Life's a Beach

I have a picture from one of my drives up the coast that I wish I had with me so I could post. It's the perfect picture of one of the more fascinating differences between Chinese and American culture. Unfortunatly, that picture is sitting on my computer at home, so you'll just have to suffer through a thousand word description.

The picture is taken from the top of the cliff just outside Jenner, CA. It looks down on the sandbar that borders, and sometimes separates, the mouth of the Russian River and the Pacific Ocean. The bar is home to a herd of harbor seals that have lived there for, well, as long as there's been harbor seals probably. You can walk out on the sandbar from the south side and get as close as the law allows, or you can drive up Hwy 1 to this cliff and look down on them in all their cute glory. I was taking the photo from the second location.

What prompted me to take the photo wasn't just the seals. It was actually kind of a bad day to be doing photography, so it was more of the "check out what I saw" kind of picture rather than the "this is an amazing shot" kind. The harbor seals were there in full force, laying in close contact with each other if not on top of each other in a giant pile of blubber and fur which completely covered the tip of the sand bar. Next to them, as if there was some sort of glass wall between them, was a flock of seagulls. They too were hunkered down in the wind and formed a whiter stripe of feather below the shiny black stripe of fur next to them. And then, to complete the picture were a flock of cormorants on the other side of another invisible glass wall. This formed another black stripe on the sand bar which now sort of resembled an Oreo cookie seen from the side. It was as if some obsessively compulsive Seal Watch volunteer went out onto the bar and organized all the animals into nice little rows.

The reason this picture comes to mind now is that it looks like a picture of the way Americans and the Chinese view our personal freedoms. The difference lies in the way the seals and the sea gulls organized themselves within their groups. (The cormorants might mean something too, but I couldn't come up with anything, so they're just there for visual closure.)

In America, we love our personal freedom. We pride ourselves on the fact that we can do whatever we want. We drink when we want at meals. We eat only as much as we want to. And while it's polite to offer more food, it's not polite to force it on another. We follow the traffic laws and stay in our lanes. It's completely rude to pull out in front of another person because that person was going somewhere and you have no right to stop them or make them slow down for you. That would violate *their* rights and if we all respect each other's rights, then we'll all be happy and free.

This is exactly how the seagulls were organized. They had spaced themselves out fairly evenly on the sand, each bird maintaining a certain boundary between themselves and the others. There were small clusters here and there, maybe a younger bird and their parent or maybe just two un-seagull-like cuddlers, but for the most part they respected each other's space. When you have feathers, it's totally understandable. I won't ruffle your feathers if you won't ruffle mine. We're all happy.

Opposed to this was the harbor seals. As I said, they were organized in a solid pile of fur and blubber. You could watch them wriggle and move as individual seals suddenly felt the need to go out to the water or just roll over to the other side. Inevitably this meant pushing other seals out of the way, climbing over them, sometimes even barking and biting to get out of a particularly tight squeeze.

I've always watched seals and thought it would suck to be one. On the one hand, they look magnificently happy lying there in the sun when they're not sliding through the water and that kind of appeals to me. But if it meant having to be climbed over and bumped and moved around in the middle of my sleep--then forget it.

But (from what I can tell) this is the Chinese approach to personal freedoms in a nutshell. If there's no one in front of me, I'm going to pull into the lane even if you're barreling down the road. I know you'll stop. And you won't even get mad because you did the same thing when you pulled onto this street earlier. I'm not going to take a drink at our meal without you because it's sad for us to drink alone. We'll all eat out of the same dish because we're eating together--even if we end up sharing our sickness. Harmony. Family. Together. These are the Chinese values and they are strong!

As an American, it's very grating sometimes. I am a seagull in a land of seals and my feathers are so ruffled it's not even funny. Sometimes I feel like I can't even breath because of the weight on my back. But while we Americans promise that "I won't step on your toes if you won't step on mine," the Chinese promise that "It's OK if you step on my toes because I'm probably stepping on yours." It's crazy to watch, but it works. And it probably works better in a land of 1.3 billion seals, er, people.