My Countrymen and Women

I love a good travelogue.

No matter if someone is showing me a slideshow, I’m reading a magazine, or I’m just hearing about it over a cup of coffee, I’m frequently entranced re-imagining tales of riding in hot-air balloons over France, witnessing riots in Ireland, or putting bird seed in your sister’s hood at Trafalgar Square while she isn’t looking, so she gets attacked by pigeons.

Romanticizing mundane walks through a European street is one of my favorite pastimes and thinking about exotic, far-away places and spaces leaves me in a fantasy world of first class flights and champagne that (I now know) is as far from the reality as possible. When I was still in possession of my naiveté, however, the only thing that could ruin my musings was when someone said,

“I had fun, but it sure isn’t America, and I’m glad to be back.”

Instantly, my imaginings evaporated and all I could think was:

“Well…DUH! Of course it wasn’t America. It bet it was better! You just got back from riding in gondolas and lazing about in palazzos. In America, you probably would have been riding in SUVs and lazing about in the McDonalds drive through…” 

In my mind, America seemed so…ordinary. Timbuktu, Shanghai, London, New Delhi, Dublin, my mind didn’t want to make these places any less than I had imagined them, and I scoffed that returning to America could be so wonderful.

Going to Tiananmen Square, however, made me realize why foreign stories are always upended with my old daydream killer.

                                                                      

Before I begin, contradictions, restrictions, and all-around ridiculous bureaucracy tend to make me laugh. It always seems to be people can’t see the pointlessness of it all and they either get really mad or timid. I, however, get giddy and start to skip. Literally.

As we crowded onto the bus from the hotel, I couldn’t help bouncing in my seat. I kept imagining what everything looked like in 1989 and wondered if we were on Tank Man’s street. Since I had known I was coming to Beijing, I was unable to contain my joy at going to the paragon of ridiculous restrictions, and planned on doing something  sarcastic that screamed “’MURICA!” As I scampered off the bus, however, I was struck with an epiphany:

The Chinese government don’t play, y’all.

Tiananmen Square, at first, seems to be your typical square that is able to hold 500,000 people. Really big and really empty (except for the line to see Mao’s body). Every couple hundreds of feet, there is a group of tourists, the odd street vendor, and really elaborate lamp posts that immediately caught my attention. Classic and elegant, these lamp posts have obviously been here for a while, but on closer examination, I realized they have been subject to some modernization and now each is home to a large, wholesale electronic store.

Speakers are arranged like a hive under the lights and at least five cameras are pointed in every direction. If I pulled my little stunt, it would be seen from 614 different angles, and would probably result in me starring in my own combination show of LockedUp: Abroad and Survivor. Sitting in a Chinese jail cell, I’m sure I would have still found the situation hilarious, but in a very dark “Call-my-embassy-I-promised-my-mother-this-wouldn’t-happen-I-don’t-want-a-bullet-int-the-head” sort of way.

Still marveling at all the security, I couldn’t help but wonder if I was standing on some kid’s (who probably wasn’t much older than me) grave. Would I have had his courage to stand up for my beliefs and hunger strike in the middle of a Square? How could this place –filled with families, fans, and fake, waving Mao watches—be the staging ground and cemetery of a better organized Occupy Wall Street?

Suddenly, being there, knowing what I know, Tiananmen stopped being funny.

It stopped being something I had only read about in history class.

It stopped being passing pop culture.

It became serious.

It became real.

It became morbid; a hallowed ground showed no reverence because the principles it stood for ran counter to the goals of the reigning status quo.

I finally realized that my friends weren’t talking about the little things in foreign countries that make you realize you aren’t in America, like the food, the toilets, the beds, the bugs, the fruit, the traffic, the streets, the houses, the farmer’s markets, the night markets, the malls, the mannerisms, the clothes, the people, etc. etc.

Those are superficial and (hopefully) you get used to them (I have), but that my friends, my countrymen and women, were talking about the big things.

Like the Declaration of Independence.  The Constitution. The Bill of Rights.

For many Americans, those documents can seem like old, crusty pieces of paper that you are obliged to see when you pass through D.C.; however, when you don’t have them and are staying in a country that fundamentally doesn’t understand them… that’s stuff I could never get used to not having and would never want to…

Proud to be an American,

Mr. Mockler