Communal Life

Something that I like very much about the Chinese is their communal disposition. (I've noticed this about everyone outside of America, actually.) The Chinese go about much of their daily lives in various kinds of groups.

Travel is mostly done in two types of groups: packs and hordes. Packs are smaller, less harmful and are often cute. Hordes are terrifying to the uninitiated and potentially disastrous. (See picture above.) Once you've participated in their traffic, though, they are not so intimidating in the horde form.

Packs. It's quite common to see women walking down the street with their arms linked together. The most adorable thing they do, though, is hold hands. You will regularly see young women and girls walking around holding hands while they talk and giggle. And it just melts your heart. It makes you want to pinch their cheeks and pat them on the head and say "there, there".

They also like to eat in groups. A table of four generations of women had breakfast next to us this morning at a mall. My guidebook warns that many restaurants don't cater to one or two patrons. Alexia and I would sometimes pass by groups of families and friends sitting at a table on the sidewalk outside the family business or home eating dinner together, surrounded by dark gray tones of stained cement, the squalid mess of poverty and the rubble of their communist regime. But the goodwill emanating from their tables seemed blind to their condition. I had to wonder, What blindness might my rich eyes suffer from?

They also exercise together in parks in the early morning. I'm sure many of you have heard about how they do Tai Chi together before work. We saw people doing Tai Chi in the boulevard next to our hotel every morning.

They also play board games and cards outside. This, in fact, is a trait they share with the Europeans, which I adore. It's not uncommon to see a gang of 10 or 20 people gathered around a table, players squatting and onlookers nervously smoking nearby. It's quite nice. I wish my neighborhood had such interesting happenings. The magic, you see, is in the usualness and regularity of it all.

Community, unfortunately, tends to erode with affluence. Rich American suburbs are empty, sterile and socially dead. Extended family quickly dissipates in the acidic activities of modern life where work, play, love and fellowship are efficiently compartmentalized. Our elderly die in silent isolation under the watchful eye of the "best care" our money can buy. Meanwhile, Chinese grandparents squeeze into tiny rooms with no space to spare to rock their children's crying babies to sleep.

Curse our rugged American-style individualism! Our affairs are to machines rather than each other. We are stoned on the opiates of television and computers while our pushers live on Wall Street generating mammoth profits with deleterious intentions. Free us from these machines - Providence - and from the progress of science and the efficiency of rationality and deliver us unto the darkness of the primal womb, the security of our death known, and the love of despair exhausted in the arms of another human being.

And may the Chinese keep to their hordes and packs as they gear up for the psychic rigors of modern life.