Walk in Another Man's Zoris

As the first director (1961) of the Institute of American Studies at the East West Center of the University of Hawaii, my job was to devise schemes for explaining America to Asian students and visitors. Our first “mission” was to debrief a group of Indian journalists who were about to go on an extended visit to the Mainland.

We tried to imagine what they would want to know. We thought it prudent to prepare ourselves to deal with the usual litany of American errors: racism, materialism, isolationism, Disney superficiality. After bringing our grueling seminar in self-recrimination to a close, we dispersed, ready to greet those Brown Indians on the morrow.

But a funny thing happened on the way to our first cross-cultural confrontation. The Indian journalists didn’t want to ask us embarrassing questions about our hastily assembled self-indictment. The first question they asked was: Why do you treat your old people so cruelly?

Huh? We were of that first generation of American parents who wouldn’t think of inflicting themselves on our kids. And we had grown up thinking of grandparents as things to be seen only on holidays! Yet one of the first things I had noticed in adjusting to life in Honolulu was how the Asian moppets always seem to hike to elementary school with a grandma in tow. I couldn’t help envying those Asian oldies. Significance? The time had come to divest ourselves of the glib explanations we were eager to foist on our visitors, and learn to listen to what was really on their minds.

Not long afterward I had a second epiphany. In those days I hosted a weekly radio program, “Pacific Profile,” in which I pumped an unending line of interesting visitors for tidbits of their expertise. Today’s visitor had been a puzzle, the editor of the leading paper in the Indian state of Kerala, which was then the center of Communist ideology in that subcontinent. By the time the interview was over I felt thoroughly battered by the man’s ideological body-blows, and seeking a peaceful common ground during our drive to the airport, I started to talk about Thomas Jefferson.

“Ah, Jefferson, that slave-holding partisan of freedom,” he began, as I swerved to miss an errant lane-cutter on the freeway. But he then shifted abruptly to his favorite Tom story. “Did you know that Jefferson almost got arrested in Italy for secreting a new and embargoed variety of rice in a hollow cane?”

No, I replied, that was news to me.

Now I consider myself something of a Jefferson buff. I had read “Notes on Virginia” and knew all about how Jefferson was researching new possibilities for agriculture in his home state as he traveled around Europe. Why had I missed this tasty item? It was simple. I was not from a Third World country, where an impending agricultural revolution was turning out to be the difference between life and death to starving millions.

This essay was also published in STORIES TEACHERS TELL.