'm grateful, because it was so humbling. Anybody who's self-loving needs to take a trip out of his own language and try to communicate. It taught me more about the power of language and it taught me something about my own capabilities, the limits of my own competencies. Some of my gaffes were incredibly embarrassing at the time, but even then I had an inkling of perspective. I mean, in order to have a reasonable life abroad, you have to have a sense of humor. And I've always been self-deprecating. That part was effortless for me.

But it seems like that self-deprecating irony doesn't always translate into Chinese.

It never does. Most of the humor doesn't translate. The two things I never could get and still can't get are sense of humor and gift-giving. I never once told a joke that any of my Chinese friends thought was funny, and I never gave a gift that anybody liked.

Still, in your writing, you're never afraid to make cultural differences a source of humor, to draw attention to the ways that the Chinese and Americans are different.

I tried not to generalize so much in the book. One of the things I came to think, not only while living there but also while writing the book, is that writers ask questions and propagandists answer them. So I never felt like I was in a position to answer questions about China particularly, and -- this is an important component of good poetry -- if you present an anecdote and then you make it universal in a way that's funny or attractive, you've been successful. If you present an anecdote and you do nothing to make it universal, you've been self-loving, because your anecdote isn't interesting unless it applies to other people. And yet at the same time, if you make it too general, then you're stereotyping.

One of the things I made an effort to do in the book was to choose characters -- choose my friends who are anti-stereotype. And the more people I met, the more I realized that even though certain patterns exist in terms of cultural behaviors, on an individual level it's just like my American friends. And that shouldn't have been a revelation, but it was for me. And if you're honest about that kind of thing, it is funny.

As the book progresses, the Chinese and Americans portrayed seem to understand each other more. But at the end, those relationships are damaged by the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and it feels like a step backward. Did you see progress in terms of cross-cultural understanding?

I would say yes, there was progress. On the ground, it looks like coming to certain understandings. My feeling overall about China is that a policy of engagement, all the time, with positive interchange and people on the ground, is the best policy. And in a small sense, friendships in China create this. This is how we're building Sino-U.S. relations. I don't think it's a top-down process. I think it's bottom-up. I think it's grass-roots efforts, like when people go and live there. And I tell all of my students to go abroad. I think it's important. I think it's important for Americans to be in the world promoting a picture of America that isn't the picture our government promotes. What we don't want to do is go backward.

That's kind of what it feels like we're doing sometimes. It had to be really strange for you to come back to the U.S. right before Sept. 11.

It was very meaningful. When I came back to America, my perspective on the U.S. had changed entirely. In a way, China gave me a view not only of China, but also of America, and what it meant to be American. You know, you have to have an external reference point. China gave me that. I watched the American news as a sophisticated consumer of moral drama, rather than a credulous fan of CNN. And I began to see patterns, and I began to see similarities between our newspapers and their newspapers; our television broadcasts and their television broadcasts; our state-run media and their state-run media. And yes, those parallels became more and more dramatic as America moved into the 2000s.

How is the media different? How are political conversations different?

You know, the Chinese language is very flexible. Lawyers complain that it's vague, but fans of it talk about how flexible it is. In Chinese, you can "leave three sides open." People don't pin you into awkward conversations -- it's a place about keeping things open, keeping things flexible, "sideways negotiation," sideways conversation.

We don't do that in America.

No, we're very confrontational. It's funny, I really feel like I've toned that down. And I'm glad. I feel like China benefited me personally; my personality is better for having been to China.

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