There has been a lot of talk lately about other people. Other ideas. Other worldviews. Other values.
Not a whole lot about genuinely attempting to understand other perspectives, though. Especially perspectives that might seem very different from our own.
I feel that needs to change. I don’t know how it can, but unless it does, I fear for the future, more than I ever have before.
Lots is happening these days, of course, and not just in the land of my birth. It’s downright overwhelming at times. Frustrating. Dizzying, baffling, terrifying, fubar. Often, I’m like a moth to a flame, burning my brain by reading the news from various sources, getting emotionally distraught again and again, wondering what the fuck is wrong with people, tossing and turning for hours in bed. And of course the sleeplessness, in turn, adds to the stress. Then sometimes, I swing right ‘round the opposite direction, and find it exceedingly difficult to resist the urge to plunge my head deep into the sand. Just zone the hell out; stare at the TV or play a mindless game, lose myself in a good book or even a crappy one (fiction, though; always fiction).
But I don’t beat myself up for zoning out like that. I’ve come to recognize that having some down time every now and then not only helps; it’s essential. I’ll never check out completely, but I now know it is important to find a balance, for my mental health. I’ll continue to keep informed as to what’s going on in my community and in the world at large, but I’m also beginning to make time for focusing on positive things. Things like playing an instrument. Spending time with the cats. Chatting with a friend. Taking a walk through the forest, pausing to watch a parrot as it climbs around eating gumnuts.
I think about the Other humans I have met in my life. People from Other places, Other cultures. Many of Other skin tones and bone structures. I’ve been quite fortunate in that I’ve gotten to meet a lot of different people, from different walks, in the half century I’ve been alive so far.
I think about Ayo, the Yoruba Nigerian engineering grad student I first met on the front porch of Bongo Java coffee shop in Nashville all those years ago. I remember how he watched me in silence as I played chess against Oliver, a guy who liked to brag, very frequently, about being by far the strongest chess player around. Later, after Oliver had wiped the floor with me and left, Ayo approached me and asked if I would be open to some pointers. I said “sure, I could definitely use some”. We had a chat, and he gave me some really solid advice, and I thanked him. A few days later, we ran into each other there again, and he lent me a book of chess openings he’d brought from home with me in mind. We got to talking, discovered we were both into music, and over the next several months, we hung out quite a bit. I would sometimes meet him at his apartment, where his keyboard was set up, and we’d play some jazz together, or I would sit and listen to him play one of his compositions; or we’d talk about world affairs over a beer or coffee; or play foosball (which was my turn to give pointers); or he’d come to one of my performances; or we’d sit across from one another, studying a game of chess, as he would patiently walk me through various moves and strategies. Incidentally, it was quite satisfying when Ayo, who was always very kind and the absolute epitome of modesty, wandered up to the porch of Bongo Java one day, hands in his pockets, then unobtrusively sat down at the chess board across from Oliver and proceeded to very calmly and systematically obliterate Oliver’s defences. That moment—when a loud, pompous person’s smugness gets wiped from his face and replaced with a look of realization that he has vastly underestimated an Other player… well, that is quite a moment.
I also think about Vadim—also an immigrant—the Russian artist I met in Asheville, North Carolina while I lived there. (I wrote a blog post about him and his art a couple of years ago—https://www.otherspect.com/2020#vadim.) He relocated to America without much in his pockets, and ended up making quite a good life, despite the prejudice and rejection he encountered from many of the locals, including, sadly, in the art scene itself.
I think about Alberto, the Argentinian landscaper I worked for part time that summer I spent in the San Francisco Bay Area visiting my brother. Alberto was a permanent resident (on a “green card”), married with children, and had started his own business with just a lawnmower and a handful of other tools and made it into a successful business, which he’d worked hard at for nine years. Perhaps he is still not a citizen and is now facing deportation. Or perhaps he is now a citizen, but is facing deportation regardless. He would not be alone.
Then there is the Venezuelan man who helped care for my father for years as my father faded through the slow, cruel decline that is Alzheimer’s. That same Venezuelan man who held my hand and comforted me when I was unable to stop the tears from coming. Who listened patiently to my silence when I was too choked up to be able to respond to something he had said. Who later became a TSA (Transportation Security Administration) agent, and was working at the airport the same day my wife and I flew back to Australia after having spent a whole year in America. Who smiled with us as we posed for a selfie together, right there next to the X-ray scanner, and me feeling that choked up lump in my throat all over again. Who is smiling still in my memory, because there he always will be, always generous, always caring, always with those kind empathetic eyes, even though he never needed to be. He didn’t have to do any of that for me, but he did it anyway. I wonder what he saw when he looked at me. I wonder if he was remembering his own son, or his own father. Or reflecting upon some other memory. I wonder what I looked like, from his perspective. Perhaps he was simply being kind. Human.
I’m an immigrant myself, but it’s not the same: I am a white man in a society that is predominantly white, so I haven’t had to face even a fraction of the challenges so many immigrants—so many people a society views as “Others”—are forced to face. The verbal abuse, the threats of violence, the risk of losing their livelihood, of being separated from their families, of ending up deported or dead in a ditch. I’ve not had to worry about any of that stuff. I am very fortunate. And cursed, in a way. But mainly the former.
But so many Other people have had to face those things. And it continues.
I keep thinking that if we ALL—not just some people, but ALL of us—could somehow be made to walk in anOther person’s shoes, obliged to experience a different perspective for even a single day, then we might come to understand so much more about the world, and thus learn how to empathize. And how to stop fearing “the Other” so much. How to stop hating. And perhaps realize we’re all in this together, and that differences of opinion are not worth going to war over.
Maybe that’s why I keep trying to see the world through other people’s eyes; perhaps I do it out of hope.
Do you ever do that? Do things out of hope? If so, what do you do?
Thank you for reading :-) If you would like to comment, you may do so either in the Otherspect Discord server (a storytelling & discussion forum, 100% free to join & participate), or by signing up to my new Substack newsletter (also 100% free, forever), which has a comments section under every entry. Here are the links:
Apologies for the tangent. 言歸正傳。。。
In my last post, “Perspective: The He Tihua”, I stated a falsehood (without knowing it). I said that I’d bumped into my classmate and friend David at the monastery outside of Zhongdian a few days before meeting He Tihua, but the opposite was true; David and I had first spent time in the Lijiang valley together, where He Tihua was, and that was weeks before we bumped into each other at the monastery.
Memory is a fickle beast, and the more years pass, the less I trust it. The brain seems to have a way of rewriting history. I’ve noticed in others, and I’ve noticed in myself. I guess that’s just life.
So anyway, after dwelling on the sequence of events some more and consulting my journals, I now realize that it was a few months after parting ways in the city of Kunming that we’d run into other in the town of Lijiang, where we then spend a few rather eventful weeks getting into trouble together (to say the least). Rendezvousing in Lijiang had been total coincidence; neither of us had know the other would be there. I think the last I’d heard David say was that he wanted to see Beijing, which was thousands of miles to the northeast.
When we left Lijiang, we headed off in separate directions. I hitchhiked up a valley to the north and crossed a couple of snowy mountain passes, attempted to cross another (stubbornly, for I’d been told by a truck driver that the pass had been snowed in and was too dangerous to travel — to which I, teenager that I was, had of course thought, Too dangerous? Pffft, not for me! ). After witnessing a couple members of a road crew very nearly (and literally) knock each other’s heads off, and then make up afterward by drinking toasts with the most disgusting alcoholic beverage I’d ever tasted (before or since), I had no choice but to accept that the pass would not be clear for a couple of weeks at least, so I backtracked to try another route. My destination? Tibet. Which was why I went to Zhongdian, which was where I bumped into David the second time, weeks after Lijiang.
So, anyway. Lijiang is an ancient town traditionally populated by the Naxi nationality, though nowadays there are way more Han Chinese people living there than the former. Interestingly, the Naxi written language, “Dongba”, is one of the few surviving (at least I assume it’s still alive; this was in the early 90s) truly pictographic scripts in the world. …Okay, I just looked it up; it’s still being taught, so it hasn’t died yet. Excellent. Anyone interested in linguistics and written languages should have a look: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongba_symbols
Alright, not going to let myself go off on another tangent. Asserting control over the caffeine in my system… NOW.
Towering over the far side of the valley was the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain and its massif. David and I decided to take a day hike, with the goal of exploring its thickly forested southern foothills; we’d misjudged distances, gotten a bit lost, and knocked on a poor woodcutting couple’s door well after dark. They were very hospitable and generous, inviting us in to share their turnip soup with them (as well as some baijiu which, for lack of a better comparison, is basically white lightning). We thanked them and made to leave, but they insisted that we stay the night; “bu anquan, bu anquan,” they kept telling us. It’s not safe; not safe. So we slept in their spare room and got up early the following morning, enjoyed some tea and rice with leftover turnip soup, thanked them profusely. We tried politely to give them some cash for putting us up and feeding us, but they wouldn’t hear of it, so we headed back down the mountain.
At the bottom of the long slope, we exited the forest and had to traverse a series of very watery square ponds, walking along the dikes in-between. I don’t think I cared what they were at the time, but now I’m wondering whether they were rice fiends or eel fields or both. On the other side was a big lake, blue as a baby’s eyes beneath the cloudless sky (the above photo is not mine — I still can’t find my slides), and it was on its shores that we came across three guys taking a smoke break from busting rocks. One of them was He Tihua.
Now I’m second-guessing myself, wondering if the rice/eel fields were after the lake or before…. Nope, they were before. Def-def-DEFinitely.
The men hailed us cheerfully, beckoning us over. Back then, it wasn’t every day a person might bump into foreigners in those parts. Not even every year, that far outside of town. Once the ritual of offering and accepting cigarettes had concluded, we began to answer their questions — mainly asked by the tallest and strongest of them, a guy who was clearly their leader. I reckon he was probably around 28 or 29, and the other two maybe a couple of years younger at most. We introduced ourselves using our Chinese names — Lei Zhibo and Baishitao, names we’d been given by a teacher — and politely asked them their names.
I’ll never forget the tall one’s response. He had no shirt on, and was rippling with muscles — not the kind formed by working out in the gym & sucking down protein shakes; these were true, tough-as-nails, honesttogod muscles, formed from doing years of manual jobs like busting up boulders with a sledgehammer in the freezing alpine wind. Rather than simply tell us his name, he took a drag off his filterless Chuncheng cigarette, leaving it dangling from his lower lip, and then struck a pose — feet far apart, flexing skyward with both fists like he was drawing back to take aim with an imaginary 100+ pound bow — then puffed out his chest and hollered so loud his voice cracked: “I AM… THE HE TIHUA!!!!!!!”
When David and I cracked up laughing, He Tihua smiled even more broadly, and did it again, even louder this time, not even caring that his cigarette had dropped from his lip to the rocky ground. “I AM THE HE TIHUA!!!!!!!!!!”
I suppose it was only fair; after all, we’d introduced ourselves in Chinese, so he had clearly felt obliged to introduce himself in English. With gusto. And in the only English he knew, we later found out.
After introductions were finished (sorry, I honestly can’t remember the other two guys’ names, but they, too, were quite friendly and welcoming toward us, just not half as loud), He Tihua got right down to the important business at hand: “Lai lai lai, hejiu!” Come come come, let’s drink!
This was not the first time I’d had baijiu, but to this day it most certainly was one of the most enjoyable. Lounging around in the sun, staring into the wind and waves, smoking cheap-ass cigarettes and drinking down shot after shot of burning hard liquor that went down like fire and turned our insides and faces cozy warm against the cold — this was late morning at best, you have to understand; what people recently have been calling “day drinking”, I suppose? — well, the only way I can describe it is that time froze. We were existing, neither in the future nor the past, but right there, right then, right in that moment and in that moment only.
Carefree, people call it. Well sure. That’s what we were. Language didn’t matter; we all communicated together just fine without it. Clocks didn’t matter. Schedules didn’t exist.
I can’t speak for He Tihua and his buddies, of course. I’m sure they did have a schedule, at least a loose one. I only have my perspective to go by, and can only imagine theirs, as a sort of uneducated guess based on the look in their eyes, the firmness in their handshakes, the cheerfully clapped shoulders, the camaraderie, the smiles at parting, the unspoken We might never see each other again and we are from different worlds but bygod we just had a bloody good connection and a most excellent few hours drinking together and we will be friends to the very end of the world.
So no, I have no way of truly knowing what He Tihua et al were thinking deep down. But I believe they genuinely were enjoying it too. At the very least, they’d met a couple of nineteen-year-olds who had given them an excuse not to have to work so hard for part of the day, though I suspect this was probably their normal pace anyway. Get there, work up a sweat, take a break, work a bit more, have some more to drink & maybe a bite to eat; work a bit more, drink a bit more, pack up, call it a day. Then the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and next week, watching the seasons change, ripening beneath the sun and alcohol buzz, making the day’s dollars (yuan) over and over, putting food on the table, maybe heading to the karaoke on a Friday night, flirting with girls; maybe play some pool, get drunk, wake up the next morning and bust some more rocks while nursing yet another hangover; dream about the distant future when you have a better job and can afford a family and you don’t have to work so hard, when you can afford to smoke Hongtashans instead of rotgut shitass Chunchengs; maybe even save up and visit Shanghai someday or take the kids on a river trip down the Five Gorges….
It’s funny, and tragic, when you meet people while traveling. The fleeting nature of such encounters puts a big fat lump square in your throat. I am not sure if we traded contact info, but even if we did, there’s not much chance it would still be current. Who knows, those guys might not even all be alive anymore.
But I hope they are. I hope they have grown wise and are happy in their golden years, but mainly, I hope they are still smiling in the sun, still young at heart if not in muscle anymore, their eyes still twinkling with positivity and their hearts just as big and jolly as they were on that sunny lakeshore in the valley of Lijiang.
Thank you for reading :-) Please feel free to comment and/or share your own perspective or related anecdote, ask questions, or whatever! Yarns is what this forum is all about.
You can do so at the link below: I’ve decided to start a Substack (despite my feelings about the policies of its CEO and shareholders). Why? Well, mainly because it seems like it might be a good platform for not only posting entries like these, but for starting a forum / conversation that can facilitate the swapping of yarns. You are welcome to join and comment, and can do so 100% free. Here is the link:
See you there :-)
His name was (is?) He Tihua, pronounced “Huh Tee Hwaa”. He knew only one phrase of English, and this he bellowed every time with gusto, bare-chested, head back, and fists pumping skyward: “I AM THE HE TIHUA!!!!!”
If I could somehow find my slides, I’d be able to post a photo of him doing just that, with the gravelly shore of a lake in the foreground and the massive slopes of the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain in the background. Alas, they were lost long ago. But his image and the sound of his cheerful drunken hollering will forever be etched in my memory.
It was Spring of 1993, and just a few days before, a friend and I had bumped into each other quite unexpectedly at a monastery a ways outside the tiny Tibetan town of Zhongdian. I had hitchhiked to get to that northwestern part of Yunnan province—an area off-limits to foreigners; hence the hat, sunglasses, and gongan (police) trenchcoat I’d acquired to disguise my foreignness as well as I could—and upon seeing that enormous monastery sprawling across the opposite side of the valley, my nineteen-year-old imagination had of course been fired, so I’d set off on foot to explore it. On the way, I crossed paths with two boys. I put them at about eleven years old, and they were clearly close friends. One was a monk, with shaved head and maroon robe; the other had short scruffy hair and wore the drab army greens and dark blues typical of so many people I’d met in the countryside. I remember wondering why a person so young would have opted to leave his family to make his vows and become a monk. It was a long time later that I learned about how so many impoverished families with multiple children were often faced with the choice of seeing their children go without food or sending one or two off to the local monastery or nunnery, where they would get fed for free. The choice would be a no-brainer, of course, but I was naiive and sheltered, so such things didn’t occur to me. I had no idea how harsh a land I was in.
Neither kid had shoes. It was cold out, wind cutting and the occasional speck of sleet blowing almost sideways, but that did not seem to have any effect on their spirits. They fell into step alongside me, their boundless youthful energy enabling them to keep up with my long-legged gait with ease. The unexpected camaraderie made me feel welcome and homesick all at once.
“Ni shi waiguo naiguojia laide?” The secular one asked. His friend the monk, the shier of the two, stayed silent, occasionally throwing furtive glances my way.
I’ve always found that children are easier to talk to and understand when learning a foreign language. It’s not so much that conversations are simple; to the contrary, they can become surprisingly complex very quickly. But children in general are much more honest, open-eyed, and patient than adults (at least with strangers, anyway). Perhaps it’s the lack of personal agendas that makes conversations with them flow more smoothly. It’s also nice that formalities tend to be dropped; or, perhaps it’s that they don’t think to use them much. The resulting interactions are often relatively casual and friendly, I find.
I answered in my broken Chinese that I was from America. The shy monklet’s eyes went wide, and he cupped his hand and whispered something into his friend’s ear. The latter scoffed and chuckled out something in Tibetan, which I could not follow, but the curiosity in my eyes must have been obvious enough for him to feel obliged to explain. “Ta xiang zhidao, ni renburenshi Maike’er Qiaodan.”
It took me a while to work out the name; I repeat it out loud a couple of times before I realized the kid was wondering if I knew Michael Jordan. I smiled and shook my head, then attempted to say “No” in Tibetan. Both boys corrected my pronunciation in unison, then laughed and chattered away cheerfully in their language. Something like “jinx buy me a coke”, perhaps.
It took us nearly half an hour to reach the monastery. As soon as we arrived, the monk placed his hands together and bowed toward me, smiling politely, and muttered “Tashi delek,” the Tibetan phrase I’d learned which served as both hello and goodbye, combined with “may you be blessed”, that sort of thing. I replied in kind, and he hurried off up a muddy slope (the roads within the monastery compound were all dirt, and rain had bucketed down that morning).
“Ta you ___de shi,” the other boy explained. I put a blank there because at the time, my Chinese was not good enough to know what word he’d used or what exactly he was talking about, but in retrospect I imagine he was telling me that his friend had either a class to attend or chores to do, and the fact that he had hurried off likely meant he was tardy or about to be. I nodded and followed as the scruffy-haired boy led me along a muddy road in the opposite direction.
As we rounded a bend, a deep male voice hailed us from the top of a hill. A monk—a young man, from my current perspective, but who was probably eight or ten years my elder at the time—was squatting with his back to a stucco wall. My companion sang out in rapid Tibetan, a string of endlessly fascinating sounds to my ears. I waited as they conversed; a minute later, the man stood and waved at me, smiling. “Tashi delek,” he said.
“Tashi delek,” I replied, wondering if I should bow or something. I was much more familiar with Chinese customs; here, I was a complete alien.
The boy must have communicated to the monk that I spoke some Chinese, because he then said, in his thick Tibetan accent, “Nide pengyou ye zai zheli.” Your friend is here, too.
Friend? I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. “Pengyou?” I said, glancing at the kid standing next to me, who was nodding confidently at me. “Shenme pengyou?” What friend?
“Lai lai lai,” the man beckoned. I squelched up the slope after him, resigning inwardly as the six-inch-deep red mud breached my boots’ defenses. The eleven-year-old charged ahead, making me suddenly feel very soft and unfit by comparison. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt that way since entering these mountains.
The man led us through an open door and up several stairs. “Lai lai lai,” he kept repeating, waving me on with his big muscular arm and shoulder, his voice deep and resounding from the close walls.
The structure felt old to me. One of the few great religious structures to have survived the Cultural Revolution, I assumed, recalling a bit of history I’d read for one of my East Asian Studies classes the year before.
At the top, we went through another big doorway, which opened out onto a broad, mud-floored courtyard with a temple on the other side. Dark wooden decking ran left and right from where we were standing, encircling the courtyard. Halfway toward the far end on our right, a figure was leaning against the railing, smoking a cigarette.
I stopped dead in my tracks. “…David?” The last time I’d seen him had been back in Kunming, months ago and hundreds of miles away.
My friend turned and smirked. “Holy fucking shit. What are the chances, dude. You lost too?”
Maybe that’s not what he said. Memory is a funny thing, and this was more than thirty years ago. But what I do remember, quite clearly, was my friend’s smile, as well as the surge of emotion welling up from deep within me. Because whether David actually said those words or not, and whether I’d have admitted it or not, I was, indeed, lost. I was absolutely gone; I’d disappeared into the Unknown, and with little or no intention of ever trying to find my way home.
Okay. Reading this, you’re probably thinking, “holy fucking shit dude, you started out writing about some guy named He Tihua, and now yeah, congratulations, you’re lost. Well done. What gives?!” And you’re right. This whole blog post has been one giant tangent; a big fat trip down memory lane.
In truth, I noticed it happened all the way back when I was writing about my escorts, the two kids who walked with me from Zhongdian to the monastery. While I was typing, I thought, Oops, I’m gonna have to delete all this, because it’s changed the subject. Or do I keep going, and change the title of the blog post to “Zhongdian” or “Friends” or something like that?
But I forgive myself, because a) it’s been a long time since I sat down and wrote like this, since I just flowed—which I’ve been doing over the past several paragraphs—and it feels really good. [Sorry, readers, if there are any out there; it’s been way too long since I wrote a proper blog post—I hope to get back into a habit of it! Thank you for bearing with me.] …And b) I can always just continue this in a follow-up blog post, in which—I promise—I’ll actually write about the He Tihua.
So yeah. I’ve decided that’s what I’m going to do. To be continued.
All content © 2025 Otherspect. Plagiarists and thieves will be hunted down and destroyed. Also, I get a tiny commission through links to works for sale at Amazon.com via that company's Associates program. It's miniscule (literally a matter of a few extra cents, not dollars), but I am required to disclose it.