Having been in an intensive language-immersion course for two years now (called Marry a Chinese Woman Who Doesn't Speak English — I highly recommend it), I seldom get the tones wrong in my Chinese pronunciation. The other day, however, I flubbed.

Ma Lei's father had asked us to pick up some cigars for a fairly wealthy friend of his, in exchange for a bunch of money. The word for "smoke" is yan, spoken in a high flat tone — much the same as singing a high note in English. The word for "salt," unfortunately, is also yan, spoken in a rising tone like a question. ("Do you want some salt?" That same sort of tone.)

Ma Lei had asked me about the cigars earlier in the morning, and mid-afternoon we happened to be running some errands near a smoke shop. I asked if she wanted to go check out the yan, but I said it like "salt," not like "smoke."

"Salt shop?!" She asked incredulously. "America has salt shops?!"

"Dui," I said: "Yes. America has many different flavors of salt . Some are expensive, and some are cheap. You told me that your dad wants us to buy some expensive salt."

"I told you no such thing," she responded. "Did you have some sort of crazy dream about salt?" (I kid you not, that's exactly what she asked me.)

"No, it wasn't a dream! We already went and bought your brother expensive salt to give his boss. Your dad wanted the same sort of salt. Did you forget?!"

"No," she said. "Why the hell would I want to go to a salt shop?! Let's just go to the beach."

Later, she reminded me that her father had asked us to buy cigars, and I was re-flummoxed. "We were right next door to a cigar shop," I challenged, "and you told me you didn't want any." She thought, and thought, and thought, and finally remembered: "No, you dumbass, you told me it was a salt shop!"

My bad! Not all yans are created equal.

Contradictions and the smell of a restaurant's back door

While walking past the back door of a restaurant, Ma Lei noted the combined smell of rotted produce, grease, and dirty dishes that is common to the back doors of restaurants. "Ayamaya!" She said, "America has smells like that, too?!"

What amused me about this was not the funny look on her face, nor the very expressive Chinese "ayamaya," but her background assumption that America — the entire country — would be devoid of restaurant-backdoor-smell.

I find that many Chinese people are prone to such sweeping generalizations. They meet one American who's nice, and they assume all Americans are nice; they meet one who's a schmuck and assume all are schmucks. I have a few possible explanations for why this is:

1) Chinese culture historically aspired to absolute sameness from everyone, so perhaps it comes naturally for the Chinese to assume that everyone and everything from a given culture is the same. And in fact, in many ways China is remarkably uniform (much of it, indeed, smelling like the back door of a restaurant).

2) The Chinese education does not demand analytical weighing of different or conflicting elements of the same whole. On the contrary, whichever part of history, or literature, or any other subject is presented by the teacher is considered to be the whole of it, and asking about anything else is both a waste of time (since it's not on the test) and an insult to the teacher.

3) Chinese philosophy was not founded on the dialectic method and, most importantly, the Aristotelian law of non-contradiction.

If a Westerner holds two contradictory ideas, such as "all Americans are nice," and "Americans all shoot each other with guns," he will likely recognize that there is a contradiction. If the issue is important to him, he will search for an explanation. At the very least, he will want to resolve the issue into a more nuanced viewpoint: "in respect X, but in another respect Y."

Most of my Chinese friends and students do not follow this approach. Rather, they tend to hold two mutually-exclusive ideas as coequals, to be applied pragmatically according to the circumstances of the moment. When the facts seem to warrant it, or when it's convenient to do so, one applies "all Americans are nice." Tomorrow or the next day, on the other hand, "all Americans are violent."

This may partly explain the huge, rapid swings that characterize much of Chinese history. In 1978, communism is the ideal. In 1979, "to get rich is glorious." Both stand as equally true and equally universal, but they will be applied according to the moment.

Westerners do this too, of course, especially where issues of religion are concerned. ("I am my brother's keeper" — where "my brother" is taken to include everyone in need — yet "to each his own" and "better dead than Red.") Nor do all Chinese people think in stereotypes: Ma Lei in particular has a wonderfully supple mind. Yet there is a strong tendency for Chinese people to think in ways that Westerns find to be flattened-out.

Taste-deaf

They say that infants who are raised in a single-language household quickly begin to lose the ability to discriminate among phonemes that are not differentiated within their home language, well before the age of one. For instance, a Chinese student of mine had a terrible time distinguishing between "hit," "hate," and "heat" — not only in her pronunciation, but even in oral comprehension. Those three vowel sounds are not differentiated in the Chinese language, so she could barely hear the difference.

I am beginning to be persuaded that the same phenomenon applies to differentiating flavors of food.

Ma Lei shocked me yesterday, by complaining that the food in America all tastes the same. If I were asked to ascribe just one quality to American food, it would be "diversity." Just since she and I have been here, we've eaten: pizza, Tex-Mex, California-style Mexican, Italian food, Midwestern-style meat and potatoes, Thai food and — yes — even Chinese. And yet Ma Lei thinks everything but the Chinese food tastes the same.

I should emphasize that Ma Lei is no philistine, where food is concerned. In fact, she has one of the most discerning palates I know. If we go to a restaurant — a Chinese restaurant — and like one of their dishes, she can take a few bites, ponder carefully what is in it, and recreate it almost exactly the next day. Her discernment among Chinese flavors is uncanny, yet she thinks the food we've eaten in America is all the same.

I pushed her to explain why, and she gave just one example. When Americans go to the grocery store for pork, we have a range of cuts that are all basically the same: grainy, fleshy white meat with essentially the same flavor. Where is the pig's snout? The ears? The tail? The entrails? How about the tendons, which the Chinese boil down to make a delicious dense, meaty gelatin? None of those things can be found at the supermarkets we've been to.

Her point could be easily expanded-upon, because Americans don't have many of the different meats that are common in China. Donkey meat can be tender and lightly gamey, and goes great in Chinese jiaozi (hand-filled dumplings akin to the wontons you may have had in soup). Dog — yes, dog! — has a rich and complex flavor I attribute to the fact that dogs are omnivorous.

On the other hand, all that diversity of foods is prepared by methods that vary little. Steam-cook. Stir-fry with spicy sauce. Stir-fry with soy-based sauce. Coat with flour and stir-fry. Change the spices up a little bit, but not very much. Everything cooked in corn oil, with a side of dull, starchy white rice. I love the food, but it does get boring.

Americans living in China think everything tastes the same, because the ways in which the Chinese diet varies are not recapitulated in our own native diet. We don't differentiate clearly and easily among the flavors of pig snout, ear, and tail, because those aren't part of the American diet. In a telling expression, many Americans think everything that isn't beef, pork or chicken "tastes like chicken." It wouldn't taste like chicken, if we regularly ate things like snake or donkey.

On the other hand, to a Chinese person the difference between spaghetti with beef marinara sauce, and beef enchiladas with jalepeno red sauce, is not particularly significant. Both are beef with starch and tomato sauce, with spices that are Other to their Chinese spices.

I dearly wish my Chinese were up to the job of making such philosophical points, because I think Ma Lei would enjoy our food a lot more if she had a different attitude. She's not a closed-minded person, or she wouldn't have married a yangguizi. But her enjoyment of America has been diminished by her boredom with our food.

A very American Christmas

My friend and former student, Xiao Li, came down for a visit yesterday. Li is like a little brother to me — smart, hardworking, honest and loving. Both he and Ma Lei represent, to me, the best of Chinese culture. Ma Lei loves him as much as I do, and she really appreciated having a Chinese friend to speak with.

We made the evening into a little Christmas. Ma Lei made our Christmas dinner: Chinese-style pork ribs, chicken wings in Coca-Cola sauce, and Chinese noodles. That's not quite the American tradition, but the food was fantastic. It was Li's first home-cooked Chinese meal since last summer, and Ma Lei is a great cook, so he ate like a teenager.

We had a little Christmas gift exchange, which was a first-ever for both our Chinese family members. Ma Lei was as excited as a little girl opening her presents. Li got a lot fewer gifts, but he was very happy to be included in the family.

It was a strange and lovely family, two Americans and two Chinese celebrating American Christmas by eating a Chinese dinner and exchanging gifts made in China. I guess nothing could be more American than that.

Dinner at P.F. Chang's

Dinner last night was at P.F. Chang's. Ma Lei kept asking "where are the Chinese people?" There were none: not on the staff, not in the kitchen, and certainly not eating there.

We ordered Mahi Mahi, a broccoli/chicken stir-fry, and an eggplant dish, along with a side of fried green beans and two starters: crunchy lettuce rolls, and something called fiery wontons. It all looked lovely, but none of it got Ma Lei's approval. The eggplant was approximating tolerable, but everything else was at perhaps the McDonald's level in her eyes. I understood her criticism, but to me the food was okay.

My mom had called ahead to tell them that this was Ma Lei's first meal in America, so we got a bit of royal treatment. Two managers came over to welcome her to the restaurant and ask how the food was. She was polite, if not truthful.

The first manager said "Welcome to America! That's 'nin hao,' right?" That's not quite right, but he was close enough to elicit a friendly laugh from Ma Lei. ("Nin hao" is "hello." "Welcome" is "huangying.") After he'd left, Ma Lei laughed about the manager of a Chinese restaurant barely knowing how to say "hello" in Mandarin.

The managers comped us a free dessert of coconut ice cream with fried bananas and other mixed fruit. Ma Lei correctly predicted that this would taste good, since it wasn't Chinese food. She wondered aloud why they didn't comp the whole meal. I suspect if word got out they'd done that, tomorrow evening everybody with a yellow face in Chicago would be lining up with fake Chinese accents to collect their free meal!

Ma Lei has a way of being bluntly honest yet gracious about her disapproval. She kept saying (in Chinese) "this is terrible," then (in English) "Sorry! Sorry!" with a big apologetic smile. As we left the restaurant, though, she suggested that she'd rather stick with American food while she's in America.

First impression of America

After cleaning up from that long flight, we went to the famous Woodfield Mall. On the drive, Ma Lei's face was glued to the window like one of those old Garfield stuffed dolls with suction cups on its feet.

She was amazed at the traffic, at how orderly it was and how few cars there were for such beautiful roads. (Don't worry, she'll see plenty of horrible traffic and horrible roads soon enough.)

She was dazzled by the Christmas lights everywhere, and how much prettier they are than the Christmas decorations we have in China. She kept saying "Santa Claus! Santa Claus!" like an excited little girl.

She was intrigued by the houses in this middle-class area. Little old brick houses, sturdy but in no way impressive, amazed her. China doesn't have many nice little single-family homes like that, with a yard and a garage for everyone. "I thought those were only in fairy tales," she said.

She loved seeing the places that China does have (such as McDonald's) and the many that China doesn't. The giant stores (Dick's Sporting Goods, Von Maur department store) impressed her, but she's just as curious to see what KFC is like in America.

She was even amazed at the car we were in (which would be too expensive for a middle-class person in China), and at the mere fact of being driven around an American city by an American woman. "I've only seen that before in movies," she said, "and now here I am."

Flying Japan vs. America

The difference between our China-Tokyo flight and our Tokyo-Chicago one was obvious immediately when we boarded in Tokyo. This plane (an American Airlines mega-jet) was obviously a little long in the tooth, the seats not nearly as modern and comfortable.

The flight attendants, while friendly enough, were far less attentive than the Japan Air Lines women had been. Ma Lei asked why they were so old and unattractive, whereas Asian-based airlines all have young, beautiful flight attendance. "Probably," she said, "the Americans don't pay enough to get pretty girls to apply."

My Chinese isn't really good enough to explain that it's illegal to discriminate against the fat and ugly in an American company, but I think she understood what I was trying to say. It took a couple of tries, though, because that concept is so foreign to a Chinese mind. In this particular instance, I'm with China!

Then the babies started crying, then shouting, then howling, as babies inevitably do on miserably long flights. Ma Lei was first annoyed that someone would bring a small baby onto a plane — Chinese people seldom do that — then wondered why those parents don't smack them for crying — the Chinese often do that. At one point there were three babies wailing a syncopated reggae beat with voices like fighting cats.

There was very little sleep had by poor Ma Lei. She's never before been on an international flight, and was not prepared for the rigors of 11+ hours in one plane. She perked up as soon as we landed, but she's due for a good long sleep now!