1962

It isn’t the year 1962, tucked away in the past, that I think about while here in Western China a half century later, but rather the dynamic double-edged-ness of everything.

To be sure, it’s not just a matter of the past—for China holds its own on this side of the digital divide. It has a techno-savvy culture and can point to astonishing feats of engineering—think of the Bird’s Nest (of 2008 Olympics fame) or the Three Gorges Dam (the largest in the world) or the sheer magnitude of infrastructure in any of its scores of cities with many millions of people. Even in the countryside of Sichuan, a train zipping through green terraced mountains and rice paddies might suddenly come upon a hamlet featuring a dozen thirty-story buildings under construction. And whether at badminton, ping pong, or piano, the Chinese push for excellence, doing their best. So the point isn’t that China is low-tech, uncultured, or stuck in the 1962 that I knew.

The 1962 I experienced was decidedly low-tech. I had never seen a computer, we opened the windows wide on hot summer nights, and my mother still darned our socks and hung our clothes out to dry. We never trooped into a restaurant unless Great Aunt Ruth was treating us to dinner in Ithaca, New York—and McDonald’s had yet to make a big dent in American culture. Not surprisingly, my mother didn’t need Michael Pollan to educate her about the slow-food movement or the virtues of eating local produce—slow food was the only food.

I can wax nostalgically about all of these things, and I see that they aren’t entirely lost here in China, where I eat one peeled grape at a time, one shelled peanut. (For clumsy me, chopsticks slow down eating, too.) Chinese women take their bags to market, haggle for the best prices on a stunning array of fruits and vegetables (none of which is wrapped in plastic or Styrofoam), and head home to prepare up to four dishes per meal, each featuring multiple veggies and herbs. The steps are slow and deliberate. The food is fabulous. Nothing is wasted.

In hot and muggy Chengdu (where I lived in July and most of August), most apartments have a tiny washing machine and room air conditioners, but these are seldom used. Instead, most people hand-wash the day’s clothes and pin them up on one of the clotheslines gracing every balcony in every complex. To minimize excessive laundry, most ladies change into simple cotton housedresses at home.

Here – there – wherever – whenever – this attention to doing things slowly and living lightly on the earth is something I cherish. But 1962 wasn’t always pretty, at least in my hometown of Trenton, Michigan. Trenton was in the armpit of the industrial Midwest, the land of “pink chemical nights” (thanks, Eugenides). Trenton’s graduating class of 1962 couldn’t have been more clean-shaven and clean cut, but the nearby Detroit River was multi-colored and toxic. Rachel Carson was with Silent Spring about to draw attention to the effects of DDT on birdsong, and the horror of Love Canal was about to mobilize a new era of regulations and protections.

Paradoxically, Trenton may have witnessed the best and the worst of a largely unregulated culture in 1962, still seemingly simple enough and do-it-yourself at home, while chemical and auto industries were transforming our airways and highways. People still had primarily sustainable, green practices, but other forces were at work, about to radically transform the environment. Likewise, I see in China quaint one-lane mountain villages about to be transformed by the appetites of automobiles. Big box stores are coming to cities. My good sense of direction is challenged by the fact I can never see the sun through the bright metallic haze. I must boil or distill all of my drinking water; I must peel my fruits and vegetables, one grape at a time.

So, if it’s not the year 1962 that I think about, it’s the paradox of progress. At the foot of the hill where we foreign teachers live in Beibei is the jiaozi woman’s tent. I watch her throw handfuls of fresh xincai into the pot gurgling over her open flame. Her elderly father sits at a nearby table, nimbly pinching together trayfuls of dumplings. From under the flap of that tent, I can see the Beibei skyline, scores of skyscrapers piercing the orange evening haze.