Of fascination and addiction

Learned knowledge and deep knowledge

No sooner had I come back from China (in fact, my flight from Shanghai landed only two hours ago) that at the airport bar, as I ordered my food and drinks, I caught myself thinking, When shall I go back to China? Why did I think so? Did I have some incredibly good time during the two weeks in Beijing and Shanghai? Yes, I met lots of people, learned a few things, had good meals, visited interesting places, but I was not happier there than I am normally in New York. Perhaps I was even a bit less happy as I really like my life in New York.

So, why did I then entertain such strange thoughts? The reason, I realized, was not in mere happiness or pleasure of being at some place. The reason, paradoxically, lay --I thought-- in a feeling of frustration. It was like an addiction. I felt that the more I learned about China, the more I thought I understood things, the further away I was from really comprehending them. It was like a battle in which the closer you seem to the victory, the more elusive the victory becomes—and then, in an effort to finally clinch that victory, you advance further only to discover that the advance had set you back. It is a battle that not only you cannot win, but that the more you try to win the surer you are to lose it. The lure of a win nevertheless overwhelms you, seduces you. That little hope that remained at the bottom of the Pandora’s box resurfaces and you think, maybe this time—only this time!—your seeming advance will prove real.

Perhaps a short story may be helpful as an illustration, or as a metaphor. At least, it was helpful to me. Several years ago when I visited a university in China, one of the students, a friendly, pleasant and beautiful young doctoral student, was “assigned” to help me around. We got along well, I thought, from the very beginning. She was younger than either of my sons, but she treated me with respect and yet with the closeness and ease that people generally reserve for those of their own age and background. We could chat about everything—and easily; we were never short of topics. One evening, after I complained of having too much of Chinese cuisine, she decided to look for a nice Western restaurant. It turned out more difficult than we thought because it was a holiday and lots of Chinese youths like then to go to Western restaurants. Most places were fully booked. However, we were lucky, and she found an excellent small Spanish restaurant that somebody new or foreign to the city, I think, would have never imagined existed. We had a very nice conversation. At the end of the dinner we went out looking for a cab. One soon appeared and as she, standing outside the car, explained to the driver where to take first me and then her, the tone of her voice suddenly changed: it became excited, gay, exuberant. She sat up front, next to the driver, and a few moments later, turning back to me, explained that the driver was from her home province. They started a conversation in which she, much younger and more loquacious, was the leader. Although I, of course, could not understand a single word, the excitement of having, in a big city, met somebody from her hometown was so palpable that I, quietly sitting in the back of the car, felt it like a force of nature, like hundreds of waterfalls dropping into the sea: the crystal sound of her voice, the verve and the high tones, the trailing off at the end of the sentences, the questions half-asked... And I realized the root of that same fascination with which I began my short story: that even if I were decades younger, even if I had decided to spend my entire life learning about, and of, China, even if I did everything humanely possible, there would be always something inaccessible and ineffable to which I could never get. I could guess from the tone of the voice, from the sound, what is being said, but I would never know it for sure. At the bottom, and said simply, however long our lives may be and however much we might dedicate ourselves to learning about something that we have not learned from birth, that special China knowledge—perhaps because it is so old and in so many ways both close and distant—will never be fully ours.

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