I Stand Corrected Page 8

  During the course of a banquet I attended with Chinese and American businessmen and their spouses, our Chinese host began an innocuous enough conversation with the woman seated on his left.

  “I see you like food,” was how he began.

  “Well, yes, I suppose I do like food,” responded the woman, charmed by what she assumed was his limited English.

  “I knew that because you are fat,” was what he said next.

  Those close enough to hear waited in stunned silence for the consequence.

  There was none.

  The brutally expressed observation—accurate though it was—would have been a martini-in-the-face insult anywhere other than China, where, it happens, being plump is a sign of prosperity. That might well be, but my chapter on social conversation warned Chinese readers that under no circumstances would a Western woman agree to put her prosperity on a public scale.

  → LESSON 12

  Mastering the skill of starting a conversation with someone you’ve just met requires you to listen carefully to the other person, to be observant, and to think before you speak. Being observant means considering the person you are addressing. If you are anxious, you won’t be able to think of anything to say in a group. Wait for the right moment and add your own thoughts or observations to the discussion. An opening line that a host may use to start a conversation is “How do you like our city?” One for a guest at a dinner or function is “How do you know our host?”

  The advice in my chapter on conversing with Westerners focused more on what not to say, and I was able to use several unforgettable examples from my own dining table.

  Some twenty-four years ago, W. organized a dinner party at our New York apartment to celebrate the impending birth of our son. The conversation was a case study in disaster.

  “If you described parenthood as a job, no one would take it,” was how it began.

  The statement was especially unexpected, coming as it did from a mother of two charming children. Of those gathered at the table, her husband was the most taken aback.

  “What a discouraging thing to tell someone who’s just announced she’s expecting!” he said.

  Choosing to ignore him, his wife turned to me. “You’re a businesswoman, Eden. If you were to list the pros and cons of the theoretical job of being a mother, would there be any takers?”

  It was the kind of interrogative that had no intention of waiting for a reply. Before I could answer, her composure snapped like a dry tree branch.

  “Even at a six-figure salary, you’d be insane to take the job!” she blurted out.

  The unsparing assessment locked us in uneasy quiet.

  “It starts with nine uncomfortable months. Each month is its own separate and awful reminder you’ve lost control of your body. Then there’s the backbreaking labor and the searing pain of delivery.”

  Her evenly spaced words produced the tonal rhythm of a demented storyteller, and our collective expression took a recognizable shape of dismay.

  “That’s just the beginning,” she continued in a monotone flattened by defeat. “You bring home this complete stranger who nurses away whatever strength you have left. By the end of the first month, the novelty has worn thin, just in time to realize your baby isn’t an item you’ve bought and can still return.”

  She then offered a bleak forecast: “You can be sure of one thing: no matter what you do or how you do it, you know—you just know—that in twenty years he’ll be sitting in a psychiatrist’s office blaming you for something, some small thing, something you couldn’t remember if someone put a gun to your head.”

  Palpable silence from our other guests failed to camouflage their horror. At the opposite end of the table, my husband’s face was telegraphing a wordless plea for intervention.

  “So, Cleveland, tell us what you’re up to these days,” I asked in a transparently obvious bid to redirect the conversation.

  Cleveland Amory was a curmudgeon who’d long given up on humans to devote himself to animal rights. To the immediate point, he was someone who had been to enough dinner parties to understand that he was being prevailed upon by a desperate hostess.

  “You know how I feel about making fur coats from baby white seals,” was his lead-in.

  “Yes …?” I said, grateful that he had taken my cue.

  “Well, I’m working with the Greenpeace people, and the really good news is we plan to sink a Canadian trawler next week.”

  The transition to another topic was more abrupt than I might have liked.

  “Isn’t that dangerous for someone?” I asked.

  W. leaned forward in his chair. His keen interest pushed aside my concern about safety in favor of the pyrotechnical details.

  “How do you sink something that size? What does it take?”

  His was a question only a man would ask and other men would appreciate. I was surprised when the one sitting to my left—Robert, who was both a close friend and our lawyer—stood up suddenly and excused himself.

  Cleveland continued to detail his plan. He would implement his scheme at night, when a skeleton crew would be on board; the boat would be anchored in shallow waters; explosives would be limited to a small detonating device in the boiler room.

  Robert had been in the bathroom for what I thought was an overly long period of time. After clearing his plate from the table, I discreetly inquired of his wife if she thought her husband was all right.

  “He’ll come back after the subject changes,” she said obliquely.

  I tapped on the bathroom door. “Bob?”

  “Is he finished?”

  “Do you mean Cleveland?”

  “Yes.”

  “With what?”

  “With what he was saying.”

  “I don’t know.… Why does it matter?”

  “Because I can’t be witness to a future crime.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say something?”

  “It was easier to leave.”

  “What have you been doing in there all this time?”

  “I found my briefcase in the hallway on the way in.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I apologized. “It never occurred to me.”

  “Is the woman all right?”

  “She seems to be … but I don’t think her marriage will ever be the same.”

  “Well, tell my wife to come for me when your guests have left.”

  Robert would not have felt the need to lock himself in the bathroom if all at the table had followed the basic dos and don’ts of polite conversation.

  → LESSON 13

  Social conversation is a give-and-take. The best occurs naturally. Unfortunately, this is also true with the worst. Stay away from provocative subjects and depressing topics that are liable to paralyze the other guests. Consider the person you are addressing, for it is unlikely that a woman, obviously delighted by her pregnancy, appreciates hearing that her baby will drain the life out of her. Don’t interrupt someone who is speaking, no matter how enthusiastic you are about entering the conversation. Avoid preempting the choice of topic, and don’t keep to any one subject for too long: it holds the other guests conversationally captive. Don’t talk at length about a place or person when it becomes apparent that no one else in your group has been there or knows the person. Don’t tell jokes unless they fall within the bounds of good taste, are at no one’s expense, and are easily understood by all in the group. It is rude to probe. Rather than pry into anyone’s marital status, ask the hostess the next day. Under no circumstances ask questions about a guest’s or the host’s wealth.

  “Are other things considered rude?” scribbled my Chinese editor in his margin notes.

  His question led me to contemplate a larger underlying issue: what exactly does it take to live acceptably among other humans? In our own culture, most of us know what is expected; there are standards to follow that drive a consistency of behavior. But how should we behave when we have no idea what constitutes rudeness outside our own cultural arena? One sho
uld not slurp soup, nor should one belch at the table. Who would doubt something so right? you might ask. But for the Chinese, slurping is acceptable and belching is a compliment to the chef.

  No matter the foreign land, acts of kindness rarely require an interpreter. Manners, on the other hand, are the complex representation of human interaction based on the history of a particular culture.

  American manners are built on a bedrock of freedom. Davy Crockett, the nineteenth-century folk hero known as the King of the Wild Frontier, took only a few short words for his advice: “If it’s right, do it.” It went without saying that an American’s “right” was inarguable and “it” could be anything.

  I am of the opinion that the English—with the exception of their Parliament, which is made up mostly of adults determined to behave like rowdy schoolchildren—are so outwardly polite it often prevents the discovery of their delightfully inward quirks and that self-deprecation is probably the only way for them to cope with their nation’s postimperial decline.

  Residing on the opposite end of the politeness spectrum are the French, most of whom appear unapologetically rude—the result, I am sure, of the French Revolution, a resounding rejection of powdered manners and, to this day, the cause of the disdainful attitude of virtually every waiter in the country.

  Unlike the Chinese, who systematically eliminated manners in the name of equity, the French after their revolution kept alive the memory of manners revered, as well as their unshakable sense of self. There is a unique relationship between the French and everything else, and hundreds of years of giving themselves disproportionate credit for simply being French has made them often unbearable, even to their own kind. I have seen this at close range.

  At one point in my young parenthood, we lived a year in Paris. On Gilliam’s first day of grade school there, it was necessary for me to register him for a cafeteria pass. I had a good look at the other parents. They were well dressed, haughty, and without the slightest shame for cutting in front of me.

  “All they do is crowd in and circle the registration table. What’s so difficult about forming a line?” I asked Gilliam.

  “It’s difficult to form a line if everyone in it believes the line begins with them,” was the boy’s assessment of both the situation and the nature of being French.

  The French might not know how to form an orderly queue, but no one would argue that they have style. That same year we lived in Paris was the first the city levied fines against those who neglected to pick up after their dogs. I watched from my apartment window as a beautifully dressed woman of a certain age, wearing leather gloves that matched the robin-blue color of her Hermès handbag, pulled out a plastic bag and, in a single graceful motion, swooped down on the digestive by-product of her little dog. With impeccable sangfroid, she placed the excrement in her handbag in order to avoid being seen carrying it to the garbage receptacle a short block away.

  Well done—but maybe not as far as the Chinese are concerned, for they find it unbearable when a man blows his nose in a handkerchief and returns it to his pocket. Lesser infractions named by the Chinese include whistling, snapping one’s fingers, pointing, and insisting on discussing business during a first meal. The ultimate display of rudeness—one that will quickly end a relationship—is to force anyone to lose face.

  Painful for the French to acknowledge but nonetheless true is that the history of correct behavior in China precedes anything French. At one time, all nations from the Yellow Sea to the Caspian were tributaries to China. In pursuit of a fuller understanding of the Chinese culture, I’ve read the translations of some of their classics, written before the Bible by several centuries. Contained in them are rules of behavior numbering no less than three thousand—convincing me that altruism in China is not so much expressions of mind and heart as it is ritualistic reenactment.

  Since humanity has proved that consideration does not occur naturally I have to believe that anything that can inspire that admirable characteristic—or assigns responsibly when it goes missing—makes us better beings. As I contemplated this issue, it dawned on me that although China has not embraced the concept of religion in quite the same way as has the West, in bodying forth the spirit of their ancestries, the Chinese have created ceremonies and traditions that serve the same functional purpose as religious belief.

  The editor had no interest in my free-floating thoughts on the immortal beliefs of the Chinese people. What he wanted were illustrations of Western rudeness. Making good on his request was simple enough. I needed only to reflect on the behavior of my friends for an inventory of what not to do.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  At three months, Gilliam was christened in an Episcopal church on upper Fifth Avenue in New York. This respectable event set off a Wagnerian epic of social mishaps.

  It began at the church’s altar, where Candida, Gilliam’s godmother, vowed to what she called the “Jew-God” that she would provide spiritual sustenance.

  “If there is a God,” said Robert as we left the church, “this crowd has pushed him to his limit of tolerance.”

  The group of attendees walked to our apartment a few blocks away for the reception. Gilliam needed a nap after his ceremonial responsibilities. One of the guests suggested that since she wanted to use the phone and the phone was in the room with the crib, she would watch Gilliam until he fell asleep. Having written a heavily reported piece scheduled to run in The Washington Post the next day, she spent an hour in the nursery conferring with the paper’s fact-checker.

  When, finally, it occurred to me to look in on both of them, I found Gilliam happily chewing the no-longer-needed marked-up typescript pages the woman was discarding in his crib. The crib’s headboard was a graveyard of Post-its, the result of her methodical approach to answering the fact-checker’s queries.

  After sending the woman from the nursery, I peeled off the Post-its, waited for Gilliam to go down for his nap, and returned to the front room to find Jonathan locked in animated debate with another guest. Jonathan’s cake fork had been lifted off the side of his plate and was waving in the air. It lashed out to make an impassioned point, tearing the veiled hat of a woman standing near.

  “Make amends and replace her hat,” I said to Jonathan after the damage was done.

  “I’ve done her a favor,” he insisted. “She looked like a beekeeper. And anyway, I’m the least of your problems. You should check out what’s happening in the kitchen.”

  Turning my attention to our small kitchen, I realized it was emitting sobs.

  One guest had pulled another aside to report that her unfaithful husband was cheating with a spectacular range of women.

  After everyone finally left, my father observed, “I’ve never met more self-absorbed people.”

  It was his polite way of saying they were all impolite.

  In a metaphorical sea of self-involvement, my friends are often storm-tossed by waves of anxiety. Piled into one room, they evoke the chaos of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. It is also true that my friends were behaving with various degrees of rudeness at my son’s christening—which enabled me, years later, to explain Western rudeness to my Chinese publisher by setting benchmarks with examples that measured levels of offense.

  → LESSON 14

  UNWITTINGLY RUDE BUT FORGIVABLE TO A POINT:

  · Poor table manners

  · Smoking in someone’s home without asking permission first

  UNCONSCIOUSLY RUDE BUT RUDE NONETHELESS:

  · Spitting or belching

  · Asking people about their marriages

  · Speaking loudly on a cell phone

  · Blocking a busy entrance by standing directly in front of the door while chatting with a friend

  · Cutting in line

  DELIBERATELY RUDE AND DESERVING OF REBUKE:

  · Shouting obscenities at a person

  · Calling into question the honesty or capability of a person in front of other people

  “So, what should you do whe
n someone is displaying the first or second level of rudeness?” asked the Chinese editor.

  My advice might just as well have been offered to Westerners.…

  → LESSON 15

  Being considerate prevents you from being rude. Sadly, it does not prevent others from being rude to you. If you are on the receiving end of bad behavior, consider the situation before reacting, and don’t automatically take it personally. Sometimes the offender has had a bad day or is unaware he or she has offended. Take a few breaths and ask yourself if it’s worth a confrontation. If you do decide to say something, even about the offense of casual rudeness, keep in mind that how you say what you want or need to say makes all the difference. When correcting an intrusive display of rudeness, better that the tone of your voice should be gentle and not harsh—a challenge for Chinese people, whose nature is to speak louder than most Westerners.

  “Okay, but what happens when someone is rude to you at the third level of rudeness?” asked the editor, as if putting us both through a ballistic defense exercise.

  “Keeping your dignity after being insulted depends upon how you react,” I added to the text. “Nothing is lost by taking the higher ground, and many times the best solution to being insulted is to not confront the person who has been rude.”

  It was at this point that I had to admit to myself it was easier to write such a thing than to do it.

  Each of us has a different threshold of tolerance when it comes to the rudeness of others. I react to rudeness by being a model of politeness myself. This reversed equation of behavior equips me with verbal tools to attack aggressive rudeness with sarcasm and provides me with a benefit of doubt when bearing witness to casual rudeness. I have been known, however, to frighten people when my patience has been entirely expended, especially when it comes to business matters.