Original Zinn by Howard Zinn

Original Zinn is a collection of interviews with Howard Zinn from approximately the years 2002-2005, in which the historian holds forth on his opinions on the United States, the state of the world, and the political Left.

I read it in a couple of hours while in Patara, Turkey. That was about two months ago. I don't think I can remember much that is specific to this book, especially as it's already thoroughly blended together in my mind with other opinion-esque pieces I've read, by Zinn and by other like-minded people.

So, sorry everyone. I'm not going to talk about Howard Zinn in this post.

Instead, I'm going to rant a bit on a related topic. I'm going to create a fictitious commenter, pretend he's left a comment, and then reply to that comment.

Strawman2011 says:

LOL don't you know zinn wasn't a real historian? he was just a hippie lefty activist who twisted history to fit his ideological biases. why don't you read a real historian sometime hahahahaha

Thank you, Strawman2011. In response, let me tell you about an episode of The Daily Show I saw earlier this year.

The guest was Mike Huckabee. My politics differs from Huckabee's quite a bit, but I will admit he was gregarious and charming on Jon Stewart's show.

(This can be attributed to the fact that he was not, at the moment, running for president. A few months ago I watched Tim Pawlenty on The Daily Show. Pawlenty was indeed running for president at the time, and as a result he was stiff and delivered only preprogrammed responses. He was Politico-Bot and at that time I believe he would have failed the Turing Test.)

Stewart brought up the historian David Barton. Barton is a figure whom Huckabee has praised in highly complimentary terms. People who like to think the USA was founded as a Christian nation generally tend to like Barton's work. In contrast, proponents of the separation of church and state have tended to dismiss him as an ideological crank. In all fairness I should mention that I've never read a thing he wrote.

I haven't seen the interview since it first aired -- apologies if I'm about to get some details wrong. Huckabee's defense basically boiled down to, 'Look, Barton's telling the truth -- he's not just making stuff up. Look at the primary sources for yourself if you don't believe me.'

This bothered me, and I was disappointed that Stewart didn't pursue the matter further.

It bothered me because not making stuff up, and convincingly demonstrating that what you claim happened, really happened, is not the mark of a first-class historian.

It's more like the absolute minimum that's expected of you.

The role of the historian is not just to say, 'Here's a bunch of stuff that happened in the past.' True, saying that is indeed part of the job of being a historian. I'm sure there are plenty of incompetent history teachers who do that part, clock out, and go home.

But the truth, as touchy-feely and unscientific as it may sound, is that being a historian is largely about storytelling. It's about constructing a narrative.

When there's a great deal of material, a historian must choose what to focus on. That's especially true when a historian is writing for a popular audience and needs to create a compelling narrative. I read Her Little Majesty, Carolly Erickson's 267-page biography of Queen Victoria, and when I finished I was quite unsure of just how much I had really learned about the old queen. Erickson's a wonderful writer, but in order to fit a readable narrative of a person's life into 267 pages, an author must choose what to emphasize, what to spin into a narrative, and what to leave out. Her Little Majesty is nonfiction, but it could be read as an unusually fact-based novel. I'm not criticizing Erickson -- she couldn't have done any differently, given the format she was working in.

And sometimes there isn't a lot of material. Many prominent people's lives are astonishingly poorly documented. It's amazing how little firsthand information we have on the life of Alexander the Great, for instance; most of our information comes from historians who lived long after his death. Any historian who tackles that period of history is going to have to pull together separate sources and conjecture a lot.

And of course, no historian can truly know what any given person was thinking at any given time. No historian can know what a person's subjective experience was like, no matter how well documented the person was.

That's why I was disappointed with Mike Huckabee's defense of David Barton. It's not enough to say a historian is factually correct. What you really need to defend is his interpretation. The narrative he strings together. His spin, if you will. Huckabee defended Barton by saying he got the basic building blocks right, when he should have defended his interpretation.

Huckabee pretended that the job of a historian is to tell us a bunch of stuff that happened. That's just not true.

Everyone who writes or talks about history creates a narrative. Good historians are honest about it. I'm a big fan of Dan Carlin's history podcast, Hardcore History. In the first installment of his series on the decline and fall of the Roman Republic, he straightforwardly says that this is a period of history that's been written about and analyzed many times before, but now his listeners are going to get the Dan Carlin version of what happened. I respect that.

Let's bring this back around to Howard Zinn. You might respect Zinn's politics and his take on history, or you might not. Fair enough.

But to attack Zinn (or David Barton, for that matter) for delivering his own version of history? Sorry, but that's just what historians do. Unless you want to wait until after the Singularity, when posthuman HistoryBots will presumably create narratives based solely on a probabilistic calculation of how things must have progressed given certain parameters in order to create the world that they exist in.

Granted, there are historians whose biases shape their work to the point that the narrative is more about themselves than objective reality. And that's a problem. But there's a continuum between a historian blinded by his own biases, and HistoryBot 4000. Every person trying to construct honest narratives about the past falls somewhere on that continuum.

If you think your favorite historian tells history 100% objectively, I'd have to say that a) you're not familiar enough with that period of history to know the whole story, b) the historian's personal biases happen to match yours, or most likely c) both.

I'm not offended by historians who wear their politics on their sleeve, as long as they honestly and sincerely try to work within the real world as it is (and was). We should all just remember that the issue isn't whether their interpretations are factually correct, because that's the absolute minimum standard that they should be achieving anyway. The issue is whether their interpretations, their narratives, are actually useful in understanding the past. And the present.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Every scene in this book has the feel of an Edward Gorey illustration.

Anyway.

After King, Queen, Knave, I continued the theme of novels mocking the upper classes of pre-World War II Europe with Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, knowing nothing of the novel or the plot beyond the fact that a well-known Alfred Hitchcock film had been based on it.

As it turns out, Rebecca is the story of a naive young nameless heroine, who marries a much older English landed aristocrat and goes off to live at his immense estate. She is never able to escape the disapproving looks of the estate's staff, led by Mrs. Danvers, who can't help comparing her unfavorably to Rebecca, her husband's dead first wife and the novel's title character.

Unfortunately, the protagonist suffers from what TV Tropes, with its talent for description, calls Wrong Genre Savvy. She thinks she's the lead character in a fairly standard romantic story, and believes that her husband is still pining after his dead wife. She thinks her role is to convince her husband that he should let Rebecca go and he should live for the future, and to find a way to make peace with mean old Mrs. Danvers.

The, when the novel's half finished, some fundamentally game-changing bits of information come to light.

I was able to read Rebecca totally unspoiled, so I got to spend the first half of the novel raging at the heroine for being such a spineless wilting nonentity who let Mrs. Danvers bully her to her heart's content, and the second half fascinated to find out how the suddenly much more compelling plot would play itself out.

Never having seen the Hitchcock film, I imagined Mrs. Danvers as looking like a malevolent version of Professor McGonagall as played by Maggie Smith in the last Harry Potter movie -- basically, a strong, imperious old lady. Apparently in the film version her character's interpreted quite differently, by Dame Judith Anderson. She's quite younger (Anderson was in her 40s), and rather than coming across as a vengeful mother figure who has lost her child (as in the novel), her relationship with Rebecca has lesbian undertones instead. Either interpretation works, I suppose, but they're mutually exclusive (one would hope).

If I do see the movie version, I'm sure the alternative Mrs. Danvers will find an equal home in my imagination.

King, Queen, Knave by Vladimir Nabokov

King, Queen, Knave was originally published in 1928, when Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian emigre living in Germany. It was not translated into English until the 1960s, when Nabokov and his son Dmitri translated it together as a father-son team.

Because the Nabokovs made it clear that they altered the novel to a significant degree, I'm not sure how much of what I read really dated to the 1920s. I assumed the English version was faithful in the small details to the original, and I enjoyed the little everyday details of life in what would retroactively be called Weimar Germany.

The plot, in broad strokes, is as follows. A country boy comes to Berlin, to work in his uncle's department store. The nephew and the uncle's wife really hit it off, to the point that they begin a steamy love affair, which the uncle remains cheerfully oblivious to.

Queen and Knave conspire to murder the King, despite both being quite inexperienced at planning and carrying out a crime of this magnitude. Psychological tension and fatal complications ensue.

The plot, as the author readily admits, is not terribly innovative. It's the prose (even if the reader is never quite sure if any given snippet of English prose came from the elder or younger Nabokov) and the macabre atmosphere that make the novel worth reading.

I never trained myself to intelligently discuss prose the way a literature professor might, so I feel somewhat hobbled when talking about modern literary writers like Nabokov.

To me, King Queen, Knave provides a look at life in 1920s Germany. It lets me play at deducing what was the same in the original 1928 Russian-language edition, and what was changed in the 1960s. But it's been two months since I actually read the thing (while traveling in southern Turkey in late August), so I can't quite recall the prose enough to discuss it at any length.

The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett

It took me a long time to get into Terry Pratchett's Discworld universe, a fact I attribute to my aversion to long series, particularly in the fantasy / SF genres. Generally I approach a series in one of two ways: either I read the first book and end it there, pretending the sequels never existed (and savoring any unanswered questions I've got as proof of the mysterious vastness of the universe). Or I read the entire series all at once as one long novel. That's what I did with Harry Potter the summer the last book came out. It only works when you've got a finished series, though.

So I was a bit apprehensive about the Discworld books, even as they approached massive popularity with more and more fans, including several of my friends. In the USA, Pratchett has fully caught up with Douglas Adams as the face of modern British fantastical drollery. Finally I gave in and started buying his books as they appeared at used bookstores.

My first Discworld book was Jingo, which probably was not the best choice for a beginner, as it focuses on a group of characters it assumes you're already familiar with (Sam Vimes and his cohort).

My second Discworld book was Monstrous Regiment, which was published later but is probably a better choice for a beginner. It's firmly set within the Discworld universe but it's more of a standalone, as it introduces a brand-new group of protagonists.

Both of these books were written after Pratchett had been writing Discworld books for a while. He'd settled into a comfortable groove, in which he parodies the tropes of several different genres within a single novel.

That said, I think it's a mistake to consider the mature Discworld novels to be parodies first and foremost. To me, a parody isn't just any humorous work that can be slotted comfortably into a particular genre. A parody is a humorous work that derives most of its humor from mocking the tropes of a particular genre. But most of the humor of the later Discworld books is character-based.

So, for example, while Monstrous Regiment does indeed parody (verb) many military fiction tropes (and thoroughly deconstructs the hoary 'brave young girl disguises herself as a man so she can enlist in the army' trope), you can't just label the novel as a whole a parody (noun). That's so limiting.

Anyway. My third Discworld book was the very first Discworld book: The Colour of Magic. As one can expect from the very first installment of a long-running series, The Colour of Magic features loads and loads of what TVTropes calls 'Early Installment Weirdness'. The novel is divided into chapters (each subsequent Discworld book would be one continuous undivided story), the story is much more episodic and disjointed than later books, stupid jokes and cheap humor are much more in evidence, and everything's a parody! Every segment of the episodic plot is a parody of a different sub-genre of fantasy.

That said, The Colour of Magic isn't a bad book. It's well-written, and Rincewind and Twoflower are both very nicely done comic characters. But it's not typical Discworld.

Which brings me to The Light Fantastic, #2 in the Discworld series. The Light Fantastic has much in common with its predecessor. Later Discworld novels would each be self-contained stories set in a well-established universe with recurring characters, but The Light Fantastic is a direct sequel to The Colour of Magic, beginning seconds after the first book ended with Rincewind and Twoflower launched off the edge of the world. The two books are one episodic novel split in half.

It's interesting to view the book as a snapshot of Discworld evolution. #2 continues the plot from #1, and like #1 it contains its share of painful jokes. (Upon hearing that the civil unrest has resulted in a mob ransacking the city's music stores, Rincewind shakes his head. 'Luters', he mutters.) It's also not all that great with its female characters; every woman in the book is a parody of a particular fantasy trope, and gets little character development beyond that. (Pratchett would get much, much better at writing women in his later books -- see Monstrous Regiment as proof of that.)

And while there's plenty of character-based humor, in The Light Fantastic it seems like Pratchett is more likely to, say, describe some aspect of Twoflower's personality in a humorous way, rather than have Twoflower actually do something humorous that fits his personality.

But there are also signs in #2 that Pratchett is settling into the groove he would ride so successfully (and profitably) in the years ahead. The Light Fantastic comes much closer to giving its readers a single cohesive story than its predecessor. It's not divided into chapters. And people who are far more serious Pratchett fans than I am claim that many of the long-running elements of the Discworld series get their start in The Light Fantastic.

I'll take their word for it -- after all, so far I've only read four novels out of -- let me check Wikipedia -- wow, 39 in total so far. Ever since I read Jingo in 2008, I've read the Discworld books at a rate of one a year. I find Pratchett to be a pleasant enough read, but I'm not sure if I'll increase my Discworld novel consumption speed.

Istanbul Musings

Istanbul is hilly. There's a story that Constantinople was founded where it was because Rome has seven hills, and the site of Constantinople also has seven hills. Well, I can say that there are hilly streets in Ortakoy, several kilometers outside of the city as it existed in Byzantine times, that are at a grade I didn't know existed outside of San Francisco. We got vertigo riding a taxi down one of those streets.

Istanbul is full of cats. And often they're the fattest, healthiest street cats that I've ever seen. We've speculated that maybe some Ottoman sultan really liked cats and declared that no cat in the empire was ever to come to harm. There does seem to be a continuum between cats who are a specific person's pet who happen to spend a lot of time outdoors, to cats who don't belong to anyone in particular but seem to be collectively cared for by a neighborhood, to cats who are genuine strays but at least they're lucky enough to be strays in Istanbul.

Istanbul has street food. It varies in quality. The corn on the cob you can buy from street stalls turned out to be astonishingly mediocre. But anything bread-based was generally quite good. I had simit (a ring-shaped bread covered with sesame seeds) for breakfast almost every day, always bought from the same guy in Taksim. Our personal favorites were the mussels, sold with a clump of flavored rice and a squirt of lemon. They were cheap and didn't make us sick even once.

Istanbul has its traffic problems, but things are getting better. We chose an apartment that was only a short subway ride to our school in Levent (thus giving us an easier experience than some of our classmates, who lived over on the Asian side and endured far more difficult commutes). Public transit is really not sufficient, but where it exists it does its job well, and the city is in the process of expanding and building more rail lines.

(All photos by Jenna.)

The Hagia Sophia

On September 7, we arrived in Istanbul. The CELTA course ran from Sept. 12 to Oct. 7, so we had four days of sightseeing first before getting down to study.

Istanbul's divided into European and Asian sides by the Bosphorus. The European side is further divided by the Golden Horn, with the bulk of the old city to the south and the center of modern Istanbul to the north. Although we'd traveled widely in Asian Turkey, we never set foot in Asian Istanbul the whole time we were there. Our apartment and school were in Europe, as are most of the places tourists are encouraged to visit; we never felt the need (or had the time) to cross the Bosphorus.

The Hagia Sophia had been closed during our day in Istanbul in August, so of course it was our first priority on our return. It's one of those famed tourist attractions that fully live up to their hype. It's always full of tourists, but with its vast size it can easily hold them all without getting cramped (unlike, say, some of the old churches in Cappadocia).

The Hagia Sophia is no longer a mosque, so visitors can wander throughout it without worrying about propriety. However, that also means that unlike a mosque, you have to pay to get in.

It's worth it, for the chance to wander about, admire the architecture, and get in plenty of your fellow tourists' photographs.

The Hagia Sophia is old. It predates any of the European nation-states. When it was built there was no England; there were only a handful of squabbling Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. There were no French or Italians or Russians as we know them today, only assorted tribes. There were no Muslims anywhere; Islam would be introduced a century later. China hadn't been a unified country since the collapse of the Han centuries earlier; there was no particular reason to expect a Chinese empire would ever rise again.

The Hagia Sophia is old, and it still stands. Its Wikipedia article reveals that it has been severely damaged on several occasions, and its dome has collapsed more than once, but it was always promptly rebuilt. I can't think of another building, anywhere in the world outside Istanbul, that is as old as the Hagia Sophia and still so well-preserved. (The Pyramids don't count -- they're not buildings in the sense of something that must be continuously maintained.)

I know of one building in Istanbul that rivals the Hagia Sophia in age: the Little Hagia Sophia, the still-functioning mosque on the city's southern edge that was slightly pre-dates its larger, more famous architectural cousin.

I'm curious. Is there a building (in the sense of a structure that people could work and live in) anywhere in the world that pre-dates the Little Hagia Sophia, and hasn't collapsed into ruins?

Selçuk, Ephesus and the Temple of Artemis

Selçuk is a town in eastern Turkey whose proximity to lots of fascinating ancient ruins has enabled it to develop quite a thriving tourist industry.

The main attraction is Ephesus, a very well-preserved Roman city that is on everyone's tourist itinerary. No matter when you go, you can be assured you'll get to share Ephesus with hundreds of fellow ancient ruin buffs. Lonely Planet looks on the bright side, pointing out that having so many people around makes it easier to imagine as a living city.

I'm not convinced - at no point did I ever feel I was anywhere but Ruin Park - but at least there's ample space for all the tourists, and we never felt embarrassed to pull out and check our guidebook in front of everybody.

Ephesus is about 3km from downtown Selçuk. We didn't have much desire to walk there, opting for a taxicab instead, but we walked back to town, stopping on our way for a surprisingly acceptable meal at a buffet restaurant clearly meant to feed large tour groups.

And on the way back, the Temple of Artemis.

Reference books that list the 7 Wonders of the Ancient World usually tell us that the Pyramids are the only original Wonder that still survives mostly intact. This is true.

The second best-preserved Wonder is probably the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, which judging from its Wikipedia entry, is now a great big pile of rubble near Bodrum, Turkey. We did not go to Bodrum on our trip.

But the third best-preserved Wonder is the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, which you pass on the walk back to Selçuk. Bear in mind that when I say it's the third best-preserved Wonder, what I mean is that we know where it is and someone's taken the liberty of stacking up a bunch of fragments of various columns to make one new column.

The Temple of Artemis today. As I told Jenna, 'This must have been really cool back when it existed.' In the far background you can see the Kale (castle), still really old but of far more recent construction, currently closed for renovations.

Selçuk itself is a pleasant touristy town. The ruins of the Basilica of St John are fascinating to wander through and are right in the town proper.

And be sure to visit one of the many cafes and restaurants in town with outdoor seating, so that as you enjoy your meal you may be beset upon by pleasantly rotund street cats, who will come waddling up to you hoping that you will take pity on them and share your dinner. Turkey in general is known for its street cats who appear suspiciously well-fed, but one street kitty in Selçuk is about the same size as two strays in a town where cats are less fortunate.

Patara and Kalkan

Patara is a town on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey which has made itself completely into a backpacker haven. I mean that in the nicest possible way. It's a very pleasant place, although slightly inconveniently located -- it's not quite walking distance either from the main road or the deservedly popular Patara beach.

We stayed at Rose Pension, which I am mentioning by name because, after a good review in the 11th edition of Lonely Planet, it inexplicably disappeared from the 12th edition, causing much grumbling among our hosts. It's a shame -- Rose Pension had some of the best food of any pension we stayed at in Turkey.

Patara Beach fills to the brim with Turks and Europeans in the summer months. The good news is that it's big enough to contain all of them, and it's mostly clean and pleasant. There's a cafe serving passable food. Big beaches aren't everyone's thing (I tend to sit under an umbrella and read) but if they're what you like, Patara is an excellent choice.

The ruins start a short walk inland. Patara used to be a prosperous fishing community, probably best known as the birthplace of St. Nicholas. Yes, that's St. Nicholas as in Santa Claus -- imagine the potential tackiness if the local tourism promoters ever decide to build campaigns around the Santa connection.

The ruins are not as spectacular as some ruins in Turkey, but they're worth a look if you're already in Patara, and you can enjoy the novelty of exploring a ruined city with goats and cattle wandering around. (I suspect even Patara at its height had goats and cattle . The notion that a city center shouldn't have livestock wandering about is probably a very recent one in historical terms, which still hasn't spread to all parts of the globe.)

We took a day trip to the nearby town of Kalkan.

The difference between Patara and Kalkan:

Patara: Backpackers

Kalkan: Wealthy tourists

And that about sums it up. We weren't really the correct demographic to properly enjoy Kalkan, but we got a good meal of meze there, and we were amused by the number of well-fed cats and dogs lazing about town.

The beach, though, is somewhat lackluster compared with Patara's, and transportation is somewhat awkward - shuttles run to the town center infrequently, and to get back to the bus terminal, you either have to trudge uphill quite a ways, or you pay a cabdriver to take you.

Overall we quite enjoyed our time along the Turkish Riviera - relaxing and with enough to maintain our interest. We celebrated our first wedding anniversary in Patara, with white wine (from an unlabeled bottle!) and nargile. Very pleasant.

Hatay

From Şanlıurfa, we headed southwest to Hatay. The city of Antakya is known to history buffs as Antioch.

Antakya continues the grand Turkish tradition of being home to very old and historically significant places. Here, it's the rock-cut church of St. Peter, the oldest place where Christians congregated in secret and arguably the oldest Christian church of them all.

Most of what you see there now isn't nearly that old; the facade was built by Crusaders, and there was restoration work done in the 19th century. But it's still a place of great historical significance, and there are very old details that survive, such as the escape tunnel that worshippers would take if approaching authorities were spotted.

The guidebook claims that the church is a fairly easy walk from central Antakya. The reality is that while the church is indeed walkable, much of that is past a strip of small-industrial and mechanical shops -- not a terribly inspiring walk, in other words, and downright unpleasant on a hot day.

The Antakya Archeology Museum on the main traffic circle doesn't look like much from the outside. Looks are deceiving, however -- on the inside it's a spacious and fascinating look at a collection of Roman mosaics and sculpture, well worth the eight lira.

Hatay is of special importance to my wife because her grandfather's family comes from here -- they're Armenians from Musa Dagh who fled persecution in the early part of the 20th Century. We made a special trip to the one Armenian village remaining in the area, which she wrote up on her own blog.

Armenian and Arab influences are strong in Hatay, which was part of Syria until the late 1930s. Before we went I worried that the unrest in Syria would adversely affect our trip, as I'd been reading reports of Syrian refugees crossing into Hatay. As it turned out, while in Hatay I saw or heard nothing of the nearby problems (which may be due more to our obliviousness than to anything else).

Hatay cuisine is much more Arab-influenced than in the rest of Turkey. For instance, hummus is for some reason not widely eaten elsewhere in the country, but it's common in Hatay. There was a small eatery near our hotel that served excellent hummus. We only learned on our last visit there that the guy who ran the place was ethnic Armenian, and what we'd been eating was Armenian hummus, cousin to what J. had been raised on.

The CELTA

I'm back in the United States, after a month of living in Istanbul and not blogging. Blame the CELTA: the Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults, which my wife and I earned in a four-week intensive course that left us little time to do anything else.

Now it's done, we're both significantly poorer but with much stronger resumes, and I have time to write much more. Excellent.

Everything blurs together and I get an odd bit of writer's block when I try to describe what the experience was like, so please see Jenna's account of how she took the course and earned a (provisional) Pass A. (Our classmate Pinar also published a good write-up of her experience.)

I myself did not earn a Pass A, but I am fairly satisfied to be included in the group which encompasses the bottom 70% of all accepted students.

Jan Wong's China

My first book on China by Canadian journalist Jan Wong was her Red China Blues, a look back on the author's complicated relationship with China. As a student during the Cultural Revolution, Wong swallowed the Communist Party line unquestioningly and traveled to Beijing to become one of the few capitalist bloc residents to study there.

Her faith in the Communist Party managed to continue for a couple of years, but it didn't last forever. Wong ended up quite disillusioned with the whole Communist experiment.

Years passed. In the second part of the book, Wong describes her return to China in the 1980s as a journalist, now cynical and no longer willing to accept the Chinese government's viewpoint uncritically. Red China Blues' climax comes when Wong describes the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, which she witnessed, in graphic detail.

Not quite so autobiographical is Wong's later book, Jan Wong's China, a collection of stories of Wong's experiences working as a journalist in China in the 1990s. The book was published at the end of that decade, so the impression I got of China was already a decade out of date. One should hope that impression is somewhat divorced from present-day reality, because the picture Wong paints is a grim one.

My total experience inside China (excluding Hong Kong and Macau) amounts to five days in Beijing in 2003, so I have little personal experience to draw on. My own thoughts on China are somewhat ambivalent; as I wrote earlier this year, China lurks on a great barely-known entity on the edge of my consciousness. (Living in Taiwan, I can hardly help it.)

I read books about China fairly often, and they tend to paint a rather alarming picture in terms of life within China's borders, particularly in the less wealthy areas. Jan Wong's stories of China in the 1990s, which I read two months ago (which is why I'm a bit hazy on details), do a good job humanizing the the individuals who live in China, while not shying away from the grittier details of life there.

After the generally grim view of China presented elsewhere in the book, the chapter on Tibet presented a remarkably - and unexpectedly - balanced picture. The Chinese authorities are not depicted as the benevolent liberators they would like foreigners to think they are. But neither are they depicted as evil overlords determined to stamp out Tibetan culture. I'm no expert on Tibet so I can't judge where the truth lies (it's probably really complicated) but Wong's treatment of Tibet, a land with half-Han, half-Tibetan citizens who voluntarily choose to remain officially Tibetan in the state records because they find it advantageous under Chinese law, hits a plausible note of fairness.

Cultural Clash of the day

The Scene.

We were in Şanlıurfa. We had just finished feeding the sacred carp and taking pictures of the shrine at Gölbaşı, in the courtyard of the mosque of Halil-ur-Rahman. We retired to one of the courtyard tea gardens. It was shaded and secluded, a place where we could drink tea and eat a snack without feeling awkward and weird on a Ramadan day.

So we did so, and an older man who spoke no English did his best to be friendly and chat with us, and we speculated about the probable power dynamic among the three cats who kept asking for food. A fairly normal Turkish tea garden experience for us, all told.

After an hour or two, we felt refreshed enough to go back out into the sunny heat to explore the bazaar nearby. We asked for the bill and we paid, giving a tip, as is custom here.

On our way out, we examined the posted menu and determined we had been overcharged. The amount was embarrassingly small by any absolute measure, but insultingly large relative to what the bill should have been. We decided to head back to contest the bill. The tea garden managers protested that our own tabulation was incomplete; we'd ordered more water than we were taking into account.

It is true that when walking around Şanlıurfa in August one tends to consume a lot of water. But the discrepancy in our bill would have corresponded to half a dozen bottles of water we would have consumed while sitting in the shade, which surely would have sent both of us in search of a bathroom at least once or twice.

With our negotiations at an impasse, a customer who spoke decent English who had witnessed the whole scene inserted himself into the situation. Trying to smooth over the situation, he said it was all due to a linguistic misunderstanding.

But, I said, they'd written '20' on a sheet of paper after they'd tabulated everything, and we'd given them 20 lira, and they hadn't given change, and we gave a tip on top of that.

So the guy changed his story. They'd assumed the extra money was a tip, he said.

I made it clear that I doubted that this just happened to be the most informal establishment we'd ever visited - a place that was really little more than a fridge, a tea stand, and a little hot plate for snacks - that automatically added a service charge to the bill. And then accepted tips on top of that.

The guy didn't like my attitude. 'Don't be rude,' he told me.

The whole encounter ended a few fruitless minutes after that, with the tea garden staff having relinquished the amount they'd overcharged us and the tip, and me feeling so angry I could scream. Not just at the audacity and chutzpah of the tea garden staff, but also at the English-speaking fellow customer. But for different reasons.

The Westerner's Perspective.

The English-speaking customer who took it upon himself to mediate obviously never had any intention of handling the disagreement fairly. He was Turkish. The tea garden staff was Turkish. We were foreigners. Of course he was going to side with them against us.

And it's not even as if maybe he really thought the staff was right. His explanation of the staff's side of the story was too obviously false. Only a weak-minded fool would have believed him.

It's sad, really. Locals ripping off foreigners are a phenomenon that everyone agrees exists. You're just helping to hurt your country's international image by insulting the foreigners and defending those louts for no apparent reason beyond blind patriotic loyalty.

I mean, that's got to be what happened, right? There can't be any other way of viewing the situation, right?

Oh yes there can.

The Other Perspective, I Suspect.

You know what I hate, as a fine upstanding Turkish citizen? Loud oafs who see only black and white, and can't distinguish shades of gray.

Like those two self-righteous foreigners who caught the tea garden staff overcharging them. Okay, small deal, it happens all the time. So once I see what's going on, I do what my duties as a human being require me to do: I try to smooth over the situation, let the staff save face, and placate the angry people. It's just a misunderstanding, I tell the foreigners. A mistake was made because the tea sellers don't speak good English. It's okay, nobody tried to overcharge you.

So what does the male foreigner do? He hears my attempt to smooth over the situation and takes it literally. He actually tells me that what I told him can not be what really happened, and he explains why. Is he five years old? Does he think I am five years old? Has he lived his entire life explaining to various people why things they tell him cannot be literally true? He must be deeply unpleasant to sit next to in a movie theater.

He forces me to think of another explanation to smooth things over, and then he tells me that isn't literally true either. Well, perhaps if I go away overnight so that I can think about it, maybe then I'll be able to come up with a story that he won't be able to nitpick. But what kind of creativity does he expect me to exercise on the spot?

And now his voice is rising, as if he is angry at me for some reason. What a rude man.

Clash of Attitudes.

This is what's really unfortunate about this sort of encounter between a culture where directness is valued, and one where maintaining harmony is more important. It would have taken a rare sort of Westerner, possessing saintlike detachment, to not have gotten angry, and I say that having spent a couple of years living in East Asia. It would have taken a rare sort of Westerner not to be provoked further by the Turkish man's admonishment to me, 'Don't be rude'. From his point of view, I was being rude, for not following the societal script. But I am a product of my own culture, and I would have felt like a weak non-confrontational fool if I'd accepted the man's obviously false explanations.

Normally I'm just about the least confrontational person you'd ever meet. I shy away from arguing with people. Yet that man's attempt to peacefully smooth things over made me so angry I wanted to hit him.

Comparing Turkey and Taiwan seems rooted in foolishness and doomed to failure. The two countries are literally at opposite ends of Asia. Yet they're both places where saving face, and maintaining interpersonal harmony, are valued at the expense of being direct and frank.

I'm going to say something about the company I work for in Taiwan here. They don't read this, and no names shall be used. The office unfortunately has a habit of making mistakes that end up inconveniencing us instructors, and of letting small problems snowball into big problems.

I remember one time I confronted office employee J after the company had made a mistake that had moderately inconvenienced me. She told me why it wasn't the office's fault, and I responded by telling her why her explanation logically could not possibly be true.

J's response? She seemed to shrink a little, saying, 'I don't know what to say,' before mumbling some other excuse which didn't make sense either.

I actually felt kind of guilty after that, as if I'd been bullying her and I realized it only after the fact. Then I regained my senses and told myself that, no, I had nothing to feel bad about. And I had the bulk of Western culture to back me up.

Still, from J's point of view I should have just accepted the transparently false explanation and dropped the issue, for the sake of interpersonal harmony.

This cultural difference isn't going to start any wars (we're not talking Samuel Huntington-level stuff here), but I do think it keeps escalating minor differences into major ones. And while I can't speak for anyone else, I am never able to spot it while it's happening. Only in retrospect, once it's too late to alter my behavior.

Incidentally, I don't intend people to read this and take away from it something as simple and insulting as 'Westerners are straight-talking, Easterners employ social lying'. We in the West employ all sorts of white lies and statements of doubtful literal veracity, many of which we're not even consciously aware of because we're too deeply immersed in the culture.

Turkey's still great.

The incident that inspired this post got sparked because the staff at a Turkish tea garden though they could overcharge us without us noticing, but I don't want to harp on them too much. Unscrupulous people are everywhere. They're not especially common here.

This was the only instance of people in Turkey being anything other than friendly and honest with us. Make no mistake, in touristy areas we've been charged touristy prices. My wife's haggled gloriously on occasion (she's much better at that than I am). But this is a culture of haggling, and you're expected to do it with a smile on your face. And there was the enterprising youngster at a remote roadside stand in Cappadocia who sold us thirsty hikers cans of low-quality iced tea at preposterous prices. But that was our fault for not asking how much before we drank the stuff. Lesson learned. All we can do is laugh at his audacity. (More seriously, we've been hit by theft, but that's impersonal, it happens all over the world and it isn't something to dwell on here.)

But most Turks we've met have been friendly and honest, even when linguistic difficulties made the encounter less efficient than it would have been otherwise. The unscrupulous tea garden in Şanlıurfa inspired this post because of the cultural differences highlighted, not because I wanted to rant about them.